While Portal 2 walked away with Kotaku‘s official game of the year award for 2011, Kotaku commenters held their own damn awards this year and they ended with a resounding chorus of “FUS ROH DAH”.
It’s been a lot of fun cataloguing and recognising the best video game music of the year. We’ve gone from AAA blockbusters to indie games, sweeping melodies to ambient synths, heroic themes to dread-soaked atmospherics. Some of the games built music into their gameworlds, while others brought in full orchestrasand still others used the kazoo as a stand-in for the protagonist.
We love video games here at Kotaku. We love them so much. We think they had a good year in 2011, although it was a pretty weird year. We had the PlayStation Network going down. We got a 3DS and, at least in Japan, a Vita. We got Minecraft and Duke Nukem Forever and even the first brand-new Assassin’s Creed game in… wow, how long was it?
After several weeks of debate, discussion, and deliberation, Kotaku‘s 2011 Game of the Year Award came down to a simple vote, and the majority voted for science.
2011 saw its share of disappointments, but it was also a year that contained a good number of nice surprises. Some were games we just didn’t see coming — they snuck up on us and grabbed us with their excellence. Others were games that we thought were going to be terrible or at best so-so, but which would up being terrific.
2011 is coming to an end. Best of lists and worst of lists, it’s time to look back at the year that was.
What Valve did this year seemed impossible: they improved on the perfection that was the first Portal. That feat was accomplished, surprisingly, by making everything about players’ return to Aperture Science less perfect. We got a scuffed-up, messier experience that resonated more deeply than any other game this year. Can Portal 2 open a rift to the top of this year’s GOTY contenders? Let’s see.
This may sound off-key coming from the guy who nominated the 12th edition of annual sports franchise for overall GOTY last year. But I’m inclined to say “None of the above,” this year. I prefer for these honours to truly mean the game, at minimum, was the best at what it did. This year’s big games, nearly all of them sequels, seem to arrive at that point more out of incumbency and the expectation that they would be a game of the year nominee.