Pc game sales 2010

The semi-structured stealth sandbox stabfest finally lets us loose to play with those clever details and just-complex-enough systems, even if you just want to play the same bit 20 times in a row to see how many ways you can do it. Messing with hapless guards has never been so entertaining and I fear it never will again. At times it has the wonderful old mix of earnestly mixing the politics of war with full-on daftness but these moments are few and far between. Metal Gear Solid is at its best when earnest, serious, and ludicrous.

The story is an unfinished mess and has some truly ghastly, hateful parts but I do like parts and just wish it had the more balanced and complete Metal Gear personality. Well, if you want Metal Gear stealth sandbox with less of the plotsprawl, mate, try Ground Zeroes.

The standalone prequel is a small, focused, and more challenging murderbox that will reward you for learning the area well as it returns again and again for new missions.

I like Quiet as a pal in the field, mind. And synchronised stealth takedowns with her feel oh so cool. Graham: A game in which you can hide inside a box? A game in which you can pin a poster of a woman to the front of that box and prompt all the guards in a base to come ogle and applaud at said woman, before you pop out and slow motion shoot them all in the head with a silenced pistol?

Video Matthew: I should probably disclose that I appeared in a Metal Gear documentary that came with the game. But was I asked to also star in Death Stranding? Of all the games on this list, Undertale may be the only one to have inspired a wrestler's ring entrance. In fact, Toby Fox's gloomy cutey of an RPG has burrowed into pop-culture consciousness in a unique way. Perhaps it's the way combat becomes a mixture of a text puzzle and a bullet-hell, perhaps it's the cast of weird monsters, perhaps it's that you can go on a date with a skeleton.

Whatever the reason, Undertale left an impression. Alice Bee: As observed by many, Megalovania is a fucking jam. But that aside, what I remember most from playing Undertale is thinking it was very clever. It seemed, even then, to be destined to be a game extremely loved in an extremely online way. Not memes, exactly, but a lot of texts posts starting "Here's the thing you need to know about Undyne.

But I liked it most when it was being funny or sweet. See: that date with the skeleton, in a date outfit that is a crop t-shirt saying Cool Dude. Undertale has empathy. It has empathy in a way very few works of fiction do, and it's up front about it. It's not trying to trick you into be empathetic, it just wants you to be a nice person. But at the end of the game you discover those stand for Execution Points and Level of Violence. You're not supposed to kill anyone, you're supposed to figure out the other options, because duh.

My surrogate parent monster at the start of the game refused to get out of my way, so I killed her. But then I immediately regretted it, and reloaded. But the game still knew. It knew what I did. Skylines lets us plant cities, seeding asphalt and concrete to watch them grow and buzz with life. The city will largely take care of itself, but you can make weed and fertilise with policies and plans to make it truly shine.

Or in this case, the chain of office. One spring night in , Cities: Skylines rode in off the steppe, marched into the campaign yurt of old Mayor SimCity, and beasted off his head with one pleasingly-curved swing of his asphalt broadsword. Also, this is a very funny sketch. Graham: It's all about the roads, isn't it? SimCity offered an always off-balance set of scales, where adding a little more houses over here required a little more industry over there and so on, till the map was full.

Cities: Skylines grabs that system wholesale, but really it's the roads that hold my attention, from trying to design the perfect road network before placing a single building, to endlessly tweaking junctions and off-ramps for hours to try to reduce those downtown traffic jams. There is always more to do, and watching your ants scurry around your ant farm more efficiently is its own reward.

Alice L: God, I love Cities. I just can't seem to deal with my trash effciently, and I always build so many roads to try and keep all the pollution away from my townsfolk that I just run out of money.

And to that I say: sandbox! Conduct industrial espionage for fun and profit in this turn-based tactical stealth game from the makers of Mark Of The Ninja. Blessed with generous knowledge of enemy movements, try to thread the needle as your agents move through facilities and dodge guards as the security response escalates. Build and upgrade a stable of agents, steal new gear, and try not to lose them by getting greedy.

But a shiny new crimetool is just the other side of this locked door Graham: Invisible, Inc. You know not only where the guards are, but where they're going to walk to.

