Best of 2012

I usually make a list of my 10 best games for a year, but to be honest, there just isn't enough outstanding games to make a full list this year. Most of the '' could have been '' games were indie experimentations, like Journey, Fez, FTL and Mark of the Ninja, which I loved, but not enough to warrant them a place amongst the best of this year. Having tested nearly 95% of 2012's relevant releases, I really can't find myself able to bring more than 5 games to the table this year. I would have loved to add Assassin's Creed 3, ME3, Hitman, Torchlight II and so on, but alas, none has enough merit.I felt like 2012 was a year that everybody wanted to avoid, especially with the numerous delays we had to endure. Maybe the end of the world scared some developers.

List items

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  1. Dishonored

  This game reminds me what kind of experiences we were graced with back in the late 90's and early 2000's. Sadly, gaming took a wrong turn with so many shooters, so-called RPG's where choices and decisions mattered little and where console games with jerky 30 frames per second ruled as kings. Fortunately, just like Thief and Deus Ex before it, Dishonored came back with all the glory that made classic games ''classics'' to begin with. A game by intelligent people, for intelligent people.

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  2. Max Payne 3

  Having played MP3 on my xbox360, I ended up being mixed over it. Sure, it was a great game, but a sadly it was also a game that performed very poorly, reminding me how old my 360 hardware was. It was a month later, in june, when it launched on my gaming PC that I was blown away by the quality of Max Payne 3's fluid and elegant gunplay. Not only does this game has a stellar storyline, but the bullet ballistics makes each and every squeeze of the trigger a real delight.

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  3. XCOM: Enemy Unknown

  Back in the 90's, I heard of Xcom. I even played it on one of those CD-ROM filled with demos you'd get with some gaming magazines. But alas, these games were way too intimidating for my younger self. Twenty years later, I fell in love with Xcom. I even named my soldiers with my friends and family's names, just to make their loses even harder to bear. What a game.

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  4. Borderlands 2

  Borderlands 1 was a good game. But that's about it. It had a very limited weapon selection and models, and its gunplay was merely good at best. Overall, it wasn't all that of a memorable experience, but just a reason to play with friends and kill shit. Borderlands 2 came around and fixed all those issues. Great guns, great gunplay, great characters and voice acting.

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  5. Diablo III

  Yeah. You're going to raise an eyebrow, and I don't care. A lot of you hated the game right off the bat, when Blizzard tried to launch its servers has legions of crazed idiots tried to spam their entry into the game, while simultaneously bitching about it on the official forums. You know what? I just did something else during those hours and never found the game to be inconvenient. Even though D3 turned out to be a different beast than DII, I still ended up playing it up to nearly 300 hours and still counting. This is the kind of game I'll come back to after a couple of months and keep pushing my barbarian up to a higher Paragon level. Even though I find hard to digest the lack of customization , I absolutely loved the gameplay and the loot. Oh, that loot...