The Fifth Annual Coint and Plick Poll for Best Video Games of 2011 - Part Four: THE TOP TWENTY

the genre comes from canabalt iirc

Heh, I do admittedly kind of love that the scientists are used both as avoidance and attack goals in the game. Poor little burnt dudes.

Dungeon Raid, eh? I'll look into it.

Radiant Historia, another DS game to buydownload onto my flash cart in the last several years... looks awesome though, seriously....

ZS are you creating all these GIFs? nice work!

can I just say these animated images are A+ more more more!!!

ok, i finally died after an epic realm of the mad god 40/40 run (almost made my first level 20 character before dying in the pits of hell at level 19.666/20

now i can get back to the srs business of continuing the results!

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#13: Super Mario 3D Land – 3DS – 63 pts – 4 votes – Top Exclusive 3DS Game
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CraigG: This is everything a Mario game on a modern handheld system should be - while I'd love a truly 2D mario game to capture the feeling I had for Mario Bros and Mario Bros 3 back when I was a kid, this comes pretty close to capturing how I felt about Mario 64 when I first played it. I've only played it 3 times, but I've already done every level, and got every star for the first 5 worlds because once I pick it up I play it for at least 1 full world.

jamescobo: For the first time, a 3D Mario which actually emphasizes running and jumping as opposed to 3D itself (despite ironically being the best 3D showcase that the 3DS has yet to yield), and SUPRIRISE: it's great. It's still not as satisfying as the lowliest of the 2D Marios (World? The Lost Levels? idk) but anyone who would deny that this game completely owns can go fuck themselves with great vigor.

Ian F: Being a mixture of New Super Mario Bros and Super Mario Galaxy meant that it never quite claimed its own unique identity, but it was still a fine Mario game with a couple of great new ideas (replaying the same levels in hard mode, shorter and harder levels) which I'd suggest came from Super Meat Boy if that didn't sound so ridiculous.

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#12: Bastion – XBLA / PC – 65 pts – 7 votes - Top Downloadable PSN/XBLA Game
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Ian F: I loved the atmosphere, loved the constant introduction of new weaponry, loved the fact that the narrative and gameplay co-existed perfectly without ever getting in each others' way. Most of all, though, I loved the music. The perfect fit of the old western/futuristic combination to the narrative! The bit with Zia's song that made me write inappropriately long gushing praise for a Jukebox review to have another avenue to talk about how fantastically well realised and beautiful the whole thing is! (pre-edited version: I've been playing this video game called Bastion, in which you play a survivor of some mysterious calamity who is trying to piece together what happened and rebuild his world, accompanied only by an ever-present narrator. Mechanically it's a fairly fast paced action game, but what it's really about is discovering and rebuilding its magical but precarious world. The best bit so far is the sequence where you drop through a hole to a new location and soon faintly hear a strange humming voice. Then, as you make your way across the landscape, you begin to hear that (female, smoky) voice singing a haunting song about building walls, and how someday those walls are going to fall. It sounds steeped in history and loss and, while you progress and try in vain to concentrate on killing monsters and not on the overwhelming melancholy, the song becomes louder and sharper until, eventually, you find a woman, lost in this wilderness, who has been singing it from the start. It really brings home the desolation of the game and is a beautiful moment.)

fennel cartwright: Bastion was really not much, but when it was something, it was polished. It was almost too stripped-down for its own good - the gameplay could have been a little more adventurous - but I have no significant complaints. Plus, it was beautiful, and the music ruled.

Nhex: Points for style, basically. Or maybe just that narrator.

Didn't vote for it but I liked bastion ok although my pretty much constant inner monologue was "why won't this narrator plz just STFU"

same. i kept on asking my previous gf if she would like a glass of water in that voice, trying to imitate it, and i probably did that way too much tbh

possibly contributing to the downfall of our relationblablabla

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#11: Bulletstorm – 360 / PS3 / PC – 70 pts – 4 vote - 2 top game votes
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Embracing shame: BULLETSTORM is stupid as hell and also awesome
jjjusten: I know I have gotten semi-cartoony wrt my love for this game but it is
straight up the best shooter or shooter derivative I have ever played.
It's batshit insane in a way that normally is relegated to the weirdo
failed game gulag of shadows of the damned or no more heroes, but with
endless amounts of polish and precision. There is quite literally
never a dull moment in the entire single player campaign, and although
i am sure the servers have dried up quite a bit over time, the
multiplayer was also genius coop mayhem. Despite all the sprawling
fantasy epics and clever puzzlers and so on, this was a lock for my
GOTY from the first 15 minutes I played it. Oh and also don't get
fooled by the demo, i think they went for mass appeal and pulled it
from the least compelling part of the game.

