I played a lot of games in 2009. I could manage to count 23 of them, since I’m only looking at games that I played for the first time. This means that I’m not counting Thief: Deadly Shadows, Dungeon Siege, Warcraft 3, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, and Beyond Good and Evil, since I’ve played those all before.

That being said, I’m going to go through my list in alphabetical order and try to give some kind of brief rating and review to each of them.

Braid

Amongst downloadable XBox Live Arcade titles, Braid is a superstar. While it doesn’t quite fit in with the casual fare that permeates downloadable console catalogs, it’s a good game to play in small chunks. Many of the puzzles can be so maddeningly difficult as to break your brain, but there’s an immense sense of satisfaction when you finally figure them out.

I played the PC version, since I have no XBox, but while the Steam release had some issues, it was worth the wait. I played it, my wife played it, and I wrote a series of hints that ended up near the top of the google search results.

Braid’s story was a bit hard to follow, introduced as it was in small chunks at the beginning of each of the game’s six worlds, and it got really odd at the end. But the game was more about the puzzles than anything else, so all else is forgivable. I’ll give the game a B.

Crysis

Before its launch, and for a number of months afterwards, Crysis‘s big marketing line was that it would bring your $2000 gaming rig to its knees with its amazing graphics. That’s probably why it didn’t sell as well as the developers might have hoped. Crysis was good, although overall I’ll say that I preferred CryTek’s earlier title Far Cry.

Crysis was almost like two separate games, as the gameplay during the second half is drastically different from the first half. Personally, I prefer the first half, as it was much closer to the gameplay in Far Cry. I could sneak around to scout an area, snipe off a few men, then let the rest come to me. It felt strategic and fun. The zero-gravity segments in the second half of the game were disorienting and confusing. I found myself backtracking unintentionally, and the alien enemies weren’t nearly as interesting to fight as the human opponents. The segments in which you fly a fighter jet were even worse. More often than not, I’d crash and burn but never know exactly what killed me.

Towards the end of the game, during a battle on an aircraft carrier, the game froze. Every time. I was never actually able to see the end of the game, which I assume was well under an hour away. I must have tried twenty times to get through that battle, but the game froze every single time. Considering the non-fun segments and the bug at the end, I’ll have to give Crysis a C+.

Defense Grid: The Awakening

As far as Tower Defense games go, I found Defense Grid to be strictly average. It held my attention long enough to play through the entire game, but I found the aliens to be generic, the story to be uninteresting, and the computer narrator’s melodramatic dialogue to be unbelievable, as the computer got more emotional about a hinted-at past war than most humans would get. The computer’s odd fixation on raspberries was a bit funny, but that small bit of humor didn’t make up for the rest of the game. I’ll give this one a C+.

Dead Space

Being the best survival horror game I’ve played in years is no mean feat. That’s what puts Dead Space in the running for the best game that I played in 2009.

It’s nearly impossible for me to talk about Dead Space without comparing it to Resident Evil, as I believe that Dead Space has neatly filled in the survival horror niche once occupied by the earlier Resident Evil games. But Dead Space is certainly its own animal, and is an entirely new generation of survival horror title. For one thing, Dead Space is more of a shooter than any of the original survival horror games (Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Clocktower) ever were. It has the best collection of weapons I’ve seen in a shooter since Doom 3, a weapon upgrade system that I like even better than Resident Evil’s, and some excellent gameplay elements such as zero-gravity areas, vacuum areas, ship-mounted weaponry for firing at targets in space, and the kinesis and stasis modules.

Dead Space is certainly a game that I’ll return to and play again some day. I’m doubting that I’ll go for the trophy where you have to play the entire game with only a plasma cutter and no other weapons, but I’ll enjoy my replay nonetheless. Dead Space gets a solid A.

