The top ten games of 2012

Posted by on December 13, 2012 in Features

I’m not sure that any of these games would have made my top ten, but I never got around to trying the Walking Dead series, Mark of the Ninja, Hitman: Absolution, Guardians of Middle Earth, Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, Natural Selection 2, Last Story, Tokyo Jungle, Yakuza: Dead Souls, or Spec Ops: The Line. So, mea culpa maxima.

But of the games I did play, here are my favorites for the year.

After the jump, the Qt3 trophies go to…

10) XCOM

Sometimes you can update a classic without betraying it. Sometimes you can appeal to newcomers without alienating the hardcore fans. Sometimes boardgames can teach videogames a thing or three.

XCOM owes more to the great boardgames of the 21st century than to the original X-Com. This is a design about establishing simple rules and then breaking them. For instance, a soldier only gets to do two things a turn. Simple rule. But a heavy soldier with bullet swarm gets to fire before doing its two things, or an assault soldier with run-and-gun gets to move twice and then fire. Simple rule broken.

Read the review here.

9) Need for Speed: Most Wanted

So this is what the Need for Speed and Burnout games have been building up to! So what if it’s missing the personality of Driver or Midnight Club: Los Angeles?

Most Wanted has motivation galore. It constantly and keenly answers the question, “Why should I race?”, yet it offers a startling amount of freedom and flexibility. This is the same franchise that loved to shunt you down long wending ribbons of predetermined road, and it’s the same developer who recently laid out a city in Burnout: Paradise without really understanding the point of an open world, much less the best way to do it. And now Criterion’s Need for Speed is one of the best open world arcade racers you can play, nearly on par with Rockstar’s brilliant Midnight Club: Los Angeles or Ubisoft’s curiously subversive Driver.

Read the review here.

8) Waking Mars

Although it’s now available on the PC, this is the first of two iOS games on my top ten list! Go, iPhone!

The genius of Waking Mars is that where other games would have combat, or spells, or inventory, or the usual gameplay vocabulary, you instead get ecology. It’s up to you to fit the pieces together. Parts of the game remind me of planting gardens or feeding ducks. And as you progress deeper, the interaction of various systems gets more complex, and more delicate, and more expansive. Waking Mars is full of surprises that all come down to nature being composed of interrelated systems, each affecting each other, each depending on each other. You might have the power to wake it up, but it’s not yours to control. This is a surprisingly thoughtful, delightfully atmospheric, smartly written, carefully designed game.

Read the review here.

7) Diablo 3

Yeah, I fell for this one. Hard and long and in spite of some very real problems. I’m not proud. But I have several high- to mid-level characters to show for it.

Diablo III is a socks-on-hardwood-floors slide down a long corridor full of stuff to break and squish: earthenware pottery, old barrels, bubblewrap, honking squawking critters that need killing. It is the product of more than fifteen years of Blizzard whittling away at a genre they arguably invented, weighing carefully how best to get it right for the most people. It is a velvet smooth, resistance free glide without the tough choices an RPG demands. “Sacred cows and longtime fans be damned,” Blizzard cried. “Let them sulk and play their copies of Diablo II!” I love it when a developer does this. I love it when a developer has the confidence, experience, vision, competence, and balls to not listen to us.

Read the review here.

6) Story Nexus

Story Nexus is a platform established by Echo Bazaar creator Failbetter Games. This is where you go to play the brilliant Echo Bazaar, recently renamed Fallen London and pried free of Facebook and Twitter.

[Echo Bazaar] is every bit as good as the classic Infocom text adventures. Better, in fact. I don’t remember the writing in those games being this good, although perhaps I was too young to appreciate it. But I don’t think any of the Infocom text adventures visited a place as vividly imagined and darkly memorable as Fallen London. And I know for certain none of the Infocom games had anything resembling the free-form gameplay on which Echo Bazaar is built. Its foundation is a latticework of quests, stats, random events, and inventory items, all of which you navigate by making choices that spread and intertwine like vines. It’s not simply about making numbers go up over time, although that certainly happens. It’s about making mutually exclusive choices. It’s about struggling with madness. It’s about solving mysteries. It’s about choosing factions. It’s about your pick of a lifelong ambition. It’s about building a framework of contacts, quirks, plots, and schemes. It’s about opening a jar of shrieks, deciding what to do with a boxed cat, and trading whispered secrets for ancient mysteries.

