I’m wondering if Sirlin didn’t mention Passage because it was not a “game”. Or maybe he just didn’t find it very interesting (like I did)

On medics, I find them really fun to play, when your on a server with good people, both your team and the enemy team. You need to constantly be watching your allies and switching targets to heal. You need to be watching the enemy to avoid being shot. You have to look behind you for spys and pyros. When an enemy gets near you, you have to be able to either run away or quickly take him down. Your constantly communicating with your team, things like your health, your ubercharge level, the fact that a pyro managed to flank you and your gonna die if that heavy your healing doesn’t turn around right that second. You have to be able to coordinate your uber to get maximum effectiveness. Your constantly buzzing around and coordinating your team. There about the most active class in the game. Hardly boring.

Portal deserves every bit of praise it gets.

tufflax: You need to give the game more time. The removal of grenades is a godsend - the classes are much different from each other with that simple change (ie, each class plays much differently in the same situations). Medics take a crapload of skill to be good at - it involves constant decision making and analysis of angles on the battlefield. You have to know when to stick to your buddy, know which cover will keep you safe, know when to stop healing to butcher that enemy who’s on top of you, and know when to leave your buddy out to dry when he overextends himself (you’ve gotta build up that ubercharge, after all - dying will reset it to 0). The ubercharge isn’t mindless, either - it’s only 10 seconds, so you have to time it perfectly. You need to be close to your target (eg, capture point), and your buddy needs to be full on ammo, and you need to do as much damage as you can in those 10 short seconds (ubercharges often go to waste when the duo runs into a roomful of sentry guns, sending them flying into the air unable to attack much).

And that has got to be the most oversimplification of stickies that I’ve ever read. Using them to guard areas is not overly powerful - you can avoid them, you can let one piece of fodder take the hit, or you can simply kill the demoman! If he’s not in sight, chances are he isn’t around to detonate the bombs on you. When used by skilled players, stickies require the most insane amounts of movement prediction since it takes a bit before you can detonate them.

Related to this point (Portal is better for being shorter) is that just about everybody who plays the game finishes it. If you can, find some gamers who aren’t hardcore, and ask them when they last finished a game. Remember - for all that the storyline in, say, something like Bioshock is excellent, if a player stops playing along the way, that story is valueless (even moreso if a potential player says “I just don’t have time”).

I stand in that very place with some games that I think would be amazing - Morrowwind, Disgaea 3, and even WoW. Great games I’m sure, but I just don’t have that much spare time anymore. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one.

I would support its inclusion, certainly as one of the best single-player games of the year, if only because at a high level it is structured in a way that is immensely superior to almost all of the competition and the developers made a lot of design choices that the rest of the industry would probably do well to emulate (even if they might not all be applicable to larger titles).