The Best of 1UP 2011: Reviews

1UP's long-standing goal to provide the most in-depth and thoughtful reviews on the web was thoroughly tested in 2011 by a number of big releases. This year, gamers were treated to the mature subject matter of Catherine, the seemingly never ending boundaries of Skyrim's open-ended quest system, and a barrage of HD remakes that caused us to question our rose-tinted feelings of nostalgia. Regardless of the challenge, 1UP's reviews held true to that credo, bringing you a steady stream of timely, interesting critiques. Check out our 10 best below.

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  Jurassic Park
  Offers the Interactivity of a DVD Menu Screen

  
  This demonstrates
  that perhaps the biggest fans can be the harshest critics. While there are certainly incidents of a fanboy's positive bias making everything seem rosy no matter what, sometimes your love of something means that what it does wrong just hurts even more. So even
  though Bob Mackey is an avowed fan of developer Telltale Games, the misstep they had with Jurassic Park was big enough that even he had to warn others to pass on it.
  
  


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  Mario Kart 7
  Comfortably Settles For Silver

  
  Given Mario Kart's
  multiplayer focus, we got all cute with our review format and had five staff members tackle the game. Not only did it make for one of our longest reviews of the year, but it earned hugely varied comments from readers.

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  Genre-Defining Tactics Ogre Returns to Define the Art of Remakes, Too

  
  One of the best RPGs
  of 2011 hit the PSP of all platforms? Who knew? Apparently, Jeremy Parish did; his review of Tactics Ogre refers to the game as "the definitive edition of an RPG masterpiece."
  


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  Deus Ex: Human
  Revolution is The Best Stealth Action Game Since Metal Gear Solid

  
  With Deus Ex being
  a game about choice, we figured we'd give readers a choice as well, offering up three different viewpoints from 1UP editors Jeremy Parish, Thierry Nguyen, and Ryan Winterhalter. The biggest difference here didn't come from disagreeing on the game quality,
  though, but rather approaching the game from different perspectives -- while Thierry played balls-out, Jeremy played stealthily.
  

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  The Legend of
  Zelda Skyward Sword Soars, But Struggles With Its Past

  
  After five years without a proper console Zelda game, fans couldn't possibly rein in their anticipation over Skyward Sword. So after a half-decade of waiting and mystery, what did Nintendo give us? A flawed (though still great) game that doesn't quite meet the series' quality standard. 1UP's Jose Otero examines why this latest Zelda isn't quite up to snuff in his thoughtful review.


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  Catherine Reminds Us That Mature Content Can Sometimes Be Sincerely Mature

  
  The build-up leading
  into Catherine signaled that it was clearly a game with adults in mind. In his review, 1UP's Jeremy Parish carefully examines Atlus's puzzle game and celebrates its mature angle.

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  Aliens Infestation
  isn't Perfect, but It's an Essential DS Game Regardless

  
  1UP's Jeremy Parish examines all the reasons why Aliens Infestation is the best video game interpretation of the Alien source material
  yet and an essential purchase for the aging Nintendo DS.
  


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  Skyrim Spans
  16 Square Miles of RPG Excellence

  
  Pehaps the most talked-about game of 2011, Skyrim surprised fans and haters alike with it's revamped quest and character class systems. In their tag-team review, 1UP's Jeremy Parish and Theirry Nguyen discuss the open-ended structure of the latest Elder Scrolls game and how it contributes
  to one of the most engrossing video game experiences of the year. After spending a combined total of 125 hours with Betheda's latest game, the two had plenty to say.

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  Batman: Arkham City
  Reaffirms Itself as The Best Superhero Game

  
  2011 gave us what
  may be the greatest superhero game of all time in Batman: Arkham City. The sentiments expressed in our review were echoed by pretty much every other gamer fortunate enough to experience Rocksteady's masterpiece. A great story, amazing combat, and copious amounts
  of fan-service combined to give us the game we deserve. As 1UP's Thierry Nguyen points out in his slug, it does what a great sequel should by trumping its predecessor in every way imaginable.
  


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  Shogun 2: Total War Makes Amends for Its Predecessor's War Crimes

  
  The
  Total War series fell on tough times a few years ago, and reviewer Tom Chick went into this game bracing himself for another disappointment. Instead, Creative Assembly surprised him and Chick makes the case in this review for what just might be the best RTS
  game this year.

