Like so many other XBLA exclusives that eventually come to other platforms, I played Limbo much later than everyone else. I really enjoyed it though. Dark, disturbing, and pleasingly puzzly, Limbo is a perfect bite-sized downloadable game. I enjoyed it so much that I wrote all kinds of hints posts for it. Limbo gets a B.

Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles was largely about nostalgia for me. Resident Evil 2 was probably my favorite game on the original Playstation, exceeding even Symphony of the Night. The fact that Umbrella Chronicles retells that story within an on-rails shooter sounded awesome to me.

The reality is that while it was fun to re-experience the story, on-rails shooters never end up being as fun as I want them to be. And like Darkside Chronicles, it got extremely hard towards the end and I was unable to finish the game and see its ending. Too bad. Darkside Chronicles gets a C.

My wife and I have always enjoyed playing RPGs together. We’ve played Dungeon Siege, Icewind Dale 1 & 2, Baldur’s Gate 2, Neverwinter Nights, Champions of Norrath, and we’re currently trying out Hunted: The Demon’s Forge. So back before we’d tried Dungeon Siege 3, we tried Sacred 2.

As it turned out, Sacred 2 wasn’t that great. The game mechanics were weird and hard to grasp, the leveling and combat weren’t satisfying, and in the end we just quit before we got very far. Sacred 2 gets a D.

Before the big holiday releases of 2011 started hitting, Shadow of the Colossus HD was one of my most looked forward to games. I’d loved playing the original, and I’ve always loved replaying good games. Now, I got to replay this one with trophies! It’s ridiculous to think I’d try to get all the lizards or fruits in the game, and I didn’t have much interest in time attack or hard mode, but I did very much enjoy the playthrough. The HD remake of Shadow of the Colossus gets a B. I plan to get to Ico HD sometime in early 2012.

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.

The whole game is minimalistic. Other than the spirit sending you on your quests to destroy colossi and your own character calling to his horse, no one in the game ever speaks. You never go up levels, and you never find new equipment. The sword and bow with which you begin the game are the same ones with which you’ll finish. Your character’s only stats are his life meter and his grip meter. And while these can be improved by hunting lizards and eating fruit, this is neither spelled out anywhere in the game nor is it necessary to the game’s completion.

The colossus battles are epic, and the music and landscapes only add to the drama. I often found myself wanting to yell out loud when I found my character wildly scrambling and gritting my teeth to hold onto the arm of a hundred foot tall colossus who was flailing wildly to dislodge the human insect who was stabbing at him with a pinlike blade. yes – the game lends itself to flowery descriptions.

For a game with no dialog, Shadow of the Colossus has pathos. Nothing is ever spelled out, but as the game progresses, you find yourself asking whether slaying the majestic colossi is the right course of action. After all, what have they done? Whom have they harmed?

I won’t spoil any more for those who may still be considering returning to 2005 to play the game, but Shadow of the Collosus holds a well-earned place in my top 20 games of all time.

12- Resident Evil 2 (Capcom, Sony Playstation, 1998)
In many ways, Resident Evil 2 doesn’t hold up well. But I enjoyed the game so much that even after twelve years, it remains one of my favorite games of all time. In 1998, Resident Evil was still coming into its own. The first game had a bit of a haunted house vibe, and terrible terrible voice acting. This sequel improved the voice acting, improved the plot, and greatly improved the graphics. Plus, the scope was so much larger – rather than zombies haunting a house, the infection had spread to the entire city. The parallel storylines followed by the game’s two playable characters was a further stroke of genius.

The game’s story primarily involved learning about how the T-virus outbreak had occurred, and learning about the even worse G-virus that the Umbrella Corporation had been developing. The fun was in discovering new enemy types along the way and enjoying the scripted cheap scares, which were plentiful. Sitting in my room at night with the lights turned off, I ate that shit up.

I suppose the decision to place this game as highly as I have isn’t an entirely rational one. It’s more about the joy that the game brought me when I first played it.

11- Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (KCE Tokyo, Sony Playstation, 1997)
The aspect of Symphony of the Night which I’ve lauded most has always been its amazing soundtrack, but that’s far from the best thing about the game. Aside from the soundtrack, and aside from the fact that the graphics were absolutely outstanding in 1997, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night was a fantastic 2d platformer that gave you an open world, RPG elements, and so much more.

Symphony of the Night was the first Castlevania game to give your character levels and an inventory. As the game progressed, you could pick up artifacts that would grant you new powers such as a double jump, flying kick, and the ability to shapeshift into a wolf, bat, or a cloud of mist. You could gain familiars who would fly alongside you, casting spells, healing you, or just attacking everything in sight.

And the boss monsters in Symphony of the Night were memorable. Trevor, Grant, and Syfa from Castlevania III made a comeback, Waterbound Sylla from Greek myth was present, and as always in Castlavania games, Death himself made an appearance. But “Granfaloon” may be my favorite Castlevania enemy of all time: a giant sphere composed of corpses. The corpses fall off and rise up as zombies to attack you. And when enough have fallen off, Granfaloon begins firing freaking laser beams at you!

