'Portal 2,' 'Skyrim' top a thrilling year in games
(AP) It's a good time to be a gamer, as studios continue to release thrilling adventures with clever stories, tight gameplay and spectacular production values. So many fine games have been released in 2011 — particularly in the last few months — that you'd need to use up a lot of sick days to catch up to them all.But there's a downside to the quality glut: The big video-game companies are taking fewer chances. The business has become less about innovation, more about iteration, that is, improving upon previous successes. I enjoyed many of these sequels, which make up 90 percent of my top 10, but if publishers aren't careful they'll run out of fresh intellectual properties to sequelize.
Fortunately, smaller studios are picking up the slack, delivering fresh ideas to the PC market, the PlayStation Network, Xbox Live Arcade and Apple's App Store. And the creators of some of this year's blockbusters, including "Uncharted 3" and "Gears of War 3," have announced