At last, my loyal FANnenites, your prodigal son has returned. For those of you who may not remember (which is probably all of you), I am Ryan Dickman aka TheRyno665 aka the guy behind 4R – Ryan’s Random Reviews & Rants. Basically, it’s a copout reason for popping in with an article whenever I can while I’m busy trying to make my way as a stand-up comedian. But really, I spend a bunch of that time playing video games. Then it hit me, why not a Best Games of 2012 list? Everyone’s doing them. Hell, FAN itself even had the Gilded Gamepad Awards. But whose opinion would you trust more: the majority of the FAN forums or some d-bag with an overinflated online ego who just writes articles whenever they feel like it? That’s what I thought.
Honestly though, I felt that I could offer a different perspective on the video game industry for one simple reason: I’m poor. Being an unpaid comic and only working part-time otherwise makes for not much disposable income. I can’t afford the $60 blockbuster titles on a regular basis, even if I wanted to. Personally, I rarely pay full price on a game anyway, unless it’s cheap to begin with. But I made a major change by becoming more of a PC gamer this year by joining Steam and, since my computer still isn’t the best rig, I stick mainly to cheap indie games. Plus I have different tastes in general so there’s that. Honestly, the only rules I have with this list are this:
#1 – It’s my opinion. Duh.
#2 – These are only games I’ve played, whether it’s just an hour or many more, or a few games that I really got excited about but haven’t yet been able to get for myself.
And for the record, this will probably be the only year-end list you’ll see without either Journey or The Walking Dead on it. That’s because I have yet to play them, but somehow they both still made me cry. Odd…
Honorable Mention – Frog Fractions 
Even though this list is meant to highlight some of the more undeground and less expensive games of the year, I didn’t feel right putting a free browser game in the Top 10. But I still feel that Frog Fraction may have been the most surprising game of the year. In my opinion, the best surprises come when you least expect them. I went into Frog Fractions just to kill a few minutes and came out of it an hour later nearly out of breath from laughter. You may be wondering why I’m giving so much praise to a seemingly easy parody of late ’80s/early ’90s edu-tainment software but trust me when I say you have to delve deeper. The game takes you through so many twists and turns that you’ll end up playing a different game entirely.
#10 – Lone Survivor
I’ll be honest, I’ve only spent about an hour or so with Lone Survivor, which takes about three to five hours to complete from what I’ve heard. But it was between this and Retro City Rampage, which I’ve also just dabbled with. And while RCR is a decent game in it’s own right, its Family Guy/Friedberg and Seltzer-style of “comedy” via inundating you with references in apropos of nothing gets tired pretty quickly. Though Lone Survivor is a horror game, I have yet to be “scared” by it but it definitely succeeds in making you uncomfortable with an unnerving atmosphere instead of taking the easy way out with jump scares. Of course, it’s still early. Maybe by the end of the game I’ll be super-paranoid and scared out of my wits. If so, then this game will have done its job.
#9 – Fez
Before you complain, trust me when I say Fez would’ve placed higher if I hadn’t just gotten it about a week ago and only spent a couple hours playing it. Ignoring all controversy surrounding creator Phil Fish and his supposed douchebaggery, the dude made a hell of a game. The graphics are crisp, the music is esoteric, the atmosphere is whimsical yet a bit foreboding and the animation is smooth. Actually, a little too smooth if you ask me. The world rotation mechanic is perfectly implemented, however it can mess with you if you’re prone to motion sickness. There’ve been a few times where I’ve just had to quit the game because of a massive headache, even though I wanted to keep going. And even though I’ve only spent a few hours with Fez, something tells me I haven’t even started to scratch the surface.
