Something went wrong. Try again later

CanuckEh

This user has not updated recently.

312 0 0 82
Forum Posts Wiki Points Following Followers

GOTY 2012

2012 came and went. It was a bizarre year to be had. There was a decided lack of notable retail games, or at least retail games that weren't following some establish mold. The digital front was certainly the more interesting landscape. I actually found that thanks to certain highly experimental downloadable games that my tolerance for certain tropes in bigger-budget games plummet. I have a hard time dealing with cliche-ridden stories or exhausted gameplay mechanics. I'm not interested in grinding levels to get a red-dot sight anymore. So, my list. I haven't played Assassin's Creed 3 yet. Most any major first person and/or cover-based shooter I have ignored, and except for Spec Ops: The Line, I don't feel bad at all. I marginally feel bad for only now playing enough Dead or Alive to clutch it's bosom onto this list, but there's still Persona 4: Golden and Xenoblade Chronicles. Beyond those, I feel pretty content about this list.

This is very much a work in progress.

List items

  • Hotline Miami is a game very much in control of you. The furious techno-beats and gruesome splatter effects make you feel superhuman as you thrash the bad guys. The subsequent eerie change in musical tone and swirling screen effects illicit nausea as you backtrack the environment and realize you've taken many lives mercilessly. The conspiracy storyline doesn't so much unfold as it strips down and exposes your ugly core. It all makes sense within the confines of this very specific kind of action game, an all-context-removed Murder Simulator. It is the most honest-to-itself game of 2012, and my personal favourite.

  • I don't care for adventure games and dislike anything zombie-related even more. But the Walking Dead game feels like a landmark moment in video games. It experiments with storytelling in a bold way that no boardroom execs dare to defy. Bad things happen to good people, bad people, kids, cities, civilization, racism and human sanity. Players make choices that reveal their true morality to themselves. There is no "good/evil" meter. There is you, Clementine, your conscience and your will, and not all of those three can survive the endevear.

  • Sleeping Dogs is easily the best retail, disc-based game I've played this year. It caters to the various strengths of the sandbox genre. It has the serious narrative or recent Grand Theft Auto games, with fully realized characters with their own nuances, quirks and depth. It also has the Saints Row mentality of sacrificing realism in the name of fun. As mortal as Wei Shen is, he can still jump from car to car and shove civilians into telephone booths. All while sporting a Bruce Lee jumpsuit.

  • Nowadays, I have a hard time complaining about the excess of first person shooters or one dollar IOS games that charge money for you to not wait for a bar to fill. I don't need to play any of those, because some stray team of developers felt it their duty to combine my two very, very specific Favorite Things into one game. I am a Persona 4 fan. I am a Guilty Gear fan. This is an Ark Systems fighting game where Persona 4's holistically strange cast engage in professional wrestling combat. It is both an improbably and yet perfectly logical combination.

  • Dust definitely wears it's 200-person team, 32 million dollar budget on its sleeve. The high quality of the animation mesh with the talented voice crew and orchestral score to give this game large-scale fantasy feel. The game effortlessly borrows elements from God of War, Diablo and Metroid in a seamless and clever combination of elements that all play off each other with relative ease. This is what next-generation, triple-A Activision/Electronic Arts titles will aspire to be in 2013.

    ...who made it again?

  • I kind of have to accept certain hard realities about Spelunky. I'm never going to finish Spelunky. At least earnestly, I will never finish Spelunky. Maybe I'll have a lucky run and give the Tunnel Man that which he needs to make a shortcut to the final world. Maybe I'll actually see the end game for myself. Miracles happen this time of year, I suppose. But even if I don't, I will still enjoy the time spent on the chain reaction-explosions that somehow lead to aggroing the shopkeeper, or the memories of playing Catch-My-Corpse with the loving Sasquatch Family.

  • Tokyo Jungle presents an interesting commentary on Darwinism and general biology in the animal kingdom, and how prevalent it may be in our allegedly civilized society. It also presents the same random, unpredictable-yet-unsafe world dynamic of Spelunky, where anything can happen and largely not in your favour. A lineage of prosperous , Aviator-sporting chickens can come to a head when running away from poisonous environments only into the mouths of a pack of starved hyenas.

  • At nearly 120 hours, White 2 is the game I somehow spent the most time with in 2012. I also feel like I'm in a very unique situation that will most likely not reflect most players' experience. I spent way too many hours on Red and Blue, have been largely intimidated by subsequent entries, got a bit of a Pokeitch after seeing assorted Black/White two McDonalds Happy Meal toys in Brazil, and returned home. There, through perhaps illegitimate means, certain friends helped me obtain an army of monsters that are familiar to me,that I may or may not have any business possessing. Why can't I start the game with my own personal Mewtwo? Unlikely circumstances notwithstanding, I'm in an ideal situation to appreciate the 12 years of iteration that Game Freak has applied since I last cared too much about this stuff. Psychics are no longer the be-all, bug Pokemon matter, there are more strategies than "hit first with your biggest shot", there's an interesting post-Elite Four game, fighting and trading on the internet exists!

  • The core game part of Sound Shapes is decidedly brief. There have been some amusing user-created levels, but nothing I've seen that approaches the style of the stages featuring professional musicians and programmed by people smarter than me. And thus I find myself replaying those levels often, over and over, with the beats turned up. The Beck levels rank as among the most hypnotic experiences in gaming that I've had all year.

