5 of my favourite games from this year. I’ll add some notable ones thereafter but these are the 5 that captured my attention, imagination and – most importantly – my time. Oh, and my money… most definitely my money.

Although I’ve ranked the games from 5 to 1 (1 being the best), the 5th, 4th, 3rd and 2nd games may as well be lined up together as an equal share of awesome while the first is most certainly my “game of the year”.

5. Deus Ex: Human Revolution

The original Deus Ex was a stunning showpiece for PC gaming. How do you create a fully realised world? By having meaningless bits of it work, like ATM machines and the ability to wander up to seemingly random folks on the street and have a chat to them.

This new title was fraught with worry from gamers. Could Square Enix re-capture that feeling from being in the Deus Ex world? Or will this be so bad it ruins the original… As it turns out they did a great job. They captured a great middle ground between a full world that suits Deus Ex and a story that belongs with Ghost in the Shell in terms of sci-fi that might actually come true.

The story is a huge strong point for this game, even more than the excellently orchestrated combat, visuals and acting. The script is strong, solid and easy to follow and the voice acting is one of the best I’ve heard – not just this year, but any year.

This would have been the best FPS RPG type of game this year if Skyrim wasn’t released.

4. Portal 2

I remember when Valve acquired the students who made Narbacular Drop everyone expected something special. Add the flare and creative spark from Valve, coupled with their excellent Source engine and give it an odd puzzle-solving twist and you have to be onto a winner. And they were. Portal was a commercial & critical success that bound FPS style gameplay elements with puzzle solving. Something you often don’t get. The fact that Valve had released a game with no major multi-player element was testament to the fun of Portal. The script was incredible and it launched Jonathan Coulton’s career into new realms with the track “Still Alive”.

With that, most fans would have been happy if Portal 2 was just Portal with new puzzles but Valve really kicked it up a notch. They added Wheatley, the now-synonymous scientific robot entity that was cast brilliantly with Stephen Merchant as the voice behind the ball of cables.

In Portal we had GLaDOS, cake and personal companion cubes as memes, but Portal 2 stepped it up with potatos and Cave Johnson.

Portal 2 deserves to be in every “top games of the year” list because it’s so good, so fun and so funny. The direction Valve are taking with the Source engine is exemplified with new effects seen in Portal 2… which hopefully leads on to Half Life 3 (or episode 3).

3. Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

This is a surprising entry. Not because it’s not number one on the list but because it’s on the list in the first place. I hated Morrowind. I hated Oblivion. I actually dislike Lord of the Rings, LARPing and games/books/movies set in fantasy lands that involve “magic”. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed such a thing from start-to-finish without being unimaginably bored for lengthy periods of time.

Skyrim is Bethesda’s answer. It’s the everyman RPG with magic, potions and men who look like cats. The opening sequence involves you as an interned criminal. How you manage to stop being interned is exactly what stopped me being bored… dragons. The game is all about dragons and violence. I’m into that. In fact, despite not being that far into the game, but far enough in to have a grasp of the story and direction of the game, I’m glad I don’t have to use magic, potions and other such horrendous “get out of jail free” cards RPG writers use to make their boring stories interesting (my opinion, of course).

There’s a lot to talk about in Skyrim. It’s difficult to explain the scope of this game, and in fact one of my only complaints is that some quests take a long time to do because you have to go an incredible distance to get to the quest location (once you visit a place you can get there in one click via the in-game map).

2. MineCraft

Indie darlings Mojang only released MineCraft a month ago, but many people have had it for well over a year now thanks to their business model. The model was to release the game in alpha mode for a low price and let it generate revenue before it’s even released. This was a genuinely brilliant idea that generated millions in revenue without having a finished product shipped. Slowly but surely the team added features as the game went through alpha phases and finally released a product that made sense.

While I’m gushing over it, it is worth noting that the game is horribly difficult to get to grips with if you’re a new user because there is literally no in-game help or assistance. There’s also no clear story mode to help you understand it. It’s kind of like dumping someone into an online StarCraft match with a pro player without explaining a thing or providing the single player experience first…

All that considered, it’s hard not to feel a sense of joy about this game. It’s great to see an indie developer do so well so quickly, and still have the ambition to go forward as an indie – ignoring the courting advances of EA amongst others.

And while I’m on about Sweden…

1. Battlefield 3

…which is also the home of DICE. Anyone who’s ever visited a shop, gone online or talked to someone who plays games knows what BF3 is. No, it’s not the next iteration of Bad Company, which was a lot of peoples’ introduction to Battlefield via consoles. No, BF3 is a stunning follow up to 2005′s Battlefield 2. Yes. 2005. I know a lot of people who will wince at that fact.

