Ah, 2009. A fun year for video games and a broke year for this reviewer, who in his shame admits freely to having not played as many games as his esteemed colleagues-in-pixilated-arms. I mean, I just got Borderlands as a Christmas gift, so there’s no making it onto my list this year (blasphemous, I know.) Always lagging behind, I am. And look—not a single PC-only game on my Top 5. I don’t even recognize myself in the mirror anymore.

Click the jump below to check out my Top 5 picks of the year, as well as two noteworthy honorable mentions.

#5. Batman: Arkham Asylum (Xbox 360/PS3)
You get to play as Batman. ‘Nuff said. Wait, I’m mixing my comic metaphors there.

No, seriously—you get to play as Batman. We’ve seen Batman in other video games before—many, many other games—but Batman: Arhkam Asylum is the first game that lets us be Batman in all his Dark Knight glory, sneaking through the shadows, swinging from cables, swooping onto unsuspected prey with merciless, non-lethal efficiency. The ultimate nerdy thrill, no game has been able to capture so perfectly the superhero experience as satisfying as this. Beautiful art design, faithful voice acting and a Rogue’s Gallery full of adversaries to stomp, Batman: Arkham Asylum is a delight to play.

The Contrarian Fanboy speaks: Some of the puzzle mechanics get a tad repetitious, like when you’d walk into a room and be thrust into a “swing from the gargoyles” stealth scenario again and again. Oh, how I yearned just to be able to drop to the floor and start pulverizing people proper.

Or any sequence involving the Scarecrow. Nuts to that guy.

na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na... BATMAN

#4. Scribblenauts (DS)
This one gets a nod on my list out of sheer tenacious creativity and innovation. Rarely has a game, let alone a Nintendo DS game been so discussed, analyzed, anticipated and dissected as Scribblenauts was after its memorable E3 showing. Audiences asked, “So what, you can create… anything?” And 5th Cell, the little scamps, just smiled enigmatically and showed another clip of God on a skateboard with a shotgun fighting Cthulu.

Once the game arrived, its flaws became immediately apparent—no, you can’t create anything, and the control scheme was a flaming nightmare of awkwardness, but how many truly original game franchises does one see emerge in any given year? Most simply recycle mechanics and engines from other titles, polishing here or tweaking there. Scribblenauts was something new, something genuinely innovative and creative—an open-ended puzzler with seemingly limitless potential, based entirely around your ability to think outside the box and develop emergent gameplay. Ask a guy like Peter Molyneux, and he’ll swear that this is the future direction of video gaming.

Yes, the game overpromised, and expectations were impossibly high, but Scriblenauts still deserves a place on this list. It may be imperfect, but I’ll take an ambitious-yet-flawed game over a redundant one any day of the week.

The Contrarian Fanboy speaks: Did I mention the control scheme was awful? This cannot be overstated.

Please do not ride Cthulu in a race against God on a dinosaur. Cthulu does not like this.

#3. New Super Mario Bros. Wii (Wii)
Nostalgia, pure and simple, will make New Super Mario Bros. Wii one of the best-selling video games of all time. This is not a deep game, or a particularly challenging game, or a terribly innovative game. In fact, it bears more than a passing similarity to the previous New Super Mario Bros. title on the Nintendo DS in design and game play. With the possible exception of Rock Band, I challenge you to find a more entertaining or satisfying gaming experience that you and three friends, be them hardcore gamers or casually curious, can sit down and just play to your heart’s content.

Young and old, man and women alike, Nintendo has a knack at cultivating games to appeal to all parties, almost to a fault. Even this reviewer’s wife, a vehement non-gamer, looked upon this title fondly in our household, remembering days of yesteryear rescuing her own Princess back on the SNES in Super Mario World. But boy, the Princess sure gets kidnapped a lot. That girl needs a LoJack system.

The Contrarian Fanboy speaks: Nintendo feels obligated to cram motion control elements into all of its games, whether the game actually benefits from them or not. Wagging your controller to fly into the air is an awkward gaming element, and will make you look stupid in front of your three friends. Thanks, Nintendo.

Too much waggling can be hazardous to your health.

#2. Street Fighter IV (Xbox 360/PS3/PC)
Again with the nostalgia titles! Apparently I’m a soft touch for things that remind me of my childhood. And nothing reminds me more of my childhood than cramming rolls upon rolls of quarters into the Street Fighter II machine at the convenience store by my house, day after day. Capcom has hit this one out of the park by resisting the temptation to make something new—like Street Fighter Alpha, or Street Fighter III and its various incarnations, or some mash-up pairing Ryu with giant robots.

