Baroque - Wanted to play this ever since Andrew’s coverage of the Saturn original way back in the day. When my company ended up publishing the remake in the US, I opted for the Wii version over the PS2 one because it has widescreen support.
Dragon Quest Swords - Got it for $20 remaindered at Best Buy just last week; I’ll crack the shrinkwrap once I’m done with MGS4.
Elebits - I ended up never playing this one, but the premise of the game appealed to me. Doesn’t everyone have the urge to just tear the entire house apart sometimes?
Metroid Prime 3: Corruption - One of the Wii’s better games, I bought this because I liked the first one.
No More Heroes - As evidenced by my strong fanaticism for the Metal Gear Solid series, I like games with a healthy sense of their own ridiculousness.
Resident Evil 4 (or, as the logo insists, 4 Resident Evil) - Bought because I was a big fan of the game on GameCube. Ironically, ended up playing this version using GameCube controls because as good as the remote+nunchuk is for aiming, I could never get the hang of moving around with them.
Super Mario Galaxy - Why would you own a Wii and not this?
Super Paper Mario - Bought because it looked like one of the most awesome game ideas ever pre-release, turned out to be just okay.
Super Smash Bros. Brawl - Bought because I was curious to see what someone like Kazushige Nojima would come up with when constrained from using dialogue. (Answer: not much.) Had fun playing it online, but then everyone lost interest and so did I.
Trauma Center: Second Opinion - Bought cause I got an employee discount.
Trauma Center: New Blood - Ditto.
WiiPlay - Bought w/o controller for $10 because I was curious if any of it was any good. (No.)
WiiSports - Came with the system.
Zack & Wiki - Bought to support original, innovative IPs on Wii. Didn’t seem to help.
Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess - Bought because I like 3D Zelda games, so there.

I guess I could do “PSP games and how long I spent playing them” next, but that just seems kind of cruel.

Bomberman Land Touch! - Atlus
Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow - The last really excellent Castlevania game. Fingers crossed for Order of Ecclesia.
Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin - The last merely good Castlevania game.
Contact - Atlus
Contra 4 - Contra’s not my thing, so I never got very far. Bought as a favor to a friend.
Cooking Mama - What can I say, I like the font.
Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime - Remember how Square Enix bothered to make a “Dragon Quest Heroes” label and then didn’t publish Shonen Yangus? Yeah. Anyway, this game’s tons of fun and has a superb loc. I wrote up a report for work once on how good it was.
Elite Beat Agents - Awesome, awesome, awesome.
Etrian Odyssey - Atlus
Etrian Odyssey II: Heroes of Lagaard - Atlus (on sale now!)
Hotel Dusk: Room 204 - Ugh, super disappointment. Maybe it got better after the desk clerk, but I wouldn’t know because the initial conversation with him is as long as some games I’ve edited.
Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja - Atlus
Mega Man ZX - Fun for a while, but the lack of focus got to me.
Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer - Heck yeah.
Osu! Tatae! Ouendan - Just as awesome as Elite Beat Agents, obviously.
Ontamarama - Atlus
Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney - I’d wanted to play this since Gyakuten Saiban 3 came out on GBA while I worked at 1UP, and incredibly, I was not disappointed.
Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Justice for All - Pretty weak overall, but I can’t say no to Franziska.
Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations - Amazing on every level, start to finish.
Apollo Justice Ace Attorney - It’s no Trials and Tribulations, but still pretty good!
Picross DS (Japanese) - This is exactly the same game as…
Picross DS (English) - And I own them both, because I love Picross that much.
Professor Layton & The Curious Village - I was pretty addicted to this when it came out and beat it in a few days, but I haven’t been tempted to go back and do any downloadable content or find the missing puzzles. I’m done with it. Maybe when the next one’s out, I’ll feel like more Layton.
Puzzle Quest - I thought this was really overrated, mainly due to the incredibly cheap AI. The RPG side of it was pretty thin and pale, and the puzzle side of it was just Bejeweled.
Rondo of Swords - Atlus
Summon Night: Twin Age - Atlus
New Super Mario Bros. - I never finished this for some reason. I think I was one of those people who really wanted it to be New Super Mario Bros. 3.
Tetris DS - How could you not?
Touch Detective - Atlus
Touch Detective 2 1/2 - Atlus
The World Ends With You - I did the first chapter and then got sidetracked by work and a vacation. It was fun and I do need to get back to it.
Yoshi’s Island DS - Um, never played. Anyone want this…?
Zelda: Phantom Hourglass - A little by-the-book for a Zelda game, but the controls were fun. I never want to deal with the Ocean Palace or anything like it again, though.

