2011 is over, then. It was an interesting year for gaming, with a relatively slow start and only a handful of big game sequels appearing early on with the likes of Little Big Planet 2, a new Total War game and Dragon Age 2. This was followed up by a great summer featuring The Witcher 2, LA Noire, a new Valve game and the unbelievable release of the mammothly disappointing Duke Nukem Forever. Then Winter came, good grief. In what proved to be one of the best gaming winters of all time, we could hardly keep up with the amount of games that came out week after week for the final few months of the year. Uncharted 3, Saints Row The Third and Modern Warfare 3 all hit us within a couple of weeks, we had a new Assassin’s Creed game, old-school arcade fun from Renegade Ops, a return to form from Sega in Sonic Generations and charming puzzler Trine 2 just managed to squeeze in before the year was out.
But none of these games were good enough to make our list. No, the top 10 games of 2011 are better than all of these. Care to find out what they are? Check back here every day as we count them down…
Dome Keeper is an excellent little spin on the tower defense game, in which you play the role of a jetpacking miner defending his base from swarms of aliens, whilst searching for a hidden relic buried somewhere beneath him. And now, with this huge free update, you can play it with friends.
I want to talk about Cloudpunk, a game where you get to be a flying-car delivery driver in a futuristic cyberpunk city. Its world is an incredible achievement of environmental design, and while the gameplay itself may be basic, the city of Nivalis is a thing of beauty to behold. Nivalis is built out of hundreds of hand-modelled cuboid buildings; there’s nothing procedural about it. Apparently it took 3 years for the devs to design the city, and it really shows.
I do love me some quality pixel art, and it doesn’t get much better than this. Cast n Chill is a cozy side-scrolling fishing game by small indie dev team Wombat Brawler, with absolutely gorgeous visuals. It’s simple to play, and you you can dip in and out of it at your leisure, making it a fine addition to our collection of coffee break games.
It’s difficult to describe the levels of hype that I felt leading up to the release of Half Life 2, and I know I wasn’t alone. This was a generation-defining moment in gaming, the likes of which has never really been replicated, and likely never will, for multiple reasons. Not only was HL2 a huge leap forward for its artistic and technological design, it ushered in an entirely new way to buy games and changed the gaming landscape forever.
Years: 1996 – 2003
To this day, the N64 holds my fondest gaming memories on a console. The PC may have stolen my heart eventually, but I’ll never forget the fun of my childhood, playing multiplayer games on my N64 with a bunch of mates after school, and during sleepovers.
One of my all-time favourite gaming memories is playing Haunting Ground with my mates at the flat in Baldock for 16 hours straight. It was me holding the controller for almost all of those 16 hours. It’s a bit obscure, so if you haven’t heard of it, it’s a survival horror game by Capcom, in which you play as a pretty little fragile girl called Fiona, who must escape from a huge labyrinthine castle. Oh, and you can’t fight. Your only option is to run away and hide from the nasty people that are out to get you. You do have a companion throughout though, the best dog in gaming, a white German Shepherd called Hewie.
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