Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Best game of 2008? A game from 2005

Ok, so it's been a really long time since anyone's posted here. Almost a year, in fact. Oh well. Um...sorry.
I've played a lot of great stuff in the last year (thanks GameFly!). A few that stand out are, in no particular order:
Fable 2
Fallout 3
Dead Space
Rock Band 2
Force Unleashed
Professor Layton
Mario Kart Wii
Burnout Paradise
GTA 4
The Orange Box
Psychonauts
Soul Bubbles
Chrono Trigger (DS)


These are all great for different reasons but there are a few that stand out because I didn't expect to like them so much. I played through all the single player stuff the Orange Box had to offer and was really impressed with Valve's storytelling and general sense of making a great game. I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on Left 4 Dead. I may even have to renew my neglected XBL account. Burnout Paradise wins points by basically taking my favorite part from the GTA games and making a whole separate game out of it. I love driving really fast and seeing what I can jump off of in an open world. But the one game that really impressed me was the oldest.
Since I got a 360 a while after it came out, I had a good list of things to play that I'd never had a chance to since they were exclusive to the Microsoft world. I was really excited to try out Dead Rising, Overlord, Gears of War, and this whole Halo thing. I mostly stuck with 360 titles for that, but I played Fable and Knights of the Old Republic for good measure too (meh). So I expected little when I popped Psychonauts in earlier this week. Holy crap, why didn't anyone make me play this earlier? It's almost as inventive of a platformer as Super Mario Galaxy! And going in and out of different people's minds allows them to throw in great variety in level design. The dialog and humor is fantastic. It speaks perfectly to the cynical teenager buried deep inside of me. Ok, not really that deep.
But anyway, Psychonauts is awesome and you should play through it if you never have. I'm gonna go do just that.

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