2007, also known as “last year” (for one more day, anyways), was arguably the best year the industry had ever seen. The perfect mixture of new franchises (BioShock, Crysis) and old names (Metroid, Nights) made sure that the 2007 was chock full o’ games for every demographic.

Or the last four months, anyways. The sheer number of games released between August 21st (BioShock) and November 20th (Rock Band, Mass Effect) turned 2007 from a rather boring year into the stuff of legend. Thank God, too, because without that last quarter of the year we may have had to settle on games like The Darkness and SingStar Pop for this top ten list – and nobody wants that.

2007 also saw some benchmarks away from the “new releases” list. Franchises like StarCraft and, near the end of the year, Duke Nukem Forever reared it’s head once more with a new teaser trailer. Also, E3 went small time in Santa Monica, PAX went big time in Seattle, E for All went… nowhere in Los Angeles, and VGXPO went to the big boy table in Philly.

We’re almost done (thank God). One more list and we’ve completed our weekly journey from 1990 to the present day. Come back here tomorrow for our Top Ten Games of 2008, including each of our Game of the Year picks. But until then, catch yourself up on our other lists, from SNES to PS3:

So, let’s say you’re Harmonix. You’re known primarily for the Guitar Hero series, but the rights to that franchise are owned by Activision. No problem when you’re your own entity, but once you decide to move in with Activision’s bitter neighbor, Electronic Arts, Activision doesn’t let you play with Guitar Hero anymore. What do you do?

You make Rock Band, which is more or less Guitar Hero and SingStar combined into one convenient package. Oh, hardcore Rock Band fanatics will swear up and down that it’s different from Guitar Hero, but they’re wrong.

That doesn’t mean it wasn’t fun, though. Harmonix continued their string of excellence with music games and while the drums didn’t make a new game, they did provide a new, fresh way to play the game.

Also, the soundtrack is chock so full o’ great artists that we’d have to pay royalties solely for mentioning them… we have no clout. Moving on.

If you were one of the many who considered Crackdown to be nothing more than “that game packaged with the Halo 3 demo, you probably didn’t bother to, you know, actually play the damn thing. If you had, and I’m sure some of you did, you would’ve realized that Crackdown was one of the refreshing open-world games to see the light of day.

In Crackdown you play a superhero… more or less. In actuality you played as a cybernetically enhanced cop called an Agent in the fictitious Pacific City. As an Agent, you’re tasked with hunting down and slaying the heads of the three gangs that pollute the city… yeah, the plot wasn’t important. What was important was that the entire city was your own personal playground. You see, as your character leveled up their attributes, such as strength and jumping, increased. After a while your Agent could lift and throw cars and leap over entire buildings.

By the time the game was released in early 2007, it had in development for almost five years. This was in part because in 2004, Microsoft gave the team at Realtime Worlds the Xbox 360 hardware and said “Here. Use this.”

Now, if you have been waiting with grand anticipation that we’d see a Crackdown 2… relax. It’s not happening. Not any time soon, anyways. But rumors have begun to fly that Ruffian Games, a Scottish studio chock full o’ former Realtime Worlds employees, could be working on a possible sequel. Only time will tell, I’m afraid.

Assassin’s Creed became a success for many reasons. On one hand, the game was a sprawling, open-world recreation of what is only described as “The Holy Land”, or for you Atheists “Israel”, that allowed you to run, jump, climb and kill anyone you want. On the other hand, every time Jade Raymond was on TV or the internet to talk about the game rabid, hormone-fueled fanboys stormed whatever publication she happened to be speaking with to discuss how “hot” she was.

Very depressing.

There was a general aura of mystery around the game until Kristen Bell, who voiced “Lucy Stillman”, revealed that the game actually took place in the not too distant future of 2012. In fact, here is what she said to IGN:

It’s actually really interesting to me. It’s sort of based on the research that’s sort of happening now, about the fact that your genes might be able to hold memory. And you could argue semantics and say it’s instinct, but how does a baby bird know to eat a worm, as opposed to a cockroach, if its parents don’t show it? And it’s about this science company trying to, Matrix-style, go into people’s brains and find out an ancestor who used to be an assassin, and sort of locate who that person is.