Years of mine life were lost to BF2, and indeed 1942. BF2 was an amazing open-world experience. For me it defined multi-player as an experience far beyond my first online MP days with Unreal Tournament. There is quite literally nothing like running to a capture point by gunning down 3 Chinese enemies on Wake Island while a helicopter crashes into a jet above you and a boat is launched into the air via C4 on the beach below. All controlled by real people somewhere in the world.

BF3 does nothing new. The netcode is improved. The graphics are far superior to anything this year and it runs on the earth-shattering (quite literally) Frostbyte2 engine, which gives DICE games the ability to destroy everything in front of them. This means that the mayhem and madness of Battlefield also includes destroying buildings. Twice yesterday I died because of RPG fire. I didn’t get hit by the RPG or the fallout from it… but no, the RPG took out a wall which took down the roof on top of me. The game told me “Bad Luck”…

The level unlocks are great and frequent enough to make the next round worthwile. I’m only level 13 but feel I’ve achieved a lot in that time, but obviously have a lot to do also.

The new maps are a mix between close-quartered areas and huge open worlds that would rival full games, let alone single maps in a 64-man battle.

The two maps that stand out for me are the two Parisian ones. One is set in the Metro tunnels under the city. Russians invade from the streets above while US troops try to defend the tunnels and get back out to the streets above. Stunning and life-like city streets add an extra sense of wonder to the game.

Seine Crossing is another real-world map with photo-realistic design and graphic notches. It’s here that using an RPG to blow the side of a building up really shines. There is no greater joy in this world than blowing the side of a building off to expose an enemy position.

There is a single player addition to this game, which helps new users get to grips with it as well as appease the console entrants to the Battlefield. The SP campaign is very good but falls short of Modern Warfare 3 simply because MW3 is ridiculous, over-the-top and maddening, which gives it the extra edge. BF3′s realistic campaign just doesn’t compare to rolling into Berlin as buildings fall down around you. But the multiplayer experience is far, far superior in DICE’s effort.

Enjoy!

It goes without saying that Battlefield is a huge franchise. It lept beyond the PC-only era into consoles with Bad Company. Bad Company 2 was DICE’s attempt to “PC-ify” the console generation with a more advanced level of difficulty applied to online gaming. With that in mind, console gamers have been taught how Battlefield works when it’s done properly.

BF3 is the spiritual successor to Battlefield 2, which was the last hurrah for DICE’s PC exclusivity. However it feels like a grown up version of Bad Company 2. The HUD, audio and visuals are similar to BC2 – but the difficulty is notched up. This game was quite clearly built for PC gamers and ported back to consoles. This is no more evident than when trying to play a balanced game with controllers versus keyboard & mouse. Of course, this is all subjective, but it matters. It’s more immersive on the PC where it looks better firstly, plays better secondly and is easier to get to grips with.

Server browser is HTML5 powered

Console gamers can jump in fairly handily. However, PC gamers are subjected to “Origin”, which is EA’s answer to Steam. The application itself is fine but in order to play a game you need to launch from Origin, which goes to a browser address which acts as a server browser, etc. This is an entire extra step just to play a game that feels needless.

The browser is well built and works well. In fact it’s so well thought out it’s a joy to use. It also means updates come server-side rather than client-side. However the extra step of having to load Origin first feels clunky and pointless, especially when Origin could have easily built a web browser into itself.

Multiplayer feels phenomenal. There are server crashes here and there but this is, generally, out of EA or DICE’s control. There is also a lot of lag, which is something DICE really needs to address better. Even when it crashes, much like BF2, you still have the urge to jump back into a game.

There still is nothing that compares to 32 people fleeting across a small bit of ocean from an aircraft carrier towards 32 people protecting their land. People loading into boats, people shooting each other to get planes and choppers and the people who spawn late who are forced to swim for it (or be snipers). Launching a huge assault is great fun, regardless of how good or bad your score is.

DICE decided to consolidate some of the class based system which was perfected and popularised by BF2. Assault now also includes the medic functions (my speciality) and as you play through you unlock items like the defibrillator, etc. The classes perfectly compliment each other, much like they did before. It makes no sense not to have a medic and an engineer in a squad, especially when you’re using vehicles.

Airstrip? Nah. Land in a driveway.

A new thing I’ve noticed when playing, that never happened in any previous games, is squads and teams organising properly in spawn points to arrange their assault. This is no more evident in the brilliant Seine map, which features two crossing points over the river via two bridges. It plays out much like 2Fort in Team Fortress, but with the obvious extra crossing to avoid deadlock. Flanking is the name of the game, and the map is tight enough to allow a lot of points of contention.

This map is by far my favourite, but for a slightly bigger map with more options in a bigger 64-man game, Operation Mètro plays very well.

