Isometrics Awards: Worst Game of 2015

Welcome to the Isometrics Awards for Worst Game of the Year, the Rancid Retrospective of the world of computer and video games. There was a huge influx of games, a lot of which were fantastic, unique or at least competent. With such a morass of games however, the inevitable hand of the greedy, the incompetent and the both ends up leading to quite a lot of crap. That said my longlist for worst games was far shorter than my longlist for game of the year, but my word what we have here plumbs new depths of terrible. So without further ado, we shall begin.

10: Batman Arkham Knight (WB Games/Rocksteady Studios: PS4/XB1/PC)

Pictured: The first mission of Arkham Knight

Let's start controversially shall we, by putting a game on this list I actually quite like. Batman Arkham Knight, the kinda-sorta swansong of the phenomenal Arkham series of bat-em-ups is actually a very good game. It's beautiful, features some interesting mechanics to add to the already excellent core gameplay elements of Arkham City and has enough intruigue and darkness to be worth your while. This would all be true if the game worked reliably. Even as of me writing this six months after launch there are problems with frame rate, the Batmobile (an otherwise fantastic mechanic) falling through the world and other random glitches that really hamper an overall experience, to the point that Rocksteady pulled the game, offering full refunds and only rereleasing it in November with much of the same issues.

If you're playing on a console that didn't suffer these problems quite as badly, feel free to replace this with F1 2015, another game which could have been fantastic but for lazy porting, terrible optimisation, inexcusable glitches and a basically unplayable multiplayer, although with less actual content and innovation over previous iterations to justify this. I gave the slight nod to Arkham Knight on the sheer scale of disaster of the launch, but honestly both could have been Number 10 on this list.

9: Godus (22Cans: PC)

Depicted: Abject Disappointment

So Peter Molyneux abandoned yet another project half finished and missing almost all the content claimed by the developer. Since Black and White he has been doing this and since Fable it has really affected the games, with them getting worse and worse up until this utter nadir of a life-simulation. Godus was a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2012 that had an early access launch in 2013, allegedly owing to problems with funding and complications that occurred during game development.

The rest of the story ends up getting very upsetting, the winner of an alternate reality mobile game ended up getting precisely nothing despite being promised real world revenue from a feature that was never put in the game. Many of the Backer's rewards (Read: The most important thing to give out when doing a Kickstarter campaign) were unfulfilled, leading to demands for refunds from irate gamers. Technically the game is still in early access but given the reduction to a skeleton crew as of February 2015 it's safe to say the game isn't being finished this side of ever.

What's in the game is fairly bad too, including terrible terrain deformation that seems designed to cause repetitive strain injury, a microtransaction model for the Android and iOS versions (The absence of which is touted a little too proudly in the PC beta), lots of annoying features borrowed from mobile gaming and an alarming lack of content. There is a potentially fun game here but the game causes too much pain both figuratively and literally to be worth more than derision.

8:Burgers (storm_sharks, PC)

The game may appear mildly exciting from still screenshots. They lie.

Well isn't this an odd curiosity of a game. Burgers is a Metal Slug clone of sorts with terrible controls, a fairly naff art style, a thoroughly baffling storyline and about an hour of content, and it only got that much due to some of the worst controls in a 2D action game I've seen for a while. It has a button for walking back which only made sense in a 2D shooter when the rest of the appalling controls were taken into account. The shooting is unsatisfying, the animation would have been laughed off of Newgrounds and the difficulty curve wobbles between absurdly easy to inexplicably difficult, while lacking much in the way of variety to justify it. The story, such as it is is so nonsensically absurd and riddled with spelling, logic and sanity errors that it's almost worth the incredibly low price of admission to see though, which is probably the highest praise it will get.

7: Battle Ranch (Playboom, PC)

Depicted: Veg vs Pigbies

Certain games are epoch-setting and blaze a trail that other games can but follow for years to come. Battle Ranch is not one of those games. A clone of Plants Vs Zombies whose derivation is only matched by sheer incompetence, Battle Ranch is the ever-so-original war between pigs and plants. Apparently that's a wacky original concept or something. Somehow despite being released in 2015 it looks like a game made with Visual Basic 6, with a frame rate that aspires for double digits and animations which aspire to actually animate at all. A game that would have been laughed off of Newgrounds.

6:Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 (Activision, PS4/XB1)

Thinking Of Your Own Captions is much more fun than Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5

There was a time, ever so long ago when Tony Hawk and his series of Pro Skater games were some of the most fun party games you could ever play, and the brand was a symbol of a great experience with a mix of brilliant gameplay and the perfect amount of sillyness. Pro Skater 5, released over a decade after Pro Skater 4 and eight years after the last good entry in the series, has regressed in a manner not seen since the execrable Flatout 3 in 2011. The game looks ugly as sin to start, with a graphical style so bad it was very quickly converted to a cel-shaded style in a failed attempt to deflect criticism (known as the “DS Gambit”). There's an alarming variety in pretty much every regard, with repetitive missions, limited tricks and a social element seemingly limited in practise to shoving other people over online. Worse than all of this however is the regression in gameplay, taking a formula that had evolved over a decade and somehow managing to mess up most of the core mechanics, either through streamlining or simple glitches. The game is monstrously unfun outside of watching those hilarious montages of the game glitching out uncontrollably. It's funny to watch but once you realise that is the whole experience, you'll have a bad time.

5:F-1 Chequered Flag (Turn6, PC)

Depicted: Bob Slayer's Dirty Little Secret

Speaking of Flatout 3, their developer Turn6 is back, releasing an F-1 game in 2015 which may go down as one of the flat out worst racing games in existence. Not having controller support may be forgivable in comparison to the more readily apparent sins of the game, such as the complete lack of competence in any technological respect. The graphics would be dated in 1995, something that is not hidden by terrible blurry visual effects. Every track feels the same and appears to be in the same environment and the only distinction between yourself and the other racers is what washed out colour you happen to be. The gameplay really sucks as well. One would assume you could not use the skidding mess that was the Glacier 3 engine in a formula one game, however Turn6 vehemently disagree adding terrible drifting and a destruction based boost mechanic to a discipline of driving intended to be about careful precision. An appalling, bargain basement excuse for a video game.

4:Temper Tantrum (Digital Homicide, PC)

Depicted: Baby Jesus Simulator 2015

So Digital Homicide are back, with their patented blend of bought, borrowed and stolen assets, mixed in with unbelievably pathetic gameplay. The sheer volume of crap they effused onto steam was so excessive I could have filled the top ten list with DH (and affiliated shell companies) games and had done with it. I was torn between this and the completely dysfunctional Galactic Hitman, and Temper Tantrum only won because of the sheer offence of it. It's a painful game to witness, partly because of the gaudiest textures ever sold via Unity, but also because of a bizarre framerate, unresponsive controls and a camera that seems obsessed with spinning. The one moment of respite was on my first attempt playing the game where I phased through a wall and ended up standing atop a swimming pool. When glitching your way out of playing a game is the best thing about it, you know you've reached a particularly rough level of bad.

3:Bloodbath Kavkaz (Dagestan Technology, PC)

Depicted: Race Relations. Also Depicted: A Repulsive Video Game

From mere technological failures to outright offensively awful messes, we have the Russian mockbuster take on Hotline Miami, Bloodbath Kavkaz. The steam page promises “all the horrors of russian [sic] modern culture” and it delivers in spades, providing a nonsensical experience seemingly made in MS Paint by a fourteen year old white supremacist. It is racism, terrible art and memes, and apparently there is no room for good gameplay, graphics that don't seriously harm people with photosensitive epilepsy and oddly enough for a Hotline Miami clone, a lack of difficulty for the most part. Beyond pathetic.

2:Gynophobia (Andrii Vintsevych, PC)

Depicted: An attempt to take a picture of the most repulsive part of the game, where the main character's dad is a massive homophobe.

Gynophobia literally denotes a fear of women, and the game takes this mildly intruiging concept with all the subtlty of a spider-shaped brick with breasts. The first issue is that the main conceit of the game is mostly a con, since two fifths of the game take place within another terribly generic zombie first person shooter, where you are wowed by awful controls, location damage limited to headshots, a grand total of three weapons (and I'm magnanimously including the knife in that as well), ugly store-bought enemies with AI completely limited to chasing the player and a level objective which consists of car maintenance. Once the actual misogynist parts of the game begin and you're shooting women-shaped store-bought zombies in the head, needless to say the game gets a little bit unhinged. The game is only an hour long as well, even taking into account the often unfair level design and lack of checkpoints, but by the end you'll have been so beaten over the head by this half-assed misogynist bollocks that killing a scorpion sorceress and the bizarre Oedipal aspects of the game are no longer even slightly amusing. A soul-destroying mess.

1:Hatred (Destructive Creations, PC/PS4)

Depicted: Deep Sociological Satire.

