While I still prefer to buy boxed copies of my PC games, I’m starting to really like the Steam platform and digital distribution.

I’m in the midst of cleaning up my computer room, also known as my “man cave”, the place where my wife dare not go. Its become a dumping ground over the past few years for all of my crap: books, action figures, Star Wars toys, Warhammer stuff, Dungeons and Dragons stuff… all the junk a typical nerd picks up over the years.

The closet in my computer room is full of all the boxes from all the games I’ve purchased over the years, and these are in addition to the boxes that I’ve shoved into our crawl space from my last clean up. For whatever reason I can’t throw them out, but this clean up project I’ve started has got me thinking that it’s time I send those boxes to the recycling depot. With digital distribution, I don’t have to worry about that stuff. The boxes used to be nice when they actually contained printed manuals, cloth maps, and other goodies in them, but those days appear to be over. I don’t see the point of a box if it’s just going to contain a paper sleeve to hold the DVD.

The other benefit to digital is no longer having to have the DVD in the drive. Call me lazy if you wish, but the other day I went to load up Oblivion and when it told me I needed the DVD in the drive I said “screw it” and played something else. The DVD was literally two feet away, but I couldn’t be bothered.

I picked up another two games on the last day of the holiday Steam sale, Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Plants vs Zombies Game of the Year Edition. I was happy to see Amnesia put back on sale, as I had regretted passing it over the first time it was on sale a few days previous.   This leads me to yet another advantage to digital purchases… there’s no physical evidence of the growing pile of games that I’ve purchased and have yet to play.

If there’s one thing that the end of a year is good for, it’s top ten lists, and a lot of the gaming publications have released their lists of the best games of 2010.

I can’t comment on most of the titles that appear on the years best games lists because, for the most part, I haven’t played them. What did I play this year?  I’m glad you asked. Here are some thoughts on all of the gaming related items I took part in during 2010…

New Hardware
In March I purchased a Nintendo Wii. The main motivation behind the purchase was for EA Sports Active, which has seen a good amount of usage in our household. I’ve got a copy of Twilight Princess that I haven’t touched, along with Super Mario Galaxy that I’ve played for about twenty minutes total. My daughter and I sometimes play together, usually Disney Princess: Enchanted Journey, or Bowling.

In July I finally replaced my aging PC with a pretty sweet Alienware, and there was much rejoicing. The guts of the machine consist of an i7-960 quad core, 3.2GHz CPU with 12GB RAM, Radeon 5870, 2.5TB hard disk space, and a Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium. That’s in addition to the pretty lights emanating from the case and the funky alien head on the front.

In October I purchased a Nintendo DS. I was initially on the fence about getting one of these things, but since buying it, its seen use almost every day. I don’t regret it for a second.

The PC Games
I’ll start with the big one, World of Warcraft, which easily took up the majority of my time. I played fairly consistently throughout the year, starting up in January after a few months break. I levelled my Mage to 80 and he’s now my “main”, supplanting my 80 Shaman. I also started up an Orc Warrior who currently sits at level 61. I’ll continue with the Warrior once the Mage is 85.

I think Cataclysm is pretty cool, but not quite as awesome as I was hoping it would be. As of today, I find my interest is beginning to lean away from WoW towards my growing stockpile of un-played games. I think at this point I play WoW because I can jump in for a half hour or so and knock off a quest or two before I have to attend to “real life” matters.

The other MMO I (sort of) played this year was EverQuest II Extended. I tried playing this, but I just can’t. I have so many fond memories of my three and a half years with EQII, but each time I go back to check it out those memories seem to drift further and further away.

I managed to play through a couple popular puzzle-type games, in Braid and Limbo. I quite enjoyed Braid and actually managed to get through it fairly quickly because I couldn’t put it down.  On the other hand, I thought Limbo was merely “okay” and not deserving of all the hype it was receiving.

I played a fair amount of StarCraft II, but I’m still a mission or two away from completing the campaign. I’m not the biggest fan of real time strategy games, but I had to check this one out, and I wasn’t disappointed. Actually, I enjoyed it more than I thought I would, although once I’m finished with the campaign I doubt I’ll load it up again until the next campaign is released.

With the purchase of my new PC I found myself looking for games that would show it off, and for that I played Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, and Far Cry 2. Call of Duty looks great, but the game play wore off on me fairly quickly. I can’t stand the lack of freedom throughout the levels. If you don’t move fast enough, you die. If you move too fast, you die. Basically, the game moves at its own pace and drags you along for the ride. Far Cry 2 is the polar opposite, and I really enjoyed it. It looks great, and I love the open world concept of it.

Finally, I spent a little bit of time playing Torchlight, which was cool and nostalgic for about half an hour, at which point I started to fall asleep. I haven’t been back since. I also played Trine for about twenty minutes, which isn’t enough time to have formed an opinion of it.

The Portable Games
I played through and finished Golden Sun, an old Game Boy Advance game on my Nintendo DS. It was decent enough, but the random battles drove me crazy. I’m now playing Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies, and I’m loving it. The graphics are great and the story and game play are both really well done. I didn’t know a whole lot about this one before getting it, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised. I’ve even found myself grinding levels not because I have to, but because I’m enjoying it.

