[Timgt5]

The Best Games of 2011

It looks like we now have another year under our collective belts and we can reflect back on some of the games for sale in 2011.

Once again I have my list of the best for 2011, which frankly was a great year for gamers.

Best Driving Game:

Hands down, Forza Motorsport 4 for Xbox 360-This game continues to be an outstanding rival to Sony’s vaunted GT series. A combination of great depth, solid physics, excellent graphics and deep customization rounds out this impressive title.

Runner up: Need for Speed, The Run, for PS3, Xbox, PC. NFS The Run follows a cross country set of challenges, with plenty of over the top arcade style physics.

For you “Carters” out there Mario Cart 7 for Wii and DS continues all the zany fun of its predecessors.

Best Platformer:

The selection was a bit thin this year for this category, my pick Little Big Planet 2 for PS3. The combination of quirky, but lovely graphics, endless user created avatars and levels and old school side scrolling style make this one a standout.

Best Action/Adventure:

This category was very strong this year with a lot of great titles.

My pick: Uncharted 3, Drakes Deception for PS3. UC3 comes in it at 10 hours of thrills, spills, explosions, massive battles and daring acrobatics. It’s all thriller and no filler.

The level of production and polish in this title serves as mind blowing showcase for the incredible talents of Naughty Dog.

A few great Runner Ups:

Assassin’s Creed Revelations: Assassin’s Creed Revelations (PS3, 360, PC) sees the end of the road for Ezio Auditore da Firenze, frankly one of the truly great game characters of this generation. Revelations sports a beautifully rendered Constantinople, loads of intrigue and great platforming and some nice combat enhancements.

Legend of Zelda, Skyward Sword: for the Nintendo Wii is a prequel to the other “Zelda” titles. With its perfected motion controls, colorful graphics and nicely written story line, this is by far the best game on Wii for 2011.

Infamous 2 (PS3): A sequel to the comic book style Infamous, continues Cole McGrath’s story as he heads down to New Maris (think New Orleans in a parallel world) and battles monsters and racists agitators. Some publisher should really pick this thing up and make it into a comic book series.

LA Noire (PS3, Xbox 360): This crime thriller, set in the late 1940s puts the player behind the badge with murders to solve. The graphics are fantastic, with particular attention to facial capture. The game play is inventive and the writing is first rate. Unfortunately the team that put this one together has been disbanded, so there will not likely be a sequel.

Best Shooter (FPS):

With all of the “hyped to the heavens” slugfest between Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3, a lot of great shooters were largely forgotten, Killzone 3 and Bulletstorm being a great examples.

My pick for 2011 goes down a different path; Rage (PS3, Xbox 360 and PC) is actually my choice for best FPS. Rage is shooter that takes place 200 years after asteroids devastate civilization. The open world “Road Warrior” style vibe of this game is spot on. The engine is well done, the graphics are terrific, the AI is smart enough to get into Harvard, and there is host of creative weaponry and gadgets to use.

Runners Up: COD MW3 and BF3 are still great games especially for going online and blowing up your friends. Killzone 3 as mentioned is also a very strong PS3 exclusive as is a redone Halo Anniversary, for Xbox 360 (basically Halo with upgraded graphics and remapped controls) Bulletstorm, for Xbox 360 and PS3 is also a lot of over the top gratuitous fun.

Best Sports Game:

NBA 2K12 continues to improve on an already great formula. Not just content to produce the best Basketball game available, the developer has continued to refine the animations, and game play mechanics.

With the NBA lockout this year, hooking a copy of this up with the big TV is about as close as you can come to having courtside seats.

Best RPG:

Elder Scrolls Skyrim, Xbox 360, PS3, gets the pick for this category. Bethesda knows what RPGers like and delivers it by the truckload here. A massive fantasy world with almost endless game play possibilities awaits anyone who buys this title.

Biggest Disappointment:

Duke Nukem Forever, (Xbox 360 and PS3), spent 13 years in development, that’s right; it went through three entire generations of Sony and Nintendo systems and two generations of Xbox systems. The game came out nearly crushed by the weight of its sheer hype. I love the “Dukester” and all of his politically incorrect swag, but the end product is a dated, ugly, poorly designed mess.

Someone please tell me again how Naughty Dog can develop a product as awesome as Uncharted 3 in less than two years and these guys cannot even master some of the basics after thirteen?

For you Wii owners out there, just thank your lucky stars you were spared this embarrassing title.

Game of the Year:

As I said in the opening, a lot of great games came out in 2011 and it was hard to pick the very best, but I am going with Batman, Arkham City, Xbox 360 and PS3. Rocksteady did yeoman’s work on Arkham Asylum, bringing real quality, which was sorely lacking, to the comic book genre.

Arkham City greatly expands the excellent game play of its predecessor.

The game sports a solid plot, fantastic voice work (especially Mark Hamill, who as the joker, is fantastic, and the ever versatile Nolan North, as the Penguin, who had a very big year being featured in just about every AAA title out in 2011), super smooth combat mechanics, excellent animation, beautifully rendered environments, and deep game play mechanics (Bonus points for “Cat woman”, being playable- meeeoowww).

Batman Arkham City is just flat out brilliant. I highly recommend this title to anyone who likes a great action game, especially if they are fans of the “caped crusader”.

So there you have it folks, 2011, a year with a lot of great games.

2012 looks to be shaping up very well, with releases like The Last Guardian, a rebooted Tomb Raider, The Last of Us, and Nintendo’s shiny new Wii-U all headed our way.