Nintendo is stupid, they had no clue what they has with W101. If they let Nintendo characters in it it would have been a multi million seller.
To recap:
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10. Super Mario 3D World
09. Tomb Raider
08. The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds
07. Disgaea D2: A Brighter Darkness
06. Shin Megami Tensei IV
05. Dragon's Crown
04. The Guided Fate Paradox
03. The Wonderful 101
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bugsonglass said:It will go down to Dragon's Crown, Wonderful 101 and Bioshock Infinite as the final three... And Infinite will win it. Sorry to have spoiled it for the rest of you
Nope!
Dvader said:So will it be Wonderful 101 or Bioshock Infinite at #1...
Nopers!
Dvader said:So Saints Row 4 #3
Wonderful 101 #2
and Bioshock at #1.
Nuh-Uh!
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Up Next: Everything WRONG with my Top 2 Choices!
Infinite #2, SR4#1 confirmed. 
For those of you who paid attention to my GOTY Preparation Blog, you should know what my final two are already. If you didn't, don't bother looking, it's gone! It comes down to this:
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--OR--
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Which will it be? That will be revealed in the next day or two, but first. Here's what I think is WRONG with my top two choices!
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Both games are giant escort missions, for better or for worse. At first Ellie is kind of useless, and the way Clickers and the Infected don't react to her or Tess is very, very odd. Elizabeth is kick-ass, and although she at first seems to be a Disney Princess, her Tears and the way the world and story revolve around her, do make her kind of awesome. The way she is "Immortal" though is also kind of odd.
Both games have been awarded accolades from all over the place saying how they are the pinnacles of their genres. For Infinite to be awarded FPS of the Year by the VGX... you could hear the collective wails of the 10 or 20 CoD and BattleField players who actually wasted their time watching that mess of a show...
...it was still a very, very bad joke. Yes, I love the way Infinite lets you choose your weapons, choose your Vigors, combine your Vigors and play the way you want to play, but there's NO WAY this game is a "great" FPS. I hardly even consider it to be one, let alone the "best" of the year. If you didn't have the PSMove, the controls were weird. People complained about the aiming down the scope being assigned to R3. The cover system, or lack thereof, made the game more difficult at times than it needed to be. Imprecise aiming, the difficulty aiming at certain parts of your enemies bodies, the very fact that you'd either be swarmed by dozens of enemies at once, or not fighting anyone for a half hour at a time sometimes, was also strange. As a FPS alone, Infinite was slightly lacking.
The Last of Us as a stealth game? Yes. The tension this game created kept me on the edge of my seat at almost all times while playing --BUT-- the formula didn't vary much at all throughout the game. Come to a new area, encounter the Infected or the Human enemies, take out the biggest threats first, then the stragglers, and move on. It was intense, but it was very, very simple. Don't even get me started on the "Puzzles." Get to a dead end, look for the conveniently placed ladder or plank. See a body of water? Look for the also conveniently placed wooden pallet to float Ellie on. Metal Gear this aint!
Another thing these games share in common is the woefully small selection of enemies you encounter. BioShock had more than The Last of Us, but c'mon! What were there three types of Infected in TLoU and the few humans you encounter? Infinite was mostly made up of human enemies, but there were the Handymen, the Zealots, the Motorized Patriots and the Vox Populi, at least. Nothing in Infinite though was on the same creative level as the Big Daddies and Splicer population of the originals.
I'm not going to say much more now, as I do --REALLY-- love both games, but if the gameplay isn't perfect in either of them, what does it come down to? The stories? What do you think I'm going to say here?
Come back on Christmas and find out!
Aww, I was hoping SRIV would stealth its way in somehow. 
(And yes, I did read this: "It was a three way tie for 10th place between it, Saints Row IV and Diablo 3 on the PS3".)
Wow I totally missed the SRIV mention at the start, I thought you loved it. I dont even remember you talking about TLOU.
I got the game and then my mother had her hip replaced. I barely got a chance to play it while everyone else was playing. I started playing it briefly when it first came out, then picked it up a few months later to finish it.
phantom_leo said:I got the game and then my mother had her hip replaced...
I meant to apolgize for that BTW.