I didn't want this to be the winner in all honesty. I suspected there was a good chance this jaunt through the life of a spree killer was going to win the worst game award, but I wanted to give it the benefit of the doubt. After all, brilliant games sometimes cover insanely dark themes, and providing there is a level of balance, enjoyment or some form of enlightenment a game can be entertaining. Hatred manages to get everything wrong that games Hatred is so desperate to emulate got right, games like Manhunt and especially Postal 2. Hatred is not the worst game of the year because of its appalling graphics, inexcusable framerate, iffy controls, generic mission objectives, its litany of bugs or its short lifespan. Not at all, the game is the worst game of this year, and indeed the worst of all time because of how much of a complete and utter waste it is. It wasted the Unreal Engine 4, providing a game that looks bad by late PS2 standards and has a framerate that aspires to reach double digits on a good day when nothing's on screen. It wasted a graphical style that sought to emulate dark age comic books but is a generic sludge of black and white nonsense that forces the player to rely on the “Killer's Sense” mapped to the right analogue stick to actually find enemies. Most importantly, it wasted what could have been a fascinating conceit, of a twisted disturbed spree killer far too psychotic and murderous to be an antihero, who kills for some purpose never said and possibly never known. It is a conceit succeeded in the disturbing Manhunt, the shamefully hilarious Postal 2 and even the controversial Super Columbine Massacre RPG, a free game made in 2005 about a real mass shooting. Hatred inspires complete apathy, a complete lack of care, effort or interest in the game they are making and trying to sell, trying to pass this lack of effort and talent as some slight against the politically correct world. It makes me furious that a game like this hoodwinked masses of people on Greenlight, Gabe Newell who stepped in to allow the game to be published after an initial ban, and myself into thinking this was a game with merit being a victim of censorship. Of the top three games, at least Bloodbath Kavkaz attempted and failed at being as satirical as Hotline Miami, and at least Gynophobia had attempted and failed to cover its subject matter. Hatred simply did not bother, and because of this complete antithesis of fun, enjoyment and meaning, Hatred gets the Isometrics Award for Worst Game of 2015.

Thank you very much for reading, and have a lovely 2016. Much better games and the honourable mentions are incoming.

Isometrics: With Armikrog, Can You Separate a Game From its Creator?

Welcome to Isometrics, the clinically conflicted gander at the literary world of computer and video games. We are but a few days away from the release of Armikrog, the sequel in spirit to cult hit The Neverhood, a fascinating odyssey in plasticine from the creator of Earthworm Jim, and yet rather than unbridled joy, I'm completely conflicted with whether I should buy a game I know I will enjoy.

“Why?!” The dearest reader of this may well scream. “If you know you will enjoy it, why not buy it and support a game you love?”

The problem of course is the author is Doug TenNepal, creator of The Neverhood and Earthworm Jim, creating Armikrog after a very successful Kickstarter from pretty much everyone other than myself who played The Neverhood back in the day. See, I love Doug TenNepal the artist. My adoration for The Neverhood basically created my eternal love for FMV games, claymation, indie games, the surreal and weird obscure games few people seem to have heard of (although enough to crowd fund a sequel evidently).

For the uninitiated, The Neverhood was a 1996 point and click adventure in the clay eponymous world, where you play as Klayman and have to find the crown of the king Hoborg. This involved exploring the world of the Neverhood, solving silly yet creative puzzles, endlessly backtracking and collecting history disks, one of which was stored in the longest corridor ever, which told the history of the Neverhood universe in clay etchings and the slowest walk cycles ever. It's hard to tell sometimes whether some of the dafter design decisions were deliberate or simply the case of wanting to keep every frame of animation made over an agonising year-long production. It is a game that is hard not to see the love that went into it, and that adds a charm that forgives some of its more fundamental flaws. The game was packed in on an OEM bundle but even so it did not sell well, possibly being a bit too out there even for the unbridled creativity that was the mid 1990s gaming landscape.

Two years later, its sequel, Skullmonkeys, followed pretty much the same formula. Eschewing the point and click shenanigans for a full on side scrolling platformer, the game was equal parts barmy and beautiful, full of a lot of surreal, hilarious and innately charming moments. These hilarious moments, like the beans scene and the awesome Bonus Room song (basically the best reason to kill yourself on that one level to collect every Swirly Q) were of course tempered by some iffy game mechanics, and an absurdly high difficulty curve artificially exacerbated by the fact there were only passwords and no save system for a PS1 game in 1998. General consensus is that the Neverhood is a better game, and I'm not going to argue, however I suspect that some individual scenes in Skullmonkeys are so funny they do bring the whole game up, and make you want to play more to see the next bit of slapstick. I did love it.

