2012 Game of the Year Voting/Discussion Thread

Okay, after getting over my table flip rage for FEZ not being nominated (to paraphrase Lum it was a great experience) here's mine:

1) Mark of the Ninja
2) XCOM: Enemy Unknown
3) FTL
4) Torchlight II
5) Dishonored

GOTY Question: If a game was provided to play for money or registration, in the case of F2P or other business models, then it was released that year.

1. The Walking Dead
2.FTL: Faster Than Light
3.XCOM: Enemy Unknown
4. Mass Effect 3
5. Journey

What? That was this year?

Oh, man, that totally would have gotten my vote!

Instead, I'm abstaining. I've only played one game on the final list, and only for a couple of hours, so I don't feel qualified to cast a ballot.

It barely missed...I'm not looking at the sheet, but I think one second place vote would have done it.

There's not a good way to do screenshots with the PS3 version, is there?

1. Guild Wars 2
2. Borderlands 2

They really should be tied for first, but Guild Wars 2 gobbled up more of my time this year.

Not unless you're running CFW.

For your vote tabulating pleasure:
1) Faster Than Light
2) Mass Effect 3
3) Drox Operative
4) Borderlands 2
5) X-Com

Honorable mention to Diablo 3. You were >< close to making the list.

Eligibility - I say the date when the game is released onto a platform from Beta for stand-alone games, and set to Open-Beta for online titles.

1) XCOM
2) Dark Souls
3) Tribes

The difficulty of release/beta/different platforms is essentially unsolvable - my rationale is to select from the games that have become available to me in the past 12 months (and ignoring stuff that comes to GOG, etc)

1) Dark Souls
2) XCOM: Enemy Unknown
3) FTL
Thanks, Thorn!

1) The Walking Dead
2) Borderlands 2
3) FTL
4) XCOM
5) Mark of the Ninja

1) Mass Effect 3 Director's Cut (did not play the release version).
2) Diablo 3.

Didn't play any of the other games on the list. Otherwise numbers 2 through 5 would likely be different (and there). Don't be surprised if I vote for Dark Souls, Dishonored or XCOM in 2013. Which brings me to ...

Eligibility:
Game of the year should be one's personal game of the year, experienced for the first time, regardless of when it was released. Thanks to Steam sales and the like, many of us no longer actually play games in the year they are released. I believe that a game which was utterly fantastic, when I first played it, should be acknowledged.

Special consideration should be made for F2P titles as well, which are constantly updated, revamped, expanded, etc.

1. Mass Effect 3
2. XCOM: Enemy Unknown
3. FTL: Faster Than Light
4. Guild Wars 2
5. Dishonored

1. DARK SOULS
2. Xenoblade Chronicles
3. FTL

WHY IS THERE NO FROG FRACTIONS I WILL CUT YOU

1. Mass Effect 3
2. The Walking Dead

I'm unsure why the number of likes you got for that amusing cat picture you posted last week is being given any weight in this thread, but whatever.

As for when a game is eligible, I propose it becomes initially eligible once it's released outside of a closed group i.e. you can buy it, once it's released on a new platform (and you played it on that platform and have not voted for it before) and every time the major version number changes thereafter.

Finally, I want to say I think having a second, run-off vote, is pointless. Just total the initial thread, post the results, boom, we're done. You already ran into the problems of the run-off vote in the first few posts. What if my votes had been ME3, Katawa Shoujo and Frog Fractions? I wouldn't be able to participate in this thread, or I'd have to pick a random second place game to participate, thus rendering the final tally dubious at best.

1) Ascension: Storm of Souls
2) Mass Effect 3
3) Borderlands 2

I'm surprised Assassin's Creed 3 didn't make the cut!

Also, I think voting should close on the 1st of Jan, not the 11th. No one is going to care about the GOTY two weeks after the Y is over.

1: Dark Souls
2. Guild Wars 2
3. Dragon's Dogma
4. Journey
5. Dishonored

1: Ascension: Storm of Souls
2: Borderlands 2

Not enough time, peeps on vacation and stuff. Plus people used to complain that they hadn't had a chance to play their Steam December purchases before voting. Damned if you do, damned if you don't...

Your hard work, your rules - that's my answer on all questions on how to run this.

1. XCOM: Enemy Unknown
2. Spec Ops: The Line Journey
3. Journey Crusader Kings II
4. Spec Ops: The Line

I should qualify this by noting Dark Souls is a better game qua game than any of them -- XCOM has some clearly dominant strategies (sat spam on the geoscape, camping on the battlescape), Spec Ops' gunplay never interested me very much, and CK2 could get rather boring/repetitive. What redeems them, to borrow Lum's phrase, is that they were great experiences. XCOM and CK2 are fantastic emergent story generators, Spec Ops skewers the unthinking violence of games, and Journey is a really cool experiment in cooperative multiplayer. Between the four of them (and other games that didn't make it onto the shortlist - Analogue, Wargame: EE), this has been an absolutely bumper year for games. :)

Guild Wars 2
Diablo III
Borderlands 2
Torchlight II

1. Spec Ops: The Line
2. Borderlands

As for GOTY eligibility, I say split the voting into two categories: "best new release" and "best game I played this year". I wanted to shortlist Minecraft for the second year in a row, because of the fun I had on HalibutBarn's server. But I couldn't, and that made me sad.

1. Dark Souls - obvious. :D

2. Guild Wars 2 - still an MMO, but surprisingly pleasant. The grind is mostly hidden, the combat is fun, and it's purty. Group quests for the most part awesome.

3. Borderlands 2 - Even better characters than before, way surprising for a shooty mcshooterson. Guns have much more personality too, as does the environment. This one's just out of the park.

