Best of 2010 according to GAMER.ru

The Year 2010 Comes to an End

For several weeks now, we have been living in anticipation of one of the most beloved holidays in our country — New Year. We prepare gifts, write kind words for greeting cards, and run around the stores like crazy, completing the quest to find the scarce components for the indispensable guest at the New Year’s table — Olivier salad. In short, we live with holiday spirit and fairy tales. Before the New Year, we usually reflect on the year gone by, and as promised, today you have the opportunity to check out our opinion on such a rich year of 2010. In this post, we share our impressions of the past 365 days, comments about significant events, people, and, of course, the most computer games that were released this year.

We deliberately abandoned a million nominations and listing games that “nobody played,” and divided our thoughts into several parts. In the first part, we will share our thoughts on the key events of 2010 and its main heroes. From the second part, you will learn which game has become the best in your opinion (sounds funny, we understand). In the third and fourth parts — editorial results, first sad, and then ecstatic. This year we selected the 10 best projects of the year and, of course, the best game according to GAMER.ru. Despite the lack of nominations, glancing at this top ten, you will easily understand who would win, for example, in the nomination for “Best Racing Simulator” or “Best Game for PlayStation 3.” We hope you will enjoy what we have created. Woo-hoo!

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Scandal of the Year

On March 1, 2010, two employees of Activision — Jason West, president, creative and technical director of Infinity Ward, and one of the company's founders Vince Zampella — were fired due to "insubordination and breach of contract." In reality, information leaked to the media that the cause of the conflict was the non-payment of severance for the development of the successful Modern Warfare 2. Three days after their dismissal, West and Zampella sued Activision and demanded payment, as well as the transfer of rights to the Modern Warfare brand. Eventually, the two rebellious men moved under the wing of Electronic Arts and created a new company — Respawn Entertainment. At their new location, they promised not to work on games in the Medal of Honor and Battlefield series. In this situation, if we set aside financial and ethical issues, the ones who suffered the most were the ordinary gamers who may never see a good shooter under the banner of TheNameYouCan’tMention. Well, and for Treyarch, which could essentially take the baton from Infinity Ward, as their latest performance in the genre showed, there was no hope at all. Thus, it turns out that we entered this year hoping to get three cool shooters at once, but ended with just one — Battlefield: Bad Company 2.

Event of the Year

This year saw a great many loud events, but still, one, even against the backdrop of impressive commercial successes of wizards from Blizzard in the PC market, stands out — the advent of two revolutionary controllers, PlayStation Move and Kinect. The ranks of hardcore PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 owners were thinned by a new casual audience, previously residing solely within Nintendo territory. With shiny controllers in hand, libraries of games for both consoles acquired fairly interesting projects — Dance Central, Fight, or, for example, Kinectimals — in which, to win, gamers had to get off the couch, learn several simple dance moves, act like a fighter by shaking their fists in the air, or pet a cute little tiger against the grain. However, despite the fact that Kinect and PS Move target similar audiences, the approaches to game creation by Microsoft and Sony differ somewhat. Bill Gates' subordinates do not even try to integrate their unique technology into “adult” games, while Sony, on the contrary, is preparing to release Killzone 3 and LittleBigPlanet 2, where players will be able to control characters using the glowing Move. It’s too early to talk about the outcome of this confrontation, and frankly, it’s not necessary, after all, Kinect and Move are too different devices. We only state that a step towards housewives and casual gamers has been taken. Now the choice is theirs.

Person of the Year

The situation with Polyphony Digital and its head, car geek Kazunori Yamauchi, is unique in the modern market. There is, as they say, something to learn from. A person — albeit a super talented one — is handed a suitcase with 80 million dollars to create a game, and they quietly wait for six years for results, almost without intervening in the process. Moreover, the game is not a multiplatform project but "just" an exclusive for PlayStation 3. And then Gran Turismo 5 was released, and despite positive yet restrained reviews from critics, and gloomy forecasts from analysts, it has silenced all detractors. According to Sony, around 6 million copies of the game have been sold worldwide — the game was bought by every seventh owner of a PlayStation 3! Thanks to its successes, extraordinary creative resilience, and open demeanor, Yamauchi-san becomes the person of the year according to GAMER.ru.

Company of the Year

In a fierce competition, after long deliberations between the two "big B's" (Blizzard and BioWare), we still decided to award the victory to Blizzard. Primarily for their passionate love for the PC — the sacred platform on the vastness of our homeland, — and secondly — for StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty and World of Warcraft Cataclysm. Besides these beautiful projects, in 2010 Blizzard also shared a whole bunch of news about probably the most anticipated game of next year — Diablo III. And for this news, too, they deserve special thanks. Next year, we expect even more pleasant surprises, loud announcements, and of course, the final version of Diablo III from Blizzard. If it were any other company, we would have to cross our fingers and pray, pray, and pray. But this is Blizzard, they are unlikely to let us down.

