Quarterlies 2007
TomChick - Features - Comments - 12/20/07
7. Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords
 Match-3's are all good and well. Zoo Keeper was previously my favorite for the cute little animal faces, but it was no better or worse than any puzzle game: good for killing time. But this insidious trick here is fitting the puzzle game into an RPG system, and adding inventory, and spells, and mana, and a mount, and even a castle, and crafting. Of course, these are all gimmicks to get you to play the Match-3, but I fall for it every time.
From my review on Yahoo: Puzzle Quest layers onto [the] basic [Bejeweled] formula the trappings of a fantasy RPG. This taps directly into the part of your brain that makes you want to level up. This is the same part of your brain that compelled you to play Diablo, massively multiplayer online games, Gran Turismo, Oblivion, Crackdown, or any other game that was built around the act of going from level one to level two to level ten, and beyond. First ding’s free. Or at least fast. Then you’re hooked and you’re still playing because you’re almost to level fifteen, followed shortly thereafter by being almost to level sixteen. Pavlov’s dog has nothing on this basic gamer reflex.
I still can't think of the name of this thing when I'm trying to tell someone about it. I tend to want to fit in the word "addiction" somewhere: Puzzle Addiction, Quest Addiction, Addiction Warlords, something like that. It doesn't help that it's available on every platform known to Man, so it's like a monkey on my back, following me wherever I go.
6. Age of Empires III: The Asian Dynasties
 I love the new Asian races: the nature friendly but fierce Japanese, the Chinese with their Mongols and flocks of monks, and oh, those Indian mumakils! When you add Asian Dynasties into the original game and the Warchiefs expansion, Age of Empires III now feels now like an RTS with three grand factions, each with its own powerful tricks – fire dances, revolutions, wonders! War Chiefs, fortresses, consulates! -- and each with their own various subfactions. It's a great grand historical mash-up, a burlesque of the Colonial Age, drawn by imaginative teenagers in the margins of their notebooks near the end of the second semester of World History.
From my review on Yahoo: As if it wasn't silly enough to have the French settling Texas, Age of Empires III has completely lost its marbles. With three new Asian civilizations and a whole mess of Far East locations, Asian Dynasties turns this series global and goony, abandoning all pretense of staid historical stuffiness in favor of a wide-open free-for-all of East meeting West and thoroughly upstaging it with some clever and funky innovations. History? Bah. This is gameplay.
What's more, Asian Dynasties redeems Age of Empires III, an ambitious, admirable, flawed game. The developers at Big Huge Games did a great job of wrestling with the interface so I don't have to. It's still tactically fussy and very demanding, but at last most of my objections have been removed. So in all fairness, it's not just the Asian Dynasties expansion that is one of my favorite games this year, but Age of Empires III itself.
5. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
 The developers at Infinity Ward must have magical powers. That's the only explanation I can think of. Call of Duty 4 has pretty much every shooter cliché in the book, yet they somehow make it so it doesn't feel like a cliché. And that's how you make an awesome game: reinvent the familiar without changing it. Take, for instance, the stereotypical rails sequence, where you're shooting a turret.
From my review on Yahoo: The turret mission is, unexpectedly, one of the highlights of Call of Duty 4. You're shooting from within the safety of an AC-130 gunship, listening to radio chatter about a situation unfolding on the ground below. It's a sobering commentary on modern warfare: remote, brutal, and efficient. And although the sound and visuals might be described as modest – here are no garish colors or fancy 5.1 subwoofer busting blasts! – this is one of the most vivid interactive presentations of the face of war in the era of CNN and the Internet.
And that's in a Hollywood-ized shooter that could have been a throwaway scripted gunfest. Other clichés get similar treatment: the sniper mission, the tutorial, the stealth mission, the rescue-the-damsel mission, the disarm-the-bomb mission, the get-the-bazooka-to-shoot-the-tank sequence. Call of Duty 4 is simultaneously cinematic and subversive. And it's even one of the year's best multiplayer games.
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