Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Best Games of 2010: Part One!

This one is going to be a doozie. In fact it’s going to end up as two articles, because 2010 was kind of an awesome year for games.

At first I didn’t really think so. I thought 2009 and 2008 had lain the groundwork for 2010 to fail. A lack of major releases late in the year that really excited me (apologies to Assassin’s Creed 2: Brotherhood, which I still haven’t played) also made me think that I’d have to pad this list with indie titles that were more conceptually interesting than truly good. But then I thought back to the summer and the early months of the year, where games were less something I enjoyed and more something that sustained me through one of the shittier years of my life. And I came up with a bunch of incredible titles, each one of them great in its own way.

Best Game I Thought Was Awful That My Friend Alex Made Me Play That I Think Is Pretty Fucking Cool Now – Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light

So, full disclosure: this is one of those games that I love so much I haven’t even beaten it yet. Whatever, I’m still putting it on this list. Want to know why? Because it’s the sort of game that provides an experience, an experience worth having, and if you haven’t sat down and played it with a friend yet you really need to.

On its face this latest installment is just a slightly more transparent take on the whole Tomb Raider concept. You solve puzzles and kill faceless bad guys and giant, surprisingly dangerous bits of wildlife. Every once in a while you take on a puzzle that is much easier than it initially seems. Every once in a great while you’re going to get really frustrated or annoyed by really repetitive game play. A score system will give you access to guns and those tiny challenges will keep you pounding your head against your controller (and this is a controller based game, regardless of what platform you play it on – PC users should invest in a dual shock if they haven’t already acquired a current generation console with USB controllers) just to get that latest, seemingly insignificant and yet simultaneously critical bonus to your whatever statistic. Challenge rooms provide a nice diversion and break up the pace of the game, letting you know that you can fool around in “safe” areas without accidentally advancing what you’d have to be generous to call a story.

But all of this perfectly adequate game making is just a framework. It’s nothing special, not until you add in another person. And that’s when Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light (hereafter referred to as LCATGOL) really loses its shit. LCATGOL takes a concept like co-op play and puzzle solving and applies it in such a way that you’ll be screaming into your microphone with each new joy and failure. You’ll be slamming your fist drunkenly into your desk at three AM trying to get through a level because you’ll be fucked if you’re going to replay this bullshit again and you’ll play an extra hour just because you want to hold on to all those sweet bonuses you received from previous stages.

It’s far from the perfect co-op game, but for a downloadable game I was going to ignore, a game with no retail release at all playing on one of the most worn out IPs in gaming history, it was nothing short of phenomenal to me when it all came together. If you can grab a ten dollar copy and have a friend who plays video games it is perhaps one of the most worthwhile purchases you can make. I cannot speak to its longevity as a title, or to whatever shape the writing of the game might take. All I can talk about is how the mechanics of the game unfold with two people, which is truly something to be cherished. If I’d played this game with anyone other than my friend Alex, if I’d played this game as anything other than a replacement for a running long-distance game night I have with friends once a week, if I’d played this game sober it might’ve seemed like a slightly less profound game to me. But the stars aligned for me, and if you have booze and friends and an internet connection there’s no reason they can’t align for you too. Get a friend, get a microphone, get a bottle of cheap bourbon and get a copy of this game so you can sit down to get your socks rocked off with a friend while you play until 3 AM, screaming at that bitch to stop letting go of the grappling hook.

Best Game That Reminded Me of a Broken Version of Modern Warfare – Call of Duty: Black Ops

I’ll keep this brief, because I’ve made my thoughts on this game pretty clear, but it deserves a mention on this list if only for how well designed the structure of the multiplayer is. It’s also perhaps the first Call of Duty that recognized just how delightful adding some absurdity into otherwise tremendously self-serious game play can be. A fucking Rambo crossbow? Remote-controlled bomb cars? A grenade called a Willy Pete? Fucking brilliant ways to insert humor into a style of play where last year’s iteration took itself so seriously it added tactical nukes to play. If you can find a way to purchase just the multiplayer for Call of Duty: Black Ops, by all means do so.

Oh, and if you can fix the bugginess of the game itself, please do.

