I've had a quick look over everything I've played over the last year and have come up with this list of ten. In no particular order:
 
Uncharted 2
Borderlands
Infamous
Resident Evil 5
Ratchet: Crack in Time
Batman: Arkham Asylum
Assassin's Creed 2
Forza 3
Modern Warfare 2
Red Faction Guerilla
 
There are a few big name games missing, some because I didn't like them, some because I didn't get time to play them yet and some that just got unlucky because ten is a smaller number than it sounds.
 
Ratchet and AC2 are on there provisionally, I haven't beaten either yet but what I have played of both has impressed me plenty. Left 4 Dead 2 is in the mail and is a remote possibility to sneak into a slot, though this is a list of ten games that are so good I can't imagine taking any one off. 
 
No music games. That may come as a surprise to anyone who knows my taste in games, or not. The only two that are even close to making it are Guitar Hero Metallica and DJ Hero and at this point I feel that these other games just have so much more to offer. Still torn over whether or not to even buy Band Hero and Lego RB on Australian release. Probably not. They've just killed it. 15+ music games in a year is 13 too many.

Let me know if there's anything really obvious I forgot but for the record Prototype isn't on here because that game is garbage.
 
All of these games will get a thorough writeup as the year draws to a close and I'll order them 1 to 10. If you want a preview of what is almost definately taking the top slot go and read my last few reviews. The interesting part will be ordering the other 9. I'll likely do a similar feature for movies once all the good ones actually come out. Stupid end of year oscar season releases mixed with Australian 2 month+ delays on releae make it hard to know anything about the year's movies until maybe December 27th. It's entirely possible that up to 8 of my favourite 10 movies of the year aren't even out yet. Two so far are absolute locks, but those other 8 are a free-for-all.

It occurs to me that I've been reviewing games in this blog while this fine site has a system in place to create a starred review so from here on in, anything I finish is getting the star treatment.  Tomb Raider Underworld is the first of these and you can expect reviews of ODST and Mass Effect any day now.
 
http://www.giantbomb.com/tomb-raider-underworld/61-20694/user_reviews/?review=11029
 
I've spent a little while putting the majority of my game collection (from PS2 to current day) into The Backloggery so I can keep track of exactly what I still need to play through.
 
 http://backloggery.com/main.php?user=shaunage
 
According to that I'm a little over a 50% completion rate which honestly is a little better than I'd expected. The site also includes a "Fortune Cookie" button which chooses a random unfinished game from your collection for you to beat next. I decided to start progress properly and to 100% definitely go with whatever game it picked for me first click. As if to mock me the site spits out a small slip of paper with the text "The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind"...  I said I'd go with it and go with it I have. I'm not a complete stranger to Morrowind. I spent the longest single game session of my life playing Morrowind about 5 years ago when I was only working on Saturdays. I came home from work, put the game in and started a new file and I played until I had to sleep again because I had work the next day. Six days and nights. By my maths that's a little over 150 hours. Surely I managed to finish Morrowind in that enormous amount of time? Well, no. I decided to do the faction quests before starting the quest proper. Fighter's Guild, Mage's, Thieve's Guild, Temple, Imperial Cult and so on and so forth until I had done pretty much everything except for the main quest. Unfortunately I'm playing the Xbox version of this game.
 
I'm not particularly familiar with the PC version of Morrowind but I can tell you that the Xbox version likes to crash if you make it think about too many things at once. If it has to remember where a lot of bodies are, a few too many crates have their contents changed, you've left a few too many doors open and (just for example) you happen to have finished all of the faction quests, the game will freeze up every half hour or so and becomes pretty well unplayable. Due to this ever so small bug I never went back to that 150 hour save and never completed the main storyline.
 
What I've done is I've started a clean file using the Xbox 360's backwards compatibility and so far I'm something like 6 hours into the game without a crash. Here's hoping that good luck continues through what I expect to be a relatively brief storyline run. More news and probably a review on that in the coming days. I haven't clicked the Fortune Cookie again since then because I do intend to see this thing through to the end before I start second guessing and switching out to other random games or even worse, going back to hours of guitar games every day. I do need to say this, though: If I complete Morrowind and click on the FOrtune Cookie again and it smugly sits there with something like "Lost Odyssey" on it I am probably going to break down and cry.
 
