Crisis Core.

Cultural Impact: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was obviously the biggest game of 2007 and really the one that cemented the Call of Duty franchise as a household name. I've never played it. No interest. Matter-of-factly, smack in the depths of the Iraq War, with that as a dominant headline in the news every day, I couldn't have been less interested in what that game seemed to be selling.

My Favorite Games: Portal was not only my favorite game from this year, but also my second-favorite title of the whole decade (after only the original Metroid Prime). That's partially owed to the game's insanely fun approach to puzzle-solving and equally to the fact that it introduces my favorite video game villain ever, the hilariously passive-aggressive GLaDOS, masterfully voiced by the one and only Ellen McLain. Up to that point, I don't think any other game had made me both smile and worry quite so much. Not in that combination. The entire final act of the game in particular wherein...

...was especially inspired and really did authentically capture that feeling of being somewhere you're not meant to be, doing shit you're not meant to be doing. (A very familiar one if you were me. ) The way GLaDOS's attitude shifts over the course of your playthrough, together with the soundtrack, plays a huge role in making this an equal parts fascinating, frightening, and just plain fun experience for me that really doesn't get old. To think it was created by a small team of students recruited from DigiPen just went to show up the entrenched industry's comparative lack of imagination. And the fact that it's also a rare example of a relatively popular game that's development was headed up by an actual woman is the icing on the cake. Yup, I originally got it in the Orange Box bundle.

A list of my favorites from '07 includes:

1. Portal
2. BioShock
3. Rock Band
4. Metroid Prime 3: Corruption
5. Peace Maker
6. Super Mario Galaxy
7. Aquaria
8. Mass Effect

I guess I'll add a small note on Peace Maker. You know that "games for change" or "games for impact" category in game awards that everyone dismisses as essentially the unearned affirmative action award? Peace Maker was the game that made those awards a thing and it did actually have conceptual merit. The game simulates the Israeli-Palestinian conflict more or less as it existed at the time and tasks the player with resolving it by finding a way to realize a two-state solution. Some crucial aspects of the game's formula for peace are obviously no longer valid in today's landscape, but it's worth pointing out that 100,000 copies were distributed in Israel and Palestine as in November of 2007 (75,000 copies were sent to the subscribers of the Israeli daily Haaretz and 10,000 to subscribers to the Palestinian daily Al-Quds, while the remaining 15,000 were distributed in high schools of both sides) as part of a project to "teach peace", which led to supervised debates taking place in Israeli and Palestinian schools and to over 50 workshops being held in 2008. That's what the "games for change/impact" category is supposed to represent: games that make a positive difference in the real world, not just games that make the people who run game awards events feel good about themselves for noticing. Maybe games can't solve all the world's problems, but they can have a positive impact, and not just on an individual level. Just my two cents.

Fuck Mario galaxy, fuck halo 3, I’m shocked thAt assassins creed isn’t up there. Portal is the. Tits..

Galaxy is in a class of its own. COD4, Prime 3, Bioshock, and Portal would be GOTY in many other years. Though Portal being so short does hurt it. Halo 3 is also the only game in the franchise that I think lives up to the hype built around the franchise. 1 and 2 I found to be meh games, but 3 was actually really good.

For me, its
1 Galaxy
2. Prime 3 (Resident Evil 4 Wii edition would go right after it if it was a new game and not a port of a 2005 game)
3, Bioshock
4. Portal
5, COD4

I've played the first Assassin's Creed.  It has promise, but the game felt incomplete and rushed.  AC2 is the game that AC1 should have been.

I've never owned any of the XBox consoles, but if/when I do, the first game I'll play will be Lost Odyssey.  I still want to play a game that is a worthy successor to Final Fantasy 12.  (I've also need to try The Last Story, but I digress.)  The Lost Odyssey has a 78 on Metacritic while Final Fantasy 13 has an 83.  This makes me wonder if the critics underrated Lost Odyssey back in the day.

So many awesome games. The World Ends With You, Metroid Prime 3, Bioshock, Pokémon Diamond... It's hard to choose.

But I will never, NEVER forget playing Super Mario Galaxy with my older sister during the Christmas of 2007. It's one of my most treasured memories and we had the time of our lifes.

I think Lost Odyssey came out at a time when JRPGs had a bit of a bad reputation due to what was perceived as dated gameplay elements dragging the whole genre down, so almost any game in it that wasn't trying some weird new things with various gameplay elements got points deducted from their final score. Turn-based battles seemed to often be seen as particularly egregious offenses in some critics eyes for whatever reason. I often found that if I played any JRPG that came out during the first half of the seventh console generation (2006 - 2010), I could quite reliably add anywhere between 5 to 10 points to their metacritic score and it would be closer to my own opinion of them, and occasionally the difference was even greater.

This makes a ton of sense.  How a game gets rated has a lot to do with the age of a person doing the rating.  If a person started gaming in the NES era, for example, then they will rate 2D platformers a lot higher than a younger person.  In this case, with turn-based RPGs, a person who started gaming in the SNES-PS1 era will rate these games higher than a younger person would.

Anyway, I love turn-based RPGs, so that probably means I will like Lost Odyssey a lot.

A pretty easy one, Super Mario Galaxy. Still unsurpassed among 3D platformers in my eyes. My top 5 for the year:

1. Super Mario Galaxy
2. Portal
3. The Witcher
4. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
5. Bioshock

Now this was an awesome year full of some of my favourite games. Portal is the best of the lot for me, with BioShock a very close second.