5. Super Meat Boy

I’m not sure any other game in my Top Ten of 2010 has as good controls as this game. None of them are as finely honed and perfected as Super Meat Boy; they will all have some minor failing somewhere between what your fingers do on the controller to what you see occur on screen. Not so with Super Meat Boy.

When you die (and you will die a lot), it was your fault. Your fingers failed you. I apologise for writing that; I really hate it when I read that stuff in reviews. I can make an exception in this case however, because it is actually true.

For some, this will be too much to take and they will give up. For others, it will spur you on to greater and greater feats of appendage dexterity. It is a remarkable piece of programming.

Everywhere you go you leave a trail of blood

The path through each level is (usually) obvious and even when it isn’t, each of your untimely demises will quickly start to reveal patterns as to what you should be doing. I think that’s part of the appeal for me, there’s a certain evolution that you go through on every new level that you play.

Initially you’re just feeling your way around, trying to work out what to do. Then you go through again and again until you can comfortably complete it (this doesn’t really happen on the later levels). Eventually as you continue to refine and streamline your path, new opportunities for time-saving become apparent (“Ooo, can I take out the need to land in front of saw blade after the wall-jump by just wall-sliding a little higher on the wall and jumping it in one go?”).

Too much salt is bad for you, m'kay?

I found myself doing this for every little chunk of a level, trying to critically analyse its make-up and navigate the most efficient path possible, trying to hone my muscle memory such that I could replicate it every time. After you’ve reached that level of depth, that’s when you try to string everything you’ve learnt together in a perfect run for a world-beating leaderboard time! Incidentally, if you like competing with your friends on leaderboards you will love this. I was ranked pretty highly around the time it came out (both amongst my friends and the wider XBL public) but I dread to think how far I’ve slipped down now.

It’s very addictive and there’s nothing more exhilarating than nailing a perfect run and rising up the leaderboards. On some of the levels, there’s nothing more exhilarating than actually finishing it!

If you didn’t know (shame on you!), this week (yesterday in fact) marked the 3 year anniversary of the EU release of Burnout Paradise; one of my most favouritest games in the whole world ever and one that helped cement some of the tremendous online (and now offline) friendships that I still enjoy today. If you fancy celebrating this glorious game, feel free to send me a message over Live.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 multiplayer is still a regular feature of my evenings. The servers have been completely ballsed up for the past week or so which has resulted in empty servers and one-sided games (yes, even more than normal). Strangely, vanilla BFBC2 didn’t seem quite as badly affected as Vietnam, so we did a bit of modern warfare too.

Last night I jumped into a game with my usual crew and found myself in a Hardcore game, where there’s no map, character health is significantly lower, you can’t enemy characters and generally things are a lot tougher. It was quite a different proposition, but it is good fun. I also picked up the co-operative Onslaught mode, which now seems to be permanently discounted. In Onslaught mode, you (and your squad of 3 teammates hopefully) progress through four of the multiplayer Rush maps, taking flags and fighting off hordes of AI enemies and vehicles. It’s great fun. The enemies aren’t totally stupid either and they seem to have a proper line of sight system as well, allowing you the opportunity to play it sneaky and flank them if you can keep out of sight.

I made a tiny bit more progress in Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. I think I’m still in Memory Sequence 4, so I’ve still got a way to go! Grabbed a few more games of Carcassonne, often in the 10-20 minutes where I’m waiting for my food to cook and the like. I tend to lose a lot. Disappointingly there still aren’t many people playing it, despite it having been on deal over Christmas.

And that’s about it. I’m going through a board game phase at the moment, but I’ll talk about later.

6. Darksiders

Games released right at the start of the year tend to fair quite badly in end of year lists, so I’m glad my memory extends back far enough to remember that Darksiders was probably my biggest pleasant surprise of the year. I remember reading about it late in 2009 and it certainly sounded intriguing; a Zelda-esque adventure set in a post-apocalyptic, neo-gothic version of Earth where you get to play as one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, War? AWW HELLS YEAH! I actually ended up pre-ordering it in a “well, the premise and what I’ve seen of it so far interests me enough to take a chance” kind of way. Don’t you just love it when a risk pays off?

This is War. You do not mess with War.

