Eurogamer's Top 50 Games of 2008: 50-41 Article

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43. Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning

EA / Mythic / PC

Oli Welsh: WAR is its own worst enemy. The amount of fun you're having scales in direct relation to how many other people are doing what you're doing. As players flocked to WAR in their hundreds of thousands, it seemed incredibly dynamic and exciting; as they left in equal numbers - for Lich King, or just exhausted by the game's relentless and shallow focus - it became apparent that Mythic's world hadn't the substance to fill the vacuum they left behind. Still, it's easily the best player-versus-player MMO out there, surprisingly easy to get into, and a great option if you have a little less time to sink than your average massive multiplayer.

Kieron Gillen: While clearly still labouring under the long shadow of World of Warcraft, this is the first game which felt as if it really was a challenger. Not that it was - in fact, not that it could be. MMOs aren't games. MMOs are relationships, and the mass-dynamics of human beings alone will prevent anyone toppling WOW until... well, I think it may just be impossible to topple WOW as long as you're working within the strict boundaries of fantasy role-playing. I suspect even a game that wanders way from the DIKU-MUD tropes wouldn't be able to touch WOW as long as it stuck to a realm of orcs and goblins. And it saddens me a bit that when I start writing about Warhammer, I'm analysing why it hasn't sold fifteen million copies or whatever. I'll keep it simple - if you were going to start playing a fantasy RPG tomorrow, the first twenty levels of WAR walk all over the first twenty levels of WOW to an embarrassing degree (with an exception for the genuinely lovely Drenai starting area), and the people who argue the contrary haven't played that opening section for years. It's a brutal game and makes a few small-yet-significant steps forward in the genre. And frankly, I'd play it over WOW just because you don't have to sit down and eat some food to heal at a decent rate.

Alec Meer: A fortnight of love becomes a month of mild tedium. You've gotten the PvP more than right, Mythic - now please work on making the world itself more exciting and characterful. Fighting only for fighting's sake has a limited shelf life.

Rob Fahey: This is going to provoke howls of outrage, but it was never going to be any other way. MMORPGs suffer in lists like this anyway, because so few of us have time to devote to them - and while WAR is a better effort than most, we all know who ruled MMOs in 2008 (just like 2007, 2006 and 2005).

42. N+

Metanet Software / Xbox Live Arcade

Kristan Reed: More games should feature in the Top 50 that look like they were made on a 16k Spectrum.

Kieron Gillen: Actually, if you do want to talk about the biases of the EG writers, you're going to have to look away from the console wars - which is, as always, just people in Eastern Europe in 1939 debating about whether it's best if they're going to be ruled by Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia - and look towards the PC. N came out in 2005, people, and was just as good then. God, I'm in an argumentative, disagreeable, trollish mood today.

Dan Whitehead: A triumph of function over form, and a game I still return to. That it didn't make my own top ten is more to do with the flurry of superlative software at the end of the year than any specific flaws in this little gem. Excellent DLC as well.

Tom Bramwell: This fizzled out for me. I loved it for an hour, then that was it. I think the Challenge Rooms in Bionic Commando Rearmed, which got much more play, delivered better on what I wanted, and thought I was getting, when I started out with this.

41. Mario Kart Wii

Nintendo / Wii

Oli Welsh: This might end up played by more people than any other Mario Kart, and you know what? That's not the end of the world. It doesn't toe the line between chaos and refinement with anything like the grace of Mario Kart DS (or even 64), but it's still exactly the kind of solidly-engineered, mechanically intricate, idiot-proof entertainment for absolutely everybody that Nintendo is said not to make any more.

Tom Bramwell: I think that's true, but I think this also captures Nintendo's shifting focus - whether conscious or not - as well as anything on the Wii or DS. I used to play Mario Kart, including the DS one, because being good at it - wielding it with authority - mattered to me, and other people, like my flatmate's girlfriend, had their own reasons that were just as valid. Now they're loving this, and I'm not.

John Walker: In last year's Top 50 there were a lot of people talking about how only Nintendo seems to know how to make games for the Wii. This was mostly included in people's ludicrous hyperbole for the flawed Super Mario Galaxy (aha! I get to say it and no one will come back!). It's odd how Mario Kart on the Wii demonstrates how sometimes Nintendo can't. Did anyone not immediately reject the wheel controls for sensible buttons and a joystick after their first race? Fantastic game, obviously, but a Wii-as-a-GameCube game.

Rob Fahey: I don't understand what happened to MK Wii. Everyone thought it was great for a week, and then everyone stopped playing. Previous MK games (even the DS one) were party-gaming staples for years, so why was this one such a flash in the pan (and practically forgotten by the end of year)?

Simon Parkin: The width of the tracks is not so much liberating as disorientating. Now you must plot racing lines within racing lines and as the pack scatters the experience is robbed of some of its traditional grasping competitiveness. That said, there's much to love, from the way that, when organising an online race, your competitors' Miis pop up from their real world locations on a globe, to the glorious ghost data challenges that you can send to bait your friends. But Mario Kart has always been a game that pits skill against luck, the premeditated against the random and in Mario Kart Wii fate wins too often over ability.