No, none of that nonsense. Street Fighter IV is a return to form, a loving homage to the glory days of arcade and the pure simplicities of button-mashing, spinning piledrivers and fireballs. The 3D graphics and 2D game play blend perfectly. You don’t need an instruction manual for this one. You just sit down, turn it on, and know what to do.

Also, do not play Dave in Street Fighter IV. He will pile drive your face.

The Contrarian Fanboy speaks: Capcom may have avoided the pitfalls from its various Street Fighter incarnations over the last ten years… except for one unfortunate area—the boss fight. Seth is a douchebag. He just makes things up to win fights, like the physics engine or the laws of gravity. He feeds on your tears.

But thank the lords up above that he can’t reincarnate himself like Gill. Capcom can go @#$% themselves over Gill.

This is you, losing the fight.

#1. Dragon Age: Origins (PS3, XBOX360, PC)
If you make a Top 5 list of the Best Games of the Year, and one of your factors is “time you have spent playing the game”, then Dragon Age: Origins deserves its crown. The latest epic RPG from BioWare, Dragon Age is as satisfying a role playing experience as North Americans can envision without stealing ideas from Square Enix. Beautiful visual designs, an engrossing and complex plot and a large and colorful cast of characters with surprisingly well-defined identities make Dragon Age a rewarding gaming experience that will suck the marrow from your bones like a vampire.

Do not be alarmed at the seemingly spontaneous two-inch beard growth that springs from your face every time you sit down to play Dragon Age. It isn’t a side effect of the game per se—it just means you’ve been sitting in a pile of your own filth for two weeks solid. It happens when you play a game this good. Fans of BioWare’s other games (Baldur’s Gate, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect) will feel right at home. This is the kind of world you can get lost in.

The Contrarian Fanboy speaks: Boy, I wish I bought this on PC. I don’t care how good you make a navigation or control scheme on consoles—it can’t hold a candle to a keyboard and a mouse when it comes to unleashing tactic-based combat on hordes of enemies. Forget the sissy “wheel” menu– give me an F1 key and I’ll whump any dragon that steps to me. Oh snap, I went there.

This is Morrigan and she blows things up for you. Try to avoid sleeping with her.

Honorable Mentions
If this was a Top 7 List, these would be #6 and #7. Lousy editors.

The Beatles: Rock Band (Xbox 360, PS3, Wii)
This one just barely missed the #5 spot list for me. More a love letter to four mop-heads from Liverpool than a rhythm game, The Beatles: Rock Band is the ultimate fan boy gift for Beatles fans—a living, breathing documentary of music, song and obscure collector’s memorabilia. It may masquerade as a video game, but the real beauty and joy in this game is being an obsessive fan of the band in question. This one rekindled my love for The Beatles.

On a personal level, it’s hard to express the joy this title brought me. But judged purely from a game merit standpoint, it gets edged out by the competition. It’s a cruel world, I know.

Torchlight (PC)
From the creators of Fate and Diablo comes… well, a carbon-copy clone of Fate and Diablo, without a hint of irony. Proof that games don’t need to break new grounds to deliver superb gaming experiences, Torchlight filled the empty stomachs of hungry PC gamers anxiously awaiting the dungeon-crawling feast of Diablo III (release TBD).

As meals go, sure, it’s all empty carbohydrates—and the game experience is short and repetitive—but the sugar rush is fantastic, and you’d be hard-pressed to get more gaming value out of a Jackson these days.




See you all next year!

Dave and Tim join Erich for a discussion of games old and new, including Halo: ODST, Scribblenauts, The Beatles: Rock Band, Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story, and Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection. In news, Super Street Fighter IV has Dave super excited, and the boys allocate their gaming dollars for the rest of the year. This week’s Symposium Ad Nauseum is Zombie Killin’. This week’s show may or may not be crazy good. It depends on how much you like fake movie reviews written for small college newspapers.

Add your thoughts. comments, and ideas for October-related promotion puns below. You can also dish on this week’s episode over in the DVD Verdict Jury Room forums.

You can listen to the show with the player below, download it here, or subscribe through iTunes or by adding our feed to your podcatcher of choice.

