Best New Shows of 2024
5. Batman: Caped Crusader (Amazon)
4. Mr. & Mrs. Smith (Amazon)
3. Fallout (Amazon)
2. X-Men '97 (Disney+)
1. Shogun (Hulu)
Best Finished Shows of 2024
5. Clone High (Max)
4. Star Wars: The Bad Batch (Disney+)
3. Masters of the Air (Apple TV+)
2. The Penguin (HBO)
1. Curb Your Enthusiasm (HBO)
So I've played some more downloadable content. It was mostly pretty fun I guess! This is the significant stuff.
Fallout 3: Broken Steel
I liked Fallout 3, but the ending was, well... irredeemably stupid. Without spoiling anything, finishing the main quest ends the game immediately with a cheap cutscene instead of wrapping up the story nicely and letting you keep playing as your character, and makes some giant logical leaps to pack it all into some sort of nice dramatic wrapping without earning it. Broken Steel fixes that by rewriting that portion slightly, still moralizing your actions pointlessly but at least keeping the plot going with a few more missions, raising the level cap to 30, giving you some new equipment, and disabling the switch that basically kills the game. The scope of the new quests feels more like an actual climax to the plot, though in a way it still feels like they're stretching something that's already resolved itself. Still, it's the most essential of the five add-ons Bethesda's released for the game, letting you do whatever you want without worrying about having to load old saves.
Fallout 3: Point Lookout
Broken Steel is the most important add-on, but Point Lookout might be the most interesting. It takes Fallout to a different setting, the mutated wastes of Maryland, infested by monsters, a dangerous cult, and irradiated versions of offensive Southern stereotypes. I haven't played the other DLC packs for the game, which apparently whisk you to other areas which are very linear and guided, leaving Point Lookout as the only one that resembles the actual Fallout 3 experience in smaller form. There's a fair amount of wandering you can do to see what's up, or you can just do the main quest line which features some glitchy action (I can't tell if the game is acting up because I've been playing this character for 30 hours or what), unique moments, and interesting if not overly difficult choices to make. It's not exactly classy, but still enjoyable.
Left 4 Dead: Crash Course
I'm glad I got this for free on the PC instead of paying for it on the Xbox 360, but it's still a neat addition to the original game that was made not too long before the sequel came out. It's a quick little campaign designed to be finished in half an hour in versus mode, so it's not the most substantial thing ever, but the two chapters here add some unique and entertaining twists on the formula. It fits in between two of the existing campaigns, explaining what transpired between them, which on one hand is interesting but on the other just makes me want them to do the same for the entire story, and I don't know if that's going to happen with them already announcing add-ons for the new one. Still, no new Left 4 Dead content is bad Left 4 Dead content, and it's worth a trip if you're not already spoiled by the sequel.
LittleBigPlanet: Metal Gear Solid Level Kit
I think this would have been a bit better for the value if it included the Metal Gear Solid-themed costumes as well, but it was still a good time with my brother for somewhere around an hour. Most of the DLC for LBP is packs of outfits and stickers to throw in your game, but once in a while they do a themed one that adds new gameplay elements and trophies (a Pirates of the Caribbean-themed one just came out this week, I think), and I like MGS a lot, so I finally decided to give it a whirl. We probably had the most fun with the paintball gun which you get to use pretty frequently, shooting each other as much as the enemies, and it definitely adds something new to the game. There's some pretty clever boss fights and special events they put together, and I'm always impressed how much people can do with the simple tools at hand, especially the developers. The LBP/MGS cross-over plot was a nice touch too. A bit short, but as cute as anything else in this game.
I guess I'm making it a tradition to start these lists on the second Monday of the new year. I thought it was a good year for games, a lot of people were disappointed by some of the bigger games but I didn't have much of a problem with any of them. A couple big ones I didn't get around to included Gears of War 2, Resistance 2 (still gotta play the first!), and Mirror's Edge. Sam and Max had the second straight year of funny, enjoyable episodic adventures, Mercenaries 2: World in Flames was fun but sadly unpolished, and Price of Persia was an interesting reboot that didn't quite live up to its heritage.
Best of 2008
7. Ratchet and Clank Future: Quest for Booty (PS3)
Many faulted it for its brevity, but that's really the point - I'd love to see more of my favorite series have more manageable and economic installments now and again, especially when they're so affordable and allow newcomers to get a taste without a huge investment. Not as good as a full, "real" Ratchet game, but not many things are.
6. Bionic Commando: Rearmed (Multi)
I don't even have nostalgia for the original NES game, but I didn't need it - the arm makes the combat and platforming some of the most fun I've ever had with a side-scrolling game, it looks and sounds awesome, and it's pretty funny too.
