2013: My Year in Trailers

I have a confession. When it comes to games (and films) I spend almost as much time reading about them as I do playing them. It's all about the anticipation, the wait, the dreams of what could be. I love to get caught up in the hype. As such, I often enjoy a game's trailer more so than I do the actual game. With that in mind, here's my personal top ten of 2013's best trailers. For the most part I've stuck to games that were actually released this year in an attempt to keep things simple. Remember, I'm ranking the trailer, not the game, but if you disagree feel free to get in the comments and argue!

10. Gone Home

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqSbYsUalMQ

How do you make a game about walking around a house and picking things up interesting? I have no idea, but this trailer somehow pulled it off. It manages to invoke a sense of dark mystery (SPOILER: darker than the game really turned out to offer), intrigue and excitement through its shadow filled rooms, offset by its upbeat soundtrack. The trailer also managed to show off its wholly convincing voicework and the attention to detail in its interactive objects (look at that cassette case swing!). It also showed us glimpses of its heavy lacing of nostalgia; meaning that everyone over a certain age walked away thinking one thing: 'a game with labelled VHS tapes of X-Files, like I had when I was younger? I have to buy this!' Sold.

 

9. A Link Between Worlds

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQt0NnKPXOY

I love, LOVE, The Legend of Zelda games. It is quite easily one of my favourite franchises of all time, and while my love affair waned a bit around the Twilight years it never really left. Although I, like many, adored Ocarina of Time, I have always contested that A Link to the Past is my favourite in the series - partly due to the fact that it was the first Zelda game I played and the first console game I ever owned. So what? Well, the A Link Between Worlds' trailer isn't particularly amazing - the low-res graphics and the need to show the game in the context of the dual-screen system, means that 3DS game trailers often suffer - but it's a direct sequel to one of my most loved games and as soon as that rousing theme tune kicked in and I saw levels I knew, faithfully updated, I almost drowned in a wave of nostalgia stronger than anything I've felt in years. So yeah. This baby is on here for purely personal reasons.

 

8. Slender: The Arrival

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSvZHD0TmbE

For many this game never really lived up to the high hopes we placed on it, but for anyone that played the original Slender: The Eight Pages, this monstrosity of a trailer had our mouths watering when it was first released. It showed the original Slender game but now with high-res graphics that actually justified our genuine terror so that it would no longer be embarrassing when we showed it to our friends. Beautiful and varied environs, convincing video camera glitch effects, a horrible brat-monster that's clearly a rip-off of the Hunter from Left4Dead and then... a sudden glimpse of the main man himself. Give me that game! No, wait, don't give me that game. Keep it the hell away from me!!    

 

7. Watch Dogs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WuZ8wuQvw0

The dark stallion of last year's E3. Watch Dogs appeared to come out of nowhere, one minute no one knew of it, the next everyone was talking about it. All thanks to its trailer. And these bad boys still continue to excite. Moody cyberpunk visuals set the tone: beautiful neon-lit, rain-slick city streets. Information tags and interaction prompts pop up on everything, giving an impression of absolute power. The action: sneaking, tailing, slow motion hand-to-hand combat, gunplay, parkour. It's definitely an Ubisoft game. But why is it on this list when Watch Dogs wasn't released this year? BECAUSE IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE!!! Trailers can lead to heartbreak and pain.

 

6 - GTA V

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvoD7ehZPcM

An upbeat tune, fast cuts of chaos and confusion, the three characters we'll get to play and clear evidence that each one is deliciously messed up, violent, confused and unpleasant. Because video games are all about escapism - so who wants to play their own boring self?

(note: how at 0:04 it sounds like 'sulking' has been inserted into the trailer. Methinks there was something a bit ruder there).

 

5 - Call of Duty: Ghosts

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQEbPn36m1c

'And let down of the year goes to...' This intensely moody, live action teaser trailer for Call of Duty: Ghosts set me up for a fall. Set in the bombed out ruins of a housing block, it catered to my love of cosplay: showing numerous men in varied armour and masks. With no gameplay to speak of whatsoever, this was a teaser in the truest sense of the word and it filled me with high hopes that Call of Duty was about to take a turn in a different direction. I had dreams of a CoD game that spanned time periods and cultures. What we eventually got was sadly more of the same - plus a dog. Oh well... people like dogs.

 

4 - Far Cry 3:  Blood Dragon

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zh94nidjpM

AHAHAHAH! Retro 80s spoofery, a cyborg middle finger and bright neon colours, ALL OF THE BRIGHT NEON COLOURS! Oh, and a glimpse of the titular Blood Dragon. Hell yeah.

 

3 - Prison Architect Alpha

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDDzSOS0vzc

So this is one flagrant cheat of a choice - the trailer was clearly released last year and the game hasn't even been published yet (you can get it in alpha though - which is the point of this trailer) BUT it's my article and I'll cheat if I want to! Cheesy voice-overs aside, I love this trailer for the lashings of irreverent sarcasm it has laden over itself; it appears to be taking the mick out of those idiots that buy games in alpha and expect a polished product. 'Enjoy exclusive access to game breaking bugs' we're told  'for example: if you decide you want to help this poor guard... you can't. Because we haven't written that bit yet - it's an alpha.' You can almost hear 'you idiot' tacked on the end of that statement. After thousands of trailers promising great dreams that never came to pass, I'd like to propose a toast: here's to Prison Architect and honesty in trailers. Cheers!

 

2  - BioShock Infinite  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRjNMQZ1qBk

BioShock Infinite's trailer makes it on here for being almost as loopy as Blood Dragon's. A breath of fresh air next to the po-faced likes of Call of Duty and Battlefield; Infinite's trailer showed that this game was going to be a FPS with a difference. It barely even seemed to share common blood with the first two BioShock games - gone were the murky, claustrophobic underwater tubes and hallways of Rapture, replaced instead by wide open vistas, picked out in pastels and wonderful sky blues. This game could almost be mistaken for a Nintendo franchise! That is until the chaos kicks in and the  cartoony colourings give way to lashings of the old ultra-violence: people being torn apart by bullets, crows and some kind of hook thing. After the game was released and the dust settled, opinion on Infinite became polarised but at the time, this trailer had everyone on board.  

 

1 - The Last of Us

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQpdSVF_k_w

Topping my list is this masterpiece of a trailer.

The tone is set with gorgeous but dilapidated post-apocalyptic city scenes. Our protagonist walks on with his slightly dogged, pragmatic pace, followed by the less certain Ellie. We see a few beats of the story - showing off the almost perfect voice-acting - followed by shots of those hideous clicker creatures, that are just zombies but at least look a bit more interesting. The line 'least they're predictable. It's the normal people that scare me' subtly hints that we can look forward to variation in the gameplay and then the action kicks in: violence and gore, heavy impacts and moments that make us sit up straight and hiss with emphatic pain. All backed by that soundtrack: a mixture of mechanical and classical, rousing and depressingly beautiful. In my humble opinion, this is a case where the game lived up to the trailer.

So that's my list: the highs and lows of promises fulfilled and squandered in the face of 2013's best trailers. I know, I know... there's a complete lack of Xbox exclusive trailers! You might want to have a word with me about that... so get in the comments.