Unlike many of the users who do reviews here I'm a pretty bad writer and have no real skill with the message board codes for inserting pics and such (not that I have a collection of them). I do however have a somewhat differant perspective than many of those who post here being primarily an RPG gamer and I have probably bought waaaay too many games this year.
That said here is what I think:
BEST SHOOTER CATAGORY
In general this is my leas favorite style of game, so I will do it first. This year was surprising in of the fact that I actually found several games I consider to be shooters that I enjoyed:
Red Faction: Gueriella: This was a game I wasn't originally going to play, but got my hands on by luck and actually wound up enjoying, largely becayse the political message wasn't as overpowering as I at first heard. Despite the title there is nothing subtle about this game at all, which disappointed me, but the voice endowed tutorials were nice, the running and gunning was frantic, and decimating structures with a sledgehammer oddly enough did not get old even if it made no sense whatesoever for the most part.
inFamous: I consider this a shooter, because while your not handling "guns" it plays pretty much like a shooter with the various "powers" you wield doing many of the same things that the weapons and abillities in other shooter based games do. What's more the entire game is pretty much based around ranged combat. Even at 34 I'm a big super-hero nerd, and can appreciate an effort to create a new universe/hero tale. The entire "Electro goes to No Man's Land" premise was kind of entertaining to my inner geek in ways I can't fully articulate.
Borderlands: This is a shooter with miminal RPG elements, I got sold on this game at the last minute when I started to think of it as a sort of first person Diablo. Originally I was wary about the game because of the change of art style from the initial planning and the very limited customization options compared to what I remembered hearing early on. In the end I was glad I didn't pass on it however.
Shooter Of the Year: Borderlands, obviously because of the RPG elements. It was surprisingly close between this and Red Faction: Gueriella for me, but I wound up clocking far more hours with Borderlands than with RFG. inFamous would have normally been my assumed "favorite" in this genere given that it has at least as much character "leveling" as Borderlands does for the most part, but in general I found it horribly annoying to have super accurate enemies shooting you from like 2 blocks away, and then having to go massively out of your way to finally take them down when you want to just get from point A to point B.
BEST BRAWLER CATAGORY
I was surprised how many brawlers were actually released this year as I had thought this was more or less a "dead" genere. The day and age of "Double Dragon", "Final Fight", and "Combat Tribes" being long behind us.
For this catagory my major selections from this year are all very decent games
Batman Arkham Asylum: Let's face it, at it's heart this game is basically a customizable brawler with a spot on presentation of the Batman universe, and some adventure game aspects as opposed to simply advancing through the stages following an arrow (though you do progress in a fairly linear fashion). It managed to have plenty of side activities, and all kinds of ways to go about taking down enemies, though in the end it always seemed to come down to massive fist fights at the key points.
Prototype: I consider this game to be a brawler because while "Sandbox" it's mostly all about hand to hand combat, especially when fighting the serious enemies in the game. You customize your bio organic melee weapon of choice (blunts, blades, etc...) and go to town. Even your ranged attacks tend to be attached to your body.
Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2: 2009 could be considered the year of the Super Hero game. Individual creations like inFamous and Prototype, a strong DC game in Batman, and of course this one, Marvel's entry. At it's heart this game is pretty much a very flashy brawler with lots of overly destructive powers going off constantly. I clocked some decent time with it, bought a character DLC pack despite the shortness of the game (and choice of plotline), and actually expected this one to be one of my all time favorites of the year... which it was but (spoilers) was disappointing compared to most of the competition.
Kenka Bancho: Badass Rumble: This is a release from very late in the year for the PSP which is a massively customizable adventuer-brawler where your basically on a school field trip to a city at the same time as pretty much every other school in the country, and are out to defeat the strongest representitives of all the other schools to prove yourself the toughest high schooler in Japan. A clever homage - satire combination to the whole idea of school tough guys this game is wildly entertaining. Done in an anime style it has wild (and customizable) attacks, over the top dialogue, and a lot of stuff to find and collect. A last minute surprise addition to the list.
The Best Brawler: Batman Arkham Asylum
Let's be honest here, Batman oozes quality, it has top notch art direction and voice acting, perfect representation of well established characters from an insantgely popular comic franchise that made most people VERY happy (and frankly making most comic fanboys happy with any product like this is saying a lot), spot on controls, and on top of that it actually had one of the best website based viral marketing campaigns I had ever seen that tied into the game perfectly.