So with that, and the obvious and inexplicably gigantic success of Earthworm Jim (seriously, only in 1995 could that game get a TV show), TenNapel naturally released a terrible fighting game and disappeared from video games to make comic books and flash cartoons based on Ape Escape (this actually happened). But hey, he returned with a massively successful Kickstarter in 2013, and Armikrog is set to be released at the start of August.

So why am I so hesitant, I hear you cry? Well, TenNapel has said some very interesting things in the interim period, things that certainly colour the opinion of a creator. Things of a “I'm not very fond of gay people” fashion. Now, several commentators have brought in his religious beliefs, being a Breibart-esque republican Christian, and while there is a connection between his opinions and those of the religious right, it seems somewhat hypocritical to tar all religious folk with the same brush as the people he is tarring. There is a fascinating article on the website Mostly Retro, which asks the question “But if you’re not a homophobic, sexist bigot and you still want to back Doug TenNapel, I have one question... [w]hat the fuck is wrong with you?”

James Eldred's article, which is a really good read posits that final support of a project made by someone with very questionable beliefs is a tacit approval of said beliefs. How far does that go however? Pencil Test Studios, the publisher and developer of Armikrog is more than just Doug himself, surely you can support the studio and not TenNapel personally? Perhaps technically, but that's not really the point. He's writer, creator and designer of the game, his name is tied directly to it and it is his creative vision. Even if that £20 (£25 for the deluxe edition) you pay for the game does not in fact go straight into his bank account to buy more bigotry, it does serve to define him as a creative asset, and every success justifies the use of his name and his talent.

Which leads to the ultimate question, how connected is an artist's beliefs and their art? The safe answer is that it clearly depends, between different artists, different works even. In some cases even different editions of the same work will receive edits to fit in with an artist's new beliefs, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein being a particular damaging example compared to the original work. We can think of many artists who made a “religious” album of course, but these err towards very general displays of worship, rather than particularly contentious issues of a faith. In gaming it is even more difficult to see, partly because of the long lead times and rather large teams working on gaming ensuring the most controversial aspects of a belief system are removed before release. TenNepal has never released a game which explicitly is transphobic or misogynist or homophobic, and it seems astonishingly unlikely that he would compromise or manipulate a concept to fit something so alienating in.

So far, we may not be able to separate a creator entirely from his game (although of course New Theorists will argue that point with me), is it possible that people can buy a game and support the studio, the publisher and the creative part of an author without endorsing these beliefs. I disagree with Mr Eldred on that aspect. You can enjoy John Lennon's music and not endorse the fact he beat his wife, an act he apologised and showed deep regret for before his death. You can enjoy Muse without buying into Matt Bellamy's conspiracy theories. You can even enjoy the game Shadow Complex, despite it being based loosely on a book written by a homophobe hiding behind his Mormon beliefs to justify his bigotry. In the end it is art, and whatever art you choose to enjoy is your business.

Just be aware that your favourite games may be made by your least favourite artists...

Isometrics: What Is Literary Gaming Anyway?

After trying to get around to it for so long, It is time to actually explain what on earth it means to be “literary” about gaming...

Note: This Originally appeared on the website Geek Pride, and I will bring back a selection of my older articles and set up some form of archive. Most of my old articles are very much based on issues current at the time of writing, but this is really my statement of principles on what I feel Literary Gaming is. I will try and get a new article done by the weekend, this is just a stopgap because work has gotten busy the last few days. In the meantime, hope you enjoy!

Welcome to Isometrics, a magnanimous meta-commentary on the synapse-sparking literary world of computer and video games. I have been doing these Isometrics blogs for a while now, and the response has been really rather nice. I've had a little feedback, suggestions and probably a better proof-reading team than most politician, and most importantly to me got people to think about these issues and ideas in gaming that they hadn't before, and for all that I couldn't be more thankful.

Clearly bogus and overwrought pandering aside, there is a point to this, because I kind of have some unfinished business. You see, while I spent the last few weeks talking about Twitterfalls and Grand Theft Auto and games so bad they're brilliant while talking about the aliterative appeal of literary gaming, I've not actually explained what on earth I mean by that phrase.

“Literary Gaming”? Isn't that a contradiction in terms? You can't game with a book, after all. Or can you? I think it's time to settle once and for all what this blog is about – with some video game examples too!