As a committed “hardcore” type of gamer (yay Ninja Gaiden 2!  Boo Horsez Magical Marshmallow Journeys), the fact that I had this game on my must-buy list was a big step out of my comfort zone.

But the previews I read about 5th Cell’s wonder-game had me craving it and so it resided just below Uncharted 2 on my most-anticipated fall gaming list.  Does it live up to the hype?

For the most part, the answer to that question is a big fat juicy yes.  I am constantly surprised and amused by the way Scribblenauts allows your imagination to go berserk.  It really is stunningly rare for the game not to understand something I write (and when I get the “Did you mean” list there is invariably stuff there I don’t even recognize).

You likely know the drill by now: you control a guy named Maxwell, who’s plopped in the iddle of different environments that require puzzle solutions.  To earn the “Starite” and a level completion, you summon anything you want by typing it in the keypad.

Wings, jetpacks, walls, freeze rays, helicopters, velociraptors, dragons, plumbers, mechanics, zombies, vampires, vampire hunters, monster trucks, submarines, whatever you want, write it and comes to life.

It’s a simple concept that is just bananas in its execution.  One could spend hours just monkeying around with the object creation on the title screen.  The actual levels are fun, though, playful, inventive and well-tuned towards using your imagination.  I did use plenty of go-to objects (pro-tip: the wall, runway, wings, cable and wall are invaluable) but the game rewards you for coming up with new stuff.

The lowlights are well-documented–lack of precise touch control, dificulty in equippin g items, cheap deaths–but I found ways to work past them.  Simply put–the strengths of this staggeringly innovative title far outweigh the weakness.  Definitely give this a spin.

The head shrink takes a week off, leaving the inmates running the asylum. Steve, Adam, and Jon bring some Canadian flair to the proceedings as they dig deep, peel back the layers, and get to the real heart of video game podcasting. Adam talks about World of Warcraft content updates, We all love Scribblenauts, Jon gets Wet and Steve races fast cars and prances around New Mombasa as Nathan Fillion (what?). We also learn that no one wants a PSP Go, Super Street Fighter 4 is coming, Dave Johnson needs roofing work done, Steve wants Enslaved, and Bioware (but not pure wholesome Canadian Bioware) and Lucasarts are gearing to start beta testing on Star Wars: The Old Republic. Meanwhile, more games get scheduled for ‘Q1 2010′, including more obscure stuff that only Steve cares about, and Demon’s Souls made HARDER? What? We clue everything up with a discussion about crappy physics, or crappy Genesis games. This episode may be bad, but it ain’t Earnest Evans!

The following words do not appear in this week’s Canuck-centric podcast – Bacon, beer, Beaver, toonie, looney, touque, Tim Horton’s, Degrassi, aboot, eh, or hockey.

Special cameo appearance by Adam’s wife (OMG! A gurlz!)

Music credits:
Opening: the theme from Danger Bay
Closing: ‘Run With Us’ from The Raccoons

Join in the Canadian fun by commenting below, heading over to the the DVD Verdict Jury Room forums, or emailing us at feedback@pixelverdict.com.

You can listen to the show with the player below, download it here, or subscribe through iTunes or by adding our feed to your podcatcher of choice.

Erich, Dave, and Tim reminisce about the frustrating days of text adventures as an appetizer to a discussion of modern games including Tales of Monkey Island: Episode 1, Scribblenauts, Halo 3: ODST, Dead Space, and Lost Odyssey. In news, what do price drops, rebates, and bundles mean for the holiday shopping season? And in Symposium Ad Nauseum: throwing heads, guns without bullets, and balls as weapons.

Send us your feedback in text form in the comments below, over in the the DVD Verdict Jury Room forums, or by emailing us at feedback@pixelverdict.com.

You can listen to the show with the player below, download it here, or subscribe through iTunes or by adding our feed to your podcatcher of choice.

The Charge:
Write anything, solve anything.

Opening Statement:
Rumored, whispered about, discussed and debated—rarely does a Nintendo DS game see so much speculation. Enter Scribblenauts, developed by 5th Cell, winner of “Best of Show” at E3 2009, the first portable game ever to do so. From its earliest teaser trailers and first-hand reports, people knew this was going to be something significant, a game with endless possibilities and creative applications.