While good, Marvel Ultimate Alliance was very short, badly written (and that's saying a lot when they can make "Civil War" worse) and had some horribly broken mechanics. Prototype was also fun, but the writing and characterization of the protaganist was awful (Yahtzee was dead on with the whole "Evil Mr. Bean" thing). Kenka Bancho was almost the winner, but in the end I have to admit that it's just not as good as Batman was overall.
BEST FIGHTING GAME
I consider fighting games to specifically be head to head one character vs. one character games. Oftentimes with a competitive component (though technically this is not nessicary). In this genere I have basically played TWO games this year that were new and struck me as being noteworthy.
Street Fighter IV: What can be said about it, it's a relaunch of Street Fighter with some new characters and a pseudo-3d gimmick vaguely similar to the XBL game "Shadow Complex" where things work on a two dimensional plane while being seen in three dimensions.
Blazblue: This is basically the continuation of "Guilty Gear" but with a new universe and cast of characters. Regular high quality 2D with some very fast paced moves, and a lot of involuted conventions unique to the series like the infamous "roman cancels".
Winner: Blazblue
This was a hard desician because honestly I was very tempted to say there were no good fighting games this year (admittedly without playing Tekken 6 yet). I was underwhelmed with the UFC game despite it's initial hype and didn't list it for that reason. In the end I feel that these games were technically worthy of mention, even though both were horribly broken affairs with some of the worst practical character balancing in the history of the genere. By this I mean that while technically balanced you have to be at a fairly high level of play for things to even out between characters. For most players some characters simply perform much better than others at the basic level of play due to the obtuse ways things were balanced. In both games when it comes to multiplayer I found that I'd constantly run into people playing the same couple of characters again and again simply because of ease of use and the fact that it required a much higher learning curve to get equivilent results with other characters. Judge me however you want, but that's my opinion, and I basically feel that the very fact that we say things like "Ken Fighter IV" comments everywhere was a sign of failure. Technically unbalanced or not I think the designers themselves should have created a game where people would want to pick more diverse characters instead of everyone sticking to the same one.
Blazblue wins because in the final equasion it had people rotating between a couple more characters than SF IV, meaning they got people more interested in the roster it seemed. On top of this I feel SF IV skimped on it's single player. I mean honestly the whole "Zangief Lariet" thing was a sign they didn't test out the single player AI enough before release.
Contreversial, but this is my opinion, and that's what this is all about.
BEST RPG:
Okay, now this here is my bread and butter when it comes to gaming, and surprisingly there were several games that entered my thought processes.
Dragon Age: Origins: There isn't much that can be said about Bioware's fantasy masterwork that hasn't already been said. I actually own this one for both the PC and X-box 360. It's a very well acted, very well designed, romp through a traditional fantasy world with a lot of "dark" and morally ambigious plot elements where even trying to be a good guy your likely to do some pretty messed up things for the right reasons.
Drakensang: This is a game I think deserves more attention, the latest installment in computer RPGS set in the universe of a german RPGs, it should be very familiar to those who were around for Sir Tech's "Realms Of Arkania" games. In general the quality is lacking in terms of graphics and voice work (OMG it can be painful) but it has a very complicated skill system behind it and a pretty involved plotline. It also tends to be fairly down to earth in terms of the action where unlike say Dragon Age your not going to be wielding many giant swords of absolute death with crackling lightning running up and down the blade.
Devil Survivor: A strategy RPG set in the Shin Megami Tensei universe for the Nintendo DS. While fairly slow paced at times it features some interesting branching paths, a time management system that isn't too crippling and adds to replay value, the abillity to save easily, and a format where I think it's actually advantageous to play it over a period of time "on the go" like DS systems are supposed to be for, than sitting down to play it straight since the grinding towards slow advancement is actually pretty easy if you don't do it all at once but rather do a battle or two here or there in between other things or while waiting in doctor's officers or whatever. It keeps all the demon collection/fusing elements that make SMT games awesome, with a modern japanese teen horror plot that should have Persona fans drooling. Surprisingly this game didn't become a much bigger deal.
