With 2020 here, all sorts of outlets have been doing lists of the decade. Best movies, books, TV shows, songs, and yes, video games. And I decided to throw my hat in the ring and give my take. Obviously this is a bit… late for such a list. I was supposed to do this much earlier in the year, but with the quarantine happening I thought it’d be a decent chance to get caught up on some games I missed. And while that sort of happened, I definitely didn’t end up playing as many games as I wanted, which leaves some giant heavy hitters like Nier: Automata and The Witcher 3 off of this list. But 10 years is a long time, and organizing my thoughts is going to be tough, so let’s throw down some ground rules:
- I will be picking a Game of the Year for each year from 2010 to 2019, then I’ll be organizing those ten based on which I think is the best. Then I’ll talk about the years and my thought process in reverse order. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the year I think the best game is from was the best year, but it’s more of a rough estimate. This also doesn’t necessarily mean that these are my absolute 10 favorite games of the decade. If I were doing that, I’d have several games from the same years in my list, and I thought this would be an easier way to do it instead.
- The games will be organized by their ORIGINAL release date, even if I played a different version. For example, I played Gravity Rush: Remastered on PS4 (released in 2015), but the original Gravity Rush released in 2012, so it will count as a 2012 game.
- Obviously, this means that re-releases and remasters won’t count as their own entries. Full blown from the ground up remakes will still count as their own thing, however (Shadow of the Colossus for PS4 will not count, but Resident Evil 2 Remake will count). This also includes “special edition” games (Persona 5 Royale and Dragon Quest XI S Definitive Edition will not count).
- Games that were released episodically or had early access will be tricky. I’ll try to use the first date that an episode was released and the first date than and Early Access game was available to the public (so, for instance, the year that Minecraft’s public Alpha went live), but this rule is a bit fluid.
- I will also be featuring games that I know a lot of people were talking about from those years that I didn’t play, just so you know I’m (probably) not forgetting anything. I won’t talk about most of those, but they’ll still be listed.
I don’t know how long this project will take (hopefully not as long as the Pixar project, especially since I have my list already populated), but I’ll try to get a piece out every week or two. No promises though.
Quick preview of the first entry though. There was one year I was almost certain would take the bottom slot, but after one game in particular caught my eye, it managed to squeak up to ninth place. So the first year is going to be… 2014. Stay tuned.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
The Loony Bin 