I'm extremely fortunate in that throughout this past year I've played and finished most of the video game titles that have interested me, actually most of the popular games that were released, and it's been yet-another fantastic year for titles. This is what I love about video games, there's never really a "bad year" where you would have been better off not buying a console, every year brings us a diversity of genres and game innovations, so many that it can be impossible to keep up with them all or pick out the best. I can't do it myself, a "top ten" list from me would be both insincere and arbitrary. Yes, some games stand out of course, but to try to mathematically compare a game where you flap your arms like a chicken to one where you shoot mutant hillbillies in a swamp is futile. Instead I find it's all about memories, so from the past year here are my ten best game experiences (in no particular order).

Best Eye Candy – Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

This past year saw the PlayStation 3 explode with wow factor graphics delivering intensity, detail, and polish with Killzone 2 and Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack In Time, but even these failed to compare to the beautiful overstimulation of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves which should have been packaged with a set of paddles for your eyes as it often delivers breathe-taking locales and staggering moments of clarity so sharp as to literally overload your senses, to the point where you will need to restart your vision. Uncharted 2 is a fun, somewhat unoriginal adventure that really delivers on eye candy.

The Most Laugh-Out Loud Humour – Brütal Legend

There is no better humourist in the video game industry than Tim Schafer, He doesn’t create spoofs or parodies, or even satires, but has that ability as someone who is steeped in enthusiast culture to take a genre that he loves and poke fun at it with a great deal of intimacy and insight. Schafer doesn’t use humour to take his subjects down a peg, but to hang-out with them and tease them like friends. With Brütal Legend he does this for Heavy Metal, brilliantly teaming up with Jack Black to deliver the tale of a legendary roadie who is sent to a primal fantasy world, not unlike those of album covers, for his chance to be the hero and fight for all that is good in the music he loves.

This is a world where hot roadsters can induce women to shed their clothes and a righteous deep bass note can bring someone back from near death. From Jack Black’s opening jaunt through a record shoppe to the endless stream of notable cameos (I love the mission where Lemme sends you off to collect bass strings as thick as a baby’s arm) there is an endless supply of throwaway lines that will have drop the controller in laughter. The experimental real-time strategy gameplay is unfortunately a bit brutal, but if you can slog through it the hilarious Heavy Metal revelry is worth the worship.

Best Extended Gameplay – Fallout 3 DLC

Despite being one of the longest titles you can invest yourself in, Fallout 3 is one of those games you hope will never end. This year the creators at Bethesda did their best to fulfill that desire with not one, but five add-on adventures available both for download and packaged into a new “Game of the Year” edition.

From Operation: Anchorage to Mothership Zeta, these add-on packs delivered new game items and quests, but more importantly new areas and cultures within Fallout’s post-apocalyptic world including encounters with invading Chinese and the swamp folk of Maryland. While the missions themselves can be a bit hit-and-miss, Broken Steel being a bit short and Mothership Zeta a bit too strange, Fallout 3’s DLC gives you the opportunity to simply hang-out and explore in its strangely sombre-yet-comfortable landscape of devastation. Fallout is at its best for me when it revisits the culture of the 1950’s through post-apocalyptic spectacles, offering nuka-cola bottles and old time radio through a perverse, ghostly sensibility. I’ve played through all five DLC packs for that and would gladly play through five more.

Best Musical Journey – The Beatles: Rock Band

Since the first Guitar Hero for the PS2 the music game genre has exploded with this year alone delivering a number of innovative takes on the concept including DJ Hero, LEGO Rock Band, and entire Singstar games devoted to ABBA and Queen, but the one title that really culminated the very best of this trend has been The Beatles: Rock Band. So many of these games attempt to take you through the career of a band, with the results often feeling rather technical, it feels like a game device or a quick MTV documentary. With its extraordinary cut-scenes, presentation animations, and in-studio chatter, The Beatles: Rock Band manages to create a band journey that is emotional, that has soul, which is not an easy thing to pull off. The music, of course, is sublime and through downloadable packs continues to be creating one of the best game experiences to revisit again and again. The Limited Edition bundle included a replica of Paul Mc Cartney’s Hofner violin bass, which remains my favorite of the instrument game controllers.

