Le Saboteur said:
And while I don't do lists I would have to say that Max Payne 3 was my 2012 Game of the Year. Nothing rivaled the experience it offered last year by far.
I'd name mine as well, but I sort of have a defining problem here. Should it be something I actually played this year, or simply a title that came out during 2012? Or pick a third option?
If I use the latter definition, guess I'll have to hold my nomination back until I've cleared the late-2012 backlog. If the former, suppose I'll be picking between
Max Payne 3 and
Sleeping Dogs, as most of my 2012 was used revisiting old titles. If I were to predict writing this a year ago, I would probably also have added
Mass Effect 3 to the mix. And while it was actually kinda okay, some of the magic I felt with the earlier two had faded.
Hmm... I guess
The Witcher 2 could work as both my 2011 and 2012 GOTY, thanks to the Enhanced Edition overhaul. But now the gods of gaming say that it'd be cheating.
But ultimately, there is one more game I played new this year that left even more of an impression than either of those I already called. Technically, it already came out in 2010, but the PC version took its sweet time arriving and only hit the shelves exactly a year ago. So my "Most Memorable New Thing I Played in 2012" title goes to
Alan Wake.
Le Saboteur said:
So what are you looking forward to in the Year of the Snake?
Short term... exactly that. As it's the name of the next story DLC of
Sleeping Dogs supposedly out this month. Taking place after the main game ends, it promises to return Wei his badge and pit him against a new sinister case.
Couple of days back, I visited the Zodiac Tournament DLC Island within Sleeping Dogs. And after its conclusion, I decided to deviate a bit from my formula of playing only single game at a time. Sleeping Dogs should have some new story DLC coming out this month apparently taking place just after the conclusion of the game proper, but if it's going to be as brief as the Zodiac Tournament, going back to it after technically moving on already wouldn't feel like worth it.
So I cut the game short a few story missions from the end to add some extra length (okay, I haven't played Nightmare in North Point either) to give me at least a full night's worth of gameplay regardless of my decision to acquire the upcoming DLCs or not.
In the meanwhile, I decided to give
Sherlock Holmes a go.
Well... really no need to wait for my impressions for too long, as I already finished it last night after a couple of lengthy sittings. Can't say if it simply was due to the brevity of the game or me being a very experienced adventure gamer.
Overall, I liked it. I suppose. But it didn't really leave a lasting impression.
I have to applaud Frogwares, they do know the basics of crafting a good, serious story-based adventure game. It was pleasantly almost completely devoid of my all-time number one pet peeve considering the genre, which means making the puzzles so artificial that they break the immersion. The most common manifestation of this is having to fetch some perfectly mundane item like a piece of string from the other side of the game world and then take it back to advance (some of you may recall me ragging about this when I gave my 2c on the Lost Horizon). If you were supposed to investigate a graveyard, everything you needed to complete the investigation were actually found within the said graveyard. The downside is that when items have uses that follow real-world logic and they're all located practically right next to each other, the inventory puzzles aren't all that challenging. Although that didn't stop the game from having a handful of those genre-typical moments where I still felt like I was taking far too convoluted steps in achieving a relatively simple goal.
(I feel I should say here that the things I just said become non-issues with so-called comedy adventures, as they have a better tendency to fit the internal logic of the reality the game takes place in.)
Also, the game is generally very good in telling you what's your aim in a given area. There were only a couple of minor occasions when I was picking up items and trying them with hotspots without really knowing what I was supposed to achieve.
Of course, the series mainstay, extremely convoluted dedicated puzzle screens that require you to beat an elaborate lock or solve a hidden code were naturally present as well. I have kind of a love-hate relationship with these. Generally I like figuring out what they're about, but I hate doing the actual crunching, because it can get tedious and occasionally even depend on pure luck and/or trial and error to get it done. Although the feature of being able to skip any of these if they provided overwhelming without punishment does make these gripes feel a bit nonsensical, as the only thing stopping me from giving up was my pride.
But that's enough about gameplay and design. On to my views about the story. (Minor spoilers may follow.)
Well, I really admired it for about two thirds through, and was ready to consider it the best in the series... then it sadly did lose some of its step. The bit brought up in earlier posts, where the biggest reveal of the story are given to you in a simple cutscene didn't really bother me in gameplay sense, but I did notice some leaps of logic and simply lazy writing in the details of said reveal.
Also, the ending was a major out of the blue moment for me. I guess the framing story was supposed to foreshadow it, but it still felt like a literal Deus Ex Machina since it was never hinted during the story proper that the Great Detective might be missing certain aspects in his life - and this late moment mystery person's relationship with the villain didn't get much of an explanation either. She just was there for our heroes to discover, and that was it.
To sum it up, it was a solid adventure and no time wasted by any means, but there were still several moments where the devs managed to drop the ball... or a handful of them.
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Well, that was a mouthful. TL;DR, I know. Back to the question of games coming up this year... it's funny, really. I already got a decent vibe of what's my 2014 GOTY's going to be, but it's really hard to pinpoint any true standout titles from the platter of 2013. Note, it's still in the air whether
GTA V will reach PCs or not.
Out of ones that will,
Broken Sword deserves a mention, naturally. And if we're to look at other old familiars, I suppose I end up checking out
Tomb Raider too, and knowing myself, I'll also give BioWare a chance to show if they've managed to go back to what was good with
Dragon Age III. Same for Ubi with
Splinter Cell: Blacklist.
Also, there are a couple of titles out already that are sort of on my peripheral radar. I'm currently wondering whether
Dead Space 3 might be worth it. Haven't played the first, but ended up acquiring the second by chance and it was okay. And for the other... even if the genre of pure hack'n'slash is generally not my cup of tea, there's something about the visuals of this new
Devil May Cry I find compelling.
Maybe from a Steam sale.
And to not simply throw true and tried IPs out there, I guess there's
this:
<iframe width="640" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/FMyQlnnxXuk" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
So... apparently it's
Deus Ex meets
Assassin's Creed with a handful of tricks of its own. Sure, I'm game.
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Now, to decide which bit of the backlog to delve into next.
Far Cry 3 and the Rook Islands could be a logical candidate, but given how I still kinda have one sandbox title on hold, maybe I'll go someplace else.