Bastion Message Board older than one year ago

The headline doesn’t refer to an extravagant orchestral rendition that you’d have to pay money to see, but rather a short video containing two of Bastion’s most glorious audio treats. I’ll never find these songs as powerful as I did when they first drifted in, just as the structure of the world and the melancholy of the situation slotted into place around my gun-toting kid, but I still get shivers up my spine when that vocal starts. An intimate performance by audio director Darren Korb and vocalist Ashley Barrett, this is a lovely way to start a Friday, or any other day. Pretty good way to end one too. Listen down yonder.

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Greg Kasavin is a writer/designer at Supergiant Games, the small independent studio behind Bastion, an action RPG where an old man talks to you the whole time. Prior to getting into game development, Kasavin worked in the gaming press, most notably at GameSpot, where he was editor-in-chief for a number of years.

I wish I could have done this thing in like February of next year because I’ve got some catching up to do, what with everything that’s come out this year. For example I still haven’t played Batman: Arkham City and Uncharted 3, sequels to my two favorite games of 2009, which I’ve been saving for a quiet moment when I can make the most of them. I’m also just far enough into The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword and Saints Row: The Third right now to think they’re great, but not far enough along in for them to crack this list.

That aside, I’m a bit ashamed that this list is dominated by big AAA productions even though I think smaller downloadable games can go toe-to-toe with the big guys. I played a lot of fantastic independent games this year such as Frozen Synapse, Jamestown, Atom Zombie Smasher, and The Binding of Isaac, and if this was a top-20 list, you would have seen a lot more of these in here.

But! I’m limited to 10, so here they are:

Sworcery is one of the only iPhone/iPad games I've played that feels like it has a soul, and offers up some kind of meaningful experience beyond a sort of frivolous, vapid sense of fast-forwarding through life's uneventful moments. I love games with a strong and specific sense of atmosphere, and S&S EP is excellent in this regard. The soundtrack is phenomenal and the game is filled with cool little details all over the place. Sworcery didn't grab me at first but when I came back to it, it hit me hard.

Like a thought-provoking movie, this one got under my skin the more I thought about it in the days after I finished it. I think one of the greatest traits of games is their ability to deliver story in an interactive way, which at its best can get you feeling even more invested than in linear media. To the Moon is a very pure effort along these lines. It delivers a great, touching, meaningful story under the guise of a 16-bit role-playing game. The music is excellent and the story's payoff is great, too. Having finished I was just glad a game like this got made at a time like this.

The arcade classic Mortal Kombat II is one of my all-time favorite games and this new MK brought back many fond memories of playing it. I felt like it totally nails the essential tone of Mortal Kombat much more successfully than any MK in years, and just as important, it plays great too. It goes over the top not just in the expected ways (with gore) but as an all-around production, what with its surprisingly polished story mode and lots of depth. For example, every fighting game these days has to have a super meter of some kind but the choices around how to use the meter in MK are some of the most interesting I’ve seen in a while.

I love killing stuff in games as much as anyone and probably more, though I really appreciate when a game can be exciting and dramatic without being all about killing stuff. Ghost Trick is an excellent example of this, and also one of the most beautifully presented games I played all year in spite of its humble trappings as a portable game. The character animations are fantastic, and the writing and story are sharp and interesting. It’s a unique game.

Remember how I said I love killing stuff in games? I’m only just getting around to Dead Space 2 even though it released early in the year, but wow, what an incredibly high-quality production. That it’s a great horror game is almost beside the point, though it’s that as well. On the surface, the environments, animations, and audio are all outstanding--the atmosphere is awesome. Plus the game controls beautifully, and its levels are filled with big and small surprises and feel like they’re part of a deep world. In a year where I was feeling pretty burnt out on shooters, this one is my favorite. It’s not exactly a shooter, of course, and that’s part of the reason why I’m liking it so much.

True story: I played this game for 12 hours straight when I first got it, then came home and played it for like five more. Really the only thing that compares to Skyrim is Bethesda’s own previous games, and this one is even more impressive in a lot of ways. While I normally enjoy RPGs for their atmosphere, story, and game systems, Skyrim doesn’t draw me in for those reasons... it’s the sandbox side of it, like it’s this great big place I can go to relax for a while and do whatever I want. I love exploring the world and messing around in it, trying to break it and figure out how it works.