Regardless of this little fact, the game went on to be an uber success. In fact, the main character of Altair has proven to be so popular that he has made appearances, in one form or another, in both Prince of Persia and Konami’s Metal Gear Solid 4. Oh, and before you ask – yes, there will be a sequel. Eventually.

Sometime after completing Jak 3, the team at Naughty Dog got really blazed and watched the Indiana Jones trilogy. It is told that sometime during Temple of Doom Naughty Dog president Ted Price remarked “You know what would be cool? This with Ryan Seacrest.” Lo and behold, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune was born!

Okay, much like my Jaffe/Crowe story from a few weeks ago, that was unabashed BS about Seacrest. But Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune does indeed take a fair bit of inspiration from the Indiana Jones trilogy (to hell with Crystal Skull), as well as the long forgotten pulp magazines of the 1940s and 1950s. When you take this kind of inspiration and combine it with gameplay that (on the surface) looks like it came out of Tomb Raider, and you can see why a lot of the people who saw the game at E3 2006 were referring to it as “Dude Raider”.

The title character, Nathan Drake, is probably the most interesting video game character we’ve seen in a long time. Unlike most heroes in games, who are stonewalt defenders of peace and justice and cookies and whatever else, Drake is a bit of a bitch. He is often times visibly stressed in firefights, and winds up being a hero more or less against his will. After all, he’s only really wanting to save his own hide. It certainly made playing through the game much more fun than it would have been with another Croft-like protagonist.

I can already hear the fanboys crying out. “HALO 3?!?!11!?! U R TEH NOOB!!!” All I have to say is… shut up. The majority of the Halo hate is unfounded, and I guarantee that about 90% of the people who say they hate it simply say so to sound cool. You know, the same way people who never played Psychonauts say it’s one of the best games ever. But I digress – Halo 3 is on this list for more than simply being a quality shooter.

Halo 3 is on this list in part because of the insane amount of marketing power that Microsoft threw behind it. Hell, the chance to get in on the Halo 3 beta drove the sales of Crackdown through the roof. As the release date approached you had everybody from Burger King to 7-Eleven getting in on the Halo madness. Hell, Pepsi-Cola even created a special flavor of Mountain Dew solely for the game’s launch.

In addition to all of the marketing, Halo 3 had what I consider to be the single best marketing campaign ever with their “Believe” ads.

Thankfully for Microsoft the marketing paid off big time. Halo 3 broke just about every sales record there was to break and would go on to sell well over eight million units… so far.

For all of you who hated Super Mario Sunshine, Super Mario Galaxy was the game for you. No water pack. No cleaning up sludge. Just simple 3D platforming at it’s finest that brought back all the basics. Princess Peach has been kidnapped by Bowser (again) and it’s up to Mario to rescue the Princess (again) and save the world galaxy from Bowser’s terror (again… kind of).

Super Mario Galaxy was universally praised by reviewers and was an immediate commercial success. Many reviews proclaimed Super Mario Galaxy to be the best Wii game ever (and many still hold to this) and one of the best platformers ever developed. This was in no small part due to the physics found inside Super Mario Galaxy… yes, physics. You see, everything in the game, from the smallest block to the largest planet, had it’s own gravitational force that allowed Mario to run around those mini worlds. The physics also allowed for Mario to jump from one celestial body to another.

In an interview with Famitsu, Shigeru Miyamoto noted that he would be all for making a direct sequel to Super Mario Galaxy, and that the sequel would include some special abilities and suits that didn’t make the final cut in the first game. Considering Nintendo’s lack of interest in the hardcore audience, it may be a while.

It would have been easy to pick the entirety of The Orange Box, but I’m not an easy person. That’s why I picked Portal.

The gameplay in Portal was so deceptively simple. You’re given a gun that fires projectiles that open portals in any solid surface. With this gun, you are tasked to navigate through a series of increasingly difficult rooms to get to the exit. Sounds simple, right?

