Whereas many of my installments in this series contain nothing but C- games, this chunk contains some good ones. First off, Pixeljunk Monsters Deluxe. Along with Beyond Good & Evil, Pixeljunk Monsters is one of those games that anyone who reads this site often must get sick of me talking about. I love the game. This year, I bought a PSP, and Pixeljunk Monsters Deluxe is nearly the only thing I’ve played on it. And you know what? It’s totally worth it. The game includes new towers, new monsters, and a whole new island. It’s essentially a third expansion pack that’s for the PSP only. As such, it’s one of my favorite games of 2011. It gets an A.

Next off, the Android version of Plants vs Zombies. I played the PC version of this game and got 100% of the Steam achievements, and then later went back to it to finish off new Steam Achievements that they’d added. And now I’ve got the mobile version on my phone. I hit some issues at first where the game would pause at odd intervals, but that was fixed by uninstalling all updates to Google Maps on my phone. Who needs GPS when there are zombies to fend off? There was a period of a month or so where I did without the Maps updates in order to play Plants vs Zomibes. The game is still great. B+.

Ahh, Portal 2. Definately one of my favorite games of the year. It’s become nearly forgotten amidst such fare as Skyrim and Arkham City, but I really do plan to go back and finish off that second run through the game some day. After all, I’m like 85% done and I still have achievements I want to get. The Smash TV and Overclocker achievements have me particularly intrigued, although I’ll probably never get most of the co-op achievements. I’ll just be happy if I can go back and run through the newest co-op levels.

The Portal and Half-Life series are Valve’s best and most valuable properties, and as such, I’ll buy (and probably love) every one they put out. Along with half of The Internet, I’ve been eagerly awaiting Half-Life 2, episode 3, but it’s looking more and more like we’ll never see that one. Half-Life 3 seems more likely. In any event, Portal 2 was a triumph. Again. A.

So often, I’ll have fifteen minutes at the end of an evening, and I don’t want to start playing Bioshock 2 or Metroid Prime. It might take half of the time I’ve got just to start playing one of those. So what casual games am I currently digging?

Chime Super Deluxe (Playstation 3)

After the Playstation Network came back up following the crash, I grabbed a Playstation points card so that I wouldn’t have to store my credit card info on Sony’s servers. While my main intent was to use it for Beyond Good and Evil HD, I tried the demo for Chime Super Deluxe and found that I really enjoyed the game. And it’s got multiplayer, which I know that my wife and I will enjoy, even if she does kick my ass at the game.

Chime Super Deluxe is a musical block placement game. The blocks don’t fall like Tetris – instead you’re given an irregularly-shaped game board and charged with filling as close to 100% of the board as possible within the alotted time. The music plays, and a vertical line (“the beat line”) moves slowly from left to right. As it passes over the blocks you’ve placed, completed square groupings (“quads”) of blocks are registered in the grid in time with pleasant musical cues, and each quad adds to your completion percentage. Create enough quads between passes of the beat line and you get a bonus.

It’s a very zen gameplay experience, and the music is enjoyable. I hear that there’s even a PC version of the game somewhere out there that includes Jonathan Coulton’s Still Alive as one of its songs.

Plants vs Zombies (Android)

I’ve played Plants vs Zombies a lot. I played it when it came out on Steam and got 100% achievements over the course of two playthroughs. Then they added additional achievements and I played through the game again to get all of them. Recently, they released an Android version of the game, and Amazon’s Android app store gave the game away free for one day, so I snagged it. I’m currently midway into my second playthrough, and I haven’t yet begun to put much of a dent in the game’s achievements.

In the unlikely event that you’re totally unfamiliar with Plant versus Zombies, it’s a tower defense game in which the zombies shuffle from right to left, heading towards your house in five lanes. You plant sunflowers to produce sun, the resource you spend to create more plants. Peashooters and cabbage-pults attack oncoming zombies, wall-nuts block them, and squash do as their name would imply. There are dozens more plants, and many types of zombies. Nighttime fogs obscure the field, the backyard’s pool requires that you place plants on lillypads to stop scuba zombies, and defending on the slanted roof prevents direct-fire attacks. The game’s got more complexity than you might think.