The original Portal is really an incredible game so I have to admit I was kind of nervous about the idea of a bigger, better sequel to something that was near perfect. But Portal 2 quickly won me over, thanks in no small part to Wheatley, a character every bit as strong and memorable as GLaDOS was in the original. There were just so many great little touches and genuinely smart, funny moments, and it’s rare to find a game that’s this exciting from a pure action perspective yet isn’t at all about combat. And man, what an ending...!

In my mind, The Witcher 2 is the best BioWare game since Mass Effect 2... and it’s not even a BioWare game! The Witcher 2 is a class act all the way. It’s one of the only games this year that wowed me with its visuals, and I loved the characters and the world. There are far too many generic, tame fantasy worlds out there. By comparison, The Witcher 2’s world feels fully realized and specific in a way that puts most other games to shame. Not only that, the narrative choices felt significant all the way through.

Demon’s Souls was one of my favorite games of 2009 so I had high hopes for its successor. And the longer I played it, the more I realized I liked it even better. The world design was just amazing to me the more I saw of it, and no other game rewards patience, perseverance, and exploration quite like this one does. The experience can feel masochistic at times, but it hits me just right. In fact, some of the most notorious moments like the slog through Blighttown and those archer sons-of-a-bitches in Anor Londo are moments I’ll long remember in a good way. I lost myself in this game for hours at a time, and obsessed over it more than any other game this year.

This is an update to the spiritual predecessor of one of my all-time favorite games, Final Fantasy Tactics. Like that game, it offers an incredibly deep and complex tactical experience in addition to a rich fantasy world filled with life-and-death struggle and scores if interesting characters. As Bastion’s development was winding down and the days and nights were getting longer and longer, I still made time every night for this one game, and ended up playing it for months. I don’t necessarily think it’s the best game of the year but it’s the one I kept coming back to and the one that kept reminding me of all the reasons I love gaming.

The end of the week nears, but our dubstep-fueled awards train keeps a rollin', with mores results from our Game of the Year discussion. To see how we arrived at this set of games, make sure to listen to today's companion podcast.

Bastion

The rise of the downloadable game may be this generation's crowning achievement, especially in light of a bummer world economy that's forced everyone to stretch every dollar. Just because the downloadable games are cheaper, however, doesn't mean they're any less worthy or our time or admiration. The downloadable market has allowed smaller, focused and more experimental games to thrive, games that would be destined for niche, cult status if they were forced to appear on a shelf with so-called AAA games.

Bastion is a game most of us would have happily paid much more for. The game represents just how much the industry has expanded to include so many more kinds of games through new distribution, and humbles us with the risk some take to bring us something different. Bastion raised eyebrows with its unique take on narration, a hook that would have earned the game accolades all on its own, but it's that Bastion is sublime in every other way that places Bastion above other terrific highlights from 2011.

Runners-Up: Renegade Ops, Iron Brigade

Gears of War 3

In the eternal quest for the video game "total package," Gears of War 3 might be the totalest of all packages. There's just so much crammed onto that disc, it feels like Gears 3 really covers all the bases. It's got far and away the best campaign in the series to date, offering explosive highs, quiet character moments, and genuine closure for the trilogy's storyline. It's got a competitive multiplayer mode that will keep you busy for months or years as you try to complete its dozens of unique challenges, provided you can hang with the franchise's ultra-hardcore fanbase. And perhaps most importantly for those overwhelmed by the skill of Gears diehards in deathmatch, the game's cooperative gameplay modes and options have been expanded to such a degree that they touch just about every aspect of the game.

Gears had already come close to perfecting the format of the campaign co-op thing in its first two installments. The only thing left to do was expand the story-mode co-op to four players, and Gears 3 does that. But more than that, its campaign actually feels built with four active players in mind, offering levels built widely enough that you have the room to flank enemies and take alternate paths to reach your objectives. Outside the story, the Beast mode is an interesting (if fleeting) way to turn the tables with your friends and play as the Locust hordes. But it's the Horde mode, with its wealth of new defensive mechanics and its immensely demanding boss encounters, that offers one of the most cohesive team-based exercises we've played in years. At the upper difficulty levels, Gears 3 Horde mode requires team coordination and strategic thinking like few other shooters, and when everyone is on point, it can provide some of the most memorable moments of any game this year. Gears popularized the wave-based survival thing with its original Horde mode in the first place, so it's extra great to see Gears 3 come along and basically redefine that game type with its latest iteration.

