Now that I’ve reviewed my favorite 2010 games, it’s time to look at the games I’m most looking forward to in 2011. For me, I should probably include Starcraft 2 on that list, since it was on my last most-looked-forward-to list, and I still haven’t played it. But here are the unreleased games that I’m most looking forward to.

Ico / Shadow of the Colossus Collection

This spring, Playstation is going to be re-releasing a high-definition version of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus as a packed-together collection. I’m not too interested in the fact that it’s going to be 3D-enabled, but I’ll buy it just to replay Shadow of the Colossus in HD, and to try out Ico, which I’ve never had the pleasure of playing.

Dead Space 2

January 25th is only about a month away, and knowing me I won’t buy Dead Space 2 on release day. But I’m definitely going to play. I loved the first game.

Batman: Arkham City

I was late to the party on Arkham Asylum, but I played the game in 2010 and loved it. Sequel? Yes, please. Maybe I’ll get a copy of Arkham City before it’s a year old.

Dragon Age 2

For me, 2009 and 2010 were largely about Dragon Age. I absolutely love the setting and the strategic combat, but I’ve been seriously overexposed. And while Dragon Age was fantastic, I did not love Awakening. As a result, I may not pick up Dragon Age 2 on March 8th with everyone else.

Beyond Good and Evil HD

The thought of playing my favorite game of all time in HD with remastered character models and getting trophies gives me great joy. I’m gonna photograph every animal, win every race, and collect every pearl. Again. It’s coming out sometime in 2011, although nobody seems to know when.

Hunted: The Demon’s Forge

I’ve been looking for a good co-op RPG to play with my wife ever since we finished Trine and discovered that Sacred 2 is kind of lame. There is very little information out there about the game, and I may wait to see some reviews before dropping the money for two copies. What I do know is that you play as a male warrior who uses two-handed melee weapons and a female archer. Co-op is the main focus of the game, and the gameplay videos look very good. Time will tell. May 10th.

Portal 2

There’s been a lot of hype and a lot of excitement around the impending release of Portal 2. Now scheduled for April 20, 2011, this sequel sees the addition of elements from one of Lungfishopolis’s Free Game Friday titles: TAG: The Power of Paint. Turns out that Valve bought out the TAG crew in the same way that they bought the Narbacular Drop crew for the first Portal game. Portal 2 looks amazing, and I’ll likely download it from Steam on April 20th.

Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

I don’t yet have a motionPlus controller, and this game may force me to buy one. I missed the boat on A Link to the Past, Ocarina of Time, and Wind Waker. Twilight Princess was the first Zelda game I’d played since borrowing a friend’s NES back in the day. And I love Twilight Princess. I’ve got very high hopes for Skyward Sword, and I likely will be buying this one on release day. That’s supposed to be sometime in early 2011, but there’s been no announcement.

The Last Guardian

I’ve been looking forward to The Last Guardian for a long time. You play a defenseless boy, and must of the gameplay appears to be stealth-based. Your only means of attack is via your huge flying puppy dog companion Trico: the titular last guardian. Given team Ico’s track record, this one should be good.

Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Before Skyrim was announced recently, I would quickly have answered that The Last Guardian was my most-looked-forward-to game. I loved Oblivion. I really really loved Oblivion. A sequel? Yes, please. And I’ll just say goodbye to another 200 hours of my life.

More often than not, I tend to play games a year or more after their initial release dates, so it can be really hard for me to provide a really good “best of” list. I just started playing Mass Effect 2, and I have yet to play Metro 2033, Starcraft 2, Super Mario Galaxy 2, Fallout: New Vegas, God of War 3, Bioshock 2, and every Assassin’s Creed game beyond the original. I’m sure that I’ll play all of these eventually, and it’s very possible that more than one would be on my best of 2010 list had I played them.

Likewise, I played Batman: Arkham Asylum this year, and I finished both Dragon Age: Origins and Trine this year. Each of those would be on my best of 2010 list had they actually been released in 2010.

On the other hand, I played Uncharted 2 this year and absolutely hated it.

So let me think. What games that were released this year did I play this year and love?

First, Heavy Rain. Of course Heavy Rain is first. It was an amazingly tense and well-told story, but my favorite thing about it was the way consequences were handled and the fact that you never had to go back and replay a scene at which you’d failed. I know that this type of design has to present some substantial challenges, but I really hope that more games are able to take this approach in the future – especially survival horror games.

Secondly, Enslaved. It’s difficult for me to lump Enslaved in alongside Heavy Rain since I just finished playing Enslaved last week, but it was a far better game than I’d been expecting.

Lastly, Hoard. I don’t often play games without stories or games without endings. But Hoard is a great little bite-sized game, and it’s a lot of fun to kidnap princesses, roast knights, and burninate the countryside.

