Assassin’s Creed 2

This game is as close to perfect as video games have come to merging platforming, open world, and role-playing elements into a cohesive game.  While I had my gripes with some of the finer points of hopping from platform to platform, more often than not I felt empowered by the sheer skill that Ezio had in navigating Renaissance Italian urban terrain.  Not only that, but Assassin's Creed 2 had a respectable story that built upon the first’s in a satisfying way and yet managed to tease just enough to make me anticipate the sequel.

Borderlands

Torchlight lit up the message boards for gaming enthusiasts all over the internet for refining certain aspects and effectively reviving the action RPG, “Diablo 2-esque” genre.  While I had my fair share of fun from both Blizzard’s and Runic Games’ offerings, the battles that often amounted to little more than clicking an enemy on the screen didn’t quite satisfy me.  Borderlands takes the addictive loot aspects of this renewed genre and mashes them together with a more than competent shooter, delivering a multitude of guns that manage to maintain individual feels and personalities and a wide variety of unique missions.

Red Faction: Guerilla

Red Faction: Guerilla does one thing right that forgives anything that it may do wrong – destruction.  Each weapon is designed for the dual purposes of murdering enemies and taking down structures.  The clear pinnacle of this design is the “nano rifle”, a gun that disintegrates anything it fires at and consequently forces the pants of sci-fi fans (like myself) to become wet at an unimaginable rate.  While the story isn’t mind blowing, there’s just enough plot development to grease the wheels of your cart of Martian domination.

Retro Game Challenge

For a young-gun like me, the tales told by Jeremy Parish and Chris Kohler on the Retronauts podcast are seemingly of true legend.  The Wii Virtual Console is a barely navigable maze of vaguely familiar names.  Retro Game Challenge makes a great attempt at restoring some of the zeitgeist of the 8-bit era for this generation, reconstructing and putting a slightly ironic twist on some old favorites like Galaga and Dragon Quest.  The charming writing and amusing overarching scenario wraps these mimicked classics together into one of the best DS games of the year.

Shadow Complex

In a time where execution is seemingly much more important than innovation, Shadow Complex is king.  This brilliant game essentially takes a formula that has been used for quite a long time in games like Metroid and Castlevania, improves upon core mechanics like traversal and backtracking, and innovates in small but effective ways.  Even more impressive is how much is packed into a small downloadable game from the Xbox Live Arcade while maintaining a consistent high level of quality throughout.

Modern Warfare 2

I wanted to hate this game.  In fact, I still do hate a lot of the peripheral things related to this game, particularly the way that both Activision and Infinity Ward treat their fans.  Regardless, it’s hard to ignore Modern Warfare 2, which combines an action-packed single player campaign with an excruciatingly effective multiplayer element.  While the writing wasn’t anywhere near Oscar-worthy, the winding plot had a hokey charm similar to Michael Bay’s best (The Rock, don’t you dare argue with me on this one).  Also similar to The Rock, the game features a soundtrack composed by Hans Zimmer, which tickles the movie score lover deep in my heart.  Don’t even get me started on the multiplayer.

Dragon Age: Origins

I’m absolutely in love with Bioware.  I haven’t put a ton of time into Dragon Age: Origins simply because I don’t have a ton of time to dedicate to it, but I quickly realized that it’s in my game of the year shortlist for a couple of reasons.  The writing is just fantastic compared to its competition, constantly making me think about my decisions and how I interact with my party members.  Beyond that, the world is so artfully constructed that I often forget the anachronistic fantasy foundation and allow myself to get wrapped up in the great atmosphere.

Halo 3: ODST

I feel like this game got too much negative criticism for what it was trying to be, namely a strong entry in an extremely popular series while telling the story of much less “epic” characters than the Master Chief.  The truth is, when your goals are measurably less lofty than “saving the universe”, small victories are that much more rewarding.  Halo 3: ODST capitalizes on that, following the stories of a handful of front-line fighters against the Covenant and their efforts to salvage what they can from a seemingly hopeless situation.

GeoDefense

2009 might be considered the year of the tower defense game, with so many offering on both traditional platforms as well as in the iPhone app ecosystem.  GeoDefense, however, differentiated itself from the rest by taking the beautiful vector art style of Geometry Wars and combining it with a basic yet complex set of towers.  Add solid touch controls and a variety of interesting boards to the mix and you have a great game that easily saps the time from you even if there are only a few minutes to spare.