First of all, a quick reminder that my Game of the Year doesn’t necessarily have to come out in 2012.  Because I don’t have the time to dedicate to video games, the price premium of buying it new rarely makes sense to me.  So my Game of the Year will be my favorite game that I played in 2012.

As I compiled my list I realized that I played a lot less games in 2012.  I may not have played a lot less hours (I haven’t bothered comparing the totals with 2011), but I definitely had a lot less variety.  A lot of that has to do with the birth of my daughter this year.  Only as the year has gone on have I been able to carve out some time here and there to play story-based games.  In addition, I resumed pursuing my master’s degree in the fall, right around the time I was able to have a bit more time to myself.  I didn’t have any gameplay at all in March, September or October.

Saint’s Row the Third (14 hrs):  I got a lot of video games for my birthday and Christmas (mostly on Steam).  So I wanted to finish up the last narrative game I had started before playing those games.  I played a few missions in Saint’s Row The Third.  As I had surmised before, the loose narrative based mostly on archetypes and stereotypes made it extremely easy to jump in.  It wasn’t like in Mass Effect or Final Fantasy 10 where I couldn’t remember why I should be caring about these characters.  The missions with the VTOL planes (STAG missions) were pretty hard.

Civilization V (17 hrs) - I took advantage of the Steam Fall Sale to finally pick up the Gods and Kings expansion to Civ V.  I have enjoyed founding my own religion, Otakuism.  Religion plays a much more key role than they did in Civ IV.  In the previous game, I would pretty much just found a religion because each city would pay me gold (with certain buildings or government choices) and I’d get a window into cities.  In Civ V the religion plays like another level of policies.  You get to choose a series of attributes for your religion such as temples giving you gold or faster territory expansion.  It tends to make the expansion of religion to other cities and civs a much more important task than before.  I’m still a little unsure of how cities pressure other cities to adopt religion because I seemed to have one city flipping even though I couldn’t see any reason for it.  (Could have been another civ sending prophets my way)  Spies are also added.  The spy missions remind me of Assassin’s Creed:Brotherhood  assassin missions.  Unlike previous iterations of Civ, the spies aren’t on the map.  You assign them to a city or city-state and then they either steal you tech (which may not be useful if you’re super advanced and/or playing normal or easier), rig elections in city states (gaining you influence), or protect your cities from being screwed over by other spies.  I must admit that I haven’t done much investigating in the civclopedia, but I can’t really see how to generate more spies and so the whole system seems like a mini-game diversion.  I continued my strategy of non-aggression unless another civ attacks me or denounces me.  Then I drop my hammer on them and take over their capital city and, sometimes, eliminate them entirely.  I like that the requirements on resources for building some units has been reconfigured.  I usually ended up not using a lot of early-game siege weapons because iron tended to be too scarce.  I think it’s a lot more balanced on which units need resources like oil, iron, and horses than before the expansion pack.

Team Fortress 2 (5 hrs) - a lot of this time was spent testing out my new private server which I described setting up in this post.

Civilization V (1 hr) - played a little bit in the game I’m documenting at onemoreturn.ericsbinaryworld.com .  Been too busy to play much more than that.

Saints Row: The Third (<1 hr) - Saints Row’s lack of a tight narrative may make it easy for me to step back into it when I have some free time, but it also makes it lack a compelling reason to come back.

Civ V (11 Hrs) - talk of the expansion pack made me want to play some more Civ.  I played a scenario and then I played a regular game.  I had a blast and I can’t wait to buy the expansion pack.

Peggle Deluxe (5 hrs) - Worked on some of the challenge puzzles

Team Fortress 2 - (3 hrs) - played when the Pyro pack came out.  Really enjoyed the new mode.

There aren’t any new games on here, so I’m only going to mention some quick comments on each.

Plants vs Zombies (29  hrs) - threw a bunch of hours into this game because I just had a handful of achievements left and for some reason I wanted to finish it off.  2 or 3 to go

Civilization V (9 hrs) - still love this game.  I wish I had more time for it

Final Fantasy X (36 hrs) - I started playing this game again to get away from computer games.  It was hurting my back to sit at the computer.  I could just stand in the guest room, where the PS2 is. I hadn’t played for months or maybe even a year, but I hadn’t gone that far in the game, so I wasn’t too lost.  (Unlike when I finished FF7 and didn’t even remember what the point was) I’m still not done, but it’s already knocked Assassin’s Creed II from long-time position as my #6 most played game raptr.  It’s already taken me longer than Final Fantasy IX.  There’ll be a review once I finish.  I’m so close, but the final boss keeps kicking my butt.  I may need to do some more grinding.

Civ 5 (70 hrs) - In March I fired up Civilization V for the first time since 16 Nov 2010.  What was the catalyst?  My wife asking what happened to all the enthusiasm for the game when it first came out.  Well, as I’ve mentioned before, right after I got the game I played it for a week straight.  Then I went on vacation to the Grand Canyon, to NYC for Halloween, had Thanksgiving and Christmas at my house, and a stronger focus on my webcomic.  Her question reminded me of how much I loved the Civilization franchise.  So I started playing and was reminded of why I loved it so much.  It took me most of the first game to get back into the groove with Civ 5’s new quirks, but I really appreciated the improvements to AI.  Civ V is now my most played game with 117 hours.  (Finally surpassing Civ 4)  Most of that time was added in March as I got sick and spent a few days home.  The achievements in Civ 5 really played a key role in keeping me interested over so many hours.  I did things I never would have done in order to get those achievements and now I have a much better understanding of how best to use those Civilizations.

I played a lot of games this year.  Perhaps more than in any previous year since leaving high school.  Since I usually don’t buy games when they first come out, the winner will not necessarily be a game that came out this year.  I went to my raptr page and took a look at all the games I played this year.  Following is a list of the games and a little about what I thought of them.  At the end will be my pick for 2010.

I was on the phone with my dad a couple weekends ago and he asked if I was playing Civilization 5.  He’d heard that Dan was playing it and was surprised that it was still around and Dan and I were still playing it.  I told him I was playing it and reminded him that it was he who indirectly got us stuck on the series.

Back in the old days of the early 1990s, no one gave a second thought to sharing computer software with each other.  Most people didn’t know about the public Internet or BBSes so, for the most part, there was no onerous digital restriction management (DRM) to keep people from sharing software.  Some games had codes that you had to type in which were found in the manual, but manuals could be photocopied - after all, there were no authentication servers to connect to.  I’ve spoken about this before, but those early “wild west” days lay the seeds for my software purchases over the last decade.  A friend lent me 3.5” disks of Sim City 2000.  I played that sucker everywhere.  I’d take it wherever there would be computers and install it there to play until my parents said it was time to go.  To this day, I’ve bought all the mainline Sim City products and expansion packs.  So, who’s to say that today’s illicit software users aren’t building up affinities for software brands they’ll be loyal to when they have the cash.