Board 8 > Games by year, ranked and explained - part II, 2005-2016

(+) Yeah! (+)

'06 better than I remembered! Too bad all the big games were busts to me. I was never really a big FF fan, but I enjoyed going through all the FF games. FF12 just felt...dull and lacking charm to me. I didn't feel very invested in any of it at all other than the usual FF staples.

I definitely remember that E3 with back-to-back PS3 embarassment and Brawl hype. Probably the most exciting E3 until the disaster that is 2010. And then after that would be the Xbone E3...was that 2014? That was definitely a great one, since it was basically the 2006 E3, but with Microsoft in the hot seat, while Sony basically became the hero for a week.
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XII is still my second favorite FF in the mainline series.
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KH2 and Okami, plus the Wii launch made 2006 pretty magical
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i have no idea what came out in 2007

2008, though. excited for that one.
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FFXII is fine, but it's a mid-tier FF.
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Not Dave posted...

i have no idea what came out in 2007

Only a little game called BioShock.

And a ton of other amazing titles. 2007 is a top year for vidya games.
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Bioshock is '08 for me (PS3)
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2007


Notable Games:

Ace Attorney 2
Ace Attorney 3
Assassin's Creed
Bioshock
Blue Dragon
Burnout Paradise
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
Contra 4
Crackdown
Crysis
Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker
Etrian Odyssey
Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn
God of War 2
Halo 3
Hotel Dusk: Room 215
Mass Effect
Metroid Prime 3
Odin Sphere
Peggle
Persona 3
Pokemon Diamond/Pearl
Portal
Rock Band
Super Mario Galaxy
Super Paper Mario
Team Fortress 2
Uncharted: Drake's Fortune

transience's take:

1 - Ace Attorney 3
2 - God of War 2
3 - Contra 4 (again!)
4 - Portal
5 - Ace Attorney 2

Overall: 18th

Gamerankings:

1 - Super Mario Galaxy
2 - Bioshock
3 - Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
4 - Halo 3
5 - God of War 2

GOTY Media Picks:

1 - Bioshock (47)
2 - Super Mario Galaxy (45)
3 - Call of Duty 4 (22)
4 - Portal (13)
5 - Rock Band (6)
5 - Halo 3 (6)

GameFAQs:

1 - Super Mario Galaxy
2 - Call of Duty 4
3 - Halo 3

What didn't come out in 2007? If there was a new franchise that originated on the PS3/360, chances are it hit in 2007. It's basically the gen 7 equivalent of 2001. Assassin's Creed. Mass Effect. Bioshock. Rock Band. Uncharted. Portal. You name it, it came out.

Where to even begin? It wasn't just that the big franchises started - many of them had lasting impacts on the industry. The biggest game of the year was probably Call of Duty 4. The early 2000s was dwarfed by Halo and its approach to FPS design. Call of Duty 4 went in a different direction. You were aiming down sights. You were leveling up. The combat was a lot faster and more twitchy. You're killing (or dying) and respawning a lot faster. There's a drip-drip aspect to the design ethos of a Call of Duty that just wasn't present in Halo. It was simpler and more accessible; another way to look at it was dumbed down. Either way, Call of Duty absolutely exploded, especially on Xbox 360. Halo 3 was the most hyped game of the year by a mile and was yesterday's news within six weeks. Call of Duty 4 was big, real big. It might be the biggest and most important game of the generation, depending on how you feel about Wii Sports.

Speaking of the 360, I feel like this is the year when everything fell into place for it. There were a whole lot of games that hit both the 360 and PS3 and most of them ran better on the 360, the cheaper console with the more straightforward architecture. The 360 had Bioshock and Crackdown and Mass Effect and Halo compared to the PS3 that had.. Uncharted? Shooters played better on 360 thanks to the built in install base that came over from the original Xbox. Online sessions worked better, voice chat was a standard thanks to a packed in headset, achievements were still new and exciting, the network was better, etc. There was the Xbox Live tax to consider but people were willing to pay for a better product. The Xbox was just better (except for the whole RROD thing, of course). PS3 would catch up over the years as more and more games got ported, but those early years were everything. The PS3 was playing catch-up for the rest of the generation.
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Back to the games. Assassin's Creed had a real next-gen feed to it thanks to the crowd physics and the number of unique NPCs on-screen at a time. It kind of played like a more sophisticated Prince of Persia. The game itself was a little underwhelming compared to the hype -- there was't a lot to do in the game despite the appearance of it being this huge interconnected world - but that would be fixed by the next installment. This was a common theme with many of the 2007 games. They promised great things but weren't quite there yet. Mass Effect was much the same - an amazing galaxy but clunky combat and controls (especially that Mako - holy crap). Uncharted was the definition of style over substance. I haven't played it but the shooting in that game by all accounts is a hot mess. Still, look at that thing. For 2007, whoa.

