So, it's no longer 2012. My list of Game of the Year is already up, and the requisite ten games were decided. But 2012 had a lot of games over the twelve months that I really wanted to put in the overall list, but due to some defect or whim just wasn't going to make it. But I really wanted to discuss them all the same. Because whatever else they did right or wrong, they were things that filled up my gaming in 2012, and some mark of credit should be theirs.
This almost made my list. It seriously did, fighting over and over with Fez for which game was truly the most deserving. Both had an almost insane degree of hiding the game inside the game, except it's only with Fez where I believe this was intentional. Dragon's Dogma was rife with insane event triggers and buried game-logic that left me searching for what the hell I was supposed to be doing more often than not. But what was truly strange about it was that unlike say, a Dark Souls, where the degree to which a game decides to just not help its player understand it turned me off, Dogma's coy dance of briefly flirting with making it look like I was progressing or understanding the game spurred me on. In a realistic sense, I understood that this was simply a game of Monster Hunter transposing itself on western RPG tropes, like a funhouse mirror reflecting Elder Scrolls or D&D. But when the end of the 'game' happened, and things just turned themselves inside out, I felt that Dogma had a potential that most people weren't going to ever grasp.
Permit me to be the contrary voice in saying that I think the southern island was where the game really kicked off for me. Vaas may have been the face of the game, but I think it was only when wandering around dressed as a merc, /blatantly/ photographing the people I was about to murder to take over a base, that I truly felt how insane Far Cry 3 could get. Particularly when I was interrupted from taking that base by two bears deciding to chase me up a guard tower. Oh god, everything has gone from terrible to worse. This was maybe the only one on this list I kept off top ten because I couldn't be sure if it was just afterglow making me happy with it.
When Final Fantasy X-2 started, I was fascinated with it because it was maybe the first time Square had bothered to examine what a world looked like /after/ the heroes defeat the world-spanning universal catastrope and what those people do afterward. Final Fantasy XIII-2 does the same thing, but also throws in a crazy time-travel plot that even Scott Bakula would blanch at, allowing them to not only examine how the world looks after Victory, but what the world could've looked like, will look like, would've could've looked like, then make the distressed damsel of the first game look like a crazy cat lady in-between shooting people with a sports bow that turns into a Moogle. God damn, but Final Fantasy knows how to make spin-offs seem weird.
I've only beaten one campaign of RE6. Every chapter was a new adventure in seeing just how far they could take the backstory and plot of Resident Evil, but for some inexplicable reason (Sherry Birkin. The reason was Sherry Birkin), I enjoyed this game more than I have any RE game published since Nemesis. Even as the entire gaming world turned against it, I turned the other way. Maybe I really am just a contrary little bastard after all.
In a game where the side-missions were just disorganized as fuck, where the final mission's optional objectives seemed more taunt than actually possible, I really only ever had one true complaint about AC3. If, when I'm done climbing every possible viewpoint on a map, and I'm still missing about 75% of the map because you're expecting me to run through it all on-foot to fill it out, you have fucked up Assassin's Creed. I'm not climbing these giant trees for my health, dammit. You can tell because half the time I'm leaping to my death-by-fall-damage afterward.
I made it to the ice caves once. That's my level of success in a game dedicated pretty much to crushing hopes and dreams. But I'll take it because even if every time I hear the opening sounds to Mine 1-1, I die a little inside, I keep going back to die a little more.
So, I'm just going to put this out there, and leave it at that. Namco, your end-bosses are fucking bullshit. I just want to see the ending once for real, instead of trawling through YouTube videos for what Lili and Asuka do in your insane victory-movies. Help a guy out.
Allow me to state that this year, my attention in racing games was split in two paths. On one end, Forza, a franchise I had given absolutely no thought of before this year, popped up with an amazing attempt at an open-world driving game. Meanwhilst, Criterion produced another in Need for Speed's lineage, which felt oddly constrained by the cops. But what was strange about the two was for me, each had a component I desperately wished to see in the other. Forza's rather unique use of user-created skins for cars let me tool around Colorado in a Makoto Kikuchi-painted race car, but stuck me with three radio stations that I basically just kept to dubstep, if not off. Meanwhile, Need for Speed let me boom Polysics through the streets and hills of The City; but everything about the car models felt oddly plain and, well, car-show in taste. I just want to make speeding around as stupid as possible before driving into a freeway embankment, guys, help me make it as foolish as possible by putting the paintjobs and player music stations together.
So, Alan Wake was one of those games I waited years for on account of being sold on the basic premise. Then it was finally released, and the combat just wore on me until I wanted to die, and the whole Twin Peaks thing had been done better and weirder by a budget cult-game produced by Swery. But somehow, despite the arcade follow-up having a bloody horde mode, American Nightmare was a treat early in the year. Maybe it was them shouldering into the Twilight Zone, or maybe it was just Arizona wastes weren't as perplexing to run around in as Washington State rainforests at night, but I was really happy to play this thing through the end. And the end. /AND THE END./
I remain in awe that this year, a game managed to make me feel sympathy for a short pink rectangle that could bounce people, and the crippling fear of abandonment she felt as her friends were being consumed by a mysterious dark force. I also can't beat that one puzzle where I have to jump two characters off of one another because they've been using each other as levitating platforms. It makes me sad.