Ah I see Leo. Aspro you sly dog you.
phantom_leo said:If you're a Wii U owner and don't have The Wonderful 101, just sell your system, you're doing it wrong!
I has the demo. Does that count?
No.
Hmm, Amazon is currently selling Wonderful 101 for $29.99 . . .
DO EET ! ! !
No.
Here's what I LIKE about both games:
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Just like Tomb Raider, I looked at The Last of Us and thought: "Why do we need next gen?" The game's attention to detail in the environments and animation are second to none on the PS3. BioShock Infinite is the kind of game that you can tell is using every last resource of the PS3 and 360 systems. Columbia is a vision to behold, is full of people at certain points, is loaded with tons of detail, the artwork is gorgeous and the characters look mostly great too. The vigors and their effects in the midst of everything else are fantastic and the framerate remains steady even with everything going on in the game at once. BOTH games are a marvel!
I love that Elizabeth isn't a helpless damsel. At first she seems like she is going to be. I know I mentioned this already, but when you first meet her, she definitely has the whole Disney Princess vibe going on! Her power, her tears, and the very fact that you bear witness to just what she is capable of makes her someone to love and fear at the same time! Ellie seems like she'll be a liability at first too. Through the first half of the game, you see her running around and through the infected and by the humans and you think to yourself: "She's useless." When Joel is backed into a corner, though, when it is just the two of them, she comes alive. Hand her a gun and she becomes your back up. Further still, in the sequence where Joel is injured, she hunts for them to stay alive, and I LOVE the fact she takes on one of the Armored Infected... and WINS... that's something I could hardly even pull off as Joel... with another person fighting beside him! Ellie goes from liability to asset to AWESOME throughout the course of the game!
Both games rely on their stories to motivate you to play and therein lies their greatest strengths of all. I've never come across a world in a game that moved me as much as Columbia. Comstock and his philosophies created a world that shook me to my very core. There were times this year where I literally reached an obsessive fever pitch searching for truths about the game and the other BioShocks. Yes, I even had a **medical** drug induced moment where I couldn't differentiate between reality and the game's reality and it literally panicked me briefly. That has never and will most likely not ever happen again. Elizabeth's life, the fundamentalism and naivete of the people made me pause as they hit too close to home. Booker and Comstock at the font, and what occurs there, made me put down my controller and stare at the screen in shock for minutes after. Elizabeth and I both have "father issues" and there are times where I would have entertained the thought of what happened there, but seeing it graphically done, considering what it really meant... Jarring, to say the least.
The Last of Us story is a lot less personal, but is just as effective. Nothing will top that opening chapter... ever. If you have dry eyes at the end of the past sequence, you are inhuman. Seeing the world that Joel and Ellie live in, fully understanding his loss, understanding the meaning of desolation, The Last of Us presents a Post-Apocalyptic world unlike any other. You understand why Joel has closed off his heart. It's that much more effective when Ellie acts like a child in spite of the world around her. You feel their desperation at times. The way Joel slowly turns around through the course of the story is masterful. Ellie protecting Joel when he gets wounded, the lengths that she'll go to... What she experiences at that time and Joel's struggle to protect her even then... also... wow, just wow! The moment you come across that herd of wandering, wild Giraffe, seeing the wonderment Ellie expresses. Knowing she is seeing something like this for the first and possibly last time, as she heroically resigns herself to what she must do... Powerful stuff! By the time I was playing as Joel in the hospital, I was howling at my TV screen, tears streaming down my face...
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02. BioShock Infinite -- The thing is, we'll never know the truth about BioShock Infinite. It's a trait of the human mind to search for things it can assign meaning to. We'll compare memories, we'll interpret things in an infinite amount of ways, just to try to relate to one another and make sense of the world around us. That doesn't mean, though, the truth is out there. Just as Elizabeth explained in the game: When the mind experiences two different realities, it will struggle to create meaning and memories that aren't there. Maybe it's sheer brilliance on Levine and his teams part, that that's exactly what I did when I experienced the game, but it's probably not what they intended. Columbia and Rapture most likely have NOTHING to do with one another. The only Constants and Variables I can truly say the games share are: Levine will ALWAYS try to spring a surprise ending on the player, the "variables" are just the way in which he is going to try and pull that off. As much as this game moved me, it may or may not have been by the developer's design...
