Game of the Year

2010, let's see...

Alpha Protocol was pretty good, but very flawed.
Civ5 was a turd and a blemish on the whole franchise.
Assassin's Creed 2 was very good but it's only its PC version, so doesn't really count.
Supreme Commander 2 is to Supreme Commander what Civ5 is to Civ, possibly worse.
So all these are out.
Nearly everything else is just below notice.

So the real contenders :
Fallout : New Vegas, best RPG since Torment with terrific worldbuilding.
M&B : Warband, the indie game which made me basically disappear from the world when I discovered it four years later and which I played more than all the AAA of this year combined.
Mass Effect 2, the insanely fun and best movie-RPG from Bioware.

And that is a hard choice... I'll have to think over it.
 
For 2010 it will be beetwen FO: New Vegas and Warband. I will go with the later one. Played it a lot too.

Is Bannerlord going to be released anytime along this century BTW?
 
I never actually played FNV, but whilst I did enjoy ME2, I played ACB much more, hence my vote. :)
 
Mass Effect 2 for 2010.
 
Oh, we've moved on to 2010 ?
Hmm, Fallout: New Vegas vs Mass Effect 2 is the first really difficult choice for me. But I see ME 2 as part of a trilogy and not really a standalone game, so I'd be inclined to vote New Vegas.


Unless there's another really good RPG.
That is not part of a series.
And criminally underappreciated.

Well, that settles it: My vote goes to Alpha Protocol.
 
2010 had a lot of good games I never got around to playing, but it also has what I consider the crown jewel of a major video game series and personal favorite. It's a game that recaptured more than any other the sheer magic (from the original games) of discovering a new world full of never-seen-before creatures, while at the same time taking one basic assumption about the setting after another, and questioning them, or even deconstructing (and, sometime, reconstructing) them.

As such, my vote has to go to Pokémon Black and White
 
Bannerlord is supposed to come out this year.
 
Oh, we've moved on to 2010 ?
Hmm, Fallout: New Vegas vs Mass Effect 2 is the first really difficult choice for me. But I see ME 2 as part of a trilogy and not really a standalone game, so I'd be inclined to vote New Vegas.


Unless there's another really good RPG.
That is not part of a series.
And criminally underappreciated.

Well, that settles it: My vote goes to Alpha Protocol.
how the hell do you vote for alpha protocol out of those 3

i mean i enjoyed ap, but really?
 
how the hell do you vote for alpha protocol out of those 3

i mean i enjoyed ap, but really?


Alpha Protocol is probably the game with the most chocies and story branches I have ever seen. The consequences in the game feel much more real than in most other games where they only amount to a different cutscene or a few changed lines of dialogue. It's also one of the rare RPGs that really allow you to approach problems differently and use stealth and presuasion. That's the kind of replayability that Bioware always keeps promising but never deliveres.
Mass Effect is mostly about shooting, and Fallout allows for some stealth, but it's also mostly useful for killing with sneak criticals.
It probably helps that I got AP a few months after release when it was patched.
 
2010: Civ5. Now it took a few years of patching/DLC'ing for the game to become a masterpiece. But the release was in 2010.
 
I think I have to vote for Warband. The engine is cumulatively solid and goofy, I think it's the best combat system I've ever tried.
 
Fallout: New Vegas for 2010
 
2010, let's see...

Alpha Protocol was pretty good, but very flawed.
Civ5 was a turd and a blemish on the whole franchise.
Assassin's Creed 2 was very good but it's only its PC version, so doesn't really count.
Supreme Commander 2 is to Supreme Commander what Civ5 is to Civ, possibly worse.

Well civ5 fans will argue that it's a great game in its final state, but I agree, overall a step backwards. It's not exactly a turd now 6 years and 2 expacs later but it's not even close to the other franchise titles and I'd never vote it for goty.

Supreme Commander 2, what a freakin' joke. Here's how to take a franchise and just kill it. It's NOTHING like supcom 1 or forged alliance. The only thing similar is the factions. Really, that's it. Resources changed completely, gone were the building tiers, gone were all of the units replaced with other stuff. Commanders still exist but their role is entirely different. And then they added a half baked research system and really crappy prototype units. It's just a really generic and crappy rts now, it's sad. I tried to complete it just to get the storyline but gave up 8 hours in cus it's so abysmal the gameplay.

For me the vote is easily Mass Effect 2. My favorite of the series, it's just kind of the pinnacle of it all. The combat is incredible improved over the first one and I liked the streamlining of things cus it really is more of an action title than an rpg. I didn't like how the first one's mechanics worked.

While 3 improves even more on gameplay and mechanics it lacks the charm of 2. I'm not really able to put my finger on it (poor ending aside) but 2 felt like personal. Your crew mattered, what you did and explored seemed to matter. I felt more of a connection with the game. 3 was fun but felt soulless in comparison, I can't explain it better than that. I think it was the mood and tone of 3 and the scope. The whole galaxy was always on the verge of collapse in 3, everything was over dramatic, no small scale events like in 2 when you pick up mordin from that plagued asteroid. That was a cool storyline self contained. I just enjoyed the smaller scope of it.

I also enjoyed the variety of enemies. 3 was too much fighting human cerberus over and over. 2 had a lot of cool types, you'd fight some mercs with krogans and salarians, then go fight some human guys later, then some turians, then some AI robots, and they'd all have different weapons and styles.



Other games that came out, Darksiders was pretty good but not close to goty worthy. It's kind of like zelda in the way it handles combat and exploration but I got bored and never finished it.

