by mento
Third annual one of these. I beat all the games on this list in the year 2012 of the Common Era. That's pretty much it.
As is customary for retired Games Beaten lists, here's some stats about the year's gaming:
Showing 1-10 of 62 items
01/01-06/01. Starting the year right. Bastion's a great game. I don't know if it would've made my top ten, but it's certainly a tightly-packed isometric adventure that's nice to look at and listen to. I probably didn't do myself any favors using keyboard controls. Wait, I'm making a huge blog for this, why am I writing anything here?
2011-10/01. Been playing this on and off since around Xmas when the Ambassador package arrived. It's ideal for that sort of portable incremental play. At this point, I've mastered every mini-game, so it's time to move onto one of the many other GBA classics on there. Or Ghost Trick. Future's looking bright, 3DS.
2011-01/02. Clearly Monolith Software were sitting around a table and thinking "you know, we've made a few of those incomprehensible space robot RPG games, how about we just make one that's frickin' awesome instead?" And thus was it so. Had I played more of Xenoblade last year, it would've easily made my GOTY: It has seriously rejuvenated my love of JRPGs. I might even have the courage to face FFXIII-2 now. Except... after 160 hours of this I'm not playing another RPG for at least a month (which is, curiously, around the time when Mass Effect 3 comes out). Let's see how I fare with less exhausting games for a while.
2011-05/02. A rather slight Mario adventure, though much like any Mario game there isn't anything particularly objectionable about it. Each stage has its own personality, though many of the traps and obstacles seem to be culled from Mario games of the past (including Galaxy). Makes it feel rather by-the-numbers in nature. At this point, all I have left to achieve is beating every stage with Luigi, a task so utterly pointless I may just ignore my completionist tendencies for the time being. UPDATE: Yeah, so, I beat every stage with Luigi. I regret everything.
07/02-17/02. Skyward Sword has its issues, but it had some welcome additions and a pretty interesting world. The dungeons felt more integrated and oddly dynamic, there was plenty to do (perhaps a little too much) and the swordfighting's complexity threw me for a loop more than once. It's not perfect, but maybe future Zeldas can build on this. Or maybe be completely different. Either case is fine, honestly.
18/02-19/02. Like with the Phoenix Wright games, I was glued to this mystery until I beat the game a relatively short amount of time later. It's definitely gripping and I've beaten more expensive games in less time, I suppose. Loved the puzzles too, needless to say, though a few were slightly aggravating (like the jailbreak sequence). Great stuff overall.
23/02-26/02. It's a solid little teamwork game, if a little awkward to get your big partner guy to do what he's told. Exploration, puzzle-solving, a lot of collectibles and some fun but easy boss fights results in a nice, low-stress game to cool down with before I hit The Last Story's no doubt byzantine JRPG combat.
29/02-09/03. The Last Story is quite something. Deep Fire Emblem style strategic combat - that frequently and happily mixes things up, changing the rules and introducing new elements to make every battle feel unique - wrapped around a meaty Gears of War cover-based action core. The story feels very traditional 16-bit JRPG too, with knights and princesses and "doing the right thing", which goes some way towards acclimatizing genre fans to the divergent gameplay. Overall it's a fantastic game and, like Xenoblade, a clear example that Japanese game design (especially that of the increasingly hoary, trope-laden JRPG) can learn from the West and could feasibly once again become the dominant creative force in the industry.
14/03. Mass Effect 3 wasn't available to rent, so I made do with the adventures of Punchy McAngryface. It feels like a Dragon's Lair game for the new century; its utter devotion to Quick Time Events makes that feature actually excusable for once, given how it's integral and not tacked-on for the sake of whatever hack designers feel it's good for. However, as much as I liked the story and the weird-ass directions it took, I have no compulsion to watch it all again, regardless of the "four playthroughs minimum" that the achievement list appears to require of me.
15/03-21/03. ME3... I feel a lot of people were gunning for this game to either fail horribly or totally redeem BioWare after the problematic Dragon Age 2. In a sense, it did both. It unwisely persisted with DA2 style fuck-ups such as boring wave-based battles and a mediocre and inconclusive ending, but it was still a mostly solid Mass Effect game that didn't feel horribly broken nor incredibly lazy. I'm saying it's more "Return of the Jedi" than "Godfather 3": Still the low point of the trilogy, but definitely no failure.