The critical darling of the year was Bioshock. Bioshock brought a vibe to it. It was immersive. It was frightening at times. It told a great story through the environment and used audio logs to great effect. Many of its tricks have been widely copied over the years. Bioshock was a single player FPS with no interest in multiplayer at all. It cared more about tone than shooting. In that sense, it was pretty unique. Maybe System Shock or Deus Ex went in that direction, but not so much on console.

The last game to bring up on the HD systems was The Orange Box. That was a bit of an eye opener. Not just Half-Life 2, but also episodes 1 and 2 which I'm pretty sure came out prior to 2007 but went global thanks to The Orange Box. Team Fortress 2 hit in 2007 which is still widely played today on Steam. But the game that stole everyone's heart was Portal. It was small in scope, maybe not worth a full price tag, but as a game that was a pack-in it blew the hell up. Portal thrived for its mind-bending puzzle design combined with its rye sense of humor. It's kind of painful to quote anything from Portal in 2017 but at the time it was fresh and you couldn't get away from it. That ending song capped off a brilliant video game. Portal's humor isn't fresh today but the gameplay is still as snappy and clean as any game out there.

That was the year for the HD twins. The Wii was a whole different story. There were two growing factions of Wii games that were quickly diverging. First you had the first party stuff, the real legit games, led by Super Mario Galaxy. Galaxy was an eye-opener. People were excited by it but it paled in comparison to Brawl, which took over the entire goddamn year, every single day, with the DOJO. That became a metagame unto itself. Meanwhile, Nintendo just casually dropped the literal greatest game of all time as per Gamerankings. Galaxy was packed to the brim with ideas. The gravity and the jumping between planets was really inspiring. Everything about this game screamed positivity. It felt like a triumph every time you turned it on. After the disappointment of Sunshine, regular old Mario wasn't really sexy anymore. There hadn't been a good one in over ten years. NSMB was also a pretty crummy game. But here comes Galaxy and Mario is better than ever.

Super Paper Mario came out and was a pretty big step down from the first two games, focusing more on platforming than the RPG elements that people came to the series for. Metroid Prime 3, on the other hand, was legit. The Wii Remote seemed to work well for a game like this and the design overall was more appreciated than Echoes. Plus, it was a new game on the Wii which was a little starved for great games, at least when compared to the deluge of the 360. Just like the Gamecube, it had the quality but not the quantity. You would get a RE4 port or a Warioware or a Fire Emblem here and there to brighten up the month.
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But the real power of the Wii showed itself in 2007. It started at the beginning of the year with Wii Play, a poor man's Wii Sports that came with a free Wii Remote and sold like 30 million copies over the course of its life. By the end of the year, the Wii was an absolute fad. Shovelware was starting to come out of every corner and it was all minigame collections. Carnival Games was the most infamous example. It was a terrible minigame collection. It got crushed by every review site. It has sold over 7 million copies. We were still in Brawl hype mode so the Wii wasn't public enemy #1 just yet but it was getting there. The Wii was the best selling console of 2007, but it wasn't crazy - 6.2 million to Xbox 360's 4.6. 2008 is where things went off the rails as the Wii sold double the closest competitor and broke 10 million units.

Of course, I wasn't really playing those huge games in 2007. For me, 2007 was all about Ace Attorney. AA2 started the year out strong and AA3 put a cap on it. We were spoiled - there was four years before the series made it to the states and we got all three games within two years. Now we would be lucky to get one game in two years. While it wasn't directly related to Ace Attorney, Hotel Dusk hit in 2007 which was very much in the same visual novel spirit. Not as quirky or goofy but just as intriguing. Pokemon hit the DS with Diamond/Pearl and Etrian Odyssey made its debut too.