Will M: This was the year of decent immature games. More of this type of UI in shooters would not be unwelcome.

fennel cartwright: underrated, super-polished, attractive, and fun. It's what Duke Nukem Forever should have been.

no bulletstorm?

i had to double-post that to correct the ranking on the gif, but hopefully a mod will fix it soon.
d'oh-dy-d'oh d'oh

3. Salsa Shark’s Biggest Disappointment:
999: 9 hours 9 people 9 doors (DS)
I have few good things to say about this game despite the rather confusing near-universal hype it's received. Here are the few good things:
- The visuals, while limited, did help set the atmosphere, along with some of the soundtrack choices.
- The puzzles were done well and their difficulty was nearly spot-on. This was the most enjoyable aspect of the game.
- The dialogue between the characters during the puzzle scenes was relatively interesting.

Most of my dislike for 999 stemmed from how useless and poorly-written most of the 'story' sections were. The writing is awful. The blocks and blocks of text, written (or translated?) in a dull, amateurish way, often repeat what other characters have said or done and are overly, unnecessarily descriptive. These sections take up a huge chunk of 'play' time without adding anything at all to the progression of the story. It's a shame because the concept behind the game is actually intriguing, but the only time you can start piecing together how the story might unfold is through character dialogue, especially during the puzzle scenes. It boggles my mind as to why the useless 'story' sections weren't heavily edited down in favour of a more dialogue-led approach. And for what it's worth, the character dialogue is slightly better written than the blocks of story, though there are a couple of characters who are a bit too unbelievable and the swearing is a bit too awkward and OTT. Which brings me to my next qualm: your character is a bit of a dick and his 'love interest' is uninteresting, which makes it difficult to really care about what happens to either of them. And then, to make matters worse, there are six (!) possible endings to 999; getting the 'true' ending requires two separate playthroughs through two specific paths which are nearly impossible to discover without a walkthrough. My first and second playthroughs both had dud endings; the thought of having to sit through the game two more times was just too much for me. The happy ending for me is that I sold the game on eBay and nearly broke even.

i've been drinking all afternoon and it's beginning to show, sorry. the 3. by Salsa Shark means nothing, i was just numbering them to see how many total disappoints we had so i could evenly disperse them throughout the top 20 (yes, i typed them out using a keyboard rather than just scanning the screen and counting in my head, i don't know wtf is wrong with me sometimes) (and yes, i realized that i didn't end up evenly dispersing them throughout the top 20 because i just totally forgot for the last 7 results or so, whoops), and Salsa Shark happened to be the third one down.

$50 to anyone who can read that paragraph without barfing

The best ending of 999 is very satisfying and you should look it up on youtube if you didn't get it. There are enough hints to its path that it's not so bad. The first ending you're required to get is more obscure, but if you do the "best" path first the game flashes the door numbers of its path on the screen.

Yay BULLETSTORM!

Oh geez guys sorry for that blurb, I didn't realise how long it actually was :S

I think the endings I got were sub, knife, and axe. Then I gave up, sold the game, and watched the real ending on YT and yeah it was alright, but I'm def glad I didn't bother playing through again (twice!) for it.

I was kind of hoping that BULLETSTORM would actually crack the top ten, but having it in the top 20 is pretty awesome. Sl0ck1 were you the other goty voter?

Btw thanks to my months of being obnoxious, my iPhone now autocorrects BULLETSTORM to all caps, so I am not actually trying to be this consistently irritating. But I am lazy. Also, BULLETSTORM!