Well, kinda. Now that the game is in hand, hindsight tells us it was almost impossible for it to live up to everyone’s expectations. In many ways, Scribblenauts is exactly as advertised—you can write anything into it, and it appears. The possibilities and combinations of items are seriously impressive, and you will be stunned at how much time and energy has gone into predicting every weird object you could possibly think to conjure. On the other hand, something had to give… and where things go tepid are the gameplay elements.

Facts of the Case:
You are Maxwell, and your job is to collect “Starites” – little sparkling star items. Why? Who cares? What matters in the world of Scribblenauts is what you can do. You have a notepad, and in it, anything you write comes to life, magically, instantly. With over ten themed environments and 220 levels to play in, the possibilities are endless. There are thousands of ways to solve a single puzzle, based only on your creativity. They call it “emergent gameplay”. You’ll call it fun.

Panda, crown, motorcycle... check!

The Evidence:
Scribblenauts is fun, seriously fun. This f-word is one you will see me using a lot in this review, because it is absolutely the simplest and most succinct way to describe this Nintendo DS game. Fun! You’ve never really played a game quite like this before. It is cutting edge, new and exciting. The game itself is a construct, the barest objectives established—Maxwell needs to get the Starite on each level to proceed. You can play any level in any order, or solve it any way you want. You can go back and repeat levels, and are rewarded for coming up with new solutions. You are given points (currency) for how quick you solve a problem, for how few items you need to conjure, and for how “creative” a solution you come up with. If a Starite is in a tree, summoning a ladder will give you the most rudimentary of scores… but summoning a dinosaur, a fishing pole, a rope and a piece of meat, then attaching the meat to the rope, to the pole, sitting on the dinosaur, and riding it to the tree will score big points. That is, if the dinosaur doesn’t try and eat you first. Either way, there’s no penalty for failure! You get infinite attempts.

There are limits, of course. Scribblenauts boasts a word list of over 22,000 entries, but there are restrictions on what can be summoned. You can’t pull up trademarked items, or profane or sexual items, things like that. “Taser” is a no-no, but “stun gun” works fine. Descriptive modifiers on items may or may not work, like colors. “White bear” may not work as expected, but “polar bear” would. With a bit of trial-and-error, you should find very little you are unable to summon. Internet memes, forces of nature, large hadron colliders, Cthulu—you name it, it’s in here. Some objects don’t always make sense, but they usually come back with something—I tried to summon a “miner” to dig a hole for me, but I ended up with a Viking. No idea why. If the game does not recognize your spelling (entered via keyboard or by quirky handwriting recognition) it will suggest closest matches. There are also limits to how many summoned items you can have in play on any given level (no doubt a restriction of the DS system) which the game will alert you to via a thermostat-like bar. You can always drag items into the trash can when you’re done with them, or when you want to try something else. Recycling is a must!

The sunglasses are a must.

Did I mention this was fun? It really, really is. You pick up Scribblenauts, and can be playing within seconds. No complicated storyline, no annoying restrictions—just play the level you want. New stages and avatar-appearances can be purchased via the currency (Ollars) but I found I was rolling in the stuff and could unlock almost all the levels within twenty minutes of game play. The failures of solving missions can often be as fun as the solutions—like summoning criminals to distract the police officers guarding the Starite in a museum-like setting, only to have the police officer kill the criminal, then move onto Maxwell. Whoops. Get a few people you know playing, and expect to spend a lot of time regaling each other with the spectacular and quirky failures and successes of each level.

And here’s where the game gets into a bit of trouble. The game elements are so open-ended that it actually poses a conceptual problem to Scribblenauts: do you spend endless agonizing hours wresting with Rube Goldberg-esque combinations of machine items, summoned characters, objects and accoutrement to solve a simple puzzle, or do you just summon a jetpack and fly up into the tree to rescue the cat? Yes, it’s fantastic and entertaining and awe-inspiring to pull off esoteric solutions to simple problems, but the game doesn’t really reward you sufficiently for the effort—you get a few more points and a little more currency, but not enough to justify the aneurysm you give yourself trying to figure out how to put the poison on the meat and throw it to the piranha (instead of throw the bottle of poison at the piranha, like I kept doing).

Robotic T-Rex vs. Superhero!