5. Fallout 3 (Multi)
Did we ever get official word from Fallout's insane fanbase on whether Bethesda's take on their favorite series really was the abomination they assumed it was from the beginning? Whatever the case, even though it may just have been The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion with a coat of post-apocalyptic paint, that's enough to keep me interested for a long time.
4. Braid (360)
Lots of download only games were great this year, but this one definitely takes the cake. The combination of wonderful production values, unique and mind-bending gameplay, and at times brilliant storytelling make it definitely worth playing however you find a way to.
3. Left 4 Dead (PC)
I haven't played it as much as I would have liked, although that always seems to happen with me and primarily multiplayer games. But when you are playing it, it can be one of the most thrilling shooter experiences imaginable, and the presence of your friends backing you up just makes it better.
2. Grand Theft Auto IV (Multi)
These last two games both got a lot of backlash, but screw that, they helped make for one of the best non-Fall gaming seasons ever. A lot of people prefer GTA's freedom and wackiness over their attempts at something more, and for them there are games like Saints Row 2 and Crackdown. But the direction they took with the first current gen entry in the popular series was probably the one they needed to take to keep it ahead of the curve. It's still a lot of fun to screw around, but it's nice to see someone trying to do more with the medium.
1. Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (PS3)
Yeah, Kojima went a little overboard trying to explain every loose end, turning nanomachines from an interesting plot device into a joke. But for the most part it's the most fun to play that MGS has ever been, it's nice to see a famous game character's story actually come to a real end, and it really doesn't hurt that the game looks amazing. I'd be lying to myself if I said it wasn't my favorite game of 2008.
Notable Exception
LittleBigPlanet (PS3)
I was enjoying this game quite a lot and it most likely would have made the list, but under absurd circumstances I accidentally broke the disc and couldn't get a new one in time, and I don't like speaking definitively on a game when I haven't seen all it has to offer.
I haven't played any of the other Fallout games, but from what I can tell, Bethesda's first stab at the series takes the skill system and trademark sense of humor and transplants them effectively into Oblivion's engine. Coming out two and a half years later Fallout 3 isn't the big step forward I was hoping for, but it's still a great game when you play it. It still has some of Oblivion's glitches and awkward moments, but it does do a fair amount of things better. Characters look better, and there's way more variety in the voice actors. The speech and bartering system relies on numbers and chance instead of a conceptually moronic mini-game. There are little additions like an indicator if a container is empty so less time is spent searching for items. And they finally got the auto-leveling enemies thing right, in a best-of-both-worlds sort of scenario. The way it seems to work, wandering around outside will always produce enemies at a similar skill level to you, so it doesn't seem too easy. But once you've been to a specific location like an underground tunnel, the enemies will always stay at the level they were when you first went there, so going back for whatever reason lets you take care of them easily without having to worry about constantly getting beaten. It's a pretty good system, maybe the best that can be done with this sort of extremely non-linear game.
On that end, Fallout is in ways better and worse than the Elder Scrolls games. Doing only the side quests that naturally came my way while playing, I beat the main story in about 22 hours. I don't think that's much less than Oblivion, and Fallout's story is certainly more interesting. They really did a lot with the humor, making it a bit more enjoyable to just be in the world, and it has a number of quests that are more creative than anything else I've seen them do. Tranquility Lane springs instantly to mind. And there's a bit more freedom in proceeding through it, with multiple ways to complete certain objectives and a lot of options in the dialogue that make it replayable. But the whole world around the main quest is a bit more barren, and that's the part of Oblivion I liked the most. I know there's a number of significant things I haven't done yet, but it seemed like fun diversions just weren't as easy to stumble across. Only the Wasteland Survival Guide came close to having the depth of one of the Elder Scrolls' factions, and it's not even just the quests - wandering around a deserted wasteland and ramshackle towns built on destroyed pieces of the old civilization is a bit more depressing and purposefully empty than an intact fantasy empire. Fallout 3 is designed to be more focused and narrow than Oblivion, and I liked that game for its breadth.
Not that Fallout isn't very good at what it does. There was some concern about the combat system, but I think it works pretty well. The V.A.T.S. system to target specific weakpoints is useful, although I tended to go for the head pretty exclusively. The normal aiming isn't very good for a shooter, but it's functional enough that you don't feel helpless when you can't use V.A.T.S. and it can actually be satisfying to use it by itself. I didn't try too much melee combat, but it seemed to function a lot like Oblivion's without any blocking. The karma system seems a little deeper than the average good-or-evil gimmick more and more games seem to be having, and unlike most of the others, it actually gives a compelling reason to be neutral. The writing is better than some of their earlier work, and overall it's a bit more polished as a product. I've been comparing the game to Oblivion for the entire review, but in the end it's probably worth checking out if you're interested, even if you've never touched an Elder Scrolls game.
