Well, it's a new year and I'm back again with another best-of retrospective. This go round, we'll be taking another 12-year look-back, at the best games of 2009, and unlike with the last one, I'm happy to be able to deliver it in a more timely, and thus, sensible fashion. 2009 was another great year for games. But really though, aren't they all, just about? Let's just say, it wasn't any slouch. Please join me as I take a look back at some of the following reasons why.
As you might have noticed by now, I have kind of a thing for gaming retrospectives. I also love anything having to do with the number 12. For those reasons, I've decided to debut a new retrospective series where I take a look back at the best games from 12 years ago. In the case of this particular article, the year 2008. Now you may be thinking, "it's 2022, shouldn't this article be about 2009 or even 2010?" And the answer is, you got me. I meant to post this nearly a year ago. My bad. Maybe I'll do one for 2009 next month. Just go with it. 2008 was a special year for gaming that saw a number of truly exceptional titles grace the various consoles of the day. Please join me as I look back at what I feel pretty good about saying were 12 of the absolute best.
Computer games have a pretty short history when you compare them with other media - books, movies and music all have far, far more works attributed to them than video games could ever have - and yet those media [books, movies and music] don't have nearly the same technological hill to climb as video games.
Whole chunks of gaming history just get abandoned as we march ever onward toward greater polygon counts, better musical fidelity and tonal shifts in gameplay. Where once the platforming collect-a-thon ruled the roost, today, most people only really want to play first/third person shooters.
And in that shift - from one platform to the next - we lose games. Sometimes catastrophically terrible games, but sometimes, we lose wonderful pieces of history, too. Like Banjo Kazooie or Okami.
One of the answers? Emulation. But the industry tends to frown upon emulation, because it requires reverse engineering the original game console [or operating system] and Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft aren't fans of that.
But... Read more