But Story Nexus is more than just Fallen London. It is the home of spin-offs like The Silver Tree, weird Western Zero Summer, sci-fi saga Winterstrike, the historical intrigue of Cabinet Noir, the Rogue-like Below, and more, including stuff you can create and share yourself. This is where you go if you want to see what videogames can accomplish when they have good writers instead of graphics.

Read the Fallen London review here. But, more importantly, check out Story Nexus here.

5) Rebuild

Possibly the best zombie game ever made for how it understands that a zombie apocalypse is about the survivors more than it’s about the zombies. Who knew one of the most insightful videogames about zombie mythology would be a turn-based iPhone game, where you can experience the anxiety in short bursts at the time and place of your choosing?

It’s bleak, difficult, and most often ends in failure. It’s about desperately needing to do three things but only having the resources to do two of them. It includes suicide, starvation, disease, lawlessness. Even the dog can die. Looming over it all is a sense of impending doom as the zombie attacks get bigger and more frequent. Over time your survivors form a band of combat hardened bad-asses. If you didn’t give them names when you recruited them, you’re going to learn their names or change them once they’ve survived a while (Rebuild will even give some characters a nickname based on certain injuries). At which point the inevitable losses sting all the more.

Read the review here.

4) Assassin’s Creed 3

I had given up on Assassin’s Creed games. I love how wrong I was. Ubisoft created a grand new game as big as America herself.

Most of the meaningful Americana is in the homestead, a sprawling counterpart to the villa improvements from the previous games. The homestead is a bit like the city building in Dark Cloud, or the Colony 6 progression in Xenoblade Chronicles. It’s got touches of Harvest Moon or the “dudes, too” dating in Grand Theft Auto IV. You’ll also find bits and pieces in the liberation missions, which range from burning diseased blankets, standing up for hungry children, or freeing conscripts from their service to King George. The story of America in Assassin’s Creed III is in the ancillary characters in the wilderness, at sea, in the nascent cities, telling ghost stories around campfires on the frontier, having babies, planting grain, and even falling into dopey teenage love with each other. It’s like your party in a Bioware game, but writ larger and broader, as befits the birth of a nation.

Read the review here.

3) Borderlands 2

In a year with some really good shooters, Gearbox’s enormous clever playground is the best place to go to shoot guns at and alongside interesting characters. And in a year with some really good action RPGs, it’s the most interesting place to go if you just want to level up.

There aren’t many action RPGs or shooters worth playing for the story. But there also aren’t many action RPGs or shooters with the writing, sense of humor, and sense of set pieces as Borderlands 2. I’m even tempted to roll out the phrase mise en scene as it might apply to a shooter, but such an academic fancypants terms doesn’t do justice to set pieces like Tiny Tina’s tea party, or Shooty McFace’s brief appearance, or Scooter’s poem for his girlfriend, or how the characters from the first game are used…I guess the best way to put it is to say Borderlands 2′s mise en scene is so kick-ass that I’m wondering how it happened.

Read the review here.

2) Xenoblade Chronicles

When writers like me talk about the Citizen Kane of videogames, we’re often rolling out trite hyperbole about some flawed spectacle, usually the latest in a long line of flawed spectacles. But works of genius are often unsung surprises, usually without great marketing budgets, many times unexpected. Greatness is at its greatest when it blindsides us and we have to struggle to describe it.

That’s what happened to me last April when I half-heartedly started an RPG I knew nothing about. A JRPG. On the Wii. What followed was an immaculately paced 100+ hour odyssey full of unforgettable characters, places, and events, all built on a foundation of the best bits from MMOs, RPG, and open-world games. Is it the Citizen Kane of videogames? Oh, who knows. I don’t even really like Citizen Kane. But it’s certainly the Lord of the Rings of videogames.

Read the review here, or the game diary here.

