[Question] The Gamingforce Game of the Year 2010: Vote a Go Go

Bayonetta - 20 points
2010's Big Ball of Fun

I don't know how Platinum Games did it. I really don't. By all rights, Bayonetta should have gotten too ridiculous to play about an hour in. And yet, somehow, it just becomes... like a car crash that keeps getting added to. You can't help but keep watching, just to see what the next fireball looks like, and how it comes about. That analogy was strained. But not nearly as strained as your suspension of disbelief as Bayonetta piles bucket upon bucket of ridiculous on top of you, and yet it never breaks. It's honestly one of the most refreshing things this year, that a game just said "Fuck it, going long" instead of trying to calculate where the line was and stopping just short. After Vanquish, it's become clear that this is going to be Platinum Games' raison d'etre, and I for one love it.

None of this would have been worth mentioning had it not been attached to, and lovingly woven into, the most solid game from a pure control perspective that has come out in a long time. Absolutely wacky combos, flips, and gunfire get pulled off effortlessly, making even the most amateurish Mexican feel like a badass. The animation's seamless transitions from move to move combined with lightning quick response to your controls, and correspondingly demanding timing on the part of the bad guys, always let you feel like a badass when you pull off a combo, while never becoming frustrating when you mess up.

It's a hard tightrope to walk between being so hard it's frustrating, and challenging while still allowing you to feel like you're the one screwing up, not the game. And Bayonetta walks that tightrope with aplomb, all the while shaking its ass seductively and whistling sweet Sega nothings.

Pac-Man Championship Edition DX - 20 points
2010's Shining Example of How to Keep a Franchise Relevant

Pac-Man Championship Edition DX has no right to be as entertaining as it is. It's a fast-paced, techno-infused version of Pac-Man. Pac-Man's like 90 years old at this point, why aren't you playing BLOPS?

Because Pac-Man CE DX isn't your grandfather's Pac-Man. By changing the focus from simple survival to a fast-paced time-limited action session, suddenly every little move counts. The pulsing techno soundtrack and steadily increasing speed keep the tension mounting as you move through well-designed chunks of maze in the most efficient way possible.

DX didn't really have to do terribly much. Pac-Man CE already did a lot of the heavy lifting, with the paradigm shift into the shifting maze halves, and all DX really needed to do was give us more maze chunks to work with. Boy howdy did they ever, and they made them in such a way that it makes DX feel almost like the world's most ridiculously fast puzzle game. There's also so MANY of them, my god, it's awesome, and the time trials are an interesting, if repetitive, way of playing with them in smaller chunks.

Did they have to add giant chains of ghosts behind you that you can eat all at once? No, not really, but they provide a fantastic incentive to keep moving forward while keeping your eye out on the nearest power pellet.

The only thing this game really was missing was better leaderboards. For a game focused on high scoring, the way it chose to allow you to gauge yourself, especially against your friends, is opaque and annoying to use. Geometry Wars 2 is still the high bar in that regard. Doesn't take away from the experience of playing this game. Sonic Team should take a good hard look at Pac-Man CE DX as an example of how to not continue to fuck up Sonic 4.

Mass Effect 2 - 20 points
2010's Best Genre Pirouette

Mass Effect was a game with a shocking amount of potential, and an almost equally shocking gap between potential and reality. A smartly-written and gigantic world, a dialogue-driven plot that emphasized moral choice just a bit too much at times, and a clunky, slow-paced inventory and combat system teamed up to make... well, a weird game. Mass Effect wasn't sure what it wanted to be, but seemed to err on the side of clunky RPG whenever it couldn't make up its mind. About 80% RPG and 20% shooter, all it really needed to succeed on its second go-round was a tighter focus on making sure the game wasn't clunky.

And then Mass Effect 2 comes out, and it's... not terribly much like the first game. I have to give BioWare a massive amount of credit for taking a good hard look at their little mishmash and rather than sticking to what they know, which is the 80%/20% RPG/action hybrid of Mass Effect 1, they noticed (how, I have no idea) that there was a good shooter being hamstrung by too much RPG cruft. And they took the ballsy step of changing the genre of a series in between games.

