Dear Wired Magazine,

I would love it if you were to stop creating asinine lists for their own sake. I’m just going to start with then “10 Most Disappointing Games of 2008” gem you dropped on December 12^th. Maybe we can branch out and discuss some others later on.

What really gets me about this latest list, Wired, is that six of the ten games on it are brand new IPs. Did you guys realize that when you were writing it? That you’ve gone out of your way to compile a list that nay-says new ideas? I’m sure you’ve gotten plenty of hate mail about that already though, so I won’t start.

What I want to look at here is the number of games you completely sidestepped that were truly disappointing. By that I mean games, and developers, that really didn’t accomplish anything with their new titles. Teams that played it safe and made exactly what we were expecting. Do you not find that disappointing? Or do you crave the predictability that populates all your “Ten Best” lists of games for 2008? Let’s have a look.

I noticed that both Gears of War 2 and Fable 2 made your top ten best 360 games of ’08. Really? Two of the most derivative games released this year and that’s your best? That’s not to say that Epic didn’t get it right the first time around, and that the Gears formula isn’t a solid one; but that’s all it is: a formula. We all knew, going in, what was going to happen, that there would be no end of locust, no end of the manly quips from Marcus and co. and that there would be no real ending to the game because it was the second chapter in a trilogy. There was maybe, maybe, one fresh moment in that whole game, and it wasn’t even playable.

And Fable 2? It’s another case of the money-safe copy-paste business doctrine. You skewer games like Dead Space and Mirror’s Edge for not ascending the golden peaks of your overly-imaginative expectations, but when a game reproduces itself, seemingly asexually, and slaps a “2” on the end of its name you call it a top game of the year. What?

If you’re going to take the time to list this stuff, negative things like disappointing games, why not call out some developers that have either been ignoring their fanbase, or that have burrowed so far into their niche that can no longer remember what an original game looks like?

I think I’ll try my hand at this thing. This is what I think a “Disappointing games of 2008” list looks like:

Rock Band 2: I love you, Harmonix, but this glorified track pack, released just in time to defer a few sales away from Guitar Hero World Tour, was never worth sixty dollars. Good job on the new peripherals though, I guess.

Guitar Hero World Tour: This game was a year behind the first Rock Band in almost every way. It’s as though Neversoft wasn’t allowed to play the competition’s game to get a good idea of how to copy it. They just imagined what the game was like based off of what all their friends who were playing it said about it. They got it so wrong Harmonix actually got away with RB2, because it least it wasn’t a step backwards.

Call of Duty: World at War: I find it unbelievable that no major publication has called this game out. This premise, this gameplay, this entire franchise, was old news in 2006. We’re almost into 2009 and Activision has actually gone back in time to deliver us more WW2 games we never wanted. This, like Guitar Hero (which Activision also owns), has taken a giant step backwards from its last iteration. Everything about this game is disappointing, because it’s just too predictable and so, so safe from a development standpoint. It’s got low cost because it recycles most of its resources from Call of Duty 4, no thought needed to be put into the story, because we all know how WW2 ends (especially when it’s told from the Allied side), and finally, the game has a built in consumer base. Everyone who only buys one shooter game a year is just going to buy the new version of the one they bought last year. Congratulations Activision, you’ve successfully tricked your customers. Again.

Sonic Unleashed: This game wasn’t disappointing for the reasons you’d think. It wasn’t because being a were-hog was dumb. It wasn’t because Sega almost had it this time. It was just because it got made in the first place. It’s amazing that Sonic keeps coming back for more punishment. It’s clear that gamers don’t want him anymore. Not the way Sega seems intent on presenting him (too-cool-for-school 80’s inspired teenager with too many “anthropomorphic neon friends”[Ben Crawshaw]). And that really is what’s mind-boggling about the Sonic franchise. The fans have told Sega, in no uncertain terms, what they want from a Sonic game. They want to go fast, and to go fast in 2D. The fans are actually asking Sega to produce a very simple game and have promised to buy it up in droves if they ever do make it. But, for whatever reason, Sega has flat-out refused to do this. They’ve been refusing for almost ten years. If they want to starve themselves out, I think it’s time we let them. We don’t need to see Sonic get lashed any further.

Gears of War 2: I liked Gears 2, I did. But, again, it was so safe and cookie-cutter that it really has no place calling itself one of the best games of 2008. Maybe one of the best games of 2006 but, oh yeah, that’s when the original Gears was released. Whoops.

Horde mode was cool, but I’m willing to bet it took all of a week to produce, test and certify. It was a tack-on-addition that turned out to be a lot of fun in its simplicity, not an award-winning effort.

Fable 2: Same gameplay, same “expressions” with no real interactions, same Molyneux super-hype. Sorry friends, good vs. evil just doesn’t cut it as far as an “immersive, nuanced canvas”(Earnest Cavalli, Wired) goes. Morality has grey areas, Fable does not. The dog and the crumb trail were neat ideas, but between Dogmeat and Isaac Clarke’s onboard nav-computer I think you’ve been beat.