Ha! Almost nobody can get through this game the first time through. But that was okay. After all, the writing was so excellent that you didn’t really mind dying four, five… six… times, just to hear GlaDOS mock you once again. Of course, once the game was released and people started beating it, the song “Still Alive” became an internet sensation… which is unfortunately, since it’s not close to JoCo’s best work.

But it’s still awesome.

How do you not love BioShock? The spiritual successor to our #2 Game of 1999, System Shock 2, BioShock had everything going for it. Excellent AI, a compelling world that players could get lost in, beautiful visuals and most importantly, excellent gameplay. But the game that became BioShock almost wasn’t.

At first, BioShock was to focus on a character who would rescue people from cults and work to readjust the person rescued, both physically and mentally, to reality. The story would have been much more political in nature, as well. That story was quickly scrapped for a story involving an abandoned WWII-era underground lab. Many elements from this story, such as the civilization born under the surface of the Earth, and an early form of AI “ecology” that would morph into the dynamic between the Splicers, Little Sisters and Big Daddies in the final game.

BioShock would go on to win several Game of the Year awards. GameSpot, GameSpy, GameTrailers, BAFTA, X-Play and Spike TV all proclaimed BioShock the best game of 2007. But it’s #3 on this list, so deal with it and let’s move on.

I am a self-proclaimed BioWare fanboy. I’ve always loved the way they go about making games, and to this very day still find myself playing everything from Baldur’s Gate to Knights of the Old Republic. However, even with all of BioWare’s previous success, their crowning jewel is without question Mass Effect. Every choice you made, from your character’s biography to what you say to who, had an effect later on in the game. The story was engrossing, the universe was vast, the presentation was absolutely flawless, and the thing that matters most, the core action-RPG gameplay, didn’t get old.

By now I’m sure we all know about the sex scene. Yes, there is a sex scene. No, it doesn’t show anything worth getting psyched for. Hell, you can look at it in the video for this post. But while the internet was buzzing over the scene, the shit didn’t hit the fan until the “psychology specialist” and blithering idiot Cooper Lawrence went on a tirade on Fox News. After incorrectly and inaccurately describing the sex scene (to which Geoff Keighley’s look of “…are you on crack?” is priceless), the gaming press lashed out and G4’s Adam Sessler went on a tirade of his own, throwing Cooper’s logic right back in her face while angry gamers killed her book on Amazon.

I mention the Sessler bit because, well… that was our first big story as a website, and any excuse to pat ourselves on the back, right?

Now Mass Effect is my personal #1 for 2007. However, I didn’t rank it #1 because I knew that if I put some mere RPG ahead of the actual #1, I’d never hear the end of it. Not from the other editors, and especially not from you… blood sucking swine.

Call of Duty 4’s single-player campaign is, plain and simple, the most intense gaming experience I’ve ever had. Some criticized the single-player campaign for being short, but I say I’d gladly play a ten hour game with an amazing story than a 40-hour game with almost no story. By now I’m sure most of you have played it but if not: SPOILER ALERT! The sequence where you play as the American Marine crawling out of the helicopter after a nuclear blast eviscerates your city sent chills down my spine and I had to put my controller down and take a step back for a few minutes.

Of course, people are still playing the multiplayer to this very day. The experience point system used in CoD4 is addicting as hell, and helps to weed out the hardcore players from the casual gamer. Also, it plays to what I like to call the “Pokemon” effect. If you give gamers something to collect, they WILL try to collect each and every one of them.

Infinity Ward has always been known as a fine developer. After all, Call of Duty and Call of Duty 2 are both great games that sold well and were met with much praise. But the release of Call of Duty 4, the best game of 2007, launched IW to what could be considered the developer A-list.

Worst Game of 2007:
Limbo of the Lost

Even before Limbo of the Lost became the laughing stock of the industry, it was a fairly poor game. Lackluster puzzle design, insipid voice acting, God awful level design and, of course, rampant plagiarism, morphed Limbo of the Lost from another forgettable point-and-click PC game into a laughably bad piece of contemporary art.

Oh yes, it’s so bad that it should be preserved for all ages.

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