One thing we’ve learned is there are too many games and too little time to play them all. This also means there isn’t even enough time to give all of them awards, but we try our best. Today we take a look at both the most time consuming efforts of the past year as well as give some awards for games that deserve some notable mentions as well.

Game Most Likely to Consume Your Life: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Two Hundred and Fifty Hours. By most estimates, this is how long it’ll take an average player to explore MOST of the content of Skyrim. To give some perspective, if the average person works a 40 hour a week job, Skyrim would take six and a quarter full work weeks to complete. Now, we realize that most gamers work jobs outside of the gaming industry and cannot devote a full forty hours a week to a single game.

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Yesterday we took a look at Minecraft, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, Capcom, Dark Souls and Portal 2. Today, we have a whole second set of awards to be given out for the best (and worst) of 2011.

Game That Shouldn’t Have Taken Nearly As Long to Come Out: Duke Nukem Forever

What happened in the time span since Duke Nukem Forever began development?

The entire Presidential run of George W. Bush.

This writer’s entire high school and college career.

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith, and The Clone Wars were all released in theaters.

The XBox was released and ended its lifecycle.

Activision released 7 proper Call of Duty titles.

Lost.

A child born when development started would have grown to be a teenager.

The list goes on and on…

And the worst part is, after all that wait… Duke Nukem Forever wasn’t very good when it did finally come out. What was considered controversial when the game began production is pretty tame by comparison to what people are enjoying in gaming now and the humor comes off as sophomoric instead of clever.

While we can understand the desire to release a passion project to finally let it see the light of day, sometimes it is better to let it enjoy a quiet death with some dignity instead of coming out guns blazing as a failure.

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2011 was one heck of a year for gaming. Once again, the Call of Duty franchise set records for the largest entertainment launch in history. A game that was only in Beta was able to sell millions of copies and spawn an ungodly large community to the point they had a convention before the game was officially released. There were tons of critical darlings encouraging developers to rethink how they create games.
Take a look this week at the awards The Flickcast (along with The Bitcast team) are proud to present for gaming in 2011

Think Outside the Box Game: Portal 2

While many may argue that Minecraft may be the most deserving of this award, they need to remember one thing. In Minecraft, there are no rules. The expanses of the box are too extreme to find the outer boundaries of. Within Portal 2, players are asked to explore new viewpoints of physics, matter and… well, portals. The puzzles in Portal 2 completely overtake the complexity and creativity of the original, which in itself was groundbreaking. With additional toys at their disposal and the introduction of a cooperative mode, the team at Valve came up with a game that redefined both the puzzle solving and FPS genres all at once.

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2009 was a huge year for gaming. With some games not living up to lofty expectations, others took the reins set before them and ran with them further than many expected. Batman: Arkham Asylum proved it was possible to make a great game based on Batman, though it took the video game industry over 25 years to figure out how to accomplish that.

Wolverine: Origins proved that games based off movies didn’t have to be bad and in the eyes of many surpassed the quality of the film that inspired it. Legends were reborn as the Beatles were featured in their own Rock Band game. Yes, it was a momentous year for gaming which leads us to proudly present these awards for the Best Video Games of 2009.

Best Playstation 3 Exclusive Game

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune was easily one of the best early releases for the Playstation 3. But the problem is no one knew about it who didn’t have the system. A fantastic game, it fell victim to the lack of Playstation 3′s being in consumers’ homes. Knowing the gem they had their hands on, Sony made sure to give Uncharted 2: Among Thieves a spotlight at this year’s E3 along with a strong marketing push when it was released this year.

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