If I'd participated I'd have top voted Mario 3D Land. "a 3D Mario which actually emphasizes running and jumping as opposed to 3D itself" is perfectly true and why it's ultimately the greatest 3D Mario even if individual levels won't reach the heights of some delirious Galaxy moments. I think it's one of the best Mario games, period, because it retains those huge architectural masterpiece levels of Galaxy while being about platforming at all times. The first 8 worlds, Mario as a toy, are about the fun of platforming, while the latter 8 are about the devilish challenge of platforming and honing your skills.

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#10: Dark Souls – 360 / PS3 – 74 pts – 4 votes - 1 top game vote
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DARK SOULS: if you need me i'll be in an induced coma so octover comes tomorrow

Roberto Spiralli: you will notice that, in blatant contravention of the guidelines, i gave dark souls 40 points. given that i have decided it is my favourite game of all time, as explained at length on the dark souls thread, i could not in good conscience give it anything less than slightly more than the maximum. IF YOU CHOOSE TO NOT ALLOW THIS EXTRAORDINARY STRATAGEM then lower the score to 30 and i will gladly forfeit the 10 remaining points from my total score. i will be able to sleep at night knowing i did the right thing. will you? (Z S: the score was lowered to 30. forks and i sleep soundly knowing that you were glad to forfeit the 10 remaining points from your total score. all hail the noble voting rules)

tomofthenest: with shame, I loved this until it kicked my ass one too many times and I realised I just couldn't be bothered fighting 10 minutes through the same foes before dying within 5 seconds of the boss fight yet a fucking gain. I'm happy with dying lots, but please just let me save before the boss for crying out loud. Thankful I only rented tbh.

polyphonic: The combat in this game is so satisfying. When you kill some undead bastard you really feel like you earned it.

bamcquern Biggest Disappointment
Hammerfight (PC)
Finishing was like eating a whole can of Planter's cheese balls. The commercial indies were so forgettable this year. The only game I fell in love with was a shitty little dodge-'em game.

Huh, I was totally expecting this higher. I haven't played it yet, it doesn't seem my kind of thing, but people were really going nuts for it.

I didn't play it till after I voted, but I would have threw some points its way.

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#9: Minecraft – PC / Mac – 83 pts – 7 votes - 1 top game vote
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tomofthenest: spent far too long on minecraft. better not talk about it as i'm in remission. put off a bit by the crazies on line with their globe planets and 16-bit CPUs.

Will M: Fuck Skyrim. This is my kind of open world.

Diamond Dave: haven't played this one for ages but it probably stole a good 100+ hours from my life this year

note that 3 of the votes, including the top game vote, and 33 of the points come from the 2010 poll. the other 4 votes and 50 points come from this year's poll. in the results spreadsheet, the two are intentionally added together, so i'm just posted them in the order that forks had.

woah, w/ dark souls out of the way this a total toss-up as to what'll get #1. arkham city? is slowly stutting around as catwoman as enjoyable to me as it is you guys? goty for that reason alone? can i get a holla?

It's between that and skyrim. I'm guessing skyrim edges out arkham.

I would have voted for Minecraft (maybe even as top game) but I didn't start playing it until after the poll.

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#8: Binding of Isaac – Mac / PC – 84 pts – 6 votes - 1 top game vote - Top Exclusive PC / Mac Game
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fennel cartwright: Binding of Isaac is polished and fun. It's not quite as mentally stimulating as Terraria, but it creates an absurdly compelling metagame out of figuring out all the items, powerups, and mechanics.

Diamond Dave: 13 hours of playtime before i finally finished my first playthrough

Nhex: A badly programmed roguelike oozing with personality, taking good bits from Zelda and Shiren the Wanderer, the brief time I had with this was memorable.

should i get that game

There's an in-browser demo.

jamescobo’s Biggest Disappointment
Sword & Sorcery (iOS)
Looks cool as shit but I have yet to have two consecutive seconds of fun with it.

