Leveling Down

One of the Xbox 360′s strongest features compared to other consoles is its multiplayer gameplay, which can probably be attributed to the Live infrastructure. It is thus not surprisingly to see strong multiplayer games on this system. For today’s awards, I will be discussing the best multiplayer games released this year, and the one better than the rest.

I will also be discussing the best new IP and best sequel of the year. It’s good to see that in 2009, there were nearly an equal number of good new IPs and sequels. The moment we begin seeing only sequels releasing and new IPs no longer developed is the moment the game industry stops advancing. It’s easy to support sequels since you know what you’re getting yourself into, but this year was perhaps the year with the largest number of development studios shutting down. Continue to take a chance by supporting new IPs – the developers need this type of support to stay in business and come up with new and exciting games to push our industry forward!

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Rounding out our main categories, today we will be looking at Best Action/Adventure, Music, Real-Time Strategy and XBLA games. Looking at the list of titles from this year, there were a surprising number of good action/adventure games out this year, and even though neither of us owns a PS3, you can’t talk about action/adventure in 2009 without mentioning Uncharted 2. I’m glad I didn’t have to nominate that game though, since that would probably have made for some tough decisions. Music games, on the other hand, seemed to take a step backwards, or maybe we are just getting sick of them. Meanwhile, Live Arcade continues to put out good titles worth taking a look at.

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It’s that time of the year again…as 2009 draws to a close and the holiday season is upon us, cmfl3x and I decided that we wanted to do our own “Leveling Down” gaming awards for 2009 where we choose winners in several categories for Xbox 360 games that have been released in 2009. At the same time, we also wanted to preserve the holiday shopping guide that Leveling Down produced last year but felt that the awards and the shopping guide were too similar.

Instead of separate 2009 awards and holiday shopping guide posts, we’ve decided to combine them this year into one. Every game we’ve nominated within our awards are games worth considering for the holidays, but at the same time, we’re also declaring the winner. Consider the awards as, if you can only buy one game from the nominees of the category, buy the winner. But if you are further interested in other games from the category, you should definitely pick them up as well as they have aspects that all make them worth considering. Game boxes have been provided for all nominees, and all of them link to Amazon, our gaming retailer of the year due to not only their ridiculous gaming deals, but their constant vigilance in price matching practically all competitors.

Our 2009 awards/shopping guide will span all week, with cmfl3x and me alternating posts and writing about a few categories each day. This will culminate on Friday when we both share our own nominations for Game of the Year, and our picks for Game of the Year. I will kick things off today with three categories: 2009′s Best Fighting Game, Best Role Playing Game, and Best First Person Shooter for the Xbox 360.

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I finally took the shrinkwrap off my copy of Left 4 Dead 2 last night, and gave it a spin by playing through the first campaign with AI opponents on Normal difficulty and the second campaign with friends & AI on varying levels of difficulty. My impressions of the retail version of the game don’t seem to differ drastically from those of my demo impressions, but I do have some stuff to talk about so hit the jump if you’re interested in hearing my thoughts on it.
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In Assassin’s Creed, 2 is definitely better than 1

As espion4ge stated a week or so ago, we save the title “review” for games that we have completed. When I opened Assassin’s Creed 2 last week, never in a million years did I think I would be writing a review for this 20+ hour game less than a week later. Yet here we are – I somehow managed to sneak around my family and Thanksgiving schedule to pour in the 25 or so hours I needed to beat the game. Guess I’ve learned a thing or two about sneaking around as an assassin from this remarkable piece of edutainment. Hit the jump to share in that knowledge.

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With Band Hero and LEGO Rock Band recently released, I picked up Band Hero to play with my family this holiday season and am even looking at LEGO Rock Band since both have several “family friendly” recognizable songs. But then I was trying to understand how the importing works for all these music games and it was somewhat of a headache since there’s over a dozen of them out now. Well, as I went through figuring them out, I decided to write up a guide at the same time, so those of you that are curious about how exporting works for all the Rock Band and Guitar Hero games can now learn from what I just learned. However, please keep in mind that I’m talking about these games specifically from a 360/PS3 perspective – Wii owners may find even more limitations in place since I don’t know much about the Wii versions. I believe the Wii Rock Band universe does not support any sort of exporting but the Wii Guitar Hero universe follows the same limitations as the 360 & PS3 versions.

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I know the economy is bad and all, but the discounted games this weekend were ridiculous! Everywhere I turned, there was a game calling my name. I ended up picking up Left 4 Dead 2 from Amazon for $35, but other than that I managed to stay strong. There were, however, tons of deals I skipped out on that I almost pulled the trigger on:

Assassin’s Creed $10
Dragon Age: Origins $35
DJ Hero $95 (with $40 Amazon Credit)
FIFA 10 $35
Guitar Hero 5 $30
Guitar Hero: Metallica $25
Marvel Ultimate Alliance: 2 $30
Resident Evil 5 $20

FYI, some of those deals are still out there as I am writing this. Is it me, or were there not these kinds of deals last year? For some reason, all the big retailers are slashing their prices in an attempt to move units – maybe they’re not meeting their sales projections or something. What’s even better is that Amazon is matching all of these deals. Now, if I see a deal at Best Buy or Walmart, I know I don’t need to make a trip because Amazon will match the deal within a day or two. When the big boys are competing, it can only be good for the consumer. What a great time to be a gamer!

Anyway, the reason I managed to resist all these games is because I’ve been playing Assassin’s Creed 2 non-stop all weekend. They’ve added some “challenge” levels that I find completely addicting. Between that and wanting to prestige in Modern Warfare 2, I didn’t really need to get in on those deals. Plus, if they’re going to offer all those deals now, I can be confident that they’ll be there again in the future.

Let the madness continue!