Every route and vision cone is visible on the UI. It should be easy, then, to sneak into its proc gen office floors and make off with the goods, right?

Ha ha, you fool. Perfect information doesn't make you perfect. You're going to make mistakes. In part because the game delights in tempting you.

Sure, you can get what you need and leave, but push on into another room or two and you might find a new tool, a new character, or rescue the character you got captured on the last mission. The more you push, the more guards will start wandering the floor in search of intruders, the more you'll find yourself having to make sacrifices of your characters.

That's tough because the character design here is great, both in terms of the unique skills your crew each have, and in their visual design. Invisible, Inc. If your favourite bit of any XCOM fight is the moment before all hell breaks loose - or if you really liked the recent Mutant: Year Zero - give this a try next. It's a tighter game, but its reduced scope brings clarity of purpose and design.

Arkane created a world of political intrigue and class struggle, where everyone is betraying everyone else, and then let you be an assassin in it.

An assassin with magic powers. The sequel, though the PC build was initially plagued with performance issues on release, goes further than the original in creating an exquisite playground for you to exploit. Hack a clockwork robot here, flood an entire building with knockout gas there, and decide the fate of a nation. Alice Bee: How do I love thee, Dishonored?

Let me count the ways. Not literally, though, or we'll be here all day. I was being poetic, like. I think Dishonored 2 is probably the perfect form of Dishonored much as I also enjoy Death Of The Outsider, and its portrayal of a world caught in the moment between past and future, between the old ways and the new.

Because you're given the option of playing as Emily or Corvo, you get two entirely different ways to play the game, even on top of the lethal vs. Christ, though, Dishonored 2 is just so fucking stylish.

It's the sexiest game to ever feature no shagging. Mission four is the Clockwork Mansion, where you have to break into the home of big science weirdo Kirin Jindosh. He's really gone hard and gone home, transforming his mansion into a weird collection of moving parts, guarded by hideous clockwork automata. And yet, you can outsmart him.

You can sneak into the walls. You can burrow into his little nest. You can be as a ghost. The whole game is like that. It is well oiled machine, and you can become a cog in it, an unknown, unseen presence that spins this way, then that, subtly changing the workings.

Or you can be a big stabby murder girl. Up to you, isn't it? Katharine: How do I love thee, Clockwork Mansion? It was, what, five hours I spent crawling around inside your walls, dodging your hulking great clockwork soldiers and trying desperately avoid your network of surveillance bots?

Or was it eight? Or nine? Whatever number it was, I'd do it all again in an instant. In truth, I needn't have spent that long slipping through the cracks of this single, but fiendishly brilliant Dishonored 2 level. This burden I brought upon myself. Having played and adored the first Dishonored but also wholly misunderstanding how its chaos system worked, I made a solemn vow upon starting Dishonored 2 that not only was I going to finish the game with Low Chaos this time, thereby getting the 'good' ending, but I was also going to do it completely unseen and without shedding a single drop of blood - and my Shadow and Clean Hands achievements remain two of my greatest gaming accomplishments to this day.

Yes, it involved a lot of quick saves and quick reloads. Yes, it probably took twice as long to play as it perhaps should have done, but it was worth it reader, because Dishonored 2 is a masterpiece of design, ingenuity and general splendidness. Karnaca is a city that twists, turns and loops back in on itself without ever losing its sense of place or structure. It's Jindosh's Clockwork Mansion writ large across an entire urban sprawl, and for me its warren of plague-ridden shops, murderous alleyways and lived-in apartment blocks are far more treacherous and enticing destinations than their Dunwall equivalents ever were.

As you pick through the aftermath of the city's devastating Bloodfly invasion, you too start to feel like some sort of disease that's rippling through its corrupted streets, dismantling its upper echelons from the inside out before leaving without a trace.

There are so many secrets to uncover and so many paths you can take to try and get there, yet all the while it's a city that adheres to the strict tick-tick-tick of its clockwork logic.

