Portal is in the running, that’s for god damn sure.
I’m still between Portal, TF2, and Bioshock, personally. Definitely not STALKER, though. I did not like Far Cry: Russia.
I’ll go as far as noting any Game of the Year list without Portal on it should be bullied.
KG
Not much on the reading comprehension huh?
FWIW, Mass Effect will most likely be awesome. But the combat looks like shit. I expect, as per usual with bioware, an awesome game with shit combat. That being said, it won’t be perfection, and it will probably be too long, and eventually you’ll find out that you are secretly the ultimate bad guy, and there’s lots of dead wives/husbands.
You forgot the part where we have to collect the four pieces of the McGuffin.
Go.
Fuck.
Yourself.
In that order.
Technically “Fuck”, “Yourself”, “Go” would work as well.
that doesn’t even make sense mr snarky pants, because Yourself is not an action.
It’s an awesome 2-3 hours, yeah, and it’s nice to see something different. Still, game of the year? Uh, no.
Portal might be puzzle game of the year. But it’s way too short for me to credibly say that when I think about 2007 ten years from now, I think “Portal.” Plus, the singular GotY concept is stupid anyway, since it reflects the critic’s genre biases more than anything else.
I don’t like puzzle games much.
SO HOW DOES THAT FIT IN YOUR WORLDVIEW?
Yeah, I don’t really like proper puzzle games all that much either, and I don’t know that I’d necessarily describe Portal as a puzzle game. Certainly the central gameplay mechanics are all puzzly, but it manages to trascend (particularly in the last third or so, of course) the genre limitations of what typically gets considered a puzzle game.
I think it’s silly to describe Portal as perfect, because I think perfection is a pretty meaningless standard. It is exceptionally well executed, like everything Valve produces, and I’m definitely looking forward to seeing the concepts presented in it integrated into broader contexts. It also stands on its own as a superb experience. Really, I have nothing but good things to say about it, and I even find the complaints about the length a little asinine. I just wouldn’t call it GOTY. On the other hand, I think the whole concept of GOTY is kind of stupid, too.
HURRRRRRRRRRRRR
It’s a puzzle game, just a non-abstract one.
And yeah, “3 hours of perfection” does not make something GotY. If we want to use that sort of reasoning then there are a lot of 10-20 minute Flash games that I think are going to take the title. Flow for example should have been GotY last year by that reasoning.
Anyway, from everything I’ve seen I’m pretty sure that Rock Band will be my GotY but we’ll see. Also, put me down for Crackdown. I was amazed by how much I enjoyed that game. I usually hate sandboxy city games too. And everyone’s avoiding Bioshock just because they’re too hip to pick something that obvious.
Portal is awesome, no doubt, but it’s not GOTY. Bioshock all the way.
oooh are WE the friendly bunch. and yea, stalker ftw
As I was playing Portal I kept thinking of classic adventure games. If they had puzzles like this (you know, that made sense) then I think people would still be playing them.
So Portal is my Adventure Game of the Year.
BIOSHOCK
Well, if we don’t have a meaning for it yet, we might as well give it one, otherwise the word’ll just be hanging around not doing anything. Let’s have it mean “as consistently awesome as Portal”.
I’ve talked to two people today who consider it the only perfect game ever made. I think it’s perfect too, in as close to a meaningful sense of that word as we can usefully get, but I’m not sure it’s the only one.
Sorry to be another one of these guys, but the length stops it short of being my game of the year. I don’t think the length’s a flaw or a problem - it’s easily long enough for the story it tells, and that story is superb. But at the end of the year I’m going to have had more fun out of something else.
Consistency and perfection don’t rank that highly for me. I’m all about three things: intensity of good experience, variety of good experience and amount of good experience.
Portal: Awesome, okay, bad.
Ep2: Great, great, okay.
BioShock: Awesome, good, great.
TF2: Awesome, awesome, awesome.
So that’s the GOTY running so far, for me. The retard option is proving surprisingly popular!
Good Lord! Do you acknowledge any concepts, words or judgements? Is any statement meaningful? Are we really not allowed to say “I like this game most” without being stupid?
In critical terms, no, I don’t think it has much meaning. It implies that there is a standard of perfection which nothing else can surpass, which, as I said, I think is silly.
Good Lord! Do you acknowledge any concepts, words or judgements?
Not if I can avoid it!
Are we really not allowed to say “I like this game most” without being stupid?
Of course, you can say anything you want, but it’s not that I have a problem with people saying “I like this game the most,” it’s more that a year is just sort of an arbitrary way to subdivide things we like. I mean, I said upthread that I thought Ep. 2 was a better experience than Portal, so obviously I’m not opposed to comparing things. I also said I thought TF2 was multiplayer game of the year, but what I was really trying to say with that was that of the multiplayer games I’ve played this year I enjoyed it the most, not that I have surveyed all multiplayer games and deem it the best. Poor choice of words on my part.
That’s just ridiculous.
For me, Game of the Year is a bit of a problem. In games, movies, music, whatever, I pretty much refuse to compare stuff across genres. When we’re talking favorite games of all time, I won’t choose between (for example) WoW and Alpha Centauri. They scratch such fundamentally different itches that it’s meaningless to pick one over the other. Sometimes within a genre there’s enough divergence that I can’t pick…Serious Sam and Deus Ex are probably my favorite FPSes of all time, but I cannot meaningfully compare them.