Personally, compared to previous years, 2009 was a solid year for games and an excellent way to round out the naughties. My most played game this year was my 2008 game of the year, Fallout 3, thanks to the excellent downloadable content released. Regardless, I did enjoy quite a few other games in my spare time too which made this list harder to narrow down to ten compared to previous years. Here are the games I have selected as being the best releases of 2009.
The reason Uncharted 2 tops this list apart from the brilliance of the game itself, is the amount of value that comes from the game. I've always believed that a game should have a strong and considerable single player mode while the multi player portion of the game should be an adjunct to enhance the experience for fans.
So many games go the other way and put the horse before the cart and create a short single player mode of little value and pad the title with a multi player mode. (Yes, I'm talking about you MW2!) Thankfully, Uncharted 2 has a meaty single player mode with outstanding production values, sensational cut scenes, wonderful writing and excellent voice acting. It's a long, rip roaring 3rd person platform game with perfect attention to detail. Adding in an excellent multilayer mode is just the perfect icing on the cake.
Fully competent first person shooter and much improved from the original title 5 years ago. Killzone 2 brought excellent graphics, a well rounded story and an innovative multi player mode to the Playstation 3 and along with Uncharted 2, Infamous and several other exclusives cemented 2009 as the year the PS3 finally came out of the shadows and into the spotlight.
This year's Fallout, only less engrossing, but no less impressive. An excellent story mode, fun co-op system and excellent downloadable content will keep the value of this game going into next year just like Fallout 3.
Everything that made the original Wii Sports successful and enjoyable has transferred well into this sequel while adding in some great additions to the franchise. Wii Sports Resort also finally made good fluid use of the new Wii Motion Plus system that other new games seemed to have trouble getting to grips with.
There have been many enjoyable Tennis games on various consoles over the years, most notably the Top Spin & Virtual Tennis series. Now, EA's Grand Slam Tennis is a fine addition to this list. This fun Wii title
Flawed and buggy at times, but Pandemic Software's swan song is a fun, rip roaring game with an excellent storyline.
A Tim Schaffer game, nuff said! Okay fine. Personally this game should have been higher on this list due to the pedigree, but the stealth use of strategy game play not shown in the demo made the game out to be something it wasn't. It looked like a fun hack and slash game when it wasn't. It's still good fun anyway, but could have been so much more. At least it's original unlike the next game on the list.
More of the same. The single player is too short, the storyline is bonkers and it's too reliant on multi-player to fill the package out. It's just lucky the multi-player mode has legs to keep someone interested. LAZY on the whole, but of course will be lapped up by all the sheep out there.
What more can be said. Here is a game any real music fan would have been wanting to play for years.