Demon's Souls: An Action RPG for the PS-3, which probably needs little introduction. It's pretty much what a stereotypical fantasy world would look like re-envisioned by a surrealistic horror writer, including a Lovecrafitan plot about escaping old ones. It's nasty, brutal, and very hard. It involves a lot of grinding and repetition, and has an awesome online gimmick where while you can't talk to anyone you see the spirits of other players characters who are online running about doing things as you play... almost all the characters in this game are ghosts for most of their time in play. You can also summon people from their other worlds even if you can't talk, or invade other worlds as a murderous black phantom. It's creepy, nasty, and generally a unique work of art unlike anything else to ever be made.
Class Of Heroes: This is basically the anime love child of the old school Wizardry games and Harry Potter. You basically make a party of six characters of your own creation who are students at a school for adventurers in a fantasy world and get sent out to do stuff in the dungeons around the school as part of their education. Brutally unforgiving to start with, and definatly tongue in cheek, it manages to give new life to old classics like teleporting floor panels, levitating over pits, and other stuff. Tons of races and classes, and concepts like managing your characters opinions of each other make this a pretty unique experience overall. This game deserved more attention especially from old school RPG fans.
Cross Edge: Rated very low by many sources, I enjoyed this game heavily, and actually collected all the DLC. It's basically a giant nerdgasm crossing over characters from sources as diverse as JRPGs and fighting games. Admittedly the game does deserve criticism for not letting you actually build a dream party due to needing to optomize "team attacks", and I can see no way anyone could possibly get the good ending without being told, but it's still a lot of fun especially for old school RPG fans. Besides any game where you can team Etna from Disgaea and Morrigan from Darkstalkers up (even if far from optimal) deserves points for pure nerdgasm if nothing else.
RPG of the Year: Dragon Age Origins. It's almost anti-climactic that I'm going to agree with almost everyone else rating RPGs out there with so many great ones this year, but in the end this game is simply better polished than any other. The voice acting is top notch, and involving people like Claudia Black (Farscape, Stargate). The plotline is interesting, and you can actually feel some of the desicians you make. Due to the development time people criticize the occasionally erratic art quality in places, but even at it's worst it's still better than most of it's serious competition.
INDIE GAME OF THE YEAR:
I have played a ton of indie games this year, although I guess some of the small companies I consider "indie" like 1C probably aren't truely "indie". Still right now a few stand out in my mind. Honestly I have not played "Torchlight" yet although I *DID* buy it when Steam put it on sale a few days ago, so for all I know that is truely deserving of the "best" title giving the reviews it's been getting.
I've played Zombie Shooter 2, Kivi's Underworld, and a bunch of others. Instead of listening them all I'm going to bring it down to two major contenders:
Fort Zombie: Some people are probably going "OMG Therumancer has lost his mind", but let me be honest. Centrally this is perhaps the best zombie game set up I've ever seen, scavenging supplies and survivors to eventually withstand a siege. While buggy, I also think the approach of using search skills and such in an RPG format as opposed to just running along and picking things up makes this much more survival/RPG oriented than it's real time roots would imply, and the gamer designers themselves said it's not meant to be an action game. The patch I downloaded improved it greatly, and while it needs some work, this is a game I think developers need to pay attention to. At it's root this is how you do a zombie survivor type game: RPG elements. I think this is the general kind of atmosphere a lot of zombie fanboys are looking for rather than the the latest zombie fragging FPS. As crude as it is so far, this has more potential as a concept than most things I've seen... if your with a big developer talk to these guys. The ideas at work here are probably going to be worth it.
Planet Alcatraz: I downloaded this one for $30 from Gamersgate due to it being another science fiction RPG done by 1C who did "Star Wolves 2" which I enjoyed a lot even if the travel times were a pain. The game is very much like Fallout 2 in quality, with the inclusion of some truely horrible cinematic animations, and probably the most laughably bad voice acting I have ever seen. I mean Drakensang deserves awards compared to this game.
However, the premise is TOTALLY unique so far, with your Riddick-Like hero dropped onto a prison planet (a soldier for the galactic authorities) looking to rescue some comrades. You deal with corrupt prison authorities, work on unraveling mysteries, collect weapons, shank people in toilers, and get captured by tough guys with names like "Hamster".
Despite how I make this sound, I feel anyone who can appreciate a dated game like Fallout 2 will enjoy this, and even notice the similarities. Indeed I kind of thing that if Van Buren had seen actual production it would probably have looked similar. I think a lot of 1C's problems has always been with localization to be honest.
