So everyone on the forum gets 210 points to delegate however they’d like across as many as 210 games. I went with just the 20 as I’m not sure I have 210 favorite games to list. Initially it’s a bit overwhelming to find even 20 favorite games since there’s no real criteria. I could have gone with games that I love right now or I could of gone with even more nostalgia and leaned towards how I remember the games that I love. I think I have a mix of both as I tried to include the games that had a significant impact on me at the time that I was playing them. I haven’t played Halo in years, but I was so into that game that I started going to tournaments for it. That’s probably the only game I’ll ever do that with, and while there may be games in my future that I enjoy even more than Halo, I can’t ignore that historical context.

So here they are after the jump! If you have any suggestions/objections let me know, I’d love to start a nerdy discussion about favorite games.

KEY:

1. [POINTS] Game Title

TIGForums Top Twenty 2009

1. [50] Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn
2. [16] Final Fantasy Tactics
3. [8] Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
4. [8] Final Fantasy VII
5. [8] Final Fantasy IV [released as FFII in US]
6. [8] Minecraft
7. [8] Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire
8. [8] Myst
9. [8] Robin Hood: Conquest for the Longbow
10. [8] Mega Man X
11. [8] Castlevania: SotN
12. [8] Counter Strike
13. [8] Halo
14. [8] Portal
15. [8] Mario Galaxy
16. [8] Street Fighter II
17. [8] Spelunky
18. [8] Driver
19. [8] NHL Hits 2002
20. [8] Starcraft

NOTE: we do have a month to continue revising this list, even just now I swapped out Mario Power Tennis for Starcraft, due to a lapse in judgement not remembering Starcraft. Expect this list to change, perhaps even based on your comments. :)

So the other day Joe, Mike and myself set up Mike’s brand new PC on the 50″ HDTV. Mike had only played the demo and Joe and I hadn’t seen much of it all. Though, being “Trine” we decided that we’d set aside a night and play through on 3 player co-op. We settled in, got some beers, popcorn and set our sights…

…as god intended! Or so we thought. About 5 hours later we found ourselves beaten and bruised determined to finish the last climb to whatever castle we were supposed to summit. Throughout that 5 hours we had lots of fun. I’d say some of the most fun I’ve had in gaming all year. Though, that may have been due to the fact that we hadn’t seen Joe in over a month and we were jonesin’ for a healthy dose of our “French” friend.

I like to think though, that the high points of Trine emerge out of the imbalanced nature of the classes. Each character has a specific set of abilities, and those abilities compliment others, and in many cases rely on each other to make it past a certain barrier. It works well, and the side-effects of co-couching this game showed themselves through the relationships between each character. For instance, I played as the thief. Mike the warrior and Joe the wizard. “Slippy Wiz” we called him. Though we do like to give Joe nicknames, this came about mainly because the wizard was ultimately the most powerful character in the game. With the ability to draw blocks and platforms, move them about at will and carry friendly characters wherever Joe became the lynchpin. It’s there that roles started to emerge. We relied on Joe’s magic heavily, but once Mike acquired the throwing ability, Joe and Mike had a kind of teamwork system where each would help the other across a gap or what ever danger lay ahead. Of course, that leaves the thief…

I was the odd man out for the entire game. It wasn’t great, but it did make for some fun interplay between the three of us. I’d get across with my grappling hook and then just wait. While I was powerful in the sense of my ability to reach places on my own, it was still… on my own. While Joe and Mike harmonized feats of friendship, I was off in one corner of the screen simply watching. It’s due to this kind of imbalance that possibly made the game a bit more interesting for us. We had some fun role-playing and taking jabs at each other. Soon enough though, it became quite obvious that this game really wasn’t meant to be played 3 player on the couch.

