This was the first Max Payne game I’ve finished. I never felt any particular love for the series but I knew enough about the squinty faced, noiré detective. Weird TV shows, hallucinations, and John Woo style gunplay are all things that piqued my interest in Max Payne, but I never sat down to play through the previous games. Max Payne 3 did lose the super natural angle in its switch from developer Remedy to Rockstar, but picked up a grittier grit and tighter mechanics in exchange. The cover system helped more than it hurt and made for some visually stunning moments when diving over desks in a firefight. Max Payne 3 did something that isn’t seen enough in games, it told the story of a man. Max’s life is sideways. He is addicted to pills and booze. He has lost all loved ones and has more enemies than he has scars. By the end of the game, things haven’t changed. Max is still a man with problems. I had a great time in between jumping backwards off a flight of stairs while shooting two guns in slow-mo and sipping a glass of whisky while listening to the monologues of a man with nothing to lose.
The Mario name is often a vector for introducing different genres to a stubborn audience. Paper Mario has never had the success as many of the other Mario spin offs. That all changes now. Just kidding. Though wonderfully refreshing in terms of a Mario game and Mario roll playing game, it will probably go over looked. Paper Mario: Sticker Star for the Nintendo 3DS is great. Having only played Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, I don’t know how novel Paper Mario: Sticker Star is. It is a perfect fit for the 3DS though. The shoebox diorama environments look great with the 3D slider at any level. The classic world map makes for picking up and playing for even a few minutes fun. And then there is the music. Every song makes meaningful changes to classic Mario tunes. They are exciting and different but still carry plenty of Mario. Paper Mario: Sticker Star might have been higher on my list had I finished it. There are several sections that drag on too long and avoiding battles becomes a necessity later on. It still is a great game and can stand with any Mario game to date.
The perfect balance of base building and strategy combat action makes XCOM: Enemy Unknown the best game I didn’t finish this year. There is no waste in this game. The process of choosing new research projects in the base has just as much importance as choosing what piece of cover to stand behind in combat. The wrong choice could end it all. Every moment of XCOM is tense. There is never enough money or resources to build everything desired, the nations of the are constantly teetering on the edge of utter panic, and even grizzled veteran soldiers have enough of a chance to miss an easy shot. The amount of tension and possibility for failure are high in XCOM, but it never manages to stretch too far into the realm of “unfair.” XCOM is a superb game; even the little touch of allowing the unique naming of soldiers adds a means for personal narrative and story telling in the tightly controlled experience. I never thought XCOM was for me until I lost myself in it for hours on end. The tension, stress, and harrowing victories appealed to me in a way I never expected.
Years ago when I was doing music stuff, my teacher told me that when I was performing, no matter how many mistakes I made it would be okay as long as I hit the very last note perfectly. Mass Effect 3 whiffed the last note. The game, as a whole, was good and tied up loose ends that had existed from the first game. Seeing familiar faces and saving the galaxy again was exciting. Dialoge wheels, hard choices, and action packed shooting were back again and functionally as good as ever. However, all the little blemishes cast a dark shadow on the quality of the game. Mass Effect 3 was probably too ambitious for it’s own good. But it’s on my list because it should be praised for its ambition and solid mechanics. It’s easy to nitpick it and forget most of the ride was a good one.
Choices! That’s what so many games have focused on this year. But to see a series like Call of Duty take steps into the realm of player agency is mind blowing. When I finished Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, I immediately started playing it through again. The choices weren’t always obvious. Sometimes it wasn't even appearnt that a fork existsed until it was too late to go back. On the surface, Black Ops 2 is another solid entry into the Call of Duty franchise. It’s the surprising decision to incorportate subtly presented choices that slightly shifts the gameplay away from running down a corridor while things happen around the player to a more unique and weighty personal expreince.
The best part of Persona 4 Arena is visual novel section and visual novels are barely video games. Sure there is a fighting game with deep systems and a unique feel to each character which hallmarks all Arc System Works games. But it wasn't about that for me. Persona 4 left a lasting impression on me and undoubtedly everyone else who played it. To see the characters back again in familiar scenarios is comforting. The Persona 4 Arena story has been seen before in the anime world. What makes it so good is how it sets up the next Persona game. By playing each of the characters stories, foreshadowing a unification of the Persona 3 and 4 worlds into a college and adult time frame story can be obviously observed. The convergence of the characters alludes to exciting new possibilities. Even though the best parts of Persona 4 Arena are text it’s more Persona and that is a wonderful thing.
