Mnemoidian

@Brodehouse: Yeah, I agree on the Multiplayer - overall, I think they've done a great job designing the multiplayer maps. They aren't so interesting when you encounter them in the main game, but most of them are very interesting when played in the intended setting (multiplayer). Most of them have a lot of interesting side-corridors for flanking and escape... there's a lot of cover, but also a lot of places where you (and the enemy) can invalidate said cover by use of higher ground.

It's been a long time since I played the Mass Effect 3 singleplayer, but... besides the whole Gears of War issue of "Hey, there's a bunch of waist-high cover in this room - I bet I'll do some shooting here!", I can't remember any issues of getting lost or finding it directly uninspired.

It's interesting how many are so dismissive of the combat in Mass Effect, meanwhile, I've easily put 100 hours into the multiplayer, just because of how satisfying it is. Sure, there are some stickiness issues witht eh whole "run on the same button as take cover", but that's generally something that you learn how to deal with :)

Returning to ME3's multiplayer (mid December) after a bit of a break, I struggled quite a lot with the Collector's as well, but... I have convinced myself that the primary reason why I'm struggling is because:

• I've taken a break, I'm rusty.
• The Collectors fight quite differently than the other enemies, and I've gotten very familiar with the other enemies. (Initially, Dragoons were a huge problem for me as well, but... I find they are the among the least dangerous Cerebus enemies now...)
• They have a lot of similarities with how the Reapers push you into melee combat. But the Collectors' swarms can disable your abilities, and possessed abominations are 1-shot kills if they detonate on you.

In short, they are difficult because they are different.

HistoryInRust has given some pretty great advice, I've only really started to build a strategy against Praetorians, but staggering them is fiendishly effective, as they are pretty easily staggered and have a very long recovery period once they are staggered.

Scions... I find are pretty squishy. Once you start dumping into them, they typically die really quickly. I usually take out their humps first, but you are probably better off just dumping in their heads.

Personally, I've been treating the Scions like Marauders (long range, massive damage) and the Praetorians like Banshees (constantly tries to get into melee range to disable you, and has an easily avoided attack that takes you down), and haven't really that much difficulties. I'm more likely to get taken down by a possessed abomination that I wasn't paying attention to :)

Darksiders ("No... not alone.", is so satisfying!) is the first thing that comes to mind.

Though "ever" is a very long time, and a huge amount of games. But I can't think of any other game right now that I left with a huge grin. Bayonetta, maybe? Though that end was just nonsense... but... Let's dance, boys!

Anyway, back to Darksiders: And that makes Darksiders 2 probably my most disappointing game of 2012, because it has nothing to do with Darksiders :(

Knew about it, but... No.

No takesies backsies.

Not sure. If PC gaming takes a dip again, I'll probably be an early adopter... but considering how strong PC gaming has been the last year, I'm not sure I need to go the console route.

But I'll probably pick up at least one of the consoles. As for which... I don't know at this point. The Xbox360's gamepads and me have a really troubling past (ie: I've got 3 pads, none of them work very well), while the Dualshock 3 has been working perfectly since they were released. Though I do like the Xbox a bit better at this point (except for the gamepads, which I loathe), I think that Microsoft has a terrible track record with user interface on the Xbox (and GFWL) - and has been making the Xbox UI worse and worse over time.

Also, Microsoft has a really shitty tendency to arbitrarily disabling features for no apparent reason. Like how I can't use Kinect voice control (despite them yammering on about it for a good 10 minutes at E3!) IN ENGLISH... because of my locale (Sweden). WTF?! I realize I'm not missing out on much, but it's a feature I've really wanted to test. In English.

So, yeah. Despite liking my Xbox better than my Playstation (at this point), I'm leaning towards Playstation, because it's not as offensive to me. On the other hand, while the Xbox store is bad, the Playstation store is a terrible mess where I can never find anything that I'm interested in... hmm, maybe I'll just stick to PC? Consoles are pretty messed up.

While I do agree that I had hoped for more from Assassins Creed 3, I think it's you are plying ridiculous amounts of hyperbole stating that it was "horrible."

You do make some fair points, but many of them can be applied to dozens of other games.

I for one am quite excited about this! :) And I find the amount of ignorant Fish-hate quite amusing, or something.

Played silly amounts of the Multiplayer... and yeah, once you really started getting good at that, the game really flowed - extremely rewarding at higher levels of practice. Personally, one of my favorite parts was how much the parallell hacking mini-game added to the game - it really feels amazing once it gets intuitive, and can end up in situations where you find yourself barely keeping up with the number of events you need to deal with at the same time.

Unfortunately, being sent out to die with no marketing in front of Mass Effect 3 (especially it's multiplayer), with little to no marketing... Meh!

Don't think it's my game of the year, but I really liked it.

(Singleplayer is pretty average though, and the combat system didn't really click for me until I had played a lot more multiplayer).

While neither FFXIII or FFXIII-2 were amazing, I still think they get a lot more hate than they deserve.

Besides, I really like the Lightning character, so I'll probably get this just to end that journey, even if the glasses moment at the end was really corny. *shrug*

Phil Fish pretty much "disappeared from the Internet" as a result of the fallout (which was quite extreme) after the whole Taken-out-of-context-Japanese-games-suck-comment (Source: Phil Fish's keynote speech at Nordic Game Conference in May 2012). As far as I can tell, he never really "returned".

Unfortunately, wanting something to happen, and being able to make it happen are quite different things.