1. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories (Wii)

My favorite Silent Hill of the series, Shattered Memories consistently surprised me with its atmosphere and narrative quality, its smart use of motion controls, and in how itmade me feel. It’s also the first time I’ve seen my girlfriend not only grasp but fully master a third person control scheme within moments of picking up the controls. We had an amazing night playing the hell out of this game, and while its psycho-analyzing replayability is apparently amazing, I feel content leaving my experience on the high note where it ended. It really, really sucks that there won’t be another one like it.

2. Limbo (Xbox Live Arcade)

Limbo is an ambient video game. It’s not particularly hard, not particularly long, and certainly not complicated. But every moment of its design exists to put you in a very specific space. From its vignetted silhouette imagery and its understated, gorgeous soundtrack, to the soft rumble when your character jumps and the way his legs kick when he’s climbing a vine, there is a quiet hostility and fragility to the game world that I can’t remember seeing elsewhere. It doesn’t hurt that the game has one of the most subtle, beautiful endings of any video game I can remember. It’s just a sweet, terrifying joy to play.

3. Vanquish (PS3/360)

I’ve already written at length about Vanquish. Suffice to say I still stand by my words. It’s an absolutely mindblowing third person shooter that asks players to do things they have always done in new and exhilarating ways. It’s a stunning technical achievement, stylish as hell, fun to play and – like Batman: Arkham Asylum – simply rock solid. I cannot recommend it enough.

4. Bayonetta (360)

Another Platinum game! The best character action game since Ninja Gaiden Black, it blew my expectations away with its generosity, ridiculous sense of humor, willingness to bewrong, and with a score-attack system that still keeps me coming back to levels again and again and again. It’s gorgeous, fast paced, tight and funny as all hell. Alongside Vanquish, Bayonetta stands as an epic middle finger to anyone riding the Japan’s Game Industry Is Dead band wagon. Show me a western game that can do these things, then we can have a conversation.

5. Starcraft II (PC)

You can strip away the multiplayer, and Starcraft II would still be one of the absolute best single player games on the PC this year. It has some of the worst characters and writing I can think of, yet the sheer joy of simply playing its missions and fuddling about with the bounty of new toys it throws your way makes for an astonishing real time strategy title. What puts it on top compared to other excellent genre entries like Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising is its unflinching dedication to delivering one of the hardest core multiplayer experiences on the market. I heard Starcraft II described as “Football II”, and this is absolutely true. FPS tourneys are moot; This is the first de-facto PC gaming sport.

I was not only surprised to really enjoy watching games being played, but Starcraft II awakened a competitive instinct in me I wasn’t ware that i had. It’s as much a cultural phenomenon as it is a game, and for that it’s one of the biggest gaming events of 2010.

6. Amnesia: The Dark Descent (PC)

As a Lovecraft fan with a big spot in his heart for 2005′s Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, Amnesia was like receiving a love letter. With its excellent Lovecraftian story, tactile physics, fun insanity mechanics, terrifying monster encounters and pervasive sense of dread, Amnesia is one of the best first person horror games since System Shock 2.

7. Red Dead Redemption (PS3/360)

I have a confession to make. Prior to Red Dead Redemption, I have never completed a Rockstar game. Even the ones I really enjoyed, such as Bully. There’s just always a moment where the games have fizzled out for me. I stopped caring about the characters, the story just drags on and on, and the mechanics become a set of errands to run. It boils down to a sandbox, and after a while that sandbox becomes boring too. Red Dead Redemption somehow avoided all those pitfalls. It offers characters I genuinely cared about, and a world I wanted to explore. Red Dead Redemption also gets this year’s Game That Almost Made Me Cry award for its amazing ending and choice of soundtrack.

It’s the best game Rockstar have made. That’s a pretty serious accolade.

8. Minecraft (PC)

I knew Minecraft was amazing the moment I realized I could plant a tree on a tree. I spent forever building the biggest tree imaginable, way above the clouds, and tunneled an epic tree house through its leafy walls. Then I dug out the ground beneath it, making it a free standing world-tree in the middle of the ocean. It was beautiful! Then, later, a friend of mine built an even taller burning swastika on the horizon, just to spite me.

Minecraft is the most delightful game I have played in years. It’s a roguelike made out of Legos, a playground that inspires creative rivalry. Its non-physics allow for amazing constructions. An undersea glass house filled with trees and flowers, leading to an underground mining and construction complex. I can only hope Mincraft grows laterally. It doesn’t need to be deeper. It just has to offer more variety.

9. Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (PS3/360)

I don’t know how Criterion do it, but they are the best guys on the planet for making arcade driving games that still feel grounded in reality. Hot Pursuit is a game about angry cars smashing angrily into each other while sounding angry. It’s addictive, gorgeous, competitive and, I’d say, the best Burnout game since Burnout Revenge. The Autolog feature is a great piece of design that facilitates constant score-attack rivalry, a form of multiplayer I’m absolutely stoked is returning to form.

10. Darksiders (PS3/360)

I’d written off Darksiders as a heavy metal Zelda clone. It turns out it IS a heavy metal Zelda clone. But it’s so good. Nintendo has dibs on the Zelda formula to the point where nobody else seems to regard it as a feasible genre. It reminded me of when Volition cloned GTA with Saints’ Row, and responded to criticism with “GTA is a genre”. Zelda is also a genre, and right now there’s only Zelda and Darksiders in it. And they’re both absolutely stellar. If you enjoyed the Zelda games at all, I can not recommend Darksiders enough. It’s a stunning game.