Runners-Up: Dead Island, Trenched Iron Brigade

Portal 2

The original Portal is often acclaimed for being one of the funniest, smartest-written games of the last decade, and that's not an incorrect compliment to give. That said, there was an air of surprise to Portal's campaign that perhaps helped prop it up in the minds of its players. The game was an unknown quantity in its earliest days of existence, a cool-looking puzzle game crammed in with bigger, more immediately noteworthy games in Valve's The Orange Box collection. Then everyone played it, and suddenly it morphed from a neat little bonus into the darling of the whole package.

Portal 2 didn't get that benefit of shock. Everyone had expectations all of the sudden. Could the writers at Valve some how up the ante on one of the most unexpectedly entertaining games of the last several years?

Credit to writers Erik Wolpaw, Chet Faliszek, and Jay Pinkerton for not only achieving greater success (heh) this time around, but making that success seem so damned effortless. In picking up many, many years in the future, with series heroine Chell once again trapped in a new, decidedly more ramshackle Aperture Science labyrinth, the writers behind the game were given carte blanche to explore the many facets of Aperture's utterly baffling infrastructure, not to mention its very origins.

The introduction of new A.I. helper/antagonist Wheatley (voiced by Stephen Merchant) and the voice of former Aperture head honcho Cave Johnson (perfectly captured by J.K. Simmons) lend a great deal of comedic oomph to the proceedings. These two characters are your primary guides through the various trials and traps laid throughout the game's eight-hour campaign, and each are such perfect sounding boards for the insanity around you that scarcely a minute goes by without at least a minor chortle. And yes, Ellen McLain is back once again as the passive/aggressively murderous GLaDOS, though many of her best moments come during the game's wonderful co-op mode, which is fantastically written in its own right. No matter how you played Portal 2, the writing and quality of storytelling always shone through, making it the easy choice for this year's Best Story award.

Runners-Up: Mortal Kombat, Bastion

Dragon Age II

Disappointment can blossom from a number of different sources--your own personal expectations based on the previous entry in a series, or the developer's previous output, promises made during the game's pre-release PR cycle--and no game disappointed quite as thoroughly on all fronts in 2011 as Dragon Age II.

Primarily, though, let's consider the legacy of Dragon Age: Origins, a massive, ambitious role-playing game whose very existence was predicated on creating a classic fantasy RPG experience in the BioWare mold, which ultimately meant incredible levels of player agency at every turn. It was designed as a love letter to stalwart BioWare fans, and as a rebuke to the notion that more crowd-pleasing business like Mass Effect had made the developer soft.

Dragon Age II undoes all of that hard work with an overwhelming sense of half-assed-ness. Even without the BioWare name, or even the relatively freshly minted Dragon Age name to live up to, Dragon Age II is an RPG that feels half-finished, its attempts at scope undermined by pervasive sense of a crushing development deadline. Where they could cut corners, they did. It's hard not to be disappointed when a series goes from so high to so low in just one iteration.

Runners-Up: Need for Speed: The Run, Red Faction: Armageddon

Ico and Shadow of the Colossus: The Collection

The recent tendency among publishers to update the last decade's more memorable games in high definition and then rerelease them on current consoles could be viewed in a more negative light, if publishers were handling the ports less respectfully and charging more for them--if, in other words, those companies were churning out quick-and-dirty cash-ins for a fast buck. But it's easy to feel good about dropping some more cash on a few of the same games you've already played when they're as lovingly restored as this year's rereleases of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Halo, just to name a couple.

Even in that respectable company, Ico & Shadow of the Colossus: The Collection is especially noteworthy if for no other reason than you're getting not one but two of the most hallowed PlayStation 2 exclusives in one $40 package. So it's a great value proposition right off the bat. But the quality of the two ports is also top-notch, since you're getting both games looking nice in 720p and with bonus 3D support. Most importantly, Shadow of the Colossus now runs at a smooth frame rate, which is especially significant when you remember what a notoriously poor performer the original game was. Throw in multiple video features including interviews with Fumito Ueda and a peek at The Last Guardian, a smattering of concept art and test footage, and even a couple of dynamic XMB themes for your PS3, and this collection is practically a new blueprint for the right way to deliver old games in new packaging.

