My favourite games of 2011

Believe it or not Battlefield, CoD and Skyrim are not on my list like most others. I'm not the biggest fan of military shooters and as for Skyrim it's not that I don't like games like that, it's more the fact I will never finish the storyline as I will always get distracted by side quests and randomly killing shit. I've still not finished Oblivion purely for that reason. Anyway I've sat and came up with a list of 7 games released this year that I've really quite enjoyed.

Payday: The Heist - This is a little multi player where you play and 3 others play cooperatively in order to pull off heists, be it robbing banks or ripping off drug dealers. I've put so many hours in to game since it's release, it brings a different twist on the team coop style of games, you can definitely tell it was inspired by Left 4 Dead by the gameplay, but it is a awesome game in its own right. It has seen a number of patches already with some DLC on the way, no doubt being a map pack.



Bulletstorm - While this game didn't get the warmest reception upon it's arrival I loved this game it is the most fun I've had playing a shooter for quite some time. The skill shot system this game had is quite ingenious. The better you played the more points you got leading to you getting more and or better weapons quicker, leading again to more points. The game made you play better in order to get decent guns. This game was fun as hell.



Orcs Must Die! - This is a little indie game that I came across on youtube, possibly a Machinima video about it I can't honestly remember. It is pretty much a tower defence game with a playable character in them rather than from the top down perspective which they started off as. I release there are many 3rd person tower defence games out there these days. This one is quite a good one, only flaw in it is the lack of multi player which I could see being a lot of fun, especially if they put a harder difficulty in.  It would be good to see, but like I said there are many out there if you do want a multi player experience.



Bastion - This is another little indie game. Which has seemingly done very well for its self since it's release back in August (I believe it was out on Xbox before then but that is its Steam release date). It is a single player hack and slash adventure game. If you haven't played this game before I highly suggest picking it up. It costs about a tenner but is definitely worth it. The story, the gameplay, the music, the narration especially. It is a really good game.



Serious Sam 3 - Not much to say about this one. It's Serious Sam, if you don't know the series. It's a old school kind of shooter. Levels consist of a shed load of enemies you get a shed load of guns and you work your way through them.



The Baconing - This is the 3rd installment in the Deathspank series. It's weird, it's random and it has orphans and robot hookers in the game. If you liked any of the other Deathspank game you will like this game. It's definitely worth a look in to at the very least.



Hard Reset - This is a decent little shooter, it's also pc exclusive. It is a fun but really quite difficult game. I struggle on Normal difficulty and it's got hard and insane after that as well. I put this in the same boat as the  likes of Serious Sam and Painkiller. It's a good attempt at bring shooters back to what they used to be like. You get a variety of weapons, it's quite good what they have done with it though. They merged the two weapon system of todays shooters with the multiple weapon system of yesteryear by letting you upgrade the two weapons you do have letting them become multiple guns in one. I quite like this feature. On release it cost just over £20 and is now down to £12.99 on Steam. Definitely worth the money I would say.

Alan Wake coming to PC

Xbox exclusive Alan Wake will be making it's way over to PC some point in Q1 next year. Took a while but it's still a lot quicker than some games have been ported over to the PC side of things, two years is relatively quick for getting console ports. Anyway hopefully this is a sign of things to come and more Xbox exclusives will be making their way over to us with mouse and keyboards. Two main ones I want are Gears of War and Halo, I highly doubt their going to make an appearance. I can only hope.

New Humble Bundle

If you don't know what the Humble Bundle is, it was set up to raise money for charity by sell a random assortment of indie games for what ever price you found fit. The amount you pay can be literally anything and can be split between the developers of the game, the charity and the guys at humble bundle. 

As an incentive for you to pay more they give you an extra game or two if you pay over the average price paid, most of the times I've noticed it's been round about $5-10. Considering if you bought these games separately it would cost about £100, it's quite a ridiculous bargain.

This bundle includes: NightSky, Shank, Super Meat Boy, Bit.Trip Runner, Jamestown, Cave Story+ and Gratuitous Space Battles. The last two games you get if you pay over the average which stands at $4.58 at the time of me writing this. I will be getting this bundle on Tuesday when I get some money. I dunno how much I will pay yet but I will do more than the average. So if you want to pick up a few new games to keep you occupied in the up run to christmas send a few quid there way. There is only 14 days left on this offer so get in while you can.

Guild Wars 2 - Mesmer Trailer

I haven't written anything about Guild Wars 2 on here, I feel I should have really considering I was a massive fan of the first game. This trailer isn't meant to be out until tomorrow but has been leaked so I figured I'll share it anyway. I'm rather happy the last profession happened to be mesmer as it is my favourite along side ranger which was one of the first announced. First character I make will be Syvari ranger, second will be Asuran mesmer. Now they just need to hurry up and release the game. Anyway here is some mesmer footage.

Modern Warfare 3 makes $1 Billion in record time.

Love it or hate it, it must be doing something right. I am not the greatest fan of the series, but the fact that it breached 1 billion dollars in a matter of 16 days after it's initial release date.

This is the fastest any media product has reached this milestone, beating Avatar which held the title at 17 days to get to the 1 billion marker, which is still damn impressive in it self.

I have played CoD games in the past I can see the appeal as they all are easy to pick up and play. I don't like them due to the health regeneration system in place. I prefer games where you have a set amount of health if you lose it you die, not this whole 'you can suck you thumb behind this car for 10 seconds and magically your cured' system they have in place with a lot of games these days. It makes the game far to easy, which I guess is why it appeals to a lot of people. It makes it easier for anyone no matter there experience playing shooters able to play the game with at least some what of a chance of not dying constantly. Anyway I'm gonna stop there before I get in to a full blown rant about why I'm not a fan and actually congratulate Activision, because like the game or not, this is one hell of an achievements.

Command + Conquer: Generals 2

A new Command + Conquer game is in the works. This one being a sequel to Generals, from the teaser trailer below it looks like they are going back to how C+C games should be. Good to see they learned from the huge mistake that was Command and Conquer 4. I did buy it purely because it was another C+C game but that was without any research in to the game at all, I regret buying it but never mind. I did enjoy the first Generals game and hopefully this will be just as good as it's predecessor. I will be keep an eye on the development of this game.

Killing Floor

Killing Floor is a coop survival game and Steam are having a free weekend this weekend with the game also knocked down to £3.74, 75% off it's regular price. If you haven't played it before think a generic survival mode with waves of enemies with the option to buy weapons in between each one. I bought this game at least a year ago I would say but never really played it. But now have put a few hours in to it over the last day or so. It is quite fun, especially if you can get a somewhat decent team together. If you do die during a wave of enemies you will remain dead until the next wave where you will respawn with the starting weapons and money, so I would suggest not dying, so long as one member of your team survives you will all respawn, but if everyone wipes it's back to the start again. It's basic survival mode stuff going on here really. 

Depending on what weapons you choose you level up in a certain perk making you better with pistols, rifles, shotguns, medicing, melee weapons etc. The more you play the easier it will get if you stay on the same difficulty, I forget the names of them but there is beginner, normal, hard and I believe a couple more after that as well. It is quite a fun little game which I'm pretty sure I've mentioned already and for £4 you can't really go wrong with it. It's got about 48 hours left of the free weekend anyway. If anything give it a shot over the next couple days.