2009 in Review - Part 1
By Naughton 7 Comments
The mad holiday release season is over, leaving my wallet lying in it's wake. I figure now is as good a time as any to do a "year in review" series of blogs. I've played a few games this year, and overall I think it was a great year overall. The first half of November was a little crazy, but now it's time to take a breather. Time to reflect. The first few posts in this series will be a Top 10 of the games I've played this year, followed by a post covering some of the bad games I've played, and then a short list of 2009 games I will have to catch up on in 2010. Numbers 6-10 will kept brief, while 5-1 will be their own posts. Let's start with #10.
10. Plants vs. Zombies
I honestly don't know when I will stop playing PvZ. It's sickeningly cute, has tons of fun minigames, and has a great sense of humor. Popcap has delivered here in spades. Even though the game is easy to a fault, it's still one of the best tower defense games I've ever played.
9. Street Fighter IV
I'm not, nor ever have been a hardcore Street Fighter fan, but I have played most of the series over the years, and Street Fighter IV was a great way to revisit those characters and settings in a beautiful, fluid way. I enjoyed what time I spent with it, even if the online felt like fighting an army of Kens. 
8. Punch-Out!
Punch-Out! on the Wii is everything that the NES original is; well made, charming , and at times brutally hard. Easily the best Wii game of the year. Hopefully we won't have to wait another 20 years to get more from this franchise.
7. Dragon Age: Origins
I'm a sucker for BioWare RPGs. I almost bought KOTOR on Steam yesterday, and I have the discs sitting in a drawer next to me. For PC and Xbox. There's a lot of menu wading, and ridiculous difficulty spikes, but those aren't dealbreakers by any means. The biggest problem I have with Dragon Age is that it came out not only right in the middle of the holiday release season, but just a few short months before Mass Effect 2. Hopefully that will light a fire under my ass to finish it before January 26th. 
6. The Beatles: Rock Band
Yes, it's really just Rock Band with The Beatles thrown in. But that's all that it needs to be. Over the next few days I'll be going through my top 5, which I'm really looking forward to. But until then, I'm going to actually play some games instead of just writing about them.