The Joystiq New Year: January 1, 2007

by Ross Miller { Jan 1st 2007 at 11:59PM }

In case you haven't flamed us for it already, the Joystiq staff picked the short-but-sweet Gears of War as the top pick for 2006. Don't forget to check our own personal picks for the more unique titles and check out the highlights for this holiday weekend:

Games of the Year and the best of the rest ...
James, Alex, Justin,
Kevin, Ross, Zack,
and Ludwig

Joystiquery
Bankshot Billiards 2 - free for one reader
Happy New Year!
Nominate game systems in the 2006 Engadget Awards
Pets get confused by video games
Quarter gobblers are broken on XBLA
Today's hottest game video: World of Wiimote
Today's hottest game video: WarioWare
Weekly Webcomic Wrapup: Fill-in-your-own Edition

News
$150 PlayStation 3 discount
$99 for Xbox 360 HD-DVD add-on
Top 20 XBLA titles purchased in 2006
XFPS reviewed: Not ready for prime time
Lieberman takes video game industry money
Best Buy selling hoarded PS3s tomorrow morning
Game Tunnel: Independent games of the year
XXX-Madden gag spoils kid's Xmas
Merc reporter on 2007: PCs bounce back
Hoping for better in-game stories next year
Improve PS2 game graphics on PS3
Sega still publishing for PS2
Guitar Hero-esque Frets on Fire working on Mac OS X
New games this week (lousy new year edition)
Weapon of mass distraction (Halo 3) spotted in Iraq
1UP likes Gran Turismo HD's teaser skills

Rumors & Speculation
Crysis crisis averted: heading to Xbox 360?

Culture
Miiplaza.net connects Mii lovers
vNES has 575 games: Demo and consider future VC titles
Girlfriend's gift to boyfriend: Mario Bros hoodie
XBL microtransaction tracker '06 edition
Game Boy Advance at the lowest point on earth

Tags: daily recap, DailyRecap, epic, gears of war, GearsOfWar

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Maylon @ Jan 2nd 2007 12:50AM

That would be my choice as well. Okay, now everyone else can cry that they should have chosen Okami or Zelda.

D2E @ Jan 2nd 2007 1:32AM

well i haven't played gears of war... im thinkin of picking it up... anyways out of the games iv'e played lots of amazing ones but i'd have to say ZTP should have won

FFXNo1 @ Jan 2nd 2007 2:11AM

Gears of War is crappy. check these comments:

http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=71322

James: Namco? Are you listening? kill.switch 2! kill.switch 2! kill.switch 2! Nah. Doesn't quite work for this one, does it?

Alec: Gives me shoulder-envy. Also: there are far too many very small walls in this game.

Dave: Gears of War? Boring greys and browns of war, more like. I don't understand how people have convinced themselves that this is great. It's not, it's just another boringly gruff shooter that does all the same things that the last one did, except jumping behind cover every so often. Still, it's the most blatantly homoerotic game of all time, so at least it's striking a blow for equality.

Luke: I thought the release of Rainbow Six Vegas made everyone realise they were wrong about GOW in that it was just a bog standard shooter that looked nice. Guess not. WHERE'S THE VEGAS LOVE, PEOPLE?

John: Honestly, I'm the girliest man in the universe, and I'm secure enough in my masculinity not to need to play this. There's something very peculiar about seeing this running on a big widescreen hi-def TV: it's one of the ugliest games I've ever seen. It's technically extremely impressive, and I've not seen a console generate graphics like it before. But it just looks awful. A talented artist can create something beautiful using merely crushed petals and an animal hair brush. Take the new Zelda, clearly built for the GameCube, and yet so utterly breathtakingly beautiful. GoW may have the most impressive graphics of any console game ever, but the artists just didn't know what to do with it. Their attempt to create haunting ruins has failed woefully, resulting in a dull and bland world, a land without a soul. And to go back to my Project 8 point, once more any sense of playing the game has been replaced by hitting a button to initiate the next scripted animation. No thanks.

Dan: Just get over it, OK? It's an 8/10, through and through. It may be a gorgeous, visceral shooter that flirts with your eyeballs and hits all the right macho buttons, but the core "duck and shoot" gameplay is never going to be the stuff of legend. It is, however, an exhilarating blast to play - either alone or with friends - and that alone makes it one of the best of this year. How it holds up five years down the line, let's wait and see...

Keza: I'm sorry, but I don't get it. Gears of War is... trashy. It's gratuitous, brash, full of itself and overall a tad unsavoury, but more importantly it seems really, really simple for a game that's supposed to catapult us all into a Microsoft-branded Next Generation of gaming. It's fun, don't get me wrong, and unbelievably pretty, but I don't understand what the enormous furore is all about.

Tom: I actually rather like Gears. It's sort of like Wac-A-Mole, but with strafing.

Mathew: I'm not trying to be controversial, here, but when played solo Gears of War seems irritatingly flawed; with far too many difficulty spikes, instant deaths and frustrating memory tests. Yet somehow, after almost chewing my tongue off with rage while trying to finish off General Raam on Hardcore, the minute I did I instantly started an Insane difficulty campaign because I just wanted to keep playing. Most remarkably, though, the flaws of the game are erased when played in co-op mode. It truly demands you work as a team, much like the superb Xbox Live multiplayer. Online or off, Gears of War is hypnotically addictive.