I had some issues with PvZ for a while, but I was able to fix them by backing out updates for Google Maps on my phone. It’s a ridiculous and insane solution since using my phone as a GPS is far more useful than playing Plants vs Zombies, but I’ve written to Popcap about the situaton. What can I say? I like the game.

Pixeljunk Monsters Deluxe (PSP)

I have a confession to make. I have an unnatural zeal for Pixeljunk Monsters. After having a slightly above-average reaction to the demo in 2007, I purchased PS3 game, and then the expansion. I played with Linda. I played alone. four years later, I was still playing. I completed every level of the game with Linda. I got 100% of the game’s trophies separately in single-player. Then I found the PSP game, which included an additional dozen or so levels and a game that included extra enemy types and new towers. I’m playing Pixeljunk Monsters on the PSP a lot, and I love the game. My obsession has grown, and it’s nearly the only thing I ever do with my PSP. I do own more games for the device, I just don’t play them.

Hoard (PS3)

Hoard is a fun game, and I still play it, even if I don’t play it as frequently as I once did. I’ve gotten gold medals on all of the Princess Rush levels and on all but two of the Treasure levels. The Hoard levels are all insanely dificult – staying alive for five minutes is a challenge I haven’t yet completed. But with levels that top out at ten minutes, it’s fun to play when I’ve got a few minutes to kill.

WordFeud (Android)

I’d been playing Words with Friends on my phone for a while, but I switched to WordFeud. I like the bonus tile layout better, and having an avatar image is nice. I only wish that they’d disallow you from trying words an infinite number of times until you find one that works. Games with more than two players would be nice as well.

What casual games do you play?

25- Braid (Jonathan Blow, PC, 2009)
Braid took the gaming world by storm primarily because of its creativity. The game originally showed up on XBox Live Arcade in 2008, but I didn’t play it until later, when it became available on Steam. Although it’s an excellent 2D sidescroller in its own right, Braid’s greatest achievement are its fiendishly complex puzzles. Although this kind of thing generally drives me insane with frustration, I actually had fun sitting there for 20-30 minutes staring at the same level, trying to figure out exactly what I was missing. If you’re interested, I’ve written up some hints for the Braid game which attempt to nudge you in the direction of the answer without outright giving it away.

24- Plants vs Zombies (Popcap Games, PC, 2009)
My first impression of Plants vs Zombies wasn’t a good one. Made by a company that got famous creating casual browser games, this tower defense title looked shallow and boring. But one day when I was bored, I downloaded the demo and gave it a shot. I was hooked. The lanes, which had originally looked horribly limiting, create their own type of strategy. Unlike many other tower defense games, the creeps can attack and destroy your towers. Certain towers can attack creeps in lanes other than their own. There are slowing attacks and area attacks. And the different environments such as pool and rooftop introduce entirely new gameplay every few levels. Fighting off bungee zombies and zombie bobsled teams has never been so much fun.

23- No More Heroes (Suda51, Wii, 2008)
No More Heroes was a flawed game in so many ways. The open world was a disaster, and the last few fights were far too difficult. But I loved it so much. It was so over-the-top ridiculous, and it took pride in it. How many games force you to save your progress by sitting on a toilet? How many let you kill enemies and have blood and coins fly out of their bodies? Or learn new professional wrestling moves from a drunk Russian guy in a bar who instructs you in “the technique of crazy awesomeness” by beating the living crap out of you? No More Heroes succeeded in being awesome not dispite its absurdity, but because of it. If you’re a fan of RealUltimatePower, you should have an appreciation for the style of humor that makes No More Heroes shine.