Desktop Tower Defense DS

I was a huge fan of the flash version of Desktop Tower Defense for a long time. I still believe it to be one of the best tower defense games ever made. As simple as it is, it’s got a lot of complexity and balance. Building new mazes for the creeps to traverse and arranging things perfectly can be quite a challenge, and if you start on advanced strategies like juggling, things get even more complex. The game begins simple, but has a lot of nuance.

For some reason, since I bought this game, I haven’t played my DS nearly as often as I used to. So I haven’t put a lot of time into the portable verion of Desktop Tower Defense. But they’ve added quite a lot of new modes, plus a number of achievements. Although not being able to share those achievements online somehow detracts from the experience, I’ll still enjoy trying to get them. Probably on an airplane at some point in the future. I’ll give Desktop Tower Defense DS a B-.

Dragon Quest 4 DS

Back in the day, when I played this game on a friend’s NES, I absolutely loved it. The charm and the fun are still there. I haven’t completed Dragon Quest 4 since beginning the NES version, but I’m easily halfway into the game. Once again, I just haven’t spent much time with the DS recently. I know that will change when Scribblenauts drops. But as far as RPGs for the DS, I haven’t seen many better. C+

Fairway Solitaire

While Fairway Solitaire is without doubt a casual game, it takes plain old solitaire and adds a golf theme to make it really interesting. Streaks where you don’t have to use cards from the deck become “long drives”, sandtraps and water hazards become cards that are inaccessible, and you can collect extra golf clubs that act as cards up your sleeve. While explaining these intracacies are beyond the scope of this mini-review, you should take my word that this game is amongst the better casual games that I’ve played this past year. B-

Fallout 3

While I didn’t go through all the expansions like Brandon did, I spent a lot of time playing Fallout 3. I played three characters, and maxxed out my levels on two of them. And even though it wasn’t entirely deserving of the “Oblivion-with-guns” moniker that it got in so many reviews, there was enough of that to detract from the game. All the things that I disliked about the Oblivion engine were still problems in Fallout 3, and none of the things that I’d loved so much about Oblivion were replaced with adequate substitutes. The charm of the first two Fallout titles was likewise lacking. As you can probably tell, I much preferred Oblivion to Fallout 3.Still, I did enjoy my time playing Fallout 3. GFW, while it does suck, gave me the ability to grab some achievements, and I got about 90% of the ones available, including every damn bobblehead in the game. I loved tearing up slavers with the shishkebab, I loved melting Combine troops with a plasma rifle, and that nuclear explosion was a thing of beauty. I’d just love to have seen more Wasteland in Fallout 3. You know, some snake squeezins, or perhaps a Scorpitron. Fallout 3 gets a B.

Far Cry 2
I wasn’t sure what to expect from Far Cry 2. I knew that it was an open-world game and that it was significantly different from both the original Far Cry and from Crysis. Far Cry removed a number of the elements that I’d liked so much about those two games: The science fiction elements, and lying prone for purposes of sneaking. I wish I’d been able to record achievements in the game. I went out of my way to grab every diamond in the northern section of the map – had I been able to get an achievement for it, I’d likely have done the same for the southern map. The game also has some really silly conventions.

Final Fantasy 12
The only other Final Fantasy games I’ve played are Final Fantasy 4 on the DS and Final Fantasy 9 back on the original Playstation. These are loong games. I’ve been playing Final Fantasy 12 for years now. I tend to play for 4-6 months before getting burned out and shelving the game for a couple months. But then I go back to it. I’m still only about 2/3 of the way through the game and I plan to go back to it soon, although I’m sure I’ll quickly shelve it again when Borderlands and Dragon Age: Origins come out in October.

Final Fantasy is about story, but it’s also about level grinding. Lots and lots of level grinding. The game’s battles are simply too hard if you move from place to place battling only story-essential foes. Level grinding is absolutely essential. It harks back to old RPGS that I’d played on the Sega Master system. And in Final Fantasy 12, it’s actually a lot of fun to level grind. There’s a lot of inventory management and skill management to do – I’ve got a couple sheets of notebook paper where I’ve got notes sketched out on how my characters’ gear and skills are set up. It reminds me of mapping out Bards Tale or Wizardry dungeons on graph paper. Final Fantasy 12 gets a B. Square Enix knows what they’re doing when it comes to JRPGs.

