One of the oldest game genres is the platformer, so named because you play a character that jumps to and from suspended platforms. Contra, Bionic Commando, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Super Mario Brothers all fall into this category.

I should make it clear here that I never got into Super Mario World or Mario 64, largely since I never owned those Nintendo Consoles. I know that those games were huge and everybody and their cat has incredibly fond memories of them, but alas – I don’t. I likewise never played any of the Tomb Raider games. Ever. Obviously, I am defective. Other platformer franchises lacking from my repetoire: Jak & Daxter, Ratchet & Clank, Laurel & Hardy.

In looking back at my favorite platformers, I’ve got to notice that all but one are 2D platformers. It just seems like the 3D platformers as a rule just don’t work as well. First-person platforming like Mirror’s Edge or the horrible platforming portions in the original Half-Life just don’t work. While third-person platforming in 3D games is generally better, it can fail pretty hard at times. The 3D platforming in games like Super Mario Galaxy and Psychonauts was mostly okay, but the platforming in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed annoyed me so much that I had to stop playing both those games before I’d gotten a quarter into either.

So now, I’d like to share my own favorite platformers, going back as far as the early eighties.

• Jumpman (Commodore 64, 1983)
  
  Jumpman’s great strength was its variety. While in the game’s early levels the premise was as simple as running around, jumping over monsters, and colecting red dots, the later levels got far more complex and varied. In some levels, you had a gun, and the button would fire the gun instead of jumping. One level let you throw lances to kill a dragon. Many levels are very puzzle-like, containing triggers that open or close doors, add or remove sections of floor, or move floating platforms. In one level, you create an explosion each time you jump. And I remember one level that generated clones every five seconds who would follow your exact path in the same way as the shadow selves in Braid – if a clone touched you, you died, so you had to keep moving.All of the above is from memory, but reading through the wikipedia page now, I see that there were 30 levels in the game. I always played on “randomizer” so as to experience the later levels I’d never have reached if I were playing straight through.Jumpman is supposed to (eventually) be released for the Wii Virtual Console, but if you’re impatient, a fan remake is available here.

• The Great Giana Sisters (Commodore 64, 1987)
  The version of this game that my brothers and I always used to play was a hacked version. The sprites had been changed to make them look like Super Mario Brothers. The levels were far far different from the actual Super Mario Brothers game, but they were fun, and they were at some points very difficult. But I was 15 years old. I got very good at the game, and played a lot of it. My brothers and I still have fond memories of inventing stupid names for each of the game’s monsters.

• Kenseiden (Sega Master System, 1988)
  I never owned a Sega Master system, but I borrowed one from a friend for a few months when he’d moved along to some better console – perhaps a Genesis. My favorite game on the SMS was Kenseiden. You played a Samurai, fighting various monsters, spirits, and demons. Each time you beat one of the game’s bosses, you’d get a scroll which detailed a samurai sword technique. You could gain overhead slashes, running cuts, and higher jumps.The game’s sixteen levels also had branching paths – you could skip certain portions of the game and take the path you wanted. I don’t remember seeing this in any other contemporary platformers until Castlevania 3, a few years later.

• Double Dragon 2 (Nintendo, 1988)
  The Double Dragon series is half platformer, half side-scrolling beat-em-up. I’d played the original Double Dragon, and I later played Double Dragon 3, but what I really liked about Double Dragon 2 was the variety of moves available. I suppose I liked the game for many of the same reasons I fell in love with Street Fighter 2. The spinning hurricaine kick was easy. The super uppercut was harder, but still doable 90% of the time. The tough one was the jumping hyper knee.In Double Dragon 2, you could punch your enemy and get him into a headlock. From there, you could give him overhead elbows, knee him in the stomach, or throw him over your shoulder. You could also kick him straight out of the headlock. This allowed you to throw enemies over cliffs, instantly killing even the tougher ones. I used to go through entire levels trying to throw or kick every single enemy over a cliff. It was fun.

• Castlevania 3: Dracula’s Curse (Nintendo, 1990)
  Maybe it was just because Castlevania 3 was the first game in the series that I really got into, but I absolutely loved this game. Maybe it was because you could pick up extra traveling companions along the way – there were 3 extra characters, and depending on the path through the game you chose, (branching paths!) you could pick up Syfa, Alucard, or Grant. Grant was a pirate character who could climb on walls, Alucard was a vampire and could throw fireballs and change into a bat, and Syfa was a wizard who could cast various spells instead of throwing axes and knives. Awesome.

• Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (Playstation, 1997)
  I played Symphony of the Night on my Playstation and was immediately blown away. Amazing game. The game’s music was better than anything I’d ever heard. And the addition of RPG elements such as leveling and equipment changed Castlevania in a fundemental way that has carried through in all of its successors. Although I hear a lot of hype today about how Borderlands is changing things up by combining RPGs and Shooters, Symphony of the Night did that more than ten years ago when they combined RPGs and Platformers. They also added in Street Fighter like movements in for casting spells and using certain items’ special abilities. The number of secret spells and abilities in the game is huge. And hidden areas are absolutely everywhere. I don’t think there’s any platformer that I’ve put as much time into as I have Symphony of the Night.

• Super Mario Galaxy (Nintendo Wii, 2007)
  Mario Galaxy is the only 3D platformer on this list. While games like Trine and LittleBigPlanet run on a 3D engine, they’re still fundamentally 2D in their gameplay. Super Mario Galaxy is a truly 3D platformer, harking back to Mario 64. The levels are incredibly varied, allowing for flying levels, underwater levels, 2D levels, ray surfing levels, and even a Monkeyball level. The power-ups are equally as varied, and you can complete the game without being forced to complete the 30 most difficult levels. Personally, I only got 96 stars.

• Trine (Playstation Network, 2009)
  
  Yes, I rave about Trine quite often. I love the game. It definitely belongs here amongst the ranks of the best platform games I’ve ever played. You’ve got three characters, each of whom go up in levels and gather loot synchronously, and you can play with two or three players should you be so inclined. The game’s puzzles tend to have more than one solution, so if your wizard dies, it’s likely that you can get across that chasm without creating a magical bridge. Plus, the game has some very doable trophies, and it’s fun for me to think that there’s a game out there other than Plants versus Zombies in which I’m actually capable of getting 100% completion. A platinum trophy? Geez – I’ve never yet even gotten a gold one. Sign me up.

This is the wackiest version of Final Fight I’ve ever seen. Back in the day, I was one of those guys in the arcade who dumped tons of quarters into Final Fight and beat the game. I generally would play Guy. Occasionally, Haggar.

In this version, you’re fighting Skeletons and Mongols instead of gang members. It’s weird. Check it out.

Play Final Fight

Most game settings are just fluff. Even some of the games I really like have dreadfully generic settings. When you read about Borderlands, the description of Pandora sounds really interesting. In the game, it’s beautiful to look at, but doesn’t have much character. The world in Dungeon Siege is huge, but kind of boring. Even the world in Bioshock which so many people rave about didn’t grab me. The dynamics and the backstory behind the Little Sisters and the Big Daddies are intriguing and have a lot of potential, but I’d have liked more. More complexity, more history, more… something. I guess that Bioshock 2 is going to give us a lot of this, but imagine if there had been a plasmid that allowed people to breathe water and thus leave the underwater city into the ocean. Andrew Ryan would protest and even outlaw their departure and they would become their own independant faction, raiding for supplies and becoming a new enemy to fight. That’s one idea – I could come up with these all day. i’ve become sidetracked, but my point is that I wish they’d have taken the setting further.

So what about the game settings I do like?

Ultima
I first entered Sosaria when I got a copy of Ultima III for my tenth birthday. Sosaria was a crude world, like the worlds of Ultima I and Ultima II before it. Later, I played Ultima IV, which introduced the world of Brittania. Somewhere between ultima IV and Ultima V, I fell in love with Brittania. Between those two games, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that I’d spent a thousand hours in Brittania. Don’t be shocked – I’ve heard of at least one person who took 15 years to finish the game. On summer vacations, I’d spend all day playing, and stay up until well after midnight.

The game’s crude graphics didn’t exactly lend a vivid sense of realism, but they forced me to use my imagination in the same way that reading a book does. As I travelled south down the coast from Britain to Paws, I imagined the seashore, and envisioned what that must look like. When I exited the eighth level of a dungeon into the Underworld, I thought of just how dark the sunless world must be, and imagined the dank smell of stagnant air. Travelling through the poisonous swamps near the village of Cove brought to mind visions of The Swamp of Sadness from the Neverending Story, except with more disease and rotted overgrowth. The game’s poor graphics forced me to use my imagination. To me, that was a vivid world, and I grew to know it well.