Next time: Wii games! How do I own 15 Wii games? What happened there?

Spoiler-filled discussion ahead after the jump.

The tremendous influence of Hayao Miyazaki means that lots of game and anime plots pay at least lip service to environmental concerns. Etrian, being a game set in a giant forest, touches on these themes. You eventually find out that the Labyrinth is the result of a revivification project run amok after our world’s ecology collapsed, and in a seeming tribute to Miyazaki’s Nausicaa, you end up destroying the last remnant of that project just before his 1000-year plan is complete. However, it levels its criticism at a more unusual target, one that’s surprisingly ballsy for a Japanese writer.

The “forest folk,” a seeming hybrid race between humanity and the vegetable kingdom, first show up in the desert wastelands of the fourth stratum. They seem to have a beef with you for trespassing on their blighted land, and violating the rules of an ancient treaty. We gave you the surface world and the good parts of the Labyrinth, they claim, so that you would at least leave us in peace on our reservation down here.

Yes, Komori is drawing a parallel here not just between capitalism and deforestation, but between capitalism and genocide. The forest folk are the image of the eradicated native–here, we think of Native Americans, but there are echoes in the original game of the Japanese aboriginals called the Ainu. In particular, the names of the bosses involved in the “forest folk” part of the story are named after Ainu gods. (This didn’t work out so well given the character limitations of the English game, but then again the Ainu gods are so obscure that almost no one would have realized it even if we’d kept them faithful. I tried, anyway.)

And in the spirit of the most challenging Miyazaki stories, it’s you–the protagonists–who play an active part in their exploitation. The last mission you receive from Etria’s ruling council is to annihilate the forest folk to pave the way for further exploration of the Labyrinth–gotta keep Etrian’s most important tourist attraction going, after all. Unlike the clever FOE-baiting you could use to get the boss of the first stratum alone, the game actually makes you slaughter every last member of the forest folk before you can pass–if you let one single FOE on floor 20 go, you can’t properly beat the boss and move on.

And all of this comes through in very little text. The leader of the forest folk gets about 100 lines sprinkled throughout the fourth stratum to say her piece; most of what’s happening is conveyed through player action and inference. That’s why what Komori does, what he excels at, isn’t just scriptwriting: it’s scenario design in the fullest sense, using every available means the game has to tell the story.

No one ever comments much on Etrian’s story, because it’s so sparse and because the game has so many other merits. So here’s to Komori and his skills; like Etrian itself, he may be overlooked, but he’s not unappreciated.

I’ve read About a Boy and High Fidelity before, and seen the movies, and I’ve also read some of Hornby’s collected music and book reviews. He’s a good writer, but not someone whose work I usually seek out, so I hadn’t gotten around to A Long Way Down yet. The premise is that four suicidally depressed people meet on New Year’s Eve at a famous suicide spot, all intending to jump, but sheer embarassment prevents them from doing it in one another’s company. Once they’re off the roof and have knocked around London for a few hours, they promise each other not to attempt suicide again until Valentine’s Day, and meet regularly in the meantime to check up on one another.

It’s a strong premise… for about half the book. Once the pact is formed, the plotting gets a little shapeless and undirected, at times feeling like a sitcom. (The stretch of the book where the group has to make the circuit of British media, claiming to have seen an angel on the roof, is particularly cartoonish, and I won’t even get into the “intervention” at the book’s end.) There’s also the problem that in a way, the book goes in reverse: it starts with an ending that it denies the characters, and then keeps going.

On the other hand, that’s exactly Hornby’s point. The book, and the characters’ lives, keeps going, and if Hornby is at a loss for what to do with these characters after not killing them, they’re facing the same problem. The characterization is much stronger than the plotting, and the book goes back and forth as each of the ex-suicides narrates a chapter here, a chapter there in their own well-realized voices.

