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Joystiq Top 10 of 2011: Skyrim
A mighty warrior stands in a frozen, Beowulfian wilderness, surrounded by traditional characters and archetypes: kings, damsels, wizards, trolls, dragons and, yes, a quest that promises both personal glory and salvation for the downtrodden. The reward at the end of the quest? Our hero gets to learn a new word. On paper, Skyrim sounds like your high school English teacher's ultimate fantasy. In practice, it is one of 2011's greatest adventures. That is, of course, assuming you can keep your mind on the quest at hand.
Joystiq Top 10 of 2011: Portal 2
The success of the Portal games comes from a combination of two completely different aspects: gameplay and narrative. Portal 2 is, on one hand, a great puzzle game in the classic tradition, sending you through a series of enclosed, self-contained puzzles. These require the arrangement of provided tools to create a single, predetermined "solution" and allow you to advance. On the other hand, it's the story of the rise and fall of a gigantic research company, and of '60s-style "for its own sake" science -- it even has Flubber! -- told years after the fact, diegetically, by two rogue AIs and a series of tape recordings. And it's genuinely funny!
Joystiq Top 10 of 2011: Batman: Arkham City
This might sound familiar. In 2009, Joystiq awarded Batman: Arkham Asylum its number three spot in that year's top ten list of games and here we are, two years later, giving that game's sequel the same honor. But it's not the same honor. Referencing the failure to launch of Pandemic's open-world Dark Knight movie tie-in game, I identified Rocksteady's success as one primarily of scale: "Instead of building an open-world Gotham City, they built an intimate (and immediately captivating) Arkham Asylum, as full of history and lore as you'd expect the comic book icon to be." Of course, Batman: Arkham City is an open-world game.
Joystiq Top 10 of 2011: Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Skyrim is going to get tons of accolades all over this year, and deservedly so, but Deus Ex: Human Revolution pulled me into its world more effectively than any other game in 2011. It didn't do everything right. Obviously, there were the boss battles. They required a narrow combat approach, playing to some of Deus Ex: Human Revolution's weakest elements. But those encounters were only disappointing insofar as they contradicted the fluidity of gameplay styles and approaches the rest of Human Revolution offered.
Joystiq Top 10 of 2011: Bastion
The Kid sat down to write about Bastion, his mind empty like a soldier's wallet. Where to begin? What to say? The game wasn't a blockbuster production, but it was beautiful and expertly executed, and an epic concept delivered by a team that knew its limitations. When there isn't an army of artists, engineers, writers and coders to impress those critical gasbags, you put your vision on display. Bastion's dynamic narration is to be the game's long-lasting cultural hook. A smooth and comforting voice relays events, but doesn't stop at exposition. There was very little the narrator didn't have a comment for, be it weapon combinations or that moment the kid simply starts smashing everything in sight. Much like "Still Alive" did double duty as Portal's end and as its revelation, Bastion takes a similar opportunity in its credits to deliver the haunting "Setting Sail, Coming Home." A combination of themes that become familiar to players through the game, the song delivered the type of emotional conclusion that even the best cutscenes rarely offer.
Joystiq Top 10 of 2011: Saints Row: The Third
If there's hope for mainstream video games, it's represented by Saints Row: The Third. Yes, I know, it has dildo bats and treats women like objects and maybe leans a bit too hard on gags aimed squarely at Fratty McKegbeer, but look just beneath the surface and you'll find a game that loves and respects its player. Saints Row: The Third plays fast and loose with the standards of good taste, but it's never willing to be reckless with your time.
Joystiq Top 10 of 2011: Shadows of the Damned
This sojourn in hell inspires the most intense evangelism, and that makes me think nobody in EA's marketing department bothered to play Shadows of the Damned. Even those who acted as envoys for the game's off-kilter charms, those people who were unpaid but still rewarded, might have gotten stuck on the easy marquee description: "It's the unfathomable oddness of Suda 51, paired with Shinji Mikami sensibility and an Akira Yamaoka soundtrack!" The summation is accurate (if a bit unfair to the major input from design lead Massimo Guarini, who left Grasshopper Manufacture in 2011), but hardly a detailed message for those unfamiliar with star Japanese designers. At least Shadows of the Damned had no troubles conveying its obvious qualities: a surprising and properly grotesque vision of post-life limbo, a protagonist passionate to a fault and a hilarious skull-on-a-stick to guide him.