Indie game of the year: Planet Alcatraz, despite the awesome ideas in Fort Zombie I simply think this game is better. But then again it was done by a more professional team. It's problems mostly being the equivilent of a bad dub job in an import movie, and a truely horrible animation team for certain sequences. On a fundemental level the game works, despite the initial difficulty and learning curve. Even with some patching Fort Zombie is still not 100% functional (or at least not for me). The biggest problem with this game is the price tag, $30 is quite expensive given the translation and some of the animation issues. Truthfully I think that will cause this game to be missed by a lot of peopled who would otherwise love it which is kind of sad, because not many companies work on science fiction RPGs, and a couple of solid english language successes could get 1C to be able to afford better people and a much better localization team.
OVERALL GAME OF THE YEAR
Really this is a tough choice. I mean honestly with the industry all leaning towards "Club Penguin: Elite Penguin Force" I fear being lynched for not picking it. But I have to go with my heart.
The three big choices are Borderlands, Batman: Arkham Asylum, and Dragon Age: Origins.
I have beaten Dragon Age: Origins, so I am going to have to give it my "pick" and as an RPG gamer it's a pretty obvious choice. Truthfully though this does make me feel I'm being a bit unfair towards Batman: AA because in general you just don't see many brawlers that polished and well put together, and the fact that it's a good BATMAN game after all this time says a lot too. Borderlands is the easiest one for me to dismiss because despite the quikiness, and gun generation system, when you get down to it it's pretty much just another shooter. It also all starts to look the same to me a lot faster than other gamers. I mean they REALLY needed more enemy models I think, and in the end I'm looking forward to DLC like "Mad Moxxi" simply for something new to shoot at because even with increasing levels the bandits are even more generic than Morrowwind/Oblivion. Forgivable to many FPS fans who fondly remember games with even less enemy variety (like Wolfenstein's original incarnation) but it isn't my genere of choice. and the game was at least making RPG pretensions.
So basically despite my desire to agree with Rebecca Mayes and say "Congrats Batman, your game of the year", I have to give it to
Game Of The Year: Dragon Age Origins.
(please, no hate flames from club-penguin fanboys... you guys are more vicious than the Halo crowd by far... )
Such are my thoughts on the games of this year. I hope I have not forgotten anything.
That said here is what I think:
BEST SHOOTER CATAGORY
In general this is my leas favorite style of game, so I will do it first. This year was surprising in of the fact that I actually found several games I consider to be shooters that I enjoyed:
Red Faction: Gueriella: This was a game I wasn't originally going to play, but got my hands on by luck and actually wound up enjoying, largely becayse the political message wasn't as overpowering as I at first heard. Despite the title there is nothing subtle about this game at all, which disappointed me, but the voice endowed tutorials were nice, the running and gunning was frantic, and decimating structures with a sledgehammer oddly enough did not get old even if it made no sense whatesoever for the most part.
inFamous: I consider this a shooter, because while your not handling "guns" it plays pretty much like a shooter with the various "powers" you wield doing many of the same things that the weapons and abillities in other shooter based games do. What's more the entire game is pretty much based around ranged combat. Even at 34 I'm a big super-hero nerd, and can appreciate an effort to create a new universe/hero tale. The entire "Electro goes to No Man's Land" premise was kind of entertaining to my inner geek in ways I can't fully articulate.
Borderlands: This is a shooter with miminal RPG elements, I got sold on this game at the last minute when I started to think of it as a sort of first person Diablo. Originally I was wary about the game because of the change of art style from the initial planning and the very limited customization options compared to what I remembered hearing early on. In the end I was glad I didn't pass on it however.
Shooter Of the Year: Borderlands, obviously because of the RPG elements. It was surprisingly close between this and Red Faction: Gueriella for me, but I wound up clocking far more hours with Borderlands than with RFG. inFamous would have normally been my assumed "favorite" in this genere given that it has at least as much character "leveling" as Borderlands does for the most part, but in general I found it horribly annoying to have super accurate enemies shooting you from like 2 blocks away, and then having to go massively out of your way to finally take them down when you want to just get from point A to point B.
BEST BRAWLER CATAGORY
I was surprised how many brawlers were actually released this year as I had thought this was more or less a "dead" genere. The day and age of "Double Dragon", "Final Fight", and "Combat Tribes" being long behind us.
