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deadmoscow

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GOTY 2012

Well, here's my GOTY 2012 list. There are a few notable games that aren't here because I haven't gotten around to playing them yet. I've only completed the first episode of the Walking Dead and I'm certain that the moment I finish it this list will receive some hasty edits. I still want to play Tokyo Jungle and Papo y Yo as well. As it is, here's my (admittedly wordy) top ten list. Enjoy!

Incidentally, I've got a few more things to put here:

2012's 2011 Game of the Year: Dead Space 2 - I liked the first Dead Space but felt like it was overly reliant on the jump scare effect (god, what a stupid ending). The sequel managed to create a serious atmosphere of dread that didn't repel me. There's a sequence near the end involving running away from a nigh-indestructible monster that was probably the most intense ten minutes I've ever played in a game. Really, really solid.

2012's 2010 Game of the Year: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors - I picked this up after a chance encounter with a glowing review on Destructoid, and found it on the cheap. Holy crap, if you have a DS just play this game right the hell now. I'm not going to say any more.

2012's Best Exercise in Futility: It's a three-way tie! Between Diablo 3, Torchlight 2, and Borderlands 2. All of these games started off super-rad, but then I realized that they didn't amount to much more than slowly watching a set of numbers increase. Borderlands 2 is pretty much the same game as Diablo and Torchlight, except that it trades in carpal tunnel for dick jokes.

List items

  • I can state with absolutely no hesitation whatsoever that Journey is the best game released in 2012. I have a really hard time trying to qualify this game with decimal scores and audio-visual descriptors, because I feel like it transcends a lot of that stuff. Journey immediately nestled into my headspace like a nostalgic memory. It feels like a manifestation of universal myth that pops up in various forms of media, and it seems sort of inconsequential that you could experience Journey on a Playstation 3 instead of around a campfire on a warm summer night.

  • If Journey is the heart of 2012, then Fez is the mind. I probably spend more time reading about and pondering Fez (and listening to it's incredible soundtrack) than I did actually playing it. It worms into your brain and stays there, constantly bugging you to go a little deeper down the rabbit hole. Fez is a brilliantly weird little world and I wouldn't take back one second of the time I spent exploring it.

  • It seems really dubious to me that Mass Effect 3 could have been a completely different experience depending on when you decided to play the game, and with what DLC. At first glance, it's an incomplete package out of the box, with crucial parts of the game cordoned off as DLC. There's still more DLC on the horizon, which I also feel dubious about, because the first time I beat this game I got the impression that it was over and done with. So in the end, you have the ending to a trilogy that feels like it was retconned only a few months out of the gate. But hey, I still loved it! Because Mass Effect 3 is still a mighty fine game, warts and all. Also, the multiplayer was far, far better than it had any right to be.

  • This was probably my biggest surprise of the year, although FTL is a close contender. I've been pretty vocal about my support for Hotline Miami in the past, suffice to say it's an extremely intelligent, self-aware game that also happens to have excellent gameplay, soundtrack, and visuals. My enthusiasm for the game has cooled somewhat since the week it came out, but I still think it's one of the better titles of 2012, regardless of what you think about its message (or lack thereof).

  • I'm gonna go ahead and say that Apocalypse Now is my favorite movie, I tend to enjoy character studies more than other kinds of stories, and descents into madness are probably the best sorts of descents. Spec Ops: The Line has all of that in spades, so of course I was nuts about it. I also liked it because it took the modern military shooter out of context and actually spent time looking closer at what war does to people. For all of its high points in story and tone, I'm willing to overlook the clunky gameplay.

  • Trials Evolution is a videogame-ass videogame. Most of my other favorite games this year do things like transcend the bonds of the medium to deliver unique stories or experiences. Trials Evolution doesn't give a shit about that stuff. It's a game about getting a bike from point A to point B, and you can just cram your "story" and "characters" and "themes." Trials Evolution is fun as hell, extremely difficult, but fair. Just turn off the god-awful soundtrack. That is, unless you think Puddle of Mudd is, like, super-cool.

  • I'm not sure if I liked this game more than the first Max Payne games. It drops the comic book cut scenes and the weird black humor, but picks up a huge amount of maturity and visual flair. And it's seriously grim. Just about every five minutes, Max Payne makes some sort of comment about what a horrible shit hole his life is. It's a pretty good revenge story, and it's also a good critique on the American Action Hero stereotype. I still find the sheer amount of killing in the game problematic, and its not a problem unique to Max Payne - just try to seriously think about how many people Nathan Drake kills on your average uncharted playthrough. The ironic bit is that Max Payne is drunk and miserable the entire time. The most ruthless and efficient killing machine known to man is pretty much hammered for the majority of the game. "I hate myself and I want to die," Max Payne says, wiping vomit off of his chin with one hand and shooting a man between the eyes at 100 yards with the other. "My life is just a bad joke," Max observes, as he falls off of an exploding water tower and shoots seven men in the head before landing on an adjacent building. I think my favorite line of dialogue, one that's emblematic of the entire game, comes near the end, where Max is unable to open a door to get after his quarry. He leans back and whole-body-yells, "God dammit!" It's a guttural, brutal, animal noise. It's the perfect aesthetic description of the entire game.

  • Oh MAN this game made me feel so cool. Dangling on a chain from a lamppost, pulling a guard into a vent to meet his untimely doom, throwing a corpse off of a ledge into a crowd of guards and terrifying them so much that they all shoot each other, climbing up walls and traversing a room full of guards like a shadow...so effing cool. Mark of the Ninja is an excellent argument for 2D stealth games, and presents relevant information in a smart, unobtrusive way. It's extremely satisfying to pull off carefully planned strings of silent assassinations, and I like that it's a stealth game that shrugs off the binary failure state and just lets you play the game however you want to.

  • Professor Layton is like the comfort food of videogames. It's like, "Come on in, have a seat on this comfy couch, solve this neat rabbit jumping puzzle! Here, I made you a cup of tea, isn't that just lovely?" Everything about this game is just so pleasant. It's my first experience with the Layton franchise, and I'm over the moon about it. Most of the puzzles are difficult without being unfair, and they scratch an itch in my brain that wants to busy itself with number patterns and deductive reasoning and so on. The daily puzzles after the fact are just icing on top. I play Professor Layton whenever I have a bad day at work. Plop down on the couch, have a nice little glass of bourbon, flip open my 3DSXL (never going back to the regular size, incidentally), and just solve some nice puzzles. Aaaahhhhhh...

  • I haven't had as much time with this game as I have with the others on this list, and that's probably why it's in the number ten position. That said, I usually hate roguelikes, and I'm only tangentially interested in space sims, but FTL has a charm and quality to it that draws me in regardless. It's brutally difficult, but usually it's more entertaining than frustrating to try and juggle massive ship damage with combat adn deflecting boarders. I just wish the first sector was slightly easier, since it can be extremely discouraging when a well-placed enemy missile ends up starting a fire and killing your first two crew members in the very first encounter. Usually I'll just restart the game at that point. But hey! Kickstarter success story, right?
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