I started writing a response to Dtoid's GOTY when it came out, but then I had to leave the city for Xmas and forgot to finish it. Well, here it is, to those who'd still read something based on an almost-week-old story.

Left 4 Dead is a no-brainer this year. Anthony said it best when he said it invented a genre. Dtoid picked the right games to nominate, but it DEFINITELY picked the right game to win it. That's all there is to it.

Braid was the absolute zenith of independent games this year. It made people talk in ways they never thought they'd talk about games again. At the same time, it was plagued by questionable themes and wore its non-budget a bit too proudly on its sleeve. While it'd be a gutsy pick for "game of the year," and might have been the most IMPORTANT game of the year (the years to come will prove this if gaming can move into an age of auteurs like Blow envisions), it simply isn't GOTY material. It's a stepping stone for GOTYs for years to come, though.

Castle Crashers exists as Braid's counterpoint; instead of a beard-stroking, rather pretentious showgazer of a single-plaer experience, you have the slickest indie fart joke ever created. Don't get me wrong, I love Castle Crashers. It's smoother than a vaseline-covered Crocodile Mile mat and it's incredibly cathartic and satisfying. But, it's also so intensely riding the nostalgia-wave that it forgot to come from 2008. It made a wheel rounder than any other while other games put seats, a chassis, and air conditioning on wheels that were already good enough. CC is amazing, but to call it GOTY would be to kick innovation in the nuts.

Those who consider Fallout 3 to be the GOTY must have played a different game from the one I played. Slowly-paced, buggy, soulless and downright crashy, this game was probably one of my biggest disappointments of the year. While I never intended to hold it against its predecessors, it does so itself by giving you so much of the SAME as those games, but without even a modicum of charm or heart or soul or whatever you call that spark that makes a great game amazing. Fallout 3 is sexy, but offers the user NOTHING worth writing a Memory Card article about in ten years. Then again, maybe I just didn't give it a fair shake after the third time I got stuck in a hole, two hours after saving, and couldn't jump or run out.

Lost Odyssey is an utter blockbuster, and the closest thing to an FF/DQ killer that we've seen in ages. Beautifully scripted and executed, it truly propelled the JRPG to the "next gen." But there lies its weakness: it's a JRPG. I loved it for many reasons, but I was also bored for many reasons. While I believe this genre could once again be relevant, I don't think anyone on Earth is moving it in that direction. JRPGs, despite big budgets, big scenes, and fantastic writing, are hurtling further and further from importance by staring at their own feet too hard.

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots was a hell of a lot of fun. But, as a fan of MGS1, 2, and 3, I also personally feel it was a giant embarrassment to the series. For all of the spending and lateness and promise and such, what we got was a series of cutscenes strung together by the most excrucatingly tenuous grasp on the concept of "narrative" that it goes well past "experimental" or "edgy" and about eight kilometers into "batshit insane" territory. Seriously, when MGS was weird, it was charming. Now it's just exhausting. MAKE A NEW GAME, HIDEO, AND DON'T MAKE IT METAL-GEAR RELATED.

Left 4 Dead perfected the shooter, redefined the shooter, and gave us some damn good co-op in a generation where we're starved for a multiplayer non-competitive experience that doesn't feel tacked on. And I'm not a Valve fanboy, either. I liked Portal and HL2 but I didn't get al evangelical about it. I think I like L4D more than either of them.