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The Most Anticipated Game of 2009
Long development times and delayed release dates are something gamers have grown accustomed to with many of today’s high-profile games. And most of the time, an extra six months or a year of waiting is a small price to pay to ensure that Triple-A titles are polished and tested for bugs. With Crysis, the problem isn’t that the game was released before it was ready—the conundrum is that Crytek released a game before our PCs were ready. Screenshots of Crysis running at max settings taunt us like a photo of Albert Pujols—both are emasculating reminders of our inadequacy. Sure, we could enjoy Crysis’s nerve-racking stealth gameplay without the next-gen graphics, but that’s a disservice akin to driving a Rolls-Royce without leather seats. We’d rather wait a year until our systems are worthy enough to play the game in all its glory. www.ea.com/crysis/, ESRB: M
We'd Have Been Pissed About the Crap Port if the Game Didn't Suck So Much
Take away all of the port problems in this game—crazy system requirements, unoriginal content, lack of crossover leaderboards between the PC and Xbox 360 versions—and what do you get? A game that’s just not fun.
It’s the same ol’ button-mashing rhythm game reskinned with a snazzier interface. Sure, you get new songs, but the difficulties have been cranked to finger-bleeding levels. And it’s not even a gradual ramp up; if you make it past the game’s crippling battle modes, the final chunk of five songs will rain blood on your fun parade.
www.guitarhero.com, ESRB: T
What Can Brown Do For You?
In many ways, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is a drastic departure from the deathmatch origins of the classic id Software franchise. But even with its startling team- and objective-based design, we are comforted by the familiar earth tones that saturate almost all the game’s maps. The terra palette is deeper now for sure—bronze, sienna, and hazel now blanket the tawny battlefield—but when the dust settles, brown is brown. We wouldn’t have it any other way.
www.enemyterritory.com, ESRB: T
Fail
We’ve come to love the occasional port from the console world—after all, Gears of War turned out OK. But releasing Halo 2 for the PC almost three years after the Xbox version shipped is silly. It’s bad enough that after all that time the game was essentially the same as the original Xbox edition, but Bungie added insult to injury by tying this 3-year-old, last-gen console port to Vista. Instead of ratcheting up the Halo experience for an audience that may not have been previously exposed to it, and potentially selling some more consoles and copies of Halo 3, the publisher added a few achievements and required a wonky OS.
www.microsoft.com/games/halo2/, ESRB: M
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