game-of-the-year-2012
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Best of the Rest: Alexander's picks of 2012
Joystiq is revealing its 10 favorite games of 2012 throughout the week. Keep reading for more top selections and every writer's personal, impassioned picks in Best of the Rest roundups. Far Cry 3Far Cry 3's story is racially insensitive, a Bechdel Test nightmare, and is criminally close to being homophobic. Despite all the cringe-worthy narrative elements that are handled with the deftness of a surgeon with a hacksaw, Far Cry 3 immersed me in its world and didn't let go until I finished. It speaks to the brilliance of the game's design team that players are compelled to push on after realizing they are one of the Rich Kids of Instagram and are tasked with saving others of their ilk.Oh my gawd, and don't even get me started on the mental self-flagellation I experienced after saving Oliver.
Best of the Rest: Jordan's picks of 2012
Joystiq is revealing its 10 favorite games of 2012 throughout the week. Keep reading for more top selections and every writer's personal, impassioned picks in Best of the Rest roundups. Tekken Tag Tournament 2With as old of a genre as fighting games are, it seems reasonable to assume the gaming development world would have their creation down to a fine science, but that's not the case. As I discovered over the course of several reviews this year, many studios still get the basic fundamentals of a fighter wrong, shipping games with lackluster arcade modes, poor online architecture and/or a lack of expanded single-player content.Tekken Tag Tournament 2, however, succeeded where most others failed by offering a full-featured smörgåsbord of single-player content, bolstered by a delightfully robust selection of local multiplayer modes and one of the best, most refined fighting engines ever developed. Tekken Tag Tournament 2 is easily the best Tekken game there's ever been, of this there can be no doubt, but it's more than that. It also happens to be the very best fighting game that 2012 had to offer.
Joystiq Top 10 of 2012: XCOM: Enemy Unknown
In the ultimate showdown of "us versus them," your decisions will determine the fate of countless soldiers, the XCOM project, Earth and, oh yeah, humanity. No pressure, Commander.XCOM: Enemy Unknown doesn't just update and re-imagine a classic PC game for a new generation. It executes on bringing a deep strategy game to consoles without skipping a beat. Developer Firaxis is well-known for creating accessible epic-scale strategy through its Civilization series. In XCOM it applies those skills acquired over a very long career – talents that went underappreciated with Civilization: Revolution – and streamlines the strategy genre to a point where everyone can feel welcome, and aficionados of the genre can recognize the brilliance in the simplicity.%Gallery-167636%
Best of the Rest: Mike Schramm's picks of 2012
Joystiq is revealing its 10 favorite games of 2012 throughout the week. Keep reading for more top selections and every writer's personal, impassioned picks in Best of the Rest roundups. Puzzle CraftFirst, I'd like to take a quick bow. Last year at this time (while lauding the great Jetpack Joyride), I pointed out that we'd never chosen a first-released-on-mobile game for our top 10 list, and that 2012 might be the year it would finally happen. And as you've seen on our final list, we did finally pick a game that fits that definition in 2012.But it wasn't my pick: For my money, Puzzle Craft is the best mobile game of the year, and definitely in my top five overall. Right now it's free on iOS, and offers a gorgeous and polished mix of casual puzzle gameplay that slowly gets more and more rewarding and complex as you level up and stockpile farm-based goodies. I love the "days of the year" time mechanic, I love the way that the rules change as you grow your town, and I just plain love this game. Hopefully we'll see new content in the new year, because I've been at max level for a while now. Max level, that is, on all three devices I've installed it on.
Joystiq Top 10 of 2012: The Walking Dead
Telltale's The Walking Dead proves the old adage true at nearly every turn: You just can't satisfy everyone all the time. As Lee Everett, you're going to fail someone no matter what you do. Every decision – including indecision – will piss someone off at best and get someone killed at worst. What's remarkable about The Walking Dead is that you actually care about these fictional relationships at all.At some point, however, the arguments, accusations and attacks cease to be important. People break apart. Relationships fall away. Eventually, only one thing matters: The safety of a little girl.
Best of the Rest: Xav's picks of 2012
Joystiq is revealing its 10 favorite games of 2012 throughout the week. Keep reading for more top selections and every writer's personal, impassioned picks in Best of the Rest roundups. SyndicateIs it wise to reboot a strategy game, remembered for being one of the best in its genre, in a completely different style? Developer Starbreeze did that with Syndicate this year turning the franchise into something almost all their own. Sadly, publisher EA didn't feel the game sold well enough and Starbreeze didn't support it post launch (perhaps A equals B, in this case). Syndicate's once high-profile reboot quietly came and went.And yet Syndicate was an excellent experience. Once mastered by the end of the game's campaign, you unleashed cyberpunk-fueled death at clans of enemies in record time. You could hack into an enemy's head and make him kill himself for you! That's crazy.Syndicate's co-op mode was the real winner as a side-story that visited great locations and offered plenty of challenge. Banging my head against a wall for an hour attempting to complete the final mission with a handful of other reviewers during the game's launch, and finally walking away successful, is still one of the best experiences I've had all year. It's a pity the game has so much promise and potential for a sequel, while Starbreeze will likely never have the chance to make it.