As an honorable mention, I’d also like to include No More Heroes: Desperate Struggle. Hard to put it on a best of 2010 list, and it wasn’t as good as the original, but I really do enjoy the ridiculous humor of the No More Heroes games, and Desperate Struggle gave me some laughs.

In one week, every living cell on the planet will be dead. You have one chance.

That’s the premise of this game, and it’s chilling. It’s hard to convey how much of an impact a game like this can have on you. You just have to play it. There is a way to save The Earth, but after you’ve played the game, you can’t retry without messing with your browser’s cache or some other form of cheating.

I watched my family die, then I died alone while working towards a cure. I had one chance.

Play One Chance

I just finished playing Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. I bought it after a strong recommendation from a few freinds on Google Buzz. I’d played the demo, and didn’t really like it. But when it went on sale on Amazon for $20, I grabbed a copy, figuring that I could sell it on EBay when I was done for at least $20. I’m not sure that I’m going to be selling it now.

Maybe it was my low expectations, but I enjoyed the game more than I’d even expected to. It certainly had its issues, but in general the game got better the more I played it. Once I got acclamated to the combat, it was certainly a lot of fun. I’m not trying to say that this game has no enjoyable gameplay. The controls are definitely a bit wonky – more than once I’d get stuck trying to jump from place to place because I needed to slide a quarter inch more up or down, and the camera angle often become difficult during some fights. Once, during a puzzle, I managed to somehow screw things up to the point that I don’t think I could have solved it without reloading. But this game’s most redeeming feature is not the flawed platforming.

I’ve heard it said that the story is what makes Enslaved a good game, but I’d like to disagree. The story is good, but what makes Enslaved a good game for me are its characters. Monkey is good. Trip is better. Pigsy is damn amazing. And the depth of these characters doesn’t really begin to come out until you’ve been playing the game for a while. That’s why I think the game gets better the more you play. When you begin, the characters are all strangers, both to you and to each other. As they grow to know each other, you as a player get to know them as well. And they must have used some advanced performance capture technology, because the performances of the CG characters during cutscenes are far too nuanced for a programmer to have coded. The humor and quality of acting in one cutscene at the start of chapter 13 made me think more of a scene with Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, and Carrie Fischer than of a typical video game cutscene. Yeah – it was that good.

Bottom line? Try Enslaved. It’s a great game.

Hello, Lungfishopolis! I almost forgot you were there. It’s been a while. Part of the reason I haven’t written is because I’ve felt that I have nothing interesting to say. But in the end, if it’s between a boring blog post and nothing at all, I suppose I should at least post something boring if there’s been nothing else here for two months.

I’ve wrapped my first playthrough of Batman: Arkham Asylum. I’d delayed playing it as long as I had because it’s a licensed game. In general, licensed games stink. I was pleased to find that Arkham Asylum does not, in fact, stink. Awesome game. The game has me listed as 91% complete, mostly because there are a number of challenges I haven’t hit yet. I won’t be going for 100% achievements on this one, mainly because I know I’ll never finish all the challenges perfectly, and a 40-hit combo feels a bit beyond my reach, but I might consider a second playthrough on Hard difficulty now that I’ve finished the first. I did manage to get all of The Riddler’s challenges.

Resident Evil: Darkside Chronicles is a fun little Wii game. I mainly bought it for the trip on memory lane through Resident Evil 2, which holds a very warm place in my heart. Paradoxically, it’s also a very scary place. The game’s fun, but I haven’t played it much recently.

Red Faction: Guerilla has been taking up a lot of my time. I bought it on Steam when it went on sale – I can’t remember whether I paid $5 or $10 for the game. I’m in Oasis, on casual difficulty, and the game’s already feeling a bit monotonous. I might just go back and play every once in a while. If only I didn’t have that damned completionist thing going, I could just put the game aside and be done with it.

Grotesque Tactics: Evil Heroes turned out to be a mistake. It cost $15, so it sounded like a good deal for a decent tactical fantasy combat game. But it’s seriously broken, and the dialog is hideous. I quit after 3 tries at the first battle. I’m actually unable to move where I want to. I click on a square and the character sprints in the other direction. Avoid this one. I should seek a refund.

Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening is an expansion from my favorite game of last year. I really loved Dragon Age. But this expansion has some problems. Notably, the difficulty is erratic as all hell. After a far too easy first chapter, I set the difficulty to hard, and I’ve played that way through most of the game. But when I got to the dragon at the end, I got stomped. Flat. I set the difficulty to normal, then easy, and kept losing. After my 3rd attempt on easy, I managed to pull off a victory. Barely. Jesus, I just want the game to end now, but I’m having difficulty mustering the will to go back to it for the final two or three battles.

