Well, I’m done with this year’s Games of the Year posts. Here’s a quick lowdown post with links to each post!

I haven’t made “Biggest Surprises” and “Biggest Disappointments” posts yet, not sure if I will… So here’s what we have right now! Again, no overall GotY post, but I don’t think it’s really needed, I think all the posts as a whole display a large variety of awesome games we got this year. Sadly we had to skip over a bunch of great games, otherwise we would have had 5-15 winners per category (other than Wii and 360), and I just decided to highlight my personal favorites. I’m sure other people/everyone else have different winners, and that’s obviously fine too.

So here it is:

2011 DS winners
2011 3DS winners
2011 Wii winners
2011 Xbox 360 winners
2011 PS3 winners
2011 Downloadable winners
2011 Multiplatform winners

jobocan 3DS, Console, ds, Game of the Year, Games of the Year, Handheld, independant, PC, ps3, PSN, wii, XBLA, xbox 360

The world of downloadable games… it brings some of the most interesting gaming experiences in modern days, due to generally being made by small teams with low budget, with said smaller teams being more willing to experiment with interesting gameplay ideas, or throwbacks to older games/genres. They’re also a very good bet for any gamer to get since they’re low-cost.

To highlight the high variety of great downloadable games and genres that it represents, I’ll go with 5 winners (seriously, I had, like, twice the number of candidates than Multiplatform… so the extra winner is warranted )
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jobocan Console, Games, Games of the Year, independant, PC, ps3, PSN, XBLA, xbox 360

Earlier this year, I got rid of my 360 because no good games were coming out for it, very few older exclusives on it were any good, and nothing down the pipeline was any good. Turns out that was a minor mistake, and I rebought a 360 a few days back (on boxing day) to get the few good games that came out (see: 2 of the winners) and a variety of XBLA games I missed.

Not a whole lot of good 360 exclusives came out this year, so I tried desperately to find 3 winners, and I’m kinda winging it at this point (most of the “obvious” winners (see: Gears, Halo) are games I don’t want anywhere near this list). Anyways, here’s my 2 winners and a third sort of random choice!
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jobocan Console, Games, Games of the Year, XBLA, xbox 360

November, as always is a big month filled with big releases, amongst the biggest releases of the year. Basically all the standard yearly GOTY fodder, though it’s understandable since a lot of it is quality games.

So here we have: over 9000 Wii releases, 13 multiplatform releases, 4 3DS releases, 2 PS3 releases and 2 Xbox 360 releases… OH and 1 PC release (almost forgot that, silly me). Don’t forget this only includes games that will probably be good, or popular games. No shovelware here (other than Call of Duty), and no/very few downloadable games (since release dates rarely pop up early for these).

Read on and tell us what you’re getting!
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jobocan 3DS, Console, Games, games of the month, Handheld, PC, ps3, PSN, wii, XBLA, xbox 360

Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve reviewed anything. Not sure why, since there’s a few games I wanted to talk about… maybe someday… but whatever, here’s one that no one is talking about now, and that no one (except maybe CGR) will ever talk about for various reasons:

1. It’s a movie tie-in for a children’s (and for children at heart) film.
2. It’s a 10$ downloadable game that’s a movie-tie in, thus it’s low budget and most people will think it sucks due to that.
3. It’s a boxing game.

Real Steel is based on a movie that I haven’t seen and probably won’t see until/if I rent the DVD/Blu-Ray. When I saw this on the PSN store, I almost ignored it but saw that there was a demo so I gave it a chance anyways. The moment I saw the “Yuke’s” logo in the start-up, I was expecting a lame game, since they’re the guys who make the crappy UFC Undisputed games. And then, after playing, I bought the game…

So read on and see what the game is like!
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jobocan Console, Games, ps3, PSN, Review, XBLA, xbox 360

Okay, I’ll make this a fast review.

Just like Pac-Man before it, Galaga recently got an upgraded version (called Galaga Legions), one that added new and fun elements to the Galaga concept and brought it to the modern age in a fun but still classic package that anyone can love. And now comes the upgrade to the upgrade. Pac-Man Championship Edition was a great Pac-Man game with a nice twist on the old gameplay, but the DX edition did so much more and was so much more fun, so I couldn’t wait for the DX edition of Galaga Legions, since the normal Galaga Legions, while sort of fun, was missing a certain something.

So read on and see if DX gives Legions what it needed!
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jobocan Console, Games, ps3, PSN, XBLA, xbox 360

I’m not really well-versed ot the Warhammer 40000 universe. All I know is that it’s basically a standard fantasy world, but with spaceships! But I checked out Kill Team anyways (thanks Pat!).

So read on and see if someone who knows nothing of WH40K enjoyed a very quick look at said universe!
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jobocan Console, Games, ps3, PSN, XBLA, xbox 360

Well, another stealth release by Atari… sort of. I think it was announced for the 360 a few days before coming out, though I saw nothing about the Steam release before it came out. Star Raiders was a weird game back in the day, but very revolutionary, due to it being one of the first proper space battle simulators, and it had some strategy segments and such, with a good amount of control options. It came out on various 8-bit Atari computers, but more popularly (or at least more commonly known in recent times) on the Atari 2600. The Atari 2600 version is noteworthy due to the touchpad controller it required.

So I decided to check it out, since the last Atari reboot, Yar’s Revenge, was great. My expectations weren’t as good as Yar’s Revenge, partly since I never actually played Star Raiders originally, and partly because the gameplay I saw in trailers didn’t seem as interesting.

So read on and see if it’s any good! Not like there’s gonna be many reviews for this elsewhere (the only review I found as of the writing of this review is an unfair review by GamePro). There’s actually not too much to talk about here, so it’s gonna be fast.
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jobocan Console, Games, PC, ps3, PSN, XBLA, xbox 360

Talk about a stealth release. It came completely out of nowhere on the XBLA, with no announcement or anything by Atari for a release date, and then it came out on Steam out of nowhere. WTF?

Anyways, this is a sequel to the best selling Atari-made game on the Atari 2600, Yars’ Revenge (notice the different placement of the apostrophe in the title). Or at least some sort of revival. Yars’ Revenge is probably my favorite Atari 2600 game, one that I replay frequently, so that alone made this a sure-buy for me. The shift in gameplay styles wasn’t much of a problem to me, since I doubt keeping the original gameplay would have been a great idea here.

Read on and see if it lives up to its predecessor!
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jobocan Console, Games, PC, Review, XBLA, xbox 360

Well January was a bit short on interesting releases. We have a few reviews left to write from what came out in the month, but until that happens let’s take a look at what games are coming out in February 2011, AKA a much more interesting month than January.

There’s a good amount of releases in February: 5 multiplatform games, 4 PS3 exclusives (one of which is a japanese release), 1 Xbox 360 exclusive, 1 Wii exclusive, 2 DS games and 2 PSP games. Keep in mind those are the interesting releases, there’s obviously a bunch of shovelware.

Read on!
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jobocan Console, ds, Games, games of the month, Handheld, PC, ps3, PSN, wii, XBLA, xbox 360