1) Guild Wars 2

I am not an MMO player. I am strictly a dabbler. Guild Wars 2 changed that. This is the game I’ve played the most this year, and not because it’s an effective time sink (hi, Diablo III!). It’s the game I’ve played the most because it’s the game I’ve most wanted to play. And it shows no sign of letting up. Whatever you have in store for me, 2013, you’ve got a tough ongoing act to follow.

…I can count on two hands the games I’ve loved as much as I now love Guild Wars 2. This isn’t just a great example of the genre and arguably the Second Coming of MMOs. It isn’t even just one of the best games I’ve ever played. This is what happens when a group of talented, smart, dedicated, imaginative, bold, consumer-friendly creators get together and spend years solving problems and making something wonderful.

Read the review here.

The most disappointing games of 2012
The most overrated games of 2012
The year-end awards

  • Forge

    You should play Mark of the Ninja, it’s very very good.

  • Brandon

    I’m going to assume that Darkness II was number eleven. ;)

  • Broooski

    Bravo on the Story Nexus pick. It’s a terrific idea with interesting execution – I don’t like all of it but I love the concept and to guts try it.

  • Eschatos

    Congratulations Tom, you’ve made me want to buy a Wii.

  • AlexHD

    LOL Diablo III and Assassin’s Creed III. Well you have other good picks there, so at least you have *some* taste.

  • Pogue Mahone

    Mark of the Ninja does kick much ass, and gets points from me personally for having a totally viable path for completing the game without killing anybody. Well, except when the game makes you kill people, but what are you gonna do.

  • http://twitter.com/Kadayi Kadayi

    TWD & Spec Ops are both worth experiencing I’d say, just simply from the narrative perspective. Neither has great game play, but they’re engaging.

  • Clay

    Thanks for the Story Nexus recommendation; will be trying out Cabinet Noir.

  • Barac Wiley

    I think Echo Bazaar(/Fallen London), which is by no means a 2012 game, is currently well ahead of any other StoryNexus title in overall content, quality, variety and execution. That said, I love that they did it. I love many of the things being done with it – they’re just mostly not even close to finished (even Echo Bazaar is a fair ways from the planned end, as I understand it). And while I don’t think it’s technically still in beta, it’s clear that there’s a considerable amount of functionality planned that’s not yet available, or if available, not really used much yet. Like metaqualities, where something you do in one StoryNexus game (or game character) can set a quality that another one (or a new character in the same one) can read and branch accordingly. Or persistent qualities that stick only within one game but can allow switching between characters / game sessions.

  • Barac Wiley

    I agree with this 100%. Also, they don’t represent a huge time investment as neither is particularly long.

  • Barac Wiley

    For my part, I don’t really have a “ten best” list, because there have been some really exceptional games this year and I can’t remember what all came out when, but some of my favorites this year that don’t appear on Tom’s list (though I enjoyed all of the games Tom lists that I’ve actually played – about half – and would probably adore Diablo 3 if it weren’t for the DRM that makes it a toxic purchase) include:

    The Secret World:
    Funcom botched the launch, certainly. There were some really critical bugs, especially surrounding chat, and there are some things that they really should have rethought design-wise (I understand that the factions are theoretically at odds game-fictionally, but when you can quest with literally anyone outside of the handful of dedicated PvP battlefields, cross-faction guilds really, really should have been an option). But it remains a fantastically beautiful, very well written game with a setting that is completely unique among MMOs and very compelling to me personally. The almost ARG-style investigative quests are (mostly) brilliant and again completely unique among MMOs, and the classless skill wheel system turns out to work quite well and scratch the deck building itch that drives so many CCGs. They’ve also done very well at rolling out consistent content updates despite an unfortunate level of staffing loss, and they just bit the bullet and dumped the subscription requirement.

    Dishonored:
    A gorgeous, painterly world, smart writing, a densely packed space that rewards exploration, intense combat, and very satisfying movement, stealth, and magical powers.

    World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria:
    Yeah, it’s more WoW. But for all that WoW currently represents essentially the baseline MMO, it’s also got probably the most content of any MMO on the market, an absurd number of potential activities not limited to the traditional questing, PvP and raiding of most MMOs, gorgeous art direction, more varied quest design than any MMO other than The Secret World, a brilliantly customizable interface (I am an addon addict), and now Pokemon. I don’t really know why they chose to add that, nor why they chose to base the current expansion off an ongoing April Fool’s joke, but I’m enjoying both thoroughly.

