My Favorite Game From Every Year I've Been Alive Part 5: 2009 to 2012
Middling games mostly. It doesn't get better.
I Hate Videogames
Read the previous installment (2005 to 2008)
2009
I didn’t mention it in the summary for 2008, but the housing crisis officially started. This isn’t a financial analysis blog. We talk about videogames and make unfunny jokes, but even I know that giving out mortgages to people who can’t repay them would be a disaster. Same with college loans. You can’t give out fifty thousand dollar loans to an eighteen year old expecting them to pay it back. The bubble’s gonna pop eventually, especially when no one can get a job with their degree, thanks to degrees being devalued, because everyone is going to college, because everyone can afford a fifty thousand dollar degree thanks to the loans.
Is what I would be saying if the world made sense, but it doesn’t. The money’s fake, you can print more if you need it, and if you’re a huge bank, you’re deemed “too big to fail” and get a government bailout. I sure wish the government had bailed me out when I spent my entire paycheck one month on gacha pulls. I made a power point explaining my situation to the bank, but the guy handling the case said that spending all my money on PNGs of anime girls was unwise, even if the summer outfits were, admittedly, really cute.
This air of financial instability underscores 2008 up to around 2013, when it mysteriously vanishes and everyone wonders why everything is so expensive all of a sudden.
Swine flu hit in 2009. Swine flu comes from pigs, and the best way to combat it was to combat the pigs directly, by hurling birds at their flimsy fortresses. That’s right it’s Angry Birds! The hit mobile game that took the world by storm and created the phenomenon of kids coming up to you and asking if you have games on your phone. This simple little physics game was easy to learn and it had enough randomness to entice casual players and keep them in a “one more level” loop. If you were alive during that time, you know how massive it was.
Plants vs Zombies also released this year to make sure your new iPhone’s battery would be spent on flash games instead of calls. Much like Angry Birds was based off Crush the Castle (a flash game), Plants vs Zombies was a take on the popular tower defense genre that dominated “addicting flash games” sites. You’d place down little plants and defend your house against waves of zombies, each with their own little quirks. The game was surprisingly good, offering a simplified but clever take on the tower defense genre. It had a lot of levels and it explored each of its gameplay ideas thoroughly. This was from the time that even a flash mobile game was made with some level of competence.
If you wanted even less gameplay in your game, and more social interaction, you had Farmville. A Facebook game that had everyone and their mother watering digital crops and pestering each other for more supplies.
This was when free to play was really hitting it big. We had the short-lived mess that was Battlefield Heroes, a more kid-friendly take on the Battlefield franchise. It had some of the things you know from the series; tanks, planes, objectives, with a cartoony presentation and cooldown-based hero powers. It was incredibly unbalanced and pay to win.
Speaking of free-to-play games with cooldown based hero powers, we got League of Legends. Yes, this game is ancient. What started off as a continuation of the Defense of the Ancients mod by ex-developers, quickly became its own mega-hit in the coming years. It popularized free-to-play with terrible micro-transactions, showing you could get millions of players by offering a small percentage of your game, and charging out the ass for the rest. Seriously, look up how much it costs to get every single hero in the game. Oh, but you can get them for free by playing. You just need to play non-stop for the next eight years, but it’s doable if you’re violently unemployed. I used to play League religiously back around 2010, but then DotA2 came out and I stopped. I’ve tried playing it again, but it’s completely different. It’s like a Ship of Theseus thing. Over the decade plus that this thing has been online, it has been receiving balance patches every few days. Once everything about it changes, is it even the same game? It sure is. I can still get forced into a 40 minute game with the most toxic people imaginable and get reported if I so much as call one of those shit-heads a shit-head.
