“Hello, please leave your message after the beep.”
“Hi, this message is for 1998 and 2007. I just wanted to tell them to go fuck themselves.”
In the dawn of 2012, I tore a leaf from my Starcraft 2 Jim Raynor Wanted Poster keepsake notebook (best thing about that game, really), determined to write down great titles as I played them. I always draw a blank when people ask for stuff I should remember, and Games of the Year articles are too important to leave to memory… especially mine. For twelve months that increasingly defiled sheet survived the chaotic sluice of cords, bills, beer cans, notes to self, and discarded gaming mice that is my desk. I exhumed it the other day.
Now, I admit this hasn’t been the best year for games, but there were more titles scrawled on there than I have medals for. After all, we don’t hand out awards like candy around here. So a whole lot of thinkin’, and even a fair amount of replayin’, was to come before the tally was in. This year I humbly offer five titles worthy of Tap-Repeatedly Special Achievement Awards, plus a handful of mentions of the honorable variety.
Time magazine has named Remedy’s horror shooter Alan Wake 2010’s Game of the Year. Our own Mat C also thought highly of it, as the above review indicates. Time talked about the game’s inherent maturity and complex storyline, even using the word “Hitchcockian” at one point: Lots of video-game covers have a bold M on their lower left corner, but none have felt as mature as Alan Wake does… Its mix of meta-awareness and Hitchcockian …