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Splitterguy

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2010 Ranked

2010 is arguably the year in which indie games and AAA titles finally met eye to eye. Thanks to a new console marketplace infrastructure and the proliferation of smartphones, the gaming market got *confusing.* This was one of the final years in which AAAs could conceivably take obvious risks, and the low cost of indie development paired with an uptick in fascination with small games for specific player-bases essentially murdered any game that fit inbetween.

For me, 2010 was a tumultuous year in which my day to day had changed drastically, more drastically than it ever had. I was at the height of my social anxiety and was in circumstances completely unfamiliar to me.

I had certainly devoured games when I could, but much of the reason there are so many titles in this list I have no natural interest in stem from the fact that I was constantly grasping at the familiar. While that mostly translates to 'I played a lot of long games I normally wouldn't have found time for' it also sometimes meant 'I'm going to play the entirety of Surviving High School for no reason at all.'

List items

  • Mass Effect 2 fulfills nearly every sci-fi video game fantasy I've ever had. The clever mix of Star Wars adventure, Star Trek politicking and retro-future technobabble has been refined to the point of perfection. I love the original Mass Effect, but exploring that game's vast, heartwarmingly nerdy universe required the player look past some things - a hilariously old fashioned elevator that masks loading screens, for example, or a hub world only navigable via the protagonist's sloth-like, geriatric jog.

    Mass Effect 2 just gets you straight there. Every time you think you've experienced a peak, Mass Effect 2 shoots you over to something else unbelievable. You've barely finished defending your crew mate in space court before your faking a bomb threat to a janitor to spoil a political assassination.

    But then, maybe you didn't do that. Maybe you didn't defend that crew mate in that court case, because maybe you felt she was being dishonest - and that currying favor with her species' military elite was more important than maintaining a personal relationship. Maybe you didn't succeed in stopping that assassination, and are now tied indirectly to its aftermath. Mass Effect 3 would go on to reduce the series' bigger narrative choices to binary states, but the little moments in 2, the ones that only earn themselves a brief comment in the sequel, feel like they matter here.

    Everything in Mass Effect 2 (and by extension of the carry-over save system, the entire franchise) culminates in an hour and a half-long suicide mission, in which major characters all are at risk. Despite the fact that the tactical choices asked of the player are extremely straightforward, the fact that I was unable to handle an escalating conflict between two important members of my crew meant that I lost an *extremely* important character. I saw that character catch a bullet - they jolted, blinked and collapsed on the ground beside me. I saw past them to a moment I knew would be coming in the next game, in which I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt their presence would be essential to mitigate a galactic-scale conflict which would now render an entire species unto ruin.

  • Amnesia: The Dark Descent is one of the best - maybe THE best adaptation of a major author's works in video games. I'm no scholar on him, but I've read a pretty decent chunk of H. P. Lovecraft's work, and of all the many adaptations of his general aesthetic, no video game, movie or television show - even the ones which are *literal* adaptations of specific works - come anywhere near replicating the feel and motivating fear that drives his work in the way that the Dark Descent does. And it does so without the rampant racism and self-absorption inherent to all other adaptations of his work, which is a plus.

    The Dark Descent is also the scariest game I've ever played. There are some people who are - as you do on the internet - lashing back at the perception that Amnesia is the Ultimate Horror Game or whatever, but...I don't know, man. I have played a lot of horror games that remove agency from the player, but none that have displayed such a fundamental understanding of why that shadow in the corner of your eye is so unsettling, why the potential of danger is almost more important than depicting something actually dangerous. This is such an intense game to play that it almost feels cruel, and yet the quality of storytelling and environmental design in it is so high that pushing past that fear is absolutely worth it. The Dark Descent earns its reputation in a way that the relatively slim (pun intended) narrative offerings of Slender, the other internet horror phenom of the era, did not.

  • Shoving Obsidian's original stab at making Fallout 3 into Bethesda's engine makes the game feel a bit like a reanimated corpse. Nothing ever feels quite right in the Mojave, which is so overcrowded with gamblers, tech giants and military personnel it makes the concept of a 'wasteland' feel like either a joke or a prescient comment on Las Vegas' actual sociology.

    That said, Obsidian tightened up the non-VATS gunplay thanks to a new down-the-sights view as well as a greater variety of weapon types, and although Obsidian devs don't seem to have anywhere near as much fun as Bethesda with fun environmental storytelling, John R. Gonzalez and his team are frankly better screenwriters than anyone at Bethesda by quite a bit. Their cast of characters is just better. I just wish they weren't in this game.

    The core gameplay loop of exploration, combat and leveling borrowed from Fallout 3 is still fun, but the ability for the player to truly roleplay via a variety of dialogue choices isn't quite the same - for a game as dense with expository dialogue as New Vegas is, there are so many times in which you're given only one dialogue response in conversation with an NPC, and most of the dialogue available to the player is dry and flavorless. A few of the bigger mechanics from the last game are back too, but for no apparent reason - the binary morality system from 3 returns in New Vegas, for example, but it's buried in a menu and doesn't appear to have any kind of effect on the world.

