This week, my list of the games I’ve played throughout 2011 continues. First off, Metroid Prime. Yeah, the old Gamecube game. I just got around to finally playing it. I never owned a Gamecube, but a few years back, I’d played Eternal Darkness on my Wii and had a lot of fun. When I mentioned to a friend that I was interested in trying out other Gamecube games I may have missed out on, he recommended Wind Waker and Metroid Prime. I’d really enjoyed Wind Waker, so it was with much zeal that I dived into Metroid Prime. I was, frankly, disappointed. I understand that this game came out way before anyone had figured out the best control configuration for first person shooters on a gamepad, but the controls just did not gel for me. I played the game a good bit, and only quit while fighting the plant boss. Sorry, Samus. Did not like the game. C-.

Osmos is one of my favorite Humble Indie Bundle games. It surprised me, and in a very good way. The premise is simple: You’re a blob. There are other blobs. Eat the smaller blobs and avoid the bigger blobs. Sounds kind of boring, but a few mechanics they added make it a lot of fun. You move by expelling a tiny amount of your substance, so moving actually shrinks you an infintesmal amount. So you want to minimize your thrust. Also, the material you expel can push other blobs, and if it hits them, they get bigger.

The amount of complexity and strategy involved is far greater than you’d think. And there are multiple sections of the game that each introduce new mechanics. Osmos is a lot of fun, and I’ve heard they introduced an iOS version. If you’ve got an iPhone, I recommend Osmos highly. It gets a B.

I got a sweet deal on The Misadventures of PB Winterbottom when I bought it on Steam. I’m pretty sure I paid $2.50. It was an XBLA game that I’d missed and heard many good things about, so I jumped all over it. It seems like all XBLA puzzle/platformers get compared to Braid, and I suppose I can understand the comparison, but the only real similarities are that they’re both XBLA puzzle/platformers, and they both have sections of levels that each introduce new mechanics. For a while, I wasn’t sure I’d get through the game without a walkthrough, but in the end I managed. My daughter watched me play more often than not.

One thing that I nearly forgot to mention about PB Winterbottom is the amazing soundtrack. The music is so well written that I enjoy listening to it at work. It’s a beautiful orchestral score that integrates ticking clocks and other elements of the time-based gameplay very well. It’s second only to Bastion as the best music I’ve heard in a game this year. I really liked it a lot - I’ll give it a B.

I passed on Peggle when it first came out. Popcap has seriously impressed me with Plants Versus Zombies (and to a lesser degree Wordworm Adventures) but I never saw the allure of Peggle. If I was going to be on a PC, I’d much rather play a less causal game. But when the Android Amazon App store offered Peggle for free, I grabbed it. And now, I play the game nearly every day. I’ve finished the “adventure”, and begun going through all the “quick play” levels. I’ve aced roughly 75% of them, and I’m working on the remaining few. On a mobile platform, Peggle is a killer app. It gets a B.

I’ve been playing Skyrim a lot, and I’m loving the game. My character is level 39 at present, and my sneak skill is already at 99 - I hope to max it out the next time I play and then work harder at maxxing out my archery, enchantment, and alchemy.

But my favorite part of any Elder Scrolls game has always been the emergent gameplay moments - those moments that weren’t specifically scripted by the programmers that somehow end up being the best thing about the game. In this article, I’d like to share a few of my favorite moments.

Taking out an entire keep of bandits Garret style

I really enjoy stealth games, so I was really excited to find that the stealth mechanics in Skyrim were way better than in Oblivion. I now sneak up on enemies regularly and slit their throats before they know I’m there. When I cleared one particular keep full of bandits recently, I did so without letting any of its inhabitants know I was ever there. They were dead before they knew they were in a fight. Skyrim’s cutscene-like final blow animations make it even more fun.

Backstabbing a snowy sabrecat

That four-word description really doesn’t do my story justice. Here’s the long version: I was coming over a snowy mountain rise and looked down to see a keep. Far away, near the keep, were two snowy sabrecats fighting an ice wraith. I watched for a while, and the sabrecats killed the ice wraith. I thought it’d be nice to get the ice wraith’s teeth since at the time they were fairly valuable to me. I hid and started firing arrows at the sabrecats, but they were so far away that I missed 80% of my shots. After 5-10 minutes of firing arrows, I’d hit a few times and they were wandering closer. One eventually charged up the mountain, and by the time he’d reached me I had him down to about 50% health. Still, I barely survived the encounter. I’d gone through all my healing potions.

