2010 Year in Review: Video Games - Page 2

It was the lack of scarf. Nightshade had rooms for Ta-te sequences of insane numbers, though. Those were a lot of fun.

I've never played a Fallout game. Can I start with Fallout: New Vegas?

There are some value-added tidbits for people familiar with the first two Fallouts, but F:NV is very loosely connected to any of the previous games. So, yes.

I hear that Obsidian wanted to basically reboot the current-gen Fallout franchise out of spite for Bethesda. Or not.

RDRR, Trevor.

Oh, I see. My perception of fighting games is that they are actually rather involved and not about mashing buttoms (well, other than Tekken Tag ). You need to be able to pull off complex combos which can be very difficult (for me anyway). This why I thought the timed combat of AC2.5B (ASSASSIN'S CREED 2: BROTHERHOOD) would appeal to you, but to each their own!

My top ten looks roughly like


10) Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood - Equally amazing and lazy. I felt that the single player was sometimes undermined by a laziness of design and the multiplayer was too restrictive towards people attempting to play within the spirit of the game. But it was still fun
9) Just Cause 2 - For 10 minutes a pop this is joy, any longer and it's a grind. But it's the one game I regret trading because I know how much fun it would have been to pop back in every now and then.
8) Castlevania: Lords of Shadow - I'm only a third into the game. If I'd finished it it would be a lot higher, just in love with the design and style of the game. I love Castlevania games, but this is the reboot the series needed.
7) Costume Quest - Just a perfectly charming way to spend seven hours. Very fun and very evocative of Halloween. Reminded me a lot of Psychonauts
6) Fable III - Haven't finished this one either, but I'm really enjoying it thus far. Feels a lot more unified in concept this time around.
5) Halo Reach - An amazing single player campaign wrapped up with a fantastic multiplayer package and the immense joy of Firefight. The campaign is up there with the first Halo in terms of general satisfaction.
4) Red Dead Redemption - An amazing single player which I felt was slightly eroded by the overly long jaunt to Mexico. The first and third acts are my favourite single player this year, the second act just bogs the whole thing down and makes the amazing multiplayer cast a long shadow over it.
3) Alpha Protocol - Clumsy gameplay aside this was probably one of the best written games of 2010. Just an amazing, if sometimes, frustrating experience which had a fantastic cast, genuine weight to your decisions and lashings of style.
2) Alan Wake - This game just hit me in a very peculiar way. I liked the tone and style of the game so much I almost forgot how clumsy the combat can be. It's got spades of personality
1) Mass Effect 2 - <3

The deal is the cover walls are there for feeble scrubs (like myself) to cower behind and pick things off. Meanwhile, super cool guys (like Shake, I imagine) slide around almost constantly beating and shooting the shit out of everything with so much style and aplomb as to make anything still functioning die out of shame. At the end of each act, your score is created using a variety of factors, including a running total of how often you died (a shameful 60+ on my first run *sob*) and how much time you spent in cover instead of getting out there, lobbing grenades, going into slowmo and shooting the grenade in mid-air, piroetting over a charging superbastard and sawing off it's limbs one by one.

I haven't been playing a ton of new stuff, but Red Dead Redemption, Mario Galaxy 2, and Halo Reach are my games of the year. The choice to go with so much motion blur in Reach still bothers me quite a bit, but not enough to ruin what might just be the best single player/co-op Halo game(I still think Deathmatch-type Halo peaked with Halo 2). You can, of course, but if I were you I'd get the Fallout 3 Game of the Year Edition instead, and save a few bucks. But hey that's just me. I've yet to dive into New Vegas, but from what I hear they're pretty much on par, although 3 is less glitchy(and has all the DLC add-ons with the Game of the Year Ed.). I've put about 150 hours into Fallout 3 and I STILL have plenty of stuff to do.

My favorite games from 2010 are:


1)Bayonetta
2)Bioshock 2
3) Call of Duty Black Ops

I'm trading in GT5 for Red Dead Redemption so that may be another to add.

In Black Ops The zombie mode after you clear the game is hilarious! JFK zombie slayer, lol.

Wasn't Uncharted 2 released in 2009? So was Batman.

Me bad. Make that 3 then.

For the heck of it, my worst of '10:

4) Battlefield BC2: I don't play MP, and the single-player campaign went from BC1's funny and huge battlefields to a tedious Call of Duty clone.

3) Crackdown 2: Crackdown 1 was merely ok, and it was better than the sequel in every single way.

2) Fable 3: Similarly, a sequel that does nothing better than the last game. Fable 3 has tons of things to do, and none of them are fun.

1) Mafia 2: The best 50s taxi simulator ever made. Also, maybe Mafia 3 will include an actual ending for this one.