Remember how I mentioned I was often on the side of the screen? Well, we soon realized that the camera had an preference, and that was Slippy Wiz there. No matter what, even if the wizard was falling far behind, the camera would be fixated on him and if we got too far away, we’d respawn near him. Eventually, we just started using it to get the whole group together. If the wiz was ahead, I’d just run off screen and then I’d respawn ahead. Of course, this is an exploit based on a bug which is probably there because 3 player couch co-op was not big on their list of priorities with this game. And it continues…

Beyond the bugged camera, there was the issue of puzzle design. Frankly we never really encountered any extensive puzzles. Mainly due to the fact that anytime we face a large gap, Joe would create a box, then hop on it whilst Mike threw it across the gap. Upon landing Joe would levitate it to where he was and we’d move on. Where was I? Probably just swinging around aimlessly getting green pots [experience] or heading off screen to respawn next to the wiz. We never felt too challenged, but maybe that’s why we had so much fun with it It was gleeful irreverently charging through these obstacles in ways we weren’t supposed to be playing.

That’s the whole idea here with these physics based puzzle platformers. Finding your own way is often much more fun, even if not intended. And while I say that, in the same breath I think it’s important to understand that in Trine while playing 3 player co-op the game gets so easy that it’s clear these are no longer puzzles allowing for creative solutions, but they were meant for a different playing style. A single player style.

It wasn’t really until the end level that this became apparent though. And if you disagree that this game’s design suffers some injury when played in 3 player mode, at least concede that the final level is assuredly a singular affair. It’s also super hard. Though, I liked that. Ascending through this vertical gauntlet of obstacles appearing out of thin air, there’s really only a couple paths to take, and all the while lava is nipping at your heels. This time-based mechanic certainly puts the pressure on, but it doesn’t allow for collaborative solutions while ascending. You’ve gotta run and gun and if someone falls behind, you have to leave them. This level, beyond any other stage in the game, is meant to be played with one character dynamically switching between roles based on the given situation. There was one concession though… The thief shines here! Finally, I served my purpose!

Ok, we’re approaching 1K words here so I’ll wrap it up. My point with all this criticism is really just about couch co-op and the importance of considering it. Nobody considered it more than Behemoth with Castle Crashers and they turned out an incredibly joyous couch co-op experience. I think Trine could have been better than that. Too often do we forget why we really play games. Just recently I listened to the Life Well Wasted episode about “why we play” and I was astounded how many developers don’t really know/think/give-a-shit-about why we play video games.

The truth is, it’s different for everybody. Sometimes I play them to engage with my friends, it’s a medium for socializing. Others, it’s about challenging myself, my will. Maybe learning something, understanding a different perspective or maybe even just-plain-turn-off-your-brain violent-combat to relieve some stress. Every player knows why they play video games, they do, even if they can’t express it. Somehow, game developers have lost track of that though. Or at least the ones that Robert Ashley interviewed.

I’m not saying Trine is part of that cold game developer reality. Trine is great. It’s beautiful too. And I’m not one for realistic graphics, but the water reflections on the rocks made me swoon. But it brought some things up for me that I think ought to go noticed. It also makes me question how I play games nowadays and my role when reviewing these games. I often [over] analyze games while I’m playing them, trying to break them down into bits so I can suss out certain pieces and understand where they came from. I’ll notice things like the terminal velocity of mega man in MegaMan9 or how many frames an animation is. I wonder if I’m being unfair to Trine, and frankly I think I probably am, but I can’t really help it.

I wonder if a game developer can simultaneously review games accurately, or are they too far behind the lines? I like to think it’s an advantage… but more likely, just navel-gazery.

Apparantly I’m an indie developer. Nobody really knows what this means. Some say it has to do with money, others say it’s about your soul. Whatever it is doesn’t really make a difference in this article, suffice to say a lot of smaller groups of people with fewer resources than ever before are making games that are possibly better or at least more interesting than huge developers with hundreds on staff and millions in their war chests. Long story short, when it comes to being a game developer this is the age of the little guy. This scenario is not unprecedented. In fact, once upon a time, mass-producing publications was not unlike traditional AAA game development.

