Before we get to the overall top 10 games of 2010 as voted by the IVG community, it’s time for us to reveal the winners in the other 12 Game of the Year categories, voting for which was conducted on the IVG forums. Here are the categories that were up for voting:
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Best Original Music
Best Sound
Best Story
Best Graphics (Artistic)
Best Graphics (Technical)
Best New IP
Best Game No One Played
Most Disappointing Game
Best Download-only Game
Best Single-player Game
Best Multi-player Game
One To Watch In 2011
Browse through the following pages to find out which games won, as well as the IVG Staff picks for each category.
Next page: Best Original Music
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A cowboy and his horse, sitting by a campfire, strumming a guitar, watching the sun creep up over the mountains, or falling asleep with the Milky Way wrapping her starry eiderdown over the desert. A soft twang, the hum of the birds, the howl of the coyote. The thunder of hooves and the rattle of wheels, interspersed with the staccato of gunfire or the clackety-clack of the steam engine, perchance with a whoo-whoo from the whistle on top of the carriage. The piano in the house of ill repute, the harmonica of the cotton picker, the spinning reel in the movie theater. Take your pick. Rockstar took all these sounds of the Wild West and composed a lovely score with it in Red Dead Redemption. Music fills the silence and sets the atmosphere. RDR’s music is the atmosphere, and silence is part of the score.
Staff Pick: Halo: Reach
Next page: Best Sound
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Sound can make or break the immersion in a game. The ears play an important part in how much we enjoy an audio visual spectacular. Red Dead Redemption brings alive the sound of Texas and Mexico. The accents, the ambient sound, the echo of gunfire in a canyon, rattling of wheels over cobblestones – these are small things people don’t notice. However, when they’re not there, we know something is amiss. Red Dead Redemption pays minute detail to sound design, achieving amazing realisim in the sound of the cowboy and his life. It’s still easy to get it right when you’re shooting a movie, but this is a video game. There’s no camera to capture the sound in a video game. It was a tough job, but Rockstar delivered.
Staff Pick: Battlefield: Bad Company 2
Next page: Best Story
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Boys want to be cowboys. Which one of us didn’t want to have a horse and tilt our cowboy heads and lead the rough life of Clint Eastwood? Rockstar made those dreams come true. However, just going along rustling cattle would not have been fun at all. Red Dead Redemption created a story, which we lived, travelling through Texas and Mexico, meeting conmen, revolutionaries, bonnie lasses, federal agents, and all the wildlife we could dream of. John Marston’s story is one of redemption, and the gameplay does an outstanding work of developing the story. It’s not just cutscenes either; clever use of conversations and newspapers and snatches of conversation bring the story to life. Red Dead Redemption also has one of the best writing in 2010. It’s a rare sandbox game that can deliver such a powerful story.
Staff Pick: Mass Effect 2
Next page: Best Graphics (Artistic)
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There’s the raw number-crunching horsepower of today’s processors that can make anything look photorealistic, but it takes a special eye for design to make it aesthetic and appealing. This category honours the game that had the best art design, Castlevania: Lord of Shadows is an explosion of colour, with its vivid vistas, jungles and ruins. The characters are designed with painstaking attention to detail. You sometimes wish that the game offered free camera movement just so you could stand in one place and gaze in wonder over the landscape. Kojima Productions brings their own special touch of the artistic to this reboot of the classic action platformer.
Staff Pick: Limbo
Next page: Best Graphics (Technical)
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If there was ever a no-contest in the 2010 Game of the Year categories, this was it. We were blessed with some beautiful games last year, from the cold and dark Limbo, to the cheery and colorful Kirby’s Epic Yarn, but when it comes to pushing hardware to its limits, no game did it better in 2010 than God of War 3. The series’ signature sense of scale was taken to a whole new level for Kratos’ first (and only?) outing on the PS3, and the game also boasts what is probably the best use of lighting on consoles. There wasn’t a pixel out of place, making God of War 3 the clear winner for the Best Graphics (Technical) category, picking up more than half the votes.
Staff Pick: God of War 3
Next page: Best New IP
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In a climate where devs and publishers are more than happy to churn out the sequel to an existing franchise, 2010 had its fair share of fresh, new IPs. From the angel slaying Bayonetta, to the end of the world adventure that is Darksiders, there’s a wealth of must-play games that are pretty original in thought, concept and execution. And IVG members, the connoisseurs that they are, chose what is perhaps the most ground-breaking title of the bunch – Heavy Rain. The great story, radical controls and interesting choices certainly made this Quantic Dream effort strike a chord with most of you. Especially with the controls, which is why performing a QTE seemed the way to go.
Staff pick: Darksiders
Next page: Best Game No One Played
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Overheard at a video game store:
“Oh, what’s this game Vanquish about?”
“Hmmm, I dunno, I’d Google it but my EDGE network sucks.”