    Additionally, while Bethesda is perfectly happy to let you go literally anywhere (within reason) on the map, even if it means getting permanently stuck in a hole halfway up a sheer cliff, Obsidian's New Vegas is a labyrinth of completely linear roads. That next quest objective might *look* like it's just ahead, but in reality all of the impassable paths and un-climbable mountains might mean you're nowhere near it.

    Worst of all, New Vegas' load times are atrocious and frequent. Even if you don't mind the limited player expression and lack of exploration, just turning in quests can take an abominably long time, especially if the quest giver is in a building (which requires a load) that itself is inside a compound (which requires a separate load).

    But all the same, the story and characters in New Vegas don't fade out like in other series titles, including the lauded Fallout 1 and 2. New Vegas' roleplaying is thin at best in regards to the player character, but the political machinations of New Vegas' power players are a memorable bit of damning American satire. For all of my hang ups with the dry, trudge-y nature of the Mojave and the games butt-ugly visuals, the various factions of New Vegas and what they stand for are really fun and creative distillations of American power. I played this game when it came out in the fall of 2010, and I'm STILL thinking about them over a decade later.

    I love that New Vegas disallows for a true happy ending, unlike Bethesda's pluckier, more Star Wars-y take on the franchise. I might not like that Obsidian's wasteland is so teeming with civilian activity in comparison to the dire straits of Bethesda's Washington DC, but the power players in this story are grim, and so aligning with them naturally leads to a grim outcome. The Bethesda titles (particularly Fallout 4) are about framing your choices (regardless of their real ethical value) in the best possible light. New Vegas is more interested in the worst possible outcome. It's a better tone to strike for a series about the end of things, at least.

  • Deadly Premonition has a certain reputation on this website, and I'll happily admit I only discovered it thanks to the Endurance Run. I became low-key obsessed with it, in fact.

    When I picked it up for myself, I was surprised how different it felt to play than to watch. Swery 65's Lynchian opus is hilarious and broken, yes, but it's also intricate. Deadly Premonition gives you plenty of time inbetween its awful corridor shooting to just kind of live in its heavily filtered approximation of middle-American life.

    Despite the game's laboriously slow pace and heavily segmented play areas, there's some real creative charm to the characterization of the townsfolk. Many characters the game allows you to observe or spend time with are worth getting to know. I love the idea of being able to know, comprehensively, what each and every citizen of note in Greenvale is doing at 4 AM on a Wednesday.

    More than anything, Deadly Premonition works because Francis York Morgan works. He is Dale Cooper by way of a Japanese surrealist kaleidoscope. Deadly Premonition's utter and complete faith that the player will fall for his suave charm, coupled with the fact Francis York Morgan is, in fact, a huge doofus, creates a pleasantly discordant mania that makes for some compelling B-game storytelling.

  • I have this foggy (pun intended) memory of Alan Wake being the AAA title to save us from the 'video games are all about shooting people' stigma, and it certainly isn't that. Instead, Remedy leaned into their skill set by making a horror shooter with some surprisingly deep combat mechanics. I'm not sure I exactly *wanted* Alan Wake to be that, but I can confirm that I never wanted it to be something else in the moment, either.

    People like to clump Alan Wake in with all the other Twin Peaks inspired titles like Lone Survivor and Deadly Premonition, but it's actually so much closer in tone and scope to a Stephen King novel smashed into a Twilight Zone episode. It's a wonderful combo that imbibes its black and white B-movie horror with some sharp fangs.

    There are some incredible set piece moments in Alan Wake, too, including one memorable extended sequence in which you assist an aged classic rock band out of a mental health facility before using their stage to fight hoards of shadow demons to '80s guitar solos. High intensity sequences like that are then complimented by even better moments in which you're just exploring the small, woodland town of Bright Falls. The environments are detailed, full of character, and sport dozens of dumb collectibles and well-written NPCs to speak with.

    Speaking of collectibles, while Alan Wake has gotten a lot of flak for its reliance on padding game play by finding trivial items like furnaces or beer can pyramids, it also has one of the best collectibles in any video game. The protagonist's manuscript, which he can't remember having written and which seems to prophesize the future, is scattered throughout the world. Hunting through dead ends to forsee the future is kind of cool!

  • It's a shame that Digital: A Love Story can't resist the temptation to become a dramatic sci-fi thriller at the end, but I don't care. The tone at the heart of this game - it's got that particular sense of lonely interconnection the internet has granted us, that sense of a billion conversations occurring all at once in total silence, is captured perfectly. The internet is different now than the early iteration Christine Love recreates here, more deeply bisected by advertising and politics. There's obviously nostalgia at the heart of Digital: A Love Story, but that's not exactly all that drives it. Most of us have had a purely online friendship or relationship of some kind at one point or another. There's a sort of bittersweet impermanence to these relationships that Digital explores expertly.

