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Best Games of the Year: 2010 Edition

A month late, but here it is. Drumroll, please!

(game titles are links)

__________

Best Twitch Platformer

Super Meat Boy



Super Meat Boy is brutal and pretty much perfect. Excellent level design, a unique cast of playable characters, and plenty of grin-inducing nods to the classics (including mini Triforces stamped all over the backgrounds) keep you playing through death after grizzly death. The audio deserves special recognition for being able to withstand the repetition of replaying levels dozens of times.

Best Music Game

lilt line



While the motion control is a nice touch, the soundtrack to this racer slash rhythm game is the true star. A different dubstep track forms the basis of each level, and getting a high score requires coordination between hand and ear. Soundtrack by 16bit.

Best Japanese Puzzle-Based French Animation-Inspired Game

Professor Layton and the Unwound Future



The Layton games are notable for amazing music, charming art direction, and, of course, puzzles. Unwound Future delivers what players have come to expect from the series, with the addition of new side-quests and mini-games.

Best Cinematic Gameplay

God of War III



Sure, the mythological cameos are neat, and sure, it's fun to hack through hordes of bad guys, but what I love most about GoW is the transitioning between cinematics and gameplay. The developers did an excellent job of creating a game that keeps the story flowing smoothly. Since game developers discovered cinematics, we gamers have had to sit through hours (and days and years) worth of poorly animated polygonal clumsiness, and God of War's seemlessness is beautiful and refreshing. And it makes you feel pretty fucking epic.

Best Game You've Never Heard Of

Cave Story



It's Mega Man, Metroid, and Earthbound in one game. It looks like your childhood. As soon as you start playing you feel a nostalgia building, and you know you will be replaying this game ritually along with Final Fantasy VI and Link to the Past. It has an amazing soundtrack. And it was made by one guy. If you have a Wii or a DSi, snag it. (It's supposedly getting a 3DS remake.)

Best Time-Sinking Roguelike

Desktop Dungeons



First of all, it's free. You have no excuse not to play it. Second, as a warning, this game may destroy your life. Each session lasts 10 to 20 minutes: this is dangerous. This game will distract you from your responsibilities. I just played for an hour in between this sentence and the last.

In the spirit of roguelikes such as Gauntlet, you choose a race and a class, and enter a dungeon to clean it out. DD gets progressively harder each time you win, opening up complex styles and strategies. Tons of fun. They even squeezed in a Super Meat Boy reference. Also, if you search for DD videos, you will be witness to the extremities of geekdom; this game is a nerd magnet, for reals.

Best of Show

Limbo



Yeah, Denmark makes games. Limbo is absolutely amazing. Atmospheric and surprising, with almost disorienting use of depth of field, this game's designers should be given MacArthur grants. You take on the role of a small child, and the minimal sound and visual scheme enhance the smallness you feel in this brutal world of traps and Lord of the Flies extras. Best played in the dark. I really can't praise this game enough.

Honorable Mentions

ilomilo: Cute two-player puzzle
Bioshock 2: Pretty, but I've been there before
VVVVVV: Awesome, but the controls can be frustrating

Best Games That Weren't Published in 2010

And Yet it Moves: This is why motion control was invented
Braid: Play this without a walkthrough, I dare you

Lifetime Achievement Award

Zoo Keeper

I play this nearly every night as I fall asleep. The more delirious I get, the stranger the words "zoo keeper" seem.

Best Game I Didn't Play

Minecraft



Yes, I know any aspiring game designer worth his or her salt is pretty much obligated to play this game. I'll get around to it.


And there you have it!

Returnage

I made really good soup out of this giant fowl carcass. I was standing there with my hand in an enormous pot full of boiled bones and meat bits, and perhaps interestingly, I felt pride, like, "yeah, my hand's in a pot of bones and meat bits."

I pulled out something which looked impossibly like a beak when I knew there was no beak in the turkey I roasted. But finding a beak, even an imaginary one, allowed me to get to know the turkey I was making soup out of. With it naked and tucked on the roasting pan, there wasn't much of a need or desire to think about the turkey as an individual.