If I wasn't playing DS, I was probably playing PS2. God of War 2 basically closed the door on the hardware by pushing it to its absolute limit. This game was super impressive technically and a lot better game than the original. I really love God of War 2 for reasons unknown - I think it just climaxes wonderfully and the combat is just fun enough to keep the great setpieces interesting. Persona launched in 1996 but in reality the first game that had any kind of mainstream pull was Persona 3 which also hit in 2007. I love Persona 3 a lot but I would never play the PS2 version again - more on this in a later year.

I could keep going on more and more games. Rock Band hit in 2007 alongside Guitar Hero 3. 2007 was probably the pinnacle of the plastic instruments era which probably qualifies as a fad if we're calling the Wii a fad. It came out, got hugely popular for 3-4 years and then faded back down into a core audience that stuck with it but couldn't sustain the massive sales numbers. GH3 probably sold something like 8 million copies LTD, maybe more. Meanwhile, Rock Band took it to the next level with drums and vocals. The game + equipment was something like $200 and people were gladly shelling it out. That shit was real for a while there. Crysis came out on PC and crushed graphics cards for years (not to mention consoles - that game was next-gen in a way that made new consoles look bad.) Blue Dragon was Mistwalker's first game and was notable not only for Sakaguchi's return to video games but also it being a Japanese 360 exclusive. Dragon Quest Monsters returned on DS with Joker. Odin Sphere had beautiful art but garbage load times. The list goes on.

Video games were healthy in 2007. You had multiple fads blowing up and huge trends that would last for years to come. You had the highest ranking game of all time. Most notably in my eyes, 2007 was the year that American devs took over. All of the big games on the HD twins were made by western devs. We'd get to know Bioware, Irrational, Naughty Dog and Infinity Ward like we knew Capcom, Konami, SNK and Square back when. Times were changing with the new console generation and they were changing fast.
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2007: Super Mario Galaxy > Trials & Tribulations > Persona 3 > Justice for All > Hotel Dusk > Super Paper Mario > Mass Effect > Portal > Assassin's Creed > Uncharted
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fads you say

ibmdk
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Ahhhhh yes 2007 was a great year indeed. Bioshock, super Mario Galaxy, portal, and odin sphere all blew my mind.
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2007 should do well...not wholy confident it will, but it was a good year.
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Awful year imo
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Burnout Paradise was awesome. Really wish there was a good follow-up.
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two ace attorneys, all I need for best year tbh

When going through a quick 2007 scan, I didn't even catch Persona 3! Jeeze. Anyways, Bioshock, Portal, Team Fortress 2, Double Ace Attorney, Hotel Dusk, Mario Galaxy, God of War 2 and Guitar Hero 3 + Rock Band makes it a pretty memorable year for me.
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Very unpopular opinion: Sunshine > Galaxy

And yeah, there was serious Ace Attorney withdrawal after that rapid fire initial release schedule!
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i didn't play an AA game between 2008 (finished AA3) and 2014 (started apollo justice)

feels good man
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I didn't get into Ace Attorney until...2008? 2009? So I had a flurry of AA games to play for a couple years and then nothing for three years.

I rarely get into any series right away though, so something like that isn't uncommon for me.
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I don't know if I'll be able to finish 2008 tonight but I'll try. 2008 is something.
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2008: both the peak and the death of the Wii.
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I'm definitely surprised years #1-3 are still out there and I say this as someone who is used to telling his friends that no, gaming isn't going downhill overall. I guess this surprise reflects my age except that transience and I are pretty close in that regard. So I dunno! Interested.
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most people think of me as an oldschool/nostalgic gamer and I'm guilty as charged there -- but there are a whole lot of great games released in the last 10 years.
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okay, yeah, this is too long to finish tonight. I'll get this up tomorrow.
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Was the first topic archived somewhere?

