Well, we’ve seen the best games on both major handheld gaming devices, the best multi-platform games, the best download-only games, the best exclusives for the 3 major game consoles, the biggest surprises of the year and the biggest disappointments/failures of the year. Now it’s time for the big one. What 3 games were the best of the year? What 3 games came in and said “THIS is what video games are all about”?

Just to clarify something here: the 3 winners are all games that won in other categories. And we strangely didn’t have a PC games category (I will hopefully rectify that next year), so no Starcraft 2 or other big PC-only titles will be seen here. Just a little note to everyone on this.

Anyhow, let’s finish up our Games of the Year awards. Here are our winners for the best games of 2010!

Actually, before talking about our 3 winners, there’s one very special game I really want to talk about. It was a game that couldn’t really fit in any other category, and therefore can’t realistically make into a winner in the Games of the Year awards, so I decided to at least have it as an honorable mention.

Honorable Mention – Battle Kid: Fortress of Peril

This game is notable for a few things. First… well, it’s awesome. A very well made game, with great music, good graphics and visual design, fun gameplay, and a GREAT challenge (not too unfair, but still very hard). Second… It came out on the NES. In an actual cartridge! It had a great-looking clear green cartridge, as well as a really cool instruction manual (and art by Guru Larry). That’s really cool, and gives us NES collectors/gamers something that we very rarely see beyond occasional homebrew ROMs or people randomly finding prototypes. Third… well, it was all made by one guy. Congrats Sivak. Not only making one of the funnest games of the year, but making it on the NES. Just awesome. We can’t have this as a winner, but I had to mention it. Oh, and there’s a sequel coming since this one did so well, I can’t wait.

Well, enough side-tracking. Without further ado, let’s name our 3 winners! All are great games, and all have very good reason to be on the list.

Donkey Kong Country Returns

What an awesome game this is. Not only a revival of a great franchise that was thought dead, but a really good revival, one that might even be better than some of the previous games in an already great franchise. Sure, the Kremlins aren’t back in action this time (we can hope for a sequel with the Kremlins though if this one does well enough), but the Tikis’ brainwashed animal army made for fun enemies to fight. The gameplay was great, the platforming was rock solid and required a lot of precision, the mine cart levels were EPIC, and the difficulty was very fair (with the addition of Diddy’s jetpack to make jumps easier, and huge amounts of lives). Oh, and it’s great graphically as well, with tons of details in the backgrounds and foregrounds, with the ability to go into the background in certain levels. And the now-cliché silhouette levels looks good as well. And it’s also a solid collect-a-ton, where finding everything isn’t THAT complicated since the game is seperated into levels. And you have a lot of levels and extra content. Truly one of the masterpieces of 2010.

Bayonetta

The action game genre has been fairly stale after DMC4, while being a great game, just didn’t do it for the masses (getting tons of really stupid complaints that applies to the rest of the series as well (reminds me of something *coughffxiiicough*)). Basically everything after was either bad God of War clones, REALLY bad God of War clones, God of War (which isn’t really good) and just bad games trying to be different. Bayonetta came during a time of suckage in the genre, and basically kicked its ass. Now THIS is what an action game should be like: fun to play, tons of crazy enemies and weapons, actually being fairly challenging and having a really fun main character. It even gives Devil May Cry 1-3-4 a run for its money, it’s THAT good. Just superb. I definitely want to see Bayonetta kicking more ass again, she’s a character with a lot of potential.

Vanquish

This was a bit of a harder choice, what with all the great games that came out this year. Go with 3D Dot Game Heroes’ great classic-style Zelda gameplay? Or Super Mario Galaxy 2 with all its huge improvements over the first one? Or a great underdog like ZHP? Or Wintrale’s or Dave’s suggestions of Golden Sun or Yakuza 3? But the right choice felt like it should be Vanquish. Vanquish was chosen for a fairly simple reason: It’s from a genre that’s generally not really fun to play, and takes it to the next level, showing that the genre doesn’t HAVE to be boring to play. Vanquish did just that for the Third-Person Shooter genre. Rather than going for the normal formula of “let’s make the game a really boring experience where you spend most of the time in cover and not give players any challenge” or the “let’s make this into a movie” route, it went with the “let’s make the main character a badass with a suit that enables him to blast through the environments at crazy speeds, give him some of the best use of bullet-time ever in gaming, and make the whole game play a bit more like an Action game than a TPS” route, which makes for a very fun, fast-paced game. It was a hard choice, but the fact that it’s one of the only fun-to-play TPS in the generation is reason enough to make it a winner for 2010.

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