(Part of our series counting down the top ten videogames of 2008 -- with interruptions for the most disappointing and most overrated -- according to Variety critics Leigh Alexander, Tom Chick, Chris Dahlen and Ben Fritz. Full details are here. To check out the rest of the list, click here. Most importantly, vote for your favorite games of 2008 in the Cut Scene reader awards here.)

Ben Fritz

Left 4 Dead (Valve and EA / Valve)

For those of us who thought Epic, Bungie and Insomniac had taken multi-player action as far as it could go, Valve delivered a genuine paradigm shift. Every single element of “Left 4 Dead,” from the level design to the resource distribution to the menus to the integration of zombie movie tropes to the dynamic A.I. not only encourages, but compels cooperative gameplay. They also make it the most genuinely scary interactive experience of 2008, because you never know what's coming next and whether your team has the guts to survive.

After dozens of successful online campaigns, however, "Left 4 Dead's" most lasting impact on me is its demonstration that great videogame design can overcome even that most intractable of foes: the Xbox Live asshole.

Leigh Alexander

Persona 4 (Atlus / Atlus)

This was the year that the industry seemed increasingly willing to back-shelve traditional Japanese mechanics and genres -- but as it did last year, the "Persona" series proves it's way too early to call the Japanese RPG a relic. "Persona 4" adapts to modern, fashionable visual and music just as deftly as it updates staid, conventional game mechanics. But it's most broadly impressive for its poignant cultural subtext and commentary on interpersonal relations -- markedly adult, even while it's all wrapped in a widely-accessible high school hipster story.

Tom Chick

Saints Row 2 (THQ / Volition)

This is the paragon of open-world city-havoc sandboxes. It's a pitch-perfect example of a game that accomplishes exactly what it intends to accomplish. It's crass and generous and spectacular, stuffed with stuff to do, usually involving the liberal application of chaos. Like the first "Saints Row," it out-"Grand Theft Autos" the best of them: "Mercenaries," "The Godfather," "Scarface," "Bully," "Grand Theft Auto" itself, and even "Crackdown." If there is a better realized vision of a city as a massive free-wheeling incendiary playground, I haven't seen it. And the fact that I can play almost every corner of "Saints Row 2" cooperatively is almost obscene. Really, Volition? You're going to go that far above the competition? That's just showboating.

Chris Dahlen

Braid (Number None)

Jonathan Blow's long-awaited debut had a nice window in late August to get critics’ and fans’ attention - most famously, Soulja Boy. It has passionate advocates, myself included, yet I wonder if we’re outweighed by the players who made fun of the writing or grew frustrated with the platforming. Blow has objected to people who criticize the game for what it's not, rather than taking it for what it is - and in my experience, "Braid" is an elegant, brilliantly-designed puzzle game where each problem has an exquisite "ah-ha" solution, and the story that started out so sweetly turns troubling and confusing by the epilogue. Is Blow ultimately full of shit, as his detractors (and blogosphere sparring partners) claim? A prize goes to the critic who can get far enough ahead of him to prove it.

Coming Friday: The most overrated videogames of 2008.

Coming Monday: The best videogame(s) of 2008

Coming tomorrow: Most of you will have too much of a hangover to read this blog anyway

(Part of our series counting down the top ten videogames of 2008 -- with interruptions for the most disappointing and most overrated -- according to Variety critics Leigh Alexander, Tom Chick, Chris Dahlen and Ben Fritz. Full details are here. To check out the rest of the list, click here. Most importantly, vote for your favorite games of 2008 in the Cut Scene reader awards here.)

Tom Chick

Fallout 3 (Bethesda Softworks / Bethesda)

I didn't do this intentionally, but once I'd arranged my list I realized that my top four games of 2008 are all powerfully imagined and skillfully created open worlds, with rock-solid infrastructures of good gameplay and an unwavering emphasis on freedom. Here are almost unprecedented juxtapositions of developer creativity and player freedom ("Grand Theft Auto IV" would have belonged among this rare company if Rockstar had either written a better story or designed a better game). "Fallout 3" is the most contrived of the four, proceeding apace along the usual RPG trappings like dialogue trees, fussy interface muckery, and occasionally clunky world building. But it's an unforgettably bleak and epic experience, brave enough to be barren and gray, but crammed with stories, vignettes, characters, and sights. Some fans of the "Fallout" series were worried that it would be "Oblivion" with guns. "Oblivion" should be so lucky.

Chris Dahlen

Left 4 Dead (Valve and EA / Valve)

The brilliance of "Left 4 Dead’s" co-operative play lies in the way that even strangers learn to work as a team, knowing their survival is at stake.  And if you play with friends, you get a rare chance to see their true character come through. I never get sick of reading about people's experiences in the game – Daniel Purvis’ tale of cowardice under pressure is my favorite - because the same few elements can afflict you in so many ways. Sort of like browsing old chess games, with a much, much scarier queen. 

Ben Fritz

Braid (Number None)

If nothing else, “Braid” entranced me with a quality I never knew videogames could possess: relaxation. Spending hours pondering, experimenting, and rewinding time while figuring out brain-bending puzzles to the tune of a wistful cello solo and the sight of swirling watercolors was a wholly unique and utterly invigorating experience. Themes of loss, regret, and forgiveness are subtly woven and then masterfully brought home, even if the epilogue is unbearably pretentious.

Leigh Alexander

No More Heroes (Marvelous and Ubisoft / Grasshopper Manufacture)

It's shamelessly bizarre, heavy-handed, clunky and incisively brilliant from beginning to end, a loving send-up of the very gamer culture that eats up the deprecating self-references with glee. Little moments of genius abound: the actually joyous use of the Wii's controls, the necessity of playing an entire stage hanging upside down from one's couch, and the population of villains who, given only brief cameos, seem more exciting and fully-realized than all of the grave animated robots we've been fed all year.