  • Red Dead is not a perfect Western, but it does something important that a lot of the genre classics it's riffing off of don't: it gives the player cultural context for each disparate element of its gunslinger fantasy. To live out the life of John Marston as a surface level open world action game, the player would have to willfully ignore the effects of a brutally colonized America that pushes Native Americans into the fringes of an oppressive culture, or the dangerous charm of populist absolution. Even the most casual player, there only to raid towns and hunt wild animals will eventually be left to wonder whether or not the buffalo they've been firing at have continued to respawn.

    Racism runs its random, stupid course through Rockstar's fictional frontier but Red Dead, like many of its more classically minded filmic contemporaries, does not explore the reality of non-white American life. It does, at least, provide glimpses of systemic American carnage.

  • All the joy and wonder and whimsy of Super Mario Galaxy without any of the predictable Super Mario 64 hub structure to slow it down. Super Mario Galaxy 2 has a hundred brilliant ideas and it is in a hurry to show you *all of them* as quickly as it can.

  • Rock Band 3 is the most complete Rock Band (re: plastic rock party game) experience ever made. As a long time fan, there are a few lingering nitpicks I never managed to look past; namely, Rock Band 3 is clearly less concerned with satisfying fans looking for a challenge in favor of bringing in newer players. The soundtrack is somewhat heavily catered towards songs easily learn-able on its guitar teaching tool, and nearly all songs featuring the just-released keyboard peripheral were a bit of a slog on guitar. There's also just not a ton in the way of extra modes for the single player.

    All that said, I think Rock Band 3's soundtrack is really strong, if a little less surprising than its bolder, more reckless prequel and less classic feeling than the original. Still, there's a real sense that Harmonix really nailed their deep blue, stock photo model aesthetic and it is unquestionably the most complete entry in the entire series.

  • To play Limbo is to stand on the crooked vertex of a Disney adventure film and see its implied danger cast as a shadowed caricature of mortality at your feet. In the film, there is a boy who always *just* escapes the screeching car, or the hungry wolves, or the careening boulder - but, what if he stumbled?

  • The first Kane and Lynch was an interesting, but ultimately too-dry exercise in third person shooting. Dog Days, on the other hand, is an insane cinema verite murder spree. It had even less variety in combat and an even less present story than its maligned forebear, but it *goes places,* dude. IO reduced their titular protagonists - characters who were meant to be their ticket to AAA mainstream stardom - to substance abusing, barely-there human wreckage. The dynamic shaky-cam effect is unbelievable. What a thing!

  • No protagonist in video game history is as excited to get his ass kicked as Super Meat Boy. The reason for the resurgence of 8/16 bit titles wasn't just nostalgia.

    Team Meat proved the (then) assumed axiom that punishing, simple games could be commercially successful if a developer had just a smidge of budget and a lot of love. Super Meat Boy understands and shares the player's crave of twitch play difficulty. Because the loop begins and ends near-instantly and the levels are a only few screens long at best, the grind is enjoyable, but never punishing.

  • I've read Yakuza 3 is a divisive title in the series, and it makes perfect sense as to why: the first two Yakuzas are goofy Anime-escalations of classic Japanese Yakuza films for the PS2, and the characters are all abroad enough to fit into that mode - the story is constantly big, and the stakes are constantly escalating. Yakuza 3, by contrast, doesn't take nearly as many big swings, and at the story's conclusion so few members of the primary Yakuza cast have changed even a little bit throughout the course of the story.

    Yet, I think Yakuza 3 is a step up from the first two games. Yakuza 3 doesn't feel like a game that changes the circumstances of the Yakuza franchise, sure, but it's a game *about* something. At this point in the story, Kiryu has fully left his life of crime behind, but is it really possible to *escape* your past? His intentions of running an orphanage are pure, and the game spends a lot (re: a LOT) of time exploring his relationship with his kids, so much so that we understand Kiryu's life as a father is almost more real than his life as a political actor within the Yakuza. But the lesson Kiryu is forced to learn is that you can set yourself aside from the world all you'd like, but the world *will* find you and yank you back into it. No one truly gets to opt out.

    Yakuza 3 can be a frustrating game this way. It handles Kiryu's Okinawan life with patience and slowly unfurling characterization, but it also shoots the pace from 2 to 11 and then back to 2 again with no warning; the game's pace is directed like a drunkard drives a car. Yakuza's insistence on random encounters, too, is a constant disruption to the action. This game has an *extremely* generous amount of content, and so many of the 100+ sidequests are hits rather than misses, arguably displaying a greater consistency than the series' high watermark, Yakuza 0. Yet, inbetween these sequences, Yakuza keeps tripping over itself with meaningless fistfights that do little else than waste the players' time.

    Yakuza 3 is a messy game, messier than even the beautiful chaos that is Yakuza 2, but it's aspirations often outshine its more bull-ish qualities. It's simultaneously more insane than any Yakuza title before it *and* more subtle. An incredibly weird, but ultimately satisfying game.

  • Suda 51's No More Heroes didn't much care whether or not you were having fun in the moment. It was more concerned with making a complete statement about a video game culture dominated by mass murderers with machismo, always flanked by a needlessly sexualized female supporting character or two. It was a game that featured an entire open world that the player was forced to traverse but that had literally nothing in it - just a flat grey series of generic buildings and faceless people. It was the modern video game without the meaningless bells and whistles there to disguise an even more meaningless task.