But let’s start at the beginning. Think “Pong.” When Guttenburg made his first bible, he was one man tinkering with a machine that could print a relatively small number of books a day. “Print” was born [don't come at me with other inventions that were marginally earlier and etc. let's just stick with "high school" history here]. The medium of “Print” is not merely about constructing something on paper and giving it to someone else, that’s called “writing a letter.” Print is about mass production for mass consumption, and early on it wasn’t so massive.

Technology got better though, and it was possible to mass produce pamphlets and eventually illustrations! But those were expensive. Incredibly expensive. Eventually the newspaper arrived and it wanted pictures in it as well. Text was boring to people, they saw the printed image and they thirsted for more. To create a newspaper with images was now a huge task requiring an enormous team of highly skilled and dependable professionals. The news couldn’t wait, so deadlines were fierce and so was the work ethic. Sound familiar game developers? To get a single illustration/image into a newspaper would first need to be drawn by an artist. Next it would be taken over to probably several etchers where it would be ingrained in a metal plate for mass production. Since there were probably more than just one illustration in each paper, there would be a whole fleet of these highly skilled people required to create the images for just one day’s newspaper. On top of this, you’ve got writers, type setters, inkers, printers, editors, management and on and on and on.

But then came photography. Dun dun duuuuuun. Photography was still pretty infantile when it first hit the scene, but it cut out an entire job position from the newspaper staff. It wasn’t long before the transfer of photos to plates was made more automatic and then the etchers had to clean out their desks as well. This process of new technology replacing loads of jobs continues on and on throughout the print industry. Typesetting becomes a thing of the past, printing gets more efficient and mechanized, and then eventually… computers take over the world.

Now I used the newspapers as an example here, but this was true of the entire print industry. Magazines, catalogs, brochures, design firms and so on. Sure there were outliers and not all my facts are straight but that’s not too important. As technology made it possible to do things more efficiently, design firms, magazines and newspapers began to struggle. Their massive amounts of employees, dependencies and ultimately outdated practices gave way to a new uprising of smaller, team-based design firms and businesses. Sure some big guys survived and even prospered in that market, but more common today are these smaller groups that have grown moreso by spawning satellites of similar size rather than a massive trunk.

Today, anyone can be a graphic designer. All you need is a rich text editor that can embed images. These kinds of tools would have been considered witchcraft during the early 1900s but today it’s taken for granted when you want to print out 50 fliers advertising your garage sale. It’s not even considered graphic design, it’s just something that’s done. This is hundreds of years into the history of graphic design [if you don't count cave paintings, which I think is a cop-out] and people have co-opted it into their life as nearly a natural function. So where does that leave the professional? The designer? Well, it leaves them to be auteurs of their craft. It’s still not feasible for one person to layout and design a newspaper every day, but only a few people can do so just fine, often under the supervision of a guiding visionary.

Gamemaker. It’s not exactly Microsoft Word, but it’s close. There are flash-based gamemaking tools that aim at giving people with zero experience the ability to create their own games. Allbeit, it’s not a blank canvas by any means, but it’s a start. Would a graphic design firm actually consider putting 40-50 people [or even 10] on a single project in a world where Microsoft Word exists? We’ve come all this way so we can support a design by commitee?

Here come the indies! While a lot of people like to put the independent game developers off in their own corner as “a movement” or a “brand” it’s not the reality. Indies are the future of the gaming industry and while this is probably not a new idea to many of you, what may be though, is that we are not in our infancy. We are a model for the future. Smaller teams with light-weight agile development processes and clear creative visions from a personal perspective will make The Games of Tomorrow [echo].

