So Eurogamer’s Top 50 Games of the Year list draws to its conclusion. Because of the unique way in which the list is compiled the order of games bucks expectations, something many of the readers have struggled with.

As contributors and staff only get to submit their own top 10 games, a low ranked game on lots of people’s lists will place higher than a top ranked game on just one or two. This is useful data in that it communicates those games that most of the staff liked over those that a very few loved, but the mathematical outcome certainly upsets perceived wisdom. This year’s readers comments have been the most tantrum-y I can remember.

Here are my final few comments on some of those games that feature in the final ten placings. You can read everybody else’s here.

7. Left 4 Dead

It is, in almost every way that matters, the perfect zombie game, one whose effectiveness derives from tight, sensible boundaries rather than sprawling ambition. The four-mission, four-stage framework inspires repeat play and warm familiarity, the experience changing through shifts to AI patterns rather than raw geography. The limited number of weapons and inputs and the small roster of enemy types have allowed Valve to perfect a few ideas rather than half-deliver on many, a wise decision when you begin to understand the precise balance that underpins the experience. Played with three friends it is an exhilarating experience that rewards co-operation over showboating heroics. In this way it works against Xbox Live’s characteristic culture of individualism, encouraging teamwork and communication in exchange for survival. It’s all the more rewarding for it.

6. Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2

The six modes shepherd you around the game in a cyclical way so that you never grow tired of the mechanics: each mode emphasises a different mechanical nuance, trains a different muscle and, like a balanced work-out, improvement in one area has benefits across the whole. The game’s true genius though, the reason we all kept playing for well over a month (a long time in videogames, especially small ones) lies in the leaderboards. To have your closest rival friend’s score on the play screen at all times, like it’s the only thing that matters because it is the only thing that matters, gave me thumb fatigue.

5. Braid

It’s a game that can be played just once and then never played again till it’s been forgotten. In this way it recalls LucasArts’s best adventures, games that could be ruined with a peek at a guidebook, whose wonder and thrill derives from the release of pent up infuriation at the moment you solve an irksome riddle for yourself. The puzzles are ingenious, even beautiful in their construction. The way the time travel idea is developed over the course of the game demonstrates a growth of ideas that games many times its length never manage. The writing that garnishes the experience, while florid and ambitious, has mostly been criticised because it is different. Naysayers be damned, this is an exemplary indie-game, created by two lovely men, and this fruit of their hard work and dedication offers cause célèbre more than any other release in 2008.

4. Fable 2

The technical issues with the game are infuriating, not because they spoil the experience but because they dominate conversation about it, conversation that would be better spent discussing its triumphs rather than its shortfalls. The choices may be limited, the interactions simplistic, but buy into this world and its systems and you’ll leave a richer person, and not only in terms of virtual real estate.

3. Grand Theft Auto IV

It was the game that everybody started but, reportedly, few finished, if Microsoft’s drop-off rate stats are to be taken at face value. This dash to experience Vice City, to see the world and to be able to pass judgment on it quickly and urgently meant that most voices commenting on the game, from the highest critic down to the lowliest forumite, were often shallow at best. Now, months later, time has mellowed the extremist views, drawing players towards a moderate consensus that this is, in most ways, an extraordinary gameworld, one that houses, in some ways, an extraordinary game.

2. Fallout 3

If Oblivion was the kind of on horseback adventure that could only have grown out of a pastoral, pre-industrialised civilisation, then Fallout 3 is the kind that could only have come from the other end of humanity’s technological trajectory. This post-nuclear fallout world is beautiful in its ruin, the shoots of life sprouting from the rubble of a collapsed American dream. The systems that Washington clothes are barely a step on from those found in Oblivion, and the story shuffles along to an uninspired conclusion. The game’s wonder then lies in its details and verisimilitude: the bottle-cap economy, the clicking radioactive rivers, the abandoned gas stations and supermarkets, the open air cinemas and broke-backed flyovers. Fallout 3 is a revelation, one that we hope will never be realized in our world, but one, which we cannot help but revisit nonetheless.

1. LittleBigPlanet

Ollie Welsh pointed out in his review that, despite LittleBigPlanet’s many triumphs, it was nothing like as perfect a platformer as Nintendo’s Super Nintendo classic, Yoshi’s Island. Of course, believers argue that it’s so much more than a mere platform game, that it is in fact, a platform in and of itself, a tool for users to realize the inventions of their imagination. But, as a tool, surely its work is best demonstrated by the game Media Molecule created using it? If that’s the case, then the question becomes: can the game’s users transcend its inventors creativity to turn a great game into a classic one?

Limitless potential is of no use until it is somehow realized and, while the YouTube videos of fantastic contraptions inspire “how on earth did they…” gasps of wonder, for me, this is a game still only pregnant with potential. That the responsibility for the game’s greatness rests on us and not on the developer is unusual, and for that reason the endless plaudits make me uneasy. Whatever the end result, this is a game I’ve thought about more than I’ve played, and, as they say, actions speak louder than words.