Here we are at the beginning of a new year with new games and soon enough an entirely new generation of platforms. 2012 has been quite the year for games and at the same time it has been quite strange. This generation for consoles has been the longest yet, almost reaching a decade and yet there have been some incredible and innovative releases. We have seen the launch of the PSVita and the WiiU and Steam has grown into a mammoth for the PC world. But enough of the inspirational stuff, we at the Exeposé Games team want to produce a year in review. This isn’t the ‘Game of the Year’ prestigious awards which will be in our print edition, this is just a quick look at some of the defining features of 2012 and the best moments that this year’s games have produced. So here it is the ‘Exeposé Games Year in Review 2012’
Top 5 weapons of this year
1. Anything in Borderlands 2: Yeah it’s a slight cop out because there are a ‘kajillion’ guns but it is impossible to decide because there are just so many. When you pick up a gun in ‘Borderlands’ you never know what will happen when you pull the trigger, be it a gun that shoots acid or a gun that instead of reloading you throw as a grenade! It’s pure insanity, match that with a script as sharp as armour piercing electric bullets and you have yourself an arsenal of madness.
2. Bow and Arrow: Far Cry 3 and Assassin’s Creed 3: It has been a great year for hunting old timey style. With the dawn of that underrated badass Hawkeye in Avengers Assemble, all of a sudden bows and arrows are cool again. One of the more satisfying aspects of Far Cry was picking off the pirates (80% of which are happy to admit they have the clap) one by one whilst they run around manically trying to you. This year with the new Tomb Raider and Crysis games sporting more stringed weaponry, this trend is far from over.
3. Bricks and lots of them: This has been a good year for the Lego games with the releases of the last Harry Potter game, Lego Batman DC Heroes 2’and most recently Lego Lord of The Rings. The unique humour and ability to tell a story through blocks has made these puzzle games fun for all ages. From wands and batarangs, to swords and heat vision, Lego has provided us with some of the greatest weapons of this year to cause blocky carnage.
4. Your ability to make choices: If there is one thing I have learnt from The Walking Dead series is that I am a terrible human being and I should never be given charge of other humans. The experience is truly harrowing and emotionally up-roaring. You feel the consequences of every decision. Just like any weapon it has a result only this result is more disruptive and painful than any gun. I have never felt like a bad person until I played this game and I am the one who use the rope dart way too liberally in Assassin’s Creed 3!
5. Vegetables: In Sleeping Dogs the executions are brutal and entertaining. From electric eel tanks to electrical substations. However, one of these diabolical weapons of destruction stands above the rest. The darkly hilarious Pak Choi execution whereby you pick up your victim and drop him on a rather pointy vegetable. Its good green family fun that teaches you the importance of reaching your five a day.
Top 5 Villains of the year
1. Vaas, Far Cry 3. So yeah this guy is crackers. The trailer says it all. It shows Vaas from a first person perspective explaining the definition of insanity. His voice, his eyes, his movement are all just so unsettling, you never know what he will do next he is just pure insanity. At the same time he is incredibly charismatic and likeable. There is just something so engaging about him. I can’t really do it justice so check out the ‘Definition of Insanity’ trailer.
2. Zombies: Yup the brain munching undead horde have featured in all sorts this year including, Black Ops, ZombieU and The Walking Dead. It seems we as gamers just can’t get enough of bashing, slicing and blasting away the undead. Maybe it is the ever present over the top gore or the racism against our deceased bretheren but whatever the reason these guys are great to kill and still scare us to this day!
3. Handsome Jack, Borderlands 2: Handsome Jack is hilariously insane. Whereas Vaas is just unsettling, Jack is just gut-splittingly funny. He is witty and has a great dark sense of humour. You find yourself eagerly awaiting his dialogue and his moments on screen just to hear what nonsense and backchat he has to say next. Credit to Gearbox, the writing has always been incredibly tongue in cheek and quick, Handsome Jack personifies this skilful dialogue. Keep an ear out for his magnificent diamond encrusted horse, ‘Butt Stallion’.
4. Raul Menendez, Black Ops 2: He is probably the biggest super-villain of the year in that he has scale and ambition. His tragic back story really creates a deep and emotional character that is so believable and his motives are pretty justified as opposed to just simply take over the world. He is charismatic and it shows in his massive following. I found myself both sympathetic and hateful towards him as the tragedy revealed the reasoning behind the menace.