Been meaning to read it but didn't have the time
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ack, I meant to archive it

oh well
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Gmun to the rescue!

http://gmun.moe/b8/Lurker/topic.php?id=75141304
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nice! that's the only time I'll click on a .moe link
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2008


Notable Games:

Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney
Advance Wars: Days of Ruin
Audiosurf
Barkley: Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden
Bionic Commando Rearmed
Braid
Castle Crashers
Castlevania: Order Of Ecclesia
Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII
Dead Space
Devil May Cry 4
Disgaea 3
Dissidia: Final Fantasy
Fable 2
Fallout 3
Far Cry 2
Final Fantasy IV DS
Gears of War 2
Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2
Grand Thefy Auto IV
Street FIghter II: HD Remix
Left 4 Dead
Littlebigplanet
Lost Odyssey
Mario Kart Wii
Mega Man 9
Metal Gear Solid 4
Mirror's Edge
N+
No More Heroes
Patapon
Persona 4
Rock Band 2
Saints Row 2
Spore
Super Smash Bros. Brawl
Tales Of Vesperia
The World Ends With You
Valkyria Chronicles
Wii Fit

transience's take:

1 - Geometry Wars 2
2 - N+
3 - Mega Man 9
4 - Castle Crashers
5 - Super Smash Bros. Brawl

Overall: 2nd

Gamerankings:

1 - GTA4
2 - LittleBigPlanet
3 - World of Goo
4 - Metal Gear Solid 4
5 - Gears of War 2

GOTY Media Picks:

1 - Fallout 3 (69)
2 - GTA4 (39)
3 - MGS4 (38)
4 - LittleBigPlanet (24)
5 - Gears of War 2 (8)

GameFAQs:

1 - Super Smash Bros. Brawl
1a - Metal Gear Solid 4
3 - Fallout 3

Dear god. This year. 2008 has the most video games that I care about over any year by far. It's just an incredible assortment of awesome-ass video games. I can easily make a top 20 of the year and I'm pretty picky about my video games. I came super close to putting it #1.

Where to start? I can't hit on all of these because it will be like 8 posts and I'm not Heroic Mario or Leonhart. I guess I can start with the two blockbusters that overshadowed the rest of the year (and honestly, the last 2 years). Super Smash Bros. Brawl's release was almost anticlimactic because there was SO much hype for SO long that there was just no way to actually enjoy it as a simple standalone video game. Never before or since had there been a media cycle quite like this one. Every night at 3am there were updates that people tuned in for. Sometimes it was YOU MUST RECOVER and sometimes it was new characters. It went on for a year. Brawl finally came out after years of waiting and delays and was.. pretty good? I played this game to death in 2008. I never got into Melee and never played Smash 64, but Brawl hit a sweet spot with me as I finally had friends on a similar skill level to play with. I won't go too deep here because Brawl has been overanalyzed for a real long time. What I will say is that the shift from extreme excitement to minority disappointment to all-around ambivalence has been a really interesting dynamic with this game. Casual fans moved on to Smash 4 and competitive fans stuck with Melee. Brawl ended up in this weird spot. I still think this game is great though. I can't really justify playing it today as I don't have anyone to play against anymore. I generally feel like you can only really love one of these games since they're so similar and Brawl was that game for me.
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The other monster was Metal Gear Solid 4. MGS4 was the Playstation 3's first great hope for success (more on the other one later.) People put this game on a pedestal when they saw the 2006 trailer -- 15 minutes! with a cliffhanger! -- combined with the 599 us dollars announcement. It was a tough spot to be in - buy an HD console and play all the great games but also make sure you can play the thrilling conclusion to the Metal Gear Solid saga. MGS4's lead-up took on a similar life of its own to Brawl, but with a totally different dynamic. The Wii had already proven itself with Galaxy and Prime 3 while the PS3 was largely seen as squandering a big opportunity. But that was all going to be fixed - Snake was here.

MGS4 was.. well, it was the greatest game ever for about a week. The response was fascinating. It was such an emotional and conclusive ending to a 10 year saga that checked every box. People were spent after it happened. It was like they just had sex with a video game and were laying in bed afterwards. Then they woke up the next morning and were like "wait, everything was nanomachines?" "why was the gameplay so linear?" I still think MGS4 is a pretty good game but there was a lot of letdown in the weeks and months afterwards as people came to grips with the 90 minute ending and relatively straightforward gameplay. It played better than the games before it but something was a little lost. That's my take on it anyway.

