Malleus on 27/12/2012 at 16:18

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1. Dishonored - not much to say that hasn't already been said, it was awesome.

2. Borderlands 2 - improved on the first game in every way, and was (and still is) a blast to play (in coop). Also gets the music of the year and villain of the year awards from me. :)

3. Mass Effect 3 - well, I hated the ending and think the writing is just off sometimes, not to mention the limited dialogue choices, but I still finished it five times. They got the shooty bits right this time though, the action gameplay is the best in the trilogy. All in all it's still quite a ride and IMO the ME trilogy is a quite a big an unique accomplishment in gaming.

4. Spec Ops: The Line - story of the year, definitely, though I kinda got hooked on the game itself too lately, finished it three times. A great deconstruction of the "tacticool manshooter". Loved the visuals and the art design (like the graffitis).

5. Max Payne 3 - this was nothing more than an exceptionally well put together, technologically (graphics, character animations) top notch action game. Which was a pretty good thing.

This year I also discovered Fallout 3 (awesome), Bioshock 2 (pretty good) and Fear 3 (crap Fear game, great coop fps).

Jason Moyer on 27/12/2012 at 17:02

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I hope other companies look at how co-op was implemented in BL2 and rip it off. I ended up playing fairly large chunks of it co-op even though I had no intention to, simply because the co-op implementation is so spectacular.

zajazd on 27/12/2012 at 17:25

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As usual this was year of disappointments and overrated games.

Best game surprisingly was Max Payne 3 - it lacks the charm of 1 and 2 but it's still a very good game.

Dishonored was good but after completing it I have mehy feelings towards it. It's just a mash of a few other games, the story is laughable and the characters are ugly as hell.

Way overrated games that I hated: Journey and Far Cry 3.

Games that other people like but I didn't try them cos I know that they are boring and not worthy of my time: Mass Effect 3, Assassins Creed 3, Blops 2, Borderlands 2, Mark of the Ninja. I'm sure there was moar.

Jason Moyer on 27/12/2012 at 17:55

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My game of the year was Thief 2, played about 80 fan missions and then had sex with a raggedy Andy doll.

Sulphur on 27/12/2012 at 21:05

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For a minute there, I'd confused zaza and Jason Moyer's posts with each other's.

...turns out, a second after I got it right, that it didn't matter anyway! Quality trolls, you jerks. :laff:


Okay, so I'm sorry, but this is going to be a thread derail. I figure Journey's gonna figure in a lot of people's 'Best Of' lists. I played the entirety of it at my friend's place on his purty 50" Samsung Series Ba-fooken-zoonga TV.

It's something, isn't it? The art direction, the music, the gameplay, the drip-feed of narrative without a single spoken word...

But I have to say something, here. Unfortunately for me, I can see the seams in the stitching. Not the flaws, mind: what I mean to say is, I can see the framework it's built for itself, from the outside looking in. It's a meticulously calibrated experience -- the full arc from mystery to despondency to despair to fear to struggle to joy is masterfully executed. And that's the problem: it's too meticulously calibrated. The emotional beats are predictable, predicated on that familiar biblical story of exodus, and the imagery is an ambiguous mash-up of religious symbolism that I fear is too conspicuous and trite - there's nothing as overtly tasteless as a wooden cross making an incongruous cameo, of course, but it's fairly obvious from the desert setting to the architectural sweep of its deserted environments that old cultures and older religions inform much of the design.

The other thing is the avatar you control. (Feel free to replace 'you' with 'I' or whatever the appropriate first-person replacement is in the following bunch of sentences, since I'm fully aware you might not feel the same way about this.) The wordlessness, the emotionlessness of your character apart from his/her's ability to chirp, does not, contrary to what you might expect, lead your imagination to fill in the blanks. It's fairly evident that the character you control is meant to be a cipher for the player, a blank slate for you to write your emotional states onto whilst playing. But that's a problem: your character clearly knows more than you do, since it's steeped in the design of the world before the game even begins. The dichotomy that transpires is, once the game starts, that you know the 'cipher' is withholding information from you because of a lack of communicative action, and you, the player, need to figure out what to do in spite of this. This may be by design, but it engenders a certain amount of distance that prevents you from fully embracing the character.

This takes away nothing from the fact that the game itself is a wonderful piece of design, wrapped up in a beautiful red bow. But, for me, it's a bit too polished and over-designed to work as art, and instead, even in the glowing triumph of its resolution, comes across as something that feels just the tiniest bit emotionally manipulative.