Justin's Game of the Year 2009: Fallout 3

Well, it's about that time, closing up the year of gaming. We played a lot of games. We covered many genres. We played on many consoles (not the PS3 though!). So what is your favorite game of the year?

This year, I'm picking Fallout 3.

At the beginning of the year I was coming down off of Call of Duty 4, a revisit from last year, that I really never let go of. I took a hiatus and spent some time with my Wii, buying more games for that than any other this year. I also bought quite a few iPod games. I even played Spore on my Mac.

Then Fallout 3 came out and I knew it was going to be a toss up between it, Halo: ODST and MW2 to make my most played game of the year award. I couldn't talk myself into yet another driving game. They're repetitive and don't really bring much to the table. I probably spent as much time driving in Forza 2 as I did painting the cars in it. The other games pretty much ended up being sequels as well. More of the same. More of the same fun, mind you, but just more story with slightly better graphics.

But Fallout 3 was such a departure from the last few years of gaming that I had to pick it just because of it's differences that I ended up enjoying so much. Besides some issues I had with the crappy voice acting and bad animations (walking around for instance was like watching a bad 80's computer generated music video), getting into a deep RPG with fully a customizable character was just what I needed. I liked the missions. I liked the choices. I liked zeroing in on people's body parts and blowing them off with a scoped magnum. This was so much better than the space epic, Mass Effect (a game that had superior voice acting) that I tried last year and got tired of real quick. Roaming around generic looking planets that could have been modeled on a G3 Macintosh with Google Maps overlays. Of real boring places. Seriously, look at this crap.

In further...

• Wii GOTY: Excite Truck
• iPod GOTY: Crush the Castle
• Retro GOTY: Excite Truck
• Car GOTY: Burnout Paradise
• Human GOTY: My son

Turn 10's cat is out of the bag

Turn 10 has tweeted “We can’t wait to start blabbing about our next big thing.” There tweet along with the above photo (photo on let is out of Turn 10's house, and image on right is artists rendition of logo) has sparked the rumor that Forza Motorsports 3 is in the works.

I’m all for a new racing game. I just hope this series doesn’t turn out to be like the Madden series by tweeking the graphics and physics a little. Don’t give me a slightly updated version of the same game. But to think about it, what more can they give you that couldn’t just be in an update? You’re going to get more cars and tracks, all things that we wish for, but they could be updates.

I guess making you’re car more customizable would be great. I commend them for the label application techniques. But we all would like more visual add-ons to separate each car in a crowd. Maybe wide body kits, or the racing body mods like GT1 had for every car in there stable.

How about Turn 10 bringing us some rally. Everyone with FM2 was trying to create the perfect drift car. Give a reason to snap that rear end loose, for the race, not just for fun.

What is on your wish list?

1 Hour Review: Forza Motorsport

I'm just an hour and twenty minutes, about 5 sessions, into Forza and I have to admit: it's a total Gran Turismo killer. This is coming from someone who not only played every Gran Turismo game, but just got Forza a few weeks ago. I know I'm not getting a PS3 anytime soon, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to test the Xbox sim racing waters, also known previously as 'that other racing platform'.

Gran Turismo was our Bible; the Holy Grail of racing games. But not anymore.

Even with all that Gran Turismo under my belt, Forza has won me over in just over an hour. The reason it probably took that long was because I finally started racing tracks that exist on both games (Tsukuba, Laguna Seca) and I actually couldn't tell the games apart. Now I wasn't sitting side by side, shot for shot with each course, but I'm not that particular about anything.

The game already had it's strong points over GT. What I would call a marriage of Need for Speed: Underground and Gran Turismo. Two of the very best genre racing games out there. Forza has the pedigree of GT with the street slang of NFS:U. Having the ability to do layers of tweakable graphics (better than the static graphics of NFS:U) and painting cars was, honestly, one of the more annoying things left out of each Gran Turismo game. Affective body damage is also nice, but nothing I really complained about in GT.

What I don't like so far is the progression system. You have to level up your profile to get harder A.I. and bigger cars. So far it seems natural, but it's impossible to take one car to the top. You have to win cars in sets of races to complete, say the novice races, before moving to the professional races. The licenses in GT could be fun, but they were also helpful in learning how to sim race. That whole system is just gone here.

The camera system also sucks. You do get more views for racing (just one), but the beautiful replays only get one "t.v." camera. The others are normal racing views from the different angles of around or inside the car. So many times I've pulled a sweet drift around a corner and I can't watch it because that happens to be a turn where the t.v.-style camera jumps to the cockpit view of the race.

But all in all, it's a better game than Gran Turismo. If you want to test the waters, pick up a used copy for under $20 and realize that you don't need (and possibly not even want) a PS3 anytime soon to fill your racing jones.

I'm Going to Spend A Lot of Money

Forza Motorsport 2: Car list (no suprises)

Well the list is out.

So far it looks on par with the latest outings of Gran Turismo. And that's too sad. That means there needs to be a third true-sim racer in the mix. Why?

Because there's no real sim racer for the everyday guy. Gran Turismo's first car list was something we all really appreciated. There are no more Honda Accords or Legacy Wagons. There was never a Nissan Maxima or Ford Probe, that's for sure.

Obviously these cars would have sucked, but the dream of taking our own cars and turning them into racing beasts will just never be realized in a racing sim. Sure you have your Need for Speed Undergrounds and Tokyo Xtremes, but that's all arcade fluff. We need a new racer on the shelves. We need a racer that puts us behind the seats of our Mercury Cougars and Ford Escapes, kick our baby seats to the curb, and lets us realize the impossible.