Prince of Persia on the Nintendo DS

I like it. I don’t know what these guys are talking about. So long as I can keep Prince wall-running and somersaulting at a respectable flow, I’m good. And I can, so I am. An option for D-pad controls in tandem with the touch screen might have been nice, but the touch controls work more than well enough.

The game is cool for what it is. I don’t see what there is to 6.8 about (yes, I just turned a review score into a verb). It plays like classic prince. Not Sands of Time. The original original. The combat may be a bit easy, but we’re all here for the sweet Jackie Chan wall jumps and avoiding spike pits, aren’t we?

Oh, and Matt? You may want to think about sprinkling a bit of objectivity into your reviews now and then. You “want[ing] to punch this version of Prince in the face” because of the art style doesn’t tell anyone if this game is worth their money. It might tell them you’re overly judgmental when it comes to small details and that you might award games lower scores than they probably deserve, but hey—maybe that’s what you’re going for.

Why is the new Prince of Persia so bad, yet still so much fun?

It really, really has been bothering me. I picked up PoP for the 360 the day it came out, set aside everything else I was playing at the time (sorry, Fallout, Dead Space, etc.) and dug into the Prince’s latest endeavour.

It was good, I guess. It felt different, but enough like last generation’s trilogy that I was happy to play it. But something was off. It wasn’t quite, and still quite isn’t, a game in the purest sense.

Now I’ll be the first to defend casual games and gaming, not because I particularly care for it, but because I think that the argument that casual games are ruining the market it moot. It’s happening: games as a medium are changing, get over it.

But here, in Ubisoft Montreal's very loose approximation of Persia, magic and alchemy and all, it doesn’t feel like I’m really playing much of anything. The new Prince is, more of than I would like to admit, a glorified, ten-hour quick-time event. And on top of that, it’s not even a very well-executed one.

Not the game as a whole, just the crummy your-timing-better-be-perfect sequences. Tell me, Ubisoft, why you would design a world that is so simple to use, but then make the rules of play inconsistent? Why is it that the B button (extend your run) and the Y button (get help from your companion, Elika) are openly encouraged to be mashed by the player to ensure success, while pressing the A button more than once in almost any scenario results in Prince taking a huge-goddamn-leap into open space?

Let me explain: there are colored plates throughout the world that allow Elika to use her powers to get Prince somewhere he couldn’t get on his own. To use them, you just press Y while Prince is on one. If, however, the plate happens to be on a wall, which is not uncommon, you have to press the Y button to use the plate before Prince falls to his death. The game doesn’t mind if you mash Y long before or long after using the plate—it won’t mess anything up. This applies to the use of the B button too, to grab rings and other things in the world that will help Prince get around. Mash the button and you’ll make sure Prince uses it. No special timing required.

Here’s the rub. The A button? You better not dick around. Let’s say you’re pressing the A button to get Prince to run up a wall, at the top of which he will grab the ledge. You better not be accustomed, from every other scenario in the game, to mashing buttons because if you were to press A, say, twice in this situation, it would lead to Prince running up the wall as normal, waiting to end of his animation, and then leaping backwards off of that wall into whatever oblivion you just avoided earlier. Why do A button commands queue while no other ones do?

While I’m griping about those plates, I have another big question. What is the deal with those goddamn plates? They just dilute the gameplay in every way. If they’re not sucking the fun out of the acrobatics (you know, the point of PoP) by flying you to the top of a huge and would-have-been-fun-to-scale-tower, they’re frustrating the living crap out of you by making you do these weird, Sonic-the-Hedgehog-like running sections. And they’re long. And if you bump into anything while running forward at an uncontrolled speed you go right back to the start. Oh, and Prince can’t move left and right too fast while in this running mode, so you better have a good memory for trial and error. Why would you use these, Ubisoft? Elika’s “powers” (flight, slingshotting, super-wall-running) are supposed to help Prince, and they do in a real sense, but they don’t help the game. They get him somewhere minus all the fun of figuring out how to get there yourself.

I do have praise for it though, really. The story-telling is marvellous. Maybe not the story itself, but the manner in which it’s told is quite ingenious. Ninety percent of PoP’s story is told through conversations with your partner Elika. What’s beautiful about this is that you can choose to never talk to her. If you’re the action-oriented gamer with no care for the motives behind your character’s actions, you’re free to be that player. If you’re like me, and you lap up any tiny droplet of story, you have hundreds of story and character enhancing dialogues to look forward to. It caters so well to two completely opposing types of players. Way to be, Ubisoft.

Oh yeah, the game is beautiful too, but you can look at some screens instead of reading about that.

In the end though, I’m just left a bit confused. On paper, I really don’t like this game. In play, it’s totally got me by the nose. I probably won’t play anything else until it’s done. It's still Prince.