Starting this coming Thursday new releases begin to blow holes in these neatly laid backlog plans. Both Brutal Legend and Uncharted 2 are out that day and then before I can blink DJ Hero is due and  Dragon Age Origins and Borderlands and Ratchet and Clank and Modern Warfare 2 and Assassin's Creed 2 and TWO MORE easy guitar games and Left 5 Dead and GH Van Halen AND I've ordered in Demon's Souls from Play Asia which I am beginning to suspect is borderine unplayable. I might have missed something but that MIGHT be it for the rest of the year. And then in February it gets nuts again.
 
What this boils down to is that my backlog is unlikely to EVER be over a 75% completion rate but hey, I'm trying. If they'd stop releasing games and I didn;t have to work, eat or sleep for maybe two years THEN we might get somewhere near 90% complete. MIGHT. On the bright side - If I ever say "I have nothing to do" you are free to remind me that I am lying.

It's been a long time since I've written anything here. I'm scared to check how long exactly because it's probably almost a full year. Much of that time has been spent working a full time job - something I wasn't used to - and I've barely been managing to PLAY any games, let alone write about them. I took a week's holidays and have taken the opportunity to sit down and actually *gasp* finish some games.
 
In order:
 
Played through GH Metallica on Expert Drums.
 
It was the last instrument I needed to beat to get that 150 point achievement so that was nice. 175 points for something like an hour's work. This also marks the third drum kit I have rendered completely useless and with that I am officially resigning from music game drumming. They're so big and so expensive and they work for approximately one week before the pads all crack and they start extra hitting/not hitting. It's a shame, because I AM playing and passing most of the hard stuff on expert, but I'm getting a max combo of like 15 because the drum kit is so broken. I also managed to pull something the wrong way and wreck the connector of my $100 Destroyer pedal. Unless someone accidentally mails me an Ion kit for free I am never ever EVER playing drums in a music game again.
 
While I'm on the subject of being done with music games... I am done with music games. After the soul-crushingly easy Beatles Rock Band left me wondering "Why are we even here?" on my way to a Full Game Full Combo on the second day after release I wasn't TOO dissappointed because, hey, Guitar Hero 5 was out the next week. While the game is certainly a better experience than World Tour (not difficult) there are still enough things wrong with the menus that should have been fixed four games ago alongside a host of new problems (Why, for example, does it scroll right back to the top of the song list any time I do ANYTHING?) that it's just a really frustrating experience all around. Add to that the increasingly aggravating super easy difficulty of the entire setlist and the low quality of most of the songs chosen and it adds up to a game I'm unlikely to go back to very often from here on in - if at all. I used to fail songs. I had to learn how to play them. I LOVED that. Being forced to learn to gallop to 5 star The Trooper in GH2 is one of the most satisfying experiences of my gaming life. There just aren't any new tricks to learn any more. It's a really sad thing realising your favourite genre of game isn't fun any more. Band Hero and Lego Rock Band are both out on the same day in a couple of months and I flat out don't want them. Easier games and worse songs is NOT a step in the right direction for those franchises. Do I still want Van Halen? Probably. I'm not even sure, anymore. I will applaud ONE change in GH5 and that is that no one gets stuck playing the (usually) even easier bass part. Nine games worth of innovation, right there.
 
There is some hope on the horizon. DJ Hero is out at the end of this month and I'm hoping that, as a completely new skill set to learn, it will bring back that same experience I used to love in GH. Either that or it'll be a total wash and I'll never play a music game again. I'll let you know which in about 4 weeks.

Played through the remaining levels of Wolfenstein.
 
It's a FPS, certainly. There's a big fight going on at the GameFAQs boards about a guy who claims to have beaten this game in 5 hours. Everyone there hates him and say they spent 15 hours or so on it. I beat the game in 4:21 and I am unlikely to return to it. It's not BAD but it's a very long way from being GOOD. The rifle was very nice once fully upgraded and the violence is just over the top enough to be interesting but that's basically all I can say for the game. The only time in recent memory I have cared less about a story in a game was in Mercs 2, where I actually just turned the sound right off for the whole game. I'm hearing pretty widespread reports of the game freezing once you collect most of the hidden items and there seems to be no patch in sight. I'm only mildly surprised by that after seeing the rest of the game. This is NOT as good as the reviews it is getting suggest and if it had been any longer than that 4:21 I might not have bothered.

