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What A Scrabulous Year!
If Halo 3 is a first-person shooter, Portal is a first-person puzzler. You're trying to escape from a research lab, armed only with a gun that fires the titular portals: place one portal against a wall and the other on the ceiling, and when you walk into the wall you'll fall through the ceiling. From this simple, brilliant gameplay concept, Valve Software has created a minimalist masterpiece, with its twisted narrative serving as the icing on the cake.
4. Wii Play
How do you turn a mediocre collection of mini-games into a yearlong hit? If you're Nintendo, you package it with a Wii Remote and watch as the Wii Play bundle prints money for your company. After all, hardly anyone is buying the highly social Wii to play games by themselves, so those fortunate enough to get their hands on one of the consoles are easy marks for a salesclerk who says, "If you're looking for an extra remote, why not buy Wii Play for just $10 more?" At 3 million copies sold in the United States alone for a gross of $150 million, it's clearly the marketing move of the year.
5. BioShock
Ayn Rand and art deco don't usually serve as inspiration for game designers. Thank goodness the folks at 2K Boston/Australia decided to draw on something besides "Aliens," "Black Hawk Down" and "The Lord of the Rings." At its best, this ambitious story of an undersea utopia gone horribly wrong is both thought-provoking and genuinely moving.
© 2007
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Member Comments
Posted By: lostalaska @ 01/08/2008 8:18:31 PM
Comment: grifter999, I totally agree about Halo 3 being (IMHO) inferior to HalfLife 2 and CoD4. Still the entire point of this article/list wasn't so much about which games are best, but about which games brought some form of innovation that will have a lasting impact on gaming for years to come, and Halo 3's video replay and posting abilities definitely raised the bar in that aspect. Most Important is very different than most fun or best games of the year.
Posted By: griffter999 @ 01/05/2008 2:54:12 PM
Comment: Personally, I didn't like Halo 3. I'm not a fan of the series. This may come as a shock but I feel disconnected when I play a game like Halo. There are shooters out there that make me feel like I'm a part of the action and that I'm really the person behind the gun and Halo just doesn't do that. The important thing I find in a shooter is that I want to know I'm shooting someone and that there's always a reasction when you shoot whatever it is that you're shooting. The two games that are the best at this in my opinion are half-life 2 (and all the subsequent episodes) and Call of Duty (all of them) which is why I'm surprised that CoD4 isn't in your list.
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