The guys over at Time Magazine are pretty much experts on everything. Every year the magazine publishes a plethora of lists, detailing the highs and lows of the preceding year. This year is no different, and alongside 53 other lists, the magazine has delivered its list of favourite games of the year.
As one of the world’s most respected publications, it comes as no surprise that its top ten games of the year list is entirely respectable.
MyGaming is in the process of compiling our own top ten games of 2011 list, so keep an eye on the site over the next few weeks. In the meantime, here is Time’s list of favourites from the year:
1. Minecraft
Minecraft
Minecraft isn’t a complex pitch: you’re in a very big, rather retro-looking low-res world. You can walk around, you can pick up things, and you can make other things out of them. While you’re doing this, various animals try to eat you. The end.
2. Portal 2
Portal 2
Where the first Portal delivered an antagonist for the ages in bitchy AI GLaDOS, the follow-up peels back the layers of her computational psyche and shows us how she got that way.
3. The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
Skyward Sword evolves the series’ trademark elements by letting you inject some individual style into how Link achieves his goals and by extruding more of the game’s puzzlelike environments into the larger world.
4. Uncharted 3
Uncharted 3
Off you go, then, on a wild-eyed adventure, channeling the Oscar-winning Peter O’Toole epic as well as Raiders of the Lost Ark by way of Romancing the Stone in what amounts to a lovingly crafted action-adventure that rises above all others in its celebration of the interactive cinematic experience.
5. Batman: Arkham City
Batman Arkham City
Arkham City takes place in a superprison carved out of half of Gotham that is run by a psychiatrist mastermind who knows Batman’s secret identity; it’s chock-full of ordinary thugs and dozens of supervillains.
6. Bastion
Bastion
Typical role-playing tropes like leveling up weapons and adding party members were transformed into achingly personal milestones, thanks to gravel-voiced narrations that reacted in real time to how you played.
7. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Skyrim
Take one part George R.R. Martin, two parts Beowulf, mix with Grand Theft Auto’s open-world, go-anywhere angle, and out pops Skyrim, a fantasy role-playing game that’s definitely not a kite-surfing sim.
8. Dark Souls
Dark Souls
Call it gaming on tenterhooks, an improbably satisfying experience drizzled in dread — a return to form for gamers who relish playing on tightropes, net-free, wrapped in a gorgeous, alien ax-murdering otherworld.
9. Sword & Sworcery
Sword and Sworcery
Easily the most beautiful mobile game of the year — maybe the most beautiful game of the year, period — Sword & Sworcery (personally, I like to pronounce that extra w) is a slowed-down, chilled-out, highly self-aware D&D-type fantasy adventure set to an ambient track of sublime mellowness.
10. Battlefield 3
Battlefield 3
Battlefield 3 was a subtler high, and it felt newer and edgier, which is why it gets the nod here. It’s a grittier, slower-paced, more naturalistic experience, darker and more novelistic.
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