Galactrix
I absolutely loved Puzzle Quest. And so I was very excited for Galactrix. I’m sad to say that I was seriously disappointed with the game. The touch screen controls are terrible. Selecting the item you want with the stylus is often more of a challenge than fighting battles. And the game’s loading screens are frequent and very long. The game’s minigames can be fun once you unlock them, and tricking out your ship with improved equipment is probably the best part of the game. Overall, Puzzle Quest was a far better game. Galactrix gets a D.

Ghostbusters
Ghostbusters was a mixed bag. There’s a lot of good, and a lot of bad. My biggest complaint about the game is the uneven difficulty. There are some moments that are just way too hard. This forced me to play through the game on “casual” difficulty. I also hit a number of bugs where certain plot triggers just wouldn’t fire, and I had to reload my last save, after which things worked fine.

If you’re going to play this game, play it for the story and the atomosphere, because those were great. The game totally nails the feel of the original movie, and having all four ghostbusters voiced by the actual actors is fantastic. The game is very well written. The plot is probably better than that of the Ghostbusters 2 movie, and there are some really funny one-liners in the game. I have to give this game a C+.

Lost Planet
Seldom have I had a worse experience with a game that I had with the PC port of Lost Planet. Most of my complaints had to do with the fact that it’s the worst PC port of a console game that I’ve ever played, but the game engine is also terrible – I have a hard time imagining that I’d have enjoyed the 360 version much more. This is the only game in my list that gets a definite F.

Mad World
I understand that my negative take on Mad World is primarily opinion. I know that other people (such as Brandon) really enjoyed Mad World. But I didn’t like the game at all. At all. I played nearly halfway through it (I’m guessing) hoping that it would get better, but I eventually just got bored and frustrated.

I’d been expected a new-school brawler that felt like SmashTV or Double Dragon, but what I got was not nearly as fun. At all. I had many complaints about the game overall, but the bottom line is that I just didn’t find it to be fun. At all. Mad World gets a D.

Mass Effect
If Brandon doesn’t kill me for my take on Mad World, then he’ll probably kill me for my take on Mass Effect. In a word: meh. The game was fine, but I didn’t get nearly as much out of it as everyone else seemed to. The story was really interesting, I’ll give you that, and Bioware always does an amazing job with the dialogue. But to me, the gameplay’s the thing. And the engine that Mass Effect ran on (actually, the engine that a lot of Bioware games have run on) felt old and klunky to me.

I played through the whole game – start to finish – but it didn’t grab me. I enjoyed the story, but the gameplay wasn’t there, so I can’t classify it as a keeper. Mass Effect gets a C.

Okami
I’d heard about Okami for a long time before having picked up a copy. I got the Wii version, although Okami was originally a playstation 2 game. And I loved it.

The gameplay in Okami is a lot like the gameplay in the more recent Zelda games – action/adventure. Fetch quests and conversations with some minor platforming and a whole lot of fighting. Also, plenty of minigames. Add to that the innovative magic brush mechanic and you’ve got a winner. But what stood out most to me about Okami were the graphics. They don’t excel by being photorealistic – just the opposite – the stylized graphics in Okami are an excellent argument against photorealism. They look amazing in a far more cartoonish way. Okami gets a B.

Penny Arcade Adventures: Episode 2: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness
I’m a big fan of Penny-Arcade. I love their style of humor, and of course I love the bulk of their subject matter: video games, tabletop gaming, and general geekery. I’ve played and loved both their games. How can you not love a game where you’re battling hobos, mimes, barbershop quartets, insane asylum inmates, and robots with a perverse sexual attraction to fruit? I give this one a B. It’s inexpensive, and if you buy it on Steam, you can shoot for the Steam achievements.

