The end of the year is approaching, and this year I’ve actually cataloged the names every game I’ve played. By my count, that’s 38 games. Rather than write up one mega-article like I did in 2010, I’m going to split this thing up into a dozen pieces and finish with an article about my favorite games of the year. Yay.

Looking back on my Games of 2011 preview from the beginning of the year, things don’t match up. I skipped Dragon Age 2 after playing the horribly disappointing demo, and The Last Guardian was pushed to 2012. I just bought two copies of the Steam version of Hunted: The Demon’s Forge, but haven’t yet started playing with my wife – I think we’ll enjoy that one.

Atom Zombie Smasher came from out of nowhere and stole my heart away. I seriously love the game. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Blendo is my favorite game studio since Troika went kaput. I’ve already finished a great many campaigns already, but I know I’ll be going back to this one quite often, if only for achievements.

It’s a fantastic game for when I just want to kill fifteen minutes, and I’d love to see a cell phone version, as I would play that sumbitch constantly. Atom Zombie Smasher gets a solid A.

I played A Boy and His Blob entirely in the presence of my four year old daughter, even letting her control things from time to time. While I understand it’s more forgiving that the old NES version of the same game, I got stuck on a puzzle midway through the levels at the city location, and never had the motivation to look up a solution on GameFAQs or the like. It’s a fun and creative game, but I’ve lost interest and haven’t played it in months. I give the game a B-.

I’m also including my replay of Batman: Arkham Asylum on hard difficulty as one of the games I played this year. It was more than 6 months following my initial playthrough, and I did go through the entire game and picked up an additional 5-6 Playstation trophies. the hard difficulty was indeed harder, but damn was it good. Arkham Asylum is still an A.

I’ll try to chime in here every week with three new games from my games-of-2011 list. I figure that we’ll be into 2012 by the time I finish.