Just as year 2009 was coming to an end, I beat my 142nd game. It was also my 101st game since 1999, when I began marking down the year when each game was beaten.

What a long, strange trip it’s been…

A lot has happened in these years. Highs and lows, relationships and breakups, books and movies, jobs and travels, houses and cars, colleges and military service. They all are important because they are what makes up my life and who I am, but I’m also glad my gaming hobby has been with me alongside these life events.

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A little over two years ago I graduated from college and moved out of the house into a “cozy and vintage” apartment downtown. I wanted to be closer to work and I needed my independence. As a result of my career in journalism and my generally frugal nature, I decided to be stingy when it came to expenditures while living on my own.

This meant I lived without Internet for the past two years. I figured since my job is online-based, and I’m on the Internet eight hours every day, I don’t need to be bothered with it at home. And looking back, it was actually a very liberating experience. It was nice not having the option of wasting hours in front of a computer screen accomplishing nothing. Watching useless (but hilarious) videos and making sure I’ve seen the latest Red Faction quibble. But of course, that lack of connectivity also had its fair share of drawbacks. I was literally in the dark on all the downloadable content and online gaming for the past couple of years. If I wanted to game online, say for a review I was working on, I needed to throw the title in my car and drive back into the suburbs to steal the family’s connection.

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As 2008 came to a close, I appeared as a guest on the Avault Podcast, and found myself posed with a difficult question to answer. “What was your favorite game of the year?” I say difficult, because I didn’t have a favorite. I quickly thought of which game had spent the most time in my 360’s DVD drive and blurted out Supreme Commander. Were there other games that were better? Sure, but my criteria for rating a game are a little different than most. For me, a game has to have staying power, and a Game of the Year must be one that lingers not only in the memory, but also on my playlist. Sadly, 2008 didn’t have such a champion for me, and 2009 looked like it might end the same…until very recently.

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Now that the 2000s are winding down and making way for the 2010s, a lot of sites are compiling their “best of” lists for the past 10 years. These lists promise to be filled with some awesome titles, since the last decade has been spectacular, gaming-wise.

However, I haven’t seen too many sites berating the games that many of us purposefully or accidentally had to suffer through during this last decade. ScrewAttack recently heralded Sonic the Hedgehog as the decade’s worst game, narrowly beating out Big Rigs for the PC. But that’s about as much jeering as I’ve seen. So, we’re going to change that and highlight some of our own “favorites.”

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A lot of things happened in the year 2009. I was able to travel to a place I always wanted to go: Japan. I started going back to school, which I guess is always a good thing. I also experienced many new, interesting and different games. Some of them were good, some of them bad, and some of them…great. Every person who plays video games remembers games they played in the past and how much they influenced their lives in some way. The best example I remember is from when I was a kid. A trivia question came up reading something like “What is the name of armor worn in medieval times that protected the hands?”. Because I played many fantasy games at a young age I knew the answer in a second: Gauntlets. Silly.

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As I write this, mere days removed from Christmas, I look ahead to the bounty of games that Santa packed in that sack while looking back upon the year that was. And this year provided especially fertile ground for my personal picking, as it was the year in which I augmented my Wii60 household with one more shiny bauble; the PS3 finally descended to a price point that I could manage without listing yet another kidney on eBay. With Sony’s new slim sweetness nestled in my home entertainment center, the Holy Trinity was complete, allowing me to genuflect before the God of War for granting me the opportunity to finally guide Drake towards his fortune while scoping out a Littlebigplanet of my own.

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As 2009 comes to a close, a rather quick close I must say. The term “Game of the Year” gets thrown around more than a baby that just shat its diaper in a room full of people wearing white gloves. With so many titles cross-platform and few exclusives, it’s become difficult to say there is a game of the year! In retrospect to simply award a “game of year” to a console version of a cross-platformed title, would be a disservice to that console experience. So after much deliberation with me myself and I, I am going to breakdown my “Game of the Year” by console and one title that is cross platformed.

Wii – Muramasa: The Demon Blade – Move over Mario Brothers your formula has been done time and time again. Muramasa is the step in the right direction for exclusive third party titles from the makers of Odin Sphere. I love a good platforming game, but a platforming title with RPG elements inspired by mythological Japan is a winner in my book. Aside from the quirky control scheme, this title is a fluid living painting waiting to be uncanvassed. You will venture through various landscapes and architectures to unveil two distinct storylines. Did I mention the plethora of blades you will come across? You owe it to yourself to play this game.

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Now I must hold my hand up straight away, be completely honest and tell you that I’m going to cheat here. Like many college students in an exam situation, I’m going to see the relatively straightforward title of “Game of the Year,” but interpret it in my own way so that I can answer it how I want to. So while many might see the title in terms of the best released game of 2009, I’m going to consider it to mean the best game I played in 2009. So don’t you all start writing in and telling me off in terms of the game’s release date. My take on the question also makes life easier for me; due to various work changes and large home improvement challenges, I didn’t get time to play as much as I would have liked in 2009. Admittedly, if I could I’d play games all day, but sadly I won’t be able to do that if I don’t pay the electricity bills. So if any game developers are reading this – come on guys, isn’t it about time you created a game that earns us a living while we play? I’m not sure how much longer my super-ego can persuade my id that time spent at work is not lost game time. Still, my id being as strong as it is, I did get some game time in this year. So my candidates for best game (I played) in 2009 are:

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I started off my Sunday morning with a shower, and a blog entry. Since I had recently dusted off my Avault blog with my game of the year entry, I figured I should try and keep it well polished. I wrote up the entry, and then left it alone for several hours, as is customary with all of my writing. When I came back and read what I had written, I hated it. Not because I thought it was poor, but because I really just don’t like blogging. The concept seems so egotistical. Who really cares what I think about crazy gaming subjects? I don’t even care what I think about crazy gaming subjects.

