Did you know that tomorrow is New Year’s? I too did at some point, but then I forgot because I was playing World of Warcraft. What? No, YOU’RE a nerd! And then I switched to programming this really cool thing that extracts data from the World of Warcraft Armory. Anyway, last night I was gently reminded that it would have been nice to turn in my “Best Games of 2010” article that was due a week ago. You know what I did then? I went and I programmed some more. In fact I was programming until 12:30 AM, which is actually later than I usually stay up playing games. (I hope my editor doesn’t read this. Oh wait…)

In all solemn seriousness, 2010 has been a good year for me gaming-wise. I beat 16 games and played many others that I did not beat. To be honest most of them were actually older ones, such as Psychonauts or The Witcher, but some were quite new. I played and reviewed Supreme Commander 2, Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising, and a bunch of smaller games. Most notably, however, I played Starcraft 2, and World of Warcraft: Cataclysm.

What I find deeply and thoroughly unsettling, is that as I look back on the stuff I wrote this year, I see that whenever I talked about Blizzard or their games I had nothing but good things to say. This may lead some people to believe that I’ve been paid off, or that I am simply a fanboy. To prove that I am neither I decided to take a two-pronged approach. First, I challenge anyone who would accuse me of these things to a duel. Second, I release a list of grievances that I have with Blizzard:

Starcraft 2:
1) It is ridiculous how much easier the final level is for those who elected to keep zerg air units and branched for the mind control tech. Take command of a few Brood Lords and watch the game win itself. Meanwhile I still cannot beat that level on hard because I kept the ground forces instead, and branched for the slow-em-down tech.
2) Any multiplayer map that has an area where one can fly to be out of range of land-based units is a potential impasse situation. If an otherwise defeated Terran player moves a building there, while his opponent is out of harvesting units and air units, neither can win nor lose. It then becomes a waiting match, to see who says “ah screw it” first.

World of Warcraft:
1) Give Warlocks a race-based demon flying mount.
2) Stop nerfing Warlocks.
3) Give something cool in-game to people who have a WoW VISA.

General:
1) Why are there no wallpapers for the 2560×1600 resolution?
2) Why is there no clear API for WoW armory?
3) Why is there no Armory web service?

Still, there is no argument in my mind that Starcraft 2 and WoW: Cataclysm both, are the most fun, interesting, engaging, polished, and overall best games of 2010. They are not the best games ever, but this year they hardly had any competition at all. Except for one…

My game of the year is Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. No, YOU’RE a nerd!