(Gamespot mirror)

What game blog "would be complete without some sort of arbitrary, stupid awards show?" (Thanks, @JimSterling!) I played and finished more video games this year than ever before, and as a result for some games I pretty much just put a number next to them because they needed to be ranked from 10 to 1 (one self-imposed rule I've yet to break. Well, sort of.) This is an amazing crop of games, probably the absolute best I've ever played in a one-year span, and I need to remind my future self that the numbers that appear next to each game really aren't extremely reflective of how awesome each game is: we're talking the difference between #1 and #10 on Gamerankings.com. I mean, is the PS2 version of Resident Evil 4 really .02% better than the Gamecube version? Is Uncharted 2 .11% better than Metroid Prime? GTA IV .07% better than Soul Calibur? That's the razor-thin margin I'm talking about here.

Honourable mentions

For better or for worse, I never got around to even playing either God of War III or Final Fantasy XIII (last year's HMs) again, so they don't make an appearance this year. However, with FF XIII-2 coming at the end of January and a slight rumour that GoW IV could emerge this year, I may finally have an impetus to play one or both of them.

All of iOS gaming




I hope to give this subject a further personal in-depth look in another entry later on, but let me say for the time being that being able to download and carry dozens (and potentially hundreds, if my iPhone wasn't a mere 16 GB) of games in my pocket makes my head spin. For all of the POS "games" out there that are merely slapdash stdent projects or screenshots of real games with tinny music playing over them, there are truly innovative and fun games available out there. The no-button interface makes transferring and porting existing types of games difficult, but certain developers have risen to the challenge. Developers like Rovio Mobile, creators of...

Angry Birds




I wanted to put it in my numbered list, but it just doesn't fit in with everything else I wanted to squeeze in. Technically, this game's two years old and its gameplay's extraordinarily shallow, but the charm shines through in spades enough for me to have six versions of it on my iPhone (regular, Seasons and Rio, plus their demo versions because I'm a sucker for Game Center achievements and leaderboards). Woohoohoohoohoo!

Alright, here we go.

T-Prime's Top 10 for 2011

10) Catherine



I make a promise to myself right now to finish this game very soon because it is so very much more than Boxxle with tits. I had the ending spoiled for me accidentally by someone who didn't know I hadn't finished it so it's sitting on my shelf half-finished, but even without knowing any of the twists Catherine is still a game very much worth playing. The core puzzle gameplay is challenging even on the lowest difficulty, but much like Bayonetta last year its insanity just made me want to keep playing it even more. The story feels very much like an anime I feel I've seen but can't quite remember actually seeing, and iffy gender politics issues aside it feels incredibly fresh to play a game that is about on ongoing relationship and what thinking about the future of said relationship actually does to a person. Of course all characters fit into sterotypes: Vincent is a whiny, spineless manchild, Katherine acts more like she wants to be his mother than his wife, and Catherine is the ditzy blonde who may or may not have something lurking beneath the surface. As just a supernatural romance anime Catherine would've work; a viewer wouldn't feel connected to Vincent at all and just want to punch him every time he opens his mouth. However, by adding in a fiendish puzzle game and a moral choice system the player can steer Vincent to what they believe is the correct path and it becomes great because of that. I just wish I also didn't know that there are eight (8!!) potential endings because every moral choice feels scary to make, even if it's the one I know I'd make in real life, because then Vincent would cock the whole thing up in a following cutscene.

9) Crysis 2



I've never been a PC gamer and have never really given a damn about Crytek and all of their tech tricks. I ended up playing Crysis 2 almost purely by accident when I asked to borrow it from a friend and he only gave me a few days to play it. Filled with the intent to finish it, I dove into Crysis 2 and, without truly meaning to, I let it suck me in. A mere ten minutes into the game, your player character "Alcatraz" has nearly been killed and is given the high-tech nanosuit that will keep him alive, let him fight on and also lets him turn invisible. The suit is given to you by a marine named "Prophet" who I have to assume was in Crysis 1 (which I've yet to play; look for it possibly showing up on my list next year). I spent the next ten minutes in the game slowly walking around the starting area, but not because I was admiring the jaw-dropping visuals. No, the visuals were so good that I completely forgot about them and instead got wrapped up in the fiction. A deadly virus has accompanied an alien invasion of New York City, and the "real" starting area after acquiring the suit is a warehouse made up of several rooms, each one filled to the brim with massive cages of what must be thousands, or maybe tens of thousands dead bodies, each a victim of the "Manhattan Virus." From there the game is a standard FPS with a few tricks up its sleeve, and while I've never been the biggest FPS fan Crysis 2 sets the stage so well and looks so gorgeous that I'd be utterly insane to not include it here this year.