Coming tomorrow morning: The third best videogame(s) of 2008.

Valve is continuing its campaign to reveal really specific sales and financial data to the public, which I noted last week is surprising and kinda odd.

Gamasutra has a report today with retail sales figures on every game the acclaimed indie developer (and online publisher) has released in its 10 year history, apparently drawn from a profile in GameInformer. GamaSutra's analysis of the figures, along with speculation about what more sales may have come via digital download on Steam, is very good and I recommend it.

However, I continue to ask: Why is Valve sharing all this data? Speculation in the comments on my last post including that Valve is looking for a buyer/partner or is trying to promote the usage of Steam. But neither makes a ton of sense to me. Maybe it just wants to raise its corporate profile right now? Maybe they really a little more respect in the world for not only making good games, but being a successful company? Something is clearly up. And in my experience, when a company puts on a full court press to raise its public profile, it has plans to do something big, or at least try to do something big, in the near future.

What impressed me most about "Left 4 Dead," which I reviewed in today's Daily Variety, isn't necessarily what it did so well, but what it didn't do. Too many games try to do everything. Thus we've got the mawkish, cliche-ridden, and utterly unnecessary story in "Gears of War 2." Or the tediously long campaign in "Halo 3" when most of us just want to get to the multi-player. Or the uninspired, tacked-on multi-player in "Fracture," a game without enough originality to even support 1/10 of its campaign.

In "Left 4 Dead," it's obvious that most of the work went into the co-op multiplayer. The result is brilliant, compelling, and virtually flawless, the biggest leap forward in multi-player since "Doom" or "Quake." From the menus to the interface to the enemy A.I. to the level design, the entire game makes strategic cooperation both simple and necessary and punishes selfishiness. I particularly love that you can see what fellow players are carrying, either in the HUD or on their persons. No hiding that first aid pack when I'm low on health, jerkface. (For a bit more on why the co-op works so great, check out my earlier post about why four people is the perfect number)

But what about the story? Doesn't "Left 4 Dead" need a single-player mode to set everything up? Hell no. That's not to say the game doesn't have a framework. Players don't just want to be dropped into a generic world with generic enemies to shoot.

"Left 4 Dead's" solution is to find a familiar genre that perfectly fits the co-op gameplay and embraces it. So it's a zombie movie, full of stock characters, settings, and visual/musical details. We all immediately get it. We know these characters, we know where they are, and we know what they want. As a result, "Left 4 Dead" doesn't waste its resources attempting to build an original plot or single-player experience that matches the quality of the co-op. It just drops us into the cliches and gets going with what it does best.

The formula is simple: Successfully innovate in a few key areas and simplify everything else in ways that compliment those features. Too many games try to do too much and the result is that while I'm imprssed by the attempt, the failures stand out and the overall game is hurt by the dissonance. It's no mistake that "Left 4 Dead" and "Boom Blox," two games with little in common, are my favorites of 2008 so far. They're not perfect in every way imaginable. Not even close. But the know what they do right, they know what's not important, and as overall works, they're both perfectly harmonious.

Full review: Left 4 Dead

I didn't really notice it until I was doing some reading while playing through "Left 4 Dead"in the past week (link to my review coming soon), but am I the only one who's a bit surprised that Valve was publicly bragging about the size of its marketing campaign and pre-sales? The company announced it was spending $10 million to promote the game (at Edge, first, it seems) and then regularly noted by how much pre-sales were exceeding last year's hit "The Orange Box" (60% in the Edge interview, 65% a week later, 95% two weeks after that). There was even a multi-page feature about Valve in EGM that included sales figures for every Valve game and projections for "Left 4 Dead" (can't find it at the moment, alas).

It's highly unusual for any company, especially a private one, to be so specific about what it's spending and how sales are looking before a game hits the market. While it does generate attention, it can also give the impression the the company is focused on dollars because it doesn't want to talk about the quality of the content, and can set up a big disappointment if ultimate performance doesn't match the hype. That's why most publishers never talk marketing spend and only boast about sales after a game comes out, if ever. This kind of pre-release hype is actually the kind of thing I'd expect from a TV network or movie studio.

It's particularly odd from Valve since it, of course is a developer known for top notch quality. And "Left 4 Dead" is definitely a game that can stand on its own. So why use it as an opportunity to brag about Valve's business prowess and why do it so early? It's unusual, and most certainly not necessary, for the sake of pumping sales. A big marketing campaign without a dollar figure and the universally positive reviews could have accomplished that. I tend to think there's some other reason Valve's getting so specific with financials at this moment. Though I admit I have no idea why.

Playing co-op with random strangers on Xbox Live is not only uncomfortably intimate, but awkward and fraught with danger. In a game like "Gears of War" (1 or 2) or "Fable 2," I just don't want to be forced to communicate with a single person I don't know, let alone risk letting him screw with my game (presuming I'm a host).

But last night I played some four person co-op in "Left 4 Dead" and it was an absolute joy. Obviously it has a lot to do with how expertly the game is designed to encourage four people to support each other, rather than f*ck each other over (more on that in my forthcoming review). But four also strikes me as the sweet spot in terms of that weird sense of intimacy you can experience when playing co-op with someone online. Two people is uncomfortably intimate, forcing you to communicate with and even get to know some random person. But four is enough that you don't feel awkward, but can still easily communicate.

That being said, if I were playing expert and had to plan strategy really carefully, I'm sure I'd rather have people I know and trust on my team. But on "normal," playing with strangers is totally fun. "Left 4 Dead" is the first online game where I completely don't mind having random Xbox Live people on my team. I even played as the Black guy for a while last night and nobody called me the N-word.