I'm glad you guys included Deus Ex and Mirror's Edge, but where is Bastion or Shadows of the Damned (just to name two great games from the last year)?

Good read, although Portal 2 kinda was pretty revolutionary imo. Portal 1 was essentially a demo of Portal 2. But more importantly, where is Bastion? I don't remember how you guys felt about it, but it was such an innovative little gem that it seems everyone overlooked ;_;

I couldn't agree more on Rayman Origins, I could hardly believe that Ubi released it this November, especially since this past November was perhaps one of THE biggest release months of the past few years. I just finished up Origins tonight in fact, and the game is actually near flawless. I hate to hear that it sold poorly because it is easily the best platformer of the year, including Super Mario 3D Land. It's really a shame.

It's really awful to see amazing games like Okami, Mirror's Edge, and Rayman suffer due to lack of sales that are occasionally due to lack of nurturing from the devs.

Woah woah woah, I'm glad you guys are giving Rage and Shadows of the Damned the recognition they deserve, but I have to say that Rage is really NOT short, and neither is DMD. Rage can easily eat up 30 hrs if you actually take the time to explore and think of fun combat strategies (which is kind of the point of the game). And Shadows of the Damned has been called short by so many people but I don't understand it, the campaign takes a good 10-12 hours the first time through. And personally when it was over I went and played it again.

Really, I don't understand the utter fixation these days with critical reception being proportional to game length -_-

And I'm not talking about you guys in particular, especially since I've heard complaints about length on these two from nearly every site.

It's just sad to see good games be written off sometimes just because of length. I mean for real, look at Portal 2. That game was PHENOMENAL, and superbly put together- BUT it was only about 15 hours. I think every reviewer mentioned the length at one time or another. I think we might all want to just try and understand that quality takes TIME to make, and therefore quality games may end up being shorter

Just look at Skyrim, which is amazing. AMAZING. But it's littered with bugs because Bethesda was being so ambitious and trying to create, essentially, an entire world.

tl;dr Length =/= quality, quality =/= length.

I have to say, Shadows of the Damned was one of my favorite games in the past few years! I'm really glad you guys made this list, these amazing games scarcely got enough of the recognition they deserved!

I'm really glad someone picked Shadows of the Damned. That game was really great, and honestly had the best soundtrack of any game this year that I can think of. Except maybe Bastion.

Oh yeah and on that note, why did no one pick Bastion?! Or even Deus Ex?

:D Been waiting for this game so long. 360 for sure!

:D That statue looks way better than I thought it would.

There are a couple moments that came to mind when I saw the title. The first one was actually already mentioned: the Bioshock 1 dentist scare. That scared the crap out of me the first time!

The second one is in Dead Space, you come into a new room with a workbench (at which you can upgrade weapons) so I go to the bench and upgrade my stuff, and IMMEDIATELY upon exiting the workbench screen there is a necropmorph down your throat. It's scripted of course, but organically scared the crap out of me nonetheless.

Third one is definitely the Condemned 1 mannequin part. Actually, all of Condemned 1 and 2.

Yay Limbo!
Good choices guys