Best of 2010

So 2010 has been and gone and has left in its wake some great gaming news stories. Harmonix being sold, the falling out between Activision and Infinity Ward's founders (and subsequent hiring by EA) and at E3, Sony and Microsoft showed off their motion controllers to the world.

More about 2010 after the jump...



And then there was the games. 2010 was a pretty good year for gaming on the whole, with some excellent games released such as Rock Band 3, Call Of Duty Black Ops, Deadly Premonition, Red Dead Redemption, Halo Reach, Gran Turismo 5 and many many more released this year. I shall honour my favourites (that I've played) in this post.

Anyway on to the awards:

Best Beard in a Game

There can only can be one possible winner for this one and it goes to....

The beard in this game is as fine of an example as you're likely to see.

Best Flash Game

There was one flash game that kept me going back to it with its bright visuals, fun battle system and it doesn't take itself too seriously.
That game is Epic Battle Fantasy 3.

  

With a score that would put some other games to shame, this game hooked me from the start and wouldn't relent until I did. At 3 a.m.
A notable mention has to go to Pixel Purge and being the best "twin stick" shooter I've played on PC
Epic Battle Fantasy is playable on Kongregate here
Pixel Purge is also playable on Kongregate here

Biggest disappointment of 2010
This could be a long one. There were many things in 2010 that were disappointing, from the SSX reveal trailer to Sony's Move controller with its confusing configurations for games. There was the long delays (and eventual release) of Gran Turismo 5 which somehow ended up looking worse than Forza 3 which came out a year earlier, though that might not be totally fair as ALL the Forza games have been released in the time its taken Polyphony to release GT 5.

Although all this was disappointing the biggest disappointment of them all was...

I was personally looking forward for this game to come out for so long, I was demolishing every preview and screenshot I could find and D-Day came and...it was crushing. I remember Final Fantasy as being sprawling epics where you can get sidetracked and lost for hours and hours, having to endure random battles to get where you want or just go wherever you want.

Imagine my hurt when I loaded up the game and was met with corridors...lots and lots of corridors. I checked the guide, which I thought would help my epic adventure, and noticed the game's maps doesn't open up until you're at chapter 11...of 13...

Add that into a battle system that, again, holds your hand until chapter 9 i think with a confusingly told story that you need to read pages and pages of background information to understand, and this game crushed my love for Final Fantasy. I may crawl back like an abused lover, but the love will never be the same.

Now for the big one, my favourite game of the year that I actually played. If you believe that I'm wrong, its either I haven't played the game you're talking about, or you're entitled to your opinion (even if it is wrong)

Game of 2010

There was only one game this could be, one game that captured my heart and although I disagreed with some of the design choices, it was still head and shoulders above everything else in scale, scope and just sheer joy for the player. That game is of course:

The saga of Commander Shepard is one of the most well told stories in gaming this generation with so many little side stories of rifts that are hundreds of years deep like those of the Krogan and, well, almost every other species. The great thing is though that you can play this game 30 times with 30 different Shepards and have a unique experience every time. My current play through has a female Shepard who was going to get busy with Garrus (a turian) and at the last second she cockblocked him, thus being in my books, a space slut. But you can be a patriotic war hero, or just a dick.

This is all without mention the combat which has been tightened up, at the expense of all the pesky RPG gameplay getting in the way. The interrupt system in cutscenes is also a welcome addition and allows you to really feel involved in the story as it all unfolds around you. Add in lots of callbacks to the previous game and Shepard meeting up with a lot of his/her old team mates, and if you're a male Shepard, finally getting it on with the quarian Tali.

Honourable mentions go to Enslaved, which managed to be a gaming equivalent of a Hollywood blockbuster and still be fun, Halo:Reach which proved jetpacks improve EVERYTHING, Rock Band 3 which allowed us to finally realise that we can be the Piano Man, Dragon Age:Origins if only for "Morrigan Disapproves", BlazBlue for proving there's a space for 2D beat 'em ups and Scott Pilgrim for proving that a licensed game can be good (and had a kick ass soundtrack from Anamanaguchi)

And that neatly wraps up my impressions of 2010. It's been a good year, here's hoping 2011 will provide enough stories to keep us all entertained inbetween all the games.