Best of 2010 (Top 5):
Terry Cavanagh's ambitious and charming little game of platformer-esque exploration contains a lot of fun, but may demand too much from your reflexes for some players. Seek out your missing crew across a sprawling map packed with secrets, symbolism, and a whole lot of challenge that will put all your skills to the test. Buckle up, Captain.
Meat Boy is back in his first commercial release! When the evil Dr Fetus absconds with Meat Boy's beloved Bandage Girl, he leaps to the rescue across more than 300 levels, braving saw blades, syringes, mutant blood clots, toxic waste, and much, much more. As twisted as it is charming and devious, Super Meat Boy is a fantastic and fantastically
hard platformer that is tremendous fun.
Explore the vast cave network inside of an asteroid taken over by the war machines of Tetron armed with little more than a jetpack and a blaster. Hero Core is a very Metroid-esque kind of game ripe with upgrades, enemies, and twisty, connected passageways that can only be fully accessed after defeating certain bosses or tripping generators. It's amazing how atmospheric the game is using no more than two colors and chunky pixel visuals, but you'll get pulled in right from the start. Created by Daniel Remar, author of Iji.
A shoot-em-up game without guns is like a library without books, or an office chair without wheels. Sure they might have some other purpose, but what fun are they without these essential little elements? Fortunately, Super Crate Box is a retro-styled platform shooter that has more guns than you can shake a stick at in the time it takes to play. (Or a katana.)
For some reason, everyone loves collecting things that are smaller than they are. We're not so much interesting in gathering buildings as we are looking at them, but if buildings were pint-sized, you can bet they'd fill our pockets like lint-covered jellybeans. Tasty Planet: Back for Seconds plays on this compulsion and puts you in control of a blob of gray goo that can eat anything smaller than it is. As you can guess, this is a dangerous thing to let loose on the Earth, but give it a time machine and all of the past and future could be in quite a pickle.
Now that it's in the top five for the best games of 2010, Hero Core should definitely get a review.
Yeah, HeroCore definitely needs a proper review, as opposed to just a Weekend Download link. Glad to see it made it: I like it just as much as Super Crate Box, but thought it might not win so voted more for it. Turns out my worries were unfounded!
Update