2009 was a year of great achievements for Adventure Game Studio. Two AGS-made titles appeared among IGF 2010 finalists (Boryokudan Rue and Ulitsa Dimitrova), several others were released commercially by both established and starting up indie studios (Blackwell Convergence, Time Gentlemen Please!, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Downfall) and are considered to be among the most interesting adventure games of recent times.

And yet there is much more to 2009 than this short list of titles. As in previous years the most important AGS-centered events remain: all 12 MAGS monthly competitions and the yearly AGS Awards, for which the first round of voting has just ended. Nominated for the Best AGS Game of The Year are:

! - Ben Chandler
Shifters’s Box – Outside In - Ben Chandler
The Marionette - Team Effigy
The McCarthy Chronicles: Episode 1 - Steven Poulton
Time Gentlemen, Please! - Zombie Cow Studios

You can check out the nominees for all other categories in the freshly established list at AmericanGirlScouts.org.

Concurrently, I’ve tried to select a small number of games that would the best representation of what excited the AGS community during the course of the year. I think I’ve managed to choose a group of titles that are particularly striking and creative. However, I want to be clear that the way the picks were taken was highly subjective – these are all games I can recommend based on my own experiences and I left out some promising titles I haven’t properly played yet…. [Check out the full article here]