2010, Game of the Year

[The_Liquid_Laser]

The 2010 Game of the Year is Super Mario Galaxy 2.
The runner up is Xenoblade Chronicles.
The master thread for all of these contests can be found here.

Welcome to the 2010’s, the final decade for this thread series.  Without going into the details, much of this decade is a decline of what came before, and I’ll leave it at that for now.

Especially since none of that has anything to do with the year 2010, which was a great year for gaming.  The Wii was still getting high profile releases.  The two HD systems were also really coming into their own, getting a good amount of quality games both in 2010 and in several following years.  Motion control games also launched for the HD systems in this year, but none of those games are in the poll.  So, without further ado, here is the list of games for 2010:

 

StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty (PC/Mac)
This highly anticipated sequel to the game that conquered South Korea scored a 93 on Metacritic and sold over 6 million copies worldwide.

 

Mass Effect 2 (XBox 360/PC)
ME 2 is often considered the high point of the Mass Effect trilogy.  It released on PS3 a year after the XBox 360 and PC release.  The XBox 360 version of the game scored an impressive 96 on Metacritic, and the game has sold over 7 million copies worldwide across all platforms.

 

Call of Duty: Black Ops (PS3/XBox 360/Wii/DS/PC)
Call of Duty reaches its sales peak for Generation 7 selling well over 30 million copies across all platforms.

 

Red Dead Redemption (PS3/XBox 360)
People called it GTA in the old west, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing at all.  This open-world adventure about former outlaw, John Marston, scored a 95 on Metacritic and has sold over 23 million copies.

 

God of War III (PS3)
Kratos goes HD for the first time scoring a 92 on Metacritic and selling over 5.2 million copies.

 

Heavy Rain (PS3)
This experimental PS3 game sought to break new ground when it came to storytelling in games.  It has sold over 5.3 million copies total.

 

Donkey Kong Country Returns (Wii)
Donkey Kong just had to return after the huge success of 2D Mario in the previous year.  Donkey Kong Country Returns has sold over 6.5 million copies.

 

Super Mario Galaxy 2 (Wii)
So many ideas were left out of the first Galaxy game, that they had to create another 3D Mario on the same system.  One of these ideas was including Yoshi for the first time in a 3D Mario game.  This game scored a 97 on Metacritic and sold over 7.4 million copies.

 

Xenoblade Chronicles (Wii)
This is a timeless tale about a boy, a girl, some giant robots and a sword that can see the future.  For some reason Reggie Fils-Aimé didn’t think this game would be relatable to Americans.  Luckily, Operation Rainfall helped bring this game to North America, although it didn’t reach there until 2012.  Xenoblade Chronicles scored a 92 on Metacrtic and has sold over 3.3 million copies across all platforms (including the definitive edition).

 

Other (please specify)
If you think another game deserves to be "Game of the Year" other than one of the 9 I listed above, then please vote “Other” and say your game in the comments.  If the "Other" category takes at least 2nd place and no other game gets at least 40% of the vote, then I will do a runoff vote including the most mentioned game(s) from the comments.

 

Voting for 2010 Game of the Year will end on Monday, Nov 27 at 11:59 PM, EST.

 

Last edited by The_Liquid_Laser - on 28 November 2023