In 2012, the keywords in my gaming life were mobile, and incomplete. I've always tried to complete games that I start playing, but as I've gotten older, my free time has become increasingly limited, and more and more often I've had to say "screw it" and just stop playing a game without finishing.
I played fewer traditional video games this year, and more mobile games and board games. I count twenty-six games in all. Eleven of them were Android games, eight were PC games, four were Playstation 3 games, and two I played on the Wii. So here's what I've got.
I played Trine 2, and while it was good, I didn't like it nearly as much as the original. The addition of the portals somehow detracted from the overall game. I think they were just monotonous puzzles, and a bit frustrating to navigate. There were a number of excellent and intuitive puzzles, but unfortunately there were also a number of annoying and frustrating bits. I found that overall the game just moved more slowly that the original.
I picked up the Shadow of the Colossus/Ico collection and finally started playing Ico. It was an enjoyable game, but when I had an extended session and hadn't saved the game for a half hour or more, dying and having to replay the same bits was a huge pain in the ass. Due largely to this type of frustration, I put the game down after getting through the first two thirds and haven't picked it back up.
I also played Telltale's Back to the Future game. While it was amazing how wonderfully the game called back to the movies, that in itself wasn't enough to hold my interest. When my free time is as limited as it is now, I'm extremely choosy with the games I play. I probably got two thirds through this game as well.
The PS3 game Journey won a ton of awards and accolades, and is one of the few games I completed. I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as some other people seem to have, but I don't regret playing it.
I barely gave Deus Ex: Human Revolution a chance. Very early on - during the first mission, in fact - I grew frustrated with the game and rage-uninstalled it. I've never been a fan of the Deus Ex series, although I really want to like it.
I spent a decent amount of time with Draw Something before I quit. There's some kind of allure to online asynchronous Pictionary. It was a lot of fun drawing the pop culture stuff before the game was ruined by ubiquituous in-app purchasing.
I also replayed Half-Life 2 again this year, and completed it - that's the third time, I think. It was as good as ever. Half-Life 2 remains one of the best games I've ever played. Possibly the best game.
Androminion is a graphically inferior Android version of the card game Dominion. Seriously - the game looks like a PC terminal screen. After discovering the card game Dominion at PAX East, I jumped at the chance to play a mobile phone version. The game is free and the AI is surprisingly good.
I spent a good amount of time with Zelda: Skyward Sword before my Wii broke. Yes, my Wii's optical disc reader no longer reads discs. I'm now forever stuck roughly 60% of the way through the game. Maybe at some point I'll be able to borrow someone else's Wii and figure out how to transfer my save game so that I can finish, as I was really enjoying Skyward Sword.
Radiant Defense had all the makings of a great mobile tower defense game. It's too bad that the game's third stage is completely impassable unless you make some in-app purchases to buy stronger defenses. It's how the developers make money, I suppose, but I can't help but resent that business model.
Bag It! is a great little mobile game that can trace its lineage back to Tetris. In Bag It!, you bag groceries, rotating them to fit in the small space. But you need to be careful, as putting that watermelon on top of your bread sticks will crush them. As the game becomes more complex in later stages, you'll have time limits, optional goals, and stages in which you're trying to intentionally crush groceries. I quit just before reaching 100 stars, since my old Droid X didn't have quite the horsepower to react quickly to some of the more challenging timed stages.
I did complete Steambirds, a turn-based strategy dogfighting game that I first saw on PC a number of years ago. The phone version is excellent. The premise is a steampunk alternate history World War 2 in which fusion-powered steam technology has changed the world. Steam-powered biplanes and zeppelins battle it out in the skies over Western Europe.
It was my five-year-old daughter who got me back into Mariokart Wii earlier this year. I still haven't unlocked everything in the game, but after going back to it, I finally unlocked the mirror circuit. The Mariokart games are just a lot of fun.
My favorite mobile game of all time remains Neuroshima Hex, and I still play it daily. The Android version doesn't yet have online multiplayer, but they've now added two new armies for in-app purchase, and I've bought both the New York and Neojungle armies. I could go on forever about how much I love the deep strategy of Hex, but I'll save that for elsewhere.
I'm not exactly sure how I found the time to complete Infamous 2, but complete it I did. It was an enjoyable game if not a stellar one. Due to the new shard location mechanics, I actually found all the blast shards in the game, and the hunt was kind of fun. Reclaiming sections of the city bit by bit was enjoyable in the same way as recovering cursed areas in Okami.