01. The Last of Us -- ...whereas in The Last of Us, everything you FEEL is just what the developer intended. It doesn't take being a parent to mourn with Joel at the beginning of the game. It's a horrific turn of events that you feel in your heart and the pit of your stomach. There has never been and will most likely never be another game that pulls this off as well as The Last of Us. I don't even want to know what it feels like to be a parent and experience this, in the game or god-forbid, first hand. You witness just what makes Joel the man he is throughout most of the game. You understand. It's what makes his turn-around that long and tentative, so meaningful and touching. You understand his pain and his reluctance to feel again. Ellie grows up in an unimagineable world, she may have a potty-mouth, but at times she's still just a child. She'll read comic books, she'll play with toys... That giraffe scene... She's the real hero here. It's both painful and beautiful to see the world through her eyes, with a sense of awe, in spite of it all. You know she knows what she's going to have to do in the end, yet she is OK with it. She accepts her fate. She wants to experience what she can before she joins her friend that she feels she left behind. The game was never ruined for me. I didn't know what was going to happen in the end as I played through it. As I said, I was literally HOWLING at the screen as I desperately fought through the hospital; I was tearing up at the thought of experiencing what I did at the beginning of the game, again, at the end. How it played out left me dumbfounded. I was touched at the sentiment. I was sickended by the selfishness. I understood completely, but was left with the feeling of: "THIS ISN'T RIGHT!!" I felt so much. This moment changed everything and cemented this game's place in my heart, in my list for GOTY, and how it stacked up against Infinite. BioShock may have had it's effect on me that it did, but that was because of ME. The Last of Us had it's effect on EVERYONE because the developers INTENDED it to be that way, and THAT cannot be denied. Both are truly great games, but The Last of Us had moments in it that will alter the path of videogame story-telling irrevocably and THAT trumps pretty much everything else!
What a great job you did with this, excellent reading. Couldn't say it better myself about TLOU.
03. The Wonderful 101 -- Really. What else can I say about this game that I haven't said already? Easily the best game for the Wii U. One of Kamiya's best works. It's just one of those games devoted to being F-U-N. I've never really said this before but it's almost the "The World Ends with You" for the U in the way it makes the --BEST-- use of the two screens so far! It's chock full of replayability. It's got a bunch of stuff to collect and unlock, including some cameo characters. You probably know this already, but this was almost a game full of Nintendo characters! Though the idea was nixed, the references still remain. You'll visit Lowrule; You'll wield a Super-Scope like gun; Wonder Black carries a Game 'n Watch themed 3DS and a Boss or two will knock you out with battles you won't see coming! Speaking of bosses, these are some of the best you'll see in all of gaming all in one game. Multi-stage, of all sizes, some are tiny, some are the size of small cities, all are totally inventive. They are all brilliant and they'll all keep you on your toes! Even between bosses, though, you and your 100 heroes won't have much time to rest. Enemies of all shapes and sizes, all with distinct attacks and weaknesses, will battle you from the cities to the rain forests and beyond. In true Kamiya fashion, each Unite Morph has its crazy combos and multiple uses. You fight your enemies using combinations of your morphs but your Morphs can also be used to Light Torches to solve Puzzles, Smash through Cracks in Floors and Walls, Slow down Time **a-la Viewtiful Joe!**... This game has unequaled action sequences but there's almost Zelda-like puzzles in there too! A game that looks like it could be a strange Pikmin strategy game is actually equal parts Okami, Devil May Cry, Zelda, Viewtiful Joe, Bayonetta, and so much more! Had this game been available at launch and advertised --HEAVILY-- it alone could have made all the difference in the world for the U. As it is now, the few that have played it, LOVE IT, but rather than being the system seller it deserves to be, it is now relegated to being simply a niche, gamer's game. This is truly frustrating as I see the potential that it holds. In my quest to find games that are unique and set new standards in gaming, this ranks among the best and deservedly sits among my top picks for 2013. If you're a Wii U owner and don't have The Wonderful 101, just sell your system, you're doing it wrong!