Best Game That I Already Played Last Year – Dragon Age: Awakenings

Technically an expansion, but an expansion with enough new content and game play to be considered a title in its own right, I struggled with the concept of putting this game on my list for this year. But here it is, because in terms of bang-for-buck game play Dragon Age still delivered and proved that Bioware can still bring it, even on a truncated development schedule. They took a sprawling masterpiece like Dragon Age: Origins and, in Awakenings, turned it into some great and every bit as much worth playing.

The vibrant sense of place at play in Origins, the sense of a larger world that the best CRPGs manage so masterfully and the great, iterative RPG game play that Dragon Age has made its business so well is all there in Awakenings, in a more manageable package. I wouldn’t say it’s better, but it’s one of the best examples of traditional storytelling in games on the market and it’s by far one of the most rewarding play experiences I’ve had in the last year. In fact, I’d only have two complaints about it to be totally honest.

First, but not foremost, the ending rushes a bit and can quickly become baffling. Also some of the choices you make just don’t make sense. Both the city and the fortress being overrun regardless of how well defended they are, and all of your companions surviving either struggle arbitrarily? Kind of weak, but it is a conventional RPG. What’s less forgivable is just how similar this game is to Dragon Age.

I’m not really sure this is a problem. Dragon Age was a fantastic game, and I’ve got nothing against a second chance to enjoy what was already a fantastic game with some new enemies, teammates and nifty new powers. But it is worth noting that there’s little other than characters and plot to differentiate this from the first Dragon Age. The game uses a handful of new texture sets and offers up many of the same models and enemies that Origins used. One of the boss fights even seems to play on this, teasing you with the idea that you’ll have to fight several of the most potent foes of Origins and then resolving the entire fight in less than a moment through the use of a lyrium chandelier. Either way, it’s worth noting that Dragon Age: Awakenings was certainly the best expansion I played last year, even if it was a bit derivative of its predecessor. I’d be more than happy to play through six or seven more Dragon Age installments, each telling its own story in a new and interesting part of Ferelden. In fact I’m actually kind of worried about Dragon Age 2, which seems to be moving away from the formula that made Origins so great. Of course, part of that could be Mass Effect 2 panic leaking into the way I see the Dragon Age franchise.

Best Game to Come From Russia, Take Our Jeans and Leave Without Giving Me a Clear Idea of Just What the Fuck Was Going On – Metro 2033

One of my big surprises when I was looking through major (non-gaming) publication’s best of lists was seeing Metro 2033 on so many of them. I loved this game, although I’m not quite sure why, and I’m glad to see that people outside of the pedant press enjoyed it too. It really was worth looking at if you didn’t get a chance, and with Steam’s end of the year sale you could probably get a copy for a song. Go on and play it if you haven’t already. I’ll be here when you’re finished.

Great, right? The shooting isn’t airtight, and it breaks the mold of copying some of the better changes that Halo made to the genre, such as the ability to melee with any weapon, and moreover being able to physically overpower any enemy you find yourself fighting. It’s a game that’s all about making you feel weak and, sometimes, overwhelmed. I’ve never seen a game do “raid defense” missions quite so well, balancing a feeling of desperation with reasonable victory conditions. Perhaps part of how Metro 2033 accomplishes this, and indeed what makes it great, is through the way it treats ammunition: it makes it valuable.

In most games ammo is constantly replenished. Running over an enemy’s corpse will net you dozens and dozens of bullets and you’ll be able to wade into battle mowing down mother fuckers left and right. But in Metro 2033 the best ammo for the best weapons, the ammo that makes you gun feel like a gun instead of piece of shit trying to kill you along with mutants and bandits, is really really fucking rare. And it’s the currency you use to buy things. If you use all your powerful bullets you won’t be able to get that fancy new armor. You also might not survive to get it if you don’t fire some of those bullets, of course.

This resource management is at the core of every element of Metro. It’s harsh, though not in the way S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was. If you’re carless with your ammo you’ll be running out of it before long. If you aren’t watching your step above ground or in areas with toxic gas you might trigger traps or be caught off guard and get some cracks in your very necessary mask, potentially leading up to a breach which could kill you. Dawdle too long in these exposed areas, though, and you won’t have enough air filters to do your job. And you’ll be holding on to these filters for the entire game, so you’d do well to watch your supply.

