I'm surprised by the lack of Halo Reach. It has arguable the best campaign in the series and the most feature rich. I would switch it with Black Ops or Heavy Rain.

Anyways, my vote is for Mass Effect 2.

I do wish there were more AA games or whatever it is we call high-tech games built by small, autonomous or semi-autonomous developers on their own terms...I do wish there were more games like that being made today. That is something I miss being more commonplace. Although I have observed an uptick thereof here in this decade thanks to more first-party financial support.

I know. As usual it’s about time rather than money. Also, I suck at RTS games.

Galaxy 2 by a mile for me. Everything I loved about the first game but with the hub fat trimmed off in favor of straight-to-level gameplay. Add in the awesomeness of Yoshi and that badass cloud power-up and Galaxy 2 is my single favorite game born on the Wii.

Not a terribly remarkable year for sure, although there are a lot of solid titles. My vote goes to Alan Wake. It wasn't the best game ever, but it was a memorable one. I was initially going to vote for Civilization V, but while excellent, it lacks the magic of Alan Wake. Fallout: New Vegas might also get my vote, but it's stuck waiting in my backlog, so I'm not exactly well-qualified to vote for it, and Alan Wake seems like a pretty good choice to me.

I adore Majin. I have it on 360 tho. Game Republic was an underrated dev. I also liked Folklore on PS3 from them. I have Knights Contract but need to play it still. Enslaved to me was a poor mans Odyssey to the west retelling and not a good game. I was so bored. Majin tho so charming. And agree it was not the time for a game like that. 7th gen was peak fuck Japan and everything needs to emulate the "hardcore gritty west" crap. Everyone chased with western gritty Japanese series reboots. Majin along with Lost in Shadow and Lost in Rain are 3 gems of that generation more people need to experience.

Not really with you on the annoying complaint (except for stiff vehicle controls), but I totally get the repetition complaint.  For me, I thought it was a fun meta-commentary on Alan Wake himself.  It's like he can't help but be a hack who throws in one-too-many action scenes into each chapter.  Maybe running back to that trough is what resulted in his previous writer's block.  I also deliberately played it chapter by chapter, so it doesn't feel as repetitive either.  

Agreed.  The fact that you had to shake the Wii remote in order to do your roll move - in a 2D platformer where timing is key - was ludicrous.  You had to be super accurate with timing to achieve a high-bounce off of an enemy too; something that Tropical Freeze seemed to largely rectify, along with a simple button press to roll, the way it should be.  Didn't help that the game was a bit boring and uninspired to me either.  And that stupid, pointless "blow" move?  No offense to fans of DKCR but the whole game kinda blows in my opinion.

Ah yes Folklore, I forgot about that one. It was different at the time and initially didn't grab me. But it left enough of an impression to pick it back up a year later and play a lot more of it. I can't remember if I ever finished it though.

Lost in shadow looks familiar and definitely something I like. I don't think I played it at the time though, it's not in my Wii library.

I played Rain (Lost in the Rain) on PS3, good game!

I'll look for lost in shadow next time I'm in the game store. Maybe they still have a physical copy for Wii laying around.

The annoyance certainly depended a lot on how much I played of the game at once, but there were several action sections especially late in the game that I found just massively frustrating to play through because of the awkward dodge and how often the enemies can sneak up on you basically invisible.