Tom: (I love this entry in the top ten. What a wonderful example of everyone submitting their first run of comments separately and assuming they were in a minority.)

Kieron: I love it, but wasn't in my own Top 10. With all the macho-overkill, what actually impresses me most about Gears of War has been kind of overlooked. It's just the small details which generally improve the genre (the reloading, for example, which every-one will be ripping off for the next few years. Or its use of cover. Or how they manage to make "Run" mean something more than "Move twice as quick". Or how they manage to integrate a massive skill-set without burying the game alive in a hellish control system). Also, there's the sense that it may be the terminal point for that Wolfenstein derived school of shooters. In which case, it's a beautiful dinosaur wandering around, wondering what all these little furry things are up to.

Kristan: Like Kieron once said, some of his favourite games of the year are 8/10 games, and this - like a lot of my personal top 10 - is a classic example of how you can fall in love with a game while still being more than happy to admit its flaws. It's a like dating a gorgeous model with rancid breath - you can live with it for the good things it offers. Who could fail to be blown away by its cinematic intensity, beautiful visuals and simple, refined duck n' shoot premise? Even though the campaign mode is way shorter than an epic (no pun intended) game like this should be, it had enough inspired moments to make it a game that every serious gamer should play, if not own. Multiplayer gamers, in particular, can have enormous fun with this - though until it lets you set up clan matches it'll never realise its obvious potential. It's so macho it hurts, but I still love it. And it's still an 8.

For more accurate reviews, check this web. They also have top 50 games of the year and Gears is not # 1. I love EuroGamer

EuroLamer @ Jan 2nd 2007 3:28AM

EuroGamer sucks, and I doubt any serious gamer listens to anything they say. It might as well be renamed to NintendoFanboy.com - the site and its users all have their heads rammed firmly up Nintendo's arse, and if anyone dares to criticise this or Nintendo on the boards they're promptly banned by the site administrators.

A joke of a site if ever there was one.

Foetoid @ Jan 2nd 2007 3:52AM

EuroLamer, you're an idiot. I own both a 360 and Wii and i have to agree with the comments on eurogamer. The game has the most amazing visuals, expecially on my 50" screen. The problem was the games artists didn't know what to do with it. The game is 90% different shades of brown and grey. It's a fantasticly playable game and deserves all the recognition in the world for being the best 360 game to date, and in my opinion, much better than Halo 1 or 2. I have a serious problem playing games that take less than 15 hours to finish on the middle difficulty. I didn't even try the easy one, i went straight for hardcore and finished the whole game in nearly 15 hours. Games should never take more than 20 hours to finish, especially something like GoW.

I would have ranked Zelda: TP over GoW simply because the visuals are nicer (bright realistic colours with believeable graphics, it feels like a real little world) compared to the bland yet high-definition GoW and becuase it takes at LEAST twice as long to finish Zelda. 35 hours it took me to knock off Zelda, and thats running through the game. GoW is fantastic and a worthy addition to anyones game library, but not a Zelda: Tp beater. I think Joystiq went with GoW cause of all the babies crying out 'joystiq is biased towards nintendo'.

Foetoid @ Jan 2nd 2007 3:53AM

Oh and i meant "less than 20 hours to finish".

lowallyn @ Jan 2nd 2007 4:31AM

zelda>gears

EuroLamer @ Jan 2nd 2007 7:47AM

So, because Gears doesn't have bright and vibrant colours in its **war-torn urban locations** it doesn't have realistic visuals?

I guess they should have thrown in a plumber wearing bright red and blue clothes, walking mushrooms, bright green and red tortoises and a princess in bright pink for added realism right?

I guess the development team should have thought about that when they were stupid enough to make a war-torn city look more like Bayruit than Telly Tubby Land.

Grow a brain before you post again, you moron.

mocax @ Jan 2nd 2007 8:34AM

Maybe europeans took psychedelic drugs before going to war.
Magic mushrooms may numb people to the horrors, so they fight more effectively. I think...

nabisco @ Jan 2nd 2007 9:09AM

I don't know about you guys, but I think Eurogamer sucks. I mean come on, I haven't even played Gears of War but after seeing win so many GotY awards it has got to be good. I think that FFXNo1 is an angry Nintendo fanboy.

Fester @ Jan 2nd 2007 9:13AM

Ok I also enjoy bright/vivid colours (typically nintendo and stuff like Viva Pinata/Lego Star Wars II) because they can "look real" but more hyper real and are very enjoyable to just gawp at.

However, Gears Of War is in no way "inferior" to those kinds of graphics just because of it's subdued colours. Obviously it doesn't jump out and hit you but it IS the most realistic looking game (in parts) that I have ever played. Roadie running especially highlights this, the water on multiplayer maps (Mansion for example) rain in the cobbles and what have you make it look/feel like true next gen graphics. It's not always consistent and they could have done more with it but even without the great graphics the gameplay is great because everything is focussed on the cover element rather than just blasting through level after level to see "a story".

It's fashionable right now to dislike Gears but true gamers know that it's a good game regardless of whether it has flaws or doesn't do everything 100% to peoples impossible demands.