It may seem a tad early to start talking about the best games of the decade, but I went in to Starbucks today and they're already serving the damn pumpkin spice latte, which is the official sign for me that this decade is on its way out.
Over the next few months, my plan is to write a new entry about my favorite games of the decade, whenever the heck I feel like it. To kick things off, I'm going to write about my favorite downloadable game.
I'm old enough to remember the heyday of arcades. In the early 1980s, games were all about proving yourself, about seeing how you stack up against the competition, people like JIM and AAA and the fabled ASS. And no one separated the wheat from the chaff quite like Pac-Man.
I'm painting in pretty broad strokes here, but it seemed to me that over time, gaming in general became less about testing your skills and measuring yourself against the competition, and more about experiences that nearly everyone could enjoy and complete, if they put in the time and effort. Oh, you beat A Link to the Past? Well, I beat it better than you did! Oh yeah? Prove it. It's certainly true that the competitive spirit flourished in arcades as fighting games rose to prominence, but I always found this genre intimidating and inaccessible. I preferred the simplicity and anonymity of games like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong. (Interestingly, my appreciation for fighting games has developed quite a bit in recent years, and Street Fighter IV is one of my favorite games of this year. But I digress.)
Throughout the latter part of this decade, though, as online services became more sophisticated and leaderboards more commonplace, there has been a renaissance of straightforward, challenging games where the focus is on scoring more points than everyone else. There have been a slew of excellent titles that fit this bill; the Geometry Wars games would probably be the first choice for most people, and my favorite from this year's offerings is the captivating Shatter. My personal pick for best in category for the 2000s, though, would be Pac-Man: Championship Edition.
Pac-Man: CE takes everything that made Pac-Man one of the most compulsively playable games of all time, and makes it better. It's faster, moving at a speed that just feels right, and it makes the original feel stiff in comparison. The clock is always ticking, creating a new sense of pressure to cram as many points as possible into each moment. The field of play is constantly evolving. The trance-like music is a perfect accompaniment to the zen-like sense of focus one feels when fully engrossed in the action. (Oh, how I love that sense of focus.) And the visuals are stunning; everything is infused with a neon glow that somehow makes the game more reflective of my memories of playing the original in dimly-lit, cacophonous arcades than the original itself.
Of course, it helped immensely that I had a few terrific players to test my skills against. Aaron Thomas, Carrie Gouskos and I engaged in a friendly but very hard-fought battle on the leaderboards, giving me more incentive than I might have otherwise felt to really get good at the game, making victory all the sweeter and defeat all the more crushing. Few experiences I've had with games can match the exhilaration I felt when pulling ahead in the final few seconds, or the sinking feeling when a single slip-up several minutes into a game turned a shot at triumph into a wasted opportunity.
I'm at a respectable 579 on the global leaderboards, and I don't think I have it in me to ever go back and try for better. I lived and breathed this game for a little while. I gave it everything I had. It tested me, and it punished me, and there were times when I hated it, but even when I hated it, I loved it. I can't go back, but I'll never forget the experience.
The high score battle is back, hopefully to stay. There could have been no one better to lead its triumphant return than the Man who helped kick it off in the first place.