One of the things we do here, is produce a Yearbook for all of the Denkians, which outlines people’s feelings about the previous twelve months and summarising just what the devil we’ve been about, apart from making these mysterious game things.

Part of this year’s research involved a fairly simple question: What’s your favourite game of the year?

Oh my!  Can open, worms everywhere (which led to various Denkians quickly creating new games around this incident including a fishing style ‘pick-up’ games, a puzzle-based activity in which the number of worms was guessed and the usual suspects who cried ‘zombie worms!’ and reached for their shotguns and pistols…)

Anyway, it very quickly became clear there are two winners by a very long way.  This is, by the way, not an official award or anything, just something we thought we’d share with you as arbiters of taste and judgement gameswise <cough!>

The two titles which emerged very quickly as Denkian’s games of the year were – Batman: Arkham Asylum (on whichever console) and Orbital (on the iPhone).  The interesting thing is that the iPhone owners had, for the most part, played Arkham as well, but had also tried Orbital.

While Arkham was praised for it’s smooth, intuitive controls and general kick-assery, Orbital was a little more subtle.  iPhone owners handed over their shiny toys to unbelievers, with one word: play!

Turns out Orbital is good.   Very good in fact.  A one thumb game in which you fire hollow 2D orbs up the screen without letting any expand across your line of death.  Simple, simple idea, but so incredibly compelling and playable that several iPhones were held hostage and negotiators had to be brought in to secure their eventual release.

Of course, a few die-hards did point out that Arkham let you knock lumps out of The Joker – but even so, it’s hard to argue with the beautiful simplicity of (an award-winning) one-button game.

- Brian (@flackboy)