Starcraft
Starcraft doesn’t have much in the way of landscape – just different maps that you fight on. But somehow, the setting calls to me. It’s a space opera, and the races are far more interesting than Klingons, Wookiees and Sebacians. When Starcraft: Ghost was annnounced, I was very excited to enter that world and see Mutalisks and Ultralisks up close. Walking amongst Protoss pylons in top-down Starcraft is one thing, but to envision a Terran Command Center lifting off or a zergling ambush from first-person perspective is fairly exciting. I would absolutely love to see a game in the Starcraft setting that is not a RTS.

Beyond Good and Evil
It’s not the geography of Hillys that calls to me, but rather its inhabitants. In real life, we think of ethnic diversity in terms of Caucasians, Asians, Africans, and Hispanics. On planet Hillys, the inhabitants aren’t only the human descendants of Apes. They’ve also descended from pigs, rhinos, cats, sharks, and hippos. The notion seems so wildly creative.

Half-Life 2
The opening of Half-Life 2 expresses so effectively the oppressive atmosphere that exists in City 17. The people of planet Earth have been conquered by an alien invasion, and the cities are nothing more than internment camps – even the names of the cities have been taken away. This is an excellent example of the “showing rather than telling” technique of authorship. They show you the horribly oppressed people and then put a crowbar in your hands and let you fight for them.

The story is as epic as the Star Wars trilogy and the setting as rich as any I’ve seen. This page does a fantastic job of laying out the timeline, filling in the backstory, and putting forth theories as to the motives of the mysterious G-Man. I’m eagerly waiting for Half-Life 2 episode 3, mainly to see where the story goes.

Oblivion
I never played Morrowind or any of the other Elder Scrolls games before Oblivion. But when I heard all the buzz about Oblivion on a discussion board I frequent, I had to try it. Oblivion is one of the most atmospheric games I’ve ever played – from the sunny mountain peaks to the swampy villages to the eerie Ayleid ruins.

Tamriel is one of those game worlds where I can easily envision the routes from place to place. The game locations seemed like real places to me. The game’s landmarks and road signs are distinct, and the terrain is varied such that I can find the way from Bruma to Chorrol without even having to consult the map.

Dragon Age
Perhaps more than any of the other game worlds listed above, the world of Dragon Age has been fleshed out wonderfully. The circle of mages that are watched over by templars to ensure that their magic doesn’t enable them to be posessed by demonic forces. The dwarven caste system, so rigid, so unfair. The seven old gods being gradually corrupted by the darkspawn, leading to blights. The enslavement of elvenkind by humanity, which has been abolished, and which has lead to the current split in the elven race. It’s all so intriguing – I’m totally absorbed in this world and its story.

I’d be interested to hear comments from other readers – what is your favorite video game setting?

I really love PC Gaming. I tend to play the vast majority of my games on the PC, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Peoples’ main objections to gaming on a PC tend to be twofold: firstly, that gaming PCs are too expensive. Secondly, that installation and troubleshooting in a Windows environment are a pain. I’ll certainly agree that consoles are easier to use, but in my opinion the advantages of gaming with a PC far outweigh the disadvantages. Plus, I hate playing shooters without a mouse.

As far as expenses, I tend to spend roughly $1000 every five years or so on a new gaming PC, and perhaps I’ll upgrade my graphics card once for each PC. So we’re talking about maybe $2500 or so each decade. Ten years is a long time – it averages out to about $20 per month. And gaming is by no means the only thing I use the PC for. Best of all, when you do get a new PC, the old one is likely still viable for other things. I’ve turned my old gaming PC into a media server, and I use it to store all my music, movies, and photos.

People rave about the great graphics on their 1080p displays when they play XBox 360 or PS3 games, but I haven’t played a game in 1080p on the PC in years. I’m currently running games at 1680×1050. If you have a decent graphics card, you can boost the graphics on a PC well above 1080p without much trouble. And if it’s a newer game that’s more graphically demanding, the PC will scale. You can change your graphics options to achieve a balance between graphics and performance.

Also, games on the PC tend to be $10 less than their console counterparts. If you play a lot of games, those increments of $10 will start adding up, making your investment in the PC a good one.