Hornby also achieves the difficult task of getting the reader’s sympathies to stay with a bunch of people who, by their own admission, have nothing to live for. The key is that each of them is pathetic, but not hopeless: like real-life suicides, if they could see beyond themselves for a little while they could spot a way out. It’s not exactly a cheering book, but it does give the reader some interesting perspective by showing them characters who have none.

This year, though, brings Persepolis. And even in a year with Ratatouille, Persepolis deserves to win.

It’s an unusual film: though it’s animated, it’s entirely in black and white, and though it deals with an Iranian protagonist coping with the Iranian Revolution, it’s written and voiced in French. But that’s only fitting, since it’s about an unusual subject. The film is an adaptation of the graphic novels that artist Marjane Satrapi wrote about her life growing up through political upheaval, in a country where “political upheaval” means men could visit you in the night and shoot you.

Maybe this is just the American imperialist reading of the film, but what struck me about it is how much both Marjane and Iran as a whole yearned for Western culture during their concurrent searches for identity. Not American culture, necessarily; Marjane’s iconoclastic parents scorn the USA during the Iran-Iraq war for its eager willingness to sell guns to both sides. But the everyday life and pasttimes of the ordinary Iranians isn’t the orthodox, rigid Islamism that the media likes to portray. As a rebellious punk girl, Marjane delights in the bootleg Iron Maiden tapes she buys from the street vendors, and the equally rebellious men and women of Tehran let go of their inhibitions at secret dance parties. The film paints a people eager to be free of the yoke of its government–for its purposes, whether that government is the secular Shah or the religious extremists who replace him scarcely makes a difference.

There’s a limit to how far you can take this, as Marjane’s grandmother reminds her when her misadventures in France come to a miserable end. Freedom doesn’t mean the freedom to do absolutely anything, and her grandmother reminds her that she should still be proud to be an Iranian.

Although of course, when she says it, she’s speaking French. Hmm.

10. Bioshock - Bioshock has a lot of problems. The hacking minigame was sort of weak, the challenge mainly comes from the infinite supply of enemies in each area, and most of the tension the scenario tries so hard to create is undone by the fact that after each death, you revive with the world in the same state, and all enemies still bearing any wounds you managed to inflict before being taken down. Making devious use of your Plasmid powers and environmental defenses isn’t quite as much fun when you can just take down any enemy by sending wave after wave of yourself after it. (To be fair, this was fixed with a later downloadable update that allows players to turn off the Vita-Chamber revival points.)

On the other hand, more than any other game this year it succeeded in creating a fantastic, unearthly place and situation and was unflinching in its drive to see the implications of that place through to the end. Like Silent Hill 2 or Killer 7, what it lacks in compelling gameplay it more than makes up for in interactive storytelling.

9. Crackdown - The exact opposite of Bioshock in all the ways that count. The storyline never gets more ambitious than “take down the thugs,” but the freedom and adrenaline rush it gives were the best any game had to offer last year. A lot of games about superheroes are either untrue to the source material or incredibly boring, because most developers can’t nail the balance between the risk any good game needs to contain and the super-badassery inherent to the genre. But Realtime Worlds did it perfectly. The rush you got from jumping 200 feet in the air, unleashing automatic weapons on a group of mobsters all the while, then kicking their getaway vehicle across half a city block upon landing was exactly what I imagined it would be like as a kid reading Marvel comics.

8. Mass Effect - Someday, Bioware is going to get all its ducks in a row for a console RPG, and the result will be magnificent. But until that happens, this is the closest they’ve come yet. Freed from the Star Wars license, they stepped up their sci-fi world-building game for this story of civilization harvesting in the future, and hit it pitch-perfect along the way. Less perfect was their implementation of the hybrid FPS/RPG combat, but it was a lot better than their last attempt at action gameplay with Jade Empire. Bioware has claimed that the Mass Effect trilogy will be complete on 360, and I’ve got my fingers crossed that we can take them at their word.