    Nobutaka Ichiki's Desperate Struggle is nowhere near as bold a critique as its predecessor. The player now speedily flips through a variety of available tasks using the city as an actual, literal menu. Catchy NES-style minigames breakup the monotony of the game's fairly basic combat, which now features a bit more variety thanks to a larger arsenal of weapons and combat styles. The game doesn't pull the rug out from under the player as it did before, and instead fulfills every intentionally unfulfilled promise of the prequel, both in terms of mechanics and narrative.

    No More Heroes so often told the player to fuck off, nowhere more memorably than in the level that consisted entirely of an extremely long, empty hallway leading up to a massive boss that simply exploded once the fight began.

    Desperate Struggle, on the other hand, is more a 'fuck yeah!' than a 'fuck you.' It has some narrative ambition, and I actually think it goes on to say some interesting things about youth and celebrity culture that make the game feel a little more immediate a narrative than the first. It's also just a funnier game this time around. I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss the original's bite, but I fell hard for the sequel's sheer personality.

  • So, Kairosoft is kind of a dynasty at this point, but their first big hit, Game Dev Story, is seminal, in a way. First of all, the game was really hard, which I think is important as a representation of the industry. When you found your company (which you probably call Butthole Software), you do it during the early '80s, and are forced to keep up with a series of console evolutions that mirror real-world video game history. Game Dev Story could've been this really meta, in-joky kind of game but it isn't. It's a sincere, thoughtful sim.

  • People have categorized Mafia II as a GTA open world game in which there is nothing in the actual open world. Those people aren't wrong - but isn't that kind of fascinating?

    Unlike the cheap Godfather ripping off of Mafia, this iconoclastic follow up is a procedural crime-sim through and through. Things take *forever* to happen in this game, and large swaths of play time are spent driving around listening to conversations. Not many big budget games are like this, especially not during this era.

    2K Czech's take on 'late '40s post-war America is strange. Everything feels like this expensive soundstage, which makes playing the game feel rather like performing in live theater. Nothing about Mafia II's design suggests this is intentional, but I found this dynamic wholly compelling all the same.

  • Alpha Protocol promised more than it could deliver, but for those of us who actually craved *MORE* Mass Effect 1 RPG combat in Mass Effect 2's shooter-laden wake, this game was a rewarding, fresh take on that short-lived Bioware formula. It lacked polish, I guess, but the writing and mechanics were all there.

  • I played Bayonetta over the course of, I think, a week, and then I never played it again. It was like a fever dream. I know I loved the combat, I know I said 'holy shit' many times, I know I fought with my hair demons on a clock tower that sped horizontally through the sky, but I couldn't tell you why any of those things happened. I've thought about this game a lot over the last ten years, but in all honesty I have no idea what this game was about.

  • There are a zillion throwback platformers in the indie scene, but Terry Cavanaugh's VVVVVV stands out for its style, brevity, and assured design. By replacing traditional platforming with what is essentially an up/down gravity switch, levels in this game feel like speedy little twitch puzzles. VVVVVV can get pretty hard, but there's something so inherently fun and unusual about it that I found myself laughing through my failures rather than frustrated at them.

  • Conviction's departure from the tank-y, sim-y Splinter Cell games of old was striking. This game made me realize the classic, traditionally clunky stealth games (which I loved!), were dead. Conviction made it way too easy to be a badass and I maintain that games in this style are missing something - but you're not likely to find a better Jason Bourne simulator out there than Conviction.

  • I seem to remember 999 garnering an enthusiastic cult following during its release for its depth of storytelling in comparison to other games on its platform. That makes a lot of sense historically because, well - if you're interested in good stories and you're trying to find them on the Nintendo DS in 2010, yeah, it doesn't get much better than 999. Playing this game today on a modern platform, though, 999 doesn't stick out so much for its depth as much as its absolutely batshit plot justifications.

    Put as simply as possible, 999 is just Messy Saw. Its premise is Saw - nine strangers find themselves stuck in a series of deadly escape rooms with bombs in their guts that detonate if they break the rules - but in execution, it's *messy,* in every sense of the word. 999 is a bizarre interactive novel, featuring wild shifts in tone and characterization, just *awful* comedy, strangely non-threatening puzzles given the premise, an inexplicable devotion to the Titanic mythos, and endless inane intertextual references to pseudo-sciences and contemporary myths.

    All of this isn't to say that 999 is *bad,* more that I was a little shocked to play through it in 2022 given its cult status. I mean, 999's basic structure works well enough - although, come to think of it, the fact that so much repetition of story content is a requisite to see the game's true ending is actually pretty annoying - but the tertiary mysteries which propel the rest of the plot ('why does this character have amnesia? why are the characters all on a cruise ship? why is this 19 year old man's name fucking *Santa Claus?*) are all over the place. The final mystery is among its worse reveals, as the game leans fully into its metaphysical TK power mumbo jumbo over its more realistic, human qualities.

