Not Game of the Year 2011

While I’ve already chronicled some of the lesser known games of 2011, it’s high time we talk about the big hits.

I’m not quite yet ready to talk about my pick for 2011’s Game of the Year, but I am well-prepared to talk about the games that WON’T be hitting the #1 spot for me. No, this is not a compilation of the worst titles of 2011; it’s quite the contrary. These are three critically acclaimed games, games I personally enjoyed quite a lot this year, that have one or two glaring flaws that prevent them from being the absolute very best of 2011.

Allow me to give you my three picks for NOT Game of the Year in 2011.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

Run! It's collapsing under the weight of its own expectation!

A while back, I chronicled the absolute nightmare that came from gamers giving low scores to Modern Warfare 3 on Metacritic for a variety of entirely dumb reasons. What I failed to mention was my own personal take of the game, as it wasn’t called for in that particular piece. I did indeed play the game, though, and while I can see where some of people’s frustrations laid, I stand by the title not deserving straight zeros on Metacritic.

The game was certainly fun. A solid action title from beginning to end, with multiplayer just as addictive as previous entries that improved just enough for the game to justify its existence. I can certainly see why some people might include it at the top of their favorite games from this year, but I can also see why some people thought it simply was not worth all the praise. I fall into the latter camp.

Again, don’t get me wrong, the game delivered in exactly the way a Call of Duty game should. The single-player was short but exhilarating, with wonderful set-piece moments and tense firefights that rarely let up. However, I simply could not help but feel that the game simply did not have the spark or the pure thrill of Modern Warfare 2. Where MW2 set the standards frighteningly high, MW3 failed to live up as a result. The set-pieces were nothing compared to the now legendary snow-mobile chase or the dramatic finale, and the emotional heartstrings being tugged felt forced compared to the chilling “No Russian” mission in MW2. Sure, there were plenty of thrills along the way, and the ending was relatively satisfying if you are one of the five people that cared about or could even tell the difference between the characters in the Modern Warfare series, but it’s a classic instance of being spoiled too soon. I just wasn’t wowed.

Naturally, the paragraph above puts more thought into the single-player campaign than most people who pick up the game – it’s the multiplayer that ropes in the millions every year. However, the exact same can be said for multiplayer as it can single player. At the expense of sounding horribly clichéd, when I turned on the multiplayer for the first time I was convinced I had the second Modern Warfare in my console. Not a whole lot has changed. The expansion pack argument can be made here, were it not for entirely new maps and loads of new perks and other content. There IS a lot more here, and for people who played previous entries into dust, it’s naturally worth hopping on board a third time. The problem, though, is that while there is new content you are not DOING anything new. It’s the same old game, but with new stuff and new opportunities to level up and bury collective days into the multiplayer.

To be considered the absolute best game of an entire year, you’ve got to stand out and rise above the other games. Modern Warfare 3 played it incredibly safe and put out a solid game that doesn’t technically do anything WRONG; for that reason, it should not be receiving top honors from anyone in 2011.

The series is ready for a massive overhaul, and thankfully, Infinity Ward are certainly competent enough to revolutionize the genre once again. Just not this year.

LA Noire

LA Noire was absolutely incredible for a number of reasons.

A dark, legitimately mature detective game set in 1940s Los Angeles, the now defunct Team Bondi’s open-world thriller turned many a head when it was released this past spring with its sharp writing, addictive crime-scene gameplay, and frighteningly good visuals. I’m talking easily the best looking game to come out all year.

While I’m typically not one to fawn over realism in games, these characters were definitely not digital. I am very much convinced that my controller was tapping into the brain of real actors on a massive, sprawling set of 1940s LA. The visuals weren’t just all for show, though – they played into the gameplay, with the realistic facial expressions frequently serving as the only way to tell if a character was telling the truth during questioning.

For all the right the game did, both technically and as a game, it is unfortunately the storytelling that killed the experience for me. Bear in mind I found the actual writing to be excellent, as well as the performances by the game’s actors – it was the way the story was told and the actual content of the story that ruined my experience.

Naturally, spoilers are ahead.

You play as Cole Phelps, a man who fought in the Second World War is now climbing the ranks from cop to detective. For every department you are transferred to, you get a new partner. Once you become a Vice detective, you are partnered up with the suspiciously slimy Chief Detective Roy Earle. Throughout the game, newspapers can be found that trigger cutscenes fleshing out some bits of the story here and there. One newspaper in particular appears during a Vice mission, revealing that Earle is actually working against you. Once the cutscene ends, you are returned to the game, with Earle still as your partner, stuck in the awkward position of knowing something the character you are playing does not.

LA Noire looked amazing, but was lacking in key areas

That was brutal. There should never be that level of disconnect between player and character. I was given information that made me feel differently about my partner than Cole Phelps felt. In film, dramatic irony is a common narrative device. In a game, though, YOU are the one in control. Knowing your partner is two-timing you kind of makes you want to shoot him in the face, but instead you have to play along and act like everything is okay. That level of disconnect was fatal to my enjoyment of the game, and only got worse with Phelps’ extracurricular activities.