The success of indie developers is not due to their passion for making games or their hunger for ramen noodles, it’s their agility. Some indies may aspire to amass a large studio filled with dozens of other developers in order to create some large dream-game, but that misses the target. If some of them do go that route I don’t think they’ll like what they see when they get there. These huge teams are already dinosaurs, even if their model hasn’t been made extinct yet, it will be shortly. The stakes are even higher than they were in the early 20th century for the print industry. Technology grows exponentially and that growth will not provide as wide a buffer as it did a century ago. I guess you could say: “We’re not there yet. Two guys can’t make a World of Warcraft, a Halo or a Little Big Planet!” But that’s the wrong challenge. Two guys can’t make a newspaper by illustrating each image, etching it themselves, setting the type, writing the articles, editing them, designing the pages, proofing the pages, loading the printer, setting up the ink, maintain the machines, package them, deliver them and clean up in just one day, can they?

Maybe two guys will make something better.

NOTE: Don’t hold me to my facts here. I’m going off of memory from a class I took about three years ago. If anyone has more precise facts on the fragmentation of the print industry, please let me know I’ll be happy to add more notations.

I’ve always played my fighting games with the joint of my thumb, or any game for that matter. I’m not sure why, perhaps it’s the same reason I hold my pencil with one less finger than I should. Whatever it is, it sucks now. I can’t play Street Fighter IV anymore because of X-Box 360s horribly gigantic d-pad. The thing has teeth.

A lot of my friends who are super hardcore have joysticks and now I’m starting to wonder if I should too. If the thing weren’t 170 BUCKS! What the hell? I figured it’d be around $60 to $90 for a decent stick. This isn’t Steel Battalion, but if I were to buy this thing it’d exceed Steel Battalion’s price tag! Maybe there’s a better option out there. I never really trusted Mad Catz anyway. Something about that “Z”. >_>

And there’s a dog too! Ok, I’ll stop. But these are some of the talking points Molyneux pedaled during his traditional PR campaign he runs for every single Lionhead game. These ideas are super awesome when you imagine them in a game:
a forgotten gamer

“I can have children! We’ll play in the woods and he’ll grow up to be like me. I can teach him how to fight with a sword. My dog! Oh yea, I’ll name him meatball and he’ll save me from battles and stuff if I get injured. It’ll be like a video game version of White Fang. And after awhile we’ll bond and he’ll start trusting me. We’ll start trusting each other. Oh man! That would be sweet!”

But not really. I mean, those are just ideas after all. No game can ever compete with the boundless possibilities of imagination. As soon as gamers hear these kind of things they begin tailoring the idea to exactly what they would want out of a game with child birth and dogs. A lot of the times it’ll be different, but if a game like this followed the desires of the quoted gamer above, he’d be in heaven. His dreams mostly met, the game would be an ode to his vision and he would fall in love. It might even be a game he remembers for his entire life.

But that’s not Fable II. Fable II is a game in which you have an animal that sniffs treasure [buried and above ground] and occasionally bites enemies ineffectually. When you have children, they are most interested in your raw attention rather than what most kids like to do… go out and play! Your wives don’t really mind if you have 20 others in the same town, just as long as you kill a yokel under a bridge blackmailing you. Townspeople adore you for your flatulence and flute-playing ability, but hate you for shooting a gun to kill a beetle that’s wandered into the square threatening the townsfolk. None of these things make much sense nor are they all that interesting.

Separating out the well-known intentions of the developer [Molyneux's teaser-squawking] from the actual game is quite difficult for me. But I suppose if I were to review this without knowing any of the intentions at hand, I would say it’s a pretty fun action-combat game when you’re actually fighting. Kind of like a watered down God of War without any of the pesky difficulty or mind blowing animations. Not to say Fable II isn’t beautiful. I’ve always loved the art direction in the Fable series and I think they often pull off incredible environments, interesting, and fresh character models. The whole world looks and feels magical. The more I played Fable II, the more I realized just how much work went into the content of the game, and how little went into its actual functionality.