7. Etrian Odyssey - All right, yes, this was “my” game, inasmuch as the localization producer can be said to be responsible for the work of a Japanese design team. The thing is, Etrian Odyssey is really, really good. I had no interest in the first-person, dungeon-hacking RPG style of gameplay at all until I was put in charge of this one, but once the localization dust settled and I tried my hand at the English version, I found that I couldn’t put it down. I’ve seen this experience repeated in forums across the Internet, and it just may be that Etrian Odyssey may have helped spark the genre renaissance that director Kazuya Niinou hoped it would.

6. Picross DS - I love Picross, and this game made me its slave. Picross is more addicting than Tetris, and it spits on sudoku. It’s like Minesweeper crossed with color-by-number, and it’s the best thing ever. More please.

5. Super Mario Galaxy - I am one of those rare folk who thought Super Mario Sunshine was better than Super Mario 64. It controlled better, it was prettier, and the gimmicks were more interesting. And now, Galaxy ups the ante again, with the best 3D Mario game yet. It’s so good that I never seriously considered going for 120 stars in the previous two games, but by the time I even got slightly tired of Galaxy’s world, I was already at 112 stars. Going all the way made sense in a way it never had before, and even if there were no bonuses for reaching 100% completion, I would still feel as if it was its own reward.

4. Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations - There were two Phoenix Wright games released last year. The first one, Justice for All, was flabby enough that I took an eight-month hiatus from it, only returning because I realized the sequel was coming soon and I should finish it up in order to be caught up to speed.

But the second one, Trials and Tribulations, may have been the most gripping graphic adventure I’ve ever played. I didn’t realize how invested I was in the world and characters until the fourth case (of five) began, setting off a marathon play session during which I couldn’t stop gushing (in non-spoilery terms) to everyone I knew on AIM. When things get crazy in case 5, they go totally off the rails until every sub-plot and minor character in the whole Phoenixverse has showed up and had his or her particular arc resolved. I’m looking forward to Apollo Justice, Ace Attorney in February, but it’s got a hard act to follow.

3. Rock Band - I’ve placed this at #3, but I fully expect that someday this game will be my retroactive #1 of 2007. Rock Band, like wine, gets better with age. I’m currently still on Medium difficulty on both guitar and drums–Rock Band’s drums, by the way, are what I’ve been waiting for ever since Parappa the Rapper–but Rock Band doesn’t just get harder on the higher difficulties, it gets more fun. When you consider that we’re only a few weeks into an extremely ambitious downloadable content program, which has already delivered winners like Joan Jett’s “Cherry Bomb, CCR’s “Fortunate Son,” and the Clash’s take on “I Fought the Law,” I don’t see how this game won’t outlast everything else on this list.

2. Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 - Again, I suppose I’m shilling for the home team here, so feel free to disregard this one if you can’t put suspicions of bias aside. But while Etrian Odyssey sparked my interest in a genre I’d never paid any attention to, Persona 3 rekindled my love for a genre I’d all but written off: the Japanese console RPG. By never taking the tropes of JRPGs for granted and always introducing its own imaginative spin on tired concepts, Persona 3 made me realize that this type of game isn’t dead, only sleeping. Featuring one of the best casts of characters this generation, examination of unusual and provocative themes, and a tightly consistent internal mytology, Persona 3 shows how little other RPG developers are trying.

1. Portal - Because no other game of 2007 was doing anywhere near as much science.

Hopefully 2008 will turn out better, but until then I’ll turn my attention to what was worth listening to in 2007.

7. Etrian Odyssey - Super Arrange
6. Andrew Bird - Armchair Apocrypha
5. Stars - In Our Bedroom After the War
4. Spoon - Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
3. Radiohead - In Rainbows
2. The White Stripes - Icky Thump
1. The Arcade Fire - Neon Bible

#7 is on the list for sentimental reasons as much as anything. 2007 was the year Etrian Odyssey came out, and it was the first project I led at Atlus, so I’ve become a collector of related paraphernalia. I’m aware of (and own) about 5 soundtrack discs for the game thus far: a “prototype” sampler disc given away with the Japanese release, the official soundtrack for the game, the official “Super Arrange” album, and two fan-made arrangement CDs by Iosys and Golden City Factory. The Golden City Factory isn’t half-bad, but the best of the bunch is the official Super Arrange album, for its larger track count and greater diversity of styles.

