My Gaming Year Part 1

In listening to various podcasts and reading various articles over the past year, I have to say this has been an absolute banner year in gaming. We had our usual dry spell over the summer with many slow news weeks but from the beginning of fall up until now, all I've been hearing is that there are too many good games coming out without enough time to play them. That is a nice problem to have if you are a gamer. It's also been a banner year for me purchasing games. I'm a little surprised when I think back to all the new purchases I made over the last 12 months.  It's now time for all of the best of 2011 lists to come out so I'll give a little talk about my gaming year divided into 3 posts.

First is Brink. No, actually last of them all is Brink. This game was a terrible disappointment all the way through. It had broken multiplayer, terrible in motion graphics, and no single player campaign even though the director of the game explicitly said in an interview that the reason it was being delayed was because they wanted to provide a deep single player experience. It had us all duped to the point that it was the number 2 seller the month it came out. It was so broken that one of the devs had to go on to youtube to try and tell users how to navigate around the fact that his multiplayer-focused game had no lobbies and no way to enter into a game with friends. Speaking of bad games published by Bethesda with lots of misleading hype....

My next game is Rage. A good game that did not deliver on its promise to those who followed its development. This is best illustrated by the fact that almost every review for this game started off by telling the reader what it was not. Rage was promoted as having a vast open world with RPG elements in the vein of Borderlands and Fallout. Not the case at all. It was a straightforward linear shooter similar to Bulletstorm. Which is fine, but I was expecting something way different. Borderlands with better graphics was what I was led to believe this game was. Bethesda is 0 for 2.

Since I mentioned it I'll give a shout out to Bulletstorm which was another purchase this year for me. It was bought used but hey it still came out this year. Bulletstorm was fun but I didn't finish it and ended up trading it back before the price went down too low. The gunplay was tons of fun and the graphics were impressive but it just didn't hold my interest long enough. Kill combos got a little repetitive as the game wore on and it was best enjoyed in short sessions. As you'll see later in my wrap up, I'm leaning towards games with more RPG elements in them and this didn't really have that.

Soooooo, now that I have my complaints out of the way for this year it's time for happy thoughts. Every year is going to have some clunkers and that is the chance you take when you decide on a release day puchase. But fortunately there are a couple release day purchases ahead that will more than make up for the disappointments. I'll have parts two and three up within the week.