Everything that is supposed to make Fable II, Fable II is pretty much a cop-out. Here’s a list:

• When I head to my bartending job to make some cash, filling pints boils down to a simple timing exercise. This convention pops up in every single other job and in expressions. It’s a boring and lazy universal solution that pleases nobody.
• Having children has nothing to do with the cool parts of having kids. It really just serves as a tax on your daily income. Instead of feeling like you have a child, or even a fraction of one, it seems more that you have an egg timer that eats gold every now and then. The same goes for your wife, although you get to hear her moan a couple times.
• As a hero, I wanted to have 15-20 kids per woman. I wanted a huge family to dominate the land. Sadly, I can only have one child per family, driving me into a life of polygamy and shame.
• You can’t really die. When you get “knocked out” you lose some amount of relative experience, essentially making the combat even less tense than its one-button design already is.
• The dog, as I said earlier, could be replaced by a treasure radar. Although I will say it’s interesting to have the dog bark off screen and respond. The implementation of that feature is very well done but, like most everything else, underdone.
• The only real consequence to most of your actions is a change to your affinity, which often times becomes the final boundary after becoming bored with the game.
• Bugs. Lots of them. I know I should give them leeway being a fellow developer and all, but seriously, these guys can afford it. It’s like the testers played for a couple hours and then called it good.
• The most fun I had in the game was after it was finished. The sidequests after the game ended were much more interesting and personal that anything I did in the game previous. There were little vignettes of story in each of them and they all felt cared-for and special. The salty jack quest. The graverobber quest. I have no idea why these were saved until after the game, but it all seemed like too little too late anyhow.

SPOILERS

I have two more gripes [big ones] that have to do with the end of the game. After you’ve collected all your heroes you assemble on top of a mountain. They form up and send you their power beams to give you strength to kill the boss guy who has just arrived as well. And then the big moment! Just as Lucien raises his gun and fires at you, your dog jumps out in front of the bullet and is killed instantly. I felt absolutely nothing. You know why? Because my dog is treasure radar. She was never in danger before, so I never had to fear for her death. No connection was made, because there was never any meaningful interaction that preempted it.

I posted something in response to Molyneux’s bit about “experiencing Love’ in a video game” on the Lionhead forums back when the PR train was running full steam. It’s what I’m guessing he was driving at with this whole dog thing. The intention being to make the player “love” the dog and then kill it so the player would feel something… real. I can’t find the post, it’s probably too old, but I said something to the tune of this:
past me

You can’t simply make a player feel love in a game by aligning it with things people love in real life. Love, or something like love, is only felt when there’s some kind of underlying risk involved. I only truly know I love someone when I worry about if they made it home okay on a long car trip, or if there’s uncertainty if they’ll make it through an illness of some kind. Love is felt when there is fear, longing, guilt and all the other messy dark feelings that go with it. Life has real tension because we can die at any moment and out of that we seek love, companionship and affection in an effort to share it and make it easier on us. Games rarely have that because we have save points, respawns and “knock outs” that don’t provide a real sense of the implicit wonder of the “now”.

The final quibbling came at the very end of the game. The boss battle… Once your dog is killed you watch a cutscene and get teleported to a dreamworld with your big sister (killed by Lucien early, the big boss guy) and you go around doing meaningless shit like shooting bottles and kicking chickens. It’s a little charming but I’m typing this with the bad taste in my mouth that follows. Eventually the music box starts playing and curiosity being what it is, you run towards the music. All of the sudden you’re there in the spire with Lucien and he’s got the three heroes powering him up with the power beams. The cutscene continues and you play [rather your character does, since you're not controlling him] the music box and it breaks Lucien’s power beams. Now, finally you have control of your character, you hit “A” and he falls dead and you’ve won. It’s a one-button boss.

I can’t help but think that this faux pas has something to do with the idea of “one-button” combat that’s strung throughout the battle system in Fable II. But there it works. It’s situational and not so rudimentary that it becomes boring. Why not let me fight the end boss? If you want to make the end guy a mere formality then give me something challenging before it [i.e. Jenova before winged Sephiroth]. Make my blood pump a little. It’s an action game!