I first heard about Andrew Bird from the commentary edition of Shaenon Garrity’s Narbonic, during a period where she discussed her favorite mad science-themed albums. The track in question from Armchair Apocrypha was “Dark Matter,” a great song whose lyrics play up the romantic notions of rebellion inherent in mad science. But that’s just the height of an all-around fine album, showcasing Bird’s sly voice and langorous songwriting.

In Our Bedroom After the War is more of Stars doing what they do: still offering soaring themes of love and liberation, built around the twining vocals of Torquil Campbell and Amy Millan. (It also has songs like “Barricade,” but that’s neither here nor there.) It seemed from the title that this album would be more pointedly political than their last few, but the balance ended up being about the same. Probably not as good as their last one, but not everything has to be. I could say the same thing about Spoon’s latest, which I enjoyed and listened to often, but still grew a little restless about.

Exempt by its very nature from the “well, can’t I buy it in a store?” syndrome was Radiohead’s newest, which I downloaded upon its release in October. It took a while to grow on me, like most of their albums, but over the last month or so I’ve found myself going back to it again and again. What’s most interesting to me about In Rainbows is that it’s less angry than the group has been in some time, with an overall quieter mood.

The opposite could be said about Icky Thump, which was a return to the White Stripes’ signature sound after the decidedly odd Get Behind Me Satan. I prefer this type of song from them anyway, but even their experiments this time out were more fun, like the flamenco stylings of “Conquest,” or the spoken-word parts of “Rag & Bone.”

Finally, there’s my favorite album of the year, Neon Bible. I very nearly wrote an entire post about this one, but gave it up because I don’t think anyone wants to hear my ramblings on Christianity. Suffice to say that I think this is one of the most vitally spiritual Christian albums in my collection, despite the surface subject matter of songs like “Intervention” and “Antichrist Television Blues.” (Yes, the Arcade Fire themselves would probably disagree. I don’t care.)

There were a lot of times, listening to the Arcade Fire’s debut Funeral, that I wondered how they could possibly follow it up–I was convinced that they were doomed to go downhill from there, having already spent themselves on such a brilliant, personal statement. This album showed that not only could they maintain it for two albums, but convinced me that they’ll be at it for a long time.

The Detteiu Mario series (available in eight installments so far: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight) is the work of a man who decided to hack his own levels of Super Mario World, the first 16-bit Super Mario game, in a way that allows the levels to be completed with no controller input whatsoever. This isn’t so clever in and of itself; it wouldn’t be so hard to construct a level that drops Mario onto a conveyor belt that takes him directly to the exit. What makes these videos so incredible to watch is the style, inventiveness, and wit that goes into the design.

Under the direction of the designer (one “daigam,” whose real Japanese name I don’t know) Mario becomes sort of a cross between Buster Keaton and Mr. Magoo, blithely making razor-thin escapes through impossible deathtraps. The videos keep getting longer and more self-aware; even the very first ones have a topper gag like reuniting Mario with Yoshi after the exit, but the capper gets more and more outrageous until Mario literally sleepwalks his way through defeating one of the game’s major bosses. The videos are full of hilariously impressive bits such as that, where you can almost see daigam’s wink at the viewer as Mario dodges bullets, hitches rides on enemies, and bounces around the levels like a pinball.

These videos are more than just technically impressive feats to wow videogame geeks. They’re there to remind anyone, whether or not they’ve played a Mario game or even know what SNES stands for, of the joys of well-executed, impeccably timed physical comedy. The best part? Anyone who is familiar with Mario games knows from the introductory map screens that he’s only on world 3–there’s still as many as 5 worlds of this stuff to go, and I can’t wait to see how inventive it can get before the end.

All right, now that I’m back at home with iTunes to tell me what in my library actually came out in 2006, I can participate here.