#8 – Lollipop Chainsaw
Originally, I was going to do an overall Best of 2012 list, but since most of them were video games anyway, I scrapped my original ideas. I was also going to do a Most Disappointing Things of 2012 list and, I’ll be honest, Lollipop Chainsaw was actually on that list, but just barely. Lollipop Chainsaw ended up being one of my most anticipated games of the year and not just for the novelty of being a cheerleader dismembering zombies with a chainsaw. I kept track with the making of the game and it seemed like every announcement made it seem like the counter-culture event of the year. So, it’s a game from the guy who made No More Heroes (Suda 51), written by the guy who wrote Tromeo and Juliet and directed Super (James Gunn) with music from the mastermind of Mindless Self Indulgence (Jimmy Urine)? Where do I sign up? Maybe my expectations were a little high but I couldn’t help but be a bit disappointed at the final result. The game itself plays fine, if a bit slow at the beginning, and I’m not worried about the game length since it’s made for high score replays. Overall, the story, the characters and the writing just felt a bit generic in my opinion considering everyone involved. They could’ve done better, making something truly original and creating a breakthrough product instead of rehashing tropes and at times being offensive just for the sake of being offensive. I’m not saying Lollipop Chainsaw isn’t worth playing, I was just hoping the end product would be a bit more subversive. But hey, at least we were introduced to Juliet Starling’s real-life counterpart Jessia Nigri because of it so things aren’t all that bad.
#7 – Borderlands 2
See, now THIS is how you do video game writing! While Lollipop Chainsaw usually just went for cheap shocks, Borderlands 2 took an already great game and added real comedy, characters and heart to make you care about what you were doing. Unfortunately, I haven’t played it for myself but I can’t stop hearing examples of the humor or the attention to character detail. Watching Anthony Burch’s journey in the video game industry is something to behold: Starting off with a web series with his sister (Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin’?) and waxing philosophical with his own rants on Destructoid to getting hired by Gearbox and knocking it out of the park with BL2. Anthony had been wanting a world where video gaming was taken seriously by the masses and now has begun his first steps. There’s still a long ways to go before people will think of a gamer first as a creative, intelligent person instead of a 14-year-old who only speaks in racist slurs on Call of Duty or the misogynist man-child who believes that females don’t deserve a chance to shine or people that believe having a same-sex relationship in a BioWare game means the end of life as we know it. But with people like Anthony and Ashly Burch, and new faces popping up all the time, we’re getting that much closer to legitimacy. Oh yeah, and the game itself is pretty cool too!
#6 – They Bleed Pixels
The past couple of years have been great for the indie game scene, with 2012 showcasing plenty of top-notch games. Unfortunately, some titles fall through the cracks and They Bleed Pixels seemed to be one of them. After releasing on the XBox Live Marketplace and floundering due to Microsoft’s indifference to promoting indie games and instead cluttering the Dashboard with ads for Axe Body Wash, TBP later ended up on PC via Steam to a better reception. It doesn’t really do a whole lot of new things, only just adding melee combat mechanics to the Super Meat Boy-esque trial-and-error precision platforming. But everything else it does is done with style, with smoothly animated character sprites and a haunting chiptune soundtrack. It’s not the most innovative out of the indie class but you could definitely do worse than They Bleed Pixels, especially since it’s routinely been marked down to about $3 to $4 during Steam sales. I’d nominate it for Most Underrated Game of 2012, with possible consideration towards the next game.
#5 – Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning
On paper, Kingdoms of Amalur looks like a shameless ripoff of multiple genres that Resident Evil 6 ended up being. You have the general game feel, basic combat and colorful graphics of the Fable series, the expansive world size of Skyrim, the copious amounts of random loot from a Diablo-esque dungeon crawler and the leveling system of old-school pen-and-paper D&D, including multiclassing. But unlike Resident Evil 6, which basically felt like five different games separated by quicktime events, Reckoning feels like one cohesive game. Though the universe and characters are pretty unremarkable, which is unfortunate considering it was written by legendary fantasy author R.A. Salvatore, the solid gameplay doesn’t make the typical trek of XP grinding a chore as in other RPGs. I’d definitely recommend this game to people who aren’t huge RPG fans or were disappointed by the Fable series (particularly after Fable III). Unfortunately, much of the game’s press came not from the game itself but from developer 38 Studios, which was formed by professional baseball player Curt Schilling and ended up filing for bankruptcy and closing down months after the game’s release due to the inability to pay back millions of dollars in loans to the state of Rhode Island in one of the most bungled efforts in the entire video game industry. Because of this, it’s doubtful if we’ll ever see a sequel so make sure you can snatch up Kingdoms of Amalur Recknoning while you can.