8) Assassin's Creed Brotherhood/Revelations



I'm lumping Brotherhood and Revelations together because they are essentially the same game with varying coats of paint. Whether Ezio is trying to make the Borgia family pay for their crimes in Rome or searching for lost clues Altair left behind in Constantinople, the two Assassin's Creed II sequels have been dripping with high production value, excellent and fun gameplay, amazing size, scope & breadth and more than a handful of sleepless nights. The reason I rank them so low is that they are the same damn game as Assassin's Creed II. Ok, in Brotherhood Ezio grows a beard, and in Revelations he gets a grey cloak and learns how to use bombs, but I've seen them before. Assassin's Creed II was such a joy to play, yet its two unnumbered sequels have grinded my enthusiasm fairly badly. I truly feel like that shouldn't be a problem, yet I also feel like it is AC's biggest problem: taken by themselves Brotherhood and Revelations are absolute hallmarks of excellent game design, the gameplay freedom is unbelievable, the characters are well-rounded and likeable and the size of either one of them is enough to last for some time, even if you never touch what I feel is a very fun and unorthodox mutiplayer. Yet much like I felt about Guitar Hero but its end, Assassin's Creed really needs to blow me away next time or it needs to pause.

7) inFamous 2



inFamous 2 is a hard game to pin down. On one hand it does exactly what it's supposed to do: continue Cole McGrath's story of facing "The Beast" and do so with electric powers while battling to either save or destroy the entire world. It's everything it should be but saying it's a "by-the-numbers" is far too harsh. The addition of other characters with powers is a nice touch, as is the ability to combine their powers with Cole's depending on your moral path. Certain powers are changed, others are added, and unlike last time the good path gets the better powers. We also (finally) get an in-world explanation for why Cole can do what he does, and Cole and Zeke's relationship goes beyond the boundaries of the generic, wacky sitcom-like friendship that inFamous 1 made me think they have. I played through both the good and evil paths in quick succession, and the Infamous ending made me feel so icky and wrong that I immediately followed it up with reloading my good path and finished the game as a Hero again. Whichever path you take inFamous 2 ends Cole McGrath's story,  and both endings felt also reminiscent of Metal Gear Solid 3's ending: despite the horrible thing that Cole has to do, the game forces you to make him do and so that you will fully feel its weight. And inFamous 2 is weighty indeed.

6) Dead Space 2



I gave serious thought to giving Dead Space 2 the #1 spot this year. I didn't play the original Dead Space until 2009, so if I'd done awards in 2008 DS definitely would've been my GOTY that year. As it stands, Dead Space 2 was the perfect way to kick-start 2011. The first time you get to take control of Isaac Clarke you have to escape from a mental ward while Necromorphs are bursting out everywhere, and the "crazy man who was right all along" setup makes the story's progression satisfying. Giving Isaac a voice was a good idea on Visceral's part, as was making it obvious from the start that his mental state is still fragile.

Like with inFamous 2, saying Dead Space 2 is "by-the-numbers" is too much, but it did fulfill all my expectations, gave me plenty of jumps and a few surprise twists and I played through it three times (mostly for trophies) before finally putting it back on my shelf. In hindsight it did feel a little too much like an action game and not enough like a survival game at points, but the overall package was just so good, with so many changes made to DS1's formula ultimately made it a better game and one of my top games of the year.

5) Back to the Future: The Game



A massive dose of nostalgia is what caused to me shell out the 20 bucks for this five-chapter "season" last February, but the first Telltale adventure I've ever played surprised me as a fun (if simple to actually play) game. The gameply consists of little more than walking around faithful alternate Hill Valleys and using items at the right time, but my rose-colored nostalgia glasses have been glued to my head in this case. The voice acting is extremely well done and all the soundalikes (minus Christopher Lloyd, who returns as the elder Doc Brown) sound so good you have to already know they're other actors because upon hearing them you won't believe they're not Michael J. Fox, Thomas F. Wilson and Lea Thompson. The score uses all of the old Back to the Future music and sound cues, and the cues actually come in very handy as the "right answer" signals at various points. All episodes are fairly linear in that there is ultimately only one way to go, buy they are enough branches of dialogue and non-essential items that I wanted to play each episode a couple of times each just to hear and see everything, and then went to YouTube for the rest when I got restless. New characters created for the game blend seemlessly with established canon characters, and to top the whole thing off, the final episode ends (no spoilers) exactly as the first movie does: the DeLorean flies in to the camera and "Back in Time" by Huey Lewis and the News begins blaring. It felt so perfect.

4) Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception



The first Uncharted was my GOTY a few years ago, and Uncharted 2 topped that game in pretty much every way. As much as I wanted to love it unequivocally, Uncharted 3 almost felt like a step back (or at least sideways) from Uncharted 2. It's still graphically dazzling, well-controlling and tells its story very well, but a lot of nitpicks got to me this time. For one, the in-game medals, unlockable costumes and avatars from UC 1 and 2, 2 especially, have gone missing from the single-player mode. Another is that shooting any gun felt slightly "off" until an "alternate aiming" system was patched in; I'm not sure what Naughty Dog did to the controls but they seem to be better, or maybe it's psychosomatic and I just think they're better. Something else that drives me batty is the way Nate moves around when you control him, very floppily and ragdoll-like, as if the developers racheted up some under-the-hood setting during debug and forgot to reset it when they went gold.