The Clockwork Mansion may leave an indelible mark on the early hours of Dishonored 2, but this is by no means a game that peaks early. Beyond Jindosh's mansion, his spirit comes back to bite you in the ass when you encounter his devilish Jindosh Lock, and moments later you're being dazzled once again by the time-travelling puzzle box that is Aramis Stilton's decaying manor house. Finally, it all culminates in the sweetest, most delicious serving of hot revenge I've ever seen in a video game.

It is, in a word, perfect, and my ultimate game of the decade by a blinking country mile. After a decade lain fallow, uncertain of its place in the modern FPS scene, the game that made Id Software returned in a shower of guts. The reborn Doom is fast, it is nimble, it is loud, and it rewards you for tearing demons apart with your bare hands.

Dave: The moment I knew that the revamped Doom was something special was when the Doom Slayer pumped his shotgun in time with the music.

Doom has a vibe, you see - a 90s power fantasy unashamed of how much cheese is heaped on. After all, do we not order entire boards of cheese at restaurants?

Cheese is great! And Doom gets this. For you see, Doom wants you to slay demons in the most barbaric way possible.

Glory Kills give you health pickups, while chopping things with the chainsaw makes the enemy cadaver spew ammunition like a fountain. This means less time is spent running away to recover and replenish, and more time is spent killing things! Explore all the thrills, chills, responsibilities, and mundanities of building a colony on another world in this survival management game.

Your plans may be big and your blueprints impressive but can be all too easily undone by shortages, spoilage, raiders, aliens, fires, your own mistakes, or the quiet ticking time bomb of a colonist who is so sick of people clomping around at night that they snap.

A bit like Dwarf Fortress, in space, with menus to click and pictures to look at. Nate: One of the worst names of the decade, for one of the best games. But for everyone else, and especially for those people whose sense of humour focuses entirely on hooting like delighted chimps whenever they spot someone using a word that also has a Sex Meaning, RimWorld sounded like a themepark based on the concept of licking arseholes. For just a few examples of the tales you can set up with RimWorld, I defer to that cool guy Nate, who listed five of his favourites here.

RimWorld is both an answer to that and its own distinct idea. Its mix of base building, survival, and life sim is just about right, and its famous harshness easy to mitigate for those who just want to have a good time, or bump up for those who relish a cascading disaster sim. Its mostly optional darkness - slavery, organ harvesting, cannibalism - is counteracted by its pleasant atmosphere and the warm glow of pemmican on the fire, or feeding a flock of fluffy chicks, or getting all your potatoes into storage after the harvest.

And you can be a nomad too. Oh my god. Stay standing for as long as you can in this simple arena FPS. Run around this empty oval arena and shoot skulls with your one gun while a timer counts up. Good luck. And my god, it looks and sounds like nothing else.

Alice0: I was taken with Devil Daggers at first sight. I adore the old 3D style of unfiltered textures and jittering vertices applied to skulls, skulls, skulls - a torrent of skulls more complex and numerous than was possible in I especially like when it breaks out of this look, with the intense colour wash and neon pinkbluepinkbluepinkblue daggerhand coming as we level up, spitting a torrent of knives. Then I heard Devil Daggers.

Jesus christ. What a sound. Grinding teeth, chuckles, groans, roars, and screams build into a rich soundscape overfilling my ears with menace. It does not sound like a video game from our world. Then I played Devil Daggers. I surely died within 20 seconds. And again. Then a bit more. A bit more. Even passing one minute felt like a triumph. It took hours to reach five minutes, egged on by rivalries with pals on the leaderboards. Waves keep on spawning, spawners keep spawning more, bigger and tougher enemies arrive, the escalation constricts the battlefield, and it all seems such a challenge.

Then you learn a bit more and survive a bit longer and realise that, actually, one wave you once found murderous was trying to feed you power-ups. You find yourself clearing waves before the next spawns. It feels chuffing great to reach the point of dancing between clouds of skulls and under the coils of a skullsnake, my knifehand flashing with power and so many awful noises in my ears. Over this, my hand is wibble-wobble-warbling as it spits knives and will soon power up to full-on screaming.