The Wii and the PS3 had their killer apps in 2008. The 360 had some big games but nothing resonated quite like Fallout 3. It wasn't a 360 exclusive by any means but I think most people associated it with 360 because a.) it played better and b.) it was an RPG with guns and those games did best on 360. It sold way better on 360 than PS3 and spread by word of mouth throughout the year. Fallout 3's setting was new for a lot of players - 3 was WAY bigger than 1 or 2 - and it had a ton of charm. It ended up winning the most GOTY awards and put people on notice for Skyrim. Bethesda had hit a triple with Oblivion and then knocked it out of the park with Fallout 3.

The other big 360 games were Fable 2 and Gears 2. Gears 2 is most notable for introducing the concept of a horde mode. I don't think people liked the game nearly as much as the original but the multiplayer kept on giving. I didn't talk about Fable on the OG Xbox - it was pure Molyneux hype that fell a little flat. Fable 2's expectations were a little more modest and people liked it more (or so it seemed to me).

Those games are fine. People liked them. But the real breakout star of 2008 was Xbox Live Arcade.

XBLA came onto the scene in 2005. The original pitch for XBLA was to bring classic games to the service - Golden Axe! Pac-Man! Street Fighter 2! - but one game changed that immediately. Geometry Wars was a breakout hit, a game that started life as a minigame in PGR2 on the original Xbox before being fleshed out into its own game. Geometry Wars showed that, hey, you can make these smaller titles on XBLA, price them how you want and sell a whole lot of copies. XBLA started with a 50mb size limit before being expanded to 150mb in 2007 and 350mb in 2008. Symphony of the Night came out in 2007 and was a huge hit. What about new, original games? Maybe they can even incorporate some features of modern consoles like achievements and online play? Every XBLA game was required to have a demo and that, along with the file size limits, made discovering new games super easy. You could queue up five of them and spent a night trying out interesting new games.

Enter 2008. It started with some enhanced ports - Rez HD was a better version of the 2002 classic. N+ was amazing - a remake/sequel of the 2005 flash game, it featured many hundreds of levels, cool music and online play. N+ is my pick for greatest pure platformer ever. I dumped an incredible amount of time into this game, both online and single player. Ikaruga hit in April.
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Then it happened - at E3 they announced Summer of Arcade. Geometry Wars 2, Braid, Bionic Commando Rearmed, Galaga Legions and Castle Crashers within five weeks. Those games were amazing - Geometry Wars 2 took the original and added a lot of depth in the form of new game modes. It was awesome for high score runs and competing against your friends (or yourself - the modes were super fun to just try to outdo your best). Braid broke new ground in the world of downloadable games. It was an original game that had a lot of depth and thoughtfulness behind it. It bent your mind in a similar way to Portal and had a wild ending. It was the first title to push XBLA games from $10 to $15 and basically proved that you could make a legit game on the service that wasn't just cheap arcade fun. Braid took everyone by surprise and is still really revered today. Bionic Commando Rearmed was *awesome* - it took the original game (that I have a ton of fondness for), gave it a killer soundtrack and even a cool local multiplayer deathmatch. 2d deathmatch doesn't seem like it should work but it totally does. Galaga Legions is the weak link of the five but still fun. Castle Crashers was the breakout hit among hits - it was a new 2d beat-em-up that basically revitalized the genre, adding RPG elements and online play. This game was absolutely huge for a good year or two. I still consider it the best in the genre.

Later that year, Mega Man 9 came out. Mega Man 9's announcement felt like a fake. They couldn't demake Mega Man, could they? But they did, and it was incredible. Mega Man 9 is probably the best in the series. Awesome weapons and a fantastic return to form after a decade of being dormant. It's an inspired game. I still prefer Mega Man 2 due to the fun factor and music, but MM9 is fan-tastic. Capcom also put out SF2 HD Remix in 2008, a remake of SF2 that rebalanced the cast and had online that actually worked. 2008 was a banner year for XBLA. I don't really have a favorite console, but if I had to pick one I'd probably go with XBLA. You could buy an entire library of awesome games for like $80. Every game on the service ended up on another platform (except Geometry Wars 2 - argh!), but at the time it made Xbox 360 the best console around. Exclusives like Mass Effect and Bioshock are nice and all but XBLA, man, that was my jam.

