Why Jamestown? Because it's a delightfully playful little game, a taut and spicy cascade of bolts and lights that comes together with a jazzy spring in its step, topped off with a cheeky flourish that, to me, suggests complete and total understanding of its genre. Because it's undoubtedly better than 95 per cent of the junk you've played this year, and because the entire cretinous world simply never gave it a chance.
It's a shmup, but don't let that immediately put you off - Philadelphian developer Final Form Games' snappy appropriation of one of Japan's most technically demanding genres has been designed to be inclusive rather than exclusive. Jamestown is many things, but most importantly it is a helpful and charming guide to a genre that modern gaming has all but forgotten.
There's plenty of lovely little indie shmups on the PC, such as Touhou, Hellsinker, and Cho Ren Sha 68k, but these are always made by experts for freakishly talented wizards with six hands and twenty eyes - your average player (such as myself) doesn't stand a bloody chance with any of them. Jamestown, on the other hand, might not pose a significant challenge to the real genre elite, but it's a lovely little link in the chain - a detailed attempt at creating a stomping ground for genre beginners, and guiding them into the more challenging arenas down the line. This is a game designed to complement rather than compete and, well, that's just an absolutely lovely thing to see in this industry.
And, well, it's just so much fun to play. Take the gleefully nonsensical context, which plops you on British colonial Mars in the 17th century and has you fight a dastardly Martian/Spanish coalition. Or just take a glance at the delightful pixel graphics - itself a dying art form, sadly - which pop off the screen with an attention to detail I haven't seen since SNK's glory days. Thick black lines containing vibrant pillows of colour bounce around with loving detail, and animated backgrounds are stacked full of charming details as enemy vessels fill the foreground with raindrops of blue and purple bullets.
I fail to see how anybody with even half an ounce of sense wedged in their indubitably festering and guff-addled grey matter would fail to enjoy this. It even displays its level titles in the form of a frontispiece and, well, if that doesn't put a smile on your face than you probably never studied any classic literature.
Many people have said to me that 2011 has been a great year for gaming and, I'm sorry, but I just don't buy it. Our AAA releases - the bread and butter of VideoGamer.com - are functional but wearyingly familiar, and while I think it would be unfair to punish them for this it's certainly dispiriting to see so little innovation in a medium that's got so much left to give.
So, yes, we've seen some bloody good games this year, but when it comes to that intangible spark that makes a game feel, and pardon my usage of such trite phraseology, fresh, I think we've seen surprisingly little - even my personal darling for Game of the Year, Portal 2, is built on a solid foundation of pre-existing mechanics.
Perhaps that homogenous weariness is felt more by me than you, as my entire career is spent ingesting and pondering these mainstream games, and perhaps you'll have no sympathy for somebody who very emphatically enjoys playing Call of Duty every single year - I'm sure many of you would argue that I am endemic of the very problem and therefore a massive hypocrite - but what I really want to see is our developers being more hazardous, more daring, more surprising and, most importantly, more fun.
What I want is to see more confident, delicate, and inspiring games. Games like Jamestown.
To me, then, Jamestown stands for something more than its humble contents - it's a niche game made by people who clearly love the form they're working with. Alongside games like Minecraft, Terraria and Spacechem, it's a beacon for games that tickle our imagination and show us things games can do that most major publishers couldn't give a toss about. Shmups are hardly the most popular genre in the world, so while Jamestown might not be the game that many of you want it's a game I think we all bloody need.
