The Games Of 2012, Part 2: The Top Five

Part 1 of this little list highlighted eight of my favorite games from 2012. This post lays out my personal top 5 games of the year.

5. Fez—Polytron Corporation

Fez is a window into another world. Two worlds, really. On one hand, it’s a game of archaeology. You fumble around in an unfamiliar land, putting together the culture of an ancient civilization. You uncover their language and writing, each new bit a clue to the arcane puzzles hidden below the game’s familiar facade.

With a little knowledge of the game’s troubled development, however, it’s easy to see Fez more as a window into the troubled mind of its designer, Phil Fish. Making this game ate away at his physical, mental, and social health. As he tells it, it nearly killed him. It’s a madness that you can feel as you fall deeper into the Fez rabbit hole. Soon you’ll find yourself scribbling notes and decoding ciphers. You start to lose it yourself. Fez isn’t just a creator making a statement about the process of creation, it forces you to feel what that creator felt. The player and Phil Fish are connected through this world and its puzzles. His descent into lunacy and frustration becomes yours. It’s an utterly unique and mystifying expression of the horrors of creation.

The Games Of 2012, Part 1

I haven’t touched this blog in a long long time. Since starting over at The Gameological Society, I haven’t really thought to use it for anything. Seeing as how we didn’t do a traditional end-of-year feature, I wanted to put together a little list over here. I’m probably the only person on the site who actually likes lists, but when you have a stable of writers as deep as ours, well, you could see how it would become problematic.

Here’s the way this is going to work. I have 13 games (deal with it) to single out. The first eight—featured in this post—are unranked. “Part 2” will feature my five favorites of the year, and that one is ranked. To be frank: the writing here isn’t great or particularly deep. I kind of wanted to just throw something together.

Let’s do this:

Thirty Flights Of Loving—Blendo Games

The J for Janky Game of the Year Spectacular, 2011 edition — Part 3: Numbers 5-1

You can find part 1, the honorable mentions, here and part 2, numbers 10 through 6, here

5. Bulletstorm — People Can Fly

Bulletstorm doesn’t tell a great story. It doesn’t have charming visuals or music. It doesn’t explore challenging themes.

Bulletstorm does, however, make shooting fun again.

The J for Janky Game of the Year Spectacular, 2011 edition — Part 2: Numbers 10-6

You can find part 1, the honorable mentions, right here.

10. To The Moon — Freebird Games

The J for Janky Game of the Year Spectacular, 2011 edition — Part 1: The Honorable Mentions

It’s that time again. This year I’ve got 14 games to discuss: my 10 favorites of the year and four honorable mentions.

The latter are four experiences that I won’t soon be forgetting. There’s something about each of them that’s unique, effective and intensely admirable, but they didn’t quite make it into my top 10.

Here we go!

El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron — Ignition Tokyo  

El Shaddai is what happens when you give a visual artist free reign over a project. Takeyasu Sawaki, whose previous credits include lead character designer on Okami, and his team at Ignition have created the most visually spectacular game ever made.

E3 Predictions and Wishes

It’s that time of year again. The Electronic Entertainment Expo is right around the corner (less then three weeks away to be exact) and I thought it might be fun to talk a bit about what I expect and hope to see at the show.

Predictions:

Microsoft

Mr. Gerardi’s 2010 Game of the Year Spectacular, Part 4: The Top 10 (2-1)

And I’m finally done with this. Sorry it took so long, but here it is.

You can check out the honorable mentions here, numbers 10-6 here and numbers 5-3 here.

2.

Red Dead Redemption

(Rockstar San Diego, Rockstar Games – 360, PS3)

Mr. Gerardi’s 2010 Game of the Year Spectacular, Part 3: The Top 10 (5-3)

Sorry about the wait, but I went on vacation and then….well I’ve been busy. I’m still writing up my top two games, but I figured I should just publish what I had so far.

You can check out the honorable mentions here and numbers 10 through six of my top 10.

5.

Super Mario Galaxy 2 (Nintendo EAD Tokyo – Wii)

Mr. Gerardi’s 2010 Game of the Year Spectacular, Part 2: The Top Ten (10-6)

Be sure to check out the previous entry in this series, the honorable mentions. And now my top games of 2010…well five of them.

10.

Vanquish (Platinum Games, Sega – 360, PS3)

Mr. Gerardi’s 2010 Game of the Year Spectacular Part 1: Honorable Mentions

Better late than never. I’ve been biding my time on this project, finishing up some games and collecting my thoughts on 2010’s trends and innovations. While it wasn’t a tremendous year for games, the ones that stuck out did some really incredible things with the medium and stand as some of the most memorable games I’ve ever played.

I will be rolling this out in four parts, the first being my honorable mentions. Later on I’ll be posting games 10-6, then 5-1 and finally a retrospective on the list and the year as a whole.

So….here we go.

The Honorable Mentions

These are five great games that just couldn’t hang in the top ten, but each one has an aspect so special and important that I felt it was important to talk about them.

Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light                                                     (Crystal Dynamics, Square-Enix – XBLA, PSN, PC)