Suddenly, Mass Effect 2 became a honest to god fun to play shooter with some RPG trappings. The dialogue stuff was still there, and arguably better done the second time. The wall between RPG mode and shooter mode was firmly erected in all the right places, and the overall pace of the game came off much better for it.

BioWare also smartly noticed that the single greatest asset their game had was its interesting sci-fi universe, and took great pains to make sure that it felt large without being overwhelming. While some may complain about the smaller areas than in the first game, by focusing better on populating everything properly, the world actually felt bigger without physically being so. The little corners of the mythology that got fleshed out were all interesting, and the amount of trouble the game went to to make sure that whatever you did in the first game somehow affected the second one was a really awesome flourish.

Was Mass Effect 2 perfect? No. The story suffers from Middle Trilogy Entry Syndrome; you spend the entire game getting a team together, go on one mission, and then the game ends on a cliffhanger. While I found it just about right, the extent to which the RPG components got dialed back in this installment was a bit drastic for some people. It has room to get more complex on that front, to be sure. There also wasn't nearly enough Mordin Solus in the game. Fuck he's the best character.

Mass Effect 2 was, in my mind, the biggest franchise improvement of this year. BioWare took a risk on changing their gameplan, and it paid off in spades.

Halo: Reach - 15 Points
2010's Prodigal Swan Song

Halo: Reach is how you say goodbye to a storied franchise. Bungie has prided themselves on their relentless support of their Halo franchise, and has built an incredibly loyal fanbase that will follow them to their next project with open arms and wallets. I'm one of them.

When they announced Halo: Reach was going to be their last Halo game, I'm not sure too many people actively doubted they'd make a good game. It's not in Bungie's arsenal to half-ass something. What was surprising, though, was how much care they took to make sure that this game was going to last without them having to tend it. They wanted to send their franchise off to its new owners, 343 Studios, with a big giant sloppy kiss to their fans, and boy howdy did they ever.

A wonderful campaign, which impressed me far more than any other Halo campaign did, and a multiplayer that, while lacking the long-term hooks that BLOPS' has, is just as incredibly rock solid and balanced as it ever was, both serve as reminders that Bungie knows what they're doing. That's not an accident; when they have a game coming out that doesn't have the word "Halo" in front of it or a Marty O'Donnell score, their best bet is to make sure that what we last saw them do was their best work. And it was.

VVVVVV - 10 Points
2010's Best Masocore Platformer/2010's Best Soundtrack

VVVVVV is everything right with indie game development. It doesn't ever get too big for its britches, it has a wicked huge amount of charm, and most importantly, it's got fantastic game design going for it. It's the best in this year's crop of "masocore" platformers, a term I'm appropriating from somewhere I can't remember for the recent surge in games that pride themselves on being difficult without being unfairly so.

Its soundtrack was sublime, its controls were a neat twist on your typical platforming without being impossible to use, and I played the shit out of that game. That's pretty much it; unlike a lot of my other favorite games, VVVVVV was focused on doing one thing really fucking well, and it did it. Simple as that.

Alan Wake - 10 Points
2010's Reminder That Survival Horror Isn't Dead

Alan Wake hearkens back to old-school Resident Evil in all the right ways. It isn't afraid to take its time, allowing you to get sucked into the atmosphere it painstakingly builds before getting the bejesus scared out of you. It has a plot that dabbles in the supernatural without feeling like Harry Potter's Spooky Storytime. It uses awkward combat as a way to increase tension in the same way Resident Evil 4/5 did. And it also nails its own version of the cinematic vibe that old Resident Evils went for, opting for a TV-style episode structure that kept the game from dragging by guaranteeing something interesting would happen every hour or so.

Its central plot conceit was neat; finding pages that alternately predict the future or give you insight about things that already happened is a neat idea, and one that's never used too gratuitously. The combat got repetitive towards the end, but never failed to be tense; the use of light throughout the game to build atmosphere as well as kill bad guys is really great.

The last thing I want to mention about Alan Wake is that it actually earned its cliffhanger ending. Instead of feeling tacked on to sell a second game, it felt right. To avoid it, they either would've had to make the game longer than it already was (and it ends at just the right point) or they would've had to severely shorten what was already there. Ending the story where and how they did felt fair and earned while still getting me excited for the next game.

