Ascii Dreams Non-Roguelike Game of the Year

It appears traditional to offer an end of year analysis of the best games of the year in preparation of the famine of the early months of the New Year. Prolific journalists and enthusiastic amateurs will provide well considered advice on which games they played provided the highs and lows, while developers and studios prepare the resolutions for 2009.

You too are being offered the choice of the best at my table – voting for the plenitude that is the 75 roguelikes which saw a release in 2008. Many of you reading this site on a regular basis will note that I also play games in other genres, perhaps skipping over the articles where I have boldy proposed designs and redesigns of what I have played in 2008. Based on these experiences, I would like to like to suggest a game of the year which falls outside the roguelike genre. But I have a confession to make. (With apologies to southern hemisphere readers).

In this grasshopper season rich with autumn’s bounties, I’ve played the ant.

I sit in my lounge, glancing briefly over the PS2 and Game Cube gathering dust under the widescreen LCD - calling it a television, when I’ve watched perhaps five hours of broadcast television all year would be a disservice – and over to the stacks of jewel cases of my gaming collection, stacked high with second hand gems of yesteryear like Half Life: GOTY edition, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Company of Heroes and recent acquisitions, like Spore and...

Well, only Spore.

I noticed, and still contemplate, a distressing trend in my purchases, which has completely changed my buying behaviour this year. I would get a game, open and install the CD once, and play a while. Then I’d have to re-image my laptop – for a variety of reasons, discussed previously – and never touch the game again. The sheer inertia of having to wait for the install, perhaps swapping CD or DVD , disc after disc, then finding and installing all the patches, only to have to repeat the process a few months later, would exhaust me far before the euphoria of actually playing would hit. Not to mention the inconvenience of having to pack for the road, a frequent experience recently.

And so the game would sit discarded in its case – while I played Left4Dead, or Team Fortress 2, or World of Goo, because it was far easier to back the Steam cache up to hard drive, and faster to restore it than install a game from optical media.

To rub salt on the raw wound, a few weeks later, the now forgotten game would arrive on Steam, where I'd be left with the unpleasant choice of repurchasing it, or relying on the sundered shell of its former fragile, imperfect physicality.

So to confess my New Years resolution last year: I swore to only buy games this as they were digitally released.

I cracked, but once. Buying Spore was a calculated risk that Electronic Arts would be unable or unwilling to distribute their tent pole games on a third party platform – one which has just been proved wrong, spectacularly so when you consider the Steam version doesn’t require SecureROM.

Which is why my game of the year is a platform, Steam, not a game.

Because Steam is really the only game in town.