This was a great year of gaming for me.  I was surprised by new titles I hadn’t heard of, pleased by spontaneous buys, and disappointed by games I had planned to buy for months prior.  Given how long it takes for me to get through games I usually just buy them or trade for them on Goozex, using the service as a long term Gamefly type setup.  As my rate of consumption increases I have to wonder if using Gamefly as a set rate of expense is a more cost effective solution, especially given the pain when I buy a stinker.  We shall see.

Below is a list of the major games I have played throughout this year.  With each is a little quip about them, and they are categorized by awesomeness.  Without further ado, here is the list:

Amazing adventures –

Borderlands – This game came out of nowhere and slapped me in the face.  I remember seeing some trailer for it, saying it was cool, then promptly forgetting about it in a sea of incoming games.  On release week, it was brought to my attention again.  The action RPG style, cell themed graphics and co-op features immediately attracted me to the title.  By release day I found myself in a Best Buy, shelling out my $60.  It was worth every penny.  Not only did it play awesome, and have great co-op, but Gearbox continued to put out DLC for this game.  In fact, I would say that I played it 6 to 8 months out of the entire year.  It had great legs to begin with, but the DLC made it into a supermodel.  At the time of this writing I have 2 days and 6 hours into my primary character, a siren.  I have enjoyed every minute of it, both on and off line, and continue to play it currently in between other games.  This was my game of the year.  Full Review

Mass Effect 2 – Literally taking your character from the first game and continuing the story (with story elements correct between games where you made hard choices) this game consumed a fair bit of my spring.  Like Borderlands, the action RPG style played really well, but the story and dialog options gave this game a lot of richness in its universe.  Leaning on my knowledge of how I never went back for a second playthrough on the first game, I played every major side quest in ME2 to their fullest.  I soaked it up like a kitchen sponge.  The plot twists and engaging nature of the story made the 30+ hours I put into the first play through worth every minute.  I knew myself well though, as I never picked it up again after the ending credits.  There was DLC released for it, but by then I had already pawned it on Goozex and was back into Borderlands again.

Splinter Cell Conviction – As a fan of Clancy games for years, this one really baked them all into one for me.  Taking the more agressive tactical elements from Rainbow Six Vegas and blending them with the assassin’s stealth of Splinter Cell, Ubisoft has created a game that tore me away from even one of my favorite games of the year Borderlands for a few months of distraction in a tight leather armor suit.  In order to take advantage of some online co-op opportunities I picked this up used off eBay of all places.  I played it online with a friend on some pre-planned weekends without ever having done the story.  I had so much fun with these couple stints that it spurned me to not only play through the entire game, but we also played through the 5 hour co-op storyline again on the highest difficulty but in half the time of the previous run through.  This game consumed a lot of time for me and I enjoyed every minute.  Previous SC games never had the pull into me that this one did and I look forward to future games if they take this direction and blend of game play elements.  Full Review

A nice fling –

Split/Second – I picked this game up after I had gotten too frustrated with Blur.  Like most games, I got it on a deal and always figured I could dump it on Goozex if I didn’t like it.  When I get into the game I was overjoyed by the gameplay and explosive graphical representations that the environment provided when you triggered events to crash your opponents.  The play and design reminded me a lot of Burnout 3 or 4, especially with the generic car makers and repeating tracks.  Though it was a rush to play up through episode 7, the game started to wain for me as the races became too difficult to get enough points to unlock progression in the game.  This lead me to having to backtrack and play previous episodes over again just to unlock newer races, which ended up being on most of the same tracks anyway.  Online play was decent, but more often than not it was hard to get a match together with a limited amount of people playing online.  It was an amazing game for a short time, but lacked the legs to make me play more than a month or so.

Kinect Adventures – I played this force fed game that comes bundled with the Kinect sensor for several days.  Given that it was my only Kinect title out of the gate it’s not like I had a lot of choice unless I wanted to keep playing with swipe and voice controls in the dashboard.  Overall the play experiences were very tight and controlled at a level of accuracy that easily surpassed the Wii we have.  With only 5 main game types and a dozen or so levels in these types you can easily see all there is to see in the game after a long day of playing.  Granted, they are still fun to go back into, but only to get a next higher level of performance or score.  Gold medals seemed to come a little too easily but Platinums were rather challenging to get.  Lots of fun, but it certainly spurns you to get more games for the Kinect in short order.  To be fair, how many people just stayed at Wii Sports when they got the console?