END SPOILERS

And herein lies the issue. The growing disparity between the gamer and his creator/reviewer. Lionhead forgot to make a boss battle fun. They forgot that video games are nearly all about the boss battles. There’s absolutely no reason to cop-out on an ending like this. It wouldn’t have “compromised the vision” it was just plain lazy. How can Metacritic award this game what is essentially 89% approval and the public 61%? Take Fallout3’s rating [there's a game with a dog in it too, and it really can die!] for example. Fable II is entirely superficial. It’s full of pretty colors, fantastic scenes and high-strung promises. But none of that delivers. All in classic Molyneux fashion. A notion clearly lost on the majority of the gaming press, perhaps because they like their games easy-to-swallow and fun to watch, yet strangely most gamers like their games moderately challenging and fun to play.

Now I’m not going to talk about each and every one of these, or even list them. This is more of a photo-post than anything.

What I do want to write about is just how drastically games have changed since my nostalgic days of pouring over in-box manuals and sleuthing through Prodigy entries. A lot has changed indeed. Check out this diddy from Police Quest SWAT. A quasi puzzle-adventure with action elements that forced you to read this [and know it] before attempting to even unsheathe the almighty sniper rifle.

I’m not sure where she is, but I’m guessing I wasn’t shy about cracking open that Fodor’s tome to find out. I always remembered loving these kind of things. Laying out the map in QfGII actually felt like laying out a map. Writing in the Myst journal was helpful. I have about 10 pages filled with my childish scrawling.

Perhaps this is from an age when designers adhered to more realistic conventions. Trying to simulate the actual feeling of being a detective with stacks of papers at your desk. Ultimately, the fun wins out over reality. Maybe it’s just the dusty nostalgia inside, but I yearn from tactile relationships outside the digital space. I remember some Sierra games were packed with “secret cards” that allowed you to peer into their information with some cardboard surrounding a strip of red plastic wrap. Now, I look back and it was perhaps an early type of DRM, not dissimilar to what some bands [Radiohead, NIN etc.] are trying to do with selling premium versions of their albums.

I’m not sure I want stuff like this in my games today, it might feel out of place. But I am pretty sure I crave the kind of dedication some of these games took. As a youth I wrapped my world around Trial by Fire. My brother and I had planning sessions on how our characters would be setup and brainstorm how to get the fire elemental out of that damn hallway. ::sigh::

Another birthday, another year further from the wonder years.

Blush (First Test Footage) from Flashbang Studios on Vimeo.

Check out more games from Blurst [including Off-road Velociraptor Safari]

If you’ve never played it, chances are you take full-speed swings at a few balls on The Range and call it a day. That’s fine, but it doesn’t scratch the surface of golf’s depth. My Dad started teaching me around 7. Learning how to golf that young is quite a feat since golf is so incredibly mental that at a young age results become… sporadic. Without any kind of emotional fortitude, lessons would soon degrade into frustration and whining etc. These lessons were important to me appreciating the game [and building my own character] though, without this basis I would never have grown to a skill level high enough to appreciate the finer and deeper lessons the game had to offer.

Skip ahead a dozen years or so and I’ve grown enough as a human being to understand how to control my mental state. In fact, my particular philosophy on life [Taoism] plays directly into succeeding and enjoying the game of golf. You see, through my whole prior career as a golfer [junior tournaments, high school varsity squad etc.] I never once understood the proper mental frame of mind necessary to be consistent on the course. I remember one tournament I played in I came out of the gates 2 under par on the first three holes at an incredibly difficult course for my age [Eagle Ridge's The General]. I was so excited that I began worrying about losing the streak I had going. I hesitated on my putts and soon that incredible score ballooned to something in the mid to low 80s [well over par for 18 holes]. Not a terrible score for me at the time, but a terrible disappointment for someone watching my first few holes from the gallery.

