GOTY-2012
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Best of 2012 Statistics: Breaking down Joystiq's awards
To decide its top ten games of the year, Joystiq goes through a fairly strict voting procedure, which is much more civil than the battle royale you might imagine our process to be. And now, you can get a better idea of how all that procedure works – while you're looking at some cool infographics.Here's how it works: each editorial staff member picks his or her top five games of the year, with no stipulation other than: the games listed must be 2012 releases in North America and not include any re-releases or upgraded versions of previously released software (sorry, Persona 4 Golden!).But the staff doesn't only select five favorites; they can list as many games as they want for the awards, with the caveat that anything listed after number five is considered their "Best of the Rest" selection.Each of the top five votes carries a weight. Number 1 is worth five points, number 5 is worth one – this is the game's base score. Listing a game as a "Best of the Rest" also carries some weight: .5 points toward the final tally per appearance on the "BotR" list. Ties are broken by the number of times a game appears on the base list – represented here as "Top Five Voted" – and, if further tie-breaking is required, by how many times it appears on the "BotR" list.Super Hexagon is a good example of how this system works as intended. The game made multiple appearances within the staff's top five lists, and appeared on the "BotR" list many times. Eventually, the game's score carried it into the fifth spot. Surprising, yes, but we collectively loved it enough to put it there.In the case of something like FTL: Faster Than Light and Borderlands 2, those games most frequently appeared in "Best of the Rest" sections of staff lists. Despite only cracking the top five of a few lists, both games were just shy of enough points to make the list due to these numerous Best of the Rests; if it was the top twelve of 2012, FTL and Borderlands 2 would be in there. It was that close.For the top spot, Journey edged out XCOM: Enemy Unknown by a mere three points. Three!
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: Journey
Watchmen, the monumental graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, was once deemed "unfilmable." So entrenched were the creators in the structure and language of their chosen medium, that no interpretation, even if faithful to the plot and characters, could truly convey as intended this study of duplicitous, damaged superheroes.One of my favorite novels, "House of Leaves" by Mark Z. Danielewski, belongs best in a book, which you flutter through, turn upside down and decode in mad layers. The core of it, however, is a spooky, spatially suspect house. Hollywood can probably handle that – and I'd go see the results – but it wouldn't be the same without the scribbled anecdotes, the cover and the spine.Journey is an unfilmable video game, despite being rooted in a concept that's miraculously relatable and explainable (for a game). A slender being, draped in beautiful and unfettered fabrics, is drawn to a mountain. The beacon beckons not with words, but a language enmeshed with the world itself. Some designers show they care by putting a dot on your screen; others make you a mountain.
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.
Joystiq Top 10 of 2012: Fez
Years of hype, several delays, a self-destructively outspoken developer, framerate stutters, game-breaking crashes, and now post-patch blues. While I don't agree, I can certainly understand why some have little time for Fez even before getting into the game underneath all the mess. That's a shame, because the game is an absolute peach.The Fez I played back in April, which crashed nine times in all and stuttered on numerous occasions, was worth the tribulations and then some. I raced through it across the release weekend, throwing myself at the challenge of finding all the cubes hidden within the cryptographic platformer, and doing so without any outside help whatsoever (OK, maybe a little). It should have been a maddening exercise of frustration and ire, but instead I had an airy grin plastered across my features throughout.
Joystiq Top 10 of 2012: Super Hexagon
Super Hexagon is about an insignificant speck squeezing through gaps in a concentric, never-ending sequence of ever-shrinking shapes. In other words, Super Hexagon is about:1. Escaping debt in a constrictive economy2. Escaping a prison made of lasers3. The inevitability of death and the hope of reincarnation4. Resilience in the face of constant adversity5. Maintaining individuality in an increasingly homogenous society6. Being in a relationship with a control freak6. Slipping past tourists who are walking too goddamn slowly6. Recognizing Satan's insidious grip on your soul7. Dodging awkward hugs8. Fitting through a coffee shop's door before it closes so you don't have to touch it9. Wearing multiple corsets at once10. Trying to reach a human being on FedEx's customer support line
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: Dishonored
Dishonored is a convoluted work, and key in reclaiming the word "convoluted" for the purposes of praise. Simplicity has a place in the finest games, but sometimes you just want to get wrapped up in things. A scarf metaphor might have gone here, had it not come from the paranoia induced by Dishonored's deadly contempt for unshielded necks. There's dignity and integrity to Dishonored's vision, projected from creators who have pursued their ideals with conviction. "This is what we think video games are about," says Arkane Studios. They're about being a rogue catalyst with power(s) and agency, wedged inside a tightly wound coil of combat mechanisms, traversal techniques and environments that communicate an alternate world, history and life without using words. They're about finding paths and learning how to exploit your abilities. They're about blocking a painter's view of his subject, just to be a dick. They're about emptying a safe before you sell the combination to an ignorant buyer. And yes, they're about stabbing necks and piling the attached bodies beneath the mansion's stairwell. Maids hate their lives while a vengeful assassin is on the loose.
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.
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."
Joystiq Top 10 of 2012: Mass Effect 3
Just two years ago, Joystiq awarded the top spot in its Game of the Year list to Mass Effect 2. In borrowing from our description of that game, we could equally incite "the rather whimsical notion that a fictional world has some sort of permanence" when talking about Mass Effect 3. The gravity of every decision in the series is intended to elicit a feeling of dire consequence. Did you lose your favorite squad member in the second game? Factors like that are expected to play a role in the final chapter of your adventure.For some, this third game began to fall apart at the seams for that very reason: we've come to expect that as the most important human in the galaxy, our decisions will leave a permanent imprint on the universe. Commander Shepard is expected to be the seemingly unstoppable hero that defies the odds and ultimately comes out the victor. That's hardly a fault of players, as those who have stuck around since the beginning should remember a rugged Shepard strutting out from the debris at the Citadel with a confident smirk at the end of the first game. %Gallery-142871%
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.
Joystiq Top 10 of 2012: ZombiU
ZombiU had a lot stacked against it before it arrived. It's a launch game for a new Nintendo platform, from a company which famously over-promised and under-delivered with another launch game, Red Steel, for the Wii in 2006. It doesn't help that the Ubisoft Montpellier game is called ZombiU, a name that screams "bland, poorly-executed shovelware." But the survival-focused action of ZombiU does a lot to set itself apart from the horde of Wii U launch games: it features the most interesting use of the console's tablet-like controller, can be punishingly difficult, and returns the survival-horror genre to its roots of surviving on scraps and fearing for your life around every corner.The premise of ZombiU is a simple, if not overused, one. An outbreak has turned the city – London this time – into a feeding ground for the undead. As you scour the city for the last remnants of weapons and supplies, you start uncovering the mystery surrounding the outbreak.The real majesty of ZombiU is found within its moment-to-moment progression. There's an internal struggle that continues to boil forward throughout the game, leaving you to question when you should dig in to that valuable inventory. It may seem like a good idea to burn ammo on a small group of brain-munching monsters in one room, but what if the next area poses a greater threat? Could you survive with your trusty, slow-swinging cricket bat for now? Is it worth moving forward an inch now, only to be set back miles later? It's the fear of the unknown, and your potential death, that makes those moments so intense.%Gallery-162496%
