LogFAQs > #876769043

Those games were great, but the biggest game of the year, by a mile, was Modern Warfare 2. 2008 featured a Treyarch Call of Duty and it sold millions but everyone was looking forward to the next Infinity Ward game. Call of Duty was never bigger than it was in 2009. I knew more about night vision goggles than I could ever imagine thanks to the $150 prestige edition. The expensive marketing campaign for its release was suffocating. The single player was mired in controversy by the "No Russian" level where you were shooting innocent civilians. The biggest news story of the year was when West and Zampella, CEO and COO at Infinity Ward, were suddenly fired and forcefully removed from the studio for.. we'll probably never totally know. It happened weeks before MW2 came out and was seen as a power grab by Activision to ensure that Infinity Ward was controllable. Activision had seized public enemy #1 from EA a year or two prior and this fit into that narrative. MW2 the game was pretty good - I don't think it was as universally beloved as COD4 but it did ratchet up the action and kept COD on top of the game. It would remain on top of the industry for several more years.

My game of the year, and one of the biggest games of the generation, was Street Fighter IV. It might be my game of the decade too. SF4 hit at the perfect time. It was a fantastic revival of a dormant franchise; better yet, it was revived by simply going back to what made the series great: Street Fighter 2. It had a familiar core and new systems that felt good. Perhaps more notable than the game itself is the culture surrounding it. SF4 hit alongside streaming sites like justin.tv and and ustream. Youtube was ubiquitous enough that you could find the world's best matches on demand. Tournaments were streamed each weekend; Evo 2009 was the first year that Evo really exploded in popularity, again, thanks to the synergy of streaming and SF4. Uncharted 2 and Arkham Asylum were amazing games but most people ripped through them in a week. SF4 was the biggest fighting game in the world for 6 or 7 years.

XBLA was tame compared to 2008's year of the ever, but it did feature one huge game: Shadow Complex. Here was an Epic subsidiary making a Super Metroid-like in Unreal Engine. Weird! It was also pretty awesome. In the years since Shadow Complex, the indie scene took over and made a bazillion Metroid-likes, but in 2009 it felt like a great rebirth of a long dead genre. Shadow Complex was visually bland and the 2.5d wasn't my favorite, but the progression and the weapons felt pretty darn good.

Those were the really big games on console. Dragon Age was a nice throwback isometric RPG from Bioware; Demon's Souls hit on PS3 to relatively little fanfare and won Gamespot's GOTY; Left 4 Dead 2 iterated on the L4D formula and was most notable for being a surprisingly quick sequel from a company that usually supports the hell out of their games; Borderlands combined FPS games with Diablo to create the loot shooter; Resident Evil 5 hit and was way more action-y than previous games, and ultimately pretty disappointing when compared to the amazing RE4. Nintendo put out Wii Sports Resort with motion plus, which was a good one of those but a.) most people were over those kinds of games and b.) it lacked the charm that the original Wii Sports had. Nintendo also put out NSMB Wii, a much-improved game from the original NSMB. NSMB played like Mario 1 whereas NSMB Wii felt more like a Mario 3. Ubisoft put out Just Dance, a waggle dance game that sold like ten million copies or something dumb like that.
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xyzzy