I adore this full-body experience. Graham: We named Devil Daggers as the best game of , and I've never felt more estranged from a comments section. The recurring refrain was, "Well, it's fine, but it doesn't have a lot of content though, does it? Its dozens of classes are clear characters, with their own colourful personalities and backstories. Nate: For the most part, I like sluggish, top-down games about organising things and increasing their complexity.

And most of my favourite games are that sort of thing. Alice L: I got really really into Overwatch for about a year. I even, embarrassingly, have a D. Va bumper sticker on my car. Alice Bee: Ignore Graham. I played loads of TF2 in the bad old days, and Overwatch may be asking you to squint and pretend you've not seen a bunch of these ideas before, but it's so much more fun than Valve's competitive shooter attached to a hat economy.

Especially if you like playing support characters which, obviously, should be called "the best class, you ungrateful bastards" and enjoying yourself at the same time.

The speed. The joy. You know how it starts in building games plopping us down alone in hostile place: first, you must knock down a tree. In Factorio, rather than starting you down the path of crafting increasingly tough axes, this tree fuels what will soon be a sprawling web of drills, conveyor belts, assemblers, generators, batteries, defenses, construction robots, and laboratories, a vast mechanism of machines building machines to build better machines.

Just the deep, brutal, chemical satisfaction of starting with nothing, and building it into a sprawling mass of ordered complexity. The difference between Factorio and other system-building games say, the Anno series, or other citybuilders where things process other things is an absolute chasm.

Because Factorio guides you into its monstrous grandeur through steps so slight you never even know your feet are moving. Play is essentially a voluntary fugue state, full of decisions so small you make them without really thinking, but adding up to works of monolithic scale.

Sin: Efficiency is like salt. A little is vital. A little more in the right place at the right moment is delightful. But the salting of things is not a worthy or interesting goal to me. Instead, I enjoy elaborate looping constructs that make a kind of sense but only for that machine, only for that world, only to me.

This machinery has a history, and even when parts of it are taken up and recombined, that history belongs here. I am an archivist factorian, constructing systems based on the changing whims and inputs of time.

You might value efficiency. You might value symmetry, or environmentalism, or deep pools of backup resources. Your machine will be your own, and you will make it and know it and love it like nobody else could. Though your co-op partner might disagree about how to continue, and the game plans for disagreements. How very complex and clever. I only mention this because it completely worked. And if a game can leave you with a sense of wonder at a time like that, and even make you feel nostalgic for the day you left your last parent in a hole forever, then it must be bloody well written.

I say written, but damn near everything about the game is layered with craft, from the sweeping, atmospheric score, to the voice acting, to the elemental combat system. What a treat, to not only recapture the feeling of playing something you loved for the first time, but to exceed it. And with a playable lizard man, too. And you know what?

The most obvious, and spoiler free, response to the title is "a big weird house", because that's what you explore as you unravel the strange stories of the strange deaths of a strange family.

They all lived together somewhere in Washington state, and as you unlock each bedroom you get another piece of the puzzle that was their lives. The vignettes you see are inventive, and take full advantage of how games can tell stories in a unique way. And everyone remembers the one with the fish, don't they? Alice0: I am so grateful to Edith Finch for building this place for me to explore.

What a treat of a house. Alice Bee: All the little stories in Edith Finch are about death, but very very few of them are actually sad, even if the deaths themselves are tragic. The way you experience them is usually joyful, beautiful, hopeful, and not sad at all. Even what is perhaps the most tragic death of all becomes a lovely game where bath toys dance together like something out of Fantasia.

It's a really wonderful video game. Katharine: The bath bit almost destroyed me, but as Alice Bee just mentioned, most of the tragedies that haunt this jumbled old mansion are more joyful than sad.

The bit with the swing, for example, is truly awful if you stop and think about it for a minute, but it's also one of the most peaceful and uplifting ends to a Finch story the game has. And oh, the bit with the fish-chopping! What an absolute masterpiece.

Graham: "They fuck you up, your mum and dad," wrote Philip Larkin. Which, yes, fine , but kids fuck up their mum and dad, too. Example: I used to be able to play things like Edith Finch and remain unaffected, but not anymore.