otm :(

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#7: Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword – Wii – 90 pts – 6 votes - 1 top game votes
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Ian F: Coming out as it did in December, I haven't finished this yet, although I've already spent longer on it than almost anything else on this list (28.5 hours so far). So it could move a place either way. I can already say with some certainty that it's a fine reinvigoration after the epic but stale Twilight Princess, that it only takes a very short period of adjustment from HD graphics to realise that it is really, really gorgeous, and that it has the best alternate world mechanic of any Zelda yet. Piloting a ship across a desert ocean was such a massive WOW moment. Also, the directional sword fighting mechanic makes fighting so much more fun than it was in previous games, and if you tried to do it with buttons alone would be a fiddly pain in the arse, so yes, it does make a fine belated case for motion controls. Also, I love the game's commitment to having you do something fun at all possible times, cutting things up into tiny bite sized pieces without dumbing down excessively, and am happy to lose a few side quests and a joined-up map to get it.

Remy Bean: I’m not even done with this. I just love everything about it; the difficulty curve, the puzzles, the wiimote interactivity, the collecting, the fetch quests, the mini games, the art style, the absolutely amazing level design. Perhaps the Wii is on its way out, and this is the grand finale –– and I hope it shows up as a launch title for whatever comes next. I haven’t had this much fun with an adventure game in years. My Serious Gamer friends tease me – because I significantly prefer cartoony games over realistic ones, whimsy before intensity –– and this game was pitched perfectly to my tastes. This feels like a spiritual successor to Link To the Past; a game that is light-hearted and frustrating and weird in equal measure

Salsa Shark: This one's been a bit of a slow burner. I like the way it makes pretty good use of the Wii's limited graphics capabilities and I love the weirdness of the desert area with the robots, but so far the game has failed to really grab me in the way I expected it would after reading all its gushing reviews. Based on previous Zelda games I just have that much faith that it'll pull through and impress me in the end. Whether or not the way the game unfolds can make up for the terrible control system has yet to be determined. This game is proof that just because you can map controls to a Wiimote doesn't mean you should.

CraigG: It falls short of my expectations that this might finally be the 3D Zelda game to match Ocarina of Time, they finally brought the mechanics into this century. Being able to run and climb and actually make your way around the environment without inexplicably being unable to get up a waist-high wall, etc, was long-needed. I've not completed it, but put in a fair amount of time so far. I haven't hit any of the bugs or annoying return-to-an-old-temple bits that seem to have infuriated others yet either, but so far it's good. I hadn't expected another Zelda to come on the Wii, so for it to be of this high quality was a bonus. I got the sweet gold Wii Remote Plus too, as I'm a soft target!

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#6: Deus Ex: Human Revolution – 360 / PS3 / PC – 100 pts – 7 votes - 0.33 top game votes
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oppet: The sequel to my favourite game ever, so had a lot to live up to. Which it mainly did, although I wouldn't have minded if they'd improved on the terrible voice acting and dubious racial stereotypes.

Jordan: Its flaws are wide-open to criticism, but it was still one of my most memorable gaming experiences of the year. It may not be the ultimate in open-world decision-making, but I always had the sense that the game was letting me figure things out at my own pace (which seems all too rare these days).

Diamond Dave: who knew i'd enjoy hiding behind a box and waiting so much?

abanana’s Biggest Disappointment
Limbo (PS3)
The video game equivalent of a movie that uses noir lighting just because it's cheap, this used silhouettes because art is expensive. The physics-based (why?) block-pushing puzzles (again?) did not help.

that's it for today. Top 5 will be either tomorrow or tuesday. probably tomorrow.

shit, I didn't use the correct system on the gif for deus ex!

awwww fuck it.

huh. were there much fewer blurbs this year than usual?

oppet: The sequel to my favourite game ever, so had a lot to live up to.

So just checking, is this some "Star Trek V never happened" happening here?

I don't know why HR wasn't working with me. I've played Deus Ex 2x and consider it to be a fucking triumph for the medium. HR I went into with an immediate distaste for the overindulgent color-pallete as well as absolutely hating the fact that conversations always played out in some sort of separate game engine. And then the actual gameplay: Am I alone in thinking it was uncommonly hard? Seems like all the NPC's are unbelievably hyper-aware of whether I'm peaking out of the corners of things, and the fact that you were some superengineered megacyborg and yet required a candy bar each and every time you knocked someone out a bizarre game facet.

