we at the entertainment staff side of Speakeasy just looove two things: video games, and looking back over what made 2011 so special. So, naturally, we present for your approval our choices for favorite game of 2011.

Please believe – “Skyrim” is absolutely massive and spectacular. Those who allowed themselves to be fully sucked into the world will be spending hundreds of hours in the game, uncaring even as their previous responsibilities (like tests and relationships with friends) wave at them in passing.

The first downloadable content pack for the latest in Valve’s “Portal” franchise is everything that gamers could want from free content added on to an already awesome game.

A project with hype stretching back at least three years, Team Bondi has finally dropped “L.A. Noire” – a game many were preparing to call the perfect mixture of gameplay and cinematic drama.

“Portal 2” is not only a satisfying sequel to an already well-loved franchise. The game actually far surpasses the first in every way, both in the scope of the new things that it tries to do as well as the way in which it pays homage to and perfects the gameplay of its roots.

Role-playing video games are such an established genre that they’re often criticized for their lack of innovative gameplay. In “Dragon Age II,” there’s not much new, especially if you’ve played the first game, but that doesn’t diminish the experience for RPG fans.

Fox News hates it. Kids love it. “Bulletstorm”, the most recent video game title developed by People Can Fly and parent company Epic Games, aims to take the first-person shooter world by storm – a storm of bullets.

Speakeasy highlights the five video games that cannot be missed in what’s sure to be a big year of releases.

Before playing “Dead Space 2,” gamers should ask themselves: Am I willing to see babies and young children turned into vicious, murderous aliens and then set them on fire?

Donkey Kong has come a long way since his days of throwing barrels at Italian men and kidnapping princesses: Nov. 21, 2010, he returned to his first true side-scrolling platform game in about a decade.

Video game company Zynga’s Facebook game and time-destroyer, “FarmVille,” is a popular juggernaut of a franchise, gaining around 62 million players since its inception in 2009. Many of the populace may have noticed with some level of alarm friends, relatives and even themselves being sucked into the addictive game, planting virtual crops and taking care of virtual animals.

Rock Band 3 makes improvements to their already successful music genre formula by adding more user friendly options, keyboards, and pro-level instruments to an impressive jam session-ready soundtrack.

In the realm of video games, there are many games that have – and quite possibly always will -cause fear, revulsion and pants-ruining responses among the brave souls who dare to play them.

Minecraft runs free of the tried-and-true methods of point reward. Instead, this independent release focuses on letting the player do essentially whatever they want in the frame of a virtual world.

Fresh from the shores of Japan, leaked copies and images of Nintendo’s upcoming video game versions “Pokémon Black” and “Pokémon White” have found their way onto the Internet, so much so that now full names, pictures and statistics of all 165 new Pokémon are known.