Mike's Top 10 Videogames of 2011 ­ Articles ­ On the Stick

On the Stick may have (more or less) decided on its top 10 games of 2011, but that doesn’t mean that the decisions were unanimous. Each of our members has his own favorites from last year, and we’ll be posting their individual lists here over the next few weeks. To start, here are Mike’s picks for the Best Videogames of 2011.

10. Ghost Trick

The Ace Attorney games always had some of the most colorful characters in the world of videogames, bringing together striking visual designs with goofy humor and sympathetic personalities. But after 4 or 5 games in the series, depending on how you want to count them, the gameplay surrounding them is starting to get a bit stale. What luck, then, that Shu Takumi, director of Phoenix Wright series, decided to strike out and make a completely new game for the DS. Ghost Trick introduces a whole new roster of fantastic characters with beautiful, 2D animation and a new set of original mechanics based around manipulating the environment in real time. Despite these changes, the game winds up feeling like a sequel to the Ace Attorney franchise as a whole – but in the best possible way. Capcom will probably run this series into the ground with countless sequels as well, but for now we can enjoy the antics of Sisel and his enthusiastic, eccentric friends without reservations.

9. Jamestown

Jamestown is a very simple game, on the surface: a vertical shooter set on colonial Mars with graphics that look like they would be at home on a Neo-Geo, if it had been abusing performance enhancers. Give it a chance, though, and you’ll find a supremely satisfying shooter with excellent mechanics, fun stage design and beautiful sprite work. The Vaunt system is a great way to keep the game interesting for both new and experienced players: novices will unleash the vaunt to save their hides when the bullets start flying, while experts will keep themselves in vaunt mode constantly for the score and attack power benefits, forgoing the safety net in the process. Toss in some good music and a brutally difficult set of challenge levels and you have a game that will keep you coming back to play a level or two for years to come

8. You Don’t Know Jack

At long last, the oldest and best series of trivia games makes its way to the current generation of consoles. You Don’t Know Jack brings back the quick thinking, cleverly-written questions and pop culture humor that we all remember, but also brings in brilliant new additions like the Wrong Answer of the Game. If you’re looking for a game with mass appeal, this is it; I’ve never had an easier time convincing non-gamers to sit down on the couch and grab a controller. It’s a total blast to play, especially in 4-player local matches, even if the final round tends to singlehandedly decide the game more often than not.

7. Hard Corps Uprising

Contra or not, Hard Corps Uprising is an excellent 2D action game that combines great sprite work with deep controls, varied levels and fun weapons. The Rising Mode upgrade system gives players a way to customize the difficulty of the game, and even failed attempts at the levels yield points that can be used to improve the characters. And once the player starts to know the levels, they can strip away the crutches and face the game on its own terms, without the frustration of having to replay the first levels over and over again while they learn them. Hard Corps Uprising also has plenty of over-the-top (not) Contra moments, including a particularly crazy final boss fight, and there’s just something fundamentally right about a spread gun that shoots in seven directions. Good fun for the old-school masochist in all of us.

6. Skyrim

Skyrim is a game that has me feeling conflicted. It does enough things wrong – the so-so combat, the wooden NPCs, the often uninspired quests – that I couldn’t bring myself to put it into my top 5 games of the year. On the other hand, it does enough right that I’ve played it for 70 hours, and will probably put another 10 or so in before finally declaring it over. And make no mistake, the only way to reach the end of Skyrim is to decide that you are done with it, since this is a game that you could play for the rest of your natural life without running out of things to do. Skyrim is a game that is about choice and doing whatever you think is worth your time: exploring the environment, taking in the sights, honing your alchemy and enchanting skills or decorating your many houses. If a particular quest doesn’t interest you, then don’t do it, because there is another one just around the corner. It’s a completionists nightmare, but by choosing how you spend your time, you can make Skyrim almost any game you want it to be.

5. Dead Space 2

The original Dead Space was a great action/horror game with solid mechanics, fun weapons and lots of gooey monsters to hack apart with your futuristic power tools. Dead Space 2 takes the first game, ditches most of the horror aspects, and then hones the combat to a razor’s edge. In a way, it’s like the anti-Skyrim: you always know where to go (follow the blue line) and what to do (dissect nasty space monsters). The one thing they do leave up to the player is the “how”, and that’s where the fun of the game is. There is a huge variety of ways to take care of your enemies in Dead Space 2, thanks to the plentiful weapons, the alternate fire modes on each of the guns and the various upgrades that you can purchase. And heck, if you don’t want to use weapons at all, you don’t have to – just tear a claw off a dead necromorph and use your kinesis launcher to fire it at the next enemy, staking him to the wall in the process. Dead Space 2 is 10 hours of refined action game, polished to a mirror sheen. With more weapons, better environments and 100% fewer asteroid-turret sequences than the first game had, this is a sequel that is an improvement in every way that matters.

