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.
This means that a title with the breadth of content that Skyrim contains that is, for the most part, addicting quality content will take up the better part of a standard gamer’s year. As discussed on The Bitcast during their Long Grind segment, Skyrim isn’t just a great game because of the length but it certainly helps when a player has the option to purchase a single player campaign that can take up so many hours compared to the now standard six to eight hours.
Best Super Hero Game: Batman: Arkham City
2011 was an interesting year for comic book games. It had some great highs like DC Universe Online being the first MMO release featuring licensing from a major comics publisher and Infamous 2 bringing a second fantastic sandbox super hero style world to PlayStation 3. It also had some blunders like Thor: God of Thunder and X-Men: Destiny but the less said about those, the better. What proved to be a highlight to the world of comic book games and just great games in general was Batman: Arkham City.
Batman: Arkham City brought everything that gamers could want and experienced in Batman: Arkham Asylum and expanded further on it with more challenges, an open world, an amazing voice cast and gorgeous art design. This game proves that licensed properties can not only overcome the stigma placed on them but end up becoming contenders for the top titles of the year.
Best Tower Defense: Orcs Must Die!
The tower defense genre started out with meager beginnings as simple flash games with basic mechanics. These 2D environments used to have a limited amount of combinations of towers to defend a home base with little deviation in the types and strengths of the enemies. With Orcs Must Die!, players were given a combination of creativity, ingenuity and humorous traps to stop the invading horde. Playing on the addictive nature of the genre and the inclusion of leaderboards to keep players competing for the top rank by rewarding brutality and creativity of kills, the team at Robot Entertainment got a winner on their hands with this downloadable PC and XBLA title.
Quickie Awards:
Best Name: Orcs Must Die!
… The name says it all.
Game Most Resembling an 80’s Movie: Homefront
Proof that Everything Can Be Made Better With LEGO: LEGO Star Wars: The Clone Wars
Best Commercial: PlayStation’s “Michael”
Game Most Unlike Its Trailer: Dead Island
Turnaround of the Year: The Nintendo 3DS
Game Most Likely to Consume Your Life If Not Playing Skyrim: Star Wars: The Old Republic
Best Use of a Chainsaw: Gears of War 3
Sorry Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine, while your Chainsword has been around longer, the Lancer is where it’s at.
Well that almost finishes up our Best of 2011 awards for the video game team on the Flickcast. For our Game of the Year selection, tune in to the next episode of The Bitcast where the team will let you listen in on their great debate over what they feel is the best overall game of 2011.
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