Doritos Crash Course – I have to say, this is one of the best platformer games I have played in a long time.  Taking your XBL avatar and running it through a physical obstical course is both fun and entertaining.  A lot of great features were put into a game that was obviously setup as an advertisement.  That’s the real rub though, you only see the Doritos name in the title screen and at the start of each level in small letters.  Small things like the screen cracking in a virtual spiderweb of your TV glass when you get thrown towards it and a collection of falling animations spice up what could have been a fairly boring game.  For a free game, it’s easily better than many paid XBLA games I’ve nabbed in the past.  Good job Doritos!

Red Steel 2 – This game was picked up on a whim.  Mostly it was because I wanted to play with more swords than Wii Sports Resort would offer.  Since the second iteration of Red Steel required Motion Plus, I figured it had to be fairly accurate.  For $7 I got it from the Target clearance rack.  Needless to say, the game play was fun, but it didn’t keep my interest very long.  The combination of sword and shooting works out pretty well, however the Wii seems to get out of sync with my movements if the action gets too heavy, causing me to get a beatdown while waiting for it to figure out what I’m doing.  I love the concept, and the game is fun overall with a fairly decent set of story cutscenes to string you along, but it just doesn’t have the staying power to be played more than a few times for me.

Missed connections –

Blur – I had a lot of excitement about this game.  When both Blur and Split/Second came out around the same time, I had to make a choice.  Ultimately what won for me was the ease of slipping into play with this game (Mario Kart on steroids), the social challenge pieces and the 4 player split screen (where S/S only had two).  Once I got it for a third of retail within a month of launch via a Kmart sale and a publisher coupon.  I figured worst case I could make a “profit” by dumping it on Goozex if I lost interest.  The first couple brackets of play were a bit of fun, and I leveraged social challenges to a couple people on my friends list, played split screen with my kids and played a bit online.  After about the third bracket I found that though I was still gaining fans, I was unable to progress.  It seemed as though they had designed the game in such a way that you would have to build up enough fans in order to unlock some car that would make you win.  I tried several more play sessions to progress and could not.  At this point I basically gave up and put it on Goozex for trade at a high point value.  Bye bye Blur baby.

Crackdown 2 – As mentioned in my previous post, I was deeply invested in the first game, so naturally I thought this one would hold true and be at least the same if not better.  With so much pent up anticipation it was only a matter of time before I finally got the game and its true colors were shown to me.  For the most part, the game had less story and structure than the first, leaving me with only a checklist of objectives to roll through.  No amount of new features like wing suits or helicopters or zombies could keep me from the fact that I was plopped down in an open world and merely told to just go out and have fun.  The fun lasted for a while, but without major plot points or really any guidance it came down to just blowing things up and collecting orbs.  Fun for a while, but not enough to even complete any set of tasks.

My DS – I swear I played something on my DS this year, but I have no idea what it was.  Most likely it was Peggle…still.  Recently the DS almost falls into phone gaming for me:  something to quickly pull out and use for short sessions.  It’s too bad because when I have a large amount of time (airplane) I love sinking a bunch of time into games like GTA: Chinatown Wars and such.  This just wasn’t one of those years.  We have Wario DIY in the house now, so maybe I’ll start playing with that.  Full Review

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And there you have it, a year of gaming for me tied up in a pretty little bow.  For the upcoming year I have a hard time getting excited about anything I have seen on the horizon except for Mass Effect 3 and Portal 2.  However if 2010 was any indication, I’m sure a game will come out of nowhere and slap me about the face with its awesomeness, just when I need it most.

- Ben Mazhary-Clark

I loved the first Crackdown game.  Though I was a little late to the Xbox 360 adpotion party, I showed up in full force and bought Crackdown as my first real game for the console.  Given that I was so fresh to the console and this was really my only primary game for it, I easily spent 3 months in early 2007 playing through it.  I even went as far as to purchase the DLC for the game, though I never found it as challenging and fun as the core game itself.  Suffice it to say, I was a Crackdown whore though.