TERA Japan

The negative news for either TERA Korea or TERA Japan never stops coming despite winning the Presidential prize (or Game of the Year Award) at this year's G*Star. TERA Japan has announced that the big scale server merge will commence on January 25th 2012, early next year. How big scale is this? Well, 10 servers merging into 3 says tons for the troubled game. The Japan server is apparently blighted by 3rd party bot programs as well, something which the Korean server is having difficulty to control.

Charra, Caia and Cillian will merge into the one and only PK server, Charra; Arun, Belleek and Selen to form into 1 of the PvE servers, Belleek; finally, Elrinu, Jurase, Mistelle and Balder into the 2nd PvE server, Elrinu.

In order to stay relevant, attract new players and maintain the current crop, some dungeons' cool-down timing will be reduced by half, with drop rates doubled as well. This event will begin today and last till January 18th 2012.

Reported earlier, TERA Japan got off to an awesome start (link), with Open Beta getting a high number of 48, 624 users. a record for publisher Hangame Japan. With emergency servers needed, hopes were sky high for the game hit with problems back in Korea. However, the negative forecasts (link) apparently is coming true in just a few months. The Korean server underwent a massive merge a few months back as well (link).

How Retail Games are Made

Forget iCloud. Do you remember floppy disks?

"When Apple decided to make their 3.5-inch floppies blue, every floppy went to blue. Then when IBM decided to go with shell gray on the 3.5-inch HD floppy, everyone else went to shell gray," recalls a sales manager for a CD/DVD manufacturer whose involvement with video games and computer software dates back to the 1990s. "One year our biggest client bought over 100 million floppy disks. The next year I would have been surprised if they bought 25,000 when they moved to compact disc."

Any game you bring home has the same basic components: a disc, an "Amaray case," and the "case wrap" that displays artwork and text. Some games have a cardboard sleeve that slides over the case, called an "O-ring." And many PC games still come in small cardboard boxes. Over the next three pages in these captions, we've broken down the production process, with images provided by Telltale Games and Coral Graphics. [Note: Emily, the author of this story, worked for Telltale from 2006 to 2009.]

Today he sees the trend repeating, but this time publishers are leaving behind physical media completely: "There used to be an industry need for both DVD and CD and our biggest worry was our competition. Now the biggest worry is technology changing."

He's talking about the rise of digital distribution, and he's right to be worried. With downloadable games on the rise and retail revenues on the decline, the shift toward digital delivery that hit the music industry hard a decade ago is becoming a threat to packaged video games. For now, retail games are still generating more revenue than downloads, but DFC Intelligence recently predicted that this could change by 2013.

As far as former EA executive Bing Gordon is concerned, the move away from packaged games is inevitable. "Physical media's just going away," he said to 1UP earlier this year. "I think we are moving from paper and plastic to digital, and there's a generation that's going to come up and go, 'That paper and plastic just feels wrong. This excess packaging -- it just feels wrong. Having to have used stuff around just feels wrong.'"

It's easy to list the pros of digital distribution: it saves money, it's convenient, and it doesn't leave behind an environmental footprint. If video games follow the music industry's lead and physical media fades into obscurity, is that so bad?

Step 1: Planning: Publishers usually squeeze manufacturing into the final weeks before launch, but they might start planning up to a year in advance. Working backward from the release date, the operations team comes up with a due date to provide final artwork and game files to the manufacturer. The schedule is almost always tight: "We may get a heads-up that it's coming down the road, but for the most part we receive the files to produce proofs about seven days before publishers need us to ship," says Coral Graphics' Lee Ramsey.

What It Costs

What exactly will we lose if packaged games go extinct? Jobs, for starters. Unlike many retail products that are outsourced to China and other countries, in the U.S. video game manufacturing is kept close to home to minimize shipping time and expense. And the same vendor often handles all aspects of manufacturing, from printing and disc replication to assembly and distribution.

"I loved inventory and manufacturing," says Scott Fry, who worked in operations for a game publisher from 1999 through 2006. "It's such an important function of what's going on at a company and a lot of people don't realize that. They don't think about those pieces that need to come together." It seems game companies want it this way, since none of the publishers we reached out to for this article wanted to speak on the record about retail manufacturing.