NPC's kill you seconds on sight and the hacking minigame assumed too much that the player was a william gibson fan and found natural joy making icons light up. it was just as bad as that tiring pipe-hacking minigame from bioshock. (funny enough, the only hacking minigame I've continually enjoyed is ME2's generic match-up: mostly b/c I feel like I've *earned* the right to hack into this and wasn't left to the devices of some randomized bs)

I'm a huge Splinter Cell/MGS fan and find both games far easier in terms of stealth... i eventually returned HR w/out having finished it b/c i was so frustrated with the idea that a bunch of generic 80s-mohawk streetpunks of the future were actively keeping their eyes centered on the corners of boxes so they could shoot whatever it is without first processing whether it was a threat or not. could've been mom, ffs, here to bring you your lunch.

best hacking game is still the droid takeover thing in Paradroid.

Based on previous Zelda games I just have that much faith that it'll pull through and impress me in the end. Whether or not the way the game unfolds can make up for the terrible control system has yet to be determined. This game is proof that just because you can map controls to a Wiimote doesn't mean you should.

Also, having to battle 'the Imprisoned' not once not twice but THRICE!! was DUMB. Battles 2 and 3 are WAY too close together and it's a pretty ridiculous and unbelievable boss to begin with >:(

BUT I've really liked the designs and gameplay of the various desert/mountain/forest areas, the dungeons (esp the desert ship) and the dungeon bosses (esp the sword robot). I also like the silly side quests <3 <3 side quests

Stoked.

Battles 2 and 3 are WAY too close together

otm. this pissed me off enough that i haven't really played the game since /:

i stalled during the tadtones bit, but i loved everything until that part. is it worth it to power through to the next part?

The last dungeon was easily my favourite in the game. Don't remember anything particularly annoying between tadtones and there.

later zeldas seem v keen on the repetition; i've seen at least one review arguing that the dungeon-repetition in the first ds title was A Good Thing, which strikes me as awfully strange

remy if you loved it all up until the tadtones then yeah, do it. the other song gathering bits are good.

is Radiant Historia that good? kinda tempted to import before prices go crazy again.

If I had played the Ascension iOS card game before this past weekend I would have thrown it some points. Great fun.

15 Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (PS3)
14 Dark Souls (PS3)
13 MotorStorm: Apocalypse (PS3)
12 El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron (PS3)
11 Dungeon Raid (iOS)
9 Rayman Origins (PS3)
8 Last Rocket (iOS)
7 Forget Me Not (iOS)
6 Radballs (iOS)
5 ICO & Shadow of the Colossus Collection HD (PS3)

Biggest Disappointment: L.A. Noire

requisites for contributing to next year's polling? did everyone w/ a write-up actually *play* all the games tallied here? i'd like to do at least one write-up... i'm opinionated enough about some stuff that i could write for pretty proper lengths and not concern myself w/ things like me3's intolerable ending. i am an a+ student.

I, for one, didn't play any of the games I wrote about

I only played the games everyone else wrote about.

i wrote the games that everyone else played

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VH2SVes0E8

*applause*

oh.

I don't really understand what you meant there, kel

1. Portal 2, 18pts
2. The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, 17pts
3. Bastion, 15pts
4. Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, 10pts
5. Radiant Historia, 9pts
6. Child of Eden, 8pts
7. Super Mario 3D Land, 7pts
8. Pullblox, 6pts
9= LA Noire, 5pts
9= StreetPass Quest, 5pts

Thanks to everyone who had a part in running this (even whoever it was who spelt my name wrong every time). I really enjoyed it.

is Radiant Historia that good? kinda tempted to import before prices go crazy again.

lamp's comments on RH are accurate:

with radiant historia i think of that old vaudeville joke that the simpsons ripped off where homer tries to by the monkeys paw: it has an innovative and reasonably challenging battle system! thats good! but it still requires some tedious grinding! thats bad! it tries to tell an ambitious, complicated story about the cost of war! thats good! it does so with dialogue shorn of any nuance or ambiguity! thats bad! &c &c &c.

I still liked it a ton.

(i promise to play more games this year)

this might be a lie btw