Enough of these free-to-play baby games, it’s time for REAL GAMES… that I didn’t play! First we got Little Big Planet. I never had a PS3 (or any PS after 2), so I never played this, but it looked fun. You could make your own levels and play them with friends. This translated to “remake Mario 1-1 endlessly, but with dicks”. Every level had dicks. MadWorld didn’t have dicks, but it had you shaking your Wii remote like one. Perform gory kills in this Frank Miller inspired brawler from Platinum. It looked like fun, but at the time I was, and still am, deathly allergic to motion control gimmicks. I sure hope they don’t become a fad at some point. That’d be miserable. Speaking of misery, Demon’s Souls! I’ve heard it’s good, but I’m not getting a Playstation just to play it. We also got Dragon Age: Origins, which is like Mass Effect, but fantasy. I didn’t understand this one. Mass Effect was already a worse version of the classic Dungeons and Dragons rpgs like Planescape and Baldur’s Gate, so then they go and release a direct comparison to those, but with less depth?
Speaking of games with “origin” in their name, X-men Origins: Wolverine. It was a third person hack and slash where you played as Wolverine. Its main gimmick was that it was the first time you’d see Wolverine using his claws to actually slice and maim people. The firs time if you’d never read any of the X-men comics, that is, which is who the game was aimed at. People who were huge fans of the Marvel movies, but didn’t read comics. The game itself was a lot of fun. It had a leap mechanic and you could fly around like a deranged cat and claw at your enemies. It was diet God of War, but like Coke Zero, it doesn’t taste as good as the real thing, but it’s still pretty dang good.
Red Faction Guerrilla was a game all about breaking stuff. It featured a detailed physics engine that would let you destroy ANYTHING. Well, any man-made structure, at least. It was fun, but the destructible environments made the game more of a novelty than anything. Since every building was made of crackers, you couldn’t have indoor levels, and since simulating an entire building crumbling took so much processing power, everything had to be completely bland. You’d have entire apartment buildings that you could take down by ramming a car into them, but once you were inside, you’d see they were empty with no chairs or tables, and the walls were flat gray. It was still a fun time, up until a random grenade blew up the building next to you and flattened you with it.
If you wanted to break everything, including the ground, you could play Minecraft. The game was still in its early phases of development, but it still showed its potential. The simple gameplay loop of gathering and building was incredibly addictive, and you could make a lot of cool stuff even with the basic blocks at the time. No one could predict that it would become the biggest game ever, but we were having fun building brown bricks in Minecraft.
The Batman Arkham series premiered this year, making you really feel like batman. This was a big shake-up at the time, since every other Batman game had sucked. This wasn’t just good for a Batman game, it was good all around. It put you in the Arkham prison, setting you loose on a bunch of henchmen. This game was good, but it also popularized “Detective vision”, where you’d press a button and the objectives would be highlighted. This then lead to the death of intuitive level design and organic sign-posting. Instead of making a level that could be navigated by humans, just stick a billion props in there and have the player press the “where do I go?” button to highlight the one thing you need to look at to progress the game.
If you wanted more puzzle detective work, you could check out 999, or Nine Hours Nine Persons Nine Doors, or Zero Escape. I’ll be calling it 999 from here on. It was a puzzle visual novel where you had to escape rooms and solve a mystery involving a Saw-style game with a cast of colorful characters. The puzzles were a little easy, but entertaining, and the overall story was nice. The characters were memorable, and the soundtrack was incredible. The only thing about this game is that I don’t know of anyone who played it, and I want to discuss the True Ending with someone because it makes no sense whatsoever.
Borderlands doesn’t make any sense, either. Premiering in 2009, this birthed the Looter-Shooter genre, where you shoot and get loot. The part about this game that doesn’t make sense is how it managed to become such a massive franchise. Its core gameplay is abysmal. It’s a slow, weightless shooter with hallway levels and enemies that are so dumb they would be more at home in congress. It’s boring, the characters are insufferable, there’s constant chattering, the world is depressing, the RPG elements are about as deep as a dog’s water dish and the game boasts about its millions of guns but they all feel the same. Genuinely baffles me how anyone could find this entertaining.
Prototype also came out this year. It was a sort of spiritual successor to the game Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction (which I don’t know if I mentioned in 2005). You’d leap from buildings, take down tanks and turn into a horrific tentacle monster. I’d say more about it, but the PC version is a pain in the ass to get working on modern systems.
