zerolight

It’s been a golden year for gamers. I’ve bought, sold, played, and traded more games this year than I have in the past few years combined, across 3 platforms no less. There’s been some stellar games on the 360 and Wii, and some decent titles on the PS3.

Game of the Year

This has to go to Mario Galaxy on the Wii. It’s simply wonderful. I’ve gushed about this a few posts back, so I’ll not repeat myself.

Most Played

Forza 2 on the Xbox 360 has seen more gaming time than any other game this year. I’ll never tire of buying, upgrading, and tuning cars in an attempt to find that magic mix that turns a road car into an awesome racer. Best racer on any format, ever. More hardcore than PGR4, but more rewarding too. This was a close contender for Game of the Year.

Best Of The Rest

It may have taken an age to reach the 360, but Half Life 2, together with the rest of the Orange Box was worth the wait. A bigger draw than Halo 3, with a better single player campaign.

Runners Up

Fifa 2008 (360) was a big surprise, playing a better, more realistic game of football than PES this year, and having a stellar online mode. Skate (360) is an amazing re-invention of the Skateboarding game. Zelda: Phantom Hourglass (DS), and Zelda: Twilight Princess (Wii) are both wonderful RPGs that have swallowed up large portions of my gaming time. Metroid Prime 3 (Wii) has relegated Halo 3 (360) to the shelf in our house. Call of Duty 4 (360) and PGR4 (360) have both been a lot of fun. Tiger Woods ‘08 (360) is a great, if very tough Golf game. Wii Sports is over-hyped, but fun. And finally, Halo 3 (360) was disappointing. The initial wow of the single player campaign was replaced with a mighty yawn half way through, and I’ve only taken it online once – I hate it online, though I may be alone in that opinion. Oh, and a finially, finally… because I forgot about Motorstorm – eye candy aplenty in this rather nice off road racer for the PS3. Handling isn’t it’s strongest point, with it being a fairly generic flavour that favors third person camera’s, but the gameplay is almost a match for the graphics. I enjoyed it a lot for a few months earlier in the year, and it remains the only PS3 game I own.

I tweaked the 2D Leopard Dock which I thought looked ropey, to make a smokey version of Tiger’s dock. I’ll live with it for a little while to see if I prefer it to my smokey 3D dock.

When I started developing the little Joomla modules to hook into the jd_wordpress and mojoBlog Joomla components, I figured some folk out there might appreciate them too. To find that some of these modules have exceeded 1300 downloads in the past few months comes as a pleasant surprise.