I’m not sure why both of these maps are so well honed compared to the rest, or why they’re set in Paris, but they feel much like it did when playing Karkland in BF2, with infantry-only settings.

Speaking of Karkland, the expansion due in December should appease BF2 fans like myself who are missing the grand scale of Karkland or Wake Island, which feel like they’re somewhat omitted from the new maps. In fact, the new maps feel more like better adaptations of Bad Company maps, rather than maps designed to remind PC gamers of how good BF2 was.

Karkland is coming in a month!

The thing that makes Battlefield what it is, is the sense of chaos that permeates the game. On the PC it’s exactly that. Demonstrating the game to other people I explained every single thing going on is someone making their own decision. Driving jeeps over hills to try and land near a flag in a position they won’t get shot in, planes falling from the sky, tanks reversing to avoid the man in front of them with the rpg launcher, random knife battles, and now with the added bit of chaos created when a building explodes into pieces in order to reveal a sniper.

On the consoles, with its limited number of players and lack of immersive control mechanics, it just doesn’t feel the same. There’s not as much chaos. There’s not as much fun… and in the more organised games players don’t quite know how to not play like they’re rambo. I will concede this experience is based on limited playing and observing others, but it’s immediately obvious that the PC experience is better than the console one.

Overall this is a remarkably well done return to the series and a great spiritual successor to BF2, even if it shares more in common with Bad Company 2. With the flaws of Origin and the crashes that occasionally occur it’s still the best of the “big” online shooters. 64 men battling it out with planes, tanks, choppers and infantry is still the most impressive online experience you can have. [9]

For example, there were over 8 million players in the beta. They shot 47 billion shots (BILLION!). You’d also have to be over 600 meters to feel safe from the wrath of a marksman… potentially.

Other fun stats are available on their info graph, via the battlefield blog.

For the first time in a linear update for Battlefield (i.e. not Bad Company) we will have a single player campaign, which Activision and Infinity Ward say demonstrates EA and DICE’s fear of Modern Warfare – and a direct hit at how they run their games.

Eurogamer sat down with DICE to ask their opinion. “We’re not straying away from the formula,” Patrick Bach, executive producer says. He continued, “It is a very different feeling we’re going after. We’re not straying away from our own ideas. We are looking at our own stuff, maybe a bit too much at times because sometimes you forget to look at what everyone else is doing. But of course it adds a lot of pressure when people’s expectations are that maybe we should do something else, rather than doing what we’re doing.”

Spoilers were revealed in the interview (titled “The Making of Battlefield”) that show a shocking scene, much in the same vein as the Modern Warfare series. Famously the first MW iteration showed a nuke going off where, in first-person mode, you died. In the second game there was a scene where you play a terrorist shooting civilians.

A war of words is going to be the defining thing for both of these games, but something gives me the feeling that regardless, most FPS fans are going to end up with both games anyway!

And here we are at that moment.

To be fair, the minimum specification requirements aren’t that bad. A 2GHz dual-core processor running Vista on 2GB of memory isn’t asking a lot. Graphics cards with 512MB RAM are a dime a dozen these days, too.

Minimum System Requirements
OS: Windows Vista (Service Pack 2) 32-Bit
Processor: 2 GHz Dual Core (Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHZ or Althon X2 2.7 GHz)
Memory: 2 GB
Hard Drive: 20 GB
Graphics Card (AMD): DirectX 10.1 compatible with 512 MB RAM (ATI RADEON 3000, 4000, 5000 OR 6000 series, with ATI RADEON 3870 or higher performance)
Graphics Card (NVIDIA): DirectX 10.0 compatible with 512 MB RAM (NVIDIA GEFORCE 8, 9, 200, 300, 400 OR 500 series with NVIDIA GEFORCE 8800 GT or higher performance)
Sound card: DirectX compatible
Keyboard and Mouse
DVD ROM Drive

The recommended specs are beefy enough, but reasonable given how delicious this game looks. A quad core CPU comes with most higher-end computers. 4GB of memory is standard in anything over €700 too. While the GPU is asking a lot, it’s still reasonable enough for most high end PC gamers.

Recommended System Requirements
OS: Windows 7 64-Bit
Processor: Quad-Core CPU
Memory: 4 GB
Hard Drive: 20 GB
Graphics Card: DirectX 11 compatible with 1024 MB RAM (NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 560 or ATI RADEON 6950)
Sound Card: DirectX compatible
Keyboard and Mouse
DVD ROM Drive

Joy of joys, though, is that my Macbook Pro should churn this out fine (via Bootcamp!). I’ve the higher spec 15-inch, so the only compromise is that the GPU is a Radeon 6700 range rather than 6950, but it does meet the memory requirements, and I’ve 8GB of memory on an SSD! /bragging

This footage comes ahead of the second Operation Guillotine trailer, which is due out tomorrow.