It won’t kill you for rounding a corner too fast, nor will it make your faction stance way too complicated for any sane person to deal with, but it will punish you repeatedly when you make mistakes. It’ll punish you for underestimating those little fucking gas bubbles, for ignoring the resource s offered to you and for failing to pay attention to your surroundings. It’ll punish you and make you keep going on, making the game a little bit harder for you every time you fail, and that’ll suck. Hard. But it’ll never suck so badly that the game will be unplayable.

Metro 2033 is without a doubt the best constructed game in terms of its shifting difficulty, its variety of play options and the manner in which it forces you to make decisions without really informing you of their impact on the world. It’s not always clear just what’s up in the world of Metro 2033, but you’re always being asked to make judgments and keep moving on with the consequences. Few games are willing to shoulder you with real consequences, to occasionally give you little or no idea of just what’s at stake while asking you to make choices. Although it is at times sloppy and is clearly a product of an Eastern European design philosophy and development cycle it’s one of the best games I played last year, and even though there are many games it brings to mind there are none that are really quite like it. Now if only I could figure out what it did with all my jeans.

Best Game That Seemingly No One Played And Liked Except Me – Alpha Protocol

There’s a lot of RPG on here, and more specifically a lot of Baldur’s Gate’s runty little children running about here, but there’s a good reason. Bioware and Obsidian (formerly Black Isle), the studios that conspired to make one of the greatest RPGs of all time, have had an incredible year. Make that a fucking incredible year. More Obsidian than Bioware, considering how strong Bioware’s showing in previous years has been, and how quiet Obsidian has been until quite recently. But over the last year they came out with a bang, and the lesser part of that was Alpha Protocol’s PC release, a game that seemingly no one gave the love it deserved.

Alpha Protocol received abysmal scores from most reviewers, racking up a 73 rating on Metacritic when you consider the best reviews. Full consideration yields less flattering results, and drops the Metacritic average for the various versions down to 68. Games that are now broadly criticized as the worst titles of the year, games with fatal flaws and no ambition, still scored higher than that, and Alpha Protocol was made with a shoestring budget compared to games like Medal of Honor and Call of Duty: Black Ops, games that failed many of their stated goals and did so without really bringing anything new to the table. Alpha Protocol was a new kind of game in a new kind of setting about the world we live in. It was one of the few games that was actually relevant in the last year.

Sure, it had problems. Bugs, balance issues, plot holes and dropped characters and content standing out like cartoon silhouettes in walls. But around all of these serious issues was a great, ambitious game about being part of a changing world, being an individual and about dealing with the consequences of actions. No game really was more transparent or adventurous in terms of how it explored the way games tell stories. Some were more deft, many had better writing and many were better designed, but the raw ambition of Alpha Protocol, the nakedness of its structure paired with the strength of its underpinning reason is just amazing.

Many people seemed to see it as something of an action-adventure title more than a role-playing title, a common problem with many third-person action-RPGs. But the fundamental underpinning of an RPG is at work in Alpha Protocol – the demand that you occupy a character and exist as that character in a world. The action trappings are but means to this end, means which often don’t seem to work as well as most people would like, which is fair. The combat of Alpha Protocol can be repetitive, sloppy and, at times, incoherent. Sometimes it’s even hilarious, such as when your character dances about during unarmed combat. But it never moves off message. If you use assault rifles you’re this kind of soldier. Shotguns? This kind. Pistols? Yet another kind. The choices you make change the game as an experience, whether you choose to stealth through the levels and go for the endurance bonuses that come with that choice or if you choose to kill every mother fucker in sight and earn weapon bonuses in the process.

This is to say nothing of a conversation system that, for the first time ever, actually impacts game play. And not just the endgame. The personal choices you make, the way you interact with your contemporaries and enemies and who you choose to kill or screw over when generates ripples, ripples that do more to change the overall course of the game than they do the play by play story. The only real problem I had with the game, aside from the occasional bug, was that I couldn’t put the moves on Sis. Although I guess that makes me kind of a creep, since she’s technically handicapped and possibly under-aged.