When it comes to gorgeous gamers, Playboy Cyber Girl Jo Garcia has the market cornered with her Gamer Next Girl take on everything interactive. The lifelong gaming geek has been spending all of her free time playing Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim lately. Garcia talks about her favorite games of 2011 in this exclusive interview.
Complex: How much time do you spend gaming?
Jo Garcia: In all honesty because all the titles we got hit with all at once, I average six hours a day minimum on gaming. And when I’m not gaming at home, I’m traveling and gaming.
I have this new portable unit from a company called Project Gaems that’s a suitcase that you can stick your Xbox or your PlayStation Slim in and it has an LCD screen so you can plug and play anywhere you go. I’ve had instances a lot lately where I’m stuck in airports and I find myself plugged into a wall playing my Xbox while I’m sitting on a three or four hour delay.
So even when I’m not really traveling and working and doing all that craziness, I’m still gaming.
What was your favorite game of 2011?
Skyrim definitely got my game of the year. I thought it was going to be horrible because they were having problems with it from the beginning because it’s a really, really big game. I wasn’t even in a rush to review it, but once I started the game I was mesmerized. I didn’t answer my phone or anything.
And in the beginning nothing really happens, but you just get caught up in it. And then you want to do different things while you’re in there that you wouldn’t normally do in a regular game that can extend the game hours longer than it needs to be, but you just can’t help it.
I built up characters so much [in Skyrim] that you can shoot a dragon down with one shot.
I built up characters so much that you can shoot a dragon down with one shot. The scale of that game is ridiculous.
Who won your war between Battlefield 3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3?
Battlefield 3 won hands down -- not only on a skill level as far as how much you get from the game, the game is a lot longer, but I just thought the battles were a little more challenging.
Even on the lower levels of difficulty, Battlefield 3 was harder than Call of Duty. I beat Modern Warfare 3 on the hardest level in six hours in just one sitting.
I’m not a huge fan of shooters, but I’ve been playing them a lot more lately and getting more into them. I was just not impressed with Call of Duty at all. Battlefield 3 not only gave you the destructible environments, they pulled the best elements from other shooter games into one huge experience.
What stood out to you with Battlefield 3?
I love that you can fly, you can drive tanks; you can blow up the sides of buildings just like in Just Cause, where you take out a building and wipe out everything in it.
The AI on the characters in Modern Warfare seem to stay within the same program. The AI in Battlefield 3, depending on how you approach it and how you shoot, those guys spawn up in different areas and move around based on what you’re doing to the environment.
So if you take out a wall, they’re not going to hide behind it anymore. You can’t really take out walls in Call of Duty, but if a cover is blown, the character still goes to that spot. Battlefield provides a more “you don’t know what’s going to happen” feel than Call of Duty did.
Call of Duty was just like it always is. I thought this time around they rode on their name with that title. I’m not saying it was horrible, but I thought Battlefield was a lot better.
A lot of people brushed Catherine off because it was a puzzle style game, but I thought that game was amazing.
Are there any games that stand out that were released earlier in 2011 before the Christmas rush of big titles?
I think that Catherine stood out. A lot of people brushed Catherine off because it was a puzzle style game, but I thought that game was amazing. It was a difficult one, and needed to be. It was a different approach to a game. Heavy Rain was the last game that gave me that, “Oh, wow” experience that I wasn’t really expecting.
What else did you like last year?
I thought Assassin’s Creed: Revelations fell under the bus, too. There were a lot of things wrong with the first game in the franchise, but since then they’ve done a great job with the series. Brotherhood was amazing because the online multiplayer was great. Revelations took the best of all the previous titles and made the best game.
It got lost a bit with the big dogs that were released like Gears, Battlefield, and Modern Warfare. The effects in Revelations are great. They overhauled the game and still kept it true to the franchise. That’s a game that definitely deserves a second look.
