With the New Year here and plenty to look forward to, now seems as good a time as any to look back at the games that made 2010 the great gaming year that it was. Now, this is my own personal list and I don’t expect everybody (or anybody) to really agree with me; but it’s my list, so I can do with it whatever I please. Since this is my list, I have to have played a game in order for it to be eligible for listing (I’m broke, so I missed out on a lot of games this year) and, since I’m broke and haven’t played many games this year, I’m limiting this list to five titles (I wanted to do ten, but I could only come up with nine console games and seven downloadable (XBLA or PSN) games… so, there’ll be an honorable mention post after I’m done with the “full” and downloadable game lists).

5.) HALO: Reach

This is probably here due to my rabid fanboyism of the HALO franchise, but there’s no denying that this is a solid title that features what is likely the best campaign in any of the HALO games. Reach’s campaign doesn’t stick around for too long, but Marty O’Donnell’s beautiful musical score wonderfully compliments the game’s somber tone.

For the campaign, you take the role of Noble Six, a Spartan III in Noble Team (a Spartan group composed mainly of III’s with the exception of one II, Jorge), as you fight a desperate but futile battle against an unbeatable foe. Reach offers moments of hope in its bleak story that are too quickly shattered as the gravity of the planet’s fall truly begins to weigh on you—it’s a stark contrast from other HALOs and a welcome change of pace that brings more humanity to the game universe.

On the multiplayer front, you have the same addictive HALO formula that propelled the franchise to become the industry giant that it is. Matchmaking works as you’d expect with waits in the lobby being painlessly quick; Firefight has been given Matchmaking functionality; each day, there are new challenges waiting for you (which grant you the opportunity to earn more credits); and your Spartan is (cosmetically) customizable depending on how many credits you have available with more armour available as you rank up. It’s an addicting game and a worthy addition to the franchise that Bungie built.

4.) Darksiders

I didn’t really know what to expect going into Darksiders—I had seen a trailer and knew that you played the role of the Horseman War and Mark Hamill lent his voice talent to one of the characters, but that’s about it. It looked fun, Mark Hamill is in it, and I had a job (ie. money), so I bought it and discovered a polished action game that was like Zelda for grown-ups. It’s a game that offers a puzzle-heavy experience in a large environment that encourages exploration as you try to regain the powers that were stripped from you because War was duped into starting the apocalypse early. Combat is bloody and brutal with War swinging around his mighty Chaoseater—which has a proper, “weighty” feel to it—to demolish foes.

Darksiders could be described as Zelda meets God of War with World of Warcraft-esque visuals… I like to take the simpler route and just say, “It’s awesome!” I loved Darksiders and am eagerly looking forward to the sequel (which, I think, is scheduled for a 2012 release). If you love the Zelda games but are growing tired of Nintendo lacking to really do anything new with the franchise, Darksiders is the breath of fresh air you have been waiting for.

3.) Heavy Rain

Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain is one of the games of 2010 that I spent several years waiting for; the original tech demo that Sony showed off to display the power of the PS3 really caught my interest and when it was finally revealed that the game would actually be coming out, I had to have it.

I grew up on adventure games that sacrificed complex gameplay in favor of telling a well-plotted story—I love experiencing interactive stories and that’s what really drew me to adventure gaming. Quantic Dream redefined what I expected from adventure games as well as storytelling in games with Indigo Prophecy (or Fahrenheit), their previous release, so my expectations with Heavy Rain were high… very high. The game was well worth the wait and succeeded in exceeding my expectations.

It starts off slow, but it’s a necessary tedium that introduces you to the game’s controls as well as one of the central characters. One hour or so into the game, though, and things pick up as the fiction of Heavy Rain pulls you in, holds you tight, and has you gasping for air as the relentless pace and unremitting intensity keep the controller firmly in your hands. The plot isn’t flawless and leaves several questions unanswered at the end of your journey (questions that will likely remain unanswered as Sony thought it wise to have Quantic Dream add motion controls over expanding the story through downloadable content), but it is a truly beautiful game that is emotionally engaging and has a kind of intensity uncommon in most games.

