Over at Kill Screen, they’ve done their yearly “High Scores” poll in which each of their contributors send in a ballot of games, assigning points to any game from 2011. The results of the vote are in, and Portal 2 is the clear winner.
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.
The hardest thing at the end of the year is to parse yourself from the hype you’re experiencing and think back to the games you played during the summer, the spring and yes, 2011′s early months.
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.
This year has been good to gaming. Hold on, let me restate that. This year has been amazing to gaming. To me, it feels like this year was this generation’s swan song, the last push of gaming before all the developers go find some foxhole to hide in while they develop games for the PS43 or the XboxKickflip.
Oh look. Somebody is voting for Skyrim as Game of the Year. How shocking. Truth be told, I very nearly voted for something else. Total War: Shogun 2 had me hooked for most of the year, and its near perfection of the series’ blend of strategic planning and real-time tactics seemed to make it, for eight months of the year, a shoe-in for my vote.
What was the best game of the year, according to those of us here at Kotaku? We don’t know. We don’t know… yet.
If you’d asked me yesterday morning my pick for Game of the Year, I would probably have said The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Now, having witnessed Quarter to Three‘s Angie Gallant play through the English translation of bizarre bird-based visual novel Hatoful Boyfriend, I’m not so sure.