5. Your targets, Dishonoured: It is hard to pick an individual from ‘Dishonoured’ because all the characters you target are just so delightfully evil. They scheme, they plot, they murder, they poison and it works so well. They all work so well with each other to create horrible individuals that you look forward to disposing of. Then out of nowhere the game gives you opportunities to non-lethally dispatch them, making the decision making element even deeper. If you want to see a collection of horrible b***ards look no further than ‘Dishonoured’.
Top 5 Developer Gaffes
1. Frank Gibeau on EA policy: Anyone noticed that it’s nigh-on impossible to buy a single player game with zero multiplayer functions these days? It may be something to do with a boast by EA President Frank Gibeau that:
“I have not green lit one game to be developed as a single player experience”
And while he may have meant features like Apps or online social content, as he stressed in a hurried restatement, to a gaming world that is beginning to be aggrieved by the pretty cynical efforts to cram profitable multiplayer options into everything that moves *cough cough f’ning Mass Effect*, it provoked more than a few raised eyebrows. Thank the good lord for Bethesda.
2. John Hemingway on The Mechromancer character: Talking about the DLC character for Borderlands 2, lead designer John Hemmingway talked about the character’s skill tree ‘Best Friends Forever’, a set of skills designed for those who “suck at first-person shooters”. All well and good. Unfortunately, instead of calling it Best Friends Forever, he referred to it as ‘the girlfriend skill tree’. Whoops. Cue a frantic twitter attempt to rectify the situation on the part of Gearbox senior management, and outrage all over the internet.
3. Jessica Merizan on Mass Effect 3: What she said in her role as Bioware Community Manager on the Bioware attempt to rectify the ending debacle: ‘When I played [the DLC] it really drove home the fact that my last choice wasn’t setting me up for a certain ending… and the ending I got was reflective of all my experiences whether I played just Mass Effect 3 or all of the trilogy’.
What she should have said: ‘It’s 1.9 Gigs of pictures and a weird cutscene which entirely spoils the pacing of the final rush toward the citadel, and you still don’t really find out what happens to your girlfriend or why a tiny child is determining the fate of the galaxy, whatever that fate is because that’s not really explained either. And it’s all you’re getting’.
4.Chris Metzen on the Mists of Panderia expansion for World of Warcraft: For those unaware, the latest expansion for WoW revolves around the mysterious island of Pandaria… wooohhh… lost out at sea and hidden by powerful magics… wooohhhh… and inhabited by a strange race of fearsome beasts KNOWN ONLY AS……. Pandas. Of the Kung-Fu variety. VP Creative Development Chris Metzen:
“This is no joke”
Whatever helps you sleep at night.
5. Stanley Woo (On ME3) again: Stanley Woo was or is known as something as a menace on the Bioware forums. A Bioware employee and moderator, he was quick to defend the company against any criticism, constructive or otherwise, and punish those who said it. He wins the top spot for this little gem, referring to the highly controversial utterly terrible ME3 ending:
“If you wish to sum up the conclusion of a multi-part epic game series as “Red, Green, and Blue,” then feel free to. But please don’t then complain that the endings are oversimplified. You are the one who has slapped that label onto it, not us.”
Top 5 Art in Games
1. Citra Talugmai, Far Cry 3: I’m desperately trying to write this with as little knowledge of Far Cry as possible. I haven’t played it yet, so don’t tell me anything! According to the interweb, Citra is a warrior-goddess-totally-hot-holiday-romance-may-kill-you kind of gal. Mystical powers and plot relevance aside, she’s totally fine despite chilling on an island with no decent healthcare or cosmetics. She does little except questionably sexually assault you in a drug induced hallucination. Sounds pretty sexualised to me.
2. Cortana, Halo 4: If the below picture doesn’t tell you Microsoft know how to make their fans happy, then I don’t know what does. The vast outpourings of Cortana porn that accompany each iteration of the series are a testament to the designers’ ability to make an AI construct stupidly attractive, for no real reason other than LOOK AT THE VIRTUAL VIRTUAL-BOOBIES. In my spaceship, the AI is going to be a large black gentleman with a gravelly voice. Maybe then the marines will stop being mown down while they’re gawking and actually f’ning fight. But regardless of how distracting she’d be in a combat zone, she definitely takes the crown of most-fantasised about AI. Poor old EDI must be crying her eyes out.