It has been this journey of learning how to control my behavior, collecting my attitude no matter what the previous shot dealt me, that has been of the utmost importance in golf. As just the slightest bit of mental minutiae can alter the smallest fraction of your swing causing a chaotic chain of events that will ultimately leave the ball in a less than desirable position. That’s where the Tao comes in.

A truly good man is not aware of his goodness,
And is therefore good.
A foolish man tries to be good,
And is therefore not good.

A truly good man does nothing,
Yet leaves nothing undone.
A foolish man is always doing,
Yet much remains to be done.

[...]

Tao Te Ching #38

It’s these words that seem so laughable, such a paradox that why would anyone even attempt to buy whatever this stanza is selling; it’s this that unlocks the secret to controlling your temper on the course. To play golf without a memory of the last shot or the next one. Living in the moment for the sheer enjoyment of being there. To play just to play without caring. Some people have witnessed this, often by accident. Perhaps you have sunk a long distance hook-shot throwing away a crumpled wad of paper without even thinking about it. Then your office mates say “you couldn’t have done that if you tried.”

It’s true. You couldn’t have. Now I’m not going to discount effort here. Effort is huge. You certainly could do better by constantly practicing that shot day-in-day-out but my point here is that at that moment in time, it behooves you not to try.

It’s only when I forget the long checklist for the golf swing that I can be consistent. Analyzing a putt, working it over and then reworking it once I’m over the ball seems like a logical and necessary exhaustive process for making it. But if I do that and then somehow discard all desire to actually make the putt and simply hit the ball, I’ve found I’ll be much happier with the result.

This is just one application of Taoism. In this case its put to golf, and quite effectively in my opinion. While I think the Tao is neat and all that, to me, what’s very interesting about this little tangent is the implication of getting deep meaning and learning long term life lessons from a game. I’ve talked a bit about what football has taught me, and now golf.

I’m not going to cram it all in this post, but I think there’s something here. Maybe it can’t be applied to simulations on a video screen, and if not, then it’s just as important to rule out what can’t make a meaningful video game as it is to point out what can.

More on this later…

If you’re not familiar, Chris Ware is a graphic novelist living in Chicago. He’s known for his Acme Novelty Library collection among other massive timeless bodies of work. His books are something to behold, I collect as many as I can afford because when I read them they invoke that feeling of intensely pouring over a huge picture book as a kid, getting enveloped in everything the world on the page has to offer.

So yea… I dig his stuff. But whatever. Let’s get to it here. I picked up a copy of the “Best American Comics of 2007” from my local library and am enjoying it thoroughly. Now I’ve been searching for an eloquent way to express my feelings about the IGF and its growing controversy and lo and behold I found it in the most unlikely of places. Within an anthology of comics.

First of all, the title: it’s misleading. Though I haven’t taken a survey, I’d imagine that a good number of the guest editors of all the Best American series have felt compelled to take issue with it, too. To presume that my personal taste defines an objective by which all living cartoonists should be judged is absurd. On top of that, any public competition is antithetical to the spirit of real art, and labeling a widely disseminated collection of artwork as “the best” veers perilously close to suggesting that artists should gauge what they do against some sort of popularity contest for an ancillary reward –notoriety, money, or even inclusion in an anthology– other than the artwork itself. So while I suppose it’s probably obvious to the reader that my name as guest editor essentially acts as a sort of aesthetic loophole for the overall series title, it still seems polite and proper to acknowledge it here. In some cases I’ve chosen stories or excerpts of stories that fulfill what I think I’m regularly looking for from art and literature (which, when boiled down past all the things that don’t really matter like a snazzy style and clever writing and accomplished drawing, means “telling the truth”). I’ve also included work that has truck in my craw to such a degree that the best I can do is to say that it’s interesting, or, in a more conversation way, that it’s made me feel really, really old.

~ Chris Ware

He goes on to express some of the history and growing criticism within the medium of comics and graphic novels.

