SUUUUUPEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEER MEAT BOY. Anyone who has me on Steam knows I've played this game once or twice. At time of writing I'm 13th in the global leaderboards, and a good 1000 seconds ahead of the 2nd best SMB player on Giant Bomb. This is the game that whenever presented with 15 minutes of spare time, I'll play this... and then be 3 hours late for whatever it was I was meant to be doing. Not only is this my top game of the year, I'd dare say it's one of my favourite games of all time.

After loving the first Street Fighter IV to pieces, I went out and bought this game on launch day, for both the 360 and PS3. So if you count vanilla Street Fighter IV, and the iPhone version, I own 5 copies of this game. Suffice to say I rather enjoy it. It's gotten to the point where I don't have internet connection in my flat for the PS3, and my flatmates already know I'm much better than them at the game. So whenever they have friends over that get a bit too cocky at this game, I waltz in, select a random character and completely destroy all their Street Fighter related hopes and dreams.

Screw you all, this game is great. While I can understand some of the critiques thrown at this game, I don't believe it deserves all the hate it gets. Sure the story is linear, but in my opinion it's still a really well told story. Sure the combat is rather simplified, but it can (and does) get incredibly difficult later in the game. Sure it takes 20 hours to get past all the tutorial stuff, but that doesn't mean the first 20 hours are dull. Since I had clocked a good 150 hours total into this game when I was finished with it, it's hard to argue against putting this in my top three games.

Yayifications! Recettear was a great surprise for me this year. From not knowing anything about it before I bought it, to being one of the best games I played this year... which makes sense as it's on this list. With a great mix of item shop shenanigans and Link To The Past-style dungeon crawling, I whole-heartedly love this game.

This is one of those rare annual sequels done right. They managed to take DJ Hero, a game that I loved last year, and make everything a million times better. The gameplay additions feel great. The free styling sections, which I never even touched in the first game due to it not sounding quite right, are substantially better. The soundtrack is phenomenal, with quite a lot of the mixes regularly played on my iPhone. But the best feature is the megamix stuff, it works incredibly well, I really just wish more sounds would link in that kind of way. Sure it'd be hard to do, but even if they masked that with a freestyle section it could work wonders. Having some samples from the mix you just played on one channel and the next mix on the other, letting the user mix between them before the next song started proper, would be an amazing addition to the series.

Platforming craziness! As a big time fan of platforming games, there was no doubt in my mind that I would love this game. So much so, in fact, that I've taken to speed running the game. My goal was to beat it in a time shorter than the VVVVVV quick look, but that proved to be impossible. I think last I checked my best time is 16 minutes and 24 seconds, a time I'm pretty sure I can never get again!

As a long time fan of the Ace Attorney series, it was good to know that this game continued the great story telling and puzzle elements of the Visual Novel style main series, despite being a gigantic departure from them gameplay wise. Hopefully the next game can break away from this stigma of everything having to take place within a month after Phoenix Wright 3, thanks to the Apollo Justice storyline. Capcom really need to stop ignoring the elephant in the room and do something clever with that part of the story.

Oh Professor Layton, I can't help but laugh at the amazing story telling in these games. It's rather impressive they can use time travel two games in a row, technically, and still make it fresh. But man... ok, spoilers here, in the 2nd game I bought the whole 'we were high' reasoning behind them going back in time, I'll buy that. However, Future London Underground? Really? Well that's incredibly stupid but fine that means there was no time travel, but WAIT, SUDDENLY TIME TRAVEL. As much as I enjoyed this game, such a silly premise. And after watching the film it looks like the stories get even sillier, awesome.

I'm not usually a fan of multiplayer focused games. I'd much rather play a single player only video game, a lock yourself in a room and play a damned video game kind of experience. So I was surprised when I enjoyed this game as much as I did, a simple kart racer, with some of the best creation tools I've seen in a game. While I never found any good original created tracks, as I like most people just found the Mario Kart or even Crash Team Racing tracks people had made and play those, this is still a great game to go back to and have a ton of fun in.

Soldier's got a new hat! So I admit the main reason behind buying this was the TF2 item you got when you pre-ordered, as I never thought Team 17 could ever top Worms Armageddon. To my surprise, however, they totally did, making this my favourite worms game ever. A lot of fun playing this with friends both online and in weird LAN parties my friends like to host. But seriously, why did they change the hallelujah sound effect?