Halfway into the year, and already we have three amazing games in straight contention for Game of The Year.
I have already praised Mass Effect 2 to the heavens on these very pages, so I won’t dwell on it now. Suffice to say that when it arrived, it seemed all set to sew up top honours at the annual GOTY awards from various publications, including this one.
Now, we’re not so sure anymore. Thanks to one new hero and another very old one. One is an outlaw gunslinger out for redemption, and the other is an Italian plumber out to save a princess. Yep, Red Dead Redemption and Super Mario Galaxy 2 are two of the finest games of all time, and they’re both hogging more of my time than they reasonably should be.
Read Dead Redemption, fondly christened ‘Grand Theft Stagecoach’ in some circles, takes the winning GTA formula and puts it into a Wild West setting — with spectacular results. To be fair, RDR is arguably a more polished and ambitious game than GTA IV, which is saying something. There’s a whole lot of stuff to do, the gameworld is huge and drop-dead gorgeous, the controls are superb, and the story is top-notch. And the exotic nature of the Western theme elevates the experience a notch above GTA for me — but of course, this is a personal opinion. I hugely admire the GTA games, and readily attest to their greatness, but I never quite fell in love with one. Red Dead Redemption had me in the first fifteen minutes. A very important part of open-world games is the quality of the world you’re given to explore, and RDR’s gameworld sits proudly alongside the greatest gameworlds ever created. Besides, Marston is so tough, he looks like Wolverine after he’s cut himself shaving with his own adamantium claws.
Meanwhile, good old Nintendo has managed to something we previously thought impossible — improve on Super Mario Galaxy. Hard though this may be to believe, Super Mario Galaxy 2 actually surpasses the near-perfect original. It marries the tight, neat organisational structure of the Super Mario Bros lineage to the wild, loopy, topsy-turvy exuberance of Super Mario Galaxy’s 3-D control and navigation to create what is quite simply the most flawless videogame I can remember. There are a wider variety of levels and challenges, some new power-ups along with old favourites, and much Yoshi-riding goodness. Yoshi can gobble up wide variety of power ups this time, giving him special abilities too. But there’s no point in me pathetically trying to describe the utter joyous perfection of Super Mario Galaxy 2 in mere words. Get out there and buy it, to see for yourself. If you don’t have a Wii, buy one just to play Super Mario Galaxy 2. I’m serious. And if you think Mario is not hardcore enough for you, you must be a person who plays comparatively casual games. Like Modern Warfare 2. Your loss.
With the likes of God of War 3, Alan Wake, Heavy Rain and Just Cause 2 already out, and other mouth-watering titles like Halo:Reach, Gran Turismo 5 and Epic Mickey slated for release before the holiday season, 2010 looks like it’ll be another incredible year for gaming, with much to keep all kinds of gamers happy. And it could well be the last year of purely traditional 2D displays — with Sony and Nintendo (with the amazing 3DS) poised to take bold leaps into 3D territory next year.