TSA’s Top 100 of 2011 Recap: 25 – 21

Don’t let the flame-haired guy below put you off, there’s a good batch of games in today’s roundup. Car combat, gun combat, and Chimera combat all await, so enjoy.

25: Twisted Metal

Explaining Twisted Metal’s delay to 2012 last week, David Jaffe quoted Shigeru Miyamoto: “A late game is only late until it ships. A bad game is bad until the end of time.” It’s a great quote – one that might not be quite so true in this era of day-one patches and year-long DLC plans – and to see a game maker peddling the “it’s done when it’s done” line instead of annual releases with minor upgrades is refreshing.

It’s been six years since the last proper Twisted Metal game (not counting the PS2 port of Head On released in 2008), but it doesn’t look like Eat Sleep Play are in any rush to get the game out: “With Twisted Metal [for PS3] we plan to ship a multiplayer classic. We plan to ship the best Twisted Metal ever made.”

Even with the number of titles already delayed to Q1 2012, pushing TM out of the typically vicious holiday season is probably for the best. It’ll hopefully allow the game, with its unique characters and brand of vehicular violence, to do better than it otherwise would (and get a bigger chunk of Sony’s marketing budget).

Twisted Metal is now due out “early 2012” for PS3.

24: Max Payne 3

Rockstar Games seem to have a habit of announcing their games long, long before we actually see anything useful about them. L.A. Noire (#30 in this list) was announced with a trailer at E3 2007 and didn’t make it out until May this year, Agent (#60) showed up with just a logo in 2009 – and has disappeared ever since – and Max Payne 3 is most definitely not the exception to the rule.

Originally announced with a couple of surprisingly chubby screenshots and targeted for a late ’09 release – well, you can probably guess that didn’t happen. However, it did resurface earlier this year, with a big Game Informer feature, featuring some new (less bald and overweight) shots, but inevitably it has now disappeared off the face of the earth again.

For what it’s worth, Rockstar still claim it’s coming this year, but if it’s really coming out this holiday season, you’d think the marketing train would have already started to move out of the station… or something. I don’t understand metaphors anymore.

Max Payne is currently targeted for release in late 2011 on PS3, 360 and PC, but don’t be surprised if it too slips to 2012.

23: Brink

“Using words such as ‘revolution’ when describing a game is a risky business, but that hasn’t stopped Bethesda when talking about their upcoming First Person Shooter, Brink,” said Dan back in his review.

When I first saw Brink (back at the Eurogamer Expo in 2009), it felt like the future. Part a weighty Killzone 2-esque shooter, part a Mirrors Edge-esque, erm, free-running game. I, and the other people I was sitting in the developer session with were pretty excited. Unfortunately, it took Splash Damage about a year to actually show anything apart from that one snippet of gameplay and I became a little concerned. Combine that with the fact that none of my regular co-op buddies picked the game up, and Brink ended up passing me by.

The feeling on the internet wasn’t massively positive either: Brink sits on Metascores ranging from 72 on PS3 down to 68 on 360, citing a dodgy story and a lack of maps. Dan had a pretty good time with the final game though, blessing it with a 9/10 in the TSA review. “Despite a bit of lag, playing online is a fantastic affair, with the potential to be made even better with the addition of more variety by way of DLC,” he says. “Looking for a deep and meaningful single player story? Then step away. Looking for an intense online shooter with more guns than Texas? Come on in, the water’s fine.”

And if you do pick it up, remember TSA’s Meets are a great place to find people to play with. Brink is out now on PS3, 360 and PC.

22: No More Heroes: Heroes Paradise

A game that starts with you riding in on a motorbike through some doors, and then slashing up two guys has to be awesome, right? No More Heroes: Heroes Paradise does just that. As Travis Touchdown, you must slash and bike your way from the world’s number eleven assassin right up to the top of the pops. We gave the open-world motorcycle slasher epic a 7/10 here on TSA, in line with the mid-70s Metascore.

It’s not all candied donuts and shiny beam katanas though – as Dan says in his review, the process for getting hold of cash – unchanged from the Wii original – is a little arduous: “To earn money to enter the next fight you must perform a set of mini-games such as mowing a lawn, or collecting coconuts. Whilst they are short in length, it becomes an absolute chore when you simply want to continue with what No More Heroes does best.” Bizarrely for a game coming from the Wii to the PS3, there are also noticeable technical issues, including but not limited to screen tearing and slowdown. How odd.

To conclude, dearest Daniel: “No More Heroes: Heroes’ Paradise is a fantastic game, held back by some frustrating design decisions. For every moment spent whooping in delight as you vanquish a foe, you’ll spend two more grimacing as you have to mow someone’s lawn, or try and pry yourself free from a lamppost.”

No More Heroes: Heroes Paradise (a port of the 2007 Wii version) is out now on PS3.

21: Resistance 3

I don’t think anyone would claim Resistance: Fall of Man is the greatest game ever made. Yet you’d think it was, given the amount of abuse Resistance 2 received from series fans when it was released back in 2008. With that in mind, Resistance 3 has a lot to prove.

Insomniac knows this though; back is the weapon wheel, and the developers have again and again apologised for decisions made in the development of R2. James Stevenson, senior community manager at the studio, says that they took a lot of the feedback from players (such as complaints at the removal of campaign-co-op) into consideration when working on number three: “If [fans are] disappointed then it hurts more than some reviewer being pissy about a game and giving it a seven, well, okay, whatever. I can move on from that. I can ignore that. But fans that are genuinely disappointed are a lot harder to cope with.”

This time round, Resistance is releasing well after a Killzone title, instead of a mere few months before it. Hopefully, that means Sony’s priorities won’t be as split as back at R2’s launch, although the recent removal of Resistance 3 from the PlayStation 3DTV bundle raises questions. Hopefully it’s because Sony reckons it’ll sell a lot of the game without including it a bundle, and not because they think it’ll actually make the bundle less appealing to potential buyers than the now MotorStorm-infused replacement. Either way, both the multiplayer beta and single-player demo have gone down well with the public, and the final game looks to fix many of the flaws of the previous two titles.

Resistance 3 is due out on PS3 in the UK on September 9th.

Just twenty left in our countdown catchup – what will you do next week without it? There’s more tomorrow…