Welcome back to Day 2 of The 30's! Our annual awards show. Today we get a bit more into video games and what kind of impact they had this year. So let's start with our first category...
Best Way to Find a Wii U In Time for Christmas
The Best Way to Find a Wii U in Time for Christmas goes to JUST WALK INTO A STORE AND BUY IT. Not in generations has finding a next gen console been as easy as picking up a Wii U. Yes, we bash Nintendo and it's decisions pretty much all of the time on the blog, but did anybody not see this one coming? I had made a challenge to co-workers that we can judge how well the Wii U is performing by walking into any given store on / around December 15th to see if you could buy a Wii U. Not only could you then, but almost every other time we checked they were readily available with the exception of Black Friday. Did Nintendo really work hard to make sure everyone who wanted a Wii U got one, or is this a case of people getting over the motion controlled gimmick and ready to see what MS and Sony have planned? Our bet is the latter.
Best Gaming Value for your Buck
If you have a Playstation 3 (or even a Vita) and you're not subscribed to their Playstation Plus service, you are doing yourself a huge disservice. You can see a list of the free games that members have received since the service started
Right Here and as you can see it's just a monstrous value. Xbox Live is touted for having better network capability and the ability to lobby chat, but you're paying them for services Sony is giving you for free. Seriously, you need to sign uo for this service.
Biggest MMO Letdown
Not only is VG30 guilty of calling this game "The Best Chance at De-Throning WoW", we also whipped players into looking forward to the game and wanting to play it. For a good section of time we all enjoyed the game. The stories were good and interactive, and then it seemed to fall apart for everyone right around the time we received our ships. My personal story went from rising in rank from nobody to apprentice to master to ghost busting. Seriously, I was flying from planet to planet to try to bust ghosts. I couldn't find people to group up with for end-game material and watched as emails started coming in begging for me to return to the game, even as it became free to play. It's not a bad MMO, but if you're looking for something different why not...
MMO Game of The Year
I picked up Guild Wars 2 and so far have no regrets in doing so. I don't have a lot of time to play MMO's anymore, and with Guild Wars 2, I'm not paying a monthly fee. It makes it a lot easier to hop in and out of periods of playing, and incentive to go back and try out a different character since it's not costing me anything beyond what I've already paid. With all that said, the game is fun but maybe too simplistic at the moment. Your attacks are based entirely on what weapon(s) you're currently holding in which hands. For example, twin daggers allows me to attack one opponent quickly, twirl around multi striking and vanish, but if I switch the main hand to sword I gain a shadow step ability. It's a neat system and the questing and events that happen are interesting and keep you engaged. Give this one a try if you need an MMO fix.
Best Side Scrolling Beat Em Up
Dungeon Fighter Online has been around for years, but we discovered it this year which makes it eligible for an award. The graphics are spritey, the moves a little complicated to do on a keyboard, but we poured 20 hours into this free to play beat em up / mmo this year, which is big. Dungeon Fighter Online plays like your typical 90's arcade beat em up, but injects an MMO class and leveling system into it, as well as the ability to party up and up the difficulty for better equipment. We had a lot of fun with this and plan on continuing to play in the new year.
Biggest Disappointment of the Year (PC)
There's a lot of disappointments from 2012, so many that we actually had to categorize them and give them other clever titles like the Wii U article above. Diablo 3 started out solid, but quickly devolved into an empty click fest. I decided to play as a Witch Doctor and because of that decision I am not capable of the same level of progression as the other classes, especially the Barbarian. Blizzard has done some modification which brought me back into the game for some time, but it once again felt empty and pointless as I couldn't do what they were asking me to without pouring hundreds of hours into it. Sorry guys, but there's better things to play out there. There's too many little things to complain about in the current iteration of the game to put here, but long time players are fairly unhappy with Blizzard's responses, and it won't be long before Blizzard drops from my most respected developer list (Blizzard and Valve, for the record)
PC Game of the Year
We're going to go ahead and call this our "Bad Call of 2011". Last year we called Skyrim the best thing to happen to gaming because of the attention that it attracted but it no way was Game of the Year material. Since posting that we went ahead and gave it an honest try and promptly shelved it for six months. One day while feeling the need for a dungeon exploring game and being disappointed by Diablo 3, I decided to give it another try and promptly spent the next several weeks in the game stopping only when I was physically injured and unable to play. Skyrim deserves all of the accolades it received and while I still want to see some further improvements to the combat and leveling systems, this is a huge step in the right direction. Good job guys.