  • My innate bias towards wrestling is probably affecting this edging out some esteemed company in my top ten. Though it helps that this installment is so firm in coaxing with Attitude Mode, a seperate domain from the rest of the game. Entering the Attitude Mode menu feels like submersing yourself into an underwater realm filled with cheetos, rap-metal and South Park caricatures of famous people. It is an all-consuming nostalgia trip. Now you can be the career-shortener that throws Mick Foley off the cell, or puts Bret Hart in the sharpshooter.

  • Not putting Asura's Wrath in the top ten was a real heartbreaker for me. Asura's Wrath provided me with a litany of unforgettable moments, along with the presence of quick-time event buttons and bad combat that must be beaten off to reach a burst orgasm. The subsequent facial of explosions and chaos that ensues is nothing short of satisfying.

  • Pretty much the only reason I didn't give Mark of the Ninja bigger props is that two wrongs don't make a right, and using one all-too-familiar plot twist followed by another left some poison in my stab wound. But I'll be remiss to not mention that the game is probably the best power fantasy of 2012. This is The Shadow video game we will never actually get. You are in a room, you know everything about the environment and the poor guards around you, they don't know anything about you. What happens next is your choice, you ninja-jesus, you.

  • There are two games on this list that I feel every person should look at, regardless of whether or not they dabble much in general video games at all. The second one is Walking Dead. I guess that puts McPixel in a special arthouse realm.

  • So I got the special edition of Dead or Alive 5, a Christmas present that was equal parts loving gesture and rib. Dead or Alive 5 is duuuuuuuuumb. But it's that right kind of unintentional dumb that you can't fake. Breasts move on their own as if they have obtained sentience. A character sets up her own voyeurism shower scene for no reason beyond testing her new hidden camera. Characters practice martial arts skills in a circus. The more Dead or Alive 5 challenged logic, the more it endeared itself to me.

  • I'm counting the released-in-2012 PC version here as it's the one I've played, being a person whom will put up the biggest fight possible to flee from the IOS battleship that consumes all. If you take away the trimmings, it is a pixel-hunt adventure game. (And McPixel out pixel-hunts just about anything while shoving a batarang up its own ass.) But like eating all the fat around a steak, the trimmings are what hits your heart the most. The music, the dialogue so confident in itself that you can post any line on Twitter at any moment, the blender-ran mixing of cheery and dark themes. Sword and Sworcery hits your emotional core and does so with a song.

  • I think I'm more partial to the intro music from Trials than most. For me, every day is Monday Nitro.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhFQm6i0TDc

  • I'm writing the rest of this list listening to the Trials intro music.

    Everyone's favourite. My experience was perhaps a little different from others. I was that amateur alien defence force that played on Easy, and restarted my game the first moment things went wrong. But hey, I needed my Seargant, Barack Obama, to survive to use his psychic powers on the enemy. I also ran into a situation where, either through overworking my scientists on other projects or trading too many goods on the Grey Market for Pokemon cards, I found myself having to grind random missions in need of key supplies to start a critical research project. At that point, the game petered out for me sooner than it should've. Then again, it was Seargeant Barack Obama that saved the world.

  • Team Meat must've done Ubi Soft a big favour all those years ago, when they trolled PETA into giving Super Meat Boy free coverage. Now I imagine PETA is not interested in assaulting the games industry, just in time for Far Cry 3 to come out. You are rewarded for killing sharks, tigers, and anything else in the name of making custom fur gun holsters. So why is the NRA attacking video games again?

  • I feel like most of the world went about ignoring Mutant Mudds and I feel a bit disheartened about that. Mutant Mudds is kind of like Super Meat Boy, except for the part where it isn't. Your dweebish hero moves at a gingerly pace, leaping at the air slowly and uses his water gun with the firing rate equivalent of rush hour traffic. But that the game can take those methodical systems and design its levels to be equal parts challenging and fair is a minor achievement. Sly reflexes are nice but you need to plan your motions several steps in advance to avoid a faceful of mudd...mutant mudd.

    Also, it got the jump on Fez and Retro City Rampage with it's Game Boy/Virtual Boy parody.

  • My position of not being that great at fighting games makes me the ideal target audience for Street Fighter Vs Tekken. I like pressing buttons to make things happen, and I'm vaguely familiar with how Street Fighter Fighting works, so I can sometimes make magic happen in a fight here. And dinosaurs.

  • I feel like Kid Icarus might be amongst the most game-filled games on this list. There's a narrative that starts, ends, starts anew, starts a few more times, ends, and then finally ends. There's a loot-crafting mechanic that I never delved into because I found it hard to top cupid sporting a cannon. There's a multiplayer mode that I never touched because Toronto public transportation is too poor to hotspot their buses. There's AR cards because that's kind of the thing 3DS does. They even included a stand to hold up your 3DS while you played Mutant Mudds. Thanks Nintendo.

  • Retro City Rampage is nothing if not committed. It loves making references. Often on top of each other, all clawing towards your screen and begging you to draw attention to some 90s show from your childhood. But there's an intelligence within all that nostalgia. When the game wants to make a statement about the politics of the industry, it will. It would just also rather just remind you about all the hours you spent on Duck Hunt.

  • So I decided that this list would be about as long as there are games I liked more than Mass Effect 3. I spent a fairly hearty number of hours finishing the game, and even toyed the idea of playing through the campaign again so that my renegade Shepherd can see the same sense of closure as my babyface Shepherd. It's just that the aformentioned closure left me with a bit of disdain for this universe, to a point where I would like to travel out of that galaxy as fast as possible and into something more friendly. (Like the Retro City Rampage universe.) And once you lose interest in the Mass Effect narrative, you're left with another cover-based shooter. And I'm good on those, it's okay EA.
Load Comments