#4 – Mark of the Ninja
The guys from Klei Entertainment took their smooth, stylish animation and mindless, gratuitous violence from their previous Shank series and focused it into something a bit more thoughtful with Mark of the Ninja. I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve never been good at stealth games. I’ve never been able to get more than five minutes into a Metal Gear Solid game. But Mark of the Ninja’s 2D perspective lends itself perfectly to the steath genre and makes you wonder why developers of this genre didn’t think of it sooner. In my opinion, Mark of the Ninja does for ninjas what the Arkham games did for Batman and finally gave them games that truly encapsulated what the characters are all about. Back in the old days, we had games like Ninja Gaiden and the Shinobi series and while they’re good games, they’re basically beat-’em-up platformers with little real ninja action beyond the typical throwing stars. Then in the 3D games, any ninja stealth games were just regular stealth games in a black jumpsuit. It’s taken a long time but Mark of the Ninja is a “true” ninja game. Since I’ve played it for PC, it’s actually surprising how well the game controls with a mouse and keyboard just as well, if not better, than with a controller (unless you’re using a cheap wireless combo like I am, then you might run into some hiccups). The game controls as fluidly as water, like a ninja should. However, I wouldn’t quite say Mark of the Ninja is the best game of the year to make you some sort of kung-fu badass. That honor would go to…
#3 – Sleeping Dogs
I’m a simple guy who likes simple things. I like Hong Kong action cinema. I also like open world sandbox crime games. So if someone were to tell me that there’d be a Grand Theft Auto: Hong Kong game (Chinatown Wars doesn’t count but only because I don’t own a Nintendo DS), I’d be the first in line. Even if it was just a below-average cash-in, I might have played it eventually and still enjoyed it for what it was. Luckily, Sleeping Dogs succeeds, not in just being a new face in the open-world genre but for all the new little things it tries out that end up working, like fluid hand-to-hand martial arts combat, tense on-foot chase sequences and balancing the ever-so difficult task of driving and shooting at the same time. This was my Most Anticipated Game of 2012 and I was interested in it from day one…well, maybe not day one back when it was True Crime: Hong Kong or Black Lotus. My want for this game went beyond just being a fan of HK cinema but also because I was a fan of Sega’s Yakuza franchise but had no plans to get a PS3. To me, this was the closest I’d get to playing a Yakuza-type game on the 360 and I might go as far to say that Sleeping Dogs has trumped the Yakuza series. With GTA V, Watch Dogs and (hopefully) Saints Row 4 on tap in 2013, the open-world games aren’t in danger of dying out but at least Sleeping Dogs provided a bit of longevity in a slightly dry year for the sandbox genre.
PS – You can personally blame this game for pushing this list back into 2013 as I finally got a copy on New Year’s Eve and have been spending pretty much every day since then playing it.
#2 – Dishonored
Just as I felt weird about putting Lone Survivor and Fez on this list despite only a few hours of playtime between them, I feel REALLY weird putting Dishonored so high on this list without even having touched the game. But to me, Dishonored deserves a high place on any 2012 list not just for the gameplay but for what it represents. In a business littered with yearly cash-in titles with little to no improvement between them, online passes, microtransactions and other generally shady business tactics, Dishonored shined for two reasons: It’s an original intellectual property and it’s solely a single player experience. (OK, the same goes for Sleeping Dogs but I’d wager Dishonored is a little more innovative.) This may sound like some sort of anti-Call of Duty propaganda but it’s not. Those games serve a purpose and sell for a reason. But other game companies are desperately trying to latch on to these trends and release copycat games just to get their piece of the pie instead of creating original, innovative games worth playing. Thankfully there’s a company like Bethesda who have the opportunity (and the balls) to release only one or two games a year, games that sell because they offer such a great gaming experience (even in spite of massive bugs, unless you’re playing Skyrim on the PS3, then I feel bad for you son). Not everything has to be linked to a Facebook account or given an arbitrary one-use online pass to prevent games from being resold. In this never-ending cash-grab, most companies have forgotten that all you need is to make a good game with a good story and people will play it. What you don’t make in short-term profits, you make in respect from your audience, who will stick around for the long-term and won’t jump to the latest fad. As good as Dishonored is on its own, we need more games like it so that the industry as a whole isn’t stuck in a state of stasis or, worse, falling under the weight of its own greed.
