Most game sites bring you Game of the Year awards every December or January. But here in Lungfishopolis, we’ve just acquired a crystal ball – we got a used one at this little shop in Chinatown, real cheap – and we are now able to bring to you our Game of the Year awards for the next decade. Hope you enjoy this little look forward. Sorry that you’ve got to wait so long to play these.
2010 – No More Heroes: Desperate Struggle (Nintendo Wii)
The sequel to No More Heroes came back strong with better minigames, better combat mechanics using MotionPlus, and even better comedy. Travis Touchdown still sits on the toilet to save his game and still drives around Santa Destroy on his “Schpeltiger” motorcycle, but now he can fight from the Schpeltiger and he’s got far better wrestling moves, including throws, submission holds, and the dreaded cluster buster.
In the opening cutscene, Travis’s girlfriend is killed, and the game consists of a giant revenge murder rampage, battling subsequently more powerful henchmen until he finds his girlfriend’s murderer. The villians are even more ridiculous, including a potato-chip-eating kid piloting a mech and a woman in a six-limbed jetpack.
2011 – Freedom Force vs The Atomic Robot Zombie Men (XBox 360, Playstation 3, PC)
This new tactical RPG from 2K Boston revisits Patriot City and reintroduces Mentor, Minuteman, El Diablo, and most of the original cast of heroes. FFvtARZM allows for online co-op play and the ability to create and share custom character models, as well as a level editor available only in the PC version.
When the evil Dr. Think takes over the Kremlin using his powers of malkinesis, Freedom Force flies to Russia to intervene. But soon, they learn of Dr. Think’s secret army of atomic robot zombie men. Can Freedom Force stop them before it’s too late?
2012 – Chimaera: Corner of the Eye (Nintendo Wii)
Chimaera: Corner of the Eye is a psychological horror game set in New Orleans. In 1971, dead bodies begin appearing inside Rachel Montrose’s house. After the third occurance, she leaves her home. When a body appears in her hotel room two days later, the police begin investigating her.
Chimaera incorporates the same insanity effect system introduced in 2002’s Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, and expands that insanity effect system in new directions using the Wiimote’s speaker, the new WiiMove controller, and the Wii’s internet connection.
2013 – Psychonauts 2 (Playstation 3, PC)
Psychonauts 2 picks up immediately where the previous game left off: at Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp. The Grand Head of the Psychonauts has been captured, and as a new Psychonaut, Raz accompanies Sasha Nein and Milla Vodello to rescue him. Their adventures carry them through Paris and Prague, and into dozens of new minds.
2014 – Portal Wars (PC)
Everyone was expecting the announcement of Half-Life 3 at E3 2012, but instead Valve announced Portal Wars, a new persistent online shooter based in the universe of Half-Life and Portal. Portal Wars is not a MMO – there are no classes or levels – but you keep gear that you acquire, and weapons and ammo can be scarce commodities. Vehicles are extremely scarce, but rather than Half-Life 2’s 3-4 vehicles, there are 14 different vehicle types initially, including the troop transport and the helicopter. Each server is one of the world’s numbered cities, and it’s possible for players to travel between them, although the journey is generally difficult. When you log off, your character goes to sleep, so it’s best to rest in the underground resistance bunkers. If one is threatened while you’re offline, you can choose to be notified by email, instant messenger, or twitter. If you’re killed, the character is permanently dead, although this is less of a loss than a MMO, since there are no levels. But you do generally lose all your gear.
Portal Wars makes use of a face-mapping system, evolved from Valve’s faceposer software. Webcams can be used so that when the player speaks, his facial expression and lip movements are mapped onto his avatar’s face, creating a new level of realism.
And in a design decision similar to Left 4 Dead, Valve allows players to play briefly as Combine forces. Combine characters are nameless, non-persistent characters. Generally, you’ll play as a white-suited combine elite. They use the super-rare pulse rifles, and sometimes have access to mounted machine guns, sniper posts, and headcrab shell launchers. Infrequently, combine players will spawn as groups of hunters, paratroops and helicopter pilots, or even striders.
Valve indicated in February of 2013 that it is possible for the resistance to retake cities and even to totally repel combine forces from the Earth.
2015 – Wasteland (Playstation 3, PC)
A direct remake of the 1998 RPG by inXile Players create a party of up to four players to control, or optionally create fewer for online co-op play, in which up to six players can participate. You can also add NPCs to a party with less than six characters, but NPCs are under their own control.
Characters begin as new desert rangers at Ranger HQ, where their adventure begins wandering the wasteland and eliminating dangerous desert creatures for the benefit of local settlements. Along the way, they can become entangled with mafia, cyborgs, and a gun-toting monastic brotherhood.
2016 – The Legend of Zelda: Destiny Mirror (Nintendo DSv)
A launch title for Nintendo’s new DSv portable, Destiny Mirror uses the DSv’s stereoscopic cameras to create 3d images of the player and his actions in the Destiny Mirror. Gameplay is stylus-controller, much like Phantom Hourglass, but much of the gameplay is done through use of the camera: waving a hand, making shadow puppets, and even drawing in mid-air with the stylus.
2017 – Quantum (XBox Universal, Playstation 4, PC)
Quantum is a sci-fi first-person shooter set in a near-future Earth where scientists at CERN have made human teleportation possible. As the game opens, the CERN facility is under seige by military groups from two separate nations who want to seize the technology. Players are part of a UN special forces unit sent to intervene.
Quantum received high praise for making excellent use of the new 3d technology in this console generation, and for its excellent voice acting.
2018 – Mechwarrior 6 (PC)
After the buggy mess that was Mechwarrior 5, nobody expected the sixth installment in this long-running series to be as good as it is. Using new DirectX13 capabilities and allowing players to run the game in up to three monitors for peripheral vision, Mechwarrior 6 brought the series to a whole new level.
2019 – Baldur’s Gate 3 (PS4, Sega Singularity, PC)
After nearly twenty years, nobody expected the Baldur’s Gate series to make a comeback. But it did, in the same way that the 1991 Neverwinter Nights game was remade in 2002, and the 1998 Wasteland game was remade in 2015. Baldur’s Gate 3 turns out to be as much of a phenomenon as the original was way back in the 20th Century.