Halo ODST released, too. It was alright. I spent most of my time with it playing Firefight. The Firefight mode in Halo Infinite is a disappointment.
Out of all these wonderful sloppers, which one did I give my government bail out to?
My pick for 2009: Bayonetta
Along with MadWorld, this was Platinum’s first official game, and they knocked it out of the park… and peaked early but that’s just my opinion. The game itself is a wonderful spectacle fighter where you play as Bayonetta, a pissed-off librarian who takes down monstrous angels with style. It’s fun, it has some great set pieces, the combat is great, it’s fluent and accessible while still having some technical bits. The enemy design is good, with a nice mix of more passive combo fodder and aggressive enemies that make you play defensive, combat encounters are nice and varied. The soundtrack is great, too. The only downsides are the over reliance on quick time events and the parry accessory is a bit overpowered. Other than that, no notes. Excellent stuff.
I can’t wait to see what gaming wonders await in the exciting year of…
2010
This was the year My Little Pony premiered, giving birth to bronies. Well, that’s certainly an omen of things to come. I want to go back to 2009 now, please.
Why go back to 2009, when there are videogames to discuss? We got Scott Pilgrim vs The World: The Game. A truly horrific beat-em-up made by people who don’t know the genre. Don’t believe me? I reviewed it in detail here.
I still want to go back. Maybe the next game will change my mind: Fallout New Vegas. Oh God. Everyone loves this game, but I can’t stand it. It’s so boring. The shooting is terrible, the world is massive but empty, and I don’t care about the shallow RPG elements.
That last one didn’t work, but how about Metro 2033- AUGH. I hated this one, too. Limp shooting and every encounter is interrupted by a cutscene. This is less like a game and more like a rushed tour through a theme park. I don’t see the appeal of it at all.
Halo: Reach? I guess? It wasn’t awful, but I didn’t care about it at all. Funny story about this game, I bought it and played it for a few hours when it released. Then, years later, I was cleaning out a closet and this game fell out of a pile of junk. I looked at it and had a genuine moment of “when did I buy this? I have this game?”. That’s how much of an impact it had on me. The thing I remember most is Egoraptor’s old cartoon on it. Turns out that no, I was in fact not ready for Halo: Reach.
Wow this year’s looking to be a real stinker. Maybe a list of games I didn’t play will cheer me up. We got Epic Mickey. I have literally no opinion on this whatsoever. Head empty, zero thoughts. I just know it was advertised a lot on release. Danganronpa premiered this year. I have it in my Steam library but haven’t played it yet. Seems alright, I’ve enjoyed other games by these developers. Its fanbase is annoying as hell. We also got Heavy Rain. JASON! JASON? JAAAASON. Shaun? SHAAAAAAAAAAAUN. SHAUN.
StarCraft 2. It was a game.
Vanquish came out. I’ve played this. It’s a cover-based third person shooter. I don’t like those. Oh, but you’re not supposed to use cover, you’re supposed to slide around! Slide around from cover to cover. I’ve never clicked with this game. Everyone describes it as this high-octane, stylish shooter but it’s a cover shooter with sliding.
Super Meat Boy is like Vanquish. They’re both games. I liked Super Meat Boy. It was fun, and it was one of the first big indie breakout hits.
We also got Mass Effect 2. I played this on release. I loved Mass Effect at the time, and was excited for the new one. Then I played it and accidentally 100% completed it and got the good ending. I went to do a second playthrough with my other character and realized I had already seen all the game had to offer. Fantastic. Amazing. Miranda’s ass saves this game from being completely forgotten.
Man there has to be something to talk about this year. Let’s see here… uh… there’s Powder Toy. A free physics simulator that simulates little particles with detailed fluids, realistic temperature changes, and electricity. You can make little logic gates. It’s fun. It’s the most interesting thing here.
There’s also Shank, a 2D beat-em-up I reviewed. It’s good. Skip the sequel.
Donkey Kong Country Returns was a good time. It brought back Donkey Kong for some platforming fun after years of absence. It had varied, creative levels and some legitimately challenging bonus levels.
