Due to the annual Thanksgiving travels, I've had no reliable internet for a few days. So the following is a few of my picks, my thoughts about them, and why they are as high/low as they are on the list.
44. Fire Emblem: Awakening - A great Strategy-RPG that brought back many of the best elements of prior entries in the series. A great cast of characters, lovely presentation, and a more acessible style that didn't rob the game of its difficulty. Its main flaws are that the central plot is somewhat disjointed and that the scenarios don't show much ingenuity in their objectives.
43. Portal - The characters and comedy have been beaten to death by now, but even after that, what you're left with is a game that invents a distinct mechanic, teaches it in a natural format, and comes to fully utilize it without ever becoming redundant. Nothing is terribly wrong, but the fact that Portal 2 exists shows how the concept could have been taken further.
42. Europa Universalis III - There are strategy games, there are grand strategy games, and then there is Europa Universalis III. EU3's gameplay is glacial compared to other games, with a single playthrough being long enough for ten rounds of any given Civilization game. This is partially pacing, but is also due to the sheer scale of the game. You control one of hundreds of historic countries for a few centuries from the fall of Constantinople to the Napoleonic era. There's the obvious choices, like creating a British or Spanish colonial empire, but the options offered go into the obscure and bizzare. Maybe you want to create a Genoan Republic with trade posts around the globe, a Mazovian conquerer that dominates Eurasia, or an Iriquois federation that simply survives contact with Europe. Its natural versatility, along with the impressive modding community, make this title eat countless hours of your life.
41. Elite Beat Agents - How do you make a rhythm game on a platform with limited storage space? There's a reason why the genre became popular in arcades and on the PS1 and PS2 rather than the N64, Dreamcast, or GameCube. But a fair number of music-based games were still released on the DS, despite the limited space in a DS card. Elite Beat Agents thus gives up on sheer song count and instead focuses on making each of the songs a tale in of themselves. The 16-song "Campaign" is composed of humorous stories presented in a comic-like style, which help make each song feel less like you're playing an instrument and more like you're harnessing the power of music to influence the tale. It works really well. It makes "You're the Inspiration" tolerable!