    999's finale in general is just utter chaos. I cannot believe 999 ends the way it does and I mean that in the worst way - I literally *cannot* believe it. I must have hallucinated that finale.

  • There were a lot of indie platformers in this period, but few felt as revelatory as RUNNER. Every level in this game feels like this whimsical pixie stick Atari journey. I always felt this little happy rush after a few levels of RUNNER.

  • DJ Hero was cool, dammit.

  • Dead Rising 2 feels distinctively more western than its predecessor, somehow. In more than a few ways, this was the final classic-style Dead Rising title. Chuck Green had a tough act to follow, and he's no Frank West he for SURE hasn't covered wars you know, but he does a respectable job all the same.

  • I'm apparently a contrarian on this, because I loved Samus Aran's portrayal in Other M. She's severe, unflappable and machine-like - but also defiant. Honestly, I think there's way more to like here than there is to dislike. This is a Team Ninja Metroid game - I think most people were disappointed that it wasn't just a Metroid game, but they're, y'know, wrong. It's a good combo.

  • In some ways, this Scott Pilgrim themed beat 'em up is closer to the original Scott Pilgrim comic book series than the film adaptation it owes its existence to. Getting Anamanguchi to score this was a stroke of genius, and Paul Robertson's take on Bryan Lee O'Malley's work is ultra convincing.

  • Case Zero was an amazing idea - what better way to advertise your game than with an hour long, $5 prequel? For fans it was worth the price of admission to get a taste of the whole experience, and for newcomers it was a cheap way to test drive the franchise. Ground Zeroes did it better, or whatever, but it missed out on Case Zero's bite-sized accessibility.

  • The praise for Halo: Reach's narrative design is overstated, as the overall plot is pretty generic late-Sci-Fi-franchise type stuff and the voice performances are fucking *abysmal* for what this game's budget must have been, but there is something to be said for Bungie's post-Halo 3 ethos. Like Halo 3: ODST, Halo: Reach does quite a bit to flesh out the broader Halo universe, depicting a more traumatic and vicious kind of fictional war than Halo 1-3's Immortal Stoic v. Saturday Morning Cartoon-militia framework. There's a sort of implicit psychological brokenness to Halo: Reach's cast of Spartan warriors, but because this is still ultimately a mainline Halo game, that potentially interesting internality only surfaces as an important part of the narrative in little gasps of conversation inbetween shootouts which dominate 95% of the experience.

    This is also a very post-Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Halo game, featuring uncharacteristic Big AAA Video Game Set Piece Moments that diverge from all the dynamic arena combat, and y'know what? These moments are pretty neat! Two sequences in particular stick out, one in which the player jettisons into space to do some spacecraft dogfighting which culminates in a raid on a Halo Star Destroyer thing a la Star Wars: Battlefront 2, and another in which the player travels by helicopter to a series of captured civilian areas in an urban environment.

    Of course, there's also the multiplayer suite. I think I'm in the minority on this one, but Halo: Reach's somewhat more complicated tightening of the Halo bolts makes this my least favorite Halo multiplayer title. The thing I like about Halo multiplayer is the rock-paper-scissors weapons and the impromptu super-heroics, and Halo: Reach's ever-so-slight Call of Duty-esque streamlining of the weapon-set and the addition of discrete armor ability pickups detracts form that, for me.

  • Metro 2033 is intense, evocative of the Dostoyevskian struggle between hope and nihilism, and willing to make the player uncomfortable to achieve its narrative goals. At its best, Metro 2033 is a shining example of blending action game heroics with thoughtful environmental storytelling.

    HOWEVER.

    It is also a game that measures your morality on the most sociopathic scale I've ever seen. Metro 2033's morality system insists killing a nazi - a nazi who is about to execute prisoners of war, who you will free if you kill him - morally equivocates you with that nazi, because all violence is created equal. It's a game that is very clear the last of humanity is contained entirely within the walls of the Russian subways, demonstrates that all inhabitants are white, more or less implying that every other race has been genocided by a nuclear winter, and then proceeds to tell its story as if this detail was trivial.

    There are some terrific core concepts within Metro 2033's design that I really appreciate, particularly during sequences in which the player is left to their own devices in some horrible urban ruin, surrounded by terrifying monsters, or when they're huddled in a half-collapsed apartment complex surrounded by post-nuclear pterodactyls. In other words, Metro 2033 is at its best when human beings are not a factor in its story. Way too much agonizing over flimsy moral decisions with, like, *crystal clear* correct actions in this otherwise clever shooter.

  • Pac-Man Championship Edition is one of the greatest video games ever made, probably the best Pac-Man game ever made, and one of the most infinitely replayable arcade games ever made. It is a perfect, singular video game that's biggest flaw was that there theoretically wasn't enough of it.

    This remake/alteration/sort-of-rerelease-that's-also-secretly-way-different-than-the-non-DX-game is basically the original Championship Edition but with bumpers on the lanes; DX is the mini-golf version of Championship Edition's The Master's tournament. Rather than a constantly shifting Pac-Man maze filled with typical Pac-Man ghosts, DX uses ghosts who linearly pursue the player in a sort of conga line, setting themselves up for easy losses. In other words, DX is basically a version of Pac-Man Championship Edition in which the player cannot lose.