It is one of my favourite games ever, but the bath scene reduced me to such a burbling mess that I can't ever play it again. Maybe when my kid is grown. This roguelikelike deck-building card game sends us up a strange fantasy tower to slay its beating heart and free ourselves from the Sisyphean cycle. Collecting cards and artefacts along a run from friends and foes, the different classes can develop wild decks and combos as we face ever stranger and more powerful enemies.

Through all this, combat remains clear and predictable, something to plan not wing. Nate: When it comes to card games, Hearthstone is my thing. Or at least it was, until I had a slurp on this Slay the Soup. And what a broth it was. Oh, how wrong I was. Like any good roguelike usual disclaimers apply about the use of the term, etc, etc , you can only really get a feeling for Slay The Spire after beefing it on hundreds of attempts. A mathematician friend once tried and failed to explain to me how there are multiple types of infinities.

Alice0: Slay The Spire is plain and simple. Cards have easy numbers and clear consequences, and enemies telegraph their moves. Draw, cast, bish bash bosh. This magical tower is a colourful place with interesting enemies and a fun tone. The building blocks are simple but allow complex constructions. Luck plays a part, of course. Such is the roguelikelike. Slay The Spire gives a satisfying amount of space to influence this. Each level we can plot our path through encounters, shops, and treasures.

We get a pick of several rewards each time too, several options to shape or support our run. And as a recovering Magic: The Gathering rat, I like the space it gives me to optimise and hone runs, stripping cards back to build a lean engine of death. The character classes are great too.

I like how well card abilities, art, and names come together in decks that feel like playing as a knight with unholy brawn, a swift rogue whose dodges and rolls slip in a subtle blow or dagger, a robotic battle mage conjuring elements and upgrading itself, and a monk chain moves between stances. What a fine cast of magical murderers. Check into the hotel opened in the mansion of an acclaimed jazz musician with this first-person explore-o-adventure game.

This is the follow-up to Off-Peak, set outside the city and beyond its strange train station. And it seems only natural that giant artworks cover every surface and fill every corner. This hotel is so loud, so vivid, so unsubtle, so clashing, that every oddity is perfectly at home. Everything is a surprise and a treat, nothing is weird. It is an excellent place to explore, and its guests are in interesting bunch. Some are musicians seeking inspiration or education. Some are making a pilgrimage to pay homage to a great.

Some are leeching from the legacy to bolster their status. Some see it just as a branding opportunity. Some have even come to remember Norwood as a friend and collaborator.

Norwood Suite explores the varied and complex relationships people have with music, how it can touch and ruin lives or become just another commodity. After being lost at sea, the Obra Dinn drifts back to civilisation with not a soul left but plenty of corpses. Wielding a magical pocketwatch, we can see the moments of their death, exploring scenes of tragedy frozen in time.

But who are all these corpses? How did everyone die? Alice Bee: More than one person I have lived with has remarked that I am, in some respects, the stereotype of a little old lady.

I sit on the sofa, with a fluffy pink blanket over my legs, drink a lot of tea, and watch episodes of Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot. I have read all the books, and I know the culprits already, so occasionally I'll throw a Midsomer Murders in to spice things up. What I am saying is, I love a mystery. Specifically, I love the mysteries where you have a chance of figuring out whodunnit yourself: the murderer has been introduced to you, in the pack of suspects, and then shuffled back amongst them.

I have, I'm sure, said many times before that Return Of The Obra Dinn is probably the only game where I have felt like I am actually detecting things - figuring them out myself, using logic, and being rewarded for it. Rewarded with the solution. And that is enough for a good detective. And my god, some of the surprises floored me. Even frozen in time, I felt unsafe. Katharine: I, too, was a fervent shoe enthusiast in my approach to Obra Dinn, but the best thing about it was comparing notes with Matthew.

He never once looked at a shoe during his first playthrough and ended up discovering an entirely different way of figuring out what's effectively the world's most obtuse version of Guess Who? So many possibilities exist in this game, and seeing friends and relatives arrive at the same conclusion via so many different methods made me appreciate its ingenuity even more. A true masterpiece. Video Matthew: I replayed this recently - left it long enough to forget the most vital clues - and was dazzled afresh by its cleverness and the sheer horror of the thing.

