Editorials

2012 is officially in the books, which means it can be time for only one thing: this year's installment of Bracken's Best Games of the Year. If you've already listened to our year-end awards extravaganza podcast, then you're well aware of what my top four games of 2012 were—but don't bail yet! There are six other games that made my top 10 of the past year, and you'll want to stick around to see what they are. Plus, if you haven't heard the podcast, the entire list is a mystery to you at this point!

So in the last post, you saw my top ten games of 2012. However, I think the last twelve months were fabulous for gaming overall. It seemed as though there were a neverending stream of titles that ranged from "pretty good" to "pretty great,"and I never had much trouble finding something that was worthwhile.

2011 (not a typo) was an odd year. Its general theme seemed to be games that I considered good (such as Portal 2, L.A. Noire, and Batman: Arkham City) getting incredible amounts of praise, to the point that I would end up being the voice of dissent on games I actually liked. Hell, at one point somebody gave Batman: Arkham City a 6 stars out of 5. Now, people liking games more than I do is perfectly fine and not all that uncommon, but this happened constantly throughout 2011 for almost every AAA game, and it left me wondering what had happened to critical discussion.

Something interesting I noticed this year was a trend of push-back against "choice" games in which the player did not get to control every outcome. The two biggest examples which spring to mind are, of course, The Walking Dead and Mass Effect 3.

Another year, another breakdown of the year's best games…according to me. Before writing this list, I went back to my archive and looked over what I'd said in years past. The funny thing is that while plenty of folk were saying that the "big" games disappointed in 2012, I also found that to be true in 2011 and 2010. Perhaps the trend is becoming more noticeable now, but in hindsight, it definitely seems to be a trend that's been happening for a while.

When I think back to my 20-something self, during the 16-bit era, I remember how starved for video game information I was. We had monthly magazines to keep us in the loop back then, and information was relatively limited. "Oh, this game looks cool!" I would think to myself, but after reading a few paragraphs and seeing a couple of images, that was it.

As we turn the calendar to 2013, I'm faced with a rather significant decision to think on over the next couple of weeks.

2012 has been an amazing year for games. I had meant to put together a post extolling the virtues of the top candidates for game of the year, but the list kept getting longer and longer, with more and more games that would have been obvious choices for a top-five list in any other year. The task was clearly beyond me. So, I enlisted the talents of Michael Abbott, Brandon Bales, Mattie Brice, Kate Cox, Denis Farr, Brad Gallaway, Brendan Keogh, Justin Keverne, Cameron Kunzelman, Kris Ligman, Eric Swain, and Dan Weissenberger. With my superteam thus assembled, let's look at some of the year's super games.

Here are some things that I took away from what I saw of the VGAs...

I don't think I gave the Nintendo 64 enough credit as a video game platform. I got the Nintendo 64 on launch day back in 1996. I was visiting a Lechmere store in Springfield, MA and saw that there was one unit left. I bought it—along with Super Mario 64 and Pilotwings 64—and brought it home. I'd played the import version of Super Mario 64 at Fantasy Realms, a local independent video game store, and wasn't particularly impressed… but it was a Nintendo system and I knew that I wanted to own it.