22- God of War (David Jaffe, PS2, 2005)
God of war took the 3D beat-em-up genre and brought it to new levels. The refinement that exists in the God of War games is hard to find elsewhere even today. Never have I seen a game with better camera angles, and rarely have I seen such epic scope in a game. God of War uses puzzles, platforming, and hordes of enemies to create wonderful gameplay. It also makes the best use of quicktime events that I’ve seen in a game. The environments where the battles take place are often as much a part of the challenge as the enemies – when you’re battling minotaurs on a conveyor belt, falling to your death is as much a danger as being gored.

21- Fallout (Black Isle Studios, PC, 1997/1999)
I’m including Fallout and Fallout 2 here, as they ran on the same engine and could have been two halves of the same game. Seldom has such a kickass combination of story, gameplay, and humor made an appearance in a game. Fallout was brilliant because it salvaged a good bit of the adult dark humor present in Wasteland and refined it into an isometric post-apocolyptic RPG which in its day was absolutely brilliant. It’s even possible to play through the entire game with a character whose intelligence is so low that he can only speak in grunts. Yeah – it closes off a lot of options, but it’s pretty damn funny.

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.

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.

The most recent example is Trine. The game immediately interested me, since the puzzle/platforming multiplayer co-op sounded like exactly the type of game my wife and I would enjoy playing together. Downloading the Steam demo sealed the deal. While I may have bought the game without having tried the demo, the demo removed all doubt. I now plan to play the game when (and if) it’s ever released on PSN.

Trine PC Demo

A game that I likely would never have bought without trying the demo is Pixeljunk Monsters. Like many other PSN demos, I downloaded it on a whim and it probably sat on my Playstation’s hard drive for a week before I even installed it. When I started playing it, my initial take was that the music was a little annoying and the graphics were too cartoony. But as I do with most demos, I decided to play through to the end before making any kind of decision. The game got addictive. The music was actually catchy. And I wanted more levels. I’ve now grown to love Pixeljunk Monsters, and it’s without doubt the game I’ve put the most time into on my Playstation 3.

Plants versus Zombies was a similar story. While it sounded cute, I expected it to be very much like the Peggle and Bookworm Adventures demos I’d tried: fun, but not worth buying.

After completing the demo levels, I had to play the full game. And it turned out to be the only game I’ve ever played on which I’ve completed every single achievement.

Plants vs Zombies Demo

The last demo that’s floated its way into my mind – I nearly forgot about this one – is the demo for Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. It was a lot of fun. I got caught up in the stealth upgrades and in kicking orcs and goblins off of cliffs. The game was rated horribly, so I didn’t buy it immediately, but when I saw it in a Target for $12.50, I snatched it up with no hesitation. And it’s a keeper. You can get it on Steam now for even less than that.

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic Demo

Now I’ll grant you – not all demos are representative of the actual game. The Playstation 3 demo for Resident Evil 5 was terrible, but the game was actually pretty good. The Playstation 3 demo for Star Wars: The Force Unleashed was excellent, but the game itself was horrible and frustrating.

In closing, I can’t write about demos without mentioning the venerable but hilarious demo for Typing of the Dead, which is still available here, especially after having read such a well-written article about the game last week.

It looks like PopCap has just released their hit game Plants vs Zombies as a flash game. If you haven’t yet played the game, I urge you to give it a shot now that it’s free. I love this game.

Play Plants vs Zombies

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.

After having completed most of the content in Plants vs Zombies, I’m still playing the game. As a tribute, I thought I’d take this opportunity to detail my five most favoritest plants and my five most hated zombies.

Firstly, the pumpkin. It’s far more expensive than the wall-nut, and has primarily the same effect. However, the pumpkin is placed directly on top of one of your plants, and it protects that plant while blocking zombies’ path. It also lets you fit more stuff into less space.

Next, the sun shroom. I don’t even use regular sunflowers at night. It’s true that sun shrooms only produce tiny units of sun for the first few minutes, but it’s not too long before they produce just as well as a sunflower, and they cost a quarter of what a sunflower does.

The hypno shroom is one groovy plant. Usually when a zombie eats your plant, you just lose the plant. But the hypno shroom is there to be eaten. The mushroom sends the zombie on such a crazy trip that it turns and tries to eat the other zombies’ brains. Best used on bucket-head zombies and football zombies.