There are not enough games like Spec Ops: The Line. A shooter that wades into the uncharted waters of moral ambiguity in games has never existed until now. Why are you killing? Who are you? Is what you’re doing right and if it isn’t, why can’t you stop? Spec Ops: The Line uses the medium of video games to ask profound questions that have never been touched on in games. Even the developers suggested that the morally good decision is achieved by putting the controller down and not playing. Who does that!? Spec Ops: The Line plays like a standard TPS but it conveys more moral profundity than any shooter before it. This is shining example of art in video games that works exclusively within the medium. It is a must play for anyone who wants video games to be taken seriously and more than just entertainment.
I’ve never been a Halo guy. In fact, I actively avoided Halo stuff because of my unfortunate reactionary nature. I get it now. The fervor behind the universe; it’s all so fleshed out and meticulously orchestrated. What I realized was Halo 4 has a perfect cadence, shifting from action to story seamlessly. Every beat feels like it could be no other way. The story of Halo 4 had me lost on some of the bigger reveals but I did feel the severity of them. The slight shift towards the relationship between player character, Master Chie,f and the AI companion, Cortana, was not expounded enough but the acknowledgement of that relationship is a good start. The simple truth is Halo 4 is a slick game. Its mechanics are perfect, the flow is flawless, and the story, though occasionally buried, has epic breath. Halo 4 has me interested in the Halo fiction. Halo 4 is great and I want to spend more time in the universe. I even sank plenty of hours into the competitive multiplayer; something I never do. Though the attempt at providing weekly content never applealed to me since I didn’t know where what I was playing fit into the whole story. Nevertheless, Halo 4 plays perfectly and was one of the best games I’ve played this year.
It’s more Borderlands. Bigger, badder, cooler, tighter, cleaner, faster, funnier, smarter, and full of more guns. Borderlands 2 is by no means revolutionary. It does improve on everything that was great in Borderlands. I loved the first game and the second has been refined to perfection. Borderlands 2 continues to grow on me the more I play even after I finished it. Borderlands 2 has plenty of memorable characters and arguably the best villain this year. Getting to see the previous Vault Hunters in the form of NPCs allows for cool missions while fighting alongside the old favorites. There are plenty of memorable missions and moments marked by humor, twists, and large degree of kick ass action. Borderlands 2 even addresses the biggest short coming of its predecessor; the ending. The potential direction a next game could go is exciting. Borderlands 2 is a perfect game and leaves me wanting more again.
Fez was my favorite game this year and not yours. Fez is much more than a puzzle platformer. Or maybe it isn’t and it’s the puzzle within a puzzle within a puzzle nature of Fez that made it so enticing to me. Rotate the 2D world on a 3D axis to gain a different perspective so you can collect cubes was what I initially thought all there was to Fez. I didn’t know why people were going bananas over yet another indy puzzle game with a unique art style. But let me tell you what the secret is; Fez is nuts. After collecting a good amount of cubes by rotating, jumping, and climbing, Fez’s shine started to wane. I opened the achievements list to see if I could get an idea just how many cubes I’d be collecting before I was done. An achievement stood out since its description was comprised solely of capital Ls and Rs. I instantly realized this corresponded to the L and R buttons which are used to rotate the world. I wrote the code down, and rotated the prescribed amount and something amazing happened. I was awarded with a new kind of cube and realized that for as many cubes that exist straight forward in the game world, there are an equal number of “anti-cubes” that could only be found by alternate means. These alternate means included, Morris code, system clock time, first person block puzzles, and transcribing a damn language. There are multiple endings, fake systems crashes, aliens, time travel, Rosetta stones, and 90 percent of all of that is expressed without words. The ultimate reason why this is my number one game this year and not yours is unfortunate. You will not have the same experience I did. I was writing down notes with paper and pencil, letting the flowing soundtrack roll through me. I was learning the counting system of another people and every cryptology loving fiber of my body was buzzing. And I was failing. I couldn’t figure even half of the puzzles out but what was amazing was how not a lot of other people were figuring it out either. The puzzle guides were nascent and unrefined. Message boards and forums were the best locations for information. We were going on this journey together (whoever we were.) I waited with bated breath for the final solution of the last puzzle to be uncovered and it wasn’t pretty. No logical analysis, not unraveling, just the full force of the people the internet slamming their weight against a random series of Ls and Rs. What was inside didn’t matter; it was watching this all unfold around me and being a part of it. For a game like Fez to exist and prompt the voracious, unified struggle to discover is magical and a once in blue moon ride. I loved it and wish everyone could have been apart of that excitement. Fez made that happen. Fez is incredible.