joystiq-best-of-2010
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Joystiq Top 10 of 2010: Mass Effect 2
The Advertising Standards Authority on The Citadel greets every visit from Commander Shepard with a deep, disgusted sigh and a disdainful eye roll. The moment that guy sets foot inside the galactic nexus -- home to millions of aliens and bustling market to many more -- is when all the complaints start rolling in. Yeah, he's saved a planet or two, but the man's obviously a duplicitous douchebag who loves nothing more than inflating his ego through endorsement. Seriously, how can every single store on the Citadel be his favorite? The simplest explanation is that it's a video game, and giving the store a highly marketable nod of approval is something that comes up on the dialogue wheel whenever Shepard talks to a clerk. In return, you receive a discount on your purchases. It's obviously sensible and entirely beneficial to endorse all space shops. The video game you're playing simply does not care.
Joystiq Top 10 of 2010: Red Dead Redemption
The Old West was not a pretty place. For decades, films and TV shows depicting this part of American history have run the gamut between sugar-coated idolization -- see: The Lone Ranger -- and, in more recent years, downright brutal (HBO's Deadwood). In games, though, the "Wild West" was at best a mild West, and then we got Red Dead Redemption.
Joystiq Top 10 of 2010: Alan Wake
Turns out we'd been thinking of "episodic" gaming the wrong way. Episodic pioneers like Telltale long-since realized that consumers won't stick around episode to episode unless they buy the season upfront; so, episodic gaming isn't so much about a new business model as it is about a new (well, for gaming at least) method of storytelling. And that's where Alan Wake comes in. When Finnish game developer Remedy Entertainment announced it was turning in wronged NYPD cop Max Payne's badge and gun, only to pick up mystery writer Alan Wake's uh, pen ... and hoodie ... it was clear something was different. Over the game's prolonged five-year development cycle, Alan Wake morphed from an open-world, sandbox-style game set in the Pacific Northwest's fictional town of Bright Falls to a carefully scripted, episodic creation that had more in common with Twin Peaks than Grand Theft Auto.
Joystiq Top 10 of 2010: Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood
Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood took the single-player mechanics of one of our top games for 2009, Assassin's Creed 2, and sharpened them to a fine point; but that's not why Brotherhood clambered so high on our best of 2010 tower. The sequel is here for blindsiding us with a panic-fueled, engrossing multiplayer component. Like many of you, we've grown cynical watching companies cram unnecessary multiplayer into games with solid single-player experiences. Upon its announcement, that's exactly what Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood's stab-or-be-stabbed multiplayer sounded like: typical padding to a cash-in sequel, still riding high on the last game's wave of success. Wrong. Not only did Brotherhood's single-player campaign offer a focused, distilled romp through Rome, but its multiplayer gave us a unique experience that, refreshingly, didn't have shooting at its heart.
Joystiq Top 10 of 2010: Super Meat Boy
Super Meat Boy is so simple in concept that it's downright pretentious to read so much into it. But what else is a critic good for? On the surface, SMB -- a repurposing of the initials of probably the most famous video game of all time -- is a quintessential "indie" work. Essentially the product of the Team Meat twosome of Edmund McMillen (the creator) and Tommy Refenes (the programmer), Super Meat Boy is equal parts professional perfectionism and total unprofessionalism. The game "oozes with the blood of artistic independence," as McMillen put it ... on his "Dev Blog for Gay Nerds." What's arguably the most technically excellent 2D platformer ever designed can't be separated from its adolescent humor. Team Meat are folk heroes for the Twixter generation: enviably talented young artists, who use their powers in defiantly uncouth ways.
Joystiq Top 10 of 2010: Battlefield: Bad Company 2
Your squad is in a helicopter, quickly approaching the objective. An engineer in the back repairs the ride while it feels the full brunt of the enemy's defensive placements. It's time to bail -- a homing dart hits the hull and as the subsequent rocket nears its destination, all too happy to relieve you of your up-to-that-point very useful conveyance, the whole squad jumps. Once on the ground, your Recon guy drops a mortar strike on the objective and, through this generous application of explosive force, your team finds ample enough cover to assault the objective. Your Assault guy drops some ammo and you all run into the fray, ready to detonate the box. It's a scenario that sounds fantastic ... and it happens all the time in Battlefield: Bad Company 2.
Joystiq Top 10 of 2010: Split/Second
Attractively molded metal cages hurtle through a sequence of man-made disasters as part of an overblown reality TV show. Despite the prevalence of appealing buzzwords, Michael Bay is the first to turn his nose up at such a stupefying 'splosionfest. "Send this one to Paul Anderson," he says with a smirk. In the realm of racing games, however, it's a tire-squealing departure from the player's usual point of entry. Ask the sincerely obsessed Kazunori Yamauchi where you fit in, and he'll point to the high-tech cradle behind the wheel. The point, surely, is to make you feel like you're inside a growling machine that sniffs out the perfect racing line on a static course. ("Surely, because I've spent half my life doing this." He wrings his hands.)
Joystiq Top 10 of 2010: Limbo
Much like its sparsely populated namesake, Limbo is a game defined by what isn't there. There's no color, no speech, no real prompting to speak of ... heck, the game doesn't even use that many buttons. It asks that you bring something of yourself to the experience, that you supply your own metaphorical color, ensuring that your journey through the bitter, monochrome world will be intensely personal. In an industry that so often chokes itself with overabundance, Limbo separated itself from the pack by saying little, yet speaking volumes.
Joystiq Top 10 of 2010: Rock Band 3
Earlier this year, Joystiq EIC Chris Grant and I were invited out to Sir Studios in Hollywood to see a secret unveiling of Rock Band 3, weeks before the embargo dropped for the public. To be honest, we weren't sure what Harmonix still had to offer beyond a new peripheral and a bigger setlist -- Activision had just revealed the silly Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock, and it looked like the music game genre really was as done as all of the analysts routinely claim it is. But the press conference that day (that kicked off with Huey Lewis' "Power of Love") was pretty astounding. On the ride back from the event, Chris and I couldn't stop talking about what Harmonix had done -- rethought everything that a Rock Band game was, seriously considered and reviewed every single problem with the genre, and really pushed forward the interplay of music and gaming. And when the game finally came out in October, it fulfilled all of the promises Harmonix made during that reveal. Rock Band 3 really is the pinnacle of what these rhythm games have become.
Joystiq Top 10 of 2010: Heavy Rain
The thoroughly democratic process through which our top 10 video games of 2010 were divined and decided left little room for sayers-of-nay once the dust had settled. The list -- as you'll soon see -- represents a cross section of what we believe to be the greatest (and therefore, our favorite, since we're such astute scholars of the ludological sciences) games of the year. All except for the game currently under discussion: David Cage's interactive thriller, Heavy Rain. Of all the games on our list, Heavy Rain was the only one whose appearance -- even at the most humble position on the pedestal -- was called into question. With such apparent spite for the title coursing through our collective veins, you might wonder how it made any showing at all. The answer is indicative of the game's overall reception in the gaming community's collective consciousness: Many writers gave the game no weight in the discussion at all, while few gave it just about as much weight as they could possibly throw.
