Flower sees you become a god or spirit and takes you on a incredible journey. The randomly-generated levels keep things tense and it looks and sounds incredible. You run, you jump and you inevitably die. It’s simple, yes, but only dimwits would see that as a bad thing. Instead, you just tap on the screen everytime you want to jump. But the first iPhone game to make this alphabetical list doesn’t need any of those. I even like virtual sticks and buttons now. My scepticism of the device as a games machine disappeared within days of getting one. If I were doing hardware awards, the iPhone would be running away with them. All the gameplay elements mesh together perfectly – with the exception of a few of the boss fights – and I’ll remember the setting and Mark Hamill’s Joker for a long, long time to come, even if I’ve already forgotten some of the details of the actual story. And if those thugs have got guns, well, he’ll have to take them out without being seen. Batman’s not going to get hurt in a fight with a thug, but make him fight six at a time and he needs to be careful. Influenced by the best comics and cartoons, it’s the first game that really, truly lets you be Batman. If I had to choose one single Game of the Year, there’s no doubt that it would be Batman: Arkham Asylum. Best of all, I’m nowhere near done with it, so it’ll last me well into 2010. Everything’s interesting, everything’s fun, there’s a decent script that’s not afraid to be funny now and again (“It’s me, Mario!”) and it’s absolutely beautiful.
![noby noby boy ios download noby noby boy ios download](https://www.giantbomb.com/a/uploads/screen_medium/0/7465/931470-noby_j_012.jpg)
You can’t move more than three feet in town without encountering a side mission, treasure chest, shop, random chase, glyph or feather. It’s tuned to perfection, with the developers having learnt the lessons of the first game and it’s absolutely packed with things to do. I loved the first Assassin’s Creed game, but the sequel is on a completely different level. Unfortunately, it means that 33rd Division, Scribblenauts, Angry Birds, Ridge Racer Accelerated, Doom Classic, Borderlands and even the mighty Demon’s Souls, Minigore and Orbital got left out. (So no Modern Warfare 2 or Uncharted 2, for example.) It was hard to whittle it down to a top ten, but I think I got there. Normal blogging will be resumed shortly, but to mark the new year, here are the best ten games of 2009… that I played.