That art style, that music, that mystery. But I still did it. Look, ma. Alice0: An open-world RPG set in small city spaces dense with detail where I can thunk punks with a bicycle sounds just grand to me.

What makes me so adore Yakuza so much more is the melodramatic tone. It commits fully to both. Yakuza 0 is a crime melodrama focused on an backalley lot in Tokyo. Who owns this lot? How far does this web of intrigue spread and how high does it go? And why is everyone trying to kill us? With our steely resolve, our strong moral code, our dramatic shouting, and our raw strength, we might just settle the matter.

Yakuza 0 is a melodramatic family comedy about a wacky mobster who loves food, has a childlike wonder, is nervous around women, and wants to help every downtrodden person in the world. Reunite families! Teach children kindness and self-confidence when you join a slot car racing league!

Help a kid get back his stolen video game, and teach a valuable lesson in parenting to his dad! Help a floundering dominatrix believe in herself! Befriend a weird dude who hangs around in his pants yelling about porn! Befriend Michael Jackson!

Hire a chicken to be a property manager at your real estate business! Kiryu and Majima are quite different and both absolutely delightful. What good boys. What excellent thugs. Kiryu slamming thugs with bicycles and boxing blows, Majima whirling around with a baseball bat and breakdancing moves. Never not melodramatic. I forgive its few mastubatory missteps. Its cities are bustling and full of fun diversions that make me digitally live there.

Ah, I want to stop writing this now and go hang out with the nice crimeboys again. In this space RPG, the galaxy is your sandbox. Faction conflicts, business, and personal interests run the simulation, the universe changing around you as you build your crew, ship, reputation, and fortune.

What sort of spaceman do you want to be? Sin: Star Traders Colon Frontiers lets you do what you want. You can hire a new crew, kicking out those bounty hunters you trained, and replacing them with diplomats and spies instead. Was this article informative? In This Article. Red Dead Redemption is a Western epic, set at the turn of the 20th century when the lawless and chaotic badlands began to give way to the expanding reach of government and the spread of the Industrial Age.

Release Date. There's a good chance you missed one of these. These are seven of the hardest to find or obtain upgrades that require the Speed Booster or Shinespark upgrades. IGN Logo Recommends. Only time will tell. Starfield Jared Moore Jackson as Nick Fury, sans eye-patch. Secret Invasion Adele Ankers Image Credits: Gamer Investments. After all, the sales of blockbuster games have made headlines. Call of Duty 5 blew the doors off all previous sales figures, for example; World of Warcraft: Cataclysm also destroyed previous PC game sales figures.

The game was respectable — it had a good story with great voice acting, generic but well executed combat, and action-packed platforming sections. The expected figure had been 1 million.

This is a repetitive theme. DJ Hero? Mafia II? Of course, the mid-studio slump is only a problem. So why is it so hard for reasonably good titles to make money? I suspect that a lack of creativity is part of the problem. Yes, it was a good game. But why buy it when you could instead play a generally superior platformer, such as Uncharted 2 or Super Mario Galaxy 2?

There is no clear answer to this question. After all, the mechanics are similar — if anything, Uncharted 2 and Super Mario Galaxy are more creative and offer more surprises. This sounds like a glut of product.

One is that there are simply too many games being made; to solve the issue, fewer should be made. The other is that the games that exist are too similar; to solve the problem, make games different. This is a short-sighted trend that has hurt the games industry for years. Sometimes, I wish Steve Jobs ran a game company. Quality issues continue to be a problem, although no one in the industry wants to admit it.

Bugs will always exist in games, but the number of games that have multiplayer problems at launch is mind-boggling; only Blizzard and to a lesser extent Valve seem to have figured out how to launch titles online without widespread problems.

There are other problems as well, such as poor storylines, low-quality voice acting, and the need to register a wide variety of accounts. Are these issues surprising? Reports of crunching — periods of time during which employees have to work 6 or 7 days a week, sometimes sleeping at the studio — are commonplace.