Eurogamer has begun publishing its Top 50 Games of 2008 rundown, a series of articles to which I contribute some words and thoughts.

This year, rather than commenting in rambling long posts or smart-arse one liners I thought I’d try to critique those games I wanted to write about in a paragraph of around 100 words: long enough to have to think carefully about what I wanted to say, but short enough to force succinctness.

I’ll post what I came up with here, but if you want to read everyone else’s commentary you’ll have to pop across to the full feature. Note that Eurogamer’s Top 50 is compiled in a different way to that of most of the large gaming sites via blind demo. Tom explains the process here, if you’re interested.

49. Mass Effect

It’s the sense that you can set down on any random passing planet in search of a side-quest that makes this universe feel, for once, like a universe: huge, intricate and bursting with mini-narratives. But in many ways it was this promise of adventure rather than its reality that made the journey compelling. Mass Effect is tension without much release. Beyond that, the technical creaks and groans bespeak either a game prematurely squeezed out for release or, worse still, one whose ambition outstripped its hardware’s capabilities. Either way, it’s a game that points to bright futures amongst Bioware’s stars.

45. Bangai-O Spirits

Bangai-O Spirits, like its maker, is slippery in the hands of genre. Across the gigantic spread of micro levels it slides unapologetically from puzzle game to shoot ‘em up to Brain Trainer. It’s a tussle of delicious contradictions: you control a giant mecha robot rendered as a tiny, ten pixel-high sprite; you set off firework explosions of rocket nukes, up to a hundred at a time, before swinging at enemies with the unsophisticated bluntness of a baseball bat. Then, when the fire and violence clears, you dash around the screen collecting up pieces of fruit. It will take a while to grow accustomed to the structure-less metagame – you can play any level in any order right from the off – but soon enough stamping levels complete becomes a collect ‘em up endeavor, irresistible to the last.

44. Mercenaries 2: World in Flames

GTA has taught us that open world games must tick at the speed of reality, slow burning stories, brooding descents into violence and trudging ascents toward wealth and conquest. Mercenaries 2, by contrast, plays like an exuberant arcade game, 2-minute missions that leave you breathless and spent, its action rolling at double speed, its explosions all Schwarzenegger pyrotechnics. It’s brash, twitchy fun and while I didn’t finish the game, not even close, the time I spent in it was far more enjoyable than most reviewers led me to believe it would be.

41. Mario Kart Wii

The width of the tracks is not so much liberating as disorientating. Now you must plot racing lines within racing lines and as the pack scatters the experience is robbed of some of its traditional grasping competitiveness. That said, there’s much to love, from the way that, when organising an online race, your competitors’ Miis pop up from their real world locations on a globe, to the glorious ghost data challenges that you can send to bait your friends. But Mario Kart has always been a game that pits skill against luck, the premeditated against the random and in Mario Kart Wii fate wins too often over ability.