Joystiq Top 10 of 2012: Halo 4
Halo 4 wasn't supposed to happen. Halo 3 was meant to conclude the story of John 117, the man we all know as Master Chief, and Halo: Reach put a bow on the franchise, leaving us to sit back and wait for whatever grand universe Bungie would reveal next.But that's not how things shook out. Instead, Bungie left Microsoft entirely, and Halo was left in the care of 343 Industries, a studio created exclusively to shepherd the franchise going forward. Who would have guessed that the untested team would create not only one of the best games of 2012, but one of the best games in the entire Halo series?
Best of the Rest: Jess' picks of 2012
Joystiq is revealing its 10 favorite games of 2012 throughout the week. Keep reading for more top selections and every writer's personal, impassioned picks in Best of the Rest roundups. FTL: Faster Than LightI find tremendous pleasure in games that allow me to name my characters, humanize them and create their unique, intricate backstories, for the sole purpose of making me watch those beloved little guys burn to death on a cramped space ship. No game does this better, or more often, than FTL: Faster Than Light.Another alluring aspect of FTL is that it's an indie game that looks indie. The game's strength lies in the incredible interstellar journey the player takes with her crew, and the graphics do everything they can to stay out of the way of these space battles and indiscriminate deaths. It's a mental game, high-energy in synapse rather than the screen – much as I've heard the original X-COM described. And like X-COM, playing FTL isn't just a wonderful experience today, but it promises greater, better things to come from Subset Games.
Joystiq Top 10 of 2012: Mark of the Ninja
Traditionally, being a "ninja" in a video game means you have supernatural speed and strength, and as such you feel confident running down a street in broad daylight, slicing through anything in your path. Role models like Joe Musashi and Ryu Hayabusa exemplify the video game ninja, a super-strong, invincible monster who feels no compulsion to seek shadows, unless those shadows are full of still-unperforated alien monsters.In Mark of the Ninja, you're just as supernaturally capable as any NES-era ninja, able to cling to almost any wall and grapple from vantage point to vantage point instantly. But Klei Entertainment built this ninja game around the stealth you'd expect from the profession, and did so in a way that feels every bit as natural as Ryu tossing a column of flame at an eagle.
Best of the Rest: Richard's picks of 2012
Joystiq is revealing its 10 favorite games of 2012 throughout the week. Keep reading for more top selections and every writer's personal, impassioned picks in Best of the Rest roundups. Asura's WrathAsura's Wrath is one of the strangest, grandest, most wonderful games I have ever played. It's not the sort of game you'll play for months on end. In fact, you might only ever play it once. The point, however, is that you should play it. The amount of pure, unbridled insanity on display is worth the price of admission alone, with more improbable and impossible things happening than I could catalog here: death duels on the moon, enemies the size of planets, enemies larger than planets, you name it.It's also responsible for the single best bit of critical hyperbole I've ever come up with, and I stand by it. As I said in my review, "Asura's Wrath is a glittering, golden starchild of incredulity, and I love it."
Best of the Rest: Mike Suszek's picks of 2012
Joystiq is revealing its 10 favorite games of 2012 throughout the week. Keep reading for more top selections and every writer's personal, impassioned picks in Best of the Rest roundups. FIFA Soccer 13I'd argue that sports games haven't quite accomplished what EA Canada managed to do this year with FIFA 13: Mix in a subtle sense of unpredictability that you'd expect from the sport the game represents. FIFA 13's first touch controls forces players to calculate their decisions on the field more carefully than ever before, as one bad bounce can create an opening for your opponent. Layered with that unpredictability and an always-improving AI is the EA Sports Football Club Catalogue, which builds on the XP system pervasive throughout the game by offering players in-game rewards for their efforts. FIFA 13 is a complete game, and is unquestionably my favorite sports game of 2012.
Massively's Best of 2012 Awards
When game obituaries and studio layoffs start to pile up in the news, Massively can seem like a herald of doom, but the reality is that the MMO industry is stronger and richer than ever. We've got more features to try, more business models to play with, more studios (and indie Kickstarters) to vie for our favor, and more titles to play than most of us could possibly sample in our lifetimes. Today, Massively's staff honors the best of the best for the year 2012. We asked each writer and streamer to vote in each category with an anything-goes nomination process. No MMO, company, or headline was off the table. Enjoy our picks for the best MMOs, expansions, studios, stories, and innovations of 2012... and our most-anticipated for 2013.