For this catagory my major selections from this year are all very decent games
Batman Arkham Asylum: Let's face it, at it's heart this game is basically a customizable brawler with a spot on presentation of the Batman universe, and some adventure game aspects as opposed to simply advancing through the stages following an arrow (though you do progress in a fairly linear fashion). It managed to have plenty of side activities, and all kinds of ways to go about taking down enemies, though in the end it always seemed to come down to massive fist fights at the key points.
Prototype: I consider this game to be a brawler because while "Sandbox" it's mostly all about hand to hand combat, especially when fighting the serious enemies in the game. You customize your bio organic melee weapon of choice (blunts, blades, etc...) and go to town. Even your ranged attacks tend to be attached to your body.
Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2: 2009 could be considered the year of the Super Hero game. Individual creations like inFamous and Prototype, a strong DC game in Batman, and of course this one, Marvel's entry. At it's heart this game is pretty much a very flashy brawler with lots of overly destructive powers going off constantly. I clocked some decent time with it, bought a character DLC pack despite the shortness of the game (and choice of plotline), and actually expected this one to be one of my all time favorites of the year... which it was but (spoilers) was disappointing compared to most of the competition.
Kenka Bancho: Badass Rumble: This is a release from very late in the year for the PSP which is a massively customizable adventuer-brawler where your basically on a school field trip to a city at the same time as pretty much every other school in the country, and are out to defeat the strongest representitives of all the other schools to prove yourself the toughest high schooler in Japan. A clever homage - satire combination to the whole idea of school tough guys this game is wildly entertaining. Done in an anime style it has wild (and customizable) attacks, over the top dialogue, and a lot of stuff to find and collect. A last minute surprise addition to the list.
The Best Brawler: Batman Arkham Asylum
Let's be honest here, Batman oozes quality, it has top notch art direction and voice acting, perfect representation of well established characters from an insantgely popular comic franchise that made most people VERY happy (and frankly making most comic fanboys happy with any product like this is saying a lot), spot on controls, and on top of that it actually had one of the best website based viral marketing campaigns I had ever seen that tied into the game perfectly.
While good, Marvel Ultimate Alliance was very short, badly written (and that's saying a lot when they can make "Civil War" worse) and had some horribly broken mechanics. Prototype was also fun, but the writing and characterization of the protaganist was awful (Yahtzee was dead on with the whole "Evil Mr. Bean" thing). Kenka Bancho was almost the winner, but in the end I have to admit that it's just not as good as Batman was overall.
BEST FIGHTING GAME
I consider fighting games to specifically be head to head one character vs. one character games. Oftentimes with a competitive component (though technically this is not nessicary). In this genere I have basically played TWO games this year that were new and struck me as being noteworthy.
Street Fighter IV: What can be said about it, it's a relaunch of Street Fighter with some new characters and a pseudo-3d gimmick vaguely similar to the XBL game "Shadow Complex" where things work on a two dimensional plane while being seen in three dimensions.
Blazblue: This is basically the continuation of "Guilty Gear" but with a new universe and cast of characters. Regular high quality 2D with some very fast paced moves, and a lot of involuted conventions unique to the series like the infamous "roman cancels".
Winner: Blazblue
This was a hard desician because honestly I was very tempted to say there were no good fighting games this year (admittedly without playing Tekken 6 yet). I was underwhelmed with the UFC game despite it's initial hype and didn't list it for that reason. In the end I feel that these games were technically worthy of mention, even though both were horribly broken affairs with some of the worst practical character balancing in the history of the genere. By this I mean that while technically balanced you have to be at a fairly high level of play for things to even out between characters. For most players some characters simply perform much better than others at the basic level of play due to the obtuse ways things were balanced. In both games when it comes to multiplayer I found that I'd constantly run into people playing the same couple of characters again and again simply because of ease of use and the fact that it required a much higher learning curve to get equivilent results with other characters. Judge me however you want, but that's my opinion, and I basically feel that the very fact that we say things like "Ken Fighter IV" comments everywhere was a sign of failure. Technically unbalanced or not I think the designers themselves should have created a game where people would want to pick more diverse characters instead of everyone sticking to the same one.
Blazblue wins because in the final equasion it had people rotating between a couple more characters than SF IV, meaning they got people more interested in the roster it seemed. On top of this I feel SF IV skimped on it's single player. I mean honestly the whole "Zangief Lariet" thing was a sign they didn't test out the single player AI enough before release.
Contreversial, but this is my opinion, and that's what this is all about.
BEST RPG:
Okay, now this here is my bread and butter when it comes to gaming, and surprisingly there were several games that entered my thought processes.
Dragon Age: Origins: There isn't much that can be said about Bioware's fantasy masterwork that hasn't already been said. I actually own this one for both the PC and X-box 360. It's a very well acted, very well designed, romp through a traditional fantasy world with a lot of "dark" and morally ambigious plot elements where even trying to be a good guy your likely to do some pretty messed up things for the right reasons.
Drakensang: This is a game I think deserves more attention, the latest installment in computer RPGS set in the universe of a german RPGs, it should be very familiar to those who were around for Sir Tech's "Realms Of Arkania" games. In general the quality is lacking in terms of graphics and voice work (OMG it can be painful) but it has a very complicated skill system behind it and a pretty involved plotline. It also tends to be fairly down to earth in terms of the action where unlike say Dragon Age your not going to be wielding many giant swords of absolute death with crackling lightning running up and down the blade.
Devil Survivor: A strategy RPG set in the Shin Megami Tensei universe for the Nintendo DS. While fairly slow paced at times it features some interesting branching paths, a time management system that isn't too crippling and adds to replay value, the abillity to save easily, and a format where I think it's actually advantageous to play it over a period of time "on the go" like DS systems are supposed to be for, than sitting down to play it straight since the grinding towards slow advancement is actually pretty easy if you don't do it all at once but rather do a battle or two here or there in between other things or while waiting in doctor's officers or whatever. It keeps all the demon collection/fusing elements that make SMT games awesome, with a modern japanese teen horror plot that should have Persona fans drooling. Surprisingly this game didn't become a much bigger deal.
Demon's Souls: An Action RPG for the PS-3, which probably needs little introduction. It's pretty much what a stereotypical fantasy world would look like re-envisioned by a surrealistic horror writer, including a Lovecrafitan plot about escaping old ones. It's nasty, brutal, and very hard. It involves a lot of grinding and repetition, and has an awesome online gimmick where while you can't talk to anyone you see the spirits of other players characters who are online running about doing things as you play... almost all the characters in this game are ghosts for most of their time in play. You can also summon people from their other worlds even if you can't talk, or invade other worlds as a murderous black phantom. It's creepy, nasty, and generally a unique work of art unlike anything else to ever be made.
Class Of Heroes: This is basically the anime love child of the old school Wizardry games and Harry Potter. You basically make a party of six characters of your own creation who are students at a school for adventurers in a fantasy world and get sent out to do stuff in the dungeons around the school as part of their education. Brutally unforgiving to start with, and definatly tongue in cheek, it manages to give new life to old classics like teleporting floor panels, levitating over pits, and other stuff. Tons of races and classes, and concepts like managing your characters opinions of each other make this a pretty unique experience overall. This game deserved more attention especially from old school RPG fans.
Cross Edge: Rated very low by many sources, I enjoyed this game heavily, and actually collected all the DLC. It's basically a giant nerdgasm crossing over characters from sources as diverse as JRPGs and fighting games. Admittedly the game does deserve criticism for not letting you actually build a dream party due to needing to optomize "team attacks", and I can see no way anyone could possibly get the good ending without being told, but it's still a lot of fun especially for old school RPG fans. Besides any game where you can team Etna from Disgaea and Morrigan from Darkstalkers up (even if far from optimal) deserves points for pure nerdgasm if nothing else.
RPG of the Year: Dragon Age Origins. It's almost anti-climactic that I'm going to agree with almost everyone else rating RPGs out there with so many great ones this year, but in the end this game is simply better polished than any other. The voice acting is top notch, and involving people like Claudia Black (Farscape, Stargate). The plotline is interesting, and you can actually feel some of the desicians you make. Due to the development time people criticize the occasionally erratic art quality in places, but even at it's worst it's still better than most of it's serious competition.
INDIE GAME OF THE YEAR:
I have played a ton of indie games this year, although I guess some of the small companies I consider "indie" like 1C probably aren't truely "indie". Still right now a few stand out in my mind. Honestly I have not played "Torchlight" yet although I *DID* buy it when Steam put it on sale a few days ago, so for all I know that is truely deserving of the "best" title giving the reviews it's been getting.
