Christmas and New Years are a time for reflection and in the spirit of looking backwards and avoiding thinking about the future, we’re going to take a look at my Top Ten games of the year that was Two Thousand and Ten.

Oh and merry Christmas and a happy New Year to you all! I hope you’re having a lovely time wherever you are!

I’ll give you fair warning: the Xbox 360 is far and away my most played platform and the results will naturally be skewed as such. To be clear though, this is my Top Ten list of games that were released during the course of 2010.

Now, without further ado…

10. blur

It was a tough call trying to decide which of the arcade racers I’ve played this year were going to scrape their way into my Top Ten. Split/Second, blur, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit… which one do you go for? It’s an incredibly tough decision and frankly if I could all have them ranked at 10, I’d do it.

For me, they all offered different but equally great arcade racing experiences. Split/Second provided a great single player experience, blur was clearly focussed on the multiplayer and Hot Pursuit sat somewhere in-between, providing a good mix of on and offline action.

As someone who loves both single and multiplayer gaming (and who considers Burnout Paradise to be the best arcade racer released this generation), surely Hot Pursuit should win, no? It’s clear the idea was to strip back everything to concentrate on the experience of driving exotic cars fast, but I can’t help but feel they’ve stripped it back that tiny bit too far. Hot Pursuit feels focussed to a fault. I still enjoyed it though and I’m very excited to see how Criterion go about supporting it with downloadable content!

Hot Pursuit - It's just not Burnout Paradise, is it?

Split/Second was a spectacular, bombastic experience that provided something a little different to most other racing games but lacked any sort of longevity, the multiplayer in particular was a very barebones affair. Still, it looks great, provided plenty of “Holy Shit!” moments and, like Hot Pursuit, once you got used to the handling model, it felt very satisfying to play.

Split/Second - Ridiculous. And all the more awesome because of it.

Ultimately though, I think blur has to win this face-off. That in itself feels like a pretty strange thing to say because I think blur’s driving/handling model is really quite shit and it is easily the ugliest of the three games. I’m not really sure why I like it. Perhaps it’s the beautifully balanced weapons and power-ups, the CoD-esque levelling system, the madness of 20-player races or and the social banter when playing with friends. Who knows?

It was hailed as a “grown-up Mario Kart” in the run-up to release, a comparison that’s something of a double-edged sword. It’s grown-up in the same way that The Fast & Furious is grown-up, which is to say, not grown-up at all. There is plenty of grown-up language hurled down the internet when you wreck someone with a Shunt at 200mph however! The comparison to Mario Kart is a little closer to the truth (if you’re talking about when Mario Kart was still good and there weren’t quite so many concessions for the newbie at the expense of the “better” player — blue shell, anyone?). It’s balanced, tactical and incredibly competitive a.k.a. the Perfect Multiplayer Storm.

blur - Zzap! Bang! Crash! ... "You UTTER B*STARD!"

The great thing about blur is that no matter where you are in the pack of 20 racers, you’re nearly always having fun. You soon learn to stop worrying about finishing first and instead concentrate on fighting amongst (and shouting at) the group of racers immediately in front and behind you. I think it’s pretty special when a hard fought battle to finish somewhere in the middle of the pack can feel like a huge, well deserved victory.

RIP Bizarre Creations (if you are indeed gone)!