Star craft 2 also released but I never bothered to get it. I did like the first one a lot.
 
As much as I love Mass Effect 2 and Warband, Fallout New Vegas is the clear winner.

Even if it needed a year or so of patching :p

Civ5 was very broken in 2010.

Civ5 might be one of those were people specifically vote for expansions as goty titles. I dislike doing this but it's not disallowed so do what you feel is right here.
 
I'd feel bad taking like 2-3 weeks off updating this and then rushing through to 2011... but I'm excited to post a couple! Well a lot actually. It's stunning to me how many of these games I've played at least a little. I think we're starting to reach the golden age of steam sales where you just own everything for pc now cus it came in a $1 humble bundle or was $2 on steam.

GOTY worthy: Bastion, Dead Space 2, Magicka, Skyrim, LA Noire.

Others I liked: Dragon Age 2, Darkspore, Deus Ex Human Revolution, Warhammer 40k space marine, the Binding of Issac, Dark Souls, Orcs Must Die

plus a bunch I haven't played like a few assassin's creed titles, zelda skyward sword, Trine 2, Star Wars the Old Republic, oh and Might and Magic Heroes VI and Stronghold 3! Haha jk, those two should probably be on a worst games of the year list. And yes, I know most people will hate on dragon age 2 and darkspore as well.

Dragon Age 2: Most of the major complaints about this game are it's nothing like DAO, which it's not. But on its own it's actually pretty fun. The massively simplified the game and changed combat a lot. Another major complaint is the game world is tiny, which it is. But, the plot and dialogue was interesting enough within that world to me I didn't really care. It's much more mass effect style dialogue with voiced answers you pick from.

The combat is much more action style, auto attack an enemy and then press some special hotkeys. Instead of a more tactical approach with organizing your team, it's more straightforward, although I do like the combo effects. In DAO there were a couple magic combos you could do like nightmaring a sleeping enemy or something, I don't remember. In 2 though there's more explicit combos, they have effects like a smash attack always does double dmg to a frozen target for example, and you can check out the different spells the setup combos between your mages and rogues or whatever you want. I found it fun and I liked the talent trees more. The combat animations are over the top, but the DAO ones were pretty awful in their own way.

In general it's just a solid action rpg, almost like fantasy style mass effect, with a much worse story. But it's a solid c+/b- game like a 7/10 in my view, I don't get the massive hate for it.



Darkspore: oh man, where to begin. This is a really hard one to talk about objectively because there were so many technical issues with the game and servers and it's the first game I've ever played that's literally dead. The took the servers offline a few months ago and now the game is done. Even in single player you had to be connected to a server, which was a big issue.

The game was diablo meets spore's creature creator. It really had nothing to do with spore at all except you could model your heroes just like you'd create creature in spore. The plot was extremely thin, some mumbo jumbo about how this dark dna was corruption spore into darkspore and there was some super boss masterminding it all. Didn't make sense.

What did make sense was the gameplay and oh man it was awesome in my opinion. You just hold down right click to attack stuff, but every hero also had three abilities. One was unique to your hero, one was unique to your elemental class type (fire, cyber etc), and one was unique to you but shared by your squad, plus every hero had a passive effect. And then you unlocked variants of the heroes with different stuff. The cool part was you assembled squads of 3 heroes and then could swap between them in game. They shared squad abilities so if you had this one guy krel that had an ability that shot two firey missile things out that increased energy dmg taken, you could pair him up with a big nuker in your squad and then the nuker could use that awesome ability. It led to tons of possibilities, plus there were even more intricacies cus hero types like cyber, fire, earth etc took double dmg from enemies the same type, so you had to mix them up, and they did energy vs physical dmg and would run into enemies resistant to that dmg so you had to plan for that. And the gear was just cool.

I loved the gameplay, but there was never a good multiplayer community so it suffered, plus all the getting online issues just killed it. And the levels were repetitive and quickly turned into a gear grind. I'd love if someone could take the gameplay and make it offline available with properly designed levels, it could be really good.


Other games, Bastion is a unique little gem, sort of plays like older zelda games. It's hard to describe. It's very lite on rpg, a little heavier on action and HUGE on atmosphere.

Dead space 2 continues the franchise improving on gameplay but it just isn't as scary as the first. Probably cus the protagonist Issac talks and the environments are more open. Still a great game though.

Magicka is really unique too. You play a little wizard and create powerful spells by combining elements. For example pressing F I believe (I might be way off on the actual keys) queues up a fire element. Then if you right click it releases a stream of fire, kinda cool. But if you then pressed D or whatever the earth button was it combined earth and fire to make a fireball. Plus there were super unique spells you could do with the right ones like summon elementals or teleport. Your fingers had to be pretty quick and the possibilities were pretty endless. Very fun game with great atmosphere as well. Funny writing.


Skyrim, well everyone here knows skyrim. I don't really even like it that much, I never bothered to mod it so probably my fault, yet somehow I have ~100 hours on it... I recognized it's a great game.

And the LA Noire, a bit more of a point and click adventure than an action title but the story is just great imo and I really enjoyed playing through it.

Unfortunately all of these are solid like 80-90 pt titles, nothing stands out enough. I think I'm going to vote magicka...
 
2011 also had Portal 2 and Witcher 2
 
and arkham city

bastion is my goty for 2011

2011 had lots of good and very good games, but none that were really great imo. bastion is kind of an underwhelming choice for game of the year.
 
Really hard to not pick Skyrim or Portal 2. I have to go with Magicka for 2011, though. That was the game that put Paradox on the map as a publisher.
 
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