I've played Zombie Shooter 2, Kivi's Underworld, and a bunch of others. Instead of listening them all I'm going to bring it down to two major contenders:
Fort Zombie: Some people are probably going "OMG Therumancer has lost his mind", but let me be honest. Centrally this is perhaps the best zombie game set up I've ever seen, scavenging supplies and survivors to eventually withstand a siege. While buggy, I also think the approach of using search skills and such in an RPG format as opposed to just running along and picking things up makes this much more survival/RPG oriented than it's real time roots would imply, and the gamer designers themselves said it's not meant to be an action game. The patch I downloaded improved it greatly, and while it needs some work, this is a game I think developers need to pay attention to. At it's root this is how you do a zombie survivor type game: RPG elements. I think this is the general kind of atmosphere a lot of zombie fanboys are looking for rather than the the latest zombie fragging FPS. As crude as it is so far, this has more potential as a concept than most things I've seen... if your with a big developer talk to these guys. The ideas at work here are probably going to be worth it.
Planet Alcatraz: I downloaded this one for $30 from Gamersgate due to it being another science fiction RPG done by 1C who did "Star Wolves 2" which I enjoyed a lot even if the travel times were a pain. The game is very much like Fallout 2 in quality, with the inclusion of some truely horrible cinematic animations, and probably the most laughably bad voice acting I have ever seen. I mean Drakensang deserves awards compared to this game.
However, the premise is TOTALLY unique so far, with your Riddick-Like hero dropped onto a prison planet (a soldier for the galactic authorities) looking to rescue some comrades. You deal with corrupt prison authorities, work on unraveling mysteries, collect weapons, shank people in toilers, and get captured by tough guys with names like "Hamster".
Despite how I make this sound, I feel anyone who can appreciate a dated game like Fallout 2 will enjoy this, and even notice the similarities. Indeed I kind of thing that if Van Buren had seen actual production it would probably have looked similar. I think a lot of 1C's problems has always been with localization to be honest.
Indie game of the year: Planet Alcatraz, despite the awesome ideas in Fort Zombie I simply think this game is better. But then again it was done by a more professional team. It's problems mostly being the equivilent of a bad dub job in an import movie, and a truely horrible animation team for certain sequences. On a fundemental level the game works, despite the initial difficulty and learning curve. Even with some patching Fort Zombie is still not 100% functional (or at least not for me). The biggest problem with this game is the price tag, $30 is quite expensive given the translation and some of the animation issues. Truthfully I think that will cause this game to be missed by a lot of peopled who would otherwise love it which is kind of sad, because not many companies work on science fiction RPGs, and a couple of solid english language successes could get 1C to be able to afford better people and a much better localization team.
OVERALL GAME OF THE YEAR
Really this is a tough choice. I mean honestly with the industry all leaning towards "Club Penguin: Elite Penguin Force" I fear being lynched for not picking it. But I have to go with my heart.
The three big choices are Borderlands, Batman: Arkham Asylum, and Dragon Age: Origins.
I have beaten Dragon Age: Origins, so I am going to have to give it my "pick" and as an RPG gamer it's a pretty obvious choice. Truthfully though this does make me feel I'm being a bit unfair towards Batman: AA because in general you just don't see many brawlers that polished and well put together, and the fact that it's a good BATMAN game after all this time says a lot too. Borderlands is the easiest one for me to dismiss because despite the quikiness, and gun generation system, when you get down to it it's pretty much just another shooter. It also all starts to look the same to me a lot faster than other gamers. I mean they REALLY needed more enemy models I think, and in the end I'm looking forward to DLC like "Mad Moxxi" simply for something new to shoot at because even with increasing levels the bandits are even more generic than Morrowwind/Oblivion. Forgivable to many FPS fans who fondly remember games with even less enemy variety (like Wolfenstein's original incarnation) but it isn't my genere of choice. and the game was at least making RPG pretensions.
So basically despite my desire to agree with Rebecca Mayes and say "Congrats Batman, your game of the year", I have to give it to
Game Of The Year: Dragon Age Origins.
(please, no hate flames from club-penguin fanboys... you guys are more vicious than the Halo crowd by far... )
Such are my thoughts on the games of this year. I hope I have not forgotten anything.
