What are Your Favorite Things of This Generation?

The forums have been abuzz recently with the community voting for best of the generation games, characters and more. (Special thanks to @mracoon , @aegon , and everyone else for creating and participating in these polls and brackets.)

Screw the democracy! In this post I'm gonna list my favorite games, characters, soundtracks, and dlc of the generation. What are yours?

Game of the Generation

Winner: Portal 2. Of all the things I will remember from this generation, of all of the amazing games I've played, no other game had as many incredible moments. Saying "apple". Potato Glados. Defective turrets. Atlas and P-Body. For a small group of my friends, just saying 'space' is enough to elicit several minutes of Portal 2 quotes. Thank you Valve, for making this. Now make a sequel to something, would you?

Honorable Mentions: Skyrim, Fallout 3/New Vegas, Saints Row IV, Bioshock.

Favorite Character of the Generation

Winner: Wheatley, Portal 2. Looking back to the previous category, Stephan Merchant brings it in a game full of memorable characters, in fact, in a generation of memorable characters.

Honorable Mentions: The rest of the roles in Portal 2, Garrus and Tali from the Mass Effect series (also full of excellent characters), The Boss from Saint's Row the Third and IV, specifically Laura Bailey, Steven Heck from Alpha Protocol, Your Brain from Fallout: New Vegas

Favorite Soundtrack of the Generation

Winner (Tie, Mass Effect 2 & 3)

Kind of a cop-out, I know, but Jack Wall and Sam Hulick helped create the two most memorable song in my eyes. I've listened to these two tracks on iTunes around 750 times collectively.

Honorable Mentions: Bastion, Portal 2, Bioshock Infinite, Batman: Arkham City.

Favorite Licensed Soundtrack of the Generation

Winner: Saints Row IV. From Biz Markie to Haddaway, from Outkast to Stan Bush, no game did it better with licensed music. And that's just one station.

Honorable Mentions: Saints Row: The Third, Forza Horizon, DmC: Devil May Cry

Favorite Downloadable Content of the Generation

Winner: Mass Effect 3: Citadel

I have stated on several occasions my feelings on the ending of Mass Effect 3, but that doesn't take away from how damn charming this DLC is. FemShep dancing, everyone shooting 46 more times, and an ending that is emotionally resonant. Outside of Saints Row IV and Bioshock Infinite, it is literally the best thing I've played this year.

Honorable mentions: Fallout: New Vegas: Old World Blues, Dragon Age 2: Mark of the Assassin, Mass Effect 2: Lair of the Shadow Broker

Now is time for the most contentious question posed on this website since its inception...

Best Persona Game since the Start of This Generation

Winner: Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 FES. I'm sorry Kanji. I'm sorry Yosuke. I'm especially sorry to you, Naoto. But my true feelings cannot be denied. Persona 4 has the slight edge in combat and memorable characters, but I care more for what happens to the members of Specialized Extracurricular Execution Squad than I care about the Investigation Team. I think the story of Persona 3 is a more cohesive overall experience. Also the music is wayyy better.

Honorable Mention: Persona 4

I made a list of my 10. I'll just say several music games are involved, so if you don't care about that genre you won't like the list. I'll also say I didn't spend any more money on, didn't spend any more time on, and didn't get any more enjoyment out of other games that I did Rock Band 3. It's the reason I'll never sell my 360.

My 10 picks

Never really thought about the extracurricular categories like character and all that. I suppose I should.

Favorite platformer: Super Meat Boy

Favorite action game and RPG: Dark Souls

Favorite developer: CDPR - For GOG, The Witcher 2 and upcoming games.

Favorite designer/director: Hidetaka Miyazaki

Favorite female character and villain: GLaDOS

Favorite first-person game: Portal

Favorite story-driven game and art direction: The Witcher 2

Favorite 3D platforming mechanics: Mirror's Edge

Favorite multiplayer game: Metal Gear Online 2 - While the expansions were free, in the month leading up to the cancellation. I played few other multiplayer games, however.

My favorite thing of the generation was the proliferation of "indie games." They're doing a lot for the industry from a creativity standpoint, and many of my favorite games are among them.

• Character: Missile
• Soundtrack: Dustforce
• Licensed Soundtrack: Braid
• Game: Braid

Platinum Games

Left trigger. Right trigger.

Favorite anything: Platinum Games.

My Skyrim character, Dragon Age: Origins' pause/party combat, my kids in Fable 2, Cyrodiil, The Tower of Latria from Demon's Souls, the class mod system in Borderlands 2, Halo 4's sound effects, the random chatter in GTA V, the dead giants in Brothers, the dialogue in Journey.