On the subject of game mechanics, the biggest execution problem with Scribblenauts is the control scheme. The D-pad moves the camera, and all movement (jumping, walking, etc) is performed by sweeps and taps on the touch screen. This is a very awkward experience for all involved. Expect to hurl your DS across the floor a few times as an errant tap with the stylus sends your character into a spiked pit, or into a pool of water with a shark, when you actually intended him to walk up a ladder. Interactions with items are handled by tapping the item, the character, or the NPC. Alas, it isn’t immediately clear which item expects which behavior to perform the expected action. Watch in frustration as the item you conjured gets hurled like a baseball at the NPC, causing him to attack you mercilessly (failing the level) when in actuality you just wanted to hand the item to him. Scribblenauts has a very clear categorization of what items can perform what functions—thrown, shot, put in, taken out, climbed, etc—but this information is not immediately made clear to the player. You can summon tens of thousands of items, but you can’t always interact with them in the way you expect to. At times, the simplest of objectives becomes a horrible, endless sequence of trial and error trying to get your character to perform the basest of actions without maiming himself.

In many ways, these are game-breaking elements. It’s impossible to ignore these issues; they are festering and pulsing right in your face at all times, crippling the utopic experience many gamers envisioned after getting wind of early demos and screenshots of Scribblenauts . In other ways, it doesn’t really matter. This is a game where you get out of it what you put into it—or what you type into it, to be exact. Yes, the controls are borked, and yes, the endless sandbox solution system leads to more frustration and confusion than actual puzzle solving—but so what? It’s impossible to deny that Scribblenauts is fun, fun, fun! If you don’t mind eschewing the actual levels and just mucking about with the near endless potential of the game to cause mayhem and mischief, the potential is endless.

Summon a vampire at your own risk. Seriously.

Closing Statement:
A brilliant idea executed awkwardly, Scribblenauts is a marvelously entertaining game, right up until the realization that the endless creativity is a gameplay hindrance. You can conjure up tens of thousands of items, but to what end? “Spleen” isn’t something you need to be able to pull up to solve any problem, ever, and there’s only so many Cthulu vs. God on a skateboard vs. vampire with a shotgun combinations you can kick out before getting bored. Once you figure out the half-dozen or so genuinely useful items, you whiz through every level without breaking a sweat. Add to this the frustratingly awkward game mechanics, and Scribblenauts falls short of its revolutionary promise.

And yet, it’s still an absolute recommendation. Weird contradiction, I know, but you have to give it to 5th Cell for creating a game that tries to think outside the box. It will be a long time before we see a game as genuinely creative as this. And it is endlessly fun, so long as you set your expectations reasonably. I haven’t experienced as much delight with a Nintendo DS game in quite a while as the simple act of seeing what ridiculous items can be conjured. Sure, they’re useless in the game, but that’s beside the point.

The Verdict:

Platform: Nintendo DS
Developer: 5th Cell
Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment
Release Date: September 15th, 2009
Rated: Everyone 10 and older

Erich, Steve, and Jon celebrate the big three-oh with a hefty discussion of games old and new, including Muramasa: The Demon Blade, Scribblenauts, The Beatles: Rock Band, Shadow Complex, Uncharted, Killzone 2, Grand Theft Auto IV DLC, and Vampire: The Masquerade — Redemption. In News, Nintendo may or may not be price dropping the Wii, Zelda: Spirit Tracks gets a release date, Bobby Kotick hates fun, people are buying PS3s, and Uncharted 2 early reviews are great. This week’s Symposium Ad Nauseum: Shooting Things with a Spaceship.

Over in the Tooting Our Own Horns Department, be sure to check out the Demon’s Souls trailer on GameTrailers.com, featuring a quote from Steve’s review! If you’d like to congratulate him, weigh in on the show, or complain about our insufferable back-patting, please leave a comment below, head over to the DVD Verdict Jury Room forums, or email us at feedback@pixelverdict.com.

You can listen to the show with the player below, download it here, or subscribe through iTunes or by adding our feed to your podcatcher of choice.

I sort of hate the useless moniker AAA title, which exists solely for fanboys to toss at each other in message board poop fights.  But with the rumor of Sony’s humongous online shooter slipping to 2010 I think there is a viable question of the number of heavy hitter games landing on consoles this year.

Perhaps we’ve been spoiled by 2008′s gargantuan year, but the forecast does look a mite slim, especially when you consider Bioshock 2 was bumped (much to the chagrin of Take2′s stock holders).

What’s remains out there, calling to you for your money?  Me–Uncharted 2 tops the list, followed by Splinter Cell Conviction and Scribblenauts and maybe Bayonetta.  But that’s it for Day 1 purchases methinks…