I think the problem is that “Literature” outside of academic circles has a very concrete definition. It has to do with books, specifically, high culture high quality ones. For that matter, the subculture of gaming has a very ludocentric definition; it is the playing of games that matters and anything outside of that is considered ancillary. So by these definitions, “literary gaming” makes absolutely no sense, even less so then gaming literature.

It is at this point I end up going into dissertation mode and lose a lot of readers.

First of all, in the true literary critic spirit of being massively pedantic about everything, including definitions, the definition of literature is “written works”. This does not actually exclude video games, or indeed most art. I will spare you my long digressions into etymology (this time!), but suffice to say a written work can include a theatrical production, a film, a comic or even a video game.

Part of the reason for this is that all these works have written scripts of some kind, something that is doubled for a video game (a narrative script and the game code, itself a form of written script), but that's not entirely the reason. Writing is composition, it is an act of creation, of using a language for a particular purpose. There is nothing to say that this language may necessarily be a printed script, it may well be evocative drawings, vocal evocations, body language, framing, tone, timbre, musical composition, even a reliance on the audience filling in the blanks.

Gaming, despite the vernacular, isn't necessarily about playing a simple game, about interacting with a set of rules to reach a determined outcome. Gaming is about interaction, about experiencing a world, a universe, a story in a way personal (either in subtle or significant ways) to the individual player/reader. It can be about both rules and experience, and it can be about neither, such is the nature of video games. They are in theory all code but this code can be used to create very different effects, like a blank canvas on which anything from tax documents to works of abstract majestic art can be created.

The act of gaming, particularly in a game with a story is to fill in deliberately left blanks, like a version of mad-libs with a physics engine. Consider a game like Mass Effect for example, a great science fiction epic tale (one I've mentioned two weeks in a row!), that makes perfectly clear that you are interacting in the narrative, and that your actions within the game's universe have consequences, some more far reaching than even the game designers realised at first. These things are true of most games, to greater or lesser effect. Pong, for example allows your actions to affect the narrative of getting the score to 21 with the consequence being the end of the game.

And therein lies the way in which the two can coexist. If literature is just writing and gaming is just interaction, than both can easily coexist, given that by this level of abstraction the act of reading is gaming. This obviously is useless to us though, so a different tactic is needed. One that will tragically remove Pong from our venerable list of literary games.

For centuries Literature has concerned itself with the fundamental question of what it is, which has in itself created an incredibly vibrant array of different works, each addressing that question with different frameworks, levels of intensity and outcomes. This tradition has spread to video games, with a lot of games focused self-reflexively on the history of the medium, but also on evolution and progression. One of my favourite games last year was a little indie title called Evoland, which told the technical history of the RPG through the medium of an RPG, each treasure chest opened being a new feature that radically altered and added to the game's world. And of course on top of that you have games like the sensational Papers, Please, a game which demonstrates more powerfully than most the ways in which a game can craft a very unique literary experience. Many great works of fiction have been about dystopian areas and corruption, but Papers, Please took you through the experience of fear, and poverty and destitution and the inevitable corruption that follows is a choice of the player that is never actually made explicit. I won't talk any more about either of these games because I feel there is definitely enough to write full articles.

To point out, a game does not necessarily have to be literary to be of high or worthy quality in order to be good or enjoyable. Literary gaming as an idea, or a descriptor (for lack of a better word), isn't necessarily a barometer of quality. Many terrible books are still literature, and many terrible works are still art. What sets them apart is that literary games can be explored in frameworks similar to ones used in literature, and given the broad schools of thought within the literary world, far more games are included than excluded, and I focus on games with interesting points, not just games of high quality.

To sum up, literary gaming as a concept is an exploration of games as a unique medium for telling stories and presenting experiences, through combinations of narrative, interaction and art. It is a reaction to the increasing criticism among mechanics focused game players that games have to be games first, art second and literature never. It is a celebration of games that explore that particularly strange relationship that the reader and the writer have, unique to any other artistic medium in history. It is a particular focus and school of thought that does justice to an art form, a literary form that can provide experiences, tell stories and evoke theme, ideology and metaphor in a way never seen before.

It is a celebration of video games, video gaming and the great authorial figures behind it.

What is your take? Was my defence spirited or ludicrous? Are games literary? Was this entirely necessary and could I have talked about anything else this week? Drop me a line in the comments before, on the facebook group or on twitter, @HuggyDave. Using the hashtag #isometrics will do nothing, but make a kitten smile. See you next month for a very special Isometrics! Thanks for reading!