    Spec Ops: The Line:
    Standard military shooter gameplay, but apocalyptic, sand-choked Dubai and the Heart of Darkness-inspired morality tale of the storyline made for a very memorable game for me. I had honestly not expected this one to pan out, but it did.

    Torchlight II:
    I enjoy this sort of game, but I don’t get really into them, generally speaking. I’ll beat them once and move on, if that. And I was kind of underwhelmed by the first Torchlight. So I was astounded at how enormously better this one was. Smart changes to things like identification, pets, enchantment, and so forth made the game tighter, much less tedious, and a lot more fun. The areas are (I think) randomized to an extent, but crucially they don’t feel like it, having all the atmosphere and coherency of a carefully handcrafted experience. There’s tons of enemy variety, and the classes have a lot of skills I really want to try along with a lovely three tier upgrade system, neither of which was true of the original. And of course, there’s multiplayer, which I haven’t been able to try yet but hope to soon when my friends get less busy with school and family.

    Prototype 2:
    I adored the first one. The second one’s writing is even worse, if that’s possible, but pretty much everything about the gameplay is better – movement, powers, missions, side missions, bosses.. and it looks significantly better, too.

  • BLAM!

    At what point does Xenoblade pick up? I tried it but quit after around an hour of wandering around the starting town trying to deliver a picnic basket to the stock jRPG meek love interest whose hobbies include cooking and apologizing.

  • Guest

    Head writer for Zero Summer here. I think you’re absolutely right in saying Fallen London is ahead of other StoryNexus titles in “overall content, quality, variety and execution” — because Fallen London’s been going for years and we’ve had about six months! :)

    But: I think you would find a lot to love in both Samsara and Zero Summer. Samsara is doing lovely, lapidary things with the StoryNexus in-house style: historical fantasy with a lazy, hookah-and-sweets vibe. And Zero Summer is just the opposite: a gritty pistols-and-horror game set in the post-apocalyptic American southwest.

    Give StoryNexus time. The best games will catch up in content breadth and mechanical polish. And are already caught up in quality of prose, cleverness of invention, depth of mystery. Do give us a try. I doubt you’ll be disappointed. :)

  • Guest

    My comment seems to have been eaten! So I’ll try to recreate:

    Head writer for Zero Summer here. I think you’re absolutely right to say that Fallen London is “currently well ahead of any other StoryNexus title in overall content, quality, variety and execution” — because Fallen London has been around for years and we’ve had about six months! :)

    But: the best StoryNexus games are doing lovely, interesting things. E.g. Samsara is doing sweet and captivating things in the StoryNexus “in-house style”: historical fantasy with a lazy, hookah-and-sweets vibe. And Zero Summer is just the opposite: a gritty, dusty blend of cyberpunk and old western, with all the requisite violence and moral heartburn and mystery and horror.

    Give StoryNexus time. The best games will catch up in terms of content quantity. And have already caught up, I think, in terms of quality of prose, and the depths of our mysteries and inventiveness, and the broadness of our worlds. Do give us a try. I doubt you’ll be disappointed. :)

  • Barac Wiley

    Looks like it wasn’t eaten after all. But yeah, absolutely. My primary issue with Zero Summer in particular is there’s not more of it yet. :)

    That said, it does seem like Fallen London has some game functionality that’s not present yet in StoryNexus. I assume it’s intended that it will be eventually.

  • Ian Slutz

    Of your year end wrap ups there is only one game I would really disagree with you on. Rebuild, while cute, disappointed me. I when I started the game on easy I thought it was fun. However, to progress I had to be come more acquainted with the mechanics and on close examination I didn’t feel they really held together enough. But what really killed the game for me was that in order to play at the higher difficulty you need info and controls which are very awkward at preforming the moves you need to do.

  • luke

    If last week’s Liberation comments are still accurate, then you haven’t played Gravity Rush yet, either. Really, not even the demo? And you call yourself an open world fan. At least you still have a few weeks to edit your list.

