Portal 2 crowned best game of 2011 by the Associated Press

@soniccar You're kidding, right? I love Portal 1, but it was a tech demo; Portal 2 was a masterpiece of storytelling and gameplay design :)

@soniccar Agreed, with the caveat that I didn't even think it was THAT great.

@JasonGW Imo, portal 2 was a better half life game than a portal game. Don't get me wrong, I love the game to bits, but I couldn't help but feel a bit disappointed by the difficulty of some of the puzzles. What I miss most are the puzzles that require you to think on your feet and shoot portals in mid-air. Imo, those were the most tense and fun moments in portal 1. It's a shame that almost every portal you had to shoot in 2 was either from the ground or from a bridge/tractor beam.

@gonintendo
Yeah, the difficulty of figuring out the puzzles was way down in 2.

@JasonGW
Calling Portal 1 a tech demo shows no respect for what it was. It was basically an independent game(I know that Valve backed the developer). As an independent game, Portal was extremely impressive. Portal 1 focused on gameplay and the puzzles. Portal 2 seemed to be trying to be more mainstream and I think the puzzles suffered from that. The only part that really gave me any problems in 2 wasn't even really a puzzle.
Even co-op was a breeze.

@soniccar
Portal 2 was extremely well made and deserves to be in there somewhere. But to me, this feels like "Annie Hall" winning over "Star Wars"

@gonintendo I agree that I miss that type as well, but I think too that the inclusion of things like the various gel types, light bridges/barriers, etc created difficulty that required a different type of thinking (more spatial and cause/effect type of reasoning as opposed to some of the "reflex" thinking of the previous game). Still, the full experience was, I felt, overall superior to the first portal. What it lacked was the "surprise" factor of the original, because of course you already knew what to expect in terms of the basic gameplay.

@soniccar I don't think it's at all disrespectful to the original Portal to call it a tech demo, because that's what it was. It was an included freebie with the Half Life 2 package in the Orange Box for a reason: it was a short experience nobody would have paid $60 for, and such a different FPS experience that nobody knew how it would end up being received by audiences. That doesn't detract from the fact that Portal 1 was *brilliant*, of course :).

As to it being "too easy," I agree and disagree all at once. There were puzzles that were challenging because they required you to think across large distances and use materials in strange ways (especially if you really wanted to nail all the achievements; I nailed about 90% of them). But that's not necessarily a bad thing. Co Op was somewhat easy, but often enough required genuine cooperative play, which few co-op modes really do, at least not to the extent that Portal 2's did.

As for it being more mainstream....well, yeah, I think that's to be expected. It went from tech demo to full-blown franchise game, and had to satisfy a good 10-20 hours of gameplay (I spent almost 30 on it, counting the co-op) as opposed to Portal 1's 3 hours worth of play. That's significant.

All in all, I think they did an amazing job of it, and did well not to cheapen it by throwing in other guns or devolving the multiplayer into simple deathmatches or capture the flag, both common FPS modes that have been played to death IMHO :P

@wolf4537 I happen to like Dark beer over lemonade myself..

@(Unverified)

Not Funny. this meme is a dead horse already and people just beat on it with a stick

@HardBoiled2009

Actually, they don't beat it with a stick. They shoot it in the knee with an arrow.

@(Unverified) If you're not careful you're gonna get an arrow in the face :)

@kilroy214
IT LIVES!!

@StarcasM

I don't think so. There's no way he'd put portal as number 1 if he didn't play co-op.

@StarcasM

I'm sorry to break it to you, but this year was a remarkable year for Single Player games, and basically proved that Single Player is in fact not dead. I find it hard to find any multiplayer experience released this year that was more compelling.

I'd say my only complaint might be the lack of Gears 3 in that list, simply because it was truly the complete experience of Single Player, Co-op, and Competitive where everything felt good.

@StarcasM Every comment you make it's a fail even worse than the previous one...

@jmr1986 A geek top ten list of video games....
Hrm... I'm not seeing a problem with that.

Carry on.

@TylerDurden1027

I totally agree Bethesda can do better.

as far as VGA's go .. another game should have won as well.

Hang on a minute, folks.

Okay, so bugs are the scum of the Earth, yes? Sure, we can all agree on that statement, and what a pity that the parasitic glitches in Skyrim are so outrageous and extensive that its quite difficult to shake the feeling that Bethesda could have prevented a lot of the horror.

But don't roam the internet claiming your jaw didn't fall off its hinges when you stumbled into a valley. When you battled one of the various spectacularly-woven creatures or characters within a visually thrilling encounter. When the chanting wades into your hungry ears once you've leveled up. When you find yourself immensely satisfied after experiencing a cleverly written dialogue sequence--knowing you made the choices acceptable for the character you intended to craft yourself. When you've discovered a gorgeous outfit or weapon for said character. When you find yourself planted in the middle of an exoticly entertaining conflict between two civilians or two entire cultures. When you've revealed to yourself a flat-out beautiful location (of the thousands that exist). When you gallop across a plain while giants and mammoths and mountains, and maybe even a dragon go about their everyday business. When Christopher Plummer and his society of Greybeards speak in the sweepingly wonderful language of the dragons--which in turn allows you, high atop a peak as you're able to taste the clouds, to shout a hearty whoof of dragon words into the air--"How epic", you think to yourself. When you grace your eyes with the glorious Northern Lights of the sky as you bask in the amazing spectacle that is The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim!