As if being forced to play as someone who is oblivious to a partner that you know can’t be trusted isn’t bad enough, you are THEN asked to sit and watch Phelps cheat on his wife! We have to kick back and watch cutscenes of Cole Phelps necking with a German woman not long after World War II while his poor wife sits at home, not knowing what’s going on. Why would I want to play as an adulterer? If we had seen Phelps with his wife, and things weren’t going too hot, at least we could understand the affair. But Phelps rarely even MENTIONED his wife, and when he did, he never indicated any dissatisfaction! So why should I be okay sitting idly by as my character cheats on his wife for absolutely no good reason?

And it doesn’t end there, oh no. The last chunk of the game features Phelps being kicked off the force, but still desperately wanting to solve the main mystery of the game. In a proper story, that character would start sneaking around, attempting to solve the problem off the clock and off the radar. Looks like Cole Phelps wasn’t THAT desperate! Instead, he just passed off his work to insurance investigator Jack Kelso, a character we only briefly met earlier in the game. Now we get to finish the game as a character we barely know! Awesome!

It felt like the game had this ulterior motive of forcing us to hate Cole Phelps with every fiber of our being under the guise of an otherwise spectacular game. They took this incredible game with tight driving and shooting, fun and fresh crime-scene investigations, intense and challenging interrogations, and some of the most stunning visuals seen in any medium, and said, “We’ve given them enough, why go the extra mile and give them a character to care about? As a matter of fact, let’s make this character a horrible, cheating, lazy man that no one can love.”

This game was absolutely exceptional, but Cole Phelps and Cole Phelps alone prevented it from becoming my Game of the Year.

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

It’s impossible for Nintendo to put out a bad Zelda game. I’ve explained in the past that every main entry in the series can easily be considered the best, and with Skyward Sword, that tradition lives on. Acting as the Wii’s last hurrah before the Wii U hopefully hits next year, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword takes everything that has made Zelda perfect and streamlines it like you wouldn’t believe. There is absolutely no down time in this game, unless you decide to make it. The black and white that was once the dungeon/overworld dynamic has turned to a brilliant shade of grey, with an equal amount of puzzle-solving and thinking being required before gaining access to a dungeon. Nintendo has stepped it up in the storytelling department, too, with a well-written and emotionally engaging story accented by an exceptional orchestral score, making this a Zelda that truly takes a step forward.

So why on Earth should this not be considered for Game of the Year?

Well, it turns out that Skyward Sword isn’t as perfect as purists would like to say, and that lies in the controls. Nintendo has finally made good use of the Wii’s Motion Plus accessory and, in classic Nintendo style, it’s done it once it’s a bit too late. However, let’s not let that take away from the fact that, from a controls standpoint, this is an incredibly ambitious game. Sword fighting is finally 1:1, many weapons and items use motion-based aiming, and even opening boss doors requires precise movements that the original Wii remote could simply not detect.

The problem is, it just doesn’t work as well as it should. I would say a good 85% of my time playing through the game, there were absolutely no complaints. While that may sound fantastic, you’ve got to look at the 95-100% that would have been complaint-free with traditional controls. The motion controls are fantastic, but they just aren’t really necessary. Everything in this game could have been done with a dual analog controller, and the experience would probably not have suffered any. And there would definitely not be issues like what I and, unfortunately, many others, have experienced.

I’ve read reviews where the controls were declared perfect, and that Nintendo could never go back to traditional controls for future Zelda games. I’ve also read reviews where the controls were considered a broken mess, something that should have never happened. Falling closer to the perfect side, I can still see where the broken crowd get their complaints. I’ve had some issues.

The Wii Remote Plus that comes with the lovely special edition bundle of Skyward Sword needs to be calibrated at the start of a play session, but I’ve had to recalibrate during gameplay. During boss fights! The 1:1 sword fighting is excellent, but when it doesn’t work you suffer. The first boss fight of the game requires precise slashing, and I wasn’t able to do that all of the time. Again, if sword fighting was done with a dual analog controller, that would not have been an issue.

I’ve had many other experiences where the aiming required centering (an easy fix, but something that needs to be fixed nonetheless), where movement while swimming became frustrating and obnoxious, and even the typically serene bird-riding segments became a wonky disaster from time to time. Traditional controls would not have presented this problem.

Naturally, it brings up the argument of whether motion controls have done the industry any good at all, but that’s a discussion for another time. What remains is the fact that a Zelda game had legitimate technical faults that simply would not have happened with a traditional control scheme. I enjoyed every moment of this game, but those issues took me out of the experience and made me remember that I was playing a videogame.

I appreciate the risk Nintendo took with the motion controls, and I would never give back my experience. But for a game to truly be considered the best of the year, its flaws have to be negligible. These flaws, unfortunately, are not. While it won’t prevent me from keeping this game in the upper half of my all-time favorite Zelda games, it simply cannot be considered the best of the year.

Forgive me, Miyamoto.

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Three games, three exceptional games, all with issues that I simply cannot get out of my head when considering which games truly shone in 2011. Why couldn’t LA Noire make us like Cole Phelps? Why couldn’t Modern Warfare 3 push the envelope just a bit more? Why couldn’t Skyward Sword at least make using the classic controller optional? These are all wonderful, wonderful games, but there’s just enough wrong with them to make them all second best.

We’ll be presenting a lengthy discussion of the year in videogames here on The Void very shortly, so keep reading!