Call of Duty: Black Ops - 10 points
2010's Most Unlikely Success Story

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was incredibly hyped, and with good reason. Infinity Ward had, in the first Modern Warfare, created one of the most tightly polished and infinitely replayable console shooters of this generation. While they had some hiccups with the ongoing support, we were all able to brush it off, since they were working on making Modern Warfare 2 work really well, right?

Treyarch, meanwhile, struck accidental paydirt with Zombie Mode in Call of Duty: World at War, but not much else. They were the second fiddle to Infinity Ward in the grand dual-developer scheme of things.

And then Modern Warfare 2 came out, and... uh, how exactly did they screw this up? The campaign was relentlessly ridiculous, which was a letdown coming from Modern Warfare 1's savvy pacing, and their promised fixes to the quirks in the campaign were hit or miss.

The multiplayer, though? Oh god, how did they fuck THAT up so badly? What was a balanced progression became the Let's Wait Until I Hit Level 40 Game, there were multiple completely overpowered abilities created by adding perks/weapons because they looked like good ideas without seemingly testing them, and then some weapons were further broken by glitches that took months to fix. The post-release support was garbage, owing to the drama going on at Infinity Ward after release, and a lot of people were left skeptical as to what Treyarch could do by building off of such a wonky base.

Turns out, they just decided to ignore Modern Warfare 2 wherever possible. They sidestepped the engine wonkiness by building off of their World at War engine, removed a host of overpowered perks and guns, some of which had needed removal since the first Modern Warfare (Juggernaut/Stopping Power, anyone?), and somehow escaped with a balanced, incredibly fun to play online shooter again. Suddenly, the roles are reversed, and I find myself incredibly excited for Treyarch's next outing.

Sure, the singleplayer goes overboard on the CIA mystery stuff to the point that the narrative is clumsy, and the difficulty falls into most of the same pitfalls the previous games have, but at least they didn't break things further! There were so many things that could've gone wrong, and regardless of whether they did or not, it would've sold. It's too big of a brand at this point to get torpedoed. But it was heartening to see that at least someone in the giant behemoth at Activision was still interested in making a good game instead of a good marketing tool.

Close But No Cigar: Donkey Kong Country Returns, Super Meat Boy, BioShock 2

DKCR and Super Meat Boy go hand in hand with VVVVVV as the three gold standards of how to make challenging platformers. All three feature fantastic level design, while they all have different approaches to the platforming itself: VVVVVV goes with gravity, DKCR goes with nostalgia-tinged accessibility without skimping on challenge, while Super Meat Boy deliberately flirts with the line between hard and unfair using rock solid controls and completely classic gameplay conventions. I didn't want to put all three of these in my list, so I picked VVVVVV for its originality and, admittedly, for coming first.

BioShock 2 was a good gameplay improvement over the first. What got me, though, was that BioShock 2 had a huge question to answer: Why, after the definitive ending that the first game had, should we re-enter Rapture? BioShock 2 never really answered that question. While I have no objection to seeing more of Rapture, the plot of BioShock 2 hit just about all of the same story beats as the first game while feeling crowbarred into its overall narrative. It wasn't bad by any stretch of the imagination. Taken on its own, it's a better game than the first one. The problem lies in that the first game had arguably the most cohesive narrative a game has ever had, and by forcing itself into that continuity, BioShock 2 never escapes feeling unnecessary.

Biggest Letdown of 2010 - Crackdown 2

I know full well Crackdown 2 had a ridiculously short development time. That doesn't excuse the game from feeling like the warmed-over years late lazy sequel that it is. There was no reason to release a Crackdown 2 with an identical city. Absolutely none. The majority of the fun in that game came from exploring a giant playground with your superpowers, and the sequel decided to give the playground a liberal coating of Next Generation Brown and Worse Textures Than The First Game while not bothering to appreciably improve the lackluster combat, driving, or story progression from the first game. Adding zombies worked for World at War, but it didn't work here.

Jam it back in, in the dark.