2.) Mass Effect 2

BioWare is one of those studios that I’ve been following for most of my life as a gamer (which has been most of my life as a person)—from Baldur’s Gate to KotOR and Jade Empire, I’ve played most of the Canadian studio’s releases and enjoyed every one (I even really liked the Sonic DS game they made). The first title in the Mass Effect trilogy is one of the games that defines the XBOX 360 library and, being BioWare (even if they are now owned by Electronic Arts (frowny face)), the sequel was sure to be a must have game—and it is.

Mass Effect was initially planned as a trilogy (which was originally intended to be published by Microsoft and therefore XBOX 360 exclusive, but we won’t go into that now… it’s good that PS3 owners will be able to experience the franchise, yeah, but I can’t help but be a fanboy when it comes to losing one of “our” franchises… regardless the system, fanboys all feel the same way when they lose an exclusive), so it wasn’t a surprise when ME2 was announced, but the game exceeded expectations by having a sweeping sci-fi story with memorable characters and fast-paced gameplay.

The first game had stat-based combat, which made things awkward when you first pop in the game as you need to level up your character to become a soldier who can easily dispatch foes—ME2 does away with that and opts for a more action-y approach by replacing this clunky combat system with that more akin to a traditional third-person shooter. Some of the streamlining that was featured in the game (like the absence of shops to buy new armour or weapons) felt like a misstep for the franchise, but it had too much good to fault it for the little things. ME2 feels more like a third-person shooter/adventure game than the action RPG that the first was, but it also feels like a natural progression for the franchise as some of the deeper RPG elements from the first title felt forced or out of place in the sci-fi epic that BioWare crafted. Needless to say, this is a must-have title if you are a fan of anything good and I am eagerly looking forward to the trilogy’s conclusion (I just really hope EA doesn’t ruin BioWare as they have so many other studios in the past).

1.) Alan Wake

Five years… five long years, I waited for the release of Alan Wake. I was a senior in high school thumbing through the pages of a gaming magazine during lunch break when I came across an article dedicated to the Remedy thriller that puts you in the role of Alan Wake, the writer. Being someone who enjoys writing fiction and story-driven experiences, this concept piqued my interest and I tried to follow the game’s development… but new info was hard to come by and things went quiet for a long time. It wasn’t until E3 of 2009 that the game came back out of hiding as the small Finnish studio wowed audiences with the horrifyingly beautiful visuals, intense gameplay, and haunting story. Part Twin Peaks with a dash of inspiration from Stephen King and some Max Payne stirred in for good measure, Alan Wake was shaping up to be everything I was hoping it would be. It’s rare to find a game, or any form of entertainment, with as much intensity and intelligence as the well-crafted Alan Wake.

Waiting for the release of this game was nothing short of painfully long, but it was easily worth it for such an amazing piece of interactive media that breaks away from the paradigms of storytelling in games. It’s a linear game that has you traversing levels in a relatively straightforward manner, but the environments are huge and open which allows the player to explore and try to find new routes to get an advantage over the Taken—or avoid them altogether.

The expansive wooded areas populated by small-town folk and decorated by cabins and logging equipment feels familiar to me as a person (having grown up in a small town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan), but it’s a wonderfully foreign setting for a game. It may not have the polygon count of some of the bigger titles out there, but the world presented in Alan Wake is memorably beautiful in its masterful presentation of a rural town haunted by a dark presence.

Alan Wake’s story may not offer the same freedom of a BioWare game, eschewing dialogue trees in favor of crafting a mysterious thriller that has you picking up on new details with each subsequent playthrough. The writing is witty and has a natural feel that makes the story feel human instead of the forced melodramatic dialogue intended to be profound common in many other story-heavy games. The town of Bright Falls is as much a character as the people that inhabit it—and I’m not just saying that to sound like a clichéd gaming journalist writing about a Silent Hill type town, I’m saying it because it’s true. All the elements of this game are used to add to the story, even the soundtrack which is wondrously fitting and equally haunting—a song by The Old Gods of Asgard (which is really Poets of the Fall) is used to explain some of the back story.

This is a game that deserves more recognition and sales than it received and I hope that Remedy gets the opportunity to continue the story of my favorite fictional fiction writer. I’ve read reviews and complaints that Alan Wake is ultimately a disappointment since it took over five years to develop, but Remedy isn’t a huge studio—there’s like 50 people working there—so, they don’t have the ability to just pound out games like Activision’s studios can. Announcing the game back in 2005 may have been a mistake, but there is nothing disappointing about Alan Wake.