Nitpicking aside, though, Uncharted 3 meets the bar that its predecessors set by its end. The Rub' al Khali Desert in Yemen is the perfect cllimax for the final game of a trilogy, after a tropical Pacific island and the Himalaya Mountains, and even if you can't truly buy what happens once Nate hits the desert it looks so damn nice, and I was so desperate to escape that it didn't bother me too much. Nate's compatriots Sully, Chloe and (eventually) Elena return, and the addition of Charlie Cutter, the educated Shakespeare-quoting treasure hunter hiding behind a face like Jason Statham, was incredibly welcome. What puzzles there are aren't ever truly difficult, but rather just a little tricky; once you figure them out (despite their implausability) you're good to go. I also excuse that because I hate it when an obtuse puzzle gets in the way of the fun, and thankfully Uncharted 3 is nothing BUT fun.

3) The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword



I never read or listened to any preview coverage about SS and it was a better game because of it. Recently I've been hearing a lot of negativity about it that, while annoying and nitpicky, can't truly be overlooked when I realize that a good amount of it really did bug me just a little bit. However, that gets countered by the fact that I had to have someone else tell me that Skyward Sword has problems, 'cause when it did I just went with 'em and enjoyed it more. Does the world feel too small with only three major ground areas? No, because a condensed world makes me search out and learn every nook and cranny. Furthermore, Skyward Sword is also the most "Metroidvainy" Zelda game ever, with numerous items unlocking major portions of areas later on, and even dungeons need revisiting at times. Since I'd never owned a Wii until this game, I'm not sure what my saying that the motion controls work very well means, but they work very well and the 1:1 swordplay became delightful to learn and figure out as the game went on. And yes, the nostalgia factor was turned to high: Link's traditional green outfit took two hours to show up and it was the longest two hours in a Zelda game ever. Zelda's Lullaby, the Master Sword, the Triforce, the Temple of Time, the Hylian Shield, all of these were welcome sights and sounds but none of them felt like they'd been shoehorned in.

The new additions are interesting tweaks to the Zelda formula. The Stamina bar allows Link to run until it drains by holding down A, and it feels so right that Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess may forever be tainted for me. New items like the Beetle and the Whip seem to replace the Boomerang and Hookshot and are perfectly suited to the motion controls as well. There is so much more to both love and hate about Skyward Sword, but I'll keep my words brief and simply say that SS had a real shot to be my GOTY, and the fact that is didn't make it is no detriment to its quality and fun. Hater or not, you should play The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword.

2) Portal 2



Portal 2 missed out on being my game of the year by the skin of its teeth. If I could make myself pull a shi++y cop-out like 2006 again I would, but when I boiled it down Portal 2 simply didn't come out on top. That's not to say it isn't full to the brim with total awesomeness that anyone wouldn't be honoured to put on their gaming shelf, though.

The early setting of a run-down facility is incredibly poignant even if you didn't play Portal 1 and recognize half the rooms in a decrepit form.

The addition of Wheatley, the would-be recipient of my non-existent Best New Character Award, and the return of Glados would make for a very humourous tandem even without the further additions of the broken turrents, Cave Johnson, Carolyn and the corrupt personality cores.

The new puzzles, with the addition of the Hard-Light Surfaces and gels, made for a pleasant tickling of the brain that never got frustrating. I remember growing very frustrated with the second half of Portal 1, but re-playing that game during the PSN downtime in April must've helped me get into a groove because I never grew exasperated with the puzzles, as puzzling as they were at times.

I won't go into too-spoilerific territory, but after the first third of the game abruptly sends you far below ground I couldn't help but get a very steampunk/"Bioshock"-esque vibe from all of it, and the juxtaposition of that entire abandoned facility with the pristine, white cleanliness of the "real" facility was perfectly jarring, and as an overall emotion it's stuck with me even as the solutions to the puzzles have faded from memory. The only "problem" someone can accuse Portal 2 of having is that is has almost zero replay value, which is the biggest reason it gets the #2 slot this year.

1) Batman: Arkham City



I almost feel like I owe the Batman games after Arkham Asylum nearly lost out to Uncharted a couple of years ago, but this time around Arkham City's open sandbox, more satisfying combat and more replayability give it the edge to nudge up to #1 on my list. I think the combat is the biggest factor. No, the fighting doesn't feel any different from Arkham Asylum, yet you can easily get lost fighting hordes of convicts for XP. Fighting with your fists, your gadgets and a few well-timed jumps while in a wide-open courtyard, an abandoned subway platform or any number of rooftops have a marvelous flow that just didn't feel possible in the asylum's cramped spaces two years prior. Even the rooms that were big enough had numerous Titan henchmen running around, and thankfully similar big enemies are kept to a minimum in Arkham City in favour of a bit more variety.

I remember feeling while playing AA's demo that Rocksteady had developed "the perfect Splinter Cell game," but AC's openness personally helps it emerge from that shadow into a league all its own. Yes, you could say that's it's just a sequel with a few minor changes and improvements over the first one, but I personally feel that those improvements were enough to make Batman: Arkham City my 2011 Game of the Year.