This beak I pulled out was all, "hey." It didn't really say more than that, because I wasn't sure if it was mad that it grew up on a Butterball farm expressly for the purpose of me making soup out of it, or if it was happy that there was this native thing going on where I used every bit of its physical being in exchange for thanks, or what. But me and the beak had an understanding.

There's this interesting thing: our genes are driven by selfishness to be better equipped for survival than any other genes in the pool. They try really hard. It's not about survival of the species, but of the individual, the gene. At the same time we are granted this amazing consciousness, the ability to acknowledge and consider our genetic purpose. As we understand it, no other animal has this ability. Some of our genes are like, "go to school and get a job, then buy a cool house and a boat or something, maybe a gardener and a pool boy or whatever." And some of our genes are like, "GAAAAAAH. UBBBBBBBBDUH." These genes assume the role of parasites, which, genetically, makes them no better or worse off than the boat-having genes.

But we have this consciousness. Does a gull recognize its loseriness when it steals your garbage? Do the people with UBBBBBBBBDUH genes recognize what they are giving up by forfeiting the glory and responsibility of having consciousness, of being capable of philosophy and reflection?

I'd rather be a turkey.

Gorillas in the Mist

...(where can you find a place
to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you
going and coming and often staying all night.)

said Rilke

--------------

I told Rilke you do not keep her:

Somewhere else the sun exposes the heavenly origin of all things
(it is true we are all made of stars)
throwing sparks from the ordinary
igniting, and in a sweep of relentless
-don't call it duty, it's a gift but a charge as well-
In a sweep of relentless expulsion of divinity
igniting the atoms of every
/thing/
until the planet's cold latitudes burn with galaxial possibility.
Until men are Gods
for one morning.

Right now (maybe just right now) it is dark here,
but I can see the sun's fire
and a memory is enough for me to feel just a little warmth.
My body feels a bit unstable,
unmoored, heavy enough but not anchored.
It could flicker, discharge enough energy to release
(just for a fraction of a second)
and appear somewhere else
a field in the universe's womb,
sprinkled with amethyst and ether, glowing with primordial potential.
In a fraction of a second I expand until I fill every pore of all there is
(I am he who is called "I am");
in a fraction of a second I am here again.

But I don't think I am here at all
(or that here is anywhere)

It is very foggy today.
My life feels congested.
I very easily feel isolated lately.
Not a very good analogy is that I'm playing Tetris and all the blocks are cascading too fast to place and they're piling up near the ceiling. At this point it doesn't matter if you get the golden long block because there's no where to put it and too many holes where things didn't align right- there's really no way to clear a line. You've got to wait for game over and start again, nice and slow.

That was not meant to sound suicidal. My mind just always runs on game references. I guess a safer way of putting it is that I need to shake my Etch a Sketch. Or maybe it's more like I have a really intricate equation, but instead of starting at the head, I started three quarters of the way in. I need to do my math. From the beginning. Solve each bracket in turn, pull them out of the way, create some empty space around the real problem.




What do you do with all of that? What if some of those equations are poisonous to you?

Ripe New Age

In 12 days I will be 29. It's coming. Can you smell that? That's original thought. According to the NBER, 29 is the average age for your first great idea.

"The age represents the optimum combination of education and energy levels required for great ideas to emerge."

We'll see, 29-year-old me. It is interesting that this past year has been notable for a narrowing of focus; my cone of vision has become less obtuse, in a geometrical sense. While the angle contracts, it pushes all of my contained knowledge together, like one of those fair-ground shoveling games, and I hope (I think) a payload is about to drop.

So, having pointed to the bleachers beyond the outfield, let's see if I rolled high enough for this called shot. Maybe combining sports analogies with a penandpaper joke will net me some pity from the muses.

Don't hold me to unrealistic standards, now; I've still got ten years to achieve true genius.

[edit] I said "load".

Take it Back

Today was an et tu Brute kind of day.

As Josh and I were driving home, we saw a van skate into a power pole at 40 or 50 miles per hour. It spun around in a circle, the doors were stripped off, smoke was billowing out of the engine. Fuck, it just about evaporated. It was unreal. I still can't shake the vision of it.