In the latest episode of the Bonus Round over at Gametrailers.com they discussed the best games of 2010 so far. I did something similar last year, and I thought it was about time to do the same for 2010. The year of 2010 has already seen several very good games. My pick for the game of the year (so far) is as follows:

The game of the year so far

Read Dead Redeption - Rockstar Games

My choice for game of the year so far is not very controversial. Red Dead Redemption stands out from the crowd as an outstanding game in my eyes. I guess I have a weakness for games from Rockstar, but I must say I love the story telling, the characters, and the settings the guys at Rockstar are able to create. The game has a few weaknesses like aiming in close quarters, boring gatling gun sequences, and a bit too much aim assistance at longer ranges (making the game a bit too easy). However, it is very fun to gun down a lot of guys in quick succession. Moreover, the cell phone was not yet invented and one does not have annoying friends calling you all the time like in GTA 4.

Runner up

Mass Effect 2 - Bioware

Read Dead Redemption is not the only great game released so far this year. Even though I enjoyed the first game more than the second, Mass Effect 2 is still a very very solid game. Great voice acting, graphics, and storytelling. However, I did not fancy the dumbing down of the RPG elements, the horrible scanning of planets to find metals, and the *SPOILER* silly chose-the-right-squad-members-at-the-end-or-else-they-will-die.

The other games I played

Modern Warfare 2 - Infinity Ward

I have also played several other games. The one I have played the most (by far) is without doubt Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2. Even though it has a lot of problems (cheaters, lack of dedicated servers, no user mods, IW.net, and so on), it is a highly addictive game (just ask my girlfriend). Getting all those challenges is very hard Battlefield: Bad Company 2 tried to dethrone Modern Warfare. Even though it was a decent game, I stopped playing it and returned to Modern Warfare. I guess I preferred being able to “win” the game by myself in Modern Warfare over having to rely on a squad as in Bad Company. Since I do not have a squad, I frequently got frustrated at all the n00bs playing to get high kill/death ratios instead of succeeding with the mission objectives.

Borderlands - Gearbox

In addition to Modern Warfare and Battlefield: Bad Company 2, I have also played a bit of Left 4 Dead 2, Anno 1404 (Dawn of Discovery), Borderlands, Fable 2, Assassins Creed 2, and Fallout 3. I think all of these games are very good, but they do not reach the same level as Red Dead Redemption and Mass Effect. Moreover, almost all of them were released in 2009. On one hand, Left 4 Dead and Assassins creed are better games than their predecessors, but they are basically more of the same. On the other hand, what I would like to see more of the same from is Borderlands. Even though the game world felt a bit empty and the quests were a bit repetitive, I very much enjoyed the game’s basic principles of having a lot of different guns, plenty of missions, and a quite open world.

Still in the back log

Splinter Cell Conviction - UBISOFT

The amount of  new games being released (and the amount of game time with Modern Warfare 2) has prevented me from playing all the games I would have wanted. I have still to (start and) finish the following games:  Fallout 3, Dragon Age Origins, Splinter Cell Double Agent, Splinter Cell Double Conviction, Army of Two 40th Day, Batman Arkham Asylum, and Bioshock 2. I am in particular looking forward to Splinter Cell Conviction and Batman Arkham Asylum. I would also like to get my hands on Just Cause 2, Alan Wake, and perhaps also Crackdown 2.

In addition to these games, there are a few games on the PS3 (which I do not have) that have received a lot of attention, in particular, God of War 3 and Heavy Rain. Honestly, I must admit that neither of those appeal to me at all. I do not fancy hack and slash/fighting that much, and Heavy Rain is not even a game.

Every PC gamer with respect for him-/herself should watch this top 10 video from Gametrailers.com. It is a nostalgic walk down memory lane for the PC games we all hold dear.