4. X-Com - I had Dishonored here earlier, but ... I don't know, it's probably me. It just feels very by the numbers so far. Satisfying, but in a weird "I feel like I've done this before" way. X-Com is a surprise for me; the LP in here is what convinced me to finally get it, and I haven't regretted it at all. So far all the streamlining makes the tedious parts of the original game nonexistent, and the good parts (getting that upgrade, or that lucky shot, or that successful flank) are still there and delicious. It might not be the infinitely replayable TBS that we used to love, but it's probably the only X-Com-like I would play in this day and age.

1. XCOM: Enemy Unknown
2. Eador: Genesis
3. Borderlands 2

1. Dark Souls
2. Legend of Grimrock
3. Borderlands 2
4. Guild Wars 2

1. Eador: Genesis
2. FTL
3. XCOM: Enemy Unknown
4. Conquest of Elysium 3

1. Dishonored
2. Ascension: SOS
3. Diablo 3
4. Legend of Grimrock

1) Borderlands 2
2) Torchlight 2
3) Dishonored
4) X-Com (fuck you, there's a hyphen!)

Just to be clear, the points are the same if I list two or four games, right? I don't want to dilute my top votes by listing runners-up.

1. Mass Effect 3
2. Dark Souls - Prepare to Die-A-Lot-Now Edition
3. Crusader Kings 2
4. XCOM

1. Mass Effect 3
2. XCOM
3. Crusader Kings 2
4. Diablo 3
5. Walking Dead

Dark Souls -- while an excellent game -- shouldn't count for GOTY in my opinion.

1. Dark Souls
2. Dishonored

That's all I played that are worthy of voting for. With the sales maybe I can try a few more before the 11th and edit my list.

I'm pretty sure your first place game always gets 10 points no matter how many you list. Listing more than two very slightly dilutes it by reducing the relative number of votes you're giving the top game vs the total number of votes cast. It almost certainly won't matter, but if X-Com beats Borderlands 2 by one vote, you would only have yourself to blame.

1. Walking Dead
2. Mass Effect 3
3. Mark of the Ninja

Diablo 3
Borderlands 2
XCOM: Enemy Unknown
Faster Than Light

1. Dark Souls
2. Borderlands 2
3. Journey
4. Hotline Miami
5. FTL

Haven't gotten to Dark Souls yet, but right now my votes are:

1. The Walking Dead
2. Crusader Kings 2
3. Borderlands 2
4. XCOM
5. Dishonored

Torchlight 2 is an Honorable Mention.

5. Mass Effect 3 - I am extremely critical of the entire last act of the game, and I'm pretty sure anybody that actually defends what happened there isn't fully understanding what you're supposed to do with the ending to a story or why that ending was so thoroughly out of place for the experience of so many players like myself, but between the multiplayer and the entire rest of the game, it's hard not to recognize it as a pretty spectacular effort, and I'm happy to just forget everything after Rannoch. Hell - any game that can actually get me to enjoy anonymous multiplayer with the sort of people that you encounter kind of frequently on Xbox Live has to be good.

4. The Walking Dead - I don't think this is game of the year and I've said why, but I do think that this is maybe the best plotting I've ever seen for a directed experience in a game. There's still all sorts of things that need to improve for this to become an experience to rival what it seems to be competing against (basically all those linear narrative modes of entertainment we already have), but it's still the best at what it is, at least so far.

3. Dark Souls - I have personal beef with one particular design component of this game that unfortunately makes it difficult for me to enjoy in the intended fashion, but that doesn't stop me from appreciating the whole other galaxy of layout and design that I love. This is one of those games that gets the game part of the fucking game right, and that makes it feel very approachable and playable to me. It would be higher if it weren't for my basic incompatibility with about two thirds of its multiplayer model (and I accept that that's a me thing, though I still think it's an issue that could have been avoided with the addition of a toggle flag not embedded in the game lore), but the way that it feels to play this thing when it's going right almost makes up for all of that. It also doesn't hurt that this might be the one game with the one thing in the entire universe at which I'm apparently better than some people (suck it, Goatface).

2. Guild Wars 2 - First things first, let's get this straight: I am supremely disappointed in this game as a vehicle for the kind of experience that I wanted it to be a vehicle for (cooperative play with my small group). I think that this is a really poorly designed MMO in a lot of ways so far as structured multiplayer goes. However, this might be the best single player experience in an MMO ever. I can't say that authoritatively, since there's all manner of stuff that I haven't played in the genre, but it's certainly the best that I've ever had. This phenomenal experience that everybody says they had with Journey (a game which I didn't play and honestly never really felt the urge to) is what I got from this. Occasionally running across other players, cooperating for a time with little actual direction, and then moving on was pretty excellent, and I haven't even started the actual story for my character in earnest on any of them (and I have eight).

1. XCOM: Enemy Unknown - There are a lot of reasons why this would be my game of the year, but mostly I want to recognize just how well Firaxis has managed to do putting an actual game in the original sense of the word (you cannot argue that XCOM is anything other than a game) into the world, and that's a less common phenomenon than you would expect. The whole experience in suffused with choice and consequence and you always (well, most of the time) feel like you're doing the thing you meant to do and implementing the approach that you wanted to implement, within the constraints that you're provided. And because it is a game, it's infinitely replayable in the way that so many other video games aren't for me.

Things I wish I had time and energy to play but didn't: Dishonored, FTL, Borderlands 2, Fez, Spelunky, Farcry 3, Xenoblade, The Last Story, and probably more stuff I'm forgetting

There are 2 xboxes in my house, mine and my neighbors. The trays have not been ejected on either box for months. The reasons are as follows:
1. Mass Effect 3
2. Borderlands 2