Game of the Year... a day late

Well seeing as it’s the first of the year I probably shouldn’t wait any longer to do my game of the year post. That’s game of last year technically, but I imagine you all figured that out. When deciding my game this year I thought about what I most appreciated in a game. As I said in my first post, I realized this year just how much a strong narrative meant to me. In retrospect this makes sense when I think of my top games of all time. Not many games from the pre-32 bit era make my list. Games that do make the list are games like Shadow of the Colossus, Shenmue 2, and the Prince of Persia trilogy of last generation. As you can see, these games simply weren’t possible until later in the 32 bit era.

I know there were some games with intelligent and interesting stories before the big 3D boom, but these were almost exclusively RPGs. I never played RPGs when I was younger do to the turn based combat. I found it boring or something and I generally kept away from them aside from the few real time combat gems until a couple of years ago (I can’t wait to try out the Chrono Trigger remake because of this).
Anyways, before I go on I should note that I have not yet played Mirror’s Edge, Fallout 3, Far Cry 2, Dead Space, or Little Big Planet. I was out of the country from early October until late November so I’ve been trying to catch up as best I can. Picked a terrible time to leave the country, huh? Ah well, at least I got to go to TGS. ;) I did manage to play 63 major games this year and of those I finished 52 or so. 5 I deemed unfinishable because of how they work. Geometry Wars 2 for example is one of those 5. However, of those 52 games only about half came out this year.


While thinking of contenders for game of the year I considered two main things. First was time spent playing a game, several journalists and bloggers I respect seem to go with how addicted to a game they were as their measuring stick. The other was how emotionally moved I was by a game. This led to two very different games. Super Smash Brothers Brawl because I played this game with my roommates and friends for upwards of 5 hours a night for a good two months before we got sick of it. That may have been a slight exaggeration, but just about every night from when Brawl came out until sometime after finals week we were on there. The other game I chose was Metal Gear Solid 4. After getting about 4 hours into it I basically could not stop playing until I saw the conclusion. After every cut scene, boss fight, or weird transitionary tool used to merge the two I was just left impressed. I didn’t fully agree with all the ending cut scene choices, but I was overall floored by this game.


So now since I have to pick one of these two for game for the year. Based on what I said in the first paragraph the choice was obvious. Despite all the fun I had bashing my friends into oblivion in SSBB, the thing that draws me into games the most isn’t just the pure fun they bring me. Metal Gear Solid 4 may not have brought me as many hours of joy as Smash did, but during those fifteen somewhat hours I could not have been more attached to everything the game presented. MGS4 was hands down my game of the year.

Strange that my two favorite games last year were on the two consoles who combined still only get a fraction of the time from me that my 360 does.