Before we really get into it, there is one major negative that I need to point out: The Start of The Game. No really, that’s it. The start of the game IS the negative. The first hour or so of Darksiders is shit. Unbelievably shit. I don’t think I’ve EVER played such a good game that has an introduction as shit as this one. It’s boring, slow, completely linear and not really any fun whatsoever. It doesn’t help that this is quite a tough game (more on that later) and I don’t recall getting much in the way of tutorials or explanations of the mechanics. Seriously, I had no real idea what was going on during the opening. I just know I was incredibly glad when it was over. Please persevere with it though, please!

I mentioned earlier that it’s quite Zelda-esque in its design. That is quite the understatement, because it’s almost a carbon copy of how Zelda works: enter a dungeon, do some fighting, solve some puzzles, kill the boss, get a new piece of equipment, use that new equipment to access new areas, repeat. Fortunately, once “that intro” is out of the way the game blossoms into a beautiful, expansive world, ripe for exploration. If you’re the kind of player that loves exploring every nook and cranny of a game, you will surely enjoy this game. For me, the key thing that makes Darksiders so good is the quality of the dungeons. With the exception of one, where you spend a lot of time fighting and riding your flaming (literally) horse Ruin, the dungeons are brilliantly designed chunks of adventure gaming, each with its own identity and style, smart puzzles, and plenty of levels to explore.

This is War's flaming horse, Ruin. He is summoned out of the ground. AT WILL!

Darksiders is a bit too easy on Normal difficulty. Actually, it’s very easy. All the forums and reviews I’d read had suggested to play it on Hard (“Apocalyptic”) difficulty for more of a challenge. And boy is it a challenge. There’s no middle ground here; either you fight and win all your battles easily on Normal or, on Apocalyptic, every single fight you engage in, no matter how seemingly insignificant the opponent, becomes a tense, sometimes infuriating battle for survival. There were quite a few difficulty spikes throughout the game. One of the early bosses is far harder than most you will fight later in the game and some encounters with standard bad guys will occasionally test your patience. It gets really silly when the “big” enemies you had trouble with early in the game arrive in packs as the small, minion-type characters later on! Combat is handled adequately but sometimes it can feel difficult to create decent combos – the controls are good though.

Lastly, it’s worth spending a bit of time talking about the characters. They’re excellent. Character designs are bold and exciting and with the exception of a few of the minor enemies, everyone helps add to the fantastic look and feel of Earth part-taken over by demons. The voice acting is brilliant, bringing the conniving, devious characters to life and there’s a reasonably good story, full of twists and turns. Oh and the ending is amazing. Seriously. I won’t spoil it, but I had goosebumps.

I finally got hold of my Pro Drums for Rock Band 3. Marie had ordered them long before Christmas but the snow conspired to deny me my present. She got a message from our office manager that they’d been delivered to work on Christmas Eve (after we’d both left). Anyway, I have them now and they are awesome. Ridiculously awesome. The cymbals add an amazing level of extra depth to the gameplay. I did have an issue with one of the cymbals double-hitting, but I think I fixed it. I’ll try to do a full review later (and a walkthrough of how to fix a double-hitting cymbal) soon, perhaps this weekend if I’m disciplined enough!

Super Mario Galaxy 2 is the first of my new games of the year. It’s predecessor, with its spectacular level design, beautiful graphics and razor-sharp controls is probably within my top ten games of all time. Only a few hours in and SMG2 is already working its magic on me. It doesn’t perhaps produce quite the same feeling of fresh, newness that the original did, but it’s lost none of its polish nor that wide-eyed excitement and desire to explore you experience every time you load up a new level.

I think most of my time this week has been spent playing Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. I was a bit ill late last week, so I had quite a vegetative weekend sat in front of my TV not doing much else. I want to do a big, proper review once I get it finished but it’s fair to say that it is an excellent game. It takes the improvements AC2 made over AC1, refines them yet further and then just gives you more. More, more, more. Within a few hours of play, your world map is chock-full of stuff to do, it’s amazing. It might also surprise you to know that I’ve been playing a lot of the newly added multiplayer mode and it is also fantastic. If you’ve got AC: Brotherhood and have only stuck to the singleplayer thus far (I know a lot of people were quite sniffy when Ubisoft announced there would be a multiplayer mode), I urge you to try it. It’s unlike any multiplayer game I’ve ever played. Once you understand the mechanics and get into the game flow, it really is very addictive!