  • tomchick

    Well, you’re right that I haven’t played it. But I did buy it! It’s waiting for me on my newly upsized Vita memory chip. I’m eager to spend some time with it!

  • tomchick

    Ian, I think I mentioned this in the review, but I feel Rebuild doesn’t really live up to its promise until you’re playing on the hardest difficulty level. Also, it’s not necessarily a game you play to win. As with many (most?) good zombie stories, everyone will die in the end. What matters is how long they stay alive and how they interact with each other until then.

    I’m not sure I understand your comments about the info and controls, but I found the interface pretty thorough in terms of giving me the info I needed. Can you tell me a bit more about what you were having trouble with?

  • tomchick

    I hate to break it to you, but like any JRPG, Xenoblade is going to take more than an hour to get interesting. :) But I can assure that one of the great things about the game is that even when it gets “interesting” (maybe give it about three or four hours?), it continues to get interesting at later intervals. This is a game with a lot to reveal.

  • tomchick

    Cool list, Barac. Glad to see some Prototype 2 love! That was way better than I expected and I still toy with the idea of breaking it out again to make some progress on the game+ I had going.

  • tomchick

    Xenoblade Chronicles also works on your Wii U. Just so you know.

  • luke

    You people and your convenient, fancy pants digital downloads. Buy the cartridges like me, save space on your tiny memory chip, and resell the thing when you’re ready.
    I think you’re going to love the art style. We’ll see about the game. A tip from my experience with the demo: Gravity Rush defaults to moving the camera around by tilting the Vita when you’re floating, though you can also use the R-stick. It’s not too painful, but yeah, try to disable that.

  • Hierophant

    Seems like! Oh, well. :)

    Fallen London has a number of features that aren’t into StoryNexus. Most importantly: creators can’t upload their own art and their own page elements. And there’s no way to create a map like Fallen London’s.

    Those are all features I believe they plan to implement eventually. But as much as we’d love to have them, I don’t think they impact the heart of StoryNexus, which is — and always will be — high-quality prose delivered in an engaging, simple-to-understand interactive way.

  • krayzkrok

    I have to agree with Guild Wars 2 being up there, I fell out of love with MMOs after World of Warcraft but GW2 took me gently by the hand, sat me down with a nice cup of tea, and reminded me about my love of exploration, the reward of tackling difficult missions with complete (and not so complete) strangers, and the great feeling of standing on a castle wall admiring our group’s banner being unfurled after an epic victory.

    Otherwise, I tend to play games long after their release, so my 2012 list is more of a 2010 / 2011 list. However, the following games left a lasting impression this year:

    The Walking Dead. You know, I’m not really a zombie fan. I resisted watching the TV series for a long time, and I resisted playing this game until a recent Steam sale convinced me to try it out. Mechanically, it’s an adventure game in the usual sense, but it does such a brilliant job with its characters and their interactions that it hit well above the mark. Most videogame characters are embarrassingly bad, so to find such depth in these was refreshing. It means that when the game stops pulling its punches, it matters.

    Legend of Grimrock. I grew up with this game when it was called Dungeon Master, or was it Eye of the Beholder, maybe it was Captive, or perhaps Bloodwych? Anyway, LoG is a great example of taking a long-neglected game mechanic and bringing it respectfully up to date. I was totally lost in its world for days, and the devs were smart enough to spend months polishing and perfecting a powerful level editor which means I keep getting dragged back in. Willingly.

    XCOM: Enemy Unknown. Please don’t suck, please don’t suck, please don’t suck. Never have so many thought the same thing in unison for the same reason. So I was relieved to find out that XCOM: EU does not, in fact, suck. What it does is take a classic that cannot possibly be improved in our minds and remix it into a great game worthy of its inspiration. It’s not perfect, I’d love to see more “randomness” patched into it, greater replayability, more maps, but I’m happy that Firaxis showed they understood what made the original such a great game. Mind you, if they don’t figure out what we want from the next DLC pack instead of the first abortive attempt, I might change my mind on the whole thing.

    Honourable mentions go to: Cargo Commander for having such a great mechanic and executing it with such aplomb; Drox Operative for successfully making an ARPG in space with depth; Escape Goat for having my favourite game name in 2012; Dear Esther for having the greatest amount of impact with the minimum amount of gameplay; FTL for making the game that I used to play in my head when I was a kid with those LEGO spaceships I made. That was a long time ago. Really.