3. Anyone vaguely female spoken to by Commander Shepherd, Mass Effect 3: Now, of course a game which allows players to woo women (and by woo I mean hit the obvious dialogue response until they fall into your arms, just like real life) isn’t going to get very far presenting a parade of homely soldier gals. We gamers are a simple breed. And throughout the series the good people at Bioware have continued to make it clear they understand this by working very hard to demonstrate that there’s clearly an attractiveness requirement for female special forces operators, or that Shepard is the luckiest/seediest bastard alive. And one could attribute the increase in virtual squadmate attractiveness to increases in technology but by Mass Effect 3 its gone waaaaaay further than that. The above is Ashley Williams, given one hell of a makeover from her appearances in the previous two games and now looking like… well, fill in your own superlatives here. The Asari are as always a race entirely comprised of blue promiscuous attractive women, and they are all over your space-armoured ass. The reporter and the new PA are both particularly svelte and will happily have you pretty much at hello. Tali, longtime masked favourite of many players, is revealed to look like (Spoilers)
4. This again- Seduce Me: Yeah yeah yeah I’ve used it before blah blah blah. You aren’t reading this for the scintillating prose. Just look at the pictures. As if you needed to be told. For complicated analysis of the above, try here, he says, shamelessly.
5. Juliet Starling, Lollipop Chainsaw: Yeah. One of the cleaner pictures available. Cheerleader. Chainsaw. Lollipops. Zombies. Tiny Skirt. High School. One of Japan’s saner offerings. Truly. It’s a grittily realistic RPG with a complex moral choice system and profound revelations about the global economic system and human reality. Not so truly. You don’t even have to play it to know what kind of squeal she makes every time she chops up a zombie. Yeah.
Top 5 Anticipated Games of 2013
1.Grand Theft Auto 5: One of the most popular franchises returns with what looks like its most graphically stunning and in-depth world to date. Set in Los Santos (Los Angeles) and the surrounding Californian countryside the environments look varied, the characters on typical tongue in cheek GTA form. The proposed size is bigger than San Andreas, Red Dead Redemption and GTA IV combined so this looks like to be Rockstar’s most ambitious production to date. Put on top of that three playable characters and you have the biggest game of the year.
2.Elder Scrolls Online: Not being a huge MMO (Massive Multiplayer Online) fan I do have my concerns with this game. Personally I would much rather an RPG like Skyrim that explored the world of Tamriel further but with the same game play and style. An MMO will mean very different things indeed but having followed it closely I may, just may, be enticed by an MMO. Graphically it looks pretty good for an MMO but oh my lord the locations, THE LOCATIONS. It is on a scale vaster than any I actually thought realistic, spanning damn near all of Tamriel. So for me it will boil down to do I want to explore or do I want my RPG. It will be a tough choice to make. For the MMO loving world I am sure it will be a hit.
3.Watchdogs: Cast your minds back to E3 last year. It all seemed terribly dull, just a sequel here, a sequel there and maybe a dancing related Kinect game. Then out of the mists of mediocrity came Watchdogs. The visual urban setting intrigued me, it was deep and had great colours and lighting which created a very heavy and suppressive atmosphere. However, the main feature above all else was the game’s hook, controlling technology. By taking a good look at just how dependant on technology we are, Watchdogs has tapped into how that technology can be manipulated and controlled in ingenious ways. The results are in-depth knowledge of random people on the street, jamming mobile phone signals and my personal favourite, changing traffic lights to cause a pile up. It looks both clever and beautiful and I just can’t wait!
4.Pokémon X and Y: New Pokémon do I really need to say more? Alright I will. It is the first fully 3d entry in the series and from the brief trailer, it looks fantastic. The colours are vibrant and the Pokémon themselves are just as varied as ever as the trailer showcases the starter and the legendary Pokémon that will feature. Apart from that there is very little else to say except get hyped and get a ‘3DS’
5.Rome Total War 2: Potentially one of the most successful PC games of all time, Rome Total War provided gamers and history geeks with hours upon hours of empire building and nation conquering. Now with it’s sequel on the horizon both veterans and newcomers are excited alike. With incredible looking graphics and animation, it looks to provide the most intense and true to life experiences of classical warfare. Check out the trailer it is full of lovely Roman politics including daggers in the back and snakes in your bed. YAY HISTORY!
Well that is it for our year in review. Overall it has been a pretty good year full of laughs, chills and thrills. Now we are in 2013 and with it comes a whole new wave of adventure, mystery and fun. As the gaming community grows larger and larger everyday, the future for gaming looks brighter and a whole world of opportunities await the industry. Thank you all for a great year!
Contributions from,
Alex Carden, Games Editor Online
Kate Gray, Comment Editor Online
Alex Phelps, Games Editor Online
exeposedev 