As I said earlier today, I’ve been playing many games this year, and not all of them came out in 2008. Here are five I particularly enjoyed over the past twelve months, despite their vintage.

The Oldies

Crackdown
I got Crackdown last Christmas from my brother, who bought it at a used game joint for a song (seems everyone got rid of their copies once they got their Halo 3 beta codes). I’m glad I asked him for it. There’s little I can say about the game that hasn’t been said in the past 24 months, so I’ll keep it short: there are few pleasures greater than scaling a building with an SUV in your hand and throwing it ten blocks, only to crush an evil ganger from a distance. That’s entertainment!

Earthbound
I’ve started this game some dozen times, but always got distracted or had issues with emulation and never really got into the good stuff. This year, though, I managed to get some semi-working emulation going on my PSP. Sadly, that emulation stopped working once I got to the part where you get to control the geeky kid instead of Ness, but that was far enough for me to understand that this is, absolutely, a game worth my time. I have since visited my friend Kelvin’s place in Ottawa, and borrowed the original cart from him. I’ll be playing this beauty on my SNES in 2009, and I can’t wait to see the end.

Football Manager 2008
This game took hundreds of hours of my life that I’ll never get back. I don’t want to get started on it, because I’m reasonably sure there isn’t a single reader who’ll care, but I’ll say one thing: nowhere else in games will you find a chaos machine like this. This game has millions of numbers which are constantly running simulations; you make decisions and attempt to direct the flow of chaos in your own favour. I spent months trying to figure this game out, and failed; I merely figured out how to tell it what I wanted, and hope for the best. It’s kinda like real life, in a way; you can never figure out how it works the way it works. All you can do is crack it open a little bit and eke out the existence you want. It figures– the one game I get all deep is the sports management simulator. Go figure.

Pokemon Snap
The N64 was to me once what the PS3 is to me now: the “other” console. I had a PS1 back in the day, and there weren’t many games I coveted. Pokemon Snap was, however, one of those few games. I didn’t care about Zelda, or Mario, or Goldeneye; I loved the concept of a game where you go around taking photographs, and get rewarded for composition and quality of shots. While it didn’t really look at composition as much as it did subject size and centering, I was still really aching to play it (and, I’ll admit, at the time, I kinda dug Pokemon). This year, I got to play it on Wii’s virtual console. I expected it to age poorly, but it was still everything I wanted it to be. Why there aren’t more games like this (pafrticularly for the Wii) is completely beyond me; a non-violent FPS that teaches users how to take good photos seems like the biggest no-brainer ever.

Skate.
Last Christmas, I got two copies of Beautiful Katamari. I traded one to a friend for Skate. I almost feel guilty for this, because Skate is so great and Beautiful Katamari is so, err… well, mediocre. I spent a lot of time playing this game; more than any Tony Hawk game, that’s for sure. It’s what a skateboarding game should be: noodling around in a beaufifully-rendered city and occasionally doing tricks worth seeing– then being able to show those things to the world via the magic of EA’s footage sharing system.

I can think of a few games that’ll probably be on this list at the end of 2009, but I don’t want to talk about them too much; after all, many of those games will be in my “Questionable Mentions” article in a few days.

Tomorrow: Five games-related pieces of writing that were important to me in 2008.