Red Dead Redemption came out this year. Grand Theft Auto in the old west. Saying it like that sounds like I’m being reductive, but it’s a compliment. It nails the atmosphere and it really makes you feel like a rootin’ tootin’ shootin’ cowboy. This is also one of the few games where I care about the story. It’s a tale of redemption (as the name implies) told through some stellar character writing. It also uses actual themes, reinforcing the central point of the narrative with parallel stories. Imagine that. A game where the story has effort put into it! The ending is kind of jarring, since John dies at the end (the game guy, not the book) and you’ve seen him survive worse. This moment introduced the term “ludo-narrative dissonance” into popular use and launched thousands of pompous essays on videogames.
Out of all these incredible games, which did I pick as my favorite?
My pick for 2010: Just Cause 2
Yeah, I picked this over Red Dead Redemption. I know, I know. It’s a lot more fun. Both games are open world third person shooters, but only one of them has a grappling hook. I know about the lasso, but it doesn’t count. This one’s a win for Rico. This action-packed game had you blasting government property to liberate a small island nation. There was a lot of freedom, with a detailed physics engine that let you tether things together and use them to cause mayhem. You could also shoot a speeding car’s tires and watch as it spun out of control and exploded. It was like playing Grand Theft Auto with cheats on, but more fun.
I’m sure things will get better from here on.
2011
The year of Party Rockin’. Bacon was the most epic thing ever, moustaches were ironic, everyone was mocking a 13 year old girl for making “Friday”, and they would have kept going but they took an arrow to the knee.
I REALLY want to go back to 2009 now.
Why was everyone getting injured by arrows? Because of Skyrim. It’s fallout with swords. The biggest game ever, ported to every system multiple times. It spawned a legion of unfunny memes and saturated gaming discussion for years. It birthed thousands of modders who are still keeping this frail skeleton of a game alive well past its expiration date. I have not played this, and have zero interest in it. I don’t care how many times Todd Howard ports it, I’m not playing it.
I guess this means we’re in the “games I didn’t play” section. We got LA Noire. It’s like a movie. I can look back on it now and appreciate the fact that it’s a Rockstar game that isn’t Grand Theft Auto. The Stanley Parable was also a non-game. It was about walking around and listening to a narrator be oh so clever about videogames. Post-modernism and hipster irony are to culture what hydrochloric acid is to soft tissue. There’s Shadows of the Damned, whose development is a huge mess that’s worth looking into. The game itself looks interesting.
We got Bulletstorm. A game I reviewed and thoroughly hated.
There’s Portal 2, which was really good. The multiplayer mode is a ton of fun, and it has some great puzzles.
Deus Ex returns with Deus Ex: Human Revolution. A game that’s really good, until you get to the much less detailed and much less interactive second half.
Red Faction Armageddon was a follow-up to Guerilla, but it wasn’t received well. People, myself included, expected another open world physics sandbox, instead we got a corridor-based third person shooter set inside caves. No one wanted that, and the game was completely ignored. Years later, I got the game on sale for two dollars and gave it a shot. It’s a surprisingly good third person shooter with great physics. The environments are repetitive, and the later levels throw an insane amount of enemies at you, to the point where it gets tedious, but it’s a decent game. Undeserving of the hate it got. Then I remembered one of its advertised features was a unicorn gun that shot rainbows out of its ass. That’s horrifically 2010s coded. Epic bacon unicorn rainbow moustache lasers.
There were also three games with the number three in them. Serious Sam 3 was the third installment in the Serious Sam franchise. It was horrifically ugly, sporting the signature brown and bloom that was the style at the time, and it brought Sam back to ancient Egypt to retread old ground. It’s long, tedious and it has some terrible indoor sections. Saints Row 3 was also a piece of software you could buy. It ramped up the kookiness of the second game into self-parody levels. It’s very of its time, with some changes to the formula that I didn’t really enjoy. The third three in this trinity is Marvel vs Capcom 3. Chaotic, wildly imbalanced, but tons of fun. It was superseded by the Ultimate edition, which came out a few months after the original.