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is a regular fixture in my 360’s disc tray so regardless of what else I play, I’ll nearly always sneak on for a few games most evenings with my Xbox Live chums. Vietnam is a fantastic add-on which manages to feel quite different to vanilla BFBC2 but be just as good. The main problem is getting a decent game of Rush. In the event we get all the EGers on one side, we’re normally so effective with our communication and tactics that if we absolutely hammer the opposing team whilst, for example, attacking, we hardly ever get to play the defence as everyone will have quit. Very frustrating!

I picked up Carcassonne on XBLA in the Christmas deals and gave that a few goes against the AI the other day. It seems fun, not as good as Settlers of Catan of course, but it does benefit from not having cards, therefore local multiplayer is possible. I’ve got a bit of a board game thing going on at the moment (I’m waiting for my copy of Civilization: The Board Game to arrive at the moment), so Carcassonne is a nice addition to the arsenal.

You can read the first part here.

9. LIMBO

LIMBO - It's a bit creepy.

I’ve already written about LIMBO at great length and to be entirely honest, there’s not much more I’d say. I’ll give you a few choice quotes, but I think I covered it the first time:

“What’s so great about the opening section is just how bleak and scary it is. There is a genuine feeling of trepidation and fear of what is to come. Normally I’d be quite critical of things like hidden insta-death traps but […] the checkpointing is forgiving and the nervous trial and error nature of the game just made sense within the context of the story.”

Hopefully you didn’t miss the half-price deal Microsoft put out on New Years’ Eve. If you did, never mind eh? You should still buy it.

8. VVVVVV

This is a bit of a surprise (late) entry in my Top Ten. I’d played the demo months ago and really enjoyed it but I didn’t get around to buying it until I was trying to think of things that would run nicely on my netbook. For the record, it runs beautifully.

VVVVVV - Yes, it's tough.

Created by indie developer Terry Cavanagh, you play as Captain Viridian, tasked with rescuing your 5 crew members (can you guess what letter all their names start with?) after your ship runs into a few inter-dimensional issues. Drawn in a super-simple but incredibly charming retro style you only have three controls available to you: Left, Right and the ability to flip gravity. There is no jump button. With this limited move set you must navigate the “open world” map (open in as much as you can pretty much go wherever you want), flipping the gravity to navigate obstacles and avoid danger.

And boy, is there a lot of danger! The graphics aren’t the only old skool gaming feature here. VVVVVV is a tough game; brutally so, but as with the best of the genre you keep trying because you know it is possible, despite how it appears the first few hundred times you attempt a particularly tough section (SPOILERish: As an example, Veni Vidi Vici is probably the toughest section in the whole game).

You will die a lot; in the 4ish hours it took me to complete the main game, I died some 2200 times (that’s over 500 times an hour!) but a bit of nimble finger work and perseverance should see you right in the end! It’s important not to understate this: VVVVVV is beautifully designed. It features some of the best, most intelligent level design I’ve seen in a long time.

Try the demo, and then buy it. Please.

7. Halo: Reach

I like Halo. At their best, they provide small doses of bombastic, unpredictable chaos against an epic space opera backdrop. At their worst, they’re sluggish, repetitive corridor shooters with little to make it stand out from the hordes of other FPS games. How many games can get some levels so right (The Silent Cartographer) and others so wrong (The Library) over the course of just one game?

Clearly, I’m not your typical Halo fan; I’ve never really got into its highly competitive multiplayer component and I think each successive campaign has been better than the last (that’s right, I thought Halo 2’s campaign was better than Halo’s). Each game was fun while it lasted but none of them left me feeling genuinely excited.

Except Reach.

Halo Reach’s campaign is spectacular. I believe my good friend Mr Binks described it like a Halo: Best of album, and I only wish I had been smart enough to come up with the analogy first because it is absolutely spot on. Gone is the repetitive corridor trudging. In its place, the campaign is stuffed to the gills with the bits that we all love about Halo; fighting out in the open, pitched battles in confined spaces and set piece after epic set piece.

Halo: Reach - Very Noble

The guns feel as good as, if not better than they’ve ever felt and whilst I’m not a fan of the trademark low gravity movement style, the controls feel tight and responsive.

My main criticism of Reach and to be fair, it covers all the Halo games to date, is the story. And to be clear, it’s not that I think the story is bad. From what I can gather, there’s a very exciting, engrossing sci-fi tale being woven here. It’s just that it’s told so badly. Whilst I’m sure I could tell you what’s going on minute to minute, the over-arching story is a vague mish-mash of seemingly unrelated events. I know it’s epic and exciting, I just don’t know why it’s epic and exciting. There is a wealth of depth and background to the story but it’s never introduced in an effective way. A recent article on EG pretty much sums it up for me.