Game: Mass Effect 2

Soundtrack: Mass Effect 1-3

Licensed Soundtrack: FIFA 13/14

Best Trend: Digital Distribution especially because of steam

Best JRPG: Persona 4: Golden

Best Handheld Game: Rune Factory 3

My favourite thing this entire generation is the xbox controller and its standardisation on PC.

I don't like the Xbox controller, but I'm happy that there is a standard, since it means that I don't have to configure my PS3 controller in every game.

Wireless controllers.

My favourite things of the generation are:

• draw distances
• crowd sizes
• wireless controllers
• PS+
• the art style in Valkyria Chronicles, which is somehow ageless and has not been copied.
• Giant Bomb

@mikeeegeee: was gonna post that pretty much. The re-emergence of "indie" games and everything that goes with them from new distribution models to the way games are funded is probably the most exciting thing this generation

This is something I hate. If it weren't for all the subscribers, there wouldn't be a paywall now and I wouldn't look at the PS4 as only a single player device. I also hate that the you have to subscribe to upload your save files. Six to nine months before deletion is way too short for the money you pay. Fortunately, there aren't many games with locked save files (though my favorite PS3 game does). But I wouldn't be surprised if they became more forced and prevalent on the PS4.

i didnt read the first post or the thread but i agree with your choces, you rule!

The fact that before this generation we didn't have the Portal Series, The Mass Effect Series or the BioShock series is crazy. I have my misgivings about BioShock: Infinite, but aside from that all three of those series have dramatically affected me in ways I didn't see coming.

@ezekiel: I lost all my save files from 2007 to 2010 from my PS3 breaking. I purchased PS+ simply for the online storage service. If you want to go through life thinking everything should be free then you'll get what you pay for.

My favorite thing has been the massive surgeance of independent games this generation. More often than not a bunch of really charming and unique experiences have come about due to it.

Sony's tax on games and other hardware sales paid for network play. This is them being greedy. If online play is similar to how it was on the PS3, it's not even their servers that require upkeep in some cases. They're charging while the developer/publisher of the game maintains it. The new features like video sharing might be more expensive, but I don't want them.

All my files except Demon's and Dark Souls are on my computer and USB stick. Limited free storage would be fantastic. Or, since you're allowing save files to be locked, let people buy storage separately at significantly reduced prices. This isn't unreasonable.

One of my favorite things this generation is that a Spin-off Persona Fighting Game ended up being one of the best fighting games since the genre's revival.

My favorite thing of this generation is Steam Sales. Buying and having a chance to play lots of games at low low prices is too sweet. I can only hope the console makers learn a few lessons from Steam's success.

Second best thing is PS+. Same idea (not as cheap) but with free games to boot.

The controllers, specially the PS4s . it's awesome...

Better netcode, we'll get there some day.

Ehh... No. PSN was kept free by the publishers. While the cost of hardware, bandwidth and maintenance of XBLA came from the user's fee and advertisement; the cost of bandwidth and maintenance of PSN initially came from fees charged to the publishers. In other words, every time people downloaded a demo of FIFA 12, it was EA that paid Sony for the bandwidth. That (and the idea that demos hurt sales more than they helped them), explains why many companies did not released demos on PSN.

The pay wall comes from a different place. The reason is because, basically, Sony thought they could get away with it. They wanted to have something similar to gold (they probably thought it would have been a bigger differentiator), but couldn't because they had offered free multiplayer. When they introduced PS+, they wanted to generate some extra revenue to their network department, but couldn't remove features from the vanilla version without some serious backlash. Being this a new generation, they decided to try again, since there was no PS4 audience that would feel robbed of.

Favorite Space - Dead Space 2

Favorite Stabbing Dudes in the Face - Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood

Favorite Cybernetics - Syndicate

Favorite Super Hero - Batman: Arkham Asylum

Favorite Running to the Right - Rayman: Legends

Favorite Locomotion - Saints Row IV/ Prototype 2

Favorite Mind Fuck - Fez

Wireless controllers, no wavebird shit.

Favorite Thing: 'Braid' opening my gaming world to all the amazing, thoughtful, weird awesome shit out there in the indi sphere.

Other Favorite Thing: 'BIOSHOCK' for blowing me the fuck away.

Favorite things runners ups' Uncharted 2, ME2, Journey

Favorite Thing? I really liked achievements. Not trophies, but achievements.

So sue me.

EDIT: Also, Dark Souls, Meat Boy, Mario Galaxy, Rayman Legends, Mass Effect, Gears of War....there was a lot to like.

Least favourite thing: true ending/story-essential DLC

That stuff is really...