    It's not a bad game, really, just a baffling one. Why would anyone make this? Why would anyone want it? Why would Namco replace the original version of the game with this much worse version, with no indication whatsoever that it's a completely different game, mechanically? On a fundamental level, I do not understand DX. It's a weirdly pernicious - though, admittedly, still fun - version of a much better Pac-Man game.

  • I remember being in total awe of this game when I booted it up. Not just for its sheer technical quality, but for its ability to create tone. I liked the idea that the game generated tension from conversation, and that much of the spaces I was exploring looked like the kinds of urban spaces I was used to in every day life.

    Still, in the face of the current backlash against David Cage's inability to produce a nuanced work in the upcoming Detroit, to put Heavy Rain under a microscope so far removed from its release reveals it to be, in both plot and tone, an above average episode of Criminal Minds *at best.* Heavy Rain is a work that practically collapses under convention, with each choice provided to the player just one more in a series of predictable instances of made-for-TV morality tales.

    There's no question that David Cage's lofty ambitions as a writer and director are hamstrung by his tendency to chase lowest common denominator genre tropes. And, let's be real, it is *hilariously clear* that he has no idea how to write a female protagonist or a person of color.

    Yet, Quantic Dream's intricately mundane spaces are at least very pretty. There's a sequence after Heavy Rain's prologue in which we see a series of New Yorkers in profile under a rainstorm as the city lives and breathes behind them. I would almost dismiss it as a tech demo, but its so nicely framed and detailed. These moments of filtered reality puncture the otherwise fun but clumsy narrative.

  • Street Fighter IV is one of the greatest fighting games yet made, as well as one of the greatest comebacks in all of gaming. Evaluating Super solely in terms of what it changed to the core game, I actually think it's a step down. For one, it lost that goddamn intro song.

    The issue for me is with the game's rebalance. Perhaps I'm just easily tricked by an undoubtedly more skilled online crowd into thinking the game functions significantly differently, but it seemed to me that Super's cast generally had a much wider window in which they could be punished and an expanded toolset with which to punish. It was all a little over my head.

    The new cast members are largely successes, though I could really do without returning mainstays like Abel and Deejay, who fail to really differentiate themselves from memorable newcomers like Juri and Hakan.

  • I sense that there's some backlash against this somewhat ubiquitous Adult Swim infinite runner, but honestly I think it was a fairly classic mobile title. I mean sure, it's entire existence is predicated on a joke, but it's satisfying to bust through obstacles and break high scores. Robot Unicorn Attack is the aesthetic realization of trillions of mid-aughts amateur flash game devs having the same dream set to a 4 Non Blondes cover band, and I LOVE it.

  • Solipskier is one of the most elegant yet goofy Flash game-y time wasters I've ever played. You essentially build a mountain as you're skiing on it, adjusting its curvature so that your skier can avoid pits and obstacles. As you do so, rainbows aND A SICK GUITAR SOLO SHOOT OUT OF YOUR BUTT HELL YEAHHHHH

  • It's Twin Peaks, but you solve puzzles! That's great! I'm bad at it but I liked spending time with Nelson. How often are video game protagonists just, like, polite human beings who go around bein' nice to folks?

  • I might be alone in this but I wanted to like Kirby's Epic Yarn more than I did. I love how it looks and sounds, but don't care for how it feels. The platforming just isn't very tight, and the whole yarn concept only stretches so far out of an aesthetic thing. Despite all that, every time I look at Epic Yarn on this list I'm grabbed by the urge to replay it. Hmmm.

  • Unlike a lot of platformer/2D shooter types on the iPhone during this period of mobile game development, Bulkypix's Pix'n Love felt sharp and full fledged.

  • Singularity is an eastern-European flavored mock up of BioShock, but it actually managed to get under my skin a little bit.

  • To most critics, Brotherhood finally streamlined all of the best parts about Assassin's Creed and escalated an already insane meta sci-fi narrative.

    To me, Brotherhood made an open world adventure game that was somehow also entirely linear. Despite being a game about free climbing, most objectives that task the player with scaling a building have essentially one correct path upward, and combat's been simplified to the point of afterthought. There is no encounter in the game that can't be resolved by mashing the counter button. It's just not engaging to play.

    I remember specifically one mission in which Ezio has to climb a small castle to rescue an ally. Partway up the climb it became evident that my only action as a player was to simply hold the analog stick towards the goal, making Ezio into a kind of slow, clunky Sonic the Hedgehog.

  • In The Incident, household objects rain onto you at random and you have to climb to the top of the impromptu trash heap. Presumably, once he reaches the top, the protagonist then has to climb down and spend a good long while thinking about what happens with waste in whatever his native country is before he is forced to once again climb the Tower of Trash-Babel.

    I often felt like the physics got in the way, but I loved how Big Bucket Software was able to give narrative justifications for all their platformer nonsense.