  • Eschatos

    Nothing against the Wii U, but I’d sooner build a new PC and use Dolphin(a Wii emulator). I’d prefer not to drop $400+ on a system when I haven’t seen any console-specific titles that interest me yet.

  • MikeO

    I have not played half of these (although I eventually will Xenoblade for certain). I would have XCOM on there for sure, if nothing else for taking me back to my ’20s and the way I felt about the world and computer games then. I love the game.

    One other not so obvious pick for me — Wargame: European Escalation. I am someone who really dislikes RTS games, even though I appreciate the ones that are really well done. This is the first RTS EVAR that made me wish I was really good at these games. I am, in fact, terrible at them, but this game knocks me out even while I am losing horribly to the computer (usually). It is also the best looking RTS game I’ve ever played, like an earthbound Sins of a Solar Empire.

    Of course, Diablo 3, with one of the best implementations of multiplayer with friends, at the price of an always on DRM. I think I liked and played D2 more, but there was a lot less gaming competition back then.

  • http://redbarrels.net/ Graeme

    Fine! Alright. I’ll try Waking Mars… Glad to see Rebuild get the love it deserves, in my top three iOS strategy games.
    There’s actually nothing here I can argue with.

  • http://twitter.com/sethdehaan seth

    I put about 10 hours into it and it hadn’t gotten interesting yet… so, some point after that, then.

  • http://twitter.com/sethdehaan seth

    Did you really enjoy the homestead building in AC3? To me, it felt like a Facebook game separated from the rest of the experience, as did the returning ‘send your assassins out on missions by navigating endless menus’ mechanic. The naval battles were the same way, but at least they let you play.

    Ubisoft just Frankenstein’d a game together out of separate systems without thinking about how they all fit together. One of the least unified games I’ve ever played.

  • tomchick

    I really do like the homestead stuff, even though I agree with what you’re saying (but you won’t catch me defending those assassin missions, even though I really like how you earn new assassin’s this time). As I wrote, the homestead stuff just feels so, well, American in its breadth, minutiae, and goofy drama.

    The probably sounds like a rationalization, but there it is. :)

  • BLAM!

    Maybe I’m just spoiled by Persona 3 and 4, which got interesting right away (though both did kind of taper off later on). Before that I hadn’t really been into any jRPG since the original Xenogears in all its badly designed glory. The last one I bought before Persona was Final Fantasy X and that killed my interest in the genre for years (FF12 was the final nail in the coffin).

    I bought Xenoblade after reading dozens of reviews saying how it broke from the norm with great characters, writing, and voice acting. My experience from the first hour was: meek love interest whose goal in life is to have men enjoy her cooking, first draft on the nose dialog, and what I guessed was people mistaking “British” for good acting (anyone who’s played a Dynasty Warriors game should know how untrue that can be).

    I just didn’t see anything with potential and stopped playing. By all accounts the story doesn’t get good till a dozen or so hours in and the wandering + combat just seemed like a tweaked version of Final Fantasy 12′s offline MMO approach.

    I read your article on 10 Things I Wish I Knew Going In. Do you have a mini piece of advice for blitzing through the boring beginning painlessly?

  • http://twitter.com/sethdehaan seth

    Fair enough! It’s a pretty boring time period to me, so that might have hurt my appreciation.

    Thinking back, I did really like how you got new people to join your homestead (and new assassins, like you mentioned). But once they were on the team their actual functions left me cold.

  • Nikolaj

    Interesting list, although like last year, I didn’t play most of those games. I guess my game of the year would probably be Mark of the Ninja followed by Primordia, mainly because those are the only games released this year that I remember playing. They’re both good, though.

    Ｉ‘m pretty sure I’ll eventually get around to playing Assassin’s Creed 3, even though I still haven’t finished 2, and Brotherhood still sits on my shelf, uninstalled.