Halo: Reach - From dooown tooown!

Reach is also the first of the series where I’ve really got into the multiplayer. It might just be because it’s the first Halo game I bought at launch (and hence large numbers of my XBL Friends List were playing it) but I just found myself drawn to it. Add Firefight mode into the mix and you’ve got an incredibly compelling package.

With their final game in the series, Bungie have perfected the Halo formula and I for one, will definitely “Remember Reach“.

Happy New Year everyone! Hope it’s going well so far!

The Christmas/New Year week is not typically a big gaming week for me (unless you count hundreds if not thousands of board game sessions), but I did get a bit of gaming done. The new Trivial Pursuit where you can place bets on other players getting their answers right or wrong is particularly good by the way.

Videogame-wise, the main staples for me were Rock Band (yes, I did cart all my instruments on the train down to Lincolnshire in the name of entertainment) and, perhaps surprisingly, definitely embarrassingly, Just Dance 2. My sister brought it with her. For Christmas, I also got Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood and Super Mario Galaxy 2 but didn’t play either (I thought I’d wait to get home first). My brother got The Michael Jackson Experience from (you guessed it) my sister!

Just Dance 2 - It scares me that I know which track this is...

Here’s something I never thought I’d say; Just Dance 2 is surprisingly good. OK, so it’s not nearly as accurate or good-looking as Dance Central and the dances are incredibly camp and silly rather than “proper” choreographed routines, but damn it’s good fun. And exhausting. It’s a genuine workout if you put the effort in! The Michael Jackson Experience is also really well made, but it’s considerably tougher than Just Dance 2, with faster, more difficult moves (that impressively go some way towards mimicking the actual music videos) and less in the way of on-screen assistance.

Rock Band 3 and The Beatles: Rock Band went down very well with the family and even my dad, who does like a bit of singing but hasn’t played anything other than Wii Sports since the Mega Drive era, got involved and tried out all the instruments. M bought me the new Pro Drums for Christmas (alas, they are still stuck in Edinburgh, awaiting my return) so I’ve left my old RB1 drum set to my sister’s boyfriend. I’m drumless!

The rest of my gaming activity was limited to trying to find stuff in the Steam sale that would actually run on my netbook. There’s really not a lot on offer!

RUSH - Very playable on my netbook!

RUSH is a fun little puzzle game where you direct different coloured blocks to their respective goals using instructional tiles that you can place as you see fit. It starts off very simply, but gets pretty taxing as you have to deal with and consider the consequences of many blocks that aren’t allowed to crash into each other! The hint system is also very nicely done, offering two different levels of help according to how stuck you are. It’s worth mentioning that it runs reasonably well too on the lowest setting despite the NF210 not meeting the minimum requirements.

Osmos - Out of this world!

Osmos is a difficult one to try and describe; it reminds me quite a lot of fl0w. As a circular, floaty object (cosmic entity or amoeba-style life form?), you spend your time absorbing smaller particles and avoiding the bigger ones. As you absorb the smaller particles you increase in size, enabling you to swallow up bigger “enemies”. You propel yourself with mouse clicks, the trade-off being that you jettison some of your body’s matter as you go. Enemy particles with different properties (attractions, repulsion, survival AI) provide each level type with an alternate spin on the formula, requiring a change-up of tactics to complete. It’s very soothing game with a great soundtrack and a “just one more go” style of play.

Outside of Steam, I grabbed the free-to-download GTA and GTA2 installers from the Rockstar Classics website which are both as good as they always were! Again, they run perfectly on a netbook.

I also completed VVVVVV this week but I shall wait to talk about it as it features somewhere in my Top Ten of 2010!

If you’re “industry” (sorry, that makes me sound like a right a-hole!) and fancy taking part, you’ve still got a little bit of time to download the form, make your predictions and get them emailed over to FreakyZoid – the deadline is 1st January, so get going!

I’ll leave it to him to post up people’s answers (I will post mine here after all the entries are in), but I’ve spent a while researching each topic, so hopefully I might get a few right! We’ll find out at the end of next year!

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)!

[EDIT: Chrome was complaining about the embedded videos from the Rockstar Games website, so I'll just link to it manually - LINK].

Pretty exciting stuff, right? :)