Runners-Up: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D, Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary

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I’m never quite sure whether posting about the Steam sale is doing mindless promotion for the company, or alerting our readers to amazing prices for games. I’m going with the latter in this instance, because bloody hell, this one took me by surprise. Not boasted of on the front page of Steam’s decidedly confusing sales page (not including the names of the games on sale is perhaps an odd choice) is the Warner Complete Pack. Clearly one of many extraordinarily reduced bundles (19 THQ games for £50, 80 Sega games for £70 for instance), the Warner bundle brings 18 games for £40, and one of them is Batman: Arkham City. So that’s basically “buy Arkham City, get every other Warner game on Steam free.” And one of those is Bastion. And another is the brand new Lord Of The Rings: War In The North. And of course yet another is Batman: Arkham Asylum.

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Supergiant are apparently fully aware that when talking about Bastion over the summer, they say they designed the original game to be complete, and therefore not really requiring of DLC. Needless to say, that stance has changed a little, as they explain: “HOWEVER! In the weeks following the release of the game, we decided to put a little something together for the holidays as a show of thanks to our fans. So, on December 14, we’ll be pleased to bring you the Stranger’s Dream DLC for Bastion, which should give you some good reasons to come back to the game while preserving the core experience just as we intended.” The Stranger’s Dream will be “a new fully narrated Who Knows Where sequence, bigger and more challenging than the others”, and there are two other new game modes, too.

The Stranger’s Dream is out Dec 14th. It’ll be free, too.

When you think about some of 2011’s best downloadable games, Bastion immediately comes to mind, and if you’ve been hoping to scratch that itch again, Supergiant Games has what you need.

On December 14, Supergiant Games is launching the Stranger’s Dream downloadable content, which includes a new “Who Knows Where” section, complete with new voice overs, and two new modes. Score Attack Mode starts players at level one with all spirits and idols unlocked, and No-Sweat Mode is the equivalent of very, very easy--you can continue where you die.

Stranger’s Dream won’t cost a dime on PC, but you’ll have to pay $1 on Xbox Live, as Microsoft has some very strange, inconsistent policies when it comes to offering free content on its service. Supergiant Games alluded to wanting to make the content free in their announcement post.

“The Stranger’s Dream DLC will be available for 80 Microsoft Points ($1) on XBLA, which we can’t make free due to Microsoft policy, so it’s about as close as we could get,” said the company. “Though, since you’ll be getting a good chunk of new content, we think you’ll be satisfied with your purchase.”

That content will also come to the Google Chrome, which may come as a shock if you haven’t heard that Bastion is also fully playable through Google Chrome now. Yes, the browser! It means Mac owners can check out this spectacular action RPG. That version is available right now, and if you want to see how well it does/doesn’t work, you can play the prologue for free.

OK, Google’s Chrome browser just officially became scary/magnicent. It’s been able to run a few games – like Plants vs Zombies – in a browser window for a while now, but the excellent Bastion has just been added, marking a serious step up in what’s technologically possible. The game starts playing in seconds of adding it, it looks just like the standard version as far as I can tell, runs smoothly and scales to your screen/window size. Oh, and you can play a free demo then pay to unlock the full thing right away if you like. It’s achieved via something called Native Client, which basically allows a new level of graphicsology. Yes, that’s the official explanation. The important bit is that it doesn’t require any plugins – it just works. As long as you have Chrome, anyway.

Obviously we’re a long way short of running Battlefield 3 in a browser, but if I was the Microsontendo guys I’d be pretty damn worried right now. Who needs bespoke, closed hardware when this is possible?

Well this is unquestionably glorious. Did you play Bastion? Of course you did. You wouldn’t be so epically silly as to ignore our insistence that you do, nor to have failed to buy it last week when it cost about 7p. So since you did, you’ll be familiar with the wonderful voice of the narrator, and his real-time commentary on the action. But, wondered Dorkly, where else might this be applied?

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