Another thing I really enjoy with the PC is the ability to replay older games using mods. Whether it’s replaying the original Baldur’s Gate using EasyTutu, running Thief: Deadly Shadows with improved textures and remapped mouse controls, installing Circle of Eight’s mods for Temple of Elemental Evil, or using the wealth of modifications available for Oblivion, user-created mods have greatly increased the replayability of some already excellent older games.

One of the few shortcomings I see with PC gaming is that aside from the few games that implement the terrible Games for Windows Live system, PC games have no achievements. There are Steam Achievements for a few Steam games such as Plants vs Zombies and the Half-Life 2 episodes, but PC games tend to not have the same online connectivity as XBox 360 and even PS3 games. But services like Raptr now provide desktop clients and gamercards that you can post online. I use Raptr’s desktop client, and have coded the gamercards on the left sidebar of this site to read data directly from Raptr so that I don’t have to do anything manually. Unless I play a PS3 game like Trine.

Call me a PC fanboy, I don’t care.

Aching for a really fun game that looks like all its art assets were created with MS Paint? Then RunMan is the game for you. Check it out.

Download RunMan

For me, 2009 was like eating at a good buffet: chock full of tasty selections, comfort food and some guilty pleasures you just can’t resist. Let’s see what was on the menu for this year!

Appetizers

Trine – Although this is a very meaty dish for a downloadable game, it was still over with a little too quickly for my tastes. The absolutely gorgeous graphics kept me riveted in place just looking at the scenery. I liked the RPG-lite aspects of character progression, but to me it seemed you could pretty much get though the entire game with just the Thief and Wizard. I’ll keep poking my head into Trine-land to work on the silver trophies and gawk at the visuals.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time – I still shake my head in disbelief every time I play this game. Can the SNES game I loved so dearly really be here on my PS3, updated in amazing HD glory? Wait, it also has trophies and online multiplayer? Was I ganked by a squad of Foot soldiers or is this really happening? The game is short, easy, and fairly shallow but I still love it for reminding me the good ol’ 16-bit days.

Main Course

Torchlight – Sometimes I wish I’d never found this game. For me, it’s like playing single player World of Warcraft. Never ending piles of rare, unique and set specific loot, a powerful and loyal pet, cool looking gear, endless random dungeons, questing that is never tedious and you can save any fricking where you want. Plus it runs like a champ on my laptop, ensuring I can get my Torchlight fix no matter where I am. I have a feeling 2010 will be filled with this excellent game as well.

Street Fighter IV – What can I say, I bought a $125 joystick and customized it just to play this game. It’s not perfect, and some of the new characters suck (I’m looking at you Rufus) but SFIV is all that I expected and more. I love the art style, I love the Super and Ultra combos and I love being the only one using C. Viper and Blanka online. And although I wish they’d have gone with DLC instead of a new release, I’m really looking forward to Super Street Fighter IV next year.

Crimson Gem Saga – This was one of my surprise favorites for the year. A truly deep turn based RPG with great graphics, interesting characters, a sense of humor and I can play it anywhere I like. It’s probably about a 40 hour adventure too, so I’m not even close to finishing it. Another perfect PSP game to pick up and play for 10 minutes, or 2 hours, and then save and go back to chasing children or pretend that I’m working.

Killzone 2 – If anyone ever tells you that PS3 and Xbox 360 games look pretty much the same, then I would challenge them to compare Killzone 2 to any 360 game and tell me it doesn’t blow them completely away. Despite a predictable shallow story, this was my favorite FPS of the year. Absolutely stunning graphics, excellent weapons and controls and addictive multiplayer. I loved this game all the way up to the final boss battle and then that cheap bastard done pissed me off. Ok, so I loved 99% of the game. For me, Killzone 2 was the pinnacle of FPS gaming in 2009.

Comfort Food

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 – MUA2 could have been an amazing game, but instead the developers were lazy and gave us a copy and paste of the first game, and then unpasted some of the good stuff and dumbed it down even further. While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it could have been so much cooler if they’d at least tried. As it stands, MUA2 is a great action game, allowing you to team up more Marvel heroes and take it to the bad guys with all their special powers and new Fusion moves. There are also new characters to destroy stuff with via DLC. I particularly enjoy using Jean Grey and Ms. Marvel together, they pretty much vaporize everything on the screen. Whenever I play MUA2 I get that warm, cozy feeling that I’ve done this all before. Wonder why that is?

