Justin's Game of the Year 2009: Fallout 3

Well, it's about that time, closing up the year of gaming. We played a lot of games. We covered many genres. We played on many consoles (not the PS3 though!). So what is your favorite game of the year?

This year, I'm picking Fallout 3.

At the beginning of the year I was coming down off of Call of Duty 4, a revisit from last year, that I really never let go of. I took a hiatus and spent some time with my Wii, buying more games for that than any other this year. I also bought quite a few iPod games. I even played Spore on my Mac.

Then Fallout 3 came out and I knew it was going to be a toss up between it, Halo: ODST and MW2 to make my most played game of the year award. I couldn't talk myself into yet another driving game. They're repetitive and don't really bring much to the table. I probably spent as much time driving in Forza 2 as I did painting the cars in it. The other games pretty much ended up being sequels as well. More of the same. More of the same fun, mind you, but just more story with slightly better graphics.

But Fallout 3 was such a departure from the last few years of gaming that I had to pick it just because of it's differences that I ended up enjoying so much. Besides some issues I had with the crappy voice acting and bad animations (walking around for instance was like watching a bad 80's computer generated music video), getting into a deep RPG with fully a customizable character was just what I needed. I liked the missions. I liked the choices. I liked zeroing in on people's body parts and blowing them off with a scoped magnum. This was so much better than the space epic, Mass Effect (a game that had superior voice acting) that I tried last year and got tired of real quick. Roaming around generic looking planets that could have been modeled on a G3 Macintosh with Google Maps overlays. Of real boring places. Seriously, look at this crap.

In further...

• Wii GOTY: Excite Truck
• iPod GOTY: Crush the Castle
• Retro GOTY: Excite Truck
• Car GOTY: Burnout Paradise
• Human GOTY: My son