Silliest Party Games – Wii Fit Plus

From flapping your arms like a chicken to running gophers over with a Segway, Nintendo’s follow-up to their popular fitness game proved to be the sleeper party game of the year. Yes, it offers a better exercise system for Wii Fit fans with a more helpful focus on burning calories over that dreadful BMI index in the original, but the real expansion in the title comes with all the new balance games that deliver silly escapes involving kung-fu rhythm challenges and, the most popular amongst kids, the snowball fights. If you play this game, keep one eyed peeled for cameras, as your friends will certainly try to capture you in mid-flair on the balance board as you try to juggle while balancing on a circus ball.

A First For Consoles – Halo Wars

Real-time strategy on a console? Somehow Ensemble Studios managed to pull it off, delivering an stimulating game of military planning and management for the living room couch. The controls are easy to pick up and offer a responsive system to quickly move and orchestrate between different groups of units. On top of that, they held on to the very look and feel of the Halo universe and delivered an emotionally-gripping story line with impressive cut-scenes that did a far better job of extending the Halo universe than this year’s Halo 3 ODST. Sadly overlooked by shooter-driven Halo fans and wrongfully dismissed by RTS fans on the PC, this successful transfer of RTS over to the console environment was one of the biggest achievements in video games this year. 

Best Game-To-Movie Adaptation – Assassin’s Creed Lineage

Not only did Ubi Soft Montreal deliver one of the best games of the year with Assassn’s Creed II, but as a side-project they also created a live action short film that delivers the best game-to-movie experience I’ve ever seen. Using a cast of unknowns and effects from their new digital movie studio, Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Lineage tells a prequel story about Ezio’s father during his time beneath the assassin’s robes and the event that lead up to beginning of the game. The film’s ability to make game characters and elements real while showing Hollywood that it lends itself well as a traditional movie experience is one of the most delightful surprises of the year. You can watch the film here

Closest To Perfection – Batman: Arkham Asylum

After you spend a few years reviewing video games you can get an immediate sense of where a game’s ambitions were set and where it failed to meet them. Most games fail in one respect or another, but the big shock this year came with Batman: Arkham Asylum, that rare title that clearly met all its ambitions, creating the best comic book video game adaptation made.

Arkham Asylum manages to deliver all of Batman’s many sides, the detective, the brawler, the creature of the night, through an impressive range of gameplay elements, story, and production design. Stealth, gadgets, fighting, puzzles, and investigative vision all work to create an action experience of endless creativity, theatrical expression, and detail.

Hardest Game To Finish – The Legend Of Zelda: Spirit Tracks

The Nintendo DS may be a portable system, but Spirit Tracks is an epic adventure with the same scale and presentation as a console game. It’s one of those games that go on forever, where the ending only turns out to be the half way point, where days can drift into weeks if not months, and even then you can keep playing long after the credits roll. For those who do log in the hours there’s a punishing final confrontation sequence waiting, one that involves not one, not two, but three brutal, demanding fights where you must control both Link and Zelda together while the game throws an array of annoying distractions at you. The impossible twist is that there is no save point, you must push yourself to the limits for all three battles, sitting through countless cut scenes, and when you inevitably die you’re not only sent back to the beginning of the chapter, but with depleted hearts and an empty inventory, forcing you to go off adventuring again for supplies just to take another crack.

As this is the first adventure to feature Link and Zelda side-by-side, there is a reward waiting for hard core fans who do manage to reach the credits as the relationship between the two characters is allowed to be much stronger and the final cut-scenes take a moment to really enjoy that bond while suggesting that there might be something more to develop in the future.

Most Interesting Controversy – Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2

For the most part video game controversies tend to be boring, they are often based on overblown or misinformed concerns, but this year saw a twist with Modern Warfare 2’s “airport scene”. The level, placed far too early in the game, puts players in the position of being under cover within a terrorist gang who proceed to shoot up an airport lounge full of innocents. A somewhat failed attempt to create a moralistic challenge for players as they decide how to react, to shoot, pretend to shoot, or do nothing at all, it’s negative reaction from gamers drew the attention of the press who then had to deal with a violence-and-video games story where it was the players in outrage for a change. The confusion as reporters began to realize the story couldn’t follow the usual pattern, where it’s the parents against adult players, provided an interesting dynamic as past news stories that often displayed concern over the lack of morals amongst gamers, gave way to discussions of games-as-art and players as people who clearly do distinguish between reality and fantasy and clearly do have standards for what is appropriate and what is not.