Best of 2010
delicious_lie: Best of 2010
List items
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ANYBODY THAT DOESN'T PUT THIS AT THE TOP OF THEIR LIST IS A SHIT. Seriously this game is so great. Hilarious, hella tight controls, hella tight level design, and even more scrambling for the top of the leaderboard than Pacman CEDX, which is a joy I've never really had before.
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This game. Oh man. So many choices that aren't just good/evil, choices where even when you've done it and you've heard about the other option and you've considered it, you still don't know which one was the 'right' one. Not to mention the stuff from ME1's save carrying over, which was way more crazy than anything anybody was expecting, I think. A landmark game in a lot of ways. I really hope that more games will take cues from what ME2 has done.
Oh, and Thane for best character of 2010. <3
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Never been so scared in my goddamn life. Clearly the developers had a vision like this with the Penumbra games, but those games had a lot of barriers between you and falling off your chair in fear. The baddies were in full view a lot of the time, there were ways to get rid of some of the baddies for good, the physics engine was great, but not quite used to its full potential. Amnesia has no such problems. The monsters are terrifying, because you only catch glimpses of them, and when you do your character FREAKS THE FUCK OUT. Light is the only thing that can keep you sane, but darkness is the only thing that can keep you safe from the monsters. Somone on Rock Paper Shotgun summed up what I love about it when they said "at one point, my life depended on whether or not the door ahead of me was a pull door or a push door." No game before this even had the physics engine to support something like that, let alone the atmosphere, the sound design. I still haven't finished it. It's right there in my steam list, daring me to play it, but I'm too scared. That says a lot.
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If Super Meat Boy hadn't taken the hardcore platforming to dizzying new heights, this'd be the best platformer of the year easily. Goddamn genius. Does the Braid thing of taking a simple mechanic and then doing every possible thing with it. Great stuff.
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Adventure gaming at its finest. Hilarious, clever, no honey on the cat hair makes a moustache nonsense. With future vision to give you hints as well as an actual hint system, it's just so much easier to play. Add that to the smaller inventory of items and powers than most adventure games, and this is just a fun adventure game, where the solutions make some goddamn sense. Every single episode did something completely different, whether in the puzzles or in the story. Sammun Mak was a HILARIOUS character. Love it.
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Where Super Meat Boy went with a difficult but not frustrating approach to platforming, where deaths instantly respawn you to minimise the period of time where you want to throw your controller at the screen, Limbo went with a different tactic. Deaths are beautiful and horrifying. They happen a lot, and they are long and drawn out. At one point, while watching my friends play, I just didn't want to watch this boy die anymore. Death is a huge part of this game's theme and its mechanics. Like SMB, the design is tight. Every puzzle is carefully crafted to only be solvable one way. You try to trick the game by jumping too early or pushing the box slightly further, and you die. Clearly the designers spent a long long time fine-tuning every puzzle. I had problems with the game's story, but I loved the game's mechanics. It's a game full of eureka moments, which is obviously what you want from a platform puzzler.
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Sure, the writing gets a little cheesy sometimes. Sure, the shooting isn't exactly perfect. Sure, the ending was kind of a crock of shit. This game is still so great. A theme for my top games this year seems to be doing everything that you can do with a mechanic, and this definitely did that. Every combination of guns, flashbangs, flares, torches, environmental lights, NPCs, fireworks, etc. was used to great effect. While in retrospect the story's kind of garbage, the way it's told is ingenious in spots. The 'third person' bit? Blew my goddamn mind. The manuscript pages acting as a tutorial (kinda) was a great blend of mechanics and story. The TVs were fucking perfect. Alan Wake: Pretty great!
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I don't even have this on 360. I have this on PC, where it is VERY MUCH in beta. Servers crash, the game freezes, the menus are a mess, it's just totally full of bugs. But I still love it. It's got the TF2 thing of really awesome character design for all the different classes (except that tanks and gunners look basically the same at a glance), it's got the risk/reward of buying skills for yourself vs. buying jump pads/turrets/whatever for your team, it's got hilarious product placements for fictional products and it's got so much fucking style! Finally somebody simplified the DOTA formula far enough that it's enjoyable to people that aren't insane.
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I haven't even played this game. It's completely tongue-in-cheek, it's dumb as hell, the soundtrack is so unsuited to the scene at almost every point, the animations are ridiculous, the characters, setting and half of the plot is basically completely stolen from Twin Peaks, but it's fantastic. It's The Room of video games. It is a sign that video games are enough of a Thing now that a The Room of video games is possible. I just can't wait to see SWERY65's The House That Drips Blood on Alex.
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Take a boring tower defence game, add tactics, add a wonderful art style, add humour, add loads of micromanagement, add difficulty, add a little bit more difficulty and most importantly add dialogue about the importance of coffee to good science.
You've got a great goddamn game.
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