A lot of first-person shooters have engineering class players. This lets objectives be reached with players who have the ability to repair items and build deadly items to murder enemies.

Battlefield 3 will (kind of) have both of those. Regenerating health through medikts left around by medic class players. However, tanks will be able to recover from light damage by staying out of harms way. This effectively lets the tank regenerate health by itself without the intervention of engineers.

DICE say this is to make sure drivers keep cool and don’t play the game as gung-ho as they might have otherwise.

It seems a bit pointless to me to have an engineer class as well as regenerating tank health, but we’ll see how this affects gameplay when the game comes out later this year.

A lot of their profits are derived from yearly updated games. In Europe FIFA trounces anything each year, while in the US Madden trounces anything else. Years ago, racing games were the best example of how to make flashy graphical leaps in console generations, and Need for Speed was top of the pile. It went into the yearly rotations EA did before getting old, tired and worn out. Especially when faced with Criterion’s Burnout series which was infinitely more fun.

A reboot a few years ago cashed in on the generation of hoodlum youths who wanted to imagine their Nissan Micra had neon and they were racing across railroad crossings in slow motion against Vin Diesel. Then the series, as it tried to re-create the same game over and over again rather then reboot the series again and again became tired, old and again trounced by Burnout.

After a break, EA returned with a proper developer who developed Need for Speed into an actual racing game. A game I didn’t like.

It’s 2010, and again the game needs a reboot. Using real developers showed the potential of the series. Not because the series can be good – with the right talent any old crap can be made good. No, what ‘Shift’ did was show EA that there is a genuine lust for a good version of the series. Handing it over to the developers who showed NFS to be crap was a great mood. Criterion created Burnout and killed NFS. Now they’re working on NFS, because of course EA bought the venerable developers.

So how do you work on NFS after you built Burnout Paradise? Well, you do the same – again. One of the failings of Paradise was that, while the racing was fun and the game itself was enjoyable, Paradise city was awful and finding races was a nightmare to do because simply driving around the city was not rewarding or enjoyable. Also the routes of races were long, winding, laborious and not exactly ‘racing game’ ish. It provided very little replay-ability outside of getting new cars, and later on bikes.

So, Criterion are masters of creating a racing title with fun, intriguing racing modes and great cars with excellent arcade-like handling. But the open world was where their last title fell down. So what could they have done, especially now that they’re part of the behemoth EA? Contact someone within EA who might know something about big, open world planning that people love, know and importantly for a racing game, can learn. You need to know when to clip the apex, when to hit the brakes hard or when to hammer down the throttle. Paradise never afforded you that knowledge because it was too big, too open and racing was too sporadic.

Shooter games are like this with open worlds. You need to know where you are. Where can you hide? Where is the enemy hiding? And how can you exploit all of these variables to win by brute force, or with tactics? One game series that does this so perfectly it makes other developers sick is Battlefield. For years level design has been a huge strong point of DICE in Sweden’s. And why bother trying to replicate it when you’re all part of the same global corporate family? Criterion have called their colleagues at DICE in to help with the open world bit of their game.

Burnout Paradise was big and often silly for a racing game. Need for Speed, however, will be four times that size. The 200 men at DICE know a thing or two about this kind of scale, and so they’re going to help the Burnout developers work things out.

“It’s been a great collaboration actually. Early on we set style guides for what we wanted to create out of this game, to offer players the ability to see a wide variety of types of environments from the deserts to the mountains to the forest to the coastal routes and so forth,” art director Henry LaBounta (formerly of George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic company) told eurogamer.

Drivability is key here. Criterion know how to make physics, design and style churn out a beautifully fun but not ludicrous driving style that gives the game finesse but without sacrificing ease of entry for new players. DICE can build a world, and so the mission for DICE was to create a world that was easily drivable and exciting in a race scenario.

Need for Speed was introduced to the world as a game where mad-hatter boy racers could pit themselves against each other, and then get chased by the cops. Through rebranding that got lost somewhere, and Criterion have gone back to the series’ beginnings to get things back on track, as it were. So not only does the game world need to be drivable, it needs to play to two types of scenario – basic racing, and evading.

The game will have a more official launch at gamescon next week, but with these two working on the title it’s bound to be brilliant. Not just as a released product, but the after-sales pitch from Criterion is always worth buying into. This makes 2010 a rather interesting year for racing fans, as for the last few years it’s been weak on that front. No F1 game is being addressed in September, while the lack of next-gen Gran Turismo (ignoring Prologue) will end at Christmas. There’ll be plenty of competition on that front, but it does seem that each game is a compliment to each other, rather then a detraction. With the online mode bound to be epic with DICE and Criterion at the helm, this could be something special for those looking for online racing action.