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.

As a lover of comic books, the original Marvel Ultimate Alliance was excellent fan service. Not only did it give you a diverse roster of heroes to play with, along with great abilities and unlockable costumes, it also gave you some RPG like attributes where you could level up your character and abilities however you saw fit. It was great fun and I still go back and play the simulator missions to unlock more costumes for my characters. So, you can imagine my excitement when MUA2 was released for the PS3. However, now that I’m playing the game I’m finding Activision took the lazy route and really watered down what could have been a great game.

First off, my aforementioned love of unlocking costumes took a serious nerf. In the original game you could unlock three additional costumes for each character, with each costume giving new attributes or stat boosts.  Not so in MUA2. Now each character only gets one unlockable costume and it’s merely a skin swap. No new stats or boost, just something to change on your team’s display. Weaksauce.

Second, the cast of characters is a bit disappointing. I know any Marvel game will be required to feature the most popular characters like Spider-Man, Wolverine, Hulk and Captain America, but I expected more diversity between this set of characters and those featured in the first game. The only notable inclusions are Songbird, Green Goblin and Iron Fist. The rest of the characters are nearly identical to the first game’s cast. I have a feeling that we’ll be seeing more additions via DLC since there are so many unplayable characters in the game with finished models and full power sets, but it still irks me that I’m playing with nearly the exact same characters as I did in the first game. I’d give up half of the current roster to play as Cloak & Dagger or Firestar.

My final gripe has to do with the game’s interface. At first glance it’s very slick and stylized. You can tell the designers intended you to play on Captain America’s side, as every screen has his shield logo and stars plastered everywhere. Even the power-ups in the game are shaped like little Cap shields. But once you start actually using the interface it’s apparent just how little work went into them. First off, when you want to load a game, you can choose Continue or Load.  Ok, aren’t they both the same?  Apparently Continue starts you off at the last auto-save point, and Load only selects your manually saved games. So if you saved a game after an autosave and choose Continue by accident, you’ll lose progress. Also, after choosing either option it goes back to the same selection screen and just sits there, making it look like it’s not loading your game.  After fifteen seconds or so it finally switches to a loading screen. It’s pretty disconcerting to watch.

The screens where you manage your character’s powers and abilities are pretty bare bones as well.  This seemed to be much more intuitive in the first game and here it’s just a list of stuff. There’s really no reason to turn off the auto-allocate feature since I’d probably have no idea where to start with this screen anyway. So I’ll just let the game think for me, taking out the main RPG element that made the first game much more than just a beat-em-up.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m enjoying this MUA2 as a straight action game, and the Civil War storyline is very well done. Graphically it’s a bump up from the last game but nothing drastic (the CG cut scenes are actually very poorly done for being on “next gen” hardware). The new Fusion powers are fun when you can decimate an entire screen of enemies or finish off a boss. Plus the possibility that I’ll get the myriad of unplayable characters as DLC is enticing. I just wish they’d have put more effort into making this an improvement over the previous game rather than cranking out a graphical upgrade.