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 – Yes, this is a great game. Yes, it’s disturbing at times. And yet it’s still a pretty run of the mill FPS with great graphics and some neat gimmicks to make things interesting. I’m a sucker for a methodical take cover & shoot FPS and MW2 fits the bill nicely. It’s not nearly as great as Killzone 2 (and not as pretty either) but blowing up Russians with Predator drone missiles as if they were ants under a magnifying glass is great fun.

Guilty Pleasures

Half-Minute Hero – I’m still in love with this game. I’m over five hours into this alleged 30 second game and it’s still a blast. The last time I played I got caught in an avalanche and had to fight polar bears naked. It was epic. This is the perfect portable game, right down to the save system. If you have a PSP, dust it off for this game, you will not regret it!

Plants vs. Zombies – This game didn’t hold my interest as much as I expected but it’s still a very fun distraction. I fire this up on the laptop and play it with my 10 year old daughter, she loves finding out about the new types of zombies as we move through the game. Crunchy!

There were other games I played in 2009, many of them being 2008 releases that I was late in playing. I’m still working on the DLC for Valkyria Chronicles. Prince of Persia was one of my favorite games of the year. I’m slinking my way though Dead Space and loving it so far. I also have a stack of 2009 games that I won’t even be able to touch until sometime next year. Games like Ghostbusters, Dead Space Extraction, Dragon Age, House of the Dead Overkill and Uncharted 2. This was such a great year for games, I can’t wait to play the goodies that 2010 will have to offer us.

I’m gonna rock this category style because that’s just how I roll.

Best Game That Ended Up Being Heroically Awesome

Batman: Arkham Asylum – if you had told me at the beginning of the year that a relatively unknown developer would end up making the best superhero video game ever and that said game would feature the greatest superhero ever created I would have laughed until I died. Batman: AA is an awesome game and hits the perfect mix of detective skills and combat mastery you’d expect from Batman.

Best Game Marred By Achievements

Red Faction: Guerrilla – At first I wasn’t taken by RFG, then I was into it like a house a’ fire and then the fires of excitement cooled into smoldering embers of rage and all of that was because of achievements. Sure I liked the story and I enjoyed blowing up things with my varied weaponry but I also enjoyed getting all of the achievements right up until the final, eight minute transporter mission. I spent hours, and I mean hours, doing that stupid race and never finished it. Then I spent hours looking for ore and radio tags to come up one piece of ore short. One piece, in a collection of three hundred pieces all of which are marked as maroon dots on your map, that is your map of a MAROON PLANET! Oh well. Yeah, it’s my fault for being so tied up with these stupid points but no game got on my bad side quite so quickly.

Best Reason To Have a Friend

Borderlands – Borderlands is fun when you play it alone but absolutely awesome when you play with other people. The class specialization is so varied that if you can’t get a certain skill, chances are a teammate can and once you get used to things like extra team experience or regenerating ammo, it’s hard to go back to playing alone. That and Scorpion turrets are a lifesaver, especially when they shoot you with healing.

Best Expensive Experiment

DJ Hero – I would have loved to been in the meeting at Activision where this one was given a green light. It’s a music game that’s targeted to a market that could be generously described as “niche” and the game comes with a $120 price tag. It’s no surprise that the game hasn’t been setting the sales charts on fire, but that shouldn’t take away from the fact that it is a very good music game experience. It challenges you in ways that other music games don’t, yet at the same time knows that this is probably all new so it doesn’t punish you in the same way. Plus the music is pretty damn good. I don’t think we’ll see another one, which is a shame, but I’m glad we got at least one DJ game before it all fell apart.

Best “What’s Black and White and Red All Over” Punchline

MadWorld – I know that Greg wasn’t big on this game but hot damn, this is very high on my list of favorites for the year. I absolutely loved everything about this game from the graphics to the moves to the sense of humor to the closing line. MadWorld stuck with me long after I played it which is more than I can say for most games. I have never looked at a street sign the same way since.

Best “I can’t believe I’m doing this on a Nintendo handheld” Activity

Dealing drugs in GTA: Chinatown Wars – I spent as much time in Chinatown Wars dealing drugs as I did doing story missions which, when you consider the 12 – 15 hour story, is a lot of time slinging rock. I don’t know what it was about that minigame but I was hooked. The fact that the rest of the game was so great certainly didn’t hurt when the time came to quit the lifestyle of a hustler and move on to other criminal antics.