Are a few bugs, aside from the game-breaking and distracting ones, truthfully going to be THAT detrimental to what I've just described?

@Shadowbender

While I agree that the quality of a game shouldn't live or die by the bugs, I'm having trouble with the "How epic" part. Clearly, you love Skyrim, as does most of the internet, given its current priapism for the game, but as someone who never really fell in love with RPGs as a genre, Skyrim really isn't anything special. I can honestly say my jaw did not drop the first time I looked across a valley. I was honestly slightly disappointed with the battles with dragons/trolls/giants/etc. (That could just be because Hollywood and Lord of the Rings has put my expectations of epic battles with mythological creatures in a different realm, but I digress.) Overall, I just feel nothing towards Skyrim. Personally, given my tastes in games, I felt like I was just going through the motions. Go here, get this, kill this guy, fight this dragon, rinse, and repeat. That just wasn't all that fun for me. The only time I even came close to thinking "How epic" was when I figured out how to basically goal line dive people by ramming them with my shield at full sprint. And that was just hilarious, not really epic.

It might just be that Bethesda did all parts of the game well, but there was always one game that did a particular aspect better. Portal's dialogue, for instance, trounces anything I heard in the hours I played Skyrim. The set pieces of Uncharted exceeded those of Skyrim. The voice acting in Batman entertained me more than that of Bethesda's so-called "epic."

Then again, I also didn't "get" Red Dead Redemption, but that won a ton of GOTY awards too.

@Shadowbender Well you've certainly put a lot of spin on that. Skyrim is good and I've had fun with it, but by God the graphics are by no means incredible. Compared to other current releases like TOR, then yes, Skyrim looks amazing. On the other hand: Just Cause 2 came out early LAST year and looks miles better imo. As usual popular things are ruined by the over-zealous fanatics and a hype-train that won't stop until it burns out.

@gordogg24p
I'll be the 1st to admit Skyrim is way to overrated, but RDR was genius! How could anyone not love it?

@Shadowbender

All of that stuff would be great if the gameplay was there to back it up. I was about 15-20 hours in when I stopped playing and it mostly had to do with the fact that the combat is awful. Most of my points were in one-handed and destruction but neither meleeing nor magic were particularly effective against almost anything. They seemed to want to make things more streamlined and action oriented yet I spend way more time going in and out of menus in the middle of a fight than I ever did in Morrowind or Oblivion (which I played for something like 90 hours) It's not particularly satisfying after playing for so many hours to be so ineffective against random enemies. Then a dragon shows up (in all it's laughably animated glory) and I kill him in 30 seconds with barely a dent in my health meter. The game is amazingly unbalanced. I can't remember the last game I played that continually made me feel like I was doing something wrong the entire time. And I had just come off of 100 hours of Dark Souls before playing Skyrim.

@HardBoiled2009 You can say the same thing about Battlefield 3. Shipped broken, yet people praise it. Sure, MW3 had a problem with Elite, but BF3 was unplayable at times.

@StarcasM

That's because, just like with CoD and skyrim, and plenty of other games, some people had the issues and others didn't, so not everyone got to experience those issues, and in turn, it wouldn't influence their opinion. I myself have been lucky enough to not have issues with any of these games.

@StarcasM not trolling here, but can you tell me the issues that plagued BF3 ? ( doesn't have it and was thinking on buying it )

@HardBoiled2009
http://i.joystiq.com/media/icon-votedown.png

@StarcasM - Battlefield 3 wasn't broken when it shipped... Its servers were.

The actual game code on this disc functioned great.

@HardBoiled2009

I think the fact that they've sold millions of copies has already made that point. I think their problem was attempting a multiplatform launch on the first day. The XBOX day 0 version (played from disk ;)), had minimal glitches and zero major bugs (such as corrupt saves, crippling lag, or broken quests). Their failure was in getting the secondary platforms to that same level.

Without a doubt the XBOX360 version of Skyrim is the hands-down Game of the Year. And that is how it should be judged.

@The Pork

I think "competent," to anyone with a quarter of a brain, doesn't mean "We agree with it" in Joystiq-isms. It means "Holy hell, who knew the AP knew anything about games and didn't just elect what got attention by putting Call of Duty and Battlefield first and second!"

It seems they actually thought out what was good about the games and what was bad, weighed that, and made their selections accordingly. Doesn't matter if it is opinion or not, it can still be considered competent/incompetent.

@Shadowbender in summary, great year for gaming. I agree with you, Portal 2 deserves all the praise, and Skyrim is just something else.

Other than that we had Deus EX:HR and Bataman. What a year. Too bad Mass Effect 3 was postponed, otherwise it would be one of the best years ever.

@melao

If Mass Effect 3 was released this year, every one of us would be digging our own graves due to the lack of physical, mental, and spriritual ability to handle the awesome of that year.

@melao and Deus EX: HR on 3rd. Another excellent game. Great list overall!

In a perfect world there wouldn't be a Portal 2. There's no Mona Lisa 2, Citizen Kane 2 or Pet Sounds 2, why did Portal need a sequel? It didn't, It was perfect. But the game industry is still young, so I forgive them. But we should not have gotten Portal 2 no matter how good it was. Which it was amazing.

@D3m0sthenes Just like there isn't a Godfather 2. Oh wait...