1986's 2012 Game of the Year

Starflight 2 Trade routes of the Cloud Nebula: Due to the magic of Good Old Games I have been able to play this Amiga classic. Gary Whitta's Computer Gaming World said that it was "a universe with so many cultures, personalities, options and plot twists that it is easy for players to suspend their disbelief." In 2012 that statement held true for my experience. It's a space opera farce without being a ripoff of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and was by far the funniest game I've played all year.

Largest Disappointment of 2012

The Walking Dead: This was one of the best games I played all year, also most infuriating due to the fact I was one of the countless people with the save game bug. Every episode Telltale would tell me the problem was fixed, and every release of a new episode would corrupt my save file. This is an insurmountable disappointment, in a game that probably had the most empowering female character I've come across in a game. I love adventure games, Grim Fandango is my all time favorite game but Telltale ambition continues to outpace their technical expertise and it's hopelessly frustrating. Having to replay that first episode 5 times because they couldn't fix their save system lifted the curtain and destroyed their artifice they created.

2011's 2012 Game of the Year

Portal 2: There is something relaxing and melodic to solving a Portal 2 puzzle, and with the Perpetual Testing Initiative I dropped about forty plus hours solving these puzzles in 2012. Even though there's a threshold for how far you can take the map creation, I was continually surprised at how creative folks were with such limited tools. Portal 2 sent me down quite a rabbit hole in 2011 with it's story but in 2012 it sent me down a rabbit hole for entirely different reasons and I am forever thankful to Valve for extending the life of their game with such a robust tool.

The List

10. Natural Selection 2

To put it frankly, in my experiences, there was no game in 2012 I played with a higher volume of banana riders. While I may chalk this up to the reverence people had for the original, I really believe that by design the game attracts a helpful community. Not once did I hear someone complain about kill death ratio, the commander was scolded but it was always done so in a genteel fashion. That's an accomplishment. Aside from the community being great, the game somehow for having two widely differently playing races feels balanced, which is crazy to me.

9. FTL

Unlike The Walking Dead, FTL to me was the most infuriating game I've played all year, but in the best possible way. While I do enjoy rogue likes, I don't enjoy them as much as many of the fans of the genre do. It's a rather exclusive club, and increasingly naval gazey genre. Pot shots aside, the game is the exception to that rule. Its not so much hard as it requires a zen amount of patience.

8. McPixel

This game has the best game soundtrack of the year hands down. Match the banging soundtrack with the Warioware gameplay and you got yourself quite a package. There isn't much more to say about this one other than, go experience it for yourself. Remember when in doubt, kick it.

7. Far Cry 3

This game created a group of millennials that at the offset I hated with a passion, and three excellently voice acted islanders which by the end of the game gave me quite a bit of Stockholm syndrome. The story was stupid, but the characterization was excellent, and at the end of the day I had a lot of fun just playing with the open world. Like the time I was sent flying off a mountain, did a 360 flip onto a water buffalo, jump out of the truck only to see it continue to roll and flip until it exploded killing a Tapir. I could go on, there were many of these but you get the point.

6. Black Mesa

This wasn't just a modification to the original Half Life, it was an homage to it. Often times in mods that revise the graphics of the games I once loved, I end up longing for the original out of nostalgia for the experience I had originally. Black Mesa was a new experience for me but at the same time was familiar.

5. Miasmata

My most recent finished game on the list having just finished it last night, Miasmata is a stunning game. Much like Anno 2070 in 2011, the complexity of the systems required to master it had me jotting down notes in my notebook. I can say as someone who goes backpacking, and is a huge fan of the works of John Muir, Miasmata is wonderful. While playing the game I was reminded of the parable of sauntering written by Muir, and despite my illness I made sure to saunter through the island consuming all there was that it had to offer casually. The patience this gave me allowed me to get over my initial panic of my first encounter with the monster and the game opened up for me past this point.

4. Endless Space

I'm just going to quote my original Steam recommendation monologue I created in my head while playing here:

"We are the all seeing race of Amoebas, our cosmopolitan adaptation favoring progress through diplomacy and trade with all organisms make us the premier proprietors of peace in all the known galaxy. Our neighbors predisposed towards destructive consumption & expansion through violence will meet a cleansing by our hands and the hands of our confederates."

If that monologue sounds uninteresting to you then I can't recommend this game.

3. Mass Effect 3

Even though the reveal of the Leviathans is STRIKINGLY similar to another race in a science fiction trilogy I love, I almost don't care because Mass Effect 3 gave me a high budget Hollywood style vision of that concept. Whether it's hearing Javik be racist to every species except for the Krogan, giving Grunt his fucking due. Seeing this scene while playing From Ashes after I had kept EDI and Javik on every mission was fucking mind blowing. It was that moment where I paused the game, and yelled out into an empty house, "WHAT THE FUCK!" Much like Grunt and Legion from Mass Effect 2, they were the characters I built an emotional bond with. Seeing them get into it in this way was incredible. Aside from that this game mechanically plays much better on a PC with mouse and keyboard than it's predecessors, and the multiplayer is exciting. It sucks that many of you probably didn't play Mass Effect 3 with the DLC prior to the ending, but I did and only the foolish mourn the loss of innocence.

2. Super Monday Night Combat

In a world where gross enjoyment determined everything, Super Monday Night Combat would have won for 2012 handily. UberEnt took two of my favorite games DotA and Team Fortress Classic, and said how can we merge these two concepts. The result was a game that I dropped three hundred plus hours on. Unlike Natural Selection 2 this sort of game does not by design attract friendly players. This is the nature of the beast and I was able to get over this in part due to the fact the skill ceiling for me felt incredibly high. If more people played the game regularly I would still be playing it but as more shooters were released the community shrank.

1. Sleeping Dogs

I'm going to preface this by saying I am a huge fan of Hong Kong New Wave cinema, I own all the subject material that Sleeping Dogs pays homage to, and I can say as a huge fan of that Sleeping Dogs feels genuine. Many reviewers point out the drastic change in tone in the story(and gameplay switching to guns) half way through the game as a negative, to put this into context. Sleeping Dogs starts with the pacing of a Johnnie To film, then quickly transitions to being more in line with a Chow Yun-Fat film. I not only didn't mind this but I understood the design decision, and loved it for this. This accompanied by all the smart throwbacks in gameplay to what made Bully great, Sleeping Dogs was a wonderful game that everyone should play. Thanks Mike Skupa, I'm glad you got to make a spiritual successor to Bully.