    By the way, you should mention that rebuild is also available for Android, and as a free browser game. :)

  • amanda_chen

    I played Rebuild (or was it Rebuild 2) in a browser and thought it was pretty fun. Now I’m waiting for Zafehouse Diaries to go on sale at Gamersgate (it’s in their indie bundle next week).

  • popeyedoyle

    Hey Tom, you had the article “best of 2012 so far”, and then this, but how about the best of the second half of 2012, so we get a few more outliers. Thanks.

  • Kwhit

    Any top 10 list that doesn’t include The Walking Dead is a failure.

  • tomchick

    Without context, I can’t tell if the comment about outliers is an insult. It usually is, so I’ll just ask you if you pick your toes in Poughkeepsie.

    On the off chance that you’re serious, here are some honorable mentions for 2012 that didn’t make either of the “best of” lists: Kid Icarus: Uprising, Resident Evil: Revelations (aka Resident Evil for the Nintendo 3DS), Unit 13, Super Stardust Delta, Fallen Enchantress, A Valley Without Wind, Trials Evolution, Spelunky, Orcs Must Die 2, Painkiller, Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion. I’m sure I’m forgetting some. Alternatively, you can click on the review tab and sort everything by ratings. :)

  • popeyedoyle

    I’m sorry, Tom! I got the idea from the AV Club who just dropped the ‘best films of 2012 so far (part 2)’ over the weekend. 62 films just from the last six months! So that made me wonder what a top ten from the last six months of gaming would look like.

    & I’m a bit poor, and was hoping you’d throw up some more cool cheap left field choices (I really like Rebuild) hence the whole outliers comment :)

    I can also see how “Thanks” might have made the comment seem sarcastic, but I’m British, and it would be really weird not to end a post without some polite interjection :) Happy Holidays!

  • MikeO

    Nobody has ever picked their toes in Poughkeepsie, but some people have been accused of picking their *feet* in Poughkeepsie. Toes?! Gross!

  • http://www.facebook.com/nrvallen Neil Allen

    I must get myself an iPad of some description as the iPod is too small for gaming. The level of innovation and variety of game types reminds me of the DS at the height of its popularity. Home consoles are becoming tiresome.

  • Mercanis

    I highly recommend you read the first sentence of the article.

  • http://www.facebook.com/ganstacrizzab David DeRienzo

    What happened to The Darkness II?

  • Undead_king35

    Mr.Chick, what were your top 10 games in 2010? As the fidgit gaming blog closed, I’ve no way to access them. Thanks!

  • tomchick

    Let’s see, 2010 was, let me go look that up…

    Okay, sorry to jump dump this into the comments section, but here’s the text from my notes. Hope the formatting doesn’t get boogered up too badly.

    10) Supreme Commander 2
    There were plenty of good RTSs that came out this year, but this is the one I like the most. It’s come a long way, and not just since Supreme Commander 1, which was a hearty but often soulless achievement in real time economic management. Supreme Commander 2 knew enough to take a step back from that, to let in a little air and personality, to tighten up the arena and the pace. The result is an accessible, generous, and many-splendored RTS that went on to get a ridiculous amount of post-release support. It got some interface improvements (including one I asked for personally!), a whole mess of dedicated work to improve the AI, and some nifty downloadable content. If you play just one RTS this year, well, you’re going to miss out. But my own personal recommendation would be to make it Supreme Commander 2. Read the review here.
    9) Kane and Lynch 2
    I don’t quite know what to make of my fondness for this game. It’s partly a business-as-usual corridor shooter trying too hard to be edgy and grim. But it has gunplay distinct from other shooters. It captures the sloppiness of some random joe spraying a thousand bullets. And part of that sloppiness works its way brilliantly into the game’s unique cheap YouTube aesthetic. There were plenty of games that looked better than Kane and Lynch 2, but there were none that looked this familiar and this real. And in terms of multiplayer support, it was the best combination of co-op and competitive I’ve ever played. It even has a touch of the psychology that makes Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood and Bloody Good Timeso special. Kane and Lynch 2 might not be a great game, but it sure is a haunting one. Read the review here.
    8) Dead Rising 2
    The miracle of Dead Rising 2 is how it honors the tough design choices that made Dead Rising 1 so good, and it does it in a way that you lightweights who can’t handle a real zombie game are tricked into playing and even having fun. Fine, run to the bathroom and save the game, you big baby. Feel better? Because the clock is still ticking, you still need to find Zombrex for Katey, and you’re still rushing headlong towards one of the bad endings. But what counts it that you’re playing the videogame that best captures the absurd dark spectacle of zombie movies. Read the review here.
    7) Bayonetta
    God Hand’s gameplay and attitude, but with God of War’s production values, and a canny appreciation for the thin line between challenging and frustrating. I’m terrible at Bayonetta, but that never stopped me from playing it. When the going gets tough, it’s a great game that makes me want to get better instead of making me want to stop playing. This is also my favorite female superhero since Cate Archer.
    6) Split/Second
    The integration of driver and track into a Michael Bay-esque gratuitous game where you go really fast through exploding stuff. Simple, effective, exciting, and wholly original. This is the best thing to happen to racing games since the original Burnout. Read the review here.
    5) Din’s Curse
    There have been plenty of good action RPGs since Diablo pretty much invented the genre. But this is the only action RPG that has almost ruined the rest of the genre for me. Din’s Curse brings dungeons to life in such a way that I’m afraid I’m going to be bored playing Diablo III. Read the review here.

