Nine worth your dime

>> The best games were the ones
that didn’t feel like work

by ERIK LEIJON

One of my biggest pet peeves is how gaming critics subdivide top 10 lists by genre/console. It’s simple: the best games were the ones that didn’t feel like work. What console they were on, the budgets, company logos or the ESRB ratings never factored into why these games stood proudly when the dust settled on 2007. There are only nine games (and only two true sequels) because there wasn’t a 10th worthy of mention.

9. MLB 07: The Show (PS3/SCEA) The only sports franchise that doesn’t feel like a yearly cash grab or some tepid attempt to placate the fairweather fan. Not a looker; it had the perfect balance between hitters and pitchers. Road to the Show mode was a great addition made specifically for baseball junkies.

8. Portal (PC, PS3, X360/Valve) Either alone or as part of the Orange Box compilation, this black-hole-shooting, first-person puzzler was the most simple and effective original idea of 2007. Armed only with a gun capable of opening two fissures in the space-time continuum, the level design possibilities were endless.

7. Crackdown (X360/Microsoft, Realtime Worlds) A genetically-enhanced cop driving around in his souped-up car, blowing shit up and taking down the city’s worst crime lords. This game was too chaotic to follow, yet too fun to put down, simply because every fight was an exaggerated mix of high-jumping, screen-shaking explosives and laughably high levels of collateral damage.

6. The Darkness (X360, PS3/2K Games, Starbreeze) Jackie and his extended family of mafioso thugs were the most interesting gaming characters of the year. Based on the comic book, this simple FPS used dialogue and sombre environments to get under your skin (especially the painstaking effort put into recreating the more dilapidated areas of NYC).

5. Assassin’s Creed (X360, PS3/Ubisoft, Ubisoft Montreal) The criticisms concerning repetitive missions and the lame story twists were valid. AC rewarded those who soaked up the awe-inspiring environments, scaled every building, carefully planned the assassinations and revelled in the long chase sequences. AC was guilty of its own convoluted structure, because the most blissful moments had nothing to do with those nine guys you killed.

4. Virtua Fighter 5 (PS3, X360/Sega) In a sense, it was only an incremental improvement on VF4, but fighting games have a certain artful flow that gains wondrous new dimensions with the subtlest of changes. Case in point: by making throws harder to execute and rebuilding the characters’ animations, every round moved with the grace of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

3. Puzzle Quest (DS, PSP, XLA/D3, Infinite) It’s Connect Four for RPG geeks. After a few metro rides ruined by a lucky wolf getting too many extra turns, I honestly stopped caring about the story or quests—my life’s work became smacking the smiles off of those smug ogres’ faces by chaining four skulls together on the game board. Puzzle Quest was a brilliant social experiment in sadomasochism.

2. Super Mario Galaxy (Wii/Nintendo, EAD Tokyo) The absolute must-own game for Wii owners. The spherical level design is so avant-garde, it makes Super Mario 64 look flat and shallow by comparison. Every planet in the galaxy was a treat to witness and explore (and the flat levels weren’t half bad either).

1. BioShock (X360, PC/2K Games, Irrational) Fuck the contrived moral dilemma of BioShock—save it for the press releases. The city of Rapture—a dystopian nightmare of art deco architecture and McCarthyist ideals—was such a creepy, engrossing, and ultimately beautiful world, no game did a better job of convincing me that I was really there. Rapture was the real star of 2007.