I'm only just getting started here. The game I was most excited about in 2008 was Lost Odyssey, a legit HD RPG with serious credentials. Sakaguchi, Uematsu, most of the team that made Shadow Hearts, the guy who translated Murakami and a really interesting premise. Lost Odyssey was 80% great and 20% tedious due to load times and weird battle design choices. Otherwise, I thought it was brilliant. There hadn't really been a high budget JRPG on the next-gen consoles so this was a really big deal. Tales of Vesperia also came out on the Xbox 360. Microsoft was going hard on Japan and it produced some good games but they were never able to overcome the cultural barrier. Valkyria Chronicles hit the PS3. Meanwhile, the crusty old PS2 got its last game of note in December, Persona 4. Persona 4 might be the most popular PS2 RPG outside of FF and KH. People really adore that game. I like it a lot too. Man, I didn't realize how good 2008 was for JRPGs until writing this. It might be the last year that multiple great JRPGs came out.

EA flirted with new IP in 2008. Dead Space was a great survival horror game. Mirror's Edge was a maddening game - absolutely fantastic mechanically with painful level design. Valve brought out Left 4 Dead which innovated with its AI director and cooperative play. It was procedural and repeatable, making it a great game to play endlessly with friends.
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One of the more notable games from 2008 is Media Molecule's LittleBigPlanet. It was hyped as a DIY game with robust level creation tools. Some of their E3 presentations were pretty snappy. It had a cute mascot character and was trying to appeal to all ages. LBP had one problem though: it played like absolute garbage. You could do tons of cool stuff with it but the 2.5d perspective didn't really feel that good and the floaty physics were a lethal blow. I kind of hate this game. They made a bunch more of them but I never went past the original. LBP rated high critically but I don't feel like any fans actually liked it.

That wasn't the biggest disappointment of 2008 though. That has to go to Spore.

Nintendo had an.. interesting 2008. It started with Brawl in March. Mario Kart Wii hit in April. That game has sold some ludicrous number of copies throughout its life. Maybe 30 million? Who knows. It probably didn't outsell May's game though - Wii Fit. We had balance boards. The weight loss market flocked to what was already a cool system thanks to Wii Sports and the thing just exploded. 10 million Wiis moved in 2008, more than double what the 360 did. It almost tripled the PS3 in NA. The Wii's fad status was never stronger than in 2008.

Like most fads, the bottom fell out fast. If we're going to mock Sony's 2006 E3 showing then we have got to crush Nintendo in 2008. The star of the show was Wii Music, an embarrassing live performance that spawned so many gifs. Miyamoto playing the Wii Remote guitar and Ravi playing the waggle drums. They introduced 'Wii Motion Plus' which was either a nice mid-gen improvement or tacit acknowledgement that the Wii Remote was a piece of garbage, depending on your viewpoint. The star game this holiday was Animal Crossing. Nothing against Animal Crossing but it shouldn't be highlighting the holiday season for the platform that is far and away in first place. The timeline is hilarious: Brawl -> Mario Kart -> Wii Fit -> Ravi Drums. It's just a slow slide from game of the generation to complete joke. Gamers backlashed pretty hard and the perception of the Wii as a joke console grew large here. It was always there - two Gamecubes duct taped together - but now it was pretty much undeniable. The remaining Wii truthers out there were hyping things like The Conduit. Yeah. Meanwhile, the PS3's other killer app - Final Fantasy XIII - got announced for the Xbox 360 which triggered Sony fans everywhere. That was a Sony game, man! I bought a PS3 for this!

