Man I haven't posted anything in awhile, probably because I've had writers block I guess, but I return with my one-sided opinion based blog where I tell you what games I thought were the best this year, but before that some games that didn't quite make it that were still great.

Honorable Mentions:

Smite- A 3D MOBA that was my real entry into the MOBA genre and it was great. It didn't make it onto my top 5 because of it's lack of map variety (weird I know) but the game was great all in all but it got boring rather fast and never really grabbed me.

Faster than Light- Talk about different, I love this game to death, it just gets repeitive after awhile, especially since I'm not one of those gamers where I need to unlock every little thing before a game gets boring, it's great and I can play it from time to time but, there's not enough variety on one go.

Awesomenauts- A great little indie game that won my heart over in just how fun the game is, while it suffers from the boring repeitive aspect all MOBAs suffer from for me (Smite), the way they captured MOBAs is great, new, refreshing way that caught my attention the same way Smite did.

Number 5: Darksiders 2

Probably one of the only games where I thought that this game would make it in the history books, sadly I'm the only person who thinks that way about this game. The fighting is great, the story is great, everything about it just radiates this feeling of timelessness and you get this idea that you'll some day come back to this game in 20 years time and think, damn, this was a good game. Strong words, I know, but yes this game was not perfect, nor do I think it is perfect, it's actually not as good as I'm making it out to be but it's just the feel of the game that caught me.

Number 4: Far Cry 3

This would be higher on my last if Ubisoft didn't leave me wanting more in the game. The campaign is about as long as Freelancer (~10 hours), without exploring every single little detail. The first 3/4 of the game with Vaas is probably the best example of character development I have ever seen in a game, more so than the Witcher. The game is also beautiful, probably the best looking game of 2012, for me anyway. Sadly, the game didn't make it very far up the top 5 list because there wasen't enough and the endings were pretty bad, I have to say. There wasen't enough, nothing was done GREAT, everything was just average or good.

Number 3: Diablo 3

Yup, you read right, the infamous Diablo 3, why do you ask? Well, the game is not as bad as everyone says, and it's probably here because I haven't gotten around to playing Torchlight 2 yet because I was planning on playing co-op with that game, still am. Diablo 3 just expresses the same feeling a big budget movie does in the sense that, you can see there was a lot of money thrown at it in some areas, but not all. Graphics were bad, the cinematics were the best thing you've ever seen, and the story was good but the bad parts in the good story were really bad. I can see why people are mad at Diablo since it has quite the name it has to live up to but I thoroughly enjoy the game, even until today, although I did take a big break and replayed it after about 3 months worth of updating.

Number 2: Guild Wars 2

I thought long and hard (shut up) about my second and first decisions, and I reached this conclusion. Guild Wars 2 was my second this year, the best MMO I have played is second. The game I have the most reverance for is second, why? Guild Wars 2 is an MMO that's why. MMOs aren't generally fun, PVP in MMOs is fun but MMOs generally, overall aren't that fun. The leveling was refreshing and got me through it with much joys to be had, and the dungeons were cool but a bit unfair and the bosses weren't too exciting, but Guild Wars 2 is one of those games you can't get mad at no matter what it does wrong, mainly because it rarely does things wrong, and when it does it doesn't do too bad, and surely makes up for in how much love the developers had for the game and how good everything else in the game is, except the story, that I will always say is not good.

And the NUMBER 1 PICK FOR ME IN 2012 IS:

Tribes Ascend

The most fun I have ever had in a game ever. Bad Company 2, Blur, NFS: Hot Pursuit, Freelancer (and I rated that as a 10), Homeworld 2 (10 too), combined do not match the fun I have had in Tribes. Tribes looks good, feels good, and is just amazing. Skiing down slopes, shooting guys with exploding discs, flags, disco grenades, knifing, the whole lot just collects to one big fun house of adrenaline. I'm always sitting on the edge of my seat as I play Tribes, sweating sometimes, at just how fun the game is, it's hard to describe. Tribes is one of those games that will go down as one of those games I will never be able to let go of, much in the same way Freelancer and Homeworld 2 have never left my heart.

I'm not done, oh no, there's still the worst game of 2012 and IT IS...

Planetside 2

Yes, this game is terrible. Why? Because it advertises that it's the largest scale FPS on the market, which it is, but sometimes too much of something is a bad thing, and in this case it's TOO BIG, it takes TOO long to get somewhere, and when you get there you could die before you're any use to anyone, then you have to wait for the LONG respawn time, then find some way out of the spawn point, but wait, you're out of MONEY! So you might have to end up running to your destination, which was already TOO long of a ride in a vehicle. Planetside 2 was way over scored by reviewers and I firmly believe, no matter how many times he will say he wasen't: Totalbiscuit was paid by SOE to praise Planetside 2 out of proportion.