It is impossible to test whether a game is better than another game in an objective way. So the best way to do this is to base the comparison on as many subjective reviews as possible. I went over to Metacritics and extracted the data for the PC, PS3, Wii, and Xbox 360. Since the 360 was released in 2005, I will only include the years 2005-2008. The total number of titles is found in the table below.

We see that the PC has consistently had over 200 games per year but that both the 360 and the Wii have catched up, the PS3 is lagging a bit behind when it comes to the number of games per year. However, quantity is as we see below not necessarily quality.

All games

The PS3 has the highest average game score for any of the platforms, the PC and 360 are not that far behind while the Wii is struggeling quite a log way behind the others. The high number of games for the Wii did not do it any good when it comes to the average game score.

	2005	2006	2007	2008	Total
PC	69,3	66,8	67,7	67,6	67,8
PS3		71,4	71,9	69,8	70,7
Wii		63,4	60,1	61,8	61,4
Xbox 360	74,8	69,6	67,2	66,3	67,7
Total	69,9	67,5	66,7	66,1	67,1

The scores above are found through calculating the average of all the game scores for all the games on the individual platforms. This includes both platform exclusives and cross platform games. The average game score does not count much for most people. Few have time to play all the around 200 games a year per platform anyway. The most important thing to me is the number of good, great and in particular outstanding games on the platform I have. If the platform has a lot of outstanding games why would I care if it has some crappy ones as well?

As we see in the table above, the PC and the 360 has the highest number of good games (game score 70-79). The number of great games (80-89) is a tie between the 360, PC and the PS3, while the PC and the 360 is perhaps slighly in front of the PS3 for the humber of outstanding games (>89). The Wii is again struggeling behind the others by a significant margin. The PC, 360 and the PS3 provided its users with about 50 great or outstanding games in 2008 and this should be enough for anyone.

Platform Exclusive

Then we are down to the platform exclusive games to really see which has the best games, just for itself. The number of exlusive games for each platform are listed below and we see that the PC has had the highest number of exclusive games all years but 2008. The Wii had in 2008 more than 150 exclusive games. The PS3 on the other hand has had quite few exclusive games so far.

We see similar results for the average scores as we did when counting cross platform games as well. The PS3 has the highest average score but we must have in mind that it had less hand half of the exclusive games the other platforms had. The difference between the PS3 and the 360 is however somewhat larger now.

When looking at the number of good, great, and outstanding games one could argue that the PC has the highest variety of platform exclusive games, while the PS3 has the lowest number of good and outstanding games. The lack of truly outstanding exclusives on the PS3 could perhaps explain why it has sold a bit lower than expected (by Sony).

Conclusions

The total number of good, great, and outstanding games for each platform between 2005 to 2008

The total number of exclusive good, great, and outstanding games on each platform between 2005 to 2008

The PS3 has the highest average score for its games. This is however mainly caused by the lack of crappy games for the platform. The Wii on the other hand seems to have plenty of those crappy games. The 360 and the PC have the higheste number of good, great, and outstanding exclusive and cross platform games. Nevertheless, regardless of which platform you have or decide to pick up it will have plenty of good games. It will however be interesting to see how 2009 turns out as the PS3 is really starting to get up to pace with some strong exclusives like Killzone 2, Gran Turismo 5, God of War 3, Heavy Rain, Uncharted 2 and so on.

The project is to get my parents a new PC on which they can work, surf the web and read their e-mail. They wanted a small, compact and silent computer.

The Hardware

With these pretty moderate system requirements there is no need to cash out for a  high end graphics card or a multi core CPU. Computers like these often become expensive, noisy, very hot or all three. It is better to find something with moderate but high enough specifications which is silent and rather small.