Platform of the Year

In the past year, thanks to the efforts of Blizzard and sales at Steam, the PC market has revived. Microsoft not only updated the Xbox 360 externally but also backed this event with the release of three exclusive projects — Alan Wake, Halo Reach, and Fable III (the latter, however, is expected to visit PC next year). The lineup of projects for the Wii in 2010 was the best in the console's entire existence. And yet, we give the first place to PlayStation 3. Sony's activity this year reminded me of the revolutionary approach to filmmaking created by BBS in the 60s and 70s of the last century. The executives of BBS — a bunch of educated young people, but true rebels at heart — suggested talented budding directors make the kind of films they wanted. Budgets were small, but “creators” received full freedom on set. In 2010, Sony released Heavy Rain and Gran Turismo 5 — projects with decent budgets, but with a spirit similar to the debut films of Bogdanovich and Hopper. For such a risk and, perhaps, the strongest lineup of exclusive games at the moment, PlayStation 3 is awarded the title of best platform of 2010 according to GAMER.ru.

Best Games of 2010 According to GAMER.ru Users

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3rd Place — StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty [PC] (142 points)

@sanchezz: Engaging, beautiful, balanced. A reference RTS in terms of both campaign and multiplayer.

@jour: A masterpiece compared to the others. Moderately epic, moderately clichéd, moderately beautiful.

@LaCTuK: Savored every minute in single-player mode.

@sergiyseriy: The best strategy in the world, what else is there to add?

@AQuaRity: StarCraft 2 is not just a tribute to old fans, but a hit worthy of 2010.

2nd Place — Fallout: New Vegas [PC, PS3, X360] (188 points)

@MrPatogen: The first two Fallouts mixed with the mistakes of the 3rd part. As a result, quite nice.

@Invizible: One of the brightest adventures of the year.

@Mackarov: Because war... war never changes.

@Edjik: A great story in an old universe.

@DarkSideCreo: Very cool, nothing compared to it this year.

@Rhino733: The best open world and atmosphere of 2010.

@ProF: Perhaps, indeed the best that could have happened to Fallout.

1st Place — Mass Effect 2 [PC, PS3, X360] (274 points)

@MrPatogen: Just an excellent continuation of the famous RPG.

@Hocc: It’s simply a game of a different level compared to all other projects.

@Pegazs: Not perfect, but so charmingly pompous that faith in the trilogy is revived.

@Magistr: A game where almost everything is impeccable.

@Mackarov: The best mixture of RPG and action about saving the universe.

@Apollo220: The only interesting space game these days.

@Soulstice: A wonderful continuation of the first part, which was also wonderful.

Disappointment of the Year

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3rd Place — Arcania: Gothic 4 [PC, PS3, X360]

@Kotovsky: The story of the Gothic series is a revelry of envy, a festival of greed, and a triumph of stupidity. In other words, it is not possible to explain all the misfortunes that have befallen the popular European role-playing brand over the past five years. It all started with a nasty dwarf publisher named JoWood loudly falling out with the authors of the series Piranha Bytes, taking away their rights to the Gothic gaming label and attracting Spellbound Entertainment, known for its well-tuned mechanism for cloning other hits, to develop the fourth part. However, something went wrong, and it was impossible to clone Gothic.

*The only right thing the developer and publisher did was changing the title of the game to Arcania: Gothic 4. This maneuver implies some kind of continuity, but also allows for a lot of innovations — after all, the first word is worth more than the second. As a result, the fourth "Gothic" is only "Gothic" by name. In mechanics, it’s whatever; anything but "Gothic". The dark atmosphere, merciless world to the lost traveler, fierce sword fights — in the past, forget it. Before us is practically a cartoon "Smeshariki": cheerful, with jokes, the main character darts around, cutting down flocks of monsters. The idea of exploring a vast game world for premature profit is killed at the root: if you arrive at any place earlier than the game designer intended, you may find nothing but an empty spot, and there won’t be even much of that since the game world is extremely closed off. And that's sad.*

2nd Place — Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight [PC]

@Kotovsky: To ensure decent sales of “the last game in the legendary Tiberium saga,” EA made an interesting video in the heat of “combat fantasy,” carried Kane (actually, of course, Joe Kucan) around various exhibitions and festivals for a whole year, launched their own TV show, and did a lot of useless things. Amid all of this, the creators suddenly forgot to make a decent game. C&C4 is as much a mockery of the series' fans as C&C Sole Survivor, released by mistake about 10 years ago and hurriedly forgotten. It is suspected that the marketers and game designers who thought the new C&C could do without base-building, resource gathering, and economic warfare — i.e. without the key elements of the RTS genre that actually grew out of the C&C series... So, it is suspected that these geniuses are not in the right positions. The outcome is sad: the army of devoted fans has scattered, each to their own, and there are simply no newcomers. Have you ever seen a tumbleweed? Go to the official forum of C&C4 and take a look — it’s a very interesting plant.

1st Place — APB: All Points Bulletin [PC]

***@NoFate: APB died almost right after birth. Some say that David Jones (who doesn’t know — the creator of the original GTA**) and Co simply miscalculated their forces, but a more plausible opinion is that the game simply turned out to be bad. Oh how great everything looked, what's called