Pixeljunk Monsters
I’ve certainly written enough here about my love for Pixeljunk Monsters. Although I didn’t start playing it in 2009, I likely won’t finish before the end of the year. Honestly, I’ll probably end up putting it aside again as I start playing Muramasa and Scribblenauts. Although I’ve only got two levels remaining in the expansion, there are still plenty of trophy challenges for me to tackle. The “Four Tree Rainbow” challenge is harder than it looked, and the “Rainbow Team” challenge looks to be incredibly difficult. In Pixeljunk Monsters lingo, to “rainbow” a level is to complete it perfectly – without losing a single villager. Pixeljunk Monsters gets an A from me simply because I can’t think of many other games I’ve ever gotten so much prolonged play out of.

Plants vs Zombies
While I’ve enjoyed many Popcap games in the past – Bookworm Adventures and Zuma come to mind – I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed any of them as much as Plants vs Zombies. I only played the game for a couple weeks, but during those weeks, I played it hard. My initial take on the game was a poor one – how could a tower defense game with only six linear lanes have the depth of something like Desktop Tower Defense? You know what? I grew out of that one quickly, and became a Plants vs Zombies addict. Steam offers achievements for the game, and PvZ became the first game on which I’d ever gotten 100% of the achievements. Plants vs Zombies gets an A. It’s all about the spikerocks, gloom shrooms and garlic.

Prototype

I can imagine Prototype being a far better game on a console. Firstly, it might not freeze as often as it did on my Vista machine, although I’m willing to concede that the freezing issue may be related to the import version of the game I’m playing. While the PC controls weren’t terrible, I had some issues with the dashing controls. Firstly, the double-tap on the ‘W’ key for an air dash wouldn’t always register – I’m sure that’s my own fault, but the double-keyboard-tap isn’t the easiest motion on which to get 100% accuracy. Similarly, I found that when dashing, you corner like a passenger jet. So often, I’d sprint past a waypoint or someone I’d intended to grab, then take at least 5 seconds to turn around and run back. And when you’re in a timed event and you’ve only got 60 seconds to do what you’ve got to do, that 5 seconds can make a huge difference.

Although I’m playing a weird Russian import version that I got on Ebay and I can’t actually register achievements, I managed to complete nearly every challenge. I got gold on all but one gliding challenge and managed to complete every infected consume event. The military consume events where you’ve got to consume the commander and then end the alert before getting in can be HARD. And although I found destroying hives and bases with a tank to be super-easy, helicopters are nearly worthless. Granted, they’re the best for fast travel, but they’re difficult to hijack and they get destroyed by one hit from anything.

Also, like Ghostbusters, I can’t imagine playing Prototype on any difficulty other than ‘Easy’. Prototype gets a C+, but it might be a B- on consoles.

Resident Evil 5

I played the Playstation 3 version of Resident Evil 5, and while it was inferior to its predecessors in different ways, it wasn’t a bad game. Resident Evil 5 tried to be Resident Evil 4. But it wasn’t different enough from Resident Evil 4 to really shine, and it didn’t have the charm of Resident Evil 4. There was no mine cart chase, no jetski sequence, and no chance to harpoon lake monsters. There was a nice sequence where you could shoot at enemies from machine guns mounted to the back of a jeep, but that alone didn’t measure up.

Resident Evil 5 only really shines when played co-op. I played with my brother on his XBox over Christmas vacation, and having the game be a shared experience really changed it. For the better. The partner AI in Resident Evil 5 is laughably bad at times. The game gets a B.

