One of the things that I had set out to do during my new year's weekend off was to complete Demon's Souls, a PS3 exclusive for which I have been singing praises to anyone who will listen. I accomplished that goal, and because it's the kind of game it is, I found myself playing an hour or so into New Game+, the much harder "second quest" playthrough that Demon's Souls dumps you into after you're done (think The Legend of Zelda for NES).

Fast-forward to the present. In the process for getting my blog back up and running, I went to Gamespot to show Jaana what I was thinking about for my site header to replace my placeholder. If you haven't seen it, it's the Flash-based frontpage that runs a brief slideshow based on recent/featured articles. The content management system that is the framework for my site is very extensible and I was pretty sure I could find something to accomplish this goal.

Before I closed my Gamespot tab, I saw something that caught my eye. The Game of the Year banner for 2009 featured a lot of the characters from various games one might have expected to see - The Joker (from Batman: Arkham Asylum), Ezio (from Assassin's Creed II), Nathan Drake (Uncharted 2: Among Thieves), and some others. To my surprise, I also saw a standard set of fluted armor there and thought "Wow, Demon's Souls was in the running for game of the year? That's nice of Gamespot to throw them a bone like that when surely one of those other AAA games with massive marketing coverage won."

I watched their GOTY announcement video and was floored.

I couldn't believe that a major commercial game review site gave a fairly unknown and fairly unmarketable game with fewer than 500,000 units sold globally the distinctive title of Game of the Year (in searching for these figures I'm glad to see that the unfortunately-named VGChartz, who collects this information, rated Demon's Souls 'Best PlayStation 3 RPG' and 'Best Game Noone [sic] Played' for 2009). Almost every other game it was up against cleared 2M units on the PS3 alone, and several were multiplatform titles.
This, however, is all the evidence you need to see:



These guys are professional video game reviewers. They have made video games their job and to that end are as jaded as game players come. They've seen every little trick and trend and gameplay gimmick a thousand times over, and it's pretty likely that they weren't looking forward to having to play Just Another Swords Game. Look at them now. They're gushing about this game.

To make sure I wasn't just confusing legitimate interest with some dudes acting because they were the least likely to screw it up on video, I watched the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 video review, by whoosh guy above. I found this was a fitting exercise because most places chose either MW2 or Uncharted 2 as Game of the Year. Make of it what you will, but it seemed to me that the difference between the trailers was more like "I can see how this game would be considered enjoyable" compared to "I enjoyed this game".

Which brings me to a point more relevant to you. For those of us who grew up in the 80's and 90's, video games were something to get excited about year after year. The home videogame industry was maturing into a fiercely competitive subculture and we all reaped the benefit of these labors of love. We have all had specific games that we look back upon fondly and, in most cases, wish to recapture some of that feeling anew. Perhaps someone reading this can't relate specifically to this phenomenon in video games, but all forms of entertainment have been subjected to the ongoing curse of popularity. Just as in the movie industry, once budgets increase and sales figures become paramount, creativity and depth are stifled to make way for sequel after sequel of the same tired old formulas because they inexplicably move units. Those of us fond of the entertainment form look on in dismay, too busy with our adult lives to do anything but sense the disappointment with how it all turned out and wonder to ourselves whether or not we are simply too old for the entire medium. In playing Demon's Souls, I felt some of this malaise melt away. In the past few months I've gradually been slipping in some time to play Demon's Souls, I have come to consider the game a spark - proof that it is still possible to make a game to get excited about. I felt vindicated watching the GOTY announcement video and witnessing the reviewers express the same emotion that I felt, which can best be described as relief.

The only thing I will say further about the game itself is that you should open your mind and try it out if you can. For some of you, it will not be your cup of tea. It is brutal, difficult, and unforgiving, the way video games used to be. I don't promise that it is all things to all people, but what it shows me and what Gamespot's review shows me is that I am not alone and there are people out there that liked things better before video games targeted the lowest common denominator (I accuse you, John Madden). Maybe there's hope for the future of video games after all.