Back to games that matter - handhelds were strong too. The PSP showed some life in 2008! Well, Square did anyway. After a few years of downsized console games, we got Dissidia, a wacky fighting game that in my opinion was pretty terrible. It was one of those fanboy dreams, especially after Smash Bros came into existence, but the combat system was kind of unmanageable. I gave up on it pretty quickly though. Crisis Core, an FF7 spinoff featuring Black Haired Cloud, was a lot more positive. It had a good story and a great ending. Seeing Sephiroth and Cloud and others in a proper FF7 prequel was surprisingly fun. The gameplay was simple button mashing but effective. The PSP was an upgrade over the PS1 hardware so returning to the world of FF7 was neat from that perspective too. It wasn't a remake but it was something. The DS had some stuff too; another DSVania, a bad Ace Attorney, a great remake of Final Fantasy IV (as opposed to the six ports that came before it) and a new Advance Wars game. Oh, and TWEWY, a unique and stylish RPG with heavy touch screen controls. The setting and style didn't do much for me on TWEWY so I never bothered engaging with the controls when they weren't immediately intuitive. Maybe it gets good - no idea.
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2008, man. The 360 soared, the PS3 got its killer app out and the Wii fell from grace. The PSP started to find its niche as a high-end portable console for Japanese games, especially RPGs. The DS kept on ticking. Steam was starting to really pick up, well, steam. It was well-known and popular, but not *huge* yet. The biggest things were still Valve games like L4D and Portal. As the indie game space explodes, we'll see it surge. Games did really great in 2008. Who needs hardware to have a great year?
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2008: Persona 4 > Brawl > TWEWY > Metal Gear Solid 4 > Crisis Core > Braid > Apollo Justice > Dissidia

You nailed MGS4 and Brawl, too. I don't know if anything will ever compare to that again. I still remember the board exploding when they announced Snake would be in Smash Bros. in 2006.
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I remember following the sales numbers of the Wii Balance Board versus the PS3. The PS3 ended up getting saved by a price drop just one month before the Balance Board passed it in sales in the US. Wii Fit was really big.
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Best series ever Professor Layton also debuted this year as I'm sure SHINE will say when he catches up
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Really enjoyed the enthusiasm in your writeup. Makes me wish I paid attention to the indie scene more. I definitely remember 2008 being the year that gaming, which was already growing in scope, just completely fractured into tiny, tranny games. Despite Brawl/Fallout 3/MGS4, that year felt like the death of AAA titles dominating the 'public consciousness' to me. (And here I define public consciousness as my exposure - which is largely B8.)

I say this as someone who's gotten more than 25% into three games from your 2008 list, of course, and touched like 4 others.
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Hmm... Lots of games I enjoyed in 2008 for sure but nothing that really blew my mind. MGS4 was great, I think my GOTY for 2008 was definitely Valkyria Chronicles. Vesperia is definitely my favorite Tales of game, Patapon was a fun surprise and Dead Space was quite fun the first play through.
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Team Rocket Elite posted...

I remember following the sales numbers of the Wii Balance Board versus the PS3. The PS3 ended up getting saved by a price drop just one month before the Balance Board passed it in sales in the US. Wii Fit was really big.

those were great.



almost as good as the old ps3 chalkboard


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2008 got me back into modern games after a long hiatus - so many good games.

BC:R, Braid, Mega Man 9, Fallout 3, Burnout Paradise, Bioshock w/ survivor mode on PS3. These are all on my list of favorite games.
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Oh crap, didn't realize how good 2008 was. Braid, MM9, and at one time SSBB were all in my top ten games. Mario Kart Wii got a lot of undeserved hate, too -- second best Mario Kart, and not just because it came with a wheel. Good casual fun there, plus unlike Brawl its online connections were legit!
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Really happy 2008 got ranked 2nd. I've been gaming since 2000, but it truly felt that this was the year I rediscovered gaming, so many great releases that meant a lot to me back then. Easily one of my favorite years in gaming.
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MGS4 is one of the games I keep meaning to get back to. I marathoned 1-3 and then got burnt out.
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4 is worth seeing through if you liked the first 3.
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i got stuck with no rations on the first beauty/beast boss and couldn't beat it after like 2 hours so i gave up
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4 does have some crazy ending fatigue going though.

I'm not sure the game really holds up all that well either.
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SeabassDebeste posted...

i got stuck with no rations on the first beauty/beast boss and couldn't beat it after like 2 hours so i gave up

Pretty sure I got stuck in the same situation my first time through, too, but I persevered and eventually won!

And yeah, MGS4 is an experience worth having if you're a fan of the series. That might be the best way to phrase it.
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mgs3 is one of my top games ever, and mgs2 is up there too

wasn't feeling mgs4 all that much even before i got stuck though. all the preachy dialogue got really annoying to me - i don't remember mgs1 or mgs2 being this bad (ending of mgs2 excluded)

but it's been like 5 years, so maybe i'll dust off the ps3 and give it some love before i get a switch
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