Once I wrap up Awakening and possibly Red Faction, I’ll install the copy of Mass Effect 2 I’ve had sitting here. It might be hard to go right from one Bioware game to another. I just ordered Enslaved, and I might try that one first. I’ve also been considering going back to oldies like Grim Fandango or Metal Gear Solid. I also never got far in Torchlight. I guess we’ll see what strikes my fancy. I’ve been putting a lot of time into Gem Miner: Dig Deeper recently.

Just had to share how incredibly excited I am about today’s announcement of the Beyond Good and Evil HD remake for Playstation 3 and XBox 360. Check out these images!

Simply awesome. You can check out more images here.

Over the years, I’ve found some damn good free games out there. These are my favorites. The best of the best, as it were.

Desktop Tower Defense

Although Pixeljunk Monsters and Plants vs Zombies may be better tower defense games, Dekstop Tower Defense is purer, and it’s free.

The Deepening

The Deepening is pure humor mashed up into a which-way story. If you’re a fan of the Beastie Boys video for Sabotage, you’ll appreciate The Deepening.

Gravity Bone

One of the few that’s not a browser game, Gravity Bone feels like a demo for a game that I’d buy in a minute. The intro level is kind of fun, and the second level is okay although it has one tough platforming bit. But the ending is AMAZING.

TAG

Do you remember how Valve grabbed up the indy developers from Narbacular Drop and used their ideas to make a little game named Portal? Well, Valve has also grabbed up the developers behind TAG and is using their ideas in Portal 2. This game is awesome and very Portal-like.

When I originally created Lungfishopolis.com, I was playing a lot more games than I am today. I’d envisioned myself as one of three or four authors who’d write on this site once or twice per week, writing about the experiences we’d had playing games rather than writing up reviews of the games we played. It was to be a labor of love rather than a job.

But while I did find two other like-minded guys willing to write on the site, life interceded. Brandon got a gig writing for GameShark.com, and when you have the choice of doing something free or getting paid for it, it’s not much of a decision. He’s now a real games journalist, and in my opinion his writing is some of the best I’ve seen. I’m happy for him in his new spot. Frank has had a lot going on in his own personal life as well, and no one could ever begrudge him for his absence here. As for myself, I’ve moved from Colorado back to Connecticut, and replaced much of my gaming with human interaction, since I have far more Connecticut friends than I ever had Colorado friends. As a result, there’s been far less on Lungfishopolis over the past few months than there’s been overall during the past few years.

What’s to come? Well… fewer articles, that’s what. Yes, I’ve considered shutting the site down, but… I kind of like the site. Yes, it contains mostly lists and other drivel that many people might find uninteresting, but I’m not giving up quite yet. While I can’t claim to have put much of any energy into improving my writing, I still enjoy that writing. And once in a while, I feel like I write something worth reading.

5- The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (Nintendo EAD, Nintendo Wii, 2006)

Despite the fact that it was originally designed as a Gamecube game, I loved Twilight Princess. The beautifully-crafted themed dungeons, the frequent story moment cutscenes, the varied gameplay, the mini-games, the music, I loved it all. And yet I never played Ocarina of Time or Wind Waker. Call me a late-to-the party Zelda fanboy.

I kept my copy of Twilight Princess. Maybe I’m hoping to get my wife to play it. Maybe I’d consider replaying it myself at some point if I ever got a huge amount of free time. It’s a long game.

4- Dragon Age: Origins (Bioware, PC, 2009)

Although I’ve never played the console version of this game, I heard that it was far inferior to the version I played on the PC. Maybe that’s why the game didn’t make a bigger splash: it was essentially a PC experience, and when ported to the console it lacked something. But there was so much that I loved about Dragon Age. First and foremost, it’s the closest thing to Baldur’s Gate that I’ve seen since… well, since 1998 when the last Baldur’s Gate game was released. Secondly, Bioware’s move away from a linear good/evil scale. Rather than your character’s alignment being affected by decisions that you make throughout the adventure, your companions’ opinions are affected. The same action can please two of your companions and piss off a third companion. I think it’s brilliant, as it steps away from the black-and-white systems of the past and simultaneously builds NPC character depth. Third, the game’s setting is the best fantasy world I’ve seen since Brittania, back in the days of Ultima V in the eighties. I love the fact that dwarves are unable to use magic and therefore are unable to dream. I love the Grey Wardens and the dark drama of The Joining. I love the story behind the creation of the darkspawn: The Fade and The Black City. And I love the background of the dragons, how archdemons come to be, and how they can be defeated. It’s a pity that I haven’t yet had time to finish DAO: Awakening.