I’m not one to be all about myself, or my talents. If anything, I’m more self-defeating than egotistical (see above). But I’m not going to give up on my blog. I’m going to try and keep it free of cobwebs. I haven’t quite figured out how exactly, but I’ll think of something. I might throw a few ideas against the wall, see what sticks, see what doesn’t, and go from there.

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Well I have to say, even though I’m a video-game reviewer, many of the big titles passed me by this year. I have these darn “professors” who expect me to “read” so I can get “grades.” Totally cut into my play time, if you ask me. So when I think of games, I really put them into two categories: those I can play with people, and those just for me to jump in solo-style have some fun.

The multiplayer one for me is easy: Left 4 Dead 2. One of the things I love about gaming is the interaction, the camaraderie. Well, no, the trash-talking. But really, I see gaming as a social experience, and L4D2 gives me everything I need from a game. I can jump in and play through the campaigns on a survivor team or bust some heads as the infected. It’s fast-paced and simply tons of fun if you’ve got friends to tackle it with. I can pop it into my machine over and over and continue to have fresh, new experiences. I applaud any game that has the ability to do that. I don’t think this really needs more explanation. If you’ve played it, you know what I’m talking about.

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2009 was a blast.

I would start off by saying that 2009 was “the year of the sequel,” but we all know that every year has its fair share of follow-ups, so taking the easy way out won’t work for me this time. We did get our first good Batman game, however, and the Ghostbusters made their triumphant return to game screens this year, much to the delight of 1980s children everywhere. And even though both are items that can’t be counted as new intellectual property, each was handled well enough by their respective developers to make us forget any prior interpretations of those games ever existed. That’s success, as far as I’m concerned.

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What has always bothered me about the year-end compilations of any sort of “best of” lists, is that everybody seems to focus of the recent releases, as opposed to doing their due diligence in going over the entire gamut of that year’s titles. Yes, both Borderlands and Modern Warfare 2 were put on shelves in October and November respectively, but does that automatically mean they were this year’s best games? In any event, there is no way for me to be knowledgeable in every single game released this year, so instead I am going to take a look at the games I beat in 2009 so far.

That list includes a total of sixteen games, but many of them like Fallout 3 and Spore were released prior to 2009, so I will not include them. The games that I did count are Dawn of War II, Zeno Clash, Overlord 2, Plants vs. Zombies, Rosemary, Pizza Morgana – Episode 1, Heroes Over Europe, Modern Warfare 2, Torchlight and Devil’s Tuning Fork. In addition to these games, there were also some that I’ve played but didn’t (or couldn’t) complete. One such game is Aion, which is an MMO and thus can never be finished. A lot of these games were excellent, some were disappointing, and some had both good and bad aspects to them. From this group, I’ve selected my top four finalists.

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For much of the gaming industry, 2009 really sucked. Those who had proclaimed the games business to be recession-proof soon discovered how wrong they were; game and hardware sales sagged compared to the strong numbers of 2008. Several development houses were shuttered, including Ensemble, who had barely shipped Halo Wars before they closed, and Grin, who produced Terminator: Salvation, Bionic Commando and Wanted: Weapons of Fate in the space of five months before the hammer came down. The enthusiast press was similarly affected, with journalistic stalwarts IGN and GameSpot suffering major employee purges.

And there were the occasional scandals. Valve raised the hackles of the Left 4 Dead loyalists by releasing Left 4 Dead 2 as a stand-alone, full-priced product instead of a free-to-download expansion pack, despite a celebrated Internet petition calling for the contrary. Infinity Ward ticked off their PC customers by not offering dedicated-server support for the PC multiplayer component of Modern Warfare 2, and almost everybody by including a controversial (and completely skippable) scene in the same game about a terrorist massacre in a Russian airport. And not to be left behind, Bioware once again had the temerity to include adult themes other than blood-drenching violence in Dragon Age: Origins; you’d have thought the right-wing crapstorm raised by the omnisexual hookups in Mass Effect would’ve still been in their heads, right?

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The year 2009 was another year of catching up for me. About halfway through, my Xbox 360 decided to croak again, just when I was making a respectable dent in my collection. With Microsoft opting not to foot the repair bill, I pawned the ‘Box and bought my own Playstation 3. Suffice to say, I had a lot of Playstation games to get acquainted with.

Sure, I had been able to sneak in a few PS3 experiences here and there while visiting family, playing through Heavenly Sword, Resistance and a couple of others over the past year. But much of my time with the PS3 until that point was spent indulging in MLB 08: The Show. The game was too addictive to give up. I didn’t even care that I hadn’t touched Uncharted or any of the Ratchet & Clanks, games I knew I’d love.

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No, not in terms of shooting at people, running them over, stealing cars, engaging in vandalism or enjoying random acts of arson. I meant in terms of my poor spine! Forget all the commotion about video games being the psychological tool of the devil – it’s the ability to bend my spine into contorted unnatural shapes that keeps me awake at night.

One of the most common medical problems connected typically to playing computer/video games is crooked posture. There is a considerable percentage of children in Junior High and High School who have a crooked posture as a result of frequent gameplay sessions. Personally I think this counteracts the video-game-begets-violence argument quite well – I mean, how intimidating is a limping, arched-over, neck-crocked game player? He probably can only see my shoes, let alone try to throw a punch at my face! The press recently had a story about a boy who ended up in hospital thanks to the fact that he used his force-feedback controller seven hours a day, which severely damaged his wrists, knuckles and hand nerves. Hardly stands him in good stead to terrorise his local community, does it?

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