Before I get to my favorite Game of the Year, here’s something I feel deserves some sort of award:
Best Not-Video Game of 2012 – Cards Against Humanity
Cards Against Humanity calls itself “A party game for horrible people”. My friends and I personally call it “Apples To Assholes”. If you have any sort of common decency, stay away from this game. If you play Apples To Apples and you find yourself playing “Hiroshima – 1945” when the word “Scenic” comes up, then Cards Against Humanity is the exact game for you. I’ve played CAH so much that I’ve probably discovered every variation of card combination you can think of…yet I still want to play it over and over again. During game night with my friends, they all want to bust out some overly-complicated board or card game while I always want to play this, surely agitating them. But what other game will let you come up with ideas like “Waterboarding: Good to the last drop”? And the best part of it all is that you can get it for free…ish. Go to cardsagainsthumanity.com and you can print off the full game in PDF form but if you want actual cards and are too lazy to make your own, the core set will run you $25. Unfortunately, it’s only available online at Amazon and frequently goes out of stock, causing others to resell it at a higher price, but I’m hoping that 2013 will bring about better distribution and a wider audience for Cards Against Humanity.
And my personal #1 Game of the Year is…Fire Pro Wrestling for XBox Live Arcade!
Just kidding, it’s…
#1 – Hotline Miami
Designed and programmed by two guys in Sweden, Hotline Miami came out of nowhere and created a buzz really quickly in late 2012. Being a sucker for sleazy ’80s movies and synthesizers, an aesthetic that Hotline Miami revels in, I was immediately hooked in. Once I finally played the game, I realized it had all the mechanics I usually didn’t like in games: One-hit deaths, trial-and-error gameplay, an odd mixture of steath and speed that requires you to pre-plan your route and strategize. I always watched people who played games like Super Meat Boy and I Want To Be The Guy and wondered why they would torture themselves like that (especially with IWTBTG) but after playing Hotline Miami, I finally got it. It’s not just that feeling you get when you finally complete a tough level but the process you take to get there. After wiping out a building floor-by-floor of Russian mobsters with guns, knives, doors, your fists or a power drill, you definitely feel the star in your own action movie. Whether you’re the “good guy” or not is up for debate, though. There’ve been many comparisons calling Hotline Miami like “old-school GTA meets Drive” which fit. Personally, I’d say Manhunt-meets-Hobo With A Shotgun with a hint of Twin Peaks. But between the colors, the pixelated graphics and the music, Hotline Miami definitely screams ’80s pop culture so loudly you’ll think you’re on cocaine. Once you’re done with Hotline Miami, you’ll wonder if you’ve been on some sort of drug trip the entire time. Most people play video games to escape reality but the true testament to Hotline Miami is that it not only does that, but also makes you question the reality that you do live in. You’ll squeal with delight as you pop out the eyes of a mobster with your thumbs but then immediately ask yourself if you’re a horrible person for doing so. Then you’ll go back to doing it all over again while you’re dancing in your chair to the electro dance-mix. It’s a vicious cycle and you can get addicted to Hotline Miami if you’re not careful. If Dennaton Games wants a PR bite, then here it is: Hotline Miami isn’t only my personal Game of the Year, but if it had a vagina, I’d fuck it.
Now that’s some professional video game journalism for you.