When you’re looking for sheer damage, the Gatling pea is hard to beat. Sure, it’s expensive, but it fires four peas at a time. I use this one quite a lot.

And then there’s my beloved squash. There weren’t many levels in the game in which I didn’t use the squash. It’s a one-use plant, but as inexpensive as it is, and for what it does, it’s certainly worth it. And while a chomper eats a zombie whole and can be re-used, it only eats one at a time, and costs about triple what a squash does. I loves me some squash.

As powerful as some of this plants are, there are some badass zombies out there.

The snorkel zombie swims in your pool underwater where you can’t touch him. I hate this guy. Fortunately, he’s got to surface to eat plants, and this really is his only weakness. Planting lily pads in his way forces him to surface to munch on a near-worthless plant.

The Balloon zombie is even worse, as he’ll just fly right over all your plants. I hate this guy. Cacti can shoot him down, but they have to be planted in the correct lane. Thankfully, balloon zombies they only appear in your backyard at nighttime.

Next, the dreaded zomboni. The zomboni drives along, plowing down your plants, leaving in its wake an ice trail unfit for planting anything. Stupid zomboni. To add insult to injury, the zomboni is often followed by the Jamaican zombie bobsled team.

I think that Pogo zombies have eaten my brains more times than any other zombie. How I loathe them. They hop along very quickly, and just jump over all your plants. Tall nuts can stop them, and those magnet plants can steal their pogo sticks, but how many times you you actually use either of those plants?

Finally, Gargantaur. Or as I call him, the Master Blaster zombie. Right out of Thunderdome. It’s bad enough that he stops along, nearly invulnerable, and smashes your plants flat with one hit. But even worse, he throws the little imp on his back over three rows of plants and it proceeds to eat your sunflowers or whatever you’ve got planted back there. Stupid jerk.

Anyone else got some favorite plants or most-hated zombies that I missed?

How interesting is it that “Tower Defense” has become a game genre? Currently, I’m playing three separate games in that genre. That’s a lotta tower defensing.

Firstly, Popcap’s Plants versus Zombies. When I initially heard about the game, I wrote it off. I was never a huge fan of Peggle or Diner Dash, and despite the fact that I really liked Word Worm Adventures and Zuma, hearing that Popcap had a new game out generally hasn’t been as exciting to me as hearing that Blizzard or Bioware has a new game out. But once I tried the demo, I’d finished playing it and then bought and downloaded the game before that evening was over. Plants vs Zombies is a crazy addictive game. The things that really make the game fun are the differing stages (daytime, night, the pool in the backyard, foggy nights, zombies on the rooftop) the differing zombies (pole vaulter zombies, tunneller zombies, Master Blaster zombies out of Thunderdome) and the huge number of plants available and their abilities. Just when you get used to what’s going on, the game has something new for you. Lots of fun.

I finished “Adventure Mode” on Plants vs Zombies last night, but there’s still endurance mode and lots of minigames to play. I may actually try to get all the Steam achievements on this one. What’s moustache mode?

Secondly, Defense Grid: The Awakening. The game seemed to have gotten good reviews, and was inexpensive enough that I’ve given it a try. Steam achievements are a plus too. But the game has totally failed to suck me in like Plants vs Zombies has. Maybe when I play it more, it will grow on me, but my initial impression isn’t a good one.

Finally, Desktop Tower Defense for the Nintendo DS. When I first played the free online version of this game, it totally sucked me in, and I couldn’t help but think what an excellent game this would be for the Nintendo DS. I haven’t yet played the DS version enough to give it anything approaching a review, but it turns out that they’ve also added achievements and the ability to create your own towers and creeps. It can be difficult sometimes to tell which towers are which on such a low-resolution screen, but overall it’s the same as the online flash version, and I’m really enjoying it. It does seem a bit easier, so perhaps I’ll try playing on hard mode, which I was never quite able to beat in the online version.