As the game progressed, you could learn magic spells or buy them from the merchant. These consisted of Street Fighter-like quarter circle motions, double button presses, or something similar. They were often difficult to pull off on a D pad, but they were very useful.

Symphony of the Night gave you two weapon slots, and two buttons with which to use them. You could dual wield weapons, such as a whip and a mace, or use a two-handed weapon, or use a sword and shield. One of my favorite magic items in the game was the shield rod, which when equipped alongside a shield allowed for a special attack: when you pressed both your weapon and shield button simultaneously, you’d trigger a magical effect based on what shield you had equipped – each shield in the game had its own unique effect. And there were dozens of shields in the game. In fact, the number of different magic items in the game was so huge that it would be nearly impossible to find them all. And many had totally undocumented powers. Many were the times I’d pull off some crazy effect and have no idea how I’d managed to do it.

As I progressed through the game and watched the completion percentage counter in the inventory screen approach 100%, I grew a bit sad. i didn’t want the game to be over. How amazing was it then when I reached what appeared to be the final room in the castle and found a second castle suspended upside-down atop the first? And the meter hit 101%…

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is available as a download on the Playstation Network. If you’ve never played, I highly recommend it.

Although the ending is a bit climactic, Heir does a good job of capturing Shadow of the Colossus’s gameplay in a 2D form. The music sounds sufficiently epic, and the colossus is… well, colossal.

Play Heir

One aspect of games that I’ve always appreciated is innovation. When a game comes out that does something totally new or that bucks the formulas to which it might be expected to adhere, it’s hard not to stand up and take notice.

The most recent example of a totally new type of game I can think of is Scribblenauts. And while the game may not have succeeded on all fronts, being quite annoying at times, it did deliver on its promise to create nearly any object that you can imagine. You’re limited only by the words you can think of, and by how the game may misinterpret multi-word objects.

The game may be a full generation old by this point, but Shadow of the Colossus still stands out to me as an innovative game. It set you against sixteen opponents, and removed any possible distractions. No leveling up, no gear to acquire, and only two attributes to improve. Only sixteen unique opponents in the entire game. I imagine that this allowed the developers to focus on making the game a cinematic experience and making the colossi sufficiently epic, which they most certainly were.

Since Maniac Mansion and Myst, adventure games have innovated very little. Their text adventure origins led to graphic adventures, and then to point-and-click adventures. The advances since then have been small and incremental. While the genre certainly does have gems like Grim Fandango, The Longest Journey, and Syberia, they haven’t really broken out of the old formula at all. Games like Still Life have some limited real-time components, but not until 2005’s Fahrenheit (remarketed in North America as Indigo Prophecy) had I ever seen real innovation in an adventure game. Many people complain about the pseudo-quicktime events in the four-directional keys that take place during action scenes, comparing it even to old games like Dragon’s Lair. But beyond that, the fact that you had only seconds to reply in a conversation, the fact that they included stealth segments, and the inclusion of a sanity meter made the game new and different. There were even keyboard and mouse related minigames for completing everyday tasks that ranged from playing with a yo-yo to giving CPR. Not your standard adventure game fare. I’m looking forward to 2010’s Heavy Rain for many of the same reasons.

Perhaps Indigo Prophecy was a game mash-up of sorts. Mixing game genres is certainly becoming more popular, whether it’s Word Worm Adventure’s combination of word puzzle and RPG or Borderlands’s mashup of RPG and shooter. I think the first I’d noticed game genre mashing up was when I played Puzzle Quest for the Nintendo DS. That was certainly an innovative game. Later came Braid, with its mixing of platforming and puzzle genres. The time rewind mechanic as an alternative to losing a life may have been used previously in Prince of Persia, but in a 2D sidescroller, it seemed to be a totally different animal.

What are your favorite game mash-ups? What games do you think have been most innovative?

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.

It’s been three and a half years since I first played Shadow of the Colossus, and despite my complaints about the camera angle and the horse, it stands out for being one of the most simple and one of the most beautifully cinematic games I’ve ever played. In honor of this week’s announcement that a Shadow of the Colossus movie is in development, I’ve chosen the game for this week’s feature.

For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, Shadow of the Colossus came late in the Playstation 2’s life cycle, and the basic plotline was that of a boy, who shows up at the outset of the story bearing a young girl’s body. He visits a shrine wherein dwells a spirit/diety/demon who has the power to restore her to life. In return, it asks that he destroy the sixteen statues lining the main hall of the shrine. In order to destroy each, he must defeat a colossus. And so armed with only a sword, bow, and his horse Argo, he sets out to locate and destroy the colossi.

The battles against the colossi are epic boss battles, and each has at least as much puzzle in it as it does combat. The sense of scale is amazing, and you truly feel like a mouse battling an elephant.

I’m glad I’ve kept this game. Although I did go back to replay it once, I only got as far as the sixth colossus before getting stuck. When you play the game on hard, it is truly more difficult than the normal difficulty level.