The Operative: No One Lives Forever? or NOLF 2?

#46 - Portal 2 (Kudos to Smeags for guessing this)

Portal 2 & I have had a tricky relationship.  On the one hand, when I first played it, I felt totally ripped off having paid £35 to get a game that was only around double the length of the already-ridiculously-short Portal; with a co-op campaign that was fleetingly over after about an extra 2 and a half hours.

However, trying to quantify Portal 2 would do it a great dis-service.  Portal 2 took everything which made the original great and just absolutely ran with it.  The portal mechanic was greatly expanded and the new gels added a whole new level of interest to the puzzles.  Casting Stephen Merchant to portray Wheatley was an absolute stroke of genius; never managing to upstage GLADOS' brilliance but bringing a whole world of awesome to the character himself.  The world you explored was a fantastic take on the clinical simplicity of the first game mixed in with nature finally reclaiming the land as its own.  Atlas and P-body's co-op adventure; although brief; may be one of the most satisfying things I ever had the pleasure of playing.

Pure brilliance from start to finish.  In fact, I kinda wish I'd put it higher in my list now.  Maybe next year!

Smeags correctly identified my clue-quote which actually summarizes the game pretty well I think.  GLADOS; humour and thinking.  A great combination.

Clue for my #45 - sequel which completely eschewed the tone of the original game and took heavy influence from Burbank's finest gaming studio; with a dash of Scotland's best IP in there too.

Clue for my #44 - a game where you have to save the future by stopping the bad guy from saving his seeress. And in the spirit of saving, the game itself managed to save my interest in this ailing franchise.

(Do you mean #44, maybe? :P)

Anyway: No-one lives forever?

edit: Good heavens, I am slow!

Score!

It's the first No One Lives Forever .

Clue for #44: Expand at all costs, no matter how many infants you have to assassinate and innocent people you have to throw in prison.

#44 Final Fantasy XIII-2

#45 Way less convincing to myself on this one, but possibly Crackdown 2?

#44 - Correct!

#45 - not quite, but you made the correct assumption about the second clue :)

I don't play either of these two series so I got them confused in my head as to which had wacky weapons and which was the one with the ridiculous jumping, but I believe I should actually have been thinking about Saints Row 2 when refering to the wacky weapons after a quick search. Still no confidence in that so if it's wrong I'm sadly out.

You're doing so well at this without getting the actual game :P  "Wacky weapons" is an interesting thing to bring up because the Burbank studio I was referring to was Insomniac Games, who are known for their wacky weapons.

The game I was referring to was Jak 2.  I don't think my clue was a particularly good one, lol.