Letter From The Editor: On The Brink of 2010

That’s it. I’ve played them all. (Okay, mostly the good ones.) The mad rush to get everything under the belt to declare game of the year winners is over and I’m nothing but a more confused man for it. As I write this, we will be beginning the initial balloting to come up with the short lists in our categories which will be posted on the site Monday. You can begin your quibbling then and prepare to crescendo to a fever pitch on the 15th of December when X-Play will have our Best of 2009 episode.

But with all these games behind me it’s time to turn to 2010, and honestly, outside of games, I’m more than happy to put the last decade in a box, never to open again. One of the titles that pleasantly surprises me is Brink, which has been up on our site all week long. I’ve been aware of the game for some time now, but it wasn’t until we received the videos that I fully appreciated how ambitious the title is with campaign-based multiplayer from both sides of the conflict, resulting in the chance that you are actually playing against other people as you proceed through the story. This has been attempted before but has never come to fruition. In fact, it does make me think of Sony Online’s well-intentioned Planetside, but not in the failure way. It puts in perspective that the dream of the MMO-Shooter should be slowly approached with baby steps. Also, I finally put together what the game reminds me of visually: Timesplitters. Check out the videos and lemme know if I’m crazy for thinking that.

Next week, we’ll also be previewing a game that is my most anticipated game for next year…so far: Red Dead Redemption. It’s easy to declare the game "GTA in the old west," but that’s selling its ambitions quite short. I’m one who wishes that the Western got better treatment in video games as the genre is more than fitting for the medium with the established tenets of the loner heroes, dubious morality and threats of violence. There’s an air to a good western that is quite sumptuous, and Red Dead might be the first video game to truly capture that.

So with all this year's games played and the games I’m excited for yet to come out, what’s there to do?  Read a book? Go to a museum? Finally try to make a soufflé?

Nah.

I’ll play more Borderlands.