What The Hell Will I Write About?
My New Years Resolution for 2011 is to get out a blog post bi-weekly (bi only because I’m not sure about how often I’ll be able to get concepts) so I need to get out a post soon. The difficulty is that news has been slow, not much in the world of gaming (LittleBigPlanet 2 is the first big release of the year, and thats not out for another 2 weeks), and I have 7 anime series that I’ve been meaning to finish but probably never will — Princess Tutu, Durarara, and Black Jack to name a few — so there’s not much I have to talk about.
So game of the year time! 2010 was a year for me to catch up on games I hadn’t played, so I can rattle off all the games I played from 2010 of the top of my head, so don’t expect me to be doing platform games, and I didn’t play the major games of the year — Red Dead Redemption, Assassins Creed Brotherhood, and Mass Effect 2 being the ones that come to mind — so this will be a unique list.
Most Improved Sequel: Pac-Man Champion Ship Edition DX
Pac-Man is a game that I think you’ve played, and after 30 years of the series going nowhere but down hill, Pac-Man CE DX is the definitive Pac-Man. Fully utilizing modern console graphics and adding new game mechanics, this is hands down the most improved sequel of 2010.
Most Thinking Game: Civilization 5
Civilization 5 is a game where you play as the English Empire if World Wars I and II hadn’t destroyed it. Some games are complicated because of the amount of micro-management that went into it — looking at you X-Com — but Civ 5 genuinely has that much depth. Short of Agricola, it is the only game where my turn can take 20 minutes of me staring at the board thinking.
Most Disappointing Game: Epic Mickey
After acquiring the rights to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit in 2007, I assumed Disney would re-release the old cartoons, make mad bank, and then do nothing with the character. I was delightfully surprised when I discovered that there would be a game using the old dark Disney cartoons — including Oswald — to re-engineer Mickey, especially with Square Enix trying to get Disney out of Kingdom Hearts. I was terrified of the final product. With a camera that hates you, controls that make Mickey move like Mario after smoking a joint and — the deal breaker — an art team that doesn’t know the difference between dark and hideous, Epic Mickey is the most Disappointing Game of 2010
Most Japanese Game: Kirby’s Epic Yarn
Epic Yarn is a game based around cute. No dark lord threatening Dreamland, no terrorist insurgency, no hidden past on the Space Colony ARK you have to retrieve (okay that was SEGA, but still.) The closest thing there is to a villain says “Soon Dreamland will be within my knitting needles!” and remember, Nintendo makes Kirby darker for the American releases. Sure, I could’ve given it to any number of weird DSi Ware releases, but I didn’t play any of those, so I say that the game based around cuteness is the Most Japanese Game of 2010, Kirby’s Epic Yarn.
Just Plain Bestest Game: Civilization 5
What can I say? I didn’t play Starcraft II, Red Dead, Etc., so my top 3 were Sonic The Hedgehog 4, Super Mario Galaxy 2, and Civilization 5. Sonic 4 was disqualified for only being the first episode, I’ll be able to give it game of the year when the final episode comes out, and Galaxy 2, well, it wasn’t bad. Galaxy 2 was just more, nothing new, nothing bad, but nothing interesting. Civ 5 is if Agricola, Memoir ’44, and Through The Ages were fused by Reiner Knizia, were ported to the computer by Valve, and then published by Inside Baseball. While I got 20 some-odd hours out of Galaxy 2, and probably 5 hours of Sonic 4 (only episode 1 of course) Steam has told me that I have played 469 hours of Civ 5. If that’s not enough endorsement, I don’t know what is. So that is my Game of the Year awards, if you don’t like them, it was kind of a last minute thing, so don’t get frustrated.
