MOST SURPRISINGLY GOOD GAME

Christmas is come and gone. But that can’t stop us from picking cheesy analogies! Yes you guessed it right. We’re going to talk about the sock.Ah, childhood. Nothing quite matched the anticipation (until much later of course, when we made….discoveries) as you rolled down that red stinking-till-yesterday piece of cloth to find out why a man would journey thousands of miles on a quadruped-pulled cart to give YOU…a pencil box? Of course your mum is real proud and she thinks you would love this “..useful…” gift. You smile back, put the ‘gift’ away and get back to work. It’s the feeling that matters, ye know.But sometimes the merry ol’ man DOES actually take his mind off Mrs. Clause’s bickering and gets you something you never expected to! 2007 was a busy year for the man-in-red as we saw quite a few innocuous looking games beating the odds and expectation, to put a smile (or in some cases a “Whoa!”) on our face that’s now hard to wash off! We started collecting YOUR opinions on what you thought was the Most Surprisingly Good Game of 2007 not very long ago. Just to refresh your memory, these were the candidates.

The Nominees

Voting had gone on for about a week and we have a clear winner. But before we tell you about it, it is but tradition to kill some time; we’re gonna tell you about the games that surprised the donuts out of us with how good they turned out to be!

And the winner is…

Make no mistake about this, we were expecting a LOT from this game. From the twisted physics based puzzles to the unique setting that was however connected to the Half-Life universe (as we found out later, “..and HOW!”), there was a lot this game had on offer. We had NOT however bargained for turrets that we would love to cuddle and lines that we keep quoting to (our) great amusement months after the game has released! Managing to cram ‘cute’ and ‘evil’ into the same breath, Johnathan Coulton’s masterpiece at the end-credits knocked our knickers off as we tried desperately to keep our mid-sections in one piece. In an age when the mind-space occupancy rates are at an all-time premium, Portal has earned its spot with ease as one of the funniest, if not the best, games ever made.

The Runners-Up:

Overlord:

We’ve always known evil is fun, no matter what the Clauses’ say. And when the game promised us just that, we definitely had our ears pricked. The game shipped with some minor issues; but as it turns out, guiding a group of psychotic gremlins to do your evil bidding was fun enough to allow the game to overcome its shortcomings. Be it dealing with the bad people who do not understand the virtues of sadism, or looting some gold, the minions were ever-ready to gleefully accomplish whatever task you deemed fit for them. That the game was a genre-bender, and looked pretty good at that, was but the cherry on the cake (It’s not a lie!).

Worms Open Warfare 2

The first W:OW was a nondescript affair; an attempt by the series to return to its 2D roots and…not much more. It’s problems were aggravated by the clunky controls, lean multi-player and other design issues, especially so on the DS. Given that, we weren’t exactly jumping with joy when we heard a second game was in the works. Curiosity is a chronic disease though, and we ended up playing the game after all. The richer content, with crazy weapons like The Buffalo of Exploding Lies, a solid level-editor and much better multiplayer made for a completely different experience from the first game, and quite simply, was a pleasant surprise. Worms:Open Warfare 2 is a worthy addition to the Worms franchise, and that it managed to grab our attention (being as it was, another Worms title) in such a busy year speaks for the quality of the game.

Reader’s Choice Award:

Powered by Gregarious (42)

• Vaibhav Says:
  January 2nd, 2008 at 12:21 am

  Way To Go Guy !!! keep the good work up !

• Ravi Says:
  January 2nd, 2008 at 7:48 pm

  Congrats guys for bringing out this cool website!.

  The winners are as expected.heh.

• Speeder Says:
  January 7th, 2008 at 1:01 am

  Good layout and nice name. Looks like another address gonna get added to my bookmarks

• bobby sandhu Says:
  January 12th, 2008 at 6:52 pm

  It took the web server 1.54 seconds of back-breaking labor to give birth to this page.
  No computers were harmed in the making of this page, but a few hundred browsers may have been euthanised.

• V Says:
  February 20th, 2008 at 6:20 pm

  Nice results.Seems fair enough.
  Cheers!!!

• LEGEND Says:
  April 7th, 2008 at 7:35 am

  WELL TOMB RAIDER AND OTHER GAMES LIKE LOST PLANET ,SOUL CALLIBUR, SILENT HUNTERS, FIFA, FLATOUT, RED LINE ETC…….SHOULD HAVE BEEN INDUCTED.