TERA online launched this year. It was an MMO with real time action combat. I played it for a bit and it was fun, even if it ran like garbage. It also had big bazoogas.
SpaceChem also released. I don’t know when I’ll get to talk about this game, so I’ll do it here. It’s a very complicated puzzle game where you combine atoms to make chemical compounds. You program the process into a machine and watch it go. You have to be mindful of each atom’s placement, where they spawn and where you output them. The puzzles get even more meticulous when you have to chain multiple reactors together and manage multiple inputs and outputs. It’s a tough, replayable puzzle game that will test your brain more than any other puzzle game. It made me realize that I’m a big dumb dumb, but it’s still very entertaining and beautifully made.
Let’s get on with the favorite.
My pick for 2011: Dark Souls
This year sucked. I didn’t want to pick Dark Souls. It’s not that I don’t like it. It’s the opposite. I didn’t want to pick it because I like it.
Wait, that doesn’t make sense, does it? If it’s my favorite game, it means I like it, right? Yeah, but I only like Dark Souls. I don’t have any specific affinity towards it. It’s the best out of this year, but I wouldn’t take a bullet for it.
Another reason why I didn’t want this game to be my pick for 2011 is because I have nothing to add to the games’ discussion. Everyone thinks the game is great, but loses a lot of steam after in the second half. I agree with that assessment, and have nothing else to add. No controversial opinion, no unique insight, no funny jokes. Just Dark Souls good. It hard. Funny praise the sun. Jolly co-operation. I am an NPC when it comes to Dark Souls.
I’ll pick Bulletstorm as my anti-favorite. It’s terrible, but at least I feel something for it. Enough to write 8,000 words on it. I enjoyed Dark Souls, but I couldn’t write a high-school essay on what I think of it. I’d have to use a lot of filler words and cheat the spacing to 2.5 while upping the font size to 16.9 to get it to one page.
Why not Portal 2? I liked it, but I played it once on release and never again. I replayed the first game a few times, but I haven’t thought about Portal 2 until I wrote this article.
2012
The world was supposed to end in 2012, according to the Mayan calendar. Looking at the games for this year, I’m glad it didn’t.
The Wii U released.
So did Borderlands 2- dammit. The sequel to one of the most boring games of all time. Now, with even more yapping. I’ve heard people say this game is fun with friends, but I’ve tried it with friends, and it sucks. It’s not that we’re boring. We can do crosswords together and have a blast, it’s the game that’s boring. Once I was playing with another one of my friends, and he was telling me something he did, but the characters in-game kept talking, so he’d stop what he was saying to let the game talk. Then after around three or four interruptions, he yelled “SHUT THE FUCK UP FOR ONE SECOND” and had to mute the game. It’s a boring, infuriating game that only offers the most baseline entertainment to barely qualify as a game. It’s a skinner box. Hell, getting locked in a room with a button that dispenses food in reaction to stimuli sounds like it’d be more interesting than Borderlands 2.
On the subject of beloved first-person games that put me to sleep: Dishonored. It’s a stealth game, but you’re incredibly overpowered and nothing is a challenge. I tried to do a ghost run of the game and, not only is it a walk in the park, it’s also incredibly unfun. The vast majority of the gadgets you get are for killing, which is discouraged in a stealth run.
While I’m tanking my reputation, I might as well talk about FTL: Faster Than Light. An indie game where you’re a ship captain, and you have to navigate hostile sectors of space. It’s interesting in theory, incredibly dull in execution. Most of the time you’re getting hammered by foes that outmatch you, scrounging for parts and money and sort of stumbling along making guesses, hoping you don’t land in a sector with a sun and a pirate. There’s no real rhyme or reason to encounters, and there are two limiting factors in exploration for some reason: fuel and time. It’s all fine and dandy until a stray missile takes out your oxygen bay and everyone dies.
Halo 4 was certainly a videogame. It was the first Halo game not done by Bungie, and it shows. It’s an awkward game that tries to mix Halo and Call of Duty. I played it for a bit on release and didn’t like any of it. Ended up returning it.
PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale was Sony’s answer to Super Smash Bros, but that answer was completely wrong. This was a platform fighter featuring Sony’s most iconic characters such as Fat Princess and a Big Daddy from Bioshock? Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon were curiously absent, but at least we got Kratos. This game was TERRIBLE. The fighting was janky and awkward, the movement was stiff, the combo system was bizarre, the fact that you had to kill an opponent with a super move turned matches into endless stale-mates, the stages were visual vomit where you couldn’t tell what was going on. The presentation was cheap and flimsy, the music sucked, the animations were lazy, the sound effects were flaccid. Bonafide honest-to-goodness dumpster juice pressed onto a disc. If I popped this into a console and got a video of Crash Bandicoot being executed by ISIS I’d be less offended.
After that, I don’t think it could possibly get any worse. What’s next? Oh it’s none other than Mass Effect 3! I bought this game on release day. I drove to Gamestop and got a physical copy of it, the same day it came out, paid $60 for it, brought it home with the intention of enjoying it and seeing the conclusion to the epic Mass Effect saga and Commander Shepherd’s incredible adventure. What I got was a choice between three different colored explosions, and the ship’s comic relief character boning a clanker. If I had popped this into a console and got a video of Garrus being executed by ISIS I’d be less offended. This game is the main reason why I skip cutscenes. Imagine being invested in a mid story over three entire games only to be let down at the end. Not just the end, the entire game was a series of disappointments. Not even Miranda’s prodigious posterior could save this mess.
Now it’s time for everyone’s favorite: the end of the article! No, it’s the section where I list what I didn’t play from the year and disappoint my readers, just like Mass Effect 3 disappointed me. Starting with Diablo 3. I have never played Diablo. No hate or anything, I just never wanted to play it. Fez came out this year, and because Phil Fish is a little crybaby, we won’t get a sequel. I know his name and last name and he’s only made one game. There are a lot of people who don’t even know who Shinji Mikami is, but they know Phil “I made one game and got bullied off the Internet” Fish. To be fair, that’s one more game than I’ve made. Speaking of Shinji Mikami, he worked on Resident Evil 4, which I like. He didn’t work on Resident Evil 6, which I don’t know if I like, because I haven’t played it, because Shinji Mikami wasn’t involved in it. See how it works itself out? Keeping with the Mikami theme, Lollipop Chainsaw. I haven’t played it, it looks interesting, but I heard the PC port was bad. Will have to get my hands on it some other way. The connection is that Chainsaw was made by Suda 51, and he worked with Mikami on Shadows of the Damned. Bravely Default is another game from this year I didn’t play. It looks like a fun JRPG, and I like the art style, but I never owned a 3DS. SSX had a sequel this year. It looks like a soul-less reboot that misunderstands everything the original stood for, and I never played it, even if I loved the SSX series.
Adding to the list of mobile games we got Clash of Clans and Subway Surfers. These should be in the previous section, but I wanted to categorize them thematically with the mobiles.
Ninja Gaiden 3 released, disappointing everyone with its weird combat and lack of weapons. It was received so poorly, that they released the Razor’s Edge edition a few months later, which added a lot of missing content and re-organized some levels to be more playable. Thanks to its tanky enemies, drawn-out fights, bad enemy design, terrible boss fights and constant quick time events, Ninja Gaiden 3 was considered the worst in the franchise. Then Ninja Gaiden 4 came out, did the same things, and people praised it. For the record, I think NG4 is worse than 3. At least 3 kind of feels like Ninja Gaiden.
This year also gave us Street Fighter X Tekken. This fighting game was a crossover between Street Fighter and Tekken, if you couldn’t tell by the subtle name. Its most innovative feature was the timeout system, where fights wouldn’t end by knockout, but by running down the clock. The game was rightfully disliked for being slow, encouraging time scamming and for its scummy DLC practices. It had on-disc DLC, which would become normal in the years after. On a related note, we’re getting Tekken X Street Fighter any day now. Yup. Just wait.