Street Fighter 4

After having beaten Seth with every character in the game other than the three big bosses whom I have yet to unlock, I’ve been playing Street Fighter 4 far less. I’ve gotten somewhat competent at online matches, although like so many other online games, the people still playing are the ones who play all the time, and are thus much better at the game than I am. But the game did bring back a good bit of my Street Fighter 2 nostalgia, and despite my hatred of Crimson Viper and Rufus, I really like the game. B+

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
This game totally fails, which is sad. It seemed like it had so much going for it. Great story, a very nice engine with good graphics, and the upgrade and combo system seemed like it was going to work out very nicely. If only it weren’t for all the bottomless pits. There is nothing as maddeningly frustrating as falling into the same pit for the fourth time when you have to wait for 5 minutes in between attempts. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed gets a D for bad platforming.

Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People

I love HomeStarRunner. I really do. So I was super-excited to hear that there was going to be a StrongBad-themed WiiWare game, and I snatched it up as soon as it was available. Sadly, I’d forgotten that I don’t generally like point and click adventure games. And that I’m horribly bad at them. So while HomestarRunner.com gets an A, Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People gets a C-.

All in all, it wasn’t a bad gaming year. Granted, there was nothing that stood out like Half-Life 2, Oblivion, or Shadow of the Colossus, but the year isn’t over yet, and I’ve still got to play Scribblenauts, Muramasa, Brutal Legend, Uncharted 2, and Dragon Age: Origins.

Keepers is a weekly segment in which I discuss games I’ve played that I’ve seen fit to keep after playing. I generally sell a game that I’ve finished, so the only reason I keep one is because I plan to replay the game some day. Classifying a game as a “keeper” is generally a badge of merit.

After having played Far Cry 2, I came to a realization. I like the original Far Cry game better than its sequel. Why? The graphics are obviously better in the second, and the wildfire effects in Far Cry 2 are very cool. It may actually have to do with the open world. I’ve never been much of a fan of open world shooters. I hated S.T.A.L.K.E.R., and I certainly didn’t like Fallout 3 as much as I liked Fallout 2.

The original Far Cry was a great game. I prefer linear gameplay for my shooters, and Far Cry did it very well. The story in Far Cry felt closer to the story in Half-Life or Uncharted than the stories in Far Cry 2 or Grand Theft Auto. To me, linear gameplay gives the designers better opportunities to deliver set pieces and meaningful encounters. As it stands, Far Cry is definitely amongst my top five shooters evar.

I haven’t gotten very far into Far Cry 2, and I plan to give the game more of a chance once my current Final Fantasy XII spree ends, but my initial impressions of the game are not good. The whole malaria thing doesn’t add to the game at all – frankly, it’s annoying. And the open world reminds me of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., which I did not like at all.

Some of the things I’d liked most in Crysis and the original Far Cry seem not to be present here. There’s no detection meter which shows when enemies see you, and you can’t lie prone. I’ll grant you that I’m less than two hours into the game, but initially, I’m disappointed.

Mad World was even more of a disappointment. I’d expected the frantic action of SmashTV, the cheezy old-school plot of Running Man, the humor of No More Heroes, and maybe the beat-em-up goodness of Double Dragon. What I got was repetitive running around, stabbing signposts into the necks of foes who might as well all be carbon copies, all for points. The violence existed only for violence’s sake, and the difficulty quickly goes from far too easy to way too hard, with very little time in any kind of sweet spot. The story is closer to Escape From New York than Running Man, and there’s little of either movie’s charm to be seen. The segments on the bike are terrible, and I quit the game just after beating a big Sumo Wrestler wannabe who kept throwing helicopters at me.

I guess the happy ending to this article is Galactrix. Initially, I was terribly terribly disappointed. The loading times on the DS are frequent and long, and the touch controls are the absolute worst I’ve seen in any DS game. It frequently takes me 5 or 6 tries to select an item from a list menu. I’ll touch “Get Missions” with the stylus, for example, and instead of highlighting and selecting that item, it will cause me to fly a bit away from the planet, which is especially annoying since it then takes me 2-3 seconds to bring up the menu again and try to select an option again.