Best “Did he just say that?” Cutscene

House of the Dead: Overkill – Seriously. Play through the game and listen to the ending conversation. If that isn’t the most disturbing conversation had in a video game, well, I don’t know what is. Good game too.

Best Game I Liked Despite Knowing Better

50 Cent: Blood on the Sand – Yes the story was stupid, yes it was filled with profanity but I don’t care. This game was a hoot. The scoring method of chaining kills for better points kept things moving quickly, the quips from Fiddy and his crew about killing your entire generation were hilarious and the co-op was sweet as sugar. I should know better than to like a game so unabashedly stupid but I can’t help myself.

Best Jaw On The Floor Game

Uncharted 2 – You know what part had my mouth agape in Uncharted 2? That part between when you picked “Start a new game” and when the ending credits rolled. Seriously y’all, this game ain’t no joke.

Best Walk Spoiled

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2010 with Wii Motion Plus – The best golf video game ever made, bar none. It’s also a pretty good money saver as you’ll never need another golf game as long as you live. Just try to resist the urge to throw your Wiimote in the nearest duck pond.

That’s it for me. In a year where I played a ton of games, these are the ones that stand out. I know I’m missing out on some of the year’s heavy hitters but these games are what’s keeping me from them so I think that says something. It says I need to leave the house more.

2009 is over, and this week in Lungfishopolis, we’ll be talking about which games were our favorites this past year. Today, I’ll be starting by talking about my own favorites.

It’s a tough call, but I’d probably have to say that my favorite game of 2009 is Dragon Age: Origins. The game’s difficulty has certainly been a struggle at times, but the setting, the story, and the characters are amazingly well done. More so than any other game I’ve played before, it’s easy to feel like the characters in Dragon Age are real people. I feel that my character has such a strong brotherlike kinship with Alistair. And when I see a conversation option to tell Leliana that she should leave the party, I shudder at the thought of how badly it would hurt her feelings.

I spent a lot of time playing Street Fighter 4 earlier in the year. According to Raptr, I only played for 34 hours, but it felt like a lot more. Based on my prowess in the arcades playing Street Fighter 2, I expected to play online and kick everyone’s ass. Sadly for me, that isn’t how it turned out. The level of online play is way higher than I’d have guessed. And while I was able to generally hold my own with Guile and Dhalsim, there were plenty of players online that stomped me into the ground. Mostly Ryu and Akuma players. Of course, the fights that were the most fun were the ones that were very close.

Another game that I’m absolutely loving is Trine. The Playstation 3 release was delayed to the point of absurdity, but it was worth it to get a 3-player game that I can play with my wife on our big TV. It’s fun single-player, but it’s much better multiplayer.

The game is a beautiful 2D sidescroller with a lot of depth. Your characters gain abilities as they go up levels, and the loot you can pick up along the way is really useful. I’m slowly getting more and more trophies. I’m going to try to get them all. I’m having a lot of trouble with the “Master Ninja” trophy, and I’m dreading the “Better Than Developers!” trophy, but I’m going to give it the old college try.

Plants vs Zombies is a game that I had not expected to love. I downloaded the demo, and ended up liking it so much that I purchased the game. The tower defense in Plants vs Zombies is done in lanes, like in a bowling alley. This is one of the things that had initially turned me off about the game, but in practice it ends up being far more fun than I’d expected. The game has three different screens, and each has a daytime and nighttime cycle. Each introduces a new gameplay element that complicates things: tombstones, the pool, the angled roof. To this day, Plants vs Zombies is the only game in which I’ve gotten 100% completion on achievements.

There are a number of games that I played this year that I’d like to add to this list but just can’t. Ghostbusters was good, but I don’t think it’s game of the year material. Ditto for Prototype. And I’d like to include Dead Space and Okami, which I finished playing this year, but I’m not because they weren’t 2009 games.

Make sure to come back later this week for Brandon and Frank’s take on the games of 2009.

This one is about a year old now, but I saw it again recently and had to share. I’m a big fan of Lore Sjoberg.

Home for New Years Day? Like Tetris? Now you can play online against other people for free. I’m not that good at Tetris, but I jumped on at 9:30 on a Tuesday night and played two games, and I came in first place. Twice. If I can win at this, anybody can.

Play Tetris Friends