Honourable mention goes to Red Dead Redemption, Dues Ex Human Revolution, and Bioshock Infinite (I know, a FPS, but the story was its best feature).

Day 10 – Portal 2

Developer: Valve Corporation
Publisher: Valve Corporation

Portal 2. ‘nuff said. :p

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Just kidding.

Valve is both a team and a developer that has done little wrong, continuing to release amazing properties in Half-Life, Left For Dead, and Team Fortress, year after year.

Well . . . The problem is they do not do this nearly often enough. That’s why Half Life 3 is a constant joke, and why it was an excruciating pain to wait for the sequel to Portal.

This much anticipated sequel to that little puzzle game included in The Orange Box that I speak of, Portal 2, improved on every facet of its predecessor while including a brilliant, hilarious story, leaving zero unsatisfied customers.

Built on the concept of using a portal gun to traverse a huge underground forgotten facility, Portal 2 increased the overall scope of the game, the traps, and added new mechanics including paint, and new faces in the personality cores. Blue paint allows the player to bounce, orange paint to speed up the ground speed, and while paint, allowing you to place portals at will, on any surface. Now, obviously these painted areas are strategic in purpose, but not sparse. They do, however, add so much more experimentation to the game’s levels.

This time around, we’re not in a controlled facility, testing rooms. This iteration has Chell wake up from a suspended animated captivity for decades. The facility and test chambers are in disrepair, and we’re escaping with help. GlaDOS is still around and is asking for help, and we get introduced to a new faces: Cave Johnson, the founder of Aperature Science (voiced by J.K Simmons), and Wheatley, a personality core (voiced by Stephen Merchant).

The new mechanics add a lot to the game, and its story is brilliantly hilarious. J.K Simmons and Stephen Merchant’s character’s lines are incredibly written and expertly performed. The platforming is as solid as ever and the new painting mechanics makes the game that much more fun and challenging.

The game is approximately 2-3 times longer than the original. But knowing that wouldn’t be enough to satiate our appetites, Valve included a complete co-op campaign featuring two robots.

The story is one of the funniest in recent memory, and the game is both challenging and fun. This is why I left it as the last game on my Top 10 Xbox 360 games.

Thanks for taking the time, and following me through this blast from the past, as we recall some of the greats from the last generation. Hopefully you enjoyed my choices, and that some would have matched your own.

• Day 9 – Grand Theft Auto V
• Day 8 – Enslaved – Odyssey to the West
• Day 7 – Gears of War
• Day 6 – Dead Space
• Day 5 – Spec ops: The Line
• Day 4 – Colin McRae’s Dirt 2
• Day 3 – RAGE
• Day 2 – HALO: Reach
• Day 1 – Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
• Day 0 – Introduction

I have some exciting stuff still to come, just around the corner. Tomorrow I’ll have the rundown from the Xbox Gamescom 2015 Media Briefing, and on Sunday, a new short story.

Next week everything goes back to normal, as I do a little catch up on the past 2 weeks.

-iRogan