  • (Based solely on local multiplayer)

    Aside from the heralded Goldeneye branding, this game has next to nothing to separate it from its genre contemporaries. Its generic but solid enough combat mechanics and arcade-y local multiplayer modes give it a hint of that classic early 2000s flavor; even though I wish it all felt a little tighter, this one is fun to jump into now and again. Given that being able to boot up a shooter with your couch budz is such a rarity these days, that's honestly a pretty great feature.

  • Aside from the fantasy fulfillment of being able to play as both Spider-Man Noire and especially Spider-Man 2099, Shattered Dimensions is more or less a standard superhero beat 'em up.

  • I was never any good at MAG, and I honestly couldn't even begin to appraise it as a shooter. I was just overwhelmed by its size and scope at the time. One time I had to give orders to other players and I freaked out and maybe quit.

  • Oregon Trail with zombies. If ever there was an 'it is what it is' game, it's this. It is...what this is.

    Organ Trail is a fun idea, though, and it definitely manages to pull some thrills out of its pun-y conceit.

  • Fastar!'s ambitions far exceed its execution, but I think its attempts at cramming the entirety of an RPG's gameplay loop into 6 second chunks is admirable.

  • Black Ops is good in that it jettisoned the Call of Duty franchise away from its increasingly unbearable Modern Warfare counterpart, but I just don't think its campaign or map design hold up anywhere near as well as the Infinity Ward stuff. Also zombies is bad.

  • I wish I liked Skate, but I find the mechanics to be too plodding. Doing anything in Skate feels sluggish. I always feel like I'm just about to slowly collapse at any given moment when I'm skating around the game's generic cityscape.

  • Bonfire of the Vanities DLC

    The appeal of seeing the Bonfire of the Vanities brought to life is obvious, and while Assassin's Creed's overarching narrative of blaming wide breadths of human tragedy on a magic ball defangs the history quite a bit, Savanorola, the pious anti-intellectual, makes for a great villain. Unfortunately, Assassin's Creed II's renaissance Italy, while admittedly gorgeous, was already pretty clunky without the addition of a new grapple mechanic and a cast of fairly anonymous dictatorial underlings to stab. It all feels like unpolished secondhand content.

  • An unnecessary addendum to a great game. It plays well enough and it certainly looks the part, but who cares? It is the 2010: The Year We Made Contact of video games.

  • Dark Void's high concept was that it featured not only horizontal cover-based shooting, but *vertical* cover-based shooting as well. And y'know what? It works pretty well! But, ultimately, it's yet another cover-based shooter, increased mobility or not. It's almost parodic the way Dark Void manages to so radically alter the possibility space of its genre while simultaneously succumbing completely the the drudgery of whack-a-mole cover-shooting. The 'B-game' sect of game development was a lot more fun during an era in which video games were more than a handful of stringently defined militaristic shooting galleries.

  • Wii Party is fine for some mindless fun, but the shadow of Wii Sports looms large over this middling collection of time wasters.

  • This is a pretty good poker game. It's schtick gets old after an hour, but, y'know, hey - poker is kind of boring anyway.

  • iPhone

    A totally serviceable port of The Sims 3. Well - okay, truthfully, serviceable is a stretch. The problem is it just doesn't translate into mobile so well. This game could've really benefited from a simplified UI and a more compartmentalized reformat of the Sim's mechanics in general. It's like there's this great game here that I just can't access in a mobile format.

  • I wanted more out of Odyssey to the West. It was supposed to be this big moment in what performance and narrative could be in a video game, and maybe you fell for Andy Serkis' charms, but answer honestly: if you saw this game's cover art on a shelf with a bunch of movies, would you not dismiss it as some SyFy made for TV thing?

  • It feels like you play Bejeweled for a while until Bejeweled decides its time for you to have lost, then you lose, then you wonder what it is that made you boot up Bejeweled in the first place.

  • Maaaaan I wish this game worked as advertised. It does better than you'd think, but...maaaaaan. The allure of portable Geometry Wars far exceeds what's actually possible on an iPhone, or at least this particular port.

  • People say Darksiders is basically Zelda and God of War mashed together, which probably explains why I like about half of it. I bet there's a lot to like here, but I just couldn't get past the ugly, edgy highschooler art and sluggish gameplay.

  • I think a lot of people were surprised Ignition was so obviously terrible, especially considering the surprise hit that was Dead Space: Extraction. That said, Ignition is not without value. Its plot may be clumsily written, but as a narrative run-up to Dead Space 2 it's kinda neat.

  • While Peace Walker is an unquestionable step up from the plodding nature of its progenitor, Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops, Peace Walker is also the most frustrating Kojima directed Metal Gear title - hell, probably the most frustrating Kojima title period.

