2010 Game of the Year Award

Another bit of housekeeping I must attend to upon reviving this pointless yet gratifying online journal is my annual Game of the Year award. Long ago, I had a companion website for this blog where I had an extensive page of my Game of the Year Award dating back to 1981. It’s all gone now, and I don’t appear to have it backed up anywhere (with the possible exception of an old hard drive I might have stored around).

Since 1981, I have chosen a personal Game of the Year based on what I played that year. In some cases, I played the game years after it’s release, but it was still better than anything else I played that year. In addition, throughout my life I’ve not always had access to the state of the art systems and  PCs required for much of gaming’s history. So, to sum up my long-winded caveat, this is a personal award  and not an industry award.

I hope to find time to recreate the entire list of Games of the Years at some point. For now, you can squint at the header at the top of this page, and behind the giant Middle-Aged Gamer logo you’ll find the cover art for every winner from 1981-2008. As with everything in my life,  I’ve got some catching up to do, starting with the 2010 Game of the Year:

2010 Game of the Year - Mass Effect 2 (Xbox 360)
This spacefaring action RPG got rave reviews for a lot of reasons - technical improvements over the first game, story, and such. But putting the game over the top were the many intricate connections to the first game in the series made real by having the game incorporate game save data from it to show the outcome of decisions made in that playthrough.

It’s a gaming concept dating back to Wizardry, where your seasoned party of adventurers could be loaded up at the start of the second game and carry over their experience and equipment, with some limitations. Mass Effect 2, with some difficulty, even allowed players who had played an iPhone spinoff game to also incorporate that game’s results into it. It’s a shame more developers don’t see the value in that.

Runner-Up: Uncharted 2: Among Theives (PS3)
2010 was my year of catch-up with the stellar PS3 exclusives I had missed, and this 2009 hit was at the top of the pack. Story, action, gunplay, and breathtaking levels make this a game that is so hard to put down until it’s done.

Runner-Up: Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood (PS3)m
Continuing with the Renaissance era adventures of Ezio Auditore, this game offered the usual mind blowingly gorgeous historic cities of the time, but also added larger assassin management duties, all while continuing to unfold a great story.

Runner-Up: Red Dead Redemption (PS3)
It’s Grand Theft Horse, and it’s exactly as perfect as one would expect. A vast western in story and scope that covers everything from gunfights to card games to tying people up and leaving them on the train tracks. A masterpiece in every way.

Archived Turbulent Waters

In case you forgot, The Turbulent Waters was my Ultima Online fansite from April 2000 - Early 2005 (or so) that was focused on ships and sailing in that pioneering MMORPG. After I closed up shop it was hosted for years by the cross-server guild the Fishing Council of Britannia.

Sadly, they seem to be gone now, and I had assumed that The Turbulent Waters went down with their ship. It turns out not being current on the internet in my old age missed the fact that what's left of the site (the main page) is preserved at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, a place that the internet is partially backed up, thankfully.

All of the graphics are missing but there are some great and passionate articles there regarding my last days playing Ultima Online and being an advocate of the development of the nautical aspect of it.
It's good to know that my efforts from that bygone era are still visible for future historians to ponder.