I'll be adding games to this list as I play through them this year. I'm hoping the gesture will get me writing about them, but mostly I'm curious as to how many games I actually finish. Also, not a completionist or Achievement guy, so anything here is just done, as in I've seen its ending (or one of its endings) and with it the bulk of what the game has to offer.
I went the Yes Man route, but I'm tempted to revisit this game for the other quest lines.
Single-player and co-op.
I'm not big on fighting games, but Mortal Kombat really does have the best single-player content the genre has ever seen. It also does a great job of teaching you its mechanics and rewarding you for playing well.
Along with Portal 2, one of my favourite experiences with a game this year.
I surprised myself by really liking ODST -- not for the fact that it was more Halo, but for its departures from the other Halo campaigns that make it feel like a unique side-story that warranted being released as a standalone game. These departures aren't enough to make you forget that it looks and plays about the same as Halo 3, but they are worth experiencing. Namely, the framing device of being separated from your squad in an abandoned city makes for a good deal of quiet, solitary exploration, with a decidedly un-shooter-like jazz-inflected soundtrack to accommodate the shift in mood. There's also an AI that guides you by manipulating signs, monitors and telephones in the environment instead of addressing you outright, which ends up being pretty eerie. These elements make time spent moving through the hub city tense, sombre, and more memorable than any of the shooter missions that are here triggered as flashbacks. There's also a sort of side-story radio play told in optional audio logs that I didn't listen to in its entirety but that, improbably, I found more involving than any of the Halo stories proper.