I wouldn't normally do this since FUSE would normally do it for me, but FUSE is down and I would like some feedback on my Darksiders 2 review, and so I could say this:

Back when I first started to reimerge as a active Gamespot member, I had this rivalry with another user who I had since forgotten the name of, but his icon was some anime character with pink hair... anyway, he "griefed" me and downvoted the first, 3? of my reviews and it has been haunting me ever since, since I'm a bit self concious and I really liked those reviews, anyway, have a nice day.

Since E3 I've been meaning to make this a post, and this problem E3 had that everyone knows about, and that was you knew nothing more about the game you wanted to look at from when you entered the convention to when you left.

When you waste your money on attending a gaming convention as a publisher / developer, you want to "WOW!" the people that attend, it's a convention after all.

Make something special for the convention, developer Q and A's, convention only demos, etc.

As the famous Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw once said "Games have demos and Movies have trailers, that's just how it works."

I think if developers stoped wasting money on game trailers altogether that would be great, and instead released game demos far in advance from the actual release, but this will never happen, instead, waste LESS money on game trailers and more on the demo, but release more GAMEPLAY trailers.

--

I was going to review awesomenauts, but it's such a great simple game I can't come up with a good 4 category review like I normally do, so I'm recommending it here hoping you will take my word for it, it truely is great.

Overall, the storyline was pretty good as short storys go, they give you the good guy and bad guy, let you see him and build him up till the end, making you hate him more and more, which they did fairly well, but because it was in such a short amount of time to build him up, I'll let them pass because they did a good job in the character portrayal. What really good me was the boss battle if you decided to aid the Dawnguards, it was definately the most unique thing in the game, including the entire DLC and all the quests leading up to the final battle, it is truely great and you can see the effort put into it, although it wasen't worth 20 dollars since I burned through the whole DLC in a day, but it was good overall, I would've priced it a little lower, but it was good.

8/10

I don't like rating games 10/10, but sometimes games just get me and manage to get me to do so, and so far only 3 have managed, one isn't really a game but 3 packed into 1 disk, which is Metroid Prime Trilogy, which was amazing, not because all 3 games were great, but they ported all 3 prime games to the Wii in one convinient package.

Freelancer was / is my most praised game and personal favourite of all time, with Homeworld 2 in second place, both I rated a 10, but that doesn't mean they have their flaws, Freelancer is incomplete with a heavy cliffhanger that we'll probably never see finish, combat can be a bit repeitive too, but I rated it a 10 because those flaws were covered by the excellence of the Pros.

Homeworld 2 is my favourite RTS, mainly because I suck at RTS games but I got a nack for Homeworld 2, but you know, the single player was a bit short, too many obvious plot devices and characters you could care less about, I mean you only really care about Karen and Fleet Intelligence, he's a character right? They don't even make you hate the antagonist, but hey I love the Homeworld universe so I didn't care very much for it, there were enough pros to make me see past the MINOR flaws the game had, still only second place in my person list of best games.

Though there came one game that almost got a 10/10, and that was Terraria, the little indie game with a dream by Redigit, it was great, and I made a review for it, though not my best, I still stand by my 9.5, why didn't I give it a 10 though? There wasen't enough direction, sure after the hardcore update that left the game with at least 60 or so hours of gameplay, but it's very hard to know how far you've progressed in the game and combat could've been a little deeper, though it was good for what it was, overall the game lacked depth, kind of like skyrim, if skyrim had more depth I would've given that game a 10/10 too, but it's just both games are simple, a fun simple, in the case of terraria, a great simple.

Not many games approaching the horizon seem to be stepping up to the plate as well as past games, overall quality is going down a slope, but effort is being made here and there: Watch Dogs, and Dishonored look nice, and I see real effort in the next Black Ops game, but that's not where I'm going for my next 10/10.

I'm putting all my hopes on an indie game coming out by the name of Starbound, a Terraria style game with a futureistic space travel theme to it, it's pretty much Terraria but at the same time it isn't, it looks great and hopefully it'll bring all the things I loved from Terraria and more, so far it looks and sounds great, good luck developers.

Alright, I haven't posted in awhile since it's been kinda slow lately, but I found something!

Fortune Winds is a board game style game, it's kind of a ship trading simulator, let me explain. You pick a character to begin your adventure, and you explore a map that looks exactly like an ancient cartographers map, the game is absolutely beautiful, and you should get it on that note, really, just because it's that good looking, but anyway: you explore the map in turns, and there are other NPC's moving around doing the same thing your doing, which is exploring, buying commodities at towns for low and selling high at other towns located around the map who will buy it for more than you bought it. As you move around the map you'll encounter sea monsters, and here is where the combat comes into play, because it's weird. The combat is a rock-paper-scissors type of thing, you have 3 types of moves which are color coded; red, green, and blue, each has its strength and weakness, and when you beat someone at a round, they lose a move, so you can't use it again. The goal of the whole game is to pick up 3 rare artifacts through either gold or finding them around the map, and to summon the ancient Kraken, and you have to kill the kraken to win.