I snuck down the mountain, thinking that if I could get up onto the keep’s walls, I could shoot down at the second sabrecat from safety. When it saw me, I started sprinting for a wall where it looked like I could jump up. My luck, I found that I couldn’t jump that high. So I ran. I ended up trapped in a V between one of the keep’s walls and a sheer cliff - if I fell, I knew I’d be dead. So I hid. And somehow, the sabrecat lost me. It came down towards the V and decided that I wasn’t there, then turned away and sat down. Its back was to me, and I’d just gotten the x15 backstab perk. So I snuck up very slowly and BAM. One-hit kill. It was so nice.

Arrows shouldn’t hurt skeletons - should they?

Archery is another skill I’m loving. The game’s bows take some getting used to - they have a lot less drop than you’d expect. But when you get a decent bow and your archery skill is good enough, a bow can be devastating. I entered one crypt and a number of skeletons began rising from their sacrophagi. As they rushed me, I took them out all one by one, one-shotting most of them. None of them were even able to enter melee. There were probably twelve or fifteen in all, and my bow pwned them, so to speak.

Mountain goat, Meet Waterfall

A small thing, really, but I stood and watched while a goat forded across a river and was swept downstream. When he reached the end, near a waterfall, he began struggling mightily. He fought it quite a lot, but in the end the goat went over and fell to his death.

You done with that?

This is the only thing on the list that actually is scripted, but I was shocked that it happened. During multiple runs back and forth from a store to an enchantment table, I found at one point that I was overburdened, so I dropped a shield and some boots on the ground. A passing woman stopped me and asked if she could have the things I’d dropped. Wow.

Picking Flowers during an Invasion

At the risk of spoilers, I was at one point involved in an armed conflict: the Invasion of Whiterun. While soldiers were locked in heated bloody battle, I kept sidetracking to pick flowers. I found the whole situation so utterly ludicrous that I felt obliged to mention it here.

Since Steam makes screenshots so easy, I’ve started trying to screenshot as many of these moments as I can, but they can be fleeting - you don’t realize a moment until it’s passed. You can see the screenshots I’ve collected so far here.

Metal Gear Solid
Yeah. The first one. The Playstation One game. I’d never really played it, although I scored a copy on EBay a number of years ago. My Playstation 3 plays PS1 games, so I gave it a go. The game actually looks pretty good with the PS3’s smoothing. But I played through until the part where you need a cigarette to see the lasers and quit. I’ve got no stomach for repeated fetch quests in games like that anymore. I do admit that I probably didn’t experience enough of the game to rate it fairly, but I give it a C-. Travesty for MGS fans, I’m sure.

Metal Gear Solid 4 got rave reviews, but I was really disappointed to find that the gameplay felt just like the older games in the series despite better graphics. As much as I really want to, it seems that I don’t like Metal Gear Solid Games. C-

 
It’s good that I have a chance here to write about Metro 2033, because I don’t think I’ve yet had a chance to discuss the game here. For the most part, I found it to be a passable shooter. But whatever thing about it that some people seemed to love - I just didn’t get. I got killed dozens of times because I wasn’t playing the game the way it wanted me to play it, and there was no indication anywhere as to how I was supposed to be playing. I got stuck and nearly gave up more times than I could count, but inevitably found my way past those points. I ended up stuck in a library where some demon was trying to force its way in. I know there was supposed to be some way to open this one door, but I never figured it out. I decided that the game was not fun enough to warrant the amount of frustrating effort I’d been putting into it. The game wasn’t absolutely horrible, so I’ll give it a C-.

The next segment of my Games of 2011 list begins with a PSP game: Dungeons & Dragons Tactics. This is one of the few 2011 games that I haven’t yet finished, and will likely continue playing well into 2012. I really like tactical battle RPGs, and this game does it fairly well. Since it’s turn-based, battles can sometimes be very time-consuming, but I grew up playing The Gold Box Games, and those were the slowest-paced strategy RPGs ever. D&D Tactics is fun, if not as full-featured as Temple of Elemental Evil, but it’s a portable game, and so I can forgive. D&D Tactics is also a good bit less buggy than ToEE. I’m not yet finished with the game, but I give it a B.

Fallout:New Vegas didn’t fare as well. I quit the game before I’d gotten very far. After I learned the game’s main plot in New Vegas, I just lost interest. And I was sure that the robot who was following me from the beginning of the game was going to end up being the main bad guy at the game’s conclusion. Meh. The game gets a C.

