Wired put out its list of the 20 best videogames of the year for 2011, & it seems to me to be a worthy list. Sure, there are debatable items on it—what good of a list would it be if there weren’t?—but overall it seems like a good starting point for anyone who wants to check out fun, challenging games.

What tickles me is that I played none of the games on that list this year. Not a one. That’s not to say I don’t game. I do, almost every Friday & Saturday night. But I tend not to buy the latest & greatest games. I wait for sales on Steam—Christmas is a fantastic time to buy year-old games1, I find—& I tend to mostly play older games. To add another wrinkle, I prefer multi-player games since I’m playing with my brother and some friends over the Net. I’ll do single-players, but I’d much rather do multi-player. It’s more fun.

So here’s my list of games for 2011 in no particular order, and yes, I already fully realize that almost none of these actually came out in 2011.

  • Left 4 Dead 2: Hundreds of hours were spent on this one in the past year. Still the best co-op game I’ve found. Each campaign is good for at least an hour of frenetic action. Favorite built-in campaigns: Dark Carnival, Swamp Fever, & Hard Rain. Favorite 3rd party campaigns: Death Aboard 2, Dead Before Dawn, Tour of Terror, Vienna Calling, Warcelona, & Questionable Ethics.
  • Unreal Tournament 2004: Still the best multi-player run-around-&-blast-each-other game I’ve ever played. I like to use Amazon Web Services to host a UT2k4 server, so I can bring it up when we’re shooting & take it down when we’re done. Network speed: excellent. Total cost: less than a buck each time we play.
  • Borderlands: Probably my brother’s favorite game of the year, & one that grew on me. The cartoonish graphics are the coolest I saw all year.
  • Dead Island: Left 4 Dead 2 meets Borderlands. A lot of fun, & one that you absolutely have to play with others. That said, the final boss was ridiculously easy.
  • Doom 3: Yup, it’s ancient (like UT, it was released in 2004), but it’s still creepy, violent fun. I have no idea what the multi-player is like, as I stuck to single-player.

These are the desktop games2 I played this year—for hours—& I enjoyed & recommend all of them.

  1. See you next Christmas, Skyrim! ↩

  2. I play some iOS games on my iPad & iPhone, but none with any sort of commitment or intensity. I’m the classic I-have-5-minutes-to-kill-so-I’ll-noodle-around-with-this-little-game player, so my recommendations aren’t really that valuable when it comes to this burgeoning gaming arena. ↩