TSA’s Top 100 of 2011 – The Lost Games

So, somewhat fittingly considering the long, arduous path to its conclusion, Journey is our most anticipated game of 2011. Of course, the very process of ranking anything as subjective as video-games is invariably going to piss some people off. Scan through that list of 100 titles now. It’s literally impossible for you to agree with the final pecking order. Heck, even I don’t agree with it and I voted!

But what of all those titles bantered around the comment sections of the series? Games people were sure would take the number one spot; potential evidence a minority of people suggested was some indication that TheSixthAxis had become influenced by whatever publisher had the biggest cheque-book. (Interestingly, and there’s an upcoming post today that clearly lays all this out statistically, but you may be surprised at just how many exclusives per console featured on the list.)

So, what about these lost games? The forgotten, the ignored, and – dare we say it – the overlooked? Well … it depends on the game in question. There are literally a truckload of titles that didn’t make it into our list for many different reasons. As we’d be here for the entirety of 2011 trying to account for them all, we’ve decided to break it down a little by sub-category and touch upon some of the most flagrant of omissions.

The Simply Didn’t Make It Bunch

We voted on hundreds of games with some fairly big – and undoubtedly good – games naturally falling outside the magic one hundred mark. Bionic Commando: Rearmed 2; Tactics Orge: Let Us Cling Together; Tony Hawk: Shred, okay, maybe not Tony Hawk: Shred, but if a title is missing from this list there’s a good chance we simply didn’t rate it high enough for it to make the final grade. There is one game that did shock me a little when it came in at #137, and that’s El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron. Personally, I think that game looks great. No one else at TSA does, however, so you never got to read my impressions of it.

The Delayed

“How can you have a Top 100 list without PixelJunk Shooter 2 on it? That just doesn’t make any sense!” Correct, good sir, it doesn’t. The fact is: we honestly thought Shooter 2 would arrive last year (as in, 2010). It didn’t and now we look like chumps. Jokes aside, if it makes you happy, Shooter 2 definitely deserves a place on the Top 100 list. I would have given it a 9.

Another game that slipped into 2011 was Curve Studio’s Explodemon! As already mentioned, we did actually vote on Explodemon! and it would have taken up its rightful place of #77 on the list if we had known that its late 2010 release date was in jeopardy. In fact, it does take up that place, in a bizzaro world version of TSA where we all have goaties and often fight each other to the death while speaking Turkish.

The Forgotten

Truth be told, we missed some games. We’re human, and despite best efforts some games slipped through our quite extensive net. Dynasty Warriors 7, The Last Story and Outland were not part of the voting process as they simply weren’t on the list to begin with. We undoubtedly missed others that are still missing per se. Would any of these titles made it into the Top 100? I think Outland would have. Sorry Housemarque!

However, the biggest omission was probably Atlus’ Catherine. Every single time Catherine was mentioned in the comment sections of the Top 100 articles I died a little more – especially considering it’s a Japanese game with very specific (read: erotic) Japanese qualities. That’s my thing – the Japanese part, obviously. Would Catherine have made the Top 100, however? We’ll never know. It gets an honorary mention here. That’ll have to do.

The Games of 2012

As already mentioned before, and we’re pretty sure no one is really surprised about their omission from the list, we didn’t include games we’re fairly certain won’t see a release this year. So, Metal Gear Solid: Rising, Shadows of the Damned, BioShock Infinite, all titles we purposely excised from the list. Which is a nice segue to …

The We Didn’t Think It Could Possible Make It Category

Mass Effect came out in November 2007. A sequel followed in January 2010. When it came to extrapolating which unannounced games should make the list (like, Uncharted 3, for instance) we looked at the release dates of related previous games and took an educated guess. It was obvious that Uncharted 3 could feasibly make a 2011 release window. It was crazy, however, to think Mass Effect 3 would do the same.

With over two years between the first two titles, we speculated that it would take the same amount of time between Mass Effect 2 and 3. Add in the fact that there is now a simultaneous PS3 version in the works, we even thought it could take longer. So, we thought, Mass Effect 3 – summer of 2012. Earliest. And then the VGAs happened and BioWare announced a “holidays 2011” release window. Oops.

Will it make that window? We don’t know. Would Mass Effect 3 have made the Top 100 knowing what we know now in relation to its scheduled release date? Definitely. Would it have been #1 as some people predicted? No. We did score Mass Effect 3 during the voting round and it actually came in at number 20. That’s just for reference, mind. We’re not surreptitiously inserting Mass Effect 3 into the list now. The last stands. Mass Effect 3 would have definitely been in there, however.

The Unannounced

The easiest category to justify, we simply didn’t know about certain games when we voted. Sure, some unannounced games did make the list, and we freely admit that, at times, we bent our own rules. We’re looking at you Mirror’s Edge 2. That said, we’re not sage-like rune tossers or eldritch orb scryers capable of predicting what games are and are not in development. The big one here is obviously The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

Though there’s been lots of hearsay about the possibility of a new Elder Scrolls game, we honestly didn’t see this one coming. We know people (who know people) and we often hear about titles that are unofficially in the pipeline that we have assured our sources we will absolutely not discuss on the site until a time they are more comfortable with. The truth is: we never heard anything about The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. We, like a lot of people, were totally surprised by that one.

It’s difficult to know where Skyrim would have slotted into the list. I’m assuming it definitely would have made it, though I doubt it would have been in the Top 10 for some reason. I could be wrong. Wouldn’t be the first time.

Other games include SSX: Deadly Descents, a game that we have heard inklings about but didn’t include as there was very little evidence that it actually existed; and The Fancy Pants Adventures, an indie game that looks like great fun but, alas, we knew nothing about in October. Just like InSane, another game we had some idea was in the works but not enough to rate and place on the list. And, anyway, that’s not set for a release until 2013.

There are also the obvious ones. We’ll possibly see a Bayonetta 2 this year, as we will a Dante’s Inferno 2. Rumoured but nowhere near concrete and, despite our best efforts, we haven’t heard any whispers in the wind about them on unofficial channels.

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We hope this explains a little of why certain games didn’t make it. If you want to know about a specific game, feel free to ask in the comments below and we’ll get to it as soon as the hangover ebbs a little and the room stops spinning.