Once a day for the six days leading up to the New Year, Ani-Gamers is posting an un-ranked list of our favorite titles from the year 2010, featuring up to two choices from each writer. Be sure to check back throughout the week to find out what geeky stuff our contributors really dug this year! We now present the choices from copy editor Sean Kim.
Super Meat Boy (Team Meat): Mind-numbingly difficult, yet surprisingly refreshing, Super Meat Boy manages to capture what truly makes a good platformer. It truly defines the masochistic style of game design, in a similar vein to other indie 2-D platformers: N+, Jumper, and I Wanna Be the Guy, to name a few. Everything about the game is polished, from the sounds that Meat Boy makes as he squishes his way through the levels to the beautiful and often varied environments. The gameplay is spectacular; not only does Meat Boy handle extremely well, the levels are designed with an amazing amount of detail to allow for an exhilarating rush when timing all the jumps perfectly. Make no mistake, though, this game is hard, and I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone. I found myself cursing at the TV on multiple occasions when dealing with some particularly challenging levels. If this type of game sounds interesting, you owe it to yourself to get Super Meat Boy. It is currently on sale for 800 MS points on the 360 and $7.49 on Steam for the PC (Mac version to be released in the coming months)
Super Meat Boy is also recommended by Ani-Gamers contributor Ink.
Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale (EasyGameStation): Capitalism Ho! Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale was certainly a surprising hit this year. The premise for the game is simple: you owe a lot of money and need to make it back through market manipulation and dungeon crawling. The gameplay is fairly basic at its core, but offers many different characters to explore various randomly created dungeons in search of fame and fortune. The item shop portion of gameplay takes a bit of getting used to, as the deadlines are a bit harsh, and the amount of options available to wisely spend your time and manipulate the market can make one’s head spin at first, though all these concepts are slowly introduced, as to provide a continual challenge throughout the game. Much of the game’s charm comes from the character interactions and dialogue. I often found myself laughing out loud at many situations, something rare in games these days. If you’re looking for a different kind of RPG, you should pick up Recettear, currently on sale on Steam for $9.99 for the PC.
Click here for all the 2010 Staff Picks posts.
