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1p

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Best of 2011

Alas, there was no official community GOTY voting this year, and i somehow missed ThatFrood's commendable effort to put together a list. I still wanted to publish my list, because this site has weirdly conditioned me to do this at the end of every year. Anything else just wouldn't feel right. Even if i actually think the idea of ranking games in the established manner is stupid and overly reductive, BUT LET'S NOT EVEN THINK ABOUT THAT RIGHT NOW.

List items

  • The original Portal came close to being a perfect game, so i was skeptical about any attempt to follow up on it. Well, leave it to Valve to make great additions to the puzzle toolset, expand on the fiction in meaningful ways, introduce new characters that are every bit as interesting and entertaining as Glados, and THEN add a co-op mode that works better than i could ever have imagined.

    My favorite part is probably the incredibly satisfying ending, because so few games ever get that part right.

  • It would have been easy for Bastion to hide an uninteresting game behind its impressive visual style, fresh storytelling and cool soundtrack. But no, take all these things away and the game underneath would probably still be a lot of fun.

  • As they are wont to do, Grasshopper made some pretty big missteps with this game. I am not here to defend these. I'm here to tell you that when Shadows of the Damned hits, it FUCKING HITS. Like when the guy that sells you items looks like a hideous monster and might be mistaken as an enemy, but then he actually talks to you in the most delightful southern accent. Or when you walk alongside this weird slug fish creature that also acts as a lantern, and this out-of-place but undeniably dope mouth harp music starts playing. I love this game.

  • This was the first Pokemon game I ever really got into. Some 130 hours were spent reliving bits of a childhood i never actually had. I also bred in excess of 30 Wobbuffets, but let's not talk about that.

  • Stacking is the most original game i played all year. It's great to see that games like this one can still get made, in this world of annualized military shooters. Perhaps it's a signal that, in the end, everything is going to work out just fine.

  • Why do so many people insist that Dead Space is not scary? Is this some secret internet macho agenda to make me feel like less of a man? Or am i actually a small child? The scares are predictable and cheap at times, but even then, this game freaks me out. Side note: Best intro sequence ever, that guy's head is like what the fuuuuhhhh

  • As a big fan of Rez, i'm relieved to see that Miz got to make another one of these. The idea of taking your entire budget and focusing it on producing a razor sharp ~60 minute game is pretty crazy, if you think about it. Crazy and awesome.

  • I don't subscribe to the notion of "Uncharted 3 is awesome, but Uncharted 2 was already awesome, so Uncharted 3 is actually garbage". Uncharted 3 is not garbage. Uncharted 3 is only garbage if you're garbage.

  • This is here by default, because it's the only PixelJunk game i played this year. We had a tremendous time in co-op. Everything about this game is totally neat.

  • It seems that i now have this annual tradition where, come November, i do nothing but play Assassin's Creed for a few days, until there is no more Assassin's Creed to be played. I can't say that buying every single one of the hundreds of shops in Constantinople was an especially fun or rewarding process, but it needed to be done, that much was clear.