I hit a bug early on in Cthulhu Saves the World that crashed the game every time I'd load, and I haven't yet gone back to it. But it's a fun little old school phone RPG, and it's got some good humor. Other than that, not much to say.
I played Songpop on my phone for a while when it came out, and it got obsessive much in the same way that Draw Something had been. The only difference is that Songpop required me to listen to audio, which wasn't always convenient. In the end, the song selections got way too repetitive - I was guessing the same dozen songs over and over.
I really wanted to like Amnesia. I'd been looking forward to it and planning to buy it for quite some time. Eventually, some Steam sale or Indie Bundle came along and I snatched it up for cheap. But after playing it for a while, I was severely annoyed by one of the same things that had bugged me about Call of Cthulhu - looking at an enemy you were hiding from caused you to lose sanity. It's horribly annoying to not be able to look at something. Aside from that, the game just didn't grab me.
Alan Wake was the first of these games in a while that I played and really liked. It didn't really feel much like a survival horror game to me - more of a shooter. But it had good story, good characters, and good gameplay. I'd balked at first because I'd watched videos and the engine looked clunky. But in the end, I warmed up to it and thoroughly enjoyed playing from start to finish. Also, the game helped me to discover Poets of the Fall, to whose music I've been listening quite a lot recently.
Long ago, I'd played the free game Hexxagon here, at Paul Neave's website. I played it actually kind of a lot. I even made a copy of the swf file which I probably still have on my home PC for local play. When I found out that there was a free Android version, I was all over it. It's got multiple maps, multiple difficulties, and is worlds better than the version I played years ago.
I wrote about Black Mesa years ago back when it was Black Mesa: Source. I'd been looking forward to it for years. I wrote an article about it on The Secret Lair. I'm roughly halfway through right now, having gotten distracted by all the other games I'm playing - primarily Dishonored. There's no doubt that I'll go back and finish. Maybe by the time I do, they'll have added the Xen levels.
Jetpack Joyride snuck up on me. I downloaded it on a whim, and played through a few times. It initially stuck me as very Canabalt-like, and I'd gotten about four minutes of entertainment out of Canabalt back when it was a big hit. But the thing that kept me engaged was the inventory buy system. And the achievement system. There are quests in Jetpack Joyride. And you can collect coins and buy stuff. As it turns out, there's even a kind of ending to the game. I completed all the game's quests and called it done.
I played through Deity in a single sitting - roughly an hour. It's a short student-developed game, and given that they created the entire game engine, it's pretty impressive. It's a stealth game with a very simple mechanic. You're some kind of ghost demon, and when you hit enemies from the rear, they die and you get a bit of health. If you hit them from the front, they die and you get hurt. So the goal is to sneak up on all of them from behind, mainly by posessing torches. Yeah, it's a bit weird. But play it. You'll catch on quick.
There was a brief period of time, about two weeks around Thanksgiving, when I was totally caught up in Minecraft PE. I wrote about it earlier. A couple days after writing that, I found the gold I needed and made sure Lia was nearby while I activated the nether reactor, summoned the obsidian tower, and fought off some zombie pigmen. Maybe I'll go back to it when a new version comes out, but for now, I'm sticking a fork in Minecraft.
I owned Penny Arcade Adventures 3 for quite a while before I really got to playing. It was all about setting aside time to play. In general when I play a phone game, I want something I can play for five or ten minutes. PAA3 takes nearly 30 seconds to start, and so it's really in a different category than most phone games I play. But I found the time during my holiday vacation at the end of 2012, and finished the game on 1/2/13. It's an entirely different type of game than the others in the series before it. Enjoyable, but wholly different.
Dishonored is my game of the year. I'm currently starting the final mission on my bloodless ghost run, after which I'm considering going through a third time without buying any powers to get the "Mostly Flesh and Steel" achievement. I can easily see me getting 100% of the game's Steam achievements, although collecting all the paintings could be a challenge without using a FAQ.
I discovered Blokish late in the year. It's a shameless knock-off of the board game Blokus, which I own. It's a great game because it plays quickly, and it's easy to grasp for even young kids. The free Android version works well and is a lot of fun. I've been playing it constantly.
The complete list is as follows: