At No. 8, we have The World Ends With You, a japanese role-playing game for the Nintendo DS. This is a game that tried to cram too many ideas, broke every rule of prudent game design, and generally was an aberration haunting the traditional school of how a Japanese RPG should be played. Needlessly to stay, its quite wonderful, with an excellent plot based on the real-world Shibuya ditrict of Tokyo, good use of the DS’s two screens, and again, some lovely music.
At No. 7, we have Oiligarchy, which is a free flash game playable at molleindustria.it. This one deserves special mention for dragging video games kicking and screaming into relevant, timely political commentary. You play as the chief of an oil company in the 1950s, bribing, influencing and destroying the environment to your hearts content. Also read the excellent Postmortem of the game on the site, somethig, i think we need more of for video games.
At No. 6, we have our first tie - this is between Gears of War 2 for the Xbox 360 and Resistance 2 for the Playstation 3 - both exemplary, if not too revolutionary, examples of a console shooter done well.
At No. 5 - we have Far Cry 2 for the PC, for its incredible world, dep deep gameplay and for essentially rebooting the first person shooter in 2008. Its an incredibly well, crafted, complex achievement, and also very very pretty to look at.
At No. 4 we have, surprise surprise, Grand Theft Auto IV for Xbox, PS3 and now pC, for getting the attention of every newspaper and magazine and conservative and concerned parent in the world the way only a controversial GTA game can. Well done there.
And so we reach our top three. By this time you may have realized, and I wish to reiterate - this has been an incredible year for video games, some have even called it a ’golden age’, and thats not too far off the mark - the number of polished, intelligent, timely, well-crafted titles is on the rise, and there’s so many avenues and channels to choose from.
So, at this point, just a quick sort of Certificate of Participation to all the games that deserve to be in this list (Just off the top of my head, there’s Audiosurf, Hinterland, Sam and Max Season 2, Spore, Braid, Mirror’s Edge, and Left 4 Dead) - it would defeat the purpose of the list to include them, of course, but lets not be exclusionary here- and at the risk of sounding overly zealous, the idea is to just point out that games are evolving beyond being covered as mere consumer choices into a hopefully maturing, and diverse medium in their own right.
At No. 3, we have Professor Layton and the Curious Village for the Nintendo DS, a point and click adventure game with some lovely hand-drawn visuals, and a fiendish set of puzzles of solve. The game is like a huge book of Shakuntala Devi puzzles - and while IM sure this ill-chosen analogy will inevitably drive you far far away from trying the game - it shouldn’t..its a wonderful experience thats get overything right - story, sound, difficulty and length.
At No. 2, we have LittleBigPlanet for the PS3. Its a sort of do-it-yourself platform making game, a little hard to explin briefly, but an absolute joy to play co-op with other people. Alone, I wouldnt recommend this game...but with another person, and this could be your grandmother, or even children, and thats the brilliance of it, its absolutely a blast. And also very educational.
And so, we reach No. 1