Overall the game is fun for a casual game, it's good for LANs and makes for a good play by email game, although you can only pick it up at Gamersgate for 10 bucks which is pretty good, no steamworks bullsh!t to get in your way, so without further ado I give you the link to the game:

http://www.gamersgate.com/DD-FWAT/fortune-winds-ancient-trader

Nexuiz is a brand new arena shooter with the CryEngine 3, it looks great, feels a bit iffy, and is a hell of alot of fun. It's 10 bucks and a really good arena shooter, and to those of you who aren't familiar with arena shooters, think of games like Quake or Painkiller. The game looks amazing, the weapons are somewhat varied but kind of imbalanced.

The gimmick to this game is they have this mutations system where you get a choice of 3 different modifiers that affect different things in the game from giving you double damage to reverseing the controls of the whole enemy team to being able to teleport enemies to your position, its crazy, but somewhat imbalanced.

If your looking for a compeitive arena shooter, like a modern Quake, this game DOES have the potential to do so, there is still ping problems in multiplayer that they are fixing, along with a couple of things, but this game DOES have the potencial to be a compeitive arena shooter that we haven't seen in a long time, the maps are great and for a 10 dollar game you should, without a doubt, go pick this game up.

You can get it on steam.

If any of you read my "About Me" you would know I'm an advocate of innovation and indie developers because their lives depend on them being unique, outlandish, and the spearheads of innovation, so theres a game I've liked recently that is currently in Alpha, and is using the Minecraft, pay before launch at a cheaper price method which is pretty smart and its pretty great, and I don't think it's been getting much attention, although I don't have a big following, I would imagine I get some sort of traffic to my profile since I get a decent amount of likes on most of my comments, so people want to see more of my opinions, especially if they see my comments often, anyway:

Starfarer is a 2D space combat game with a bit of RTS in this game where your ship as multiple guns that all have different purposes, but to me so far it just seems like a SPAM ALL THE WEAPONS kind of game right now, the only tactical aspect of it is the shield mechanic where (on some ships) it only shields a certain area around your ship (not all) depending on where your mouse on is on a screen, and the fleet part on the RTS aspect of the game where in the missions you have to capture points and you can send NPC controlled ships to control them, and the tactical part comes in when certain ships are more effective agasint other ships, and you can sometimes switch between your flagship and any other ship in your fleet, it's really good and these guys deserve for their game to be released.

Here you go

First impressions (first hour) I was a little dissappointed, because the quests were your average kill this quests, untill...

After that hour the dynamic events kicked in and I got new abilties and picked up new weapons which led to more abilties and weapon combinations and MORE abilties.

Dynamics events make the world alive, although they need some tweaking, but beta is beta. You have no reason to look at the whole world since it scales to the quest itself so you never have to fear of facerolling through events.

This game falls into the idea that lead to the basis of my score for Kingdoms of Amalur, the story isn't great but the combat makes up for it, and they execute the world much better than KoA, but im not comparing it to KoA, I should be comparing it to WoW.

The WoW era is done for, games like this, TERA Online, and Planetside 2 is the next-gen in MMO's now that technology can handle more and give us more features in a genre that thrives on features.

I'm predicting I'll give this game a 9 or 9.5 when all is said and done.

Dear Esther as you know is a game that came out recently that involves you walking around an island and being told a story.

Debate whether or not this "game" is technically a game or not has been put into question recently, and I am here to share with you my point of view.

A game by definition is "A form of play or sport, esp. a competitive one played according to rules and decided by skill, strength, or luck."

By definition alone, dear esther is not a game, no skill or luck is involved, you are just being told a story and holding down the w key.

By the definition of video game which is: "A game played by electronically manipulating images produced by a computer program on a television screen or display."

One could misunderstand this easily and say, well, yes it is a video game because it is electrionically manipulating images, etc, etc, but you would fail to take into consideration the word "game", which brings back the first definition into this one, so again, no Dear Esther is not a game.

Now let's remove the literal meanings, Dear Esther has controls, a story, a world to explore, yes, but there is no gameplay in said game, it's just you holding down the W key, so really, it's a walking simulator, which is not enough for me to consider it a game, it's like walking through an art gallery really, with one of those audio recordings you play at specific parts to get a commentary about it.

I've played Dear Esther, the story is unique to say the least, yes and the enviorments are absolutely amazing, but it isn't 10 dollars amazing, especially since you are literally holding down the W key for an hour, and I have to add, it is the most frusterating thing when you are walking down somewhere and it's a dead end with no commentary to add to it, you just wasted time exploring, so there is no reward for exploring except getting bored and frusterated, which they just added to increase the length of the game, so really the game is about 20-30 minutes.

Should you buy Dear Esther? Depends, if you are desperately looking for a game to just calm down (not de-stress), sure why not, if you like looking at pretty vistas while holding the W key for an hour with a semi decent story, sure, would I? I did but I would not recommend this thing to anyone.

I call it a thing because, no, I do not categorize this as a game, because it's a story, with a world to walk around in, there's no gameplay, just... Story. Unique? Definately. Genre innovating? Hell. No.

Dear Esther, is not, a game.