Maximum PC's 2010 Gaming Awards: 12 Games That Ruled Our PCs

Posted 03/09/2011 at 2:55pm | by The Maximum PC Staff

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And the winners are...

If Nathan Edwards had known that our Art Director would re-color his fancy Glowstone trophy, he wouldn’t have spent so much time mining ore in Nether.

Another year passes, and PC games continue to deliver a healthy dose of shock and awe, sometimes in surprising forms. The advent of DirectX 11 is making games look better than ever. But this year’s Game of the Year delighted us not with spectacular graphics, but the nostalgic look and feel of a 32-bit console. We played through hundreds of titles collectively, and after heated debates, secret meetings, and clever-award-title brainstorming, we’re proud to share our favorite titles from 2010.

Game of the Year

Minecraft

Minecraft isn’t our Game of the Year because it’s an indie success story—although, it is. It’s not our Game of the Year because of its cute low-res textures and block-based worlds. No, it’s our Game of the Year because it perfectly encapsulates what PC gaming is capable of. Minecraft is a sandbox game in the truest sense of the word—your character spawns in a massive, randomly generated world, explores it, punches its cows, fights its zombies, spiders, and creepers, harvests its raw materials, and uses those materials to build anything—like the very award trophy that honors its greatness. Minecraft’s million-plus users have constructed everything from huge castles to scale models of the Enterprise to working computational engines—all in the game. Even if your ambitions are more modest, you can spend dozens of hours just exploring your world (usually accidentally), from cloud level to the depths of the earth. Minecraft is successful because it’s good, and its success bodes well for PC gaming.
www.minecraft.net  ESRB: E

The David Hasselhoff Award

The Settlers 7: Paths to a Kingdom

Like The Hoff himself, The Settlers games get a lot more love in Germany (and other parts of Europe) than they do here in the U.S. of A. Unlike with David Hasslehoff, we can see exactly why the Germans love The Settlers 7—it’s a complex, nuanced, and utterly charming game of real-time economic strategy.

This is the latest in the series and arguably the best, with great graphics and a huge single-player campaign. Getting past the game’s steep learning curve can be tough, but for anyone who likes thoughtful strategy games, it’s absolutely worth it.
thesettlers.us.ubi.com/the-settlers-7/  ESRB: E10+

The Money Tree in Full Bloom Award

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm

Let’s face it: WoW players are a captive audience. If it wanted to, Blizzard could place in each World of Warcraft: Cataclysm box a single, unpolished turd and still rake in piles and piles of crisp, green cabbage. But alas, it doesn’t. Each of WoW’s expansions has built onto the core game in meaningful ways, and Cataclysm is the best one yet.

In addition to new races, new zones, new dungeons, a new profession, and all the other usual trappings of a WoW expansion pack, Cataclysm’s release sees an extensive renovation of the original World of Warcraft zones, updating each for a much smoother and more engaging early-game experience. Six years after its release, there’s never been a better time to play.
www.worldofwarcraft.com/cataclysm  ESRB: T

The Son, Do You Know How Fast You Were Going? Award

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit

When you’re screaming down a desert road at 180 miles per hour in a black Lamborghini, deploying lethal spike strips and smashing other jacked-out, exotic cop cars into trees and off cliffs, it doesn’t take long for you to realize that you’re having a damn-good time. Hot Pursuit combined an awesome career mode, pulse-pounding visuals, and one crazy-ass, competitive online network that had us going back to race again, just to see who topped the Speed Wall.

With the exception of our Lotus-owning Editorial Director, it also made us feel like we drive highly inadequate and underpowered vehicles in real life.
www.needforspeed.com  ESRB: E10+

The Pip Boy Award

Fallout: New Vegas

Ah, VATS. How we love you so. Stopping time. Letting us line up that wonderful head shot so we can marvel at the gore volcanoes you make out of the neck stumps of our fearsome foes. Fallout: New Vegas took a tried-and-true formula full of action, upgrading, and all the pertinent RPG elements needed to engineer a life-sucking addiction, and placed it in freakin’ Las Vegas. Annoying and unintentionally hilarious bugs aside (many of which have been fixed in various patches), New Vegas, particularly Hardcore Mode, which essentially turned the game into a simulation, had us hooked instantly, and left us waiting and eager to return to the personality-packed wasteland of the post-apocalyptic, nuclear world.
fallout.bethsoft.com  ESRB: M

The Strip Mining Is Only One of the Services We Offer Award

Mass Effect 2

Surprised delight, human. Mass Effect 2 removed our socks, shoes, and every usable resource from our solar system. Building on the story (and your character’s decisions) from the sci-fi RPG Mass Effect, the sequel upped the ante in every direction: Better graphics, tighter combat, a much-improved inventory, and an expanded cast were all welcome, but we stayed for the story. Poignant, exhilarating, and funny in equal measure, Mass Effect 2 enthralled us. We do miss the MAKO, though.
www.masseffect.com  ESRB: E10+

The Underdog Award

Transformers: War for Cybertron

We hope we can be excused for having low expectations for Transformers: War for Cybertron—a game developed by a completely unknown studio, and based on a franchise that has had a rocky (to put it kindly) couple of years.

One of the year’s most pleasant surprises was the fact that War for Cybertron did not suck, and was, in fact, a pretty bitchin’ third-person shooter. It’s not the best action game of the year, but everyone loves an underdog story, and we’re glad that Transformers came out on top.
www.transformersgame.com  ESRB: E10+