It's December already? It really doesn't seem like that long ago since we did our Best of 2007 at Gamasutra, but somehow, a year has passed, which means it's time to start reflecting again.As you may know, each of us handles our own top fives on various topics -- events, issues, people, and different sub-sections of games. When it comes to the games themselves, we tend to do it by committee, especially our top 10, which is decided as a group. While time passes quickly, it's a bit too early yet to talk about "Game of the Year" even still -- in case you're wondering, though, no, I haven't decided yet. There are a few titles that I still want to play first, and in the end it'll be much more difficult this year than just picking between Portal and BioShock.
My individual contribution this morning was a roundup of the year's top five biggest disappointments. In my position I get to wear many hats -- blogger, critic, reviewer, industry reporter -- and I aimed here to incorporate the issues that I felt most frustrated about, and that I felt most frustrated the industry, during the year. Check it out!
Speaking of time passing before you know it, I hadn't realized how long it's been since I updated the little sidebar I use to link my favorite stuff from outside of SVGL. You may or may not have seen the big two-parter I did on the piracy issue at Gamasutra, and I've added a little poll today to try and suss out your attitudes on piracy, too. The more writing I do on the issue, the more I realize what an overwhelmingly complex issue it is, so it's probably no surprise that one of the things that disappointed me this year is that there aren't more answers and more solutions.
If you keep up with SVGL, you probably have a good idea of the things I found most disheartening this year, but please see the full list for a couple that may surprise you!
On some of our game lists, we tend to elect "honorable mentions," titles that weren't sorted into the top five but that we found worthy of note anyway (see our Top 5 Downloadables for an example). "Honorable mention" seems like a funny thing to include in a list of disappointments, but there were a couple things I declined to mention because of them being largely personal, too subjective, and probably not useful.
Last year, I wrote a list of what I found the most poignant moments in the year's titles for the Aberrant Gamer. I also wrote a list of the year's best characters. This year, I wouldn't even know where to start with such a list. I'm not sure if nothing really stuck with me because my focus in writing began to shift to industry writing and I was thinking about it less, or because I really couldn't find anything of note -- but either way, that's disappointing.
Well, actually, that's only half-true. If I decline to write a poignant moments list, it's probably because at least three of them would probably be from MGS4. You know how I am! I just haven't got the energy to justify my subjectivity or deal with backlash. If I tried writing a best characters list, it might end up wholly dominated by No More Heroes, and that's probably a little unfair, too. So I'll pass on it this year.
In other words, the range of game elements that truly moved me to write this year was far narrower, and whatever the reason (I'd very much like to know the reason), I'm kind of wistful over that.