    4) Pinball FX 2
    The guys at Zen Studios are geniuses not just for how they’ve made videogame pinball that doesn’t veer too far from real pinball, but also for tables that shrewdly marry theme and gameplay gimmicks. They’ve even put their tables into a neatly packed social experience on the Xbox 360. In terms of stealing time that I didn’t intend to give it — I was only going to play a quick game and here it is two hours later! — Pinball FX 2 was the most felonious game of the year. Read the review here.
    3) Lost Planet 2
    Clever gunplay, ridiculously varied character design, memorable set pieces, gratifying co-op, challenging difficulty settings, inspired driveable mechs, insanely oversized bosses, a story that literally goes off the rails in a good way, and a glorious glorious slot machine full of unlockables, many of which I really want. I’m absolutely crazy about this game, and I didn’t even like the first Lost Planet. Read the review here.
    2) Just Cause 2
    Just Cause 2 is the perfect illustration of what it takes to make a great open world game. I call it — I made this up just now, so bear with me — the three M’s: majesty, movement, and mayhem. The majesty is the fantastic graphics, and there were none this year better than Just Cause 2. An open world game needs to show you a world that makes you think, “Holy cats, I want to get out into that!” Movement is part of the power dream of videogames, and Just Cause 2 nails it in the most glorious way since Tribes and Spider-Man 2. Finally, mayhem…well, you don’t need me to explain that. No other open-world game does the three M’s as well as Just Cause 2. Oh, I just thought of a fourth M: “Ms. Bolo Santosi”. Every open world game — heck, every game! — needs that. Read the review here.
    1) Bioshock 2
    I’ve already written a lot about Bioshock 2. So rather than write even more, I’ll just say that of all the videogames to come out this year, none had something as important to say as Bioshock 2. That it says it in the context of a richly atmospheric and consistently surprising follow-up to my favorite game of 2007, with a nifty multiplayer game to boot, is just gravy.

  • Undead_king35

    Lost Planet 2? I though that was Monster Hunter with guns? Oh well, I guess, that’s what I get for stereotyping Capcom games. Thanks Mr.Chick, one final question: did you write reviews for Computer Games Online? Thanks again. Excellent list by the way.

  • tomchick

    Lost Planet 2 still holds up! I go back in from time to time, and I’m plinking away at an insane difficulty play-through. I’m guessing you can get that game for about 99 cents these days.

    I did write for Computer Games Online! I wrote for that site and magazine for many years under its many various names. It was Computer Games Strategy Plus back in the olden days. Steve Bauman was one of my favorite editors to work with.

  • Undead_king35

    Thanks, and don’t worry Mr.Chick, Monster Hunter Freedom Unite still fills that never burning monster-killing void for me especially since my friends still own a Psp. Maybe I’ll get Lost Planet 2, for now I’ll hold out for Lost Planet 3.

  • Undead_king35

    Sorry for bugging you again, but do you have top 10 lists that go further back? And if so, can you display them? Thanks.