2007: A year in games.

(transposed from Kotaku.com)

You know, thinking back, 2007 was actually a banner year for disappointment in games. Perhaps I'm just getting cynical in my mid 20s, but just about every major, hot shit title that came out this year came with caveats.

A whole mess of games were released buggy, some almost to the point of unplayability. Others had glaring bugs that never should have made it past QA. And I'm not talking about 4th party shovelware. I'm talking about AAA titles. It just seemed like almost every major title could have benefit from another few months in the oven.

Let's look back at some of my most anticipated games of the year, and see how they fared:

The Orange Box: Well, not much to complain about here, actually. I figured I'd start off on a high note. Three great games (5 if you're new to HL2), one low price. About the only thing I can complain about is having to wait another 18 months for Ep 3. And, supposedly, the PS3 version fails at RAM.

Halo 3: Microsoft spent billions of dollars and sacrificed the population of a small Indonesian island to a dark, tentacled god to make Halo 3 a smash hit. And it is. The gameplay is solid, the multiplayer is rather nice as well. But, still, two major complaints; friendly AI is still skullhumping retarded, and the interesting bits of the single-player story are so deeply buried that they might as well not even be there. Bungie gets an A in game design, but a C- in storytelling.

Hellgate: London: The long awaited spiritual successor to Diablo 2. With guns. In a ruined, post apocalyptic London. What could go wrong? Well, apparently, everything. The game is basically WOW with a single player mode, the players models look like utter CRAP, and bugs are so prevalent you'd think you were in a dollar an hour motel in Tijuana.

Kane and Lynch: Without even approaching Eidos' shady advertising tactics (*****!) or the whole Gamespot debacle, Kane and Lynch fell off of it's hype and landed on it's ass. The cover mechanic was just...FAIL. Mass Effect basically did the exact same thing, but at least it sort of worked. In Kane and Lynch, taking cover is mostly guess work. It's a shame, too. The gritty, evil 'buddy criminal' genre had quite a bit of appeal to me.

Assassin's Creed: I still haven't played this one, but I did watch my brother play it for about half and hour. And most reviewers seem to agree; Assassin's Creed has two major flaws. The enemy AI is just plain silly, and the repetitive investigation missions lack punch. Also, the ending is apparently a total bitch-slap.

Lair: What more do I really need to say? The controls are fucked. The total lack of an optional analog stick mode is just silly.

Bioshock: It's beautiful. It's mysterious. You spend way too much time plumbing. I mean hacking. Dead bodies dance creepily due to a minor ragdoll glitch, which really probably could have been fixed. And the endings were just... well, kind of meh.

Mass Effect: Probably one of the most ambitious American RPGs to date, Mass Effect delivers on almost every front, save two: a slightly better cover mechanic than Kane and Lynch (seriously, did no one play Gears of War last year?), and a messed up inventory system.

That's all I can think of off the top of my head.

Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but it seems to me that publishers are pressuring developers to put games out on the market before they're really ready. I hope that's not the case, but the evidence abounds.
I for one am getting pretty sick of popping in a brand new, AAA title, only to run into an obvious bug within the first 10 minutes of gameplay. Here's hoping that 2008 will see less of this phenemenon.