The game has a definite learning curve,and once I’d gotten past it and begun to unlock more of the game’s different minigames, it got fun. And it began to grow as addictive as Puzzle Quest. Because of my first two complaints, I don’t find it to be as good a game as Puzzle Quest, but I’m enjoying it.

Even if you’re not a fan of Steam like I am, they’ve got a deal this weekend too good to pass up. Four games for $9.99 – that means you’re getting some great games for $2.50 each.

Three of the four games here are ones I’ve talked about before on this site, and they definitely fall within my “keepers” category. Firstly, Far Cry. This is the original PC version, far different from the console versions. Even if you think you might not like it – it’s only $2.50!

Secondly, Beyond Good and Evil, which I’ve raved about far more than I ever should have. I won’t gush more in this post, but it’s worth significantly more than the $2.50 you’d pay for a box of string cheese. I’ve bought four copies over the years, and played it 5 times.

Third, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. While it had its minor annoyances, I really enjoyed the gameplay. I got the game, which was originally $50, for $12.50 at Target and jumped for joy at my bargain-hunting prowess. Later, I got another copy on the cheap from Steam. But I paid more than $2.50.

Lastly, IL-2 Sturmovik: 1946, which is some kind of flight simulator. No idea.

Anyway, if you’ve not played these games, I’d seriously jump on Steam’s weekend deal here.

One of my end impressions of Crysis is that it’s much much shorter than Far Cry was. That’s fine, as I’m not in need of another Oblivion or Fallout 3. My gaming hours are limited. But a lot of people will complain about that. Of course, Crysis apparently has some robust online play, but then again I tend not to play shooters online.

It’s taken me quite a long time to get to the end of Crysis. Granted, I haven’t yet completed the game. I would have completed it, except that the final hour or so of the game freezes and crashes so often that for a while I could only play in 10-minute chunks. Recently, it’s been even worse. I’m fighting what I believe to be the final boss, and I’m quicksaving every 60 seconds or so. It’s gotten to the point where I felt like I was spending more time loading the game than playing it, so I tested that theory. From desktop to actual gameplay: 75 seconds. Then, I played for 65 seconds before it froze and crashed. I may never complete Crysis.

But aside from my technical difficulties with the game, I’ve got other complaints about Crysis. Although I’ll admit that there were a couple parts in Far Cry that drove me nuts, the entire second half of Crysis was terrible. The entire zero-gravity portion of the game was simply not fun, and fighting the aliens was not nearly as fun as fighting humans. How do you try for a head shot on a creature with no discernable head? I nearly quit the game during the portion where you’re flying a VTOL, as I’d continuously crash for no apparent reason.

I should mention here that although there were Far Cry titles for consoles, namely the XBox’s “Far Cry: Instincts” and “Far Cry: Instincts: Evolution”, and later the 360’s “Far Cry: Instincts: Predator”, these were absolutely not the same game as the original Far Cry that was released only for the PC. In the original Far Cry, you played Jack Carver, who had no superpowers. I’ve never played any of these console versions, but as I understand it, you’re kidnapped and injected with a superserum of some kind. Interestingly, in Crysis, you wear a nanosuit which gives you similar powers.

The two parts in Far Cry that I’d hated were firstly the sequence where you were dropped in the middle of the jungle with something like 10 bullets, and surrounded by those mutants that can jump twenty yards and rip your head off instantly. That part took about fifty tries to get past. Secondly, the final battle of the game, which I was never able to beat. I had to type in a cheat code just to see the end of the game, and I only used invulnerability for about 45 seconds to do it. It was just harrd. Similarly, I was not able to see the end of Crysis, because it froze so much that I uninstalled it before completing the game.

So I suppose I’d say that Crytek’s games seem to be mostly good, but sprinkled with hideously annoying segments. This does not bode well for when I play Far Cry 2, but I still intend to play it eventually.