Gun Metal Gaming: A 2009 Retrospective: Prologue

Hello, everyone, Wolfman here. Happy New Year! I’d ask you to hold on as I make a roundabout explanation for my latest one-year project.

At the end of 2019, just over four years ago, I wrote an article about my game of each year of the 2010s (a list that became outdated within a few months after I played Fire Emblem: Three Houses, but that’s not the point). Looking at them, and the rest of each year’s top five, was a way for me to explore the themes of the decade and my own relationship with them as a gamer and critic. After all, I was there for so many of the hype cycles, the controversies, the ways our industry has changed.

Some point afterwards, and for the rest of those four years, I began thinking every so often about how that list might look for other years or decades. I could do a list of favorites from this era, but I regularly thought back to the 2000s, the time when I really started playing games extensively. But those top fives would be a lot harder, and not just because I only bought a PS2 after the PS3 had come out and have less familiarity with its catalog. The Aughts were fascinating and compelling and rough, all in equal measure—especially their back half. That was when we moved into high definition, the Wii’s revolution, the proliferation of indies and mobile games, and DLC. In some respects, the Seventh Console Generation of gaming was the last time where the jump in technology felt truly, deeply epochal.

Image: Activision. The unstoppable Call of Duty became emblematic of all to which the mainstream gaming industry aspired: cinematic flair, hyper-realistic graphics, multiplayer, and a childish take on geopolitics.

It was also often terrible. Between the fetishization of open worlds, the dominance of jingoistic military shooters, the nickel and diming from microtransactions, and the parade of grumpy antiheroes, times were dark and ugly. Studios were regularly shuttered thanks to the ballooning costs of HD development, slowly setting up the current status quo of constant layoffs and downsizing. Journalists and sites started feeling the heat of a contracting online news space. While Nintendo had a few bangers amidst what was then their unparalleled commercial success, the dominating Wii became something of a creative albatross. Dour, gun metal gray action was the norm, as was ripping off Resident Evil 4 without any of the brilliance or charm. Your protagonists were mostly grizzled, “average,” vaguely unkempt white guys with the same motivations and angry disposition, often even voiced by the same dude. And the potential of downloadable content was marred with exploitative business practices, all of which have slowly mutated into the problems we have today. But looking at these years, one stands out as particularly emblematic: 2009.

2006 was a rough start, but an exciting one that also concluded the Sixth Generation. 2007 had a laundry list of classics. 2008 was notorious for many gigantic blockbusters that got more negative reappraisals, but I still think highly of plenty of them. 2010 saw the real beginning of a serious indie market. 2011 gave us Dark Souls and the formal release of Minecraft (though that one did initially release in ‘09). 2012 had several major games grappling with the culture of the era. And 2013 finally took us into the Eighth Generation with dramatic sequels and new IPs.

Within this, 2009’s “role” in the generation feels somewhat odd and unclear. It’s not as though it’s without anything important, mind. It has Batman and Uncharted 2 and Bayonetta; it might have more good games than ‘06 or ‘08. But culturally speaking, the last year of the decade was confused and insecure in a way that mimicked the generation itself. It was situated between several blockbusters that all loomed large. While licensed shovelware continued to exist for a few years, this had its last real hurrah with stupid (and oddly high profile) Watchmen and Saw games. Only a few releases really entered the video game canon. And while the DS did get some stuff, it was the time where the Wii’s creative momentum started to sputter out. The glorious Super Mario Galaxy 2 was right around the corner, but this was a year where Nintendo’s holiday hit, its crowning jewel, was the deflating New Super Mario Bros. Wii (and I’d put Spirit Tracks from that year as one of The Legend of Zelda’s weakest entries). I was mostly a Nintendo player until 2010, so I really wasn’t playing a lot, but even after getting a 360 I didn’t really dive much into the previous year.

Image: Super Mario Wiki. The creep of excess even infiltrated games like Bowser’s Inside Story, which added an exhausting “kaiju” mini-game to the procedings.

If I was to make a Top Five now, I could. Bayonetta would be at the top, and the other four would be Batman: Arkham Asylum, Pokémon HeartGold, Professor Layton & the Last Specter, and Resident Evil 5. And I like all those games a lot, but that’s kind of a depressing list, right? I bounced off the Batman games hard thanks to Arkham City, Last Specter’s weird optional RPG side thing kind of presaged the series’ sudden problems, HeartGold’s still “just” a remake (if an excellent one) in what was already a very saturated Pokémon market, and the very digestible RE5 shouldn’t be in the top tier of anything. But nothing else I played from that year reaches even that level.

What does all this mean? Well, my personal unfamiliarity with 2009 and my disrespect for its place in history forms the premise of this new series: a year-long retrospective. At or near the end of each month, I’m going to review one game from 2009. It’ll be a game I’ve never played—or, at least, not for more than a half hour a decade ago. That means no Angry Birds, no Assassin’s Creed II, no Bowser’s Inside Story, no terrible Bionic Commando reboot. I’m also restricting myself to things I can easily and legally access; in practice, I’ll be mostly playing backwards-compatible Xbox 360 games I can get cheaply or already own, but it also means I’m not going to review the exciting and prohibitively expensive Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, a Wii cult classic that might have ended up being my favorite game of 2009 had I the foresight to buy it back then. Alas. Anyway, here are my twelve subjects:

Dragon Age: Origins, Bioware’s side series to Mass Effect with its own complicated history.
Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, the small-scale counterpart to GTA4, the last top-down Grand Theft Auto, and the only one made specifically for Nintendo systems.
Plants vs. Zombies, one of the truly dominating mobile titles from the year where smartphones became a dominanting player in the industry.
Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard, one of the era’s notorious failed new properties, an example of stunt casting in an era known for it, and a look at contemporary video game comedy.
The Saboteur, a historical open world crime game with a well respected art style and sad history.
Wii Sports Resort, Nintendo’s biggest game of the year and their attempt at one-upping their indefatigable Wii Sports.
Borderlands, possibly the single most important gaming IP to come out of 2009.
Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X, one of the latter day Tom Clancy games and the cheapest licensed game I could consider “important.” Gotta have some Ubisoft here, right?
50 Cent: Blood on the Sand, a vacuous vanity project that somehow became a cult classic.
Shadow Complex, Champion of the XBLA, vanguard of the Metroidvania’s resurgence.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, the game that arguably represents 2009 best.
Prototype, the game that arguably represents 2009 best aesthetically.

The selection I’ve drawn up isn’t meant to cover the most important or artistically valid games. Several were included precisely because they are not good. But to me, they all fully reference the aesthetics and attitudes and developments of 2009 as a challenged, challenging year in gaming. There are dull military shooters, an ambitious role-playing classic, bloated sandboxes, a couple popular indies, a potentially terrible Will Arnett performance, at least one era-defining triumph, and plenty of fun diversions. If nothing else, I’m excited to try each one. I cut ‘Splosion Man precisely because its Portal-aping humor didn’t interest me. Though admittedly, I also cut the Saw game because I was never going to spend fifty dollars on a Saw game. I have some self-respect (others I passed over for various reasons include F.E.A.R. 2, Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood, A Boy and His Blob, and Vin Diesel’s Wheelman. I stand by my picks).

Personally, this is fun for me. It’s a new way to explore a time-limited series, an evolution on things “Dispatch from the Dive” and “Pikachu in Pictures” each did, and being a monthly project certainly makes it less overbearing than if it were a weekly one. I hope we both enjoy it as much as I’m hoping.

Next game: Dragon Age: Origins.