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.

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.