I opted for the following hardware: First the Antec NSK3480 casing with a 380 watt power supply. The case is small, looks good and it is quite cheap when you consider that it has a PSU. It is however so small that it only fits micro ATX motherboards. Next I got a low power dual core AMD Athlon X2 4850e, a matching Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-DS2H motherboard with an onboard graphics chip and 4GB of DDR2 RAM. Moreover I got a Western Digital Caviar BLUE 160 GB hard disk and a Samsung SH-S203B DVD recorder. In addition to the PC itself I got a Logitech Cordless Desktop Wave (like the one I have myself) and a NEC 22WV 22″ LCD wide screen display.

In total everything cost about 5000 NOK or around 550 Euro. I think this is quite cheap when considering that you get a quite nice office machine with a LCD display and a cordless mouse and keyboard.

The Software

The first thing you’ll need is an operating system (OS). I prefer Linux because it is a very good OS with all the applications I need. Moreover, everything comes without licensing fees. So I started by downloading Ubuntu (the Linux distribution I normally use). The next thing you have to do is to make a bootable CD using for instance the open source CD recording tool InfraRecorder.

Insert the CD into the computer and install Ubuntu following the on-screen instructions. This is pretty fast and rather simple. The best thing is however that Ubuntu includes most of the applications and all the drivers (unless you have brand new and fancy hardware) you’ll need.

However, there are a few applications which need to be installed or upgraded. OpenOffice 3.0 is for instance not included in the October release of Ubuntu. The 3.0 version will be included later and I am sure 2.4 would do but there are a few additions in 3.0 which I like Luckily it is rather simple to upgrade from 2.4 to 3.0 using these procedures.

Next, I installed my number one e-mail client, Thunderbird. This is easily done by opening the “Apllications” menu in Ubuntu, clicking “Add/Remove…”, search for Thunderbird, select it and click “Apply Changes” like in the illustration above.

Next up is Skype. Even though this is NOT an open source application it is a rather useful tool for communicating with friends and family. Skype is pretty much installed the same way as OpenOffice, see these procedures.

Ubuntu comes with a community implementation of the Java Runtime Environment (JRE). This is unfortunately a lot slower than Sun’s implementation so it is adviceable to install Sun’s JRE. This is done by choosing “Administration” on the “System” menu and then “Synaptic Package Manager”. In the Synaptic Package Manager, search for sun java and select “sun-java6-jre” and click apply, see the illustration above. To configure your system for using the newly installed JRE open a terminal window, type the following command (without “”) "sudo update-alternatives --config java" and select the right JRE.

For easy parental use I finally created launch icons for the most used applications like e-mail client, browser, text editor and spreadsheet. This is done by right clicking on the application in the menu and selecting “Add this launcher to the desktop”.

In addition to these applications you may need to install for instance the a flash player, codecs for video playback etc. However, the installation of these is started automatically when needed so the only thing you need to do is to follow the instructions.

The only thing remaing is to hand it over and hopefully not giving too much first aid when they start using it.

Image linked in from GameSpy

The acclaimed World in Conflict (WiC) is a fun, beautiful and fast paced video game for the PC. It has a several infantry, armor and air units, a decent story, and good looking destructible environments, smoke, fire, water, and explosions. Never have artillery barrages and nuclear explosions been so beautiful on the PC.

Nevertheless, after finishing the single player campaign I am left with a feeling that something is missing. WiC is supposed to be a RTS/RTT game but where are the strategies and the tactics? Pounding your enemies to pieces using artillery and air strikes before rushing them with, freely replaceable, tanks does not require a lot of thinking nor strategy. When the pace of the game is so high and the penalty of loosing a tank is so small, the most important thing you need to think about is the placement of your artillery fire. Flanking and other tactics which were very useful in games like Company of Heroes are not really necessary and in many of the missions you are not given the luxury of time to apply any tactics as Ivan keeps coming in waves.

The developers of the game, our Swedish friends at Massive Entertainment, have done a good job creating a quite fun game even though it lacks some of the tactical/strategical aspects of other games. Norwegian Rangers are even included in the game, however with a quite poor English accent and I suspect our Swedish neighbours are trying to make fun of us.