The Console Games
This year saw my Xbox 360 red ring on me, but fortunately it was still under warranty, so I sent it off for repair. My replacement box has been running smoothly ever since. This wasn’t a big year for the console for me. I spent some time playing Tomb Raider: Guardian of Light cooperatively with my wife. It’s a great, fun little game.

Most of my time on the 360 was spent with NHL 10, which is the best dang hockey game I’ve ever played (I haven’t played NHL 11). The only other games I spent any decent amount of time with on the Xbox were Deadspace and Halo ODST. I’ve made it through about half of Deadspace and it’s really cool. I love the atmosphere and it’s genuinely pretty creepy. ODST however is a little disappointing. I love all of the other Halo games, but just a few missions in, I find it a little on the boring side.

There are other games I dabbled with on the Xbox here and there, but nothing I spent any significant amount of time with.

Steam
This year marked my first purchases from Steam. Typically I like to have a box and printed manual, but given that less and less shelf space is being dedicated to PC games and most of them no longer come with printed manuals, there was no longer anything to keep me from purchasing my games from Steam. The frequent sales don’t hurt either.

The Games I Bought but Haven’t Played
As always, my eyes were bigger than my amount of free time. I have purchased, but have yet to spend any time playing the following games:

• Left 4 Dead 2
• Batman: Arkham Asylum
• Dawn of War II: Gold Edition
• Super Mario Galaxy 2

I also recently received Halo Reach as a gift at Christmas, and purchased Super Street Fighter IV and Forza Motorsport 3 with a gift card, also received at Christmas. I won’t count those games among the ones I “haven’t played” as I’ve only had them for a couple days now.

My Game of the Year
Looking back over the year, I’ve actually played more than I thought I had. There’s no doubt that World of Warcraft took up the vast majority of my free time, but I certainly wouldn’t say it’s the game I enjoyed the most this year. For that, I’ll turn to Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies for the Nintendo DS.

It does so many things right. There are no random battles, so if you just want to get from one place to another quickly, for the most part you can. It’s got all of the requisite bells and whistles, such as nice graphics and great music. It’s got a nice world that feels big without feeling too big, and once you reach a certain part in the game you’re more or less free to explore it as you wish as opposed to being led through it in a specific order.

What does it the most for me though are the underlying mechanics. I love the way the party and class systems work. You can adventure alone if you wish, or create a party, and you can also choose from among several classes to play and change your class whenever you want (after a certain part early in the game). If you’ve got a DS and like RPGs, I highly recommend it.

Anyway, I hope you all have had a great year, and here’s wishing you the best for 2011.

There are advantages to being sick sometimes.  I started coming down with something early Friday evening and a few hours later, just before bed time, it had turned into a full-blown sore throat along with jam-packed, stuffed up sinuses.  I knew I wouldn’t be getting any sleep any time soon, so while the rest of the family slept to visions of sugar plums in their heads, I fired up the ol’ Xbox 360 and did some gaming until the wee hours of the morning.

After a bunch of games of NHL 10 I finally lumbered up to bed and closed my eyes for a while.  Just a few short hours later though, I was wide awake again.  The clock told me it was just before 6:00am.  I checked on my two kids; the first born was out like a light and typically doesn’t wake until 7:30.  The new born was sleeping so soundly in his crib that I had to stare at his chest to make sure he was still breathing.  Glorious.  Two and a half months old and already sleeping nine hours a night.  So again, I fired up the 360 and dug out a game I haven’t played in ages, Burnout Paradise.  It didn’t take long to be reminded of just how fun Burnout is, and how good looking it is too.

I managed a solid two hours with the game before my daughter awoke and took over the TV.  Later in the afternoon, with my wife out with our daughter and my little guy sleeping in the crook of my left arm, I fired up my PC and killed some time in EverQuest II: Extended.  I haven’t been actively playing it, because I’ve definitely moved on from Norrath, but from time to time I do get the urge to pop in and check out the game I spent so many hours playing just a few years ago.  I gained a couple levels with the Inquisitor, now level 12, and yeah… that game does nothing for me.

Finally, I loaded up Batman: Arkham Asylum, which I had purchased off Steam for pretty cheap.  I only got a few minutes to play it, but what I saw was awesome.  I’ll be coming back to it for sure.  Hopefully my cold doesn’t go away too quickly.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

I haven’t been this excited over a game announcement in quite some time.

I started the draft of this post two weeks ago on the 28th of November.  I was going to talk about my impressions of The Sundering event in World of Warcraft but of course, that’s crazy old news now and much has happened since.  Since our newest addition to the family arrived on September 30th, I’ve been on my computer exactly three times, each time to get a little bit of WoW in while the kids slept.  So given the complete lack of free time that I have these days, I haven’t seen a whole lot of the new Azeroth as of yet.

I did bring my Mage over to Vashj’ir and did enough quests there to ding 81, and I’m still undecided as to how I feel about the underwater zone.   The quests have been fairly routine, which is just about what I expected, but aside from that the zone itself seems too busy.  It’s so colourful and full of “stuff” floating around and moving about; and with the flood of players in the zone these days the respawn rates of the mobs is insane.  It seems I can’t take two steps without having to fight something.

I’ll probably stick with leveling the Mage until he’s 85 and then get back to leveling my Warrior who currently sits at 61.  After that, I’ll likely roll a goblin to check out all the new old world stuff.  Provided I get some free time of course.