Started and finished Mass Effect.
 
2007 was stunning. I managed to beat many of the big name releases of the year back then (Assassin's Creed, Bioshock, Halo 3, Uncharted etc.) but there will always be a few important ones that slip through the cracks. I loved Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect is a very impressive progression from that game. The graphics are outstanding for the most part, the most obvious flaw being those awful shadows on people's faces. The important part here is the speech between characters. The voice acting is uniformly some of the best to ever appear in a game and the conversation system is outstanding. The actual content of the conversations and the story itself are also some of the best gaming has on offer. The combat works incredibly well and it's a system that I'd like to see blatantly copied in a few more games. I am glad that I waited as long as I did to play it because it's now only a few months until the sequel and I may have gone insane waiting over two years for it.

I think that's everything I've gotten to the credits of in the last few days. I have Tomb Raider Underworld in the drive right now, ready to play with intent to complete. I think I'm halfway through or further already. Also in line to be played through are Prototype, Bionic Commando, Condemned 2, Dead Space and Super Mario Galaxy, all of which I have played maybe the first hour of. My current "Sound turned off, listening to a podcast" games are Dirt 2, Red Faction Guerilla and Trials HD. Dirt 2 is very good, though the shift in stye from the first game was a poor decision. Rewind is a lifesaver, though my "reset to track" button is sorely missed. More actual point to point rally races would have been nice. 3 lap circuit races are not something I am enjoying and if I ever have to race that Ensenada track again I'm going to stop playing. I am liking RF: G for the most part. If things reset when you died, it might be literally unplayable but hey, that's not the case. Knock over a building, it falls on you and kills you, you respawn and it's still knocked down. Genius. Seriously. Trials is fun when you're getting it right but seriously WHAT AM I DOING WRONG? One of the expert tracks I had to retry so many times that it actually kicked in a time limit I'd never seen before and restarted the level after about 250 attempts at a single obstacle. I guess what I mean is that the first three sets of levels are fun and the rest of the game is an ABSOLUTE NIGHTMARE. I have gone through entire podcasts and still been stuck on the same level.
 
In non gaming news: The Boat That Rocked, Inglourious Basterds and Watchmen are the best three movies so far this year in that order. Here's hoping one or more of those sneak in to that new 10 slot Best Picture shortlist. Oh, and Up is garbage. It seems like everyone else has been watching a totally different movie than I saw.
 
Front runner for GOTY is still Resident Evil 5. The amount of fun I had with that game may come down to the fact that I have never played it in any way other than online co-op. Got the full 1000 in it, which included at LEAST three full playthroughs, maybe more.
 
According to my release schedule the next important release is Brutal Legend and Uncharted 2, both on October 15th. Basically that means that I am never going to play Brutal Legend. Sorry, Tim.
 
I'll be keeping this up to date from here on in. It's good to be back.

Several months after I trawled the Orange Box for a 13 point achievement to get my score even again for my 55555 I have now managed my next goal that seemed reasonable. 77777. It's always a little bit scary getting close to one of these numbers because you need to plan it perfectly to ensure you don't hit something by accident and jump 30 points over. Scene It seemed a pretty safe bet and that's where I got it. Last achievement to get me there: Producer - answer 60 questions right and none wrong in one game - 35 points. I'll be honest here. I paused the game and looked everything up on IMDB. They were a bit generous with the final set of questions - giving a set of 5 questions about the first X-Files movie to someone who owns all 9 seasons on DVD.

Anyone reading this knows that Call of Duty 4 was amazing - a huge leap forward for the series and honestly for games in general. Most of those same people will have been stunned to hear the announcement that World at War was going back to World War 2. Those people were right to be worried.



I don't care if it is set in Japan. World at War is a really standard World War 2 game and I was sick of it before the end. The flamethrower is great and so is hearing Keifer Sutherland scream obscenities about the Japanese. It's certainly not 'bad', I just didn't really enjoy it and found almost nothing memorable at all about the entire campaign. COD4's story progession was one of its strongest points. CoD WaW shares the same problem every WW2 game does, you just shoot enemy soldiers for 8 hours and then the war ends. I'm not going to write any more about it. This is not a negative review, it's a good game, it's just a giant leap backwards.