    For all the hubbub around Metal Gear Solid: Phantom Pain's blatant misogyny, Peace Walker is *much* worse. Case in point: Peace Walker encourages the player to peer beneath the clothes of a supposedly underage girl as they learn that this girl was sexually assaulted. It's *gross.* And it commits to the sexualization of this character. An endgame reward consists of the player going on bonus "dates" with her, sequences which grant a kind of 'underwear mode' reward in which the mission can be replayed, but this time with a slightly more naked teenager. And, like - whatever plot justifications come later for this cutscene as far as the girls age is concerned, hey, what the FUCK is that??? Seriously! That is a weird, fucked up thing to do! Genuinely reprehensible behavior on the part of the devs, Kojima most especially.

    Peace Walker's...well, I'll call it what it is: *light pedophilia* casts a dark shadow over the rest of the game. While Peace Walker's main plot gets into some pretty radical stuff, most of which is pretty compelling on paper, you can't just shrug off such an ugly and genuinely heinous instance of misogyny like that. It is number one with a bullet on my list of 'things I remember about having played Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker.'

  • Possibly the dumbest adaptation of a historically significant piece of literature in recent memory. It's one asset is that it fulfills the literature-nerd fantasy of seeing Dante's circles of hell brought vividly into life - the problem is, it's all filtered through this sub-Todd McFarlin 14-year old edge-lord creative vision.

  • Game Room was a tremendous idea, but it lacked the scope of games and the easy access to the games it did have for it to take off.

    First off, the game library. Game Room launched with a handful of arcade titles and added a few more classics over the subsequent months, but by the end of 2010 it was clear Game Room had become a dumping ground for Atari 2600 landfill titles. Secondly, the 'rental' concept, that you could plunk down a real dollar to play any game in the catalogue once, in the manner of an arcade, just wasn't generous enough to justify the cost. Considering the measly library of titles, spending a dollar to play, say, a two player-only hockey game for fifteen minutes is maybe the worst deal in video game history. Thirdly - Game Room was straight up broken wayyyy too much of the time for how basic it was!

    I have a lot of nostalgia for Game Room, don't get me wrong, but it was a sloppy product.

  • There was a time when smartphones were still exciting and new, and publishers desperately tried capitalizing on this new, enormous market by shoveling hilarious bullshit into the Apple store. There are still plenty of broken, misleading titles out there, but named-brand publishers have cleaned up their act quite a bit, and at least *present* their shovelware as passable.

    Still. It was a beautiful time.

  • Dinner Date invites the player to "become the subconciousness of Julian Luxemborg," its lead developer, which makes any direct criticism of it seem like a personal attack. A lot of Dinner Date's critics seem to have therefore opted to critique the form rather than the content. Almost ten years on, playing a game in which the player's primary interactions are to simply look around a room and fiddle with whatever's nearest you isn't all that unusual format-wise, but at the time it inevitably drew hundreds of "is the video game Dinner Date actually a video game?" thinkpieces. I suppose there was plenty to discuss besides the fact, then.

    I'm much more interested in the content. What ages Dinner Date is not its rudimentary design, or even the highfalutin marketing of its rudimentary design - it's Julien, the lead character. Essentially, Dinner Date is a game about a 27 year old white man who gets stood up by a 22 year old Asian woman - I only bring the woman's ethnicity up because her absence prompts Julien to make some offhand comment about what Asian women tend to do - who subsequently languishes in self pity. He literally gets wine drunk and discusses romantic era poetry with *himself.*

    Listen: I'm writing this in another time and place. We live in an era of incels, of regressive social politics, of Petersons and Cernovichs. It would be unfair of me to expect a decade-old game to completely align with contemporary culture. All the same, it's impossible not to read into Julien's sexual alienation and think about these things. Nobody likes to be stood up, but Julien appears to be drawing from something deeper, and more bitter. Why is it that, with some men, romantic foibles inevitably lead to some large-scale critical treatise on the very concept of sex and romance? Why is someone else always at fault? Why does one party need to be at fault at all?

    We also live in an era of ghosting, and the vagueries of texting, and swiping left. As a game partially about confusing sexual dynamics, Dinner Date is arguably as poised to stand as an evergreen time capsule of romantic isolation as it is destined to feel like it EXTREMELY came out in 2010. However - I have been ghosted before. I did not collapse into a mumbling, distraught tirade about how, like, 'men and women *really* are' or whatever. This personality trait is timeless, but it is not good. Julien's romantic interest broke a social contract and wasted his time, sure. It's perfectly normal to feel hurt. Sometimes you have to have a solo wine drunk kinda night. But to be Julien's romantic interest, to have decided to stay home, and then to see his emotional state so quickly plummet into what appears to be an aged, simmering frustration in this video game...wouldn't Dinner Date be the clearest sign humanly possible that you were right not to have showed up?

    At Dinner Date's conclusion Julien is smoking a cigarette out of his window, pontificating to himself. A popular webcomic is stuck on his fridge, conspicuously in frame. He goes on about how all it is people seem to do - himself presumably excluded - is drink, go dancing and fuck. He doesn't like dancing.

    My problem with Dinner Date is not its high concept, or its limited level of interactivity. I just don't *want* to explore this man's subconscious. In fact, watching the news at night, it seems like the world at large is being *confronted* by the subconscious of more extreme men than Julien on a daily basis. To voluntarily explore that head space is almost punishing.
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