I’ve never been as huge a fan of the Mass Effect series as everyone else seems to be. The first one was good, but not amazing. Mass Effect 2 was pretty much the same. Good, but not brilliant. I thought the ending was very well done - I liked that part a lot. In the end, I’ll give Mass Effect 2 a B.

I have a lot more to say about the games on today’s list than I have about many others. That’s probably just because I like to complain, and I’ve got a lot to complain about with these three titles.

I got Dead Nation for free as part of PSN’s “oops my bad” program. In the end, I was favorable impressed, as it ended up sucking way less than I’d expected. The game’s tragic flaw is that in a world of zombies, you’re at a distinct disadvantage in melee combat, and when you’re mobbed by as many zombies as appear in the game’s later chapters, avoiding a face-to-face with the undead is easier said than done. In other words, I was overcome and devoured alive by Zed so often that I uninstalled the game. It’s one of the few on this list that I never completed. Dead Nation gets a C.

I could easily write an entire article about Dead Space 2, the summation of which would be “The excessive gore in the game bothers me much more right now than it did even two years ago”. I’m not sure why that is. It’s odd, because I remember really liking the original Dead Space. I had to go back and re-read my original take on the game just now to remind myself why I really liked it. Turns out it was because it was the closest thing I’d played to a survival horror game since I’d had a Playstation 1.

That said, I mostly enjoyed Dead Space 2. I enjoyed getting many of the different weapon-specific Playstation trophies, and upgrading my weapons. I enjoyed using detonator mines and the line gun secondary weapon in a strategic way. But stomping on corpses got old quickly. Still, I was just about into the game’s final chapter when I quit. You see, near the end of the game, you’re forced to play a mini-game where you have to guide a large-bore needle into the center of your eyeball for no apparent reason. When you fail, you’re treated to a hideous and unskippable 20-second long death sequence. After watching that death sequence three or four times, I turned off the game, and I haven’t gone back to it. It’s been over six months, and I don’t see myself firing up Dead Space 2 ever again.

It seems a shame that the difficult segment that led to me quitting Dead Space 2 was gameplay for which the game had in no way trained me. After putting all that time into the game, I’d have liked to see the ending, and getting the endgame trophy would have been nice too. Despite all my complaints, I’m giving Dead Space 2 a B.

Back when the original Dungeon Siege was new, my wife and I had tons of fun playing it together, although we never got that far. We later tried Dungeon Siege 2, but for some reason that I can’t entirely pinpoint, I hated it. When the Dungeon Siege 3 became available for a console I owned and I found that I could get an inexpensive used copy, I jumped all over it. Linda and I played through the first seven of the game’s twenty-one chapters in split-screen co-op and got stuck at the Grand Chapterhouse amidst an Ikaruga-like trap complex that killed us over and over again.

While I won’t say for sure that we’ll never go back to the game, our recent purchase of Hunted: The Demon’s Forge makes it seem unlikely. I give Dungeon Siege 3 a C+.

Part three of my list includes games seven, eight, and nine in my list of the thirty-something games I’ve played in 2011.

The first of these is Bioshock 2. I waited a long time after the game’s release to play it because, honestly, I just wasn’t that excited. In the end, the game pretty much met my expectations. It was okay, it was well-made but hardly my favorite of games. The whole parenting angle was kind of neat, and I enjoyed turtling during the guard-the-little sister portions, but somehow I’d hoped for more from the game. I guess the Bioshock series just doesn’t gel with me like it does with some people. Still, I give it a B.

Chime Super Deluxe is a game that really surprised me. One day, I’d been looking for something new, scanning the PSN demos, and I downloaded the game to check it out. After trying it, I bought it, and it’s been added to the list of 3-4 casual PSN games that I constantly go back to, right beside others like Hoard and Pixeljunk Monsters. Chime is a Tetris-like shape placement game, but the shapes don’t drop. Instead, you’re looking at the grid top-down and playing against a time limit. The game’s music also reacts to your in-game actions. B+.

I suppose that in playing a game like Cut the Rope, I’ve jumped on the bandwagon a bit. It’s up there with games like Angry Birds. But despite its mainstream nature, it really isn’t a bad game. I’ve finished nearly every level with a 3-star rating. C+.

It’s hard to think ahead to other games at this point. This time of year, we’re generally buried in the year’s best releases. I’ve still got eighteen more riddler trophies and four riddles in Arkham City, and my character in Skyrim is level 21 and he’s only begun to scratch the game’s surface. I haven’t even bought Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, which is one of my most anticipated games this year. But look what’s coming…

Trine 2
As I mentioned recently, the release of Trine 2 completely caught me off-guard. Since I’ve still got a bunch of PSN dollars from a card I bought a while back, I’ll likely snatch this one up on December 6th. I loved the first one, and it’s the only platinum PSN trophy I’ve got.