If you wanted a better fighting game, we got Skullgirls, a tag fighter using the ratio system from Capcom vs SNK 2. It had a small roster on release, but each fighter was different from the rest, with distinct playstyles and movesets. It had a great, hand-drawn art style and a kickin’ soundtrack. Lots of fun, and it had way better netcode than anything at the time.
There was also XCOM: Enemy Unknown. A reboot of the Xcom franchise of tactical alien warfare games. It’s a great game, but I never managed to get past the first UFO raid mission. It’s one of my gamer badges of shame. I will get back to it at some point.
We also got a sequel to Counter Strike? Yeah Counter Strike: Global Offensive. An overhaul of CS1.6. Fun fact, the gap between the original Counter Strike and Global Offensive is now shorter than the gap between Global Offensive and whatever comes next.
With all this dreck on deck, who did I pickle to tickle my pickle?
My pick for 2012: Gotham City Impostors
Yeah baby, we’re back with the bizarre niche picks. What the hell even is this? It’s a Call of Duty style first person shooter set in the Batman universe. You play as either the bats or the clowns and you shoot the enemy team with guns. There were different classes based on body type: Heavy, medium and small, each with different health values and speeds. There were loadouts and fun gadgets. There was a glider that let you dive bomb enemies, and if you were using the heavy class, it was a one-shot kill. To counter that, there was an electric lawn gnome you could place that would zap them out of the air. The glider was the preferred cheese tactic, so I’d run the gnome on every load out, zap the flyers down, tea bag them for a bit while they were stunned, then kill them. It got me called a looooooooot of slurs on Xbox Live, so you know it worked. You can’t play it anymore since it was an online-only game and the servers were shut down. This happened to a lot of games from this era.
Runners up: Oh wow! We finally have enough decent games to merit their own runner up section again!
Dragon’s Dogma. It’s a great RPG with interesting combat and some neat little details. It’s a goblin, arisen! It fears fire! Strength in numbers, arisen.
Hotline Miami. Fast paced, brutal, mostly unfair. Make split-second decisions on the best way to clear out rooms full of mafiosos. The soundtrack is one of the all-time greats.
Sleeping Dogs. A man who never eats pork bun is never a whole man.
Mark of the Ninja. Forget Dishonored. That’s old and busted. Mark of the Ninja is a much better stealth game.
Binary Domain. A cover-based third person shooter, and I don’t like those, but this one’s fun. It has good, responsive shooting and some fun moments, even if the boss fights are almost as bad as some in Ninja Gaiden 2.
Conclusion
That was the early 2010s. An uneven set of years that had some surprisingly good stuff hidden away. 2012 turned out to be a strong year, with a lot of good stuff. Around this time up until maybe 2018, my picks will become very safe and boring, seeing as how there were a ton of games releasing each year, but a lot of them were stinkers, if you couldn’t tell by my overwhelmingly negative reaction to a lot of them. Stuff really started to stink from here on out, so expect things to get even more boring. Right now I’m looking at the 2013 list and I see Bioshock Infinite. Hooray.
Tune in next time to see what other shockingly wrong opinion I have on games! Maybe I’ll say something wild about Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor, who knows what I’ll think of Bloodborne, and my opinion on Overwatch could shock and amaze! Probably not.
All this and more on the next installment of this nonsense series!
My favorite game from this years is Starcraft 2, but I didn't realize it at the moment. Having played a lot of SC 1 and Broodwar, back in 1999, I waited 10 years for SC2 and I liked it and enjoyed the campaign but at the same time I thought it was worst than Broodwar, and I didn't like that the campaign didn't release complete.
But years later I realized that I really, really enjoy the game. And no other RTS felt as good since then. I still play it from time to time.
Other thing I do from time to time is remember Miranda's ass
The dark ages that never stopped... Video games still get a couple of bangers every year but the amount of titles became x10 what they previously were but now you're getting 1/10th of the games worth a shit. And it kept getting worse. Very sad state of affairs but you can't really deny people love lapping up this stuff considering video games became more and more profitable, nonstop. And this is taking into consideration that the gacha juggernaut hasn't been popularized yet.