Quarterlies 2005
TomChick - Features - Comments - 01/01/06
7. The Best Looking One
Shadow of the Colossus
 The word “graphics” only partly means how next-gen your engine is. A far more important facet is the artwork, which is what makes otherwise coarse games like We Love Katamari, Killer 7, and Darwinia beautiful. And no game this year had graphics comparable to the absolutely lovely Shadow of the Colossus, an alternately languid and thrilling adventure from the folks who did Ico.
From my Computer Games Magazine review: The colossi are a triumph of artwork, looking old and odd, almost Aztec and often goofy, bearded or scowling or tired or lazy, usually with pinched little faces and bodies patched together from bits of stone and fur for you to cling to like a burr on a dog. They’re myths from a language you don’t know. Some of the colossi are thrilling, some are eerie, a couple are just plain annoying. But the sense of scale and bulk is superlative, a triumph of technology minus the gratuitous spectacle of a God of War.
6. The Real Time Strategy One
Dragonshard
 Us real time strategy junkies have been getting some seriously primo stuff. I can think of no other genre in which the latest games are so consistently creative, polished, clever, and fresh. My favorite from the past year was Dragonshard, which has you plunging underground for gold, scouting overland for magical crystals, interacting just the right amount with battles, and not worrying one iota about peons or economics.
From my Yahoo review: For five years and three games, [Liquid Entertainment has] come tantalizingly close to making some really good RTSs. So you might figure that this time they finally made something good…you'd be wrong. Dragonshard isn't just good. It's great…an ingenious mix of resource management, micromanagement, action, RPG elements, tactics, strategy, innovation, and good old fashioned D&D atmosphere.”
5. The One That Works Out
God of War
 Everything about God of War is muscular: the design, the narrative, the graphics engine, the hero. This game is almost single handedly responsible for reminding us all that, five years after its debut, Sony’s Playstation 2 is just getting warmed up while Microsoft is strangling the Xbox in its crib.
From my Computer Games Magazine review: [God of War Developer David] Jaffe has neatly paired his ooh-look-how-brutal! sensibility with the kind of fantasy they don't make any more. It is unabashed pre-politician Schwarzeneggar, from a time when the 'hero' part of 'action hero' didn't preclude gore, dead bystanders, and topless women. It's a welcome return to the morally bankrupt, musclebound, R-rated swords-and-sorcery that would have scandalized Oxford ninnies like Tolkein (among the tidbits in the excellent developer commentary: "We got to keep the nipples, but we lost the penis on the cyclops"). God of War's Greek mythology owes more to Boris Vallejo than Edith Hamilton. Like that other recent slab of ancient Greek cheese, the Wolfgang Petersen/Brad Pitt Troy, the source material is beside the point…the priority is to thrill the audience, so no harm, no foul. Particularly since God of War does its job so well.
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