Amy
Amy was supposed to come out in September, then on Halloween. Then it was supposed to come out in November. Guess what? November is over now. Still no Amy. But the videos look so good. Let’s hope that the delay has given the game extra polish. I loves me a good survival horror game.

The Last Guardian
This release date has been pushed and pushed, and currently sits at some point in 2012. It’s probably my number one most-anticipated game for 2012. Oh, look. It was my most-anticipated game for 2011 too.

Mechwarrior Online
The latest in the Mechwarrior series has been re-envisioned quite a few times, but now looks to be a free-to-play title. It may very well be the first free-to-play game I actually try. I’ve been a big fan of Mechwarrior, if not a fan of online multiplayer games.

Pixeljunk Monsters Browser Game
What’s even more ridiculous than Greg wanting to play a free-to-play online multiplayer game? I’ll tell you what. Greg wanting to play a browser-based MMO. My love for Pixeljunk Monsters is that strong. Hopefully the browser game is half as good as the amazing PSP edition.

Lots of good games in 2011, and this portion of the list has some of the best. Picking up where I left off on Monday, Bastion is a game I took no notice of during its previews during Pax East 2011 when I was there, despite my friends’ enthusiasm over the game. After all, it was an XBLA game, and I had no XBox. By the time the Steam version was announced, the game had already gotten a lot of praise and I picked it up. How awesome was it to have such an excellent story in what appeared like such a retro-style game! The music was stellar, and the gameplay had a lot of nuance. B+.

Batman: Arkham City is very possibly my own personal game of the year. Skyrim is very good, Portal 2 was awesome, and I’m really looking forward to Skyward Sword, but Arkham City had excellent gameplay along with a good story that had an ever better ending. A.

I’d been looking forward to Beyond Good and Evil HD since having first heard of the game. If you haven’t yet realized it, Beyond Good and Evil is just about my most favoritest game evar. It should go without saying that I was a fan of the HD remake. Sadly though, the controls on this version were seriously subpar. B+.

The end of the year is approaching, and this year I’ve actually cataloged the names every game I’ve played. By my count, that’s 38 games. Rather than write up one mega-article like I did in 2010, I’m going to split this thing up into a dozen pieces and finish with an article about my favorite games of the year. Yay.

Looking back on my Games of 2011 preview from the beginning of the year, things don’t match up. I skipped Dragon Age 2 after playing the horribly disappointing demo, and The Last Guardian was pushed to 2012. I just bought two copies of the Steam version of Hunted: The Demon’s Forge, but haven’t yet started playing with my wife - I think we’ll enjoy that one.

Atom Zombie Smasher came from out of nowhere and stole my heart away. I seriously love the game. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Blendo is my favorite game studio since Troika went kaput. I’ve already finished a great many campaigns already, but I know I’ll be going back to this one quite often, if only for achievements.

It’s a fantastic game for when I just want to kill fifteen minutes, and I’d love to see a cell phone version, as I would play that sumbitch constantly. Atom Zombie Smasher gets a solid A.

I played A Boy and His Blob entirely in the presence of my four year old daughter, even letting her control things from time to time. While I understand it’s more forgiving that the old NES version of the same game, I got stuck on a puzzle midway through the levels at the city location, and never had the motivation to look up a solution on GameFAQs or the like. It’s a fun and creative game, but I’ve lost interest and haven’t played it in months. I give the game a B-.

I’m also including my replay of Batman: Arkham Asylum on hard difficulty as one of the games I played this year. It was more than 6 months following my initial playthrough, and I did go through the entire game and picked up an additional 5-6 Playstation trophies. the hard difficulty was indeed harder, but damn was it good. Arkham Asylum is still an A.

I’ll try to chime in here every week with three new games from my games-of-2011 list. I figure that we’ll be into 2012 by the time I finish.

When the first Trine game came out, I waited forever. It was supposed to release in the Spring, and by the time it actually came out, it had passed. [insert haiku about days of summer passing]

This time, the complete opposite is true: I just found out this morning that Trine 2 is going to be available in less than 2 weeks. With all the time I’m putting into Skyrim, I haven’t yet bought Skyward Sword, and I’m not sure how much time I’ll have for Trine 2, but I’m glad that it’ll be available if I want it.