Joystiq Top 10 of 2011: Dark Souls
It's a crying shame that, for the uninitiated masses, Dark Souls will primarily be remembered for its considerable difficulty. It's an absolutely true shame, of course. To my recollection, no other game's punishment caused my brother to literally break a controller in a fit of rage, delete his save and write a chart-topping tribute song before his hatred could subside. It's not all death and discouragement, however. Though every twist and turn of Dark Souls' menacing and lovely locales plays host to a preset lineup of fiends (many of whom can kill you with a sideways glance), there is a strange progress to the proceedings. It may come after hours of un-progress, but it comes -- and when it does, it comes correct. Self-improvement in games typically comes in forms that are mechanical (you level up and gain five magic points!) or educational (now you know where the spike traps are). Dark Souls' core tenet of repetitious short-burst failure paired with a wildly open-ended RPG character progression system blends both methods perfectly. What's more, it offers an intensely terrifying risk/reward system for ever-precious Souls; fortunately, your Brains are never jeopardized.
Joystiq Top 10 of 2011: Gears of War 3
If my life were a book, the chapter covering the last quarter of 2011 would be one page long and contain one phrase, in bold: Gears of War 3. In reality, lots of things happened to me over the last couple months, but aside from a brief affair with Skyrim, most of my time was spent going to farmers markets and crafts fairs with Gears of War 3. You know, committed relationship couple-type stuff.
Joystiq Top 10 of 2011: Mortal Kombat
Fighting games are pretty serious business. The community that supports the arcade and tournament scene is composed of roughly the same people it was fifteen years ago, and as a result this particular corner of the gaming kingdom has a longer lasting, more detailed memory than most of its non-competitive contemporaries. This makes fighting game players hard to impress, especially when their opinion of your legacy titles is less than stellar. Mortal Kombat had a heavy coating of nostalgia working for it prior to its launch, but it also had to contend with the series' long and storied history of brokenness and balance problems: Nearly every character in Mortal Kombat Trilogy had an infinite combo, for instance, which serves as a perfect example of what competitive fighting game players remembered about the franchise. Not to say that the old Mortal Kombat games weren't fun, because they were, they just weren't "tournament ready." So, when April finally rolled around and Mortal Kombat landed in disc trays around the world, that's what everyone expected: The fun, over-the-top, painfully broken hodgepodge of violence and pseudo-Asian mythology we've all come to know and love over the last twenty-odd years. Little did we realize that what we were actually getting was not only the best fighting game of 2011, but one of the ten best games to come out all year.
The year in which Joystiq played 2011 games
Curtailing the year to just ten top games is our annual act of brutality. If it seems unfair, hostile and without victory, it's because we spent much of 2011 sweating and squirming in the crushing grip of Dark Souls. Sooner or later you become addicted to no-win scenarios. While our ten favorite games could easily be joined by yet another ten, we're wary of extinguishing potency so soon after "infinity" became a major selling point. Bloated in-game clocks, labyrinthine dungeons and quests without end dominated our attempts to underline a year of quality. Nobody ever has time to play everything, and in 2011 you might not have had time to play a quarter of Skyrim. We're leaping into a year's glut of excellent games, then, fully cognizant of the blind spots that can't be avoided when the staff is human and bound to predictable chronology. That's why, until we've hired a set of hard-working, temporally immune androids, you'll see each writer's personal picks too. Rather than changing the format of our end-of-year summary, we'll continue adjusting the mindset with which you read it. Starting now and continuing over the next few days, you'll see a snapshot of what Joystiq -- both the website and the people behind it -- played, loved and nearly espoused in 2011. And that, we think, is a pretty nice way of preparing you for the inevitable, outrageous omission of your favorite game.
