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.
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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.