4. Trenched

Trenched didn’t have much of a shelf-life, but it burned brightly for the short time that our crew played it. For two brief weeks, our nightly sessions with this game had 3 or 4 of us running around in tuxedos and saluting each other on the deck of our walking aircraft carrier…when we weren’t lobbing mortar shells at hordes of those damn tubes. Doublefine has always made games that were 4 parts funny and 1 part fun, but with Trenched it feels like they reversed the proportions and came up with something that’s both hilarious and really satisfying to play. Tower defense gameplay is fun, but being able to run around and attack the tubes directly keeps the game engaging even when you aren’t thinking about turret placement or upgrades. The different weapon classes are all fun to use, but limited weapon slots on the trenches force you to coordinate with your teammates if you want to have the balanced arsenal that you’ll need to get the best rank on each stage. Trenched only really works with a full party of Men of Valor, which means that you can’t really enjoy it unless you find some other people who haven’t played the game yet to party up with. But for those few weeks when we were all in it together, Trenched was one of the most fun games I played this year.

3. Bastion

The first thing anyone ever mentions when they talk about Bastion is the narration. To be honest, the idea almost turned me off the game before I ever tried it, as I imagined myself suffering through a constant rehashing of my character’s actions while I played. Turns out that I didn’t have things quite – Bastion does occasionally use its narrator to underscore something that the player just did, but more often he serves a better purpose, feeding you the game’s story without forcing you to stop actually playing to absorb it. As you make your way through the ruined world, Rucks continually fills you in on where you are, what you are doing and what it all means. Showing you a ruined city is one thing, but having someone tell you about all the people that used to be there, now wiped out, adds a lot of meaning to what the player sees – and does it all without breaking up the action. Of course, the narration is only one part of the larger whole, and in Bastion’s case, every individual part has been lovingly crafted. The graphics are in beautifully hand-painted 2D, brought to life with by the way the world builds itself up around you as you explore. The music is a fantastic blend of acoustic sounds, western themes, trip-hop and vocals that are actually half-decent. The gameplay is straightforward but engaging and allows for dozens of different weapon and ability combinations, each one of which is actually viable. Every part comes together to make a game that is short, but which makes extremely good use of the player’s time. And while the plot meanders a bit in the first half, the last hour of the game is expertly presented and manages to get into emotional territory that is almost never seen in the medium: regret, melancholy, maybe even forgiveness. Supergiant Games has put together something incredibly solid with Bastion, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what they will do next.

2. Deus Ex: Human Revolution

It’s not very often that someone custom-builds a game just for me, but that’s what it felt like with Deus Ex: Human Revolution. HR combines excellent cover-based stealth gameplay with a first-person RPG, all dressed in the trappings of deadly serious cyberpunk. Jensen’s abilities are great fun to use, and the upgrade path that you pick can completely change the way you approach a given area of the game. Add in some great near-future dystopian cities (with near-future dystopian city sky boxes) and a trip to the fucking OLYMPIC STADIUM in Montreal and you have the recipe for a game that I simply couldn’t put down until it was finished. About the only complaint I have for Deus Ex is that it’s a good deal longer than it really needs to be – but when a game is this enjoyable, it’s a lot easier to forgive the fact that they made too much of it.

1. Binding of Issac

Every once in a while, someone takes two things that have never been associated with each other, looks at them and says “why not?”, and ends up creating something magical. Peanut butter and chocolate. FPS gameplay and RPG character progression. Golden retrievers and basketball. In every case, the simple juxtaposition of two things puts each of them in a new light, creating something that feels original out of well-known components. For The Binding of Isaac, Edmund McMillen and Florian Himsl took the mechanics of a twin-stick shooter and the structural framework of a roguelike, fused them together and created a new type of game. A type of game, as it turns out, that I couldn’t put down until I had seen everything it had to offer, some 60 hours later. Isaac’s fast-paced gameplay is more engaging than the traditional roguelike’s “think and click” approach, making for a game that’s more immediately gratifying. At the same time, the randomized dungeons, along with huge list of items and their various effects, made me want to come back again and again to see how things would be different on my next run. One attempt might see me using a huge supply of overpowered bombs to take out everything in my path, while another would have me scraping by with half a heart to my name, praying that I would find a slot machine in the next room. Some runs seemed like they are doomed to failure, only to turn around later thanks to a fortuitous combination of luck and player skill. Others started out gloriously, only to burn out gruesomely when the game – or my reflexes – dealt me a bum hand. Despite the ups and downs, though, I found myself winning more and more games as I learned how the items and enemies behaved, until I could make a decent run with almost any combination of upgrades. And that’s just how a roguelike should be, isn’t it? The Binding of Isaac represents the birth of a new genre of game, and it is my great hope that others will be inspired to create similarly-minded games that take familiar elements and reuse them in novel ways. And if someone wants to do so without all of the dead fetuses and feces? Well heck, that sounds like Game of the Year 2012 material to me.