3- Baldur’s Gate (Bioware, PC, 1998)

I’m grouping both games here. After all this time, Baldur’s Gate may still be my favorite computer role-playing game. There’s something about the old Infinity Engine and about the makeup of these old games that no other CRPG since has been able to capture. Baldur’s Gate had more character customization options, more spells and magic items, more obscure side-quests, and more areas to explore than any other game since. It’s amazing that twelve years later, Baldur’s Gate is still setting the bar for computer role playing games.

2- Half-Life 2 (Valve Software, PC, 2004)

Valve’s development of the Source engine was an amazing achievement. But aside from that, the story and gameplay in Half-Life 2 were breakthrough accomplishments on a number of levels. Innovative enemies, physics-based puzzles, and the best facial animation ever included in a video game. All of this, and a excellently-written science fiction story about an alien occupation of planet Earth and the unlikely underground rebellion led by a voiceless protagonist who may be backed by a mysterious otherworldly businessman. I’m currently replaying Half-life 2 for the fourth time.

1- Beyond Good and Evil (Ubisoft, PC, 2003)

You knew this was coming. Beyond Good and Evil remains my favorite game of all time. I’ve ranted about it so often and for so long that I won’t repeat myself here – you can go read any of a number of other rants I’ve written about how good the game is. I’ve replayed it five times now, from start to finish, and unlocked every hidden item in the game. I’m ready now for Beyond Good and Evil 2. Bring it on.

Although my little game blog here is no 1up, there are a number of Lungfishopolis articles of which I’m proud. I thought it’d be fun to look back on some of the site’s best posts.

Awesome things I’ve done in Scribblenauts (link)
After having seen a tweet written by Wil Wheaton, I got the idea of sharing Scribblenauts experiences with other players of the game. Due to some bizarre planetary conjunction, fourteen other players stumbled across my post and chimed in. It hasn’t been too often that I’ve gotten that many comments on a post, so I consider that one a success.

Ode to the Shalebridge Cradle (link)
While on my second replay of Thief: Deadly Shadows, I became entranced with the romantic spookiness of The Shalebridge Cradle, one of the best video game levels ever created. And yes, I wrote a sonnet. I thought it came out rather well.

Co-op Etiquette (link)
In considering the nature of pop-in multiplayer, which could sometimes occur without explicit invitation, Brandon wrote up a good article detailing an experience of his. I enjoyed reading it, and I cracked myself up with the image I threw together to accompany the article.

Everything Old is New Again (part 1 / part 2 / part 3 / part 4)
When the Ghostbusters video game was announced, I thought it would be a good idea to examine what other decades-old movie licenses were ripe for being made into video games. Weekend at Bernies? Xanadu? I hope people had half the fun reading it that I had writing it.

Scribblenauts Smackdown (part 1 / part 2 / part 3 / semifinals / finals)
This was part of my ill-fated big push to bring traffic to Lungfishopolis after the big fourteen-comment Scribblenauts post detailed above. The idea: pit-fight Scribblenauts creatures and describe the battle in far more detail than actually occurs in-game. It drew in a few commenters, but wasn’t nearly the success I’d hoped.

Games for Couples (link)
Honestly, I really enjoyed all the multi-author articles that ever appeared on this site. But this one presented some stuff that I actually thought could be useful to people looking for games to play with their girlfriends or wives.

MusicCast (link)
I put together five different podcasts wherein I played and commented on video game music before I stopped due to lack of interest. Maybe I’m in the minority with my appreciation of video game music, but I still listen to it.

Confessions of a Games Journalist (part 1 / part 2 / part 3)
In 2008, Brandon’s went to Vegas to write about a preview of Saints Row 2 for GameShark.com, and he wrote about his time in Vegas here. I thought that was pretty damn cool.

Braid Hints (World 2 / World 3 / World 4 / World 5 / World  6)
When I played Braid, I had to look up a few of the solutions online, and I hated having to do it. So my bright idea was to write up some hints that would nudge players in the right direction without giving the answers away. The series has proved popular, even years later.

Game of the Year Awards, 2010-2019 (link)
A little more than a year ago, I got wildly creative and wrote a future-history piece about a decade’s worth of Game of the Year games that haven’t yet come out. Sure, nine out of ten games were completely fictitous, but I did predict the existence of a 3D Nintendo DS, although I placed it in 2016.

Pixeljunk Monsters Strategies (part 1 / part 2 / part 3)
I’ve never been one for writing strategy guides, but I was really really into Pixeljunk Monsters. Actually, I kind of still am.

Poopsocking (link)
My favorite of all the collaborative articles, poopsocking asked its authors “What game have you put the most hours into?” This article had four contributors, which is a record for Lungfishopolis.