A couple years later, Real Time Worlds attempted another game called APB.  This was set in a similar environment to Crackdown, but was more focused on becoming the next big MMO, which of course we all know WoW will keep that crown until the end of time.  Since Real Time Worlds was putting all their focus into APB, they pawned Crackdown 2 onto a new studio that had grown out of RTW called Ruffian Games.  I was aprehensive of this at first, but was still loving the idea of a sequel to a game that I spent so many hours and even months on.  Now anyone who has done any amount of serious video gaming should know that you are setting yourself up for failure once you start getting too excited about a game.  It seems best if you just let them sneak up and slap you across the face, as this year’s release of Borderlands showed.  However, I let myself get excited into the hype of Crackdown 2.  Reading previews, watching trailers and developer diaries, I should have known that I was setting myself up for disappointment.

Dell had a deal a few days after release of the game, which they said was a pre-order discount but they were still running it well after the release date.  Taunted by the good deal on the game I placed an order and refreshed package tracking pages in rapt anticipation.  When it arrived I coveted the cover and swooned with dreams of Agent sugarplums in my head.  Putting in the game I found myself in the same world that I had left three years prior, though it looked much more worse for wear.  Controls and game play came easily, and contained the same niggles such as the struggle of getting a proper enemy targeted when in a horde of target-able objects.  I threw myself into the game, looking for new adventures.

For a while, I was honestly entertained.  I built up my skills, explored the world and new game concepts such as closing freak breaches, which proved to be one of my favorites.  The game was fun, but it was nothing new.  There were new objects to play with, like the magnetic grenades that allowed you to suspend objects in midair in springy fashion.  Even these wained my interest quickly and I hunted for more depth in the game.

I didn’t find it.

The entire weak storyline had been stripped from the game, leaving you only a series of tasks to be done in almost any order.  Though the appeal of the open world was there, and great expanses of sandbox to play in, there was so little direction in the game that I felt there was nothing to work towards except a hollow checklist of activities.  Freak breaches closed: check.  Control point controlled: check.  Collect every gun by bringing it back to a checkpoint after I was through a bunch of the game and forgot the mechanic: check.

I spent a good couple weeks in my copious free time hacking and slashing through this game.  I even got most of my skills up to the amazing cap level of 6 (ground pound and the wing suit were fun at this level).  I closed breaches, controlled points, and tried to destroy the infected zombie apocalypse, which seemed to be the only real goal of the game.  More often than not, I found myself frustrated trying to get these goals done.  Freak breaches could only be done at night, and I often found myself crawling across the map to close one, only to have dawn arrive and I can’t work on the objective, which caused me to wander off and forget about it until it was dark again, getting to it just in time for…dawn again.  Arrrgh!  There was one last control point that I needed to complete, but the bulk of the enemies were on the roof of the building above the point.  If I went too far away from the point while climbing the building then it would reset and I would have to start over.  The weapons were satisfying, explosions abound, and I never found myself at a loss to blow things up or mow them down.  Nothing really new to see here, but that was fine as well.  Graphics were also about the same.  With a texture filled cell shaded world it is a style I’ve come to like a lot, though it’s not really pushing the pixels that hard.

Orbs were a big part of the last game and this iteration was no different.  I found them easier to get in many areas and had mighty asparations to get them all this time.  I was also excited about online co-op, since the previous game didn’t perform well in this area at all.  Needless to say, I didn’t get all the orbs because my lack of enthusisiam preventing me from wanting to stay in the game long enough to do so.  To be honest, the orb hunting was one of the highlights of this game for me.  I easily spent hours doing nothing but this.  In the end though, it wasn’t enough to keep me going.  Co-op never happened either since no one I knew had gotten this game.  Better luck next time.

Overall I was left unsatisfied.  I wanted it to be the sequel of a lifetime.  What I got was less of an overall game, put out as a quick money shot for a publisher, riding on the successes of a prior title.  Had this game even been given the shallow storyline treatment of the first game, or better yet sliding even closer to a GTA title, it would have done so much towards giving the game structure.  Instead I didn’t even bother finishing it, and it goes into my Goozex queue of shame.  I pour out a drink for my homie Crackdown 1, may you rest in sweet peace in my gaming memories.

– Ben Mazhary-Clark