May I have the envelope please?

So we now come to a start of a new year when all of the major gaming sites post their nominees and winners for video game of the year. Looking back at a year of video games and picking one out to be considered the "best" of the year is a topic which could no doubt inspire considerable debate. I have no desire to quibble a great deal with this or that decision of a particular gaming media organization, but simply to provide some basic thoughts some of the decisions that were made.

We all knew going in that Uncharted 2 would be at the top of the list, and unsurprisingly, many sites picked this as game of the year. Modern Warfare 2 also garnered its fair share of votes as well. No major site that I am aware of picked Left 4 Dead 2. I wonder if this is because, in spite of a tremendous amount of gaming journalism to the contrary, this was really just an expansion pack, as I have described in a previous post. I think, to some extent, Modern Warfare 2 was a little sketchy in terms of being considered a true sequel. In this regard, I think Infinity Ward was, in some sense, a victim of their own success with Call of Duty 4. I remember thinking to myself, is there really all that much they can do with the game, other than provide a new single player campaign and tweak the multiplayer a little bit? In the end, I was right. That is essentially all they did, which is not to say its a bad game at all, the shooting mechanics in the game are still incredible, but game of the year?-I'm not so sure.

One thing you can certainly say for Assasins Creed 2 and Uncharted 2 is that they are real honest to goodness sequels, not only tweaking certain aspects of gameplay, but providing completely revamped graphics engines and settings as well.

The real dark horse candidate in any of these game of the year deliberations, would have to have been From Software's Demon's Souls. Many organizations did not even consider this game worthy of nomination. I give credit to Gamespot for picking this one for the ultimate prize. I realize that games like Uncharted 2 are certainly worthy, but there is just something I like about a major gaming site bucking the big hype machine and going with a worthy, but under the radar candidate. I would also like to give a nod to Team Xbox for picking Assassins Creed 2, another game that I really enjoyed this year.