10. Pretty Girls Make Graves - Elan Vital
9. Shoji Meguro feat. Various - Persona 3 Original Soundtrack
8. Beck - The Information
7. The Pipettes - We Are The Pipettes
6. Sufjan Stevens - The Avalanche
5. Gnarls Barkley - St. Elsewhere
4. The Dresden Dolls - Yes, Virginia…
3. Sufjan Stevens - Songs for Christmas
2. The Decemberists - The Crane Wife
1. Joanna Newsom - Ys

What my list tells mainly says is that, divorced from close proximity to Amoeba and Rasputin, I barely bought any music this year. Seriously, I haven’t even listened to Elan Vital all the way through yet–it’s only #10 because I’m pretty sure it must be good based my love of PGMG’s former efforts. #9 is a video game soundtrack, and a very good one, but… a video game soundtrack. #8 is Beck’s surprisingly good The Information, but the fact that I was surprised by its quality says a lot. And as much as I liked We Are the Pipettes, in a better year it would have been #10.

So nearly halfway through the chart we reach one of two Sufjan Stevens albums this year; his B-sides were evidently better than at least four other artists’ best efforts. St. Elsewhere was the best hip-hop I heard all year, but I haven’t been seeking it out the way I usually do, and the rest of my favorite MCs sat this year out after seemingly all contributing something in 2005.

The Dresden Dolls at #4 is more like it. This was a great album, although I bounce back and forth on whether or not I prefer it to the self-titled debut. “Mrs. O” almost forces the argument all on its own, but the slicker sound in Yes, Virginia… doesn’t allow for anything as weird as “Coin-Operated Boy.” But I’d be happy to listen to either disc, so the point is moot.

I’d heard the better part of #3, Songs for Christmas, as three leaked EPs circulating the blogosphere. Those three discs in the 5-disc set remain mostly untouched (except for one rerecorded song and, thrillingly, a new coda added onto my favorite Christmas carol ever) and the two new EPs, which are weighted more toward Stevens originals than traditional carols, maintain the same eclectic but essentially joyful spirit of the season. (Even with song titles like “Did I Make You Cry on Christmas? (Well, You Deserved It!)”) It’s far too early to tell, but in the long run I think this is going to end up being for me what Bing Crosby’s Christmas album is to my dad. It might even deserve a higher spot for that, but it seems strange to give something like that to “just” a Christmas album.

Someday the Decemberists are going to get the #1 spot on my year-end lists, because I love them so much. They came pretty close this year with The Crane Wife, which only suffers slightly because of its recycling of previously-explored themes. Granted, a lot of bands revisit the same territory throughout their careers, but only the Decemberists would turn again to ridiculously specific material such as horrific lullabies to scare kids into misbehaving, and ill-fated meetings between murderous rogues and newlywed brides. Still, the music is getting better with every album, and “The Crane Wife Parts 1&2″ that close the album are as beautiful as anything they’ve recorded.

Finally, Ys, which I’m going to drag out again. It’s genius, and not everyone is going to be able to accept or believe that because of Newsom’s voice. But to (re-)quote David Byrne, “The better a singer’s voice, the harder is it to believe what they’re saying,” and Newsom’s vocals do a fantastic job of underscoring how personal and sincere all these songs are. “Truthful” in this case is not incompatible with “poetic,” though, since her lyrical skills are par excellence, with plenty of dazzling imagery and word choices. It’s hard, really hard, to get into, but if ever there was worth an album worth braving its inaccessibility, this is it.

Bonus Awards!

The “Why Did I Buy This Album” Prize: Beth Orton - Comfort of Strangers
1998’s Central Reservation is so amazing that I buy all of Beth Orton’s albums. I’ve never listened to a single one of them besides Central Reservation. This will stop now.

The “Better Than It Sounds” Prize: Art Brut - Bang Bang Rock & Roll
I listened to this one about a dozen times when it came out, but now I sort of actively hate it. It’s true; comedy does not wear well in music.

This was my second project, and the first one I got to edit by myself, so I’m proud of that at least. It’s also a genuinely good game: it’s hard-but-fair as the best strat-RPGs are, and it’s one of the best-looking GBA titles ever insofar as pure style goes. Seriously, the menus and interfaces in this one are just out of control. So if you can find it, and you enjoy the genre, it’s definitely worth picking up.