“Well, it looks interesting, guns and all. But, but, but…the dude is not Kratos, Master Chief, Marcus Phoenix, Sam Fisher or even those random soldiers from COD.”
“You’re right, without any of those on the cover, it’s definitely not a good game. Let’s get Splinter Cell: Conviction instead!”
That is probably why Vanquish is the Best Game No One Played. It leads to two observations. One: people are too lazy to read the back of the box. Two: a decent portion of you have played the game; enough to recognize that this is without a doubt the most superlative title that everyone missed out on. It’s a tragedy because it’s got great gameplay, fantastic production values, and it allows you to throw back rockets fired at you by giant robots.
Staff Pick: Limbo
Next page: Most Disappointing Game
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In a year full of sequels and franchise games, it’s not exactly a shock to find that both of our winners for Most Disappointing Games are sequels. It’s not a surprise either that both games were supposed to give their respective franchises a makeover. Both games tried to mainstream their franchises by either copying from other games or dumbing down the core mechanics, and both fell flat on their faces. Medal of Honor (our community winner) was supposed to be a reboot to the series and take it into the modern setting. It copied the other big modern warfare (ha ha) shooter shamelessly and ended up as a soulless game with no identity of its own. Splinter Cell: Conviction (our staff pick) decided that being an action game would help it shift more copies than being a stealth game ever had. So out went everything that made Splinter Cell unique, and in went a whole lot of cover-based shooting, auto-aiming and running around openly in well lit areas.
Staff Pick: Splinter Cell: Conviction
Next page: Best Download-only Game
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There’s something to be said for a game that has almost no story, very little in the way of HD graphics, and rudimentary gameplay that harks back to the days of Mario on the NES. Everyone knows it as Limbo. Here on IVG, we call it the Best Download-Only Game. It’s one of those titles that’s so easy to fall in love with for the sheer simplicity of it all, wrapped in a dark, almost horror-like outer shell that changes your perception of what a platformer is and what it could be. That’s not say that it was the only standout download-only in 2010; we also had DeathSpank, Super Meat Boy and Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light (which came in second with 1.43% less votes). But math doesn’t feature in the maniacal world of Limbo. Just you, running through the darkness trying to find someone.
Staff Pick: Limbo
Next page: Best Single-player Game
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When we started working on this year’s GOTY awards, we were very clear that we won’t have more than five nominations per category. Very clear. You can all see now how that turned out, and the blame squarely lies on this one category, where we could not arrive at a mere five nominations amidst the quality offerings. 2010 saw some of the best single-player games (and campaigns). Through the year, we saw the return of old heroes, some in their swan song, and the rise of new ones. And a new one it is that captured the fancy of the IVG community, with Red Dead Redemption snagging the Best Single-player Game award. It wasn’t just the great cast of characters, the top-notch production values and refined GTA4 gameplay mechanics. The greatest achievement of Red Dead Redemption lies in its game world. Deceptively sparse, surprisingly dangerous, where something is always waiting for you around the corner.
Staff Pick: Mass Effect 2
Next page: Best Multiplayer Game
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As far as winners are concerned, you probably couldn’t pick two games that are farther apart than Halo: Reach and Bad Company 2 (our staff and community picks respectively). Bad Company, with its modern weapons, settings, unlocks, classes and maps is almost a poster boy of current generation shooters. Reach, on the other hand, with its colorful outlandish weapons, bizarre futuristic maps and core mechanics is as close as you can get to the classic Quake/Unreal shooters of the old. But despite being at the complete opposite ends of the spectrum, both games did have a few things in common as well. They were both balanced to perfection, they both had wonderful support from the developers (DICE with free maps, Bungie with user-created content), and both of them were an absolute riot to play.
Staff Pick: Halo: Reach
Next page: One To Watch In 2011
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Let’s get the obvious out of the way. Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception is the choice of both readers and the staff as the one to look forward to in 2011. Now since we’ve crossed that hurdle, the important question is why this PS3 exclusive beat out everything else on the horizon, including heavy hitters like Elder Scrolls V, Mass Effect 3 and Gears of War 3. Our in-house team of expert conspiracy theorists (read: hamsters on a wheel) have concluded that it could be due to these factors:
1. Rising prices of vegetables leaving our large herbivore population to look somewhere else for their fix. UC3’s graphics, we’re told, are good enough to eat.
2. Celebs going topless in print publications, causing people to fuss and fret over reading magazines as it would be taboo, and hoping that Elena does the same in UC3.
3. Dhoni’s poor captaincy which led to us not winning the Test series against South Africa has put people off cricket for life and look to UC3 for solace.
We soon decided that all of the above were rubbish. It’s obvious that everyone’s interested in Uncharted 3 because it’s the sequel to what is perhaps the most awarded game in this console generation, and Drake’s Deception seems likely to carry that forward.
Staff Pick: Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception
Click here to see which games made our list of the Top 10 Games of 2010 as voted by the IVG community.