As a cartoonist myself, I’ve been quite heartened at the veritable explosion of intriguing work in a medium that as recently as a decade ago seemed marginal and embarrassing. In fact, it has almost gotten to the point now where a cartoonist doesn’t have to explain or qualify what he or she does, let alone not have to launch into a thumbnail history of comics as a commercial-cum-artistic medium to family members at Christmastime. Comics are appearing in bookstores as novels and in museums as art. Even more amazing is that this is all because there really does appear to be a concomitant general increase in interest by the public, one of the most tangible bits of the evidence being the very book you now hold…

…But for all this general and encouraging bonhomie, the opinions expressed are not always rah-rah; in a June 2006 roundup of various recent comics in the Times, the reviewer expressed a certain weariness at the “creeping sameness” to much of what he was leafing through, “semi- or wholly autobiographical sketches of drifting daily life and its quiet epiphanies.” Admittedly, as comics have entered their late adolescence as art/literature, a preponderance of autobiographical work has accrued, beginning with the 1960s and 1970s comics of Just Green, Aline Kominsky (now Kominsky-Crumb), Harvey Pekar, and, of course, Robert Crumb himself. Art Speigelman has eloquently expressed the difficulty of understanding both the value of and the means to approaching fiction in his recent “Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@#*!” and the three generations of artists C. Tyler, Joe Matt, and Jeffrey Brown have, at least up until now, devoted their oeuvres almost solely to soul-searching self-analysis. I genuinely think that this is a necessity, however, both for the artists and the medium. As cartoonists and comics still attempt to acquaint themselves with not only how to express real human emotion but also try to decide exactly what human emotions are worth expressing, the most facile and immediate way to do it is to write about oneself. Charges of self-indulgence and navel-gazing are inevitable, especially for an artist maturing within an insulated and comparatively worry-free culture such as America’s, but isn’t art at least partly a means of finding a way out of oneself and then reporting back? The value of trying to see and feel one’s own experience is a necessary step toward understanding what communicates and works in a medium, as well as important bridge to cross toward completely synthetic, or imaginary, storytelling, should any artist want to cross it.

~ Chris Ware

Phew. That was a lot of transcription there. But it was worth it, hopefully… When I read Ware’s introductory thoughts on comics, I immediately drew the parallel between comics and video games. Both are in their varying incubation stages of New Media in hopes [imminent] of becoming full fledged artistic mediums within mainstream culture.

Ware mentions an influx of autobiographical work in comics, so I look to the early autobiographers in Video Games. I can only really refer to a few off the top of my head. Edmund McMillen [Aether], Rod Humble [The Marriage] and Jason Rohrer [Gravitation]. Much of these games are dubbed “Art House” and perhaps rightly so. The difference being that comics have been through this phase of their development and are even getting a little sick of the routine. To Video Games, an insightful autobiographical [or its equivalent] game would be a complete and utter breakthrough.

In a previous post I mentioned how Video Games are in their adolescence but now I’m wondering if we’re going through puberty… Is that the same?

First off, the numbers are alarming. Even to those in the industry, but I Wii Play is a good game! The mini-games have a great amount of appeal. Ok, I’ll give you the fishing, the matching game, the bubble-position crap and I’ll even throw in the cow-race. Those aside, and mind you many of those games get picked up by plenty of people, have you played the shooting game? Air hockey, billiards? Ok fine, those aren’t 19.2-million-sold good. What does that leave… Hmm…

Wii Tanks!!!!

Yep. It’s an AWESOME game. In fact, I think it’d sell for $10 alone on Wii-Ware just fine. There are 100 levels. If that’s not enough, add in a level generator and a way to share levels online, or perhaps a 1on1 competitive multiplayer element and you may just have another flagship Nintendo game just in its own rite. It’s easy to forget, stuffed in with all the other mini-games with its slim cardboard sleeve CD-case, but it’s worth hours of entertainment just for the co-op Wii Tanks experience.

Notice that article references three major games that are all sequels… or quadrals? [MGS4, GoW2, Halo3]. Perhaps Nintendo has done something different and is being rewarded in a big way.