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.

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Mass Effect 2 (19 hrs) - I knew my wife was getting close to delivering our first child, so I was rushing as quickly as I could to save the galaxy.  I got to it with one week to spare.  Phew!  I didn’t enjoy the story as much as Mass Effect 1, but the gameplay was orders of magnitude better.  For one thing I didn’t have to worry about having too many guns.  (A frequent problem in the first entry)  I also enjoyed the characters a little more (some of them, anyway).  I ended up doing a lot more side missions and I felt they were well designed.  If too much time doesn’t pass between when I finished the game and when I get free time to blog, I’ll do a writeup on Mass Effect 2 and how I liked it vs the first one.  However, it would mostly be a long-winded version of what I said above and with the baby…. well, don’t hold your breath.

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

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Civilization V (75 hrs) - What can I say about this game that I haven’t said already?  This is the series that made “One More More Turn…” famous and it still works today.  If I were to start a game tonight, I would not go to bed at a reasonable time.

[caption id=“attachment_5199” align=“alignleft” width=“150” caption=“Team Fortress 2”] [/caption]

With school over I had plenty of time to get back into video games last month.  I had a blast!

Team Fortress 2 (6 hrs) - Got back into this game because my brother-in-law wanted to play it.  I’d forgotten how awesomely fun it is to play this game!

Plants vs Zombies (5 hrs) - I wanted a quick game of fun so I went after some achievements in PvZ.  I also found this game to be a blast.

My graduate degree has stemmed my play time this month.  This is all I was able to put in.

Mass Effect 2 (1 hr)

Team Fortress 2 (41 min)

For those who are new readers, I’m keeping track of the games I’m playing monthly (via Raptr) and then writing a little blurb on the games.  This is in prep for my year-end blog post.

Team Fortress 2 (4 hrs) – I continue to really enjoy this game.  I think of all of non-story-based games I have, this one has one of the fastest completion times for a single game.  Civilization 5 can take me a week or longer to finish.  And my other games fall somewhere between these two.  (With a few exceptions like Pacman CE DX)