Wrote a giant freaking Vanquish review just now. My hands are actually tired. You should check that game out. It's, er, pretty good. 
http://www.giantbomb.com/vanquish/61-29903/user-reviews/?review_id=17300    

What a garbage name. But I suppose that's fine, considering it's being helmed by garbage people. Honestly, in my mind, Zampella and West and the whole COD "empire" they built is frat boy bullshit from one end to the other. I could not care less what these hobos think up. It'll be a cold day in hell before they manage to even vaguely surprise me. 
 
Also, from Eurogamer: 

Picked up Brutal Legend the other day. I'm laughing and laughing, and the soundtrack is fantastic. But I don't think I'm actually enjoying the game. In retrospect, the same rings true for Psychonauts, where the experience was a bigger deal than the gameplay. You know what? I'm okay with that. If Double Fine is to be the company that delivers story and character first, gameplay second, they wouldn't be the first; Hideo Kojima has been doing this shit for a decade, and for my money, Double Fine's stories and characters make me happier. 
 
I gotta say though. I'd totally play a metal-related RTS if it was done properly. On the PC.

This game is freaking awesome. I'm really into the quiet, lonely atmosphere, and the chase bits aren't half as bad as i thought they would be. Climax have WHIPPED the Wii! This game looks and feels absolutely amazing! Best bit yet has been simply handing the controllers to my non-gamer girlfriend and see her handle the look/move system almost immediately, while she has struggled with dual-stick setups in the past. I guess the addition of a pointer makes it less abstract? 
 
The only problem I've had though is kind of big. Early on in my first play, at the bit where you shake the cans around to find the key, at first i got lost and couldn't find the cans, so i paced around for a while. Suddenly the sound started going really weird on me, and i'm not talking Silent Hill weird, i'm talking WRONG weird. For a while i was apologizing for it to my girl, saying oh hey, you know, sometimes Silent Hill games will fuck with the sound to fuck with your head, but after it kept screaming at me even during the diner cutscene i had to admit something was definitely wrong. Like it would randomly play the sample of Harry yelling for Cheryl, pitched up, over absolutely ear-shattering bursts of noise. I have never heard shit like this come out of the Wii before. Just shrill, digital clipping, repeated looping samples played wrongly. Nuts. Pausing the game stopped it, though resuming the game kicked it right back in. I did a bunch of testing with other games to make sure it wasn't my amp messing with me, and when i rebooted the game it didn't happen again. 
 
Anyone else have this happen on the Wii? With this game or others? It's the single craziest sound bug I've ever come across.

Finally got to play it. From the first 2 hours of play (which i understand isn't much), it's the most unpleasant game i currently own for the PS3. The previous titles were retarded, but endearingly. MGS4 is the bad kind of retarded. At some point, the use of barely altered cow moos as the Gecko "roar" was greenlighted, and that's fucking emblematic of the whole experience. 
 
Kid with the keys to his dad's Ferrari. That's the vibe i get from this game. People have GOT to stop apologizing for Kojima's bullshit, because he has consistently had his hands on something good for years but has always managed to make those things stupider than they need be. That isn't the sign of a master of his field. It's the sign of someone who needs to be told no.

Good things first. This game is awesome. At first i thought this was going to be some exploitative titty party, but instead B turns out to be a pretty good character. She's certainly oversexed, but the vulgarity of it all somehow removes it from titillation and into the realm of.. Empowerment? She's the first female action game hero (for a game of this sort) that i think actually works. My girlfriend said, after watching me play it for a couple hours, that this is the "gayest game she has ever seen", and she means that in the best way. It's just a total gay-parade of a game. Just nothing but flamboyance and skin and celebration of being something else. I heart it.
 
I'm really enjoying the witch-time dynamic. Like Ninja Gaiden (my favorite action game series by far), it trains you to look for patterns on a screen-wide scale instead of concentrating on one enemy alone, and getting pure platinum medals feels well earned and very satisfying. It's funny how the defining factor of games like this tend to be how you avoid damage, rather than dish it out. The combat is mashy enough to be effective under stress (there's a lot of that), but deep enough with its timing windows that you can really lay on the murder on individual enemies if you wish (you typically wish). The boss fights are truly epic. The result is, for the most part, a game where you'll happily replay levels for better ratings, simply because it feels fair, and a clean victory is up to YOU, not the odds the game throws you. For all the talk about how western development is "taking over", i haven't seen a western title that nails this aspect of an action game ever, and i hope Japanese devs are proud of this.
 
It does, however, have a bunch of flaws. It's a game after all, games have flaws. Typically the camera will treat you pretty good, but i have had enough camera freakouts to mess up my flow. It's not as thoroughly borked as the Ninja Gaiden 2 camera was, but it's certainly in the way more than you'd like. It made me think of how much flak NG2 got for its camera, and how little I've heard about Bayonetta's. Worse is the absolutely ridiculous story. I don't mind a ridiculous story, but in Bayonetta, there's a lot of it. Lengthy cutscenes offer nothing of interest, with reams and reams of dialogue that for the most part don't even make sense. It just won't shut up! It doesn't help that the landscape is strewn with tomes of lore. For a game that's so absolutely retarded (i mean that in a good way), this abundance of self-important lore is baffling.
 
The worst bit by FAR has been a level I'll characterize as straight up "broken". Ostensibly a bike racing.. thing.. It instead suffers dramatically from absolutely abysmal physics, repetitive design, and a section where i would fall through the ground on every single pass until i started slamming the jump button randomly until i somehow made it across. This whole level seems absolutely amateurish compared to the sheen of the rest of the game, and i wish Platinum had straight up cut it from the game. I don't ever want to play it again.
 
But my god. I'll recommend this game to anyone up for a crazy Japanese variety cabaret show filled with ridiculous characters and over the top madness. I haven't had this kind of base joy playing a game in a very long time. I hope it sells well and Platinum get to make more of this.