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Home > News > Tags > GOTY 2012
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XCOM: Enemy Unknown is not the game that I played the most this year and it’s not even the game that brought me the most joy in 2012, but I was unable to escape its shadow while looking for my Game of the Year winner.
This is the 2012 game that everyone should play.
The mix of impressive tactics, emergent sto... |
31 December 2012
02:01 GMT |
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We're now at the end of Softpedia's Game of the Year 2012 awards and the main distinction – the Game of the Year one – will have two winners, one chosen by me, Andrei Dobra, and one chosen by my colleague, Andrei Dumitrescu, which both reflect our personal opinions.
For me, as you could have gu... |
30 December 2012
09:51 GMT |
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I have loved the Total War series ever since The Creative Assembly launched the very first game in the series, the original Shogun, but the series has always offered me disappointment in equal measure to the joy it provided.Total War: Rome 2 might just be the first game in the series that has no critical weakness tha... |
29 December 2012
13:01 GMT |
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While 2012 was certainly a great year for gaming, with many impressive titles appearing in the last 12 months, including lots of sequels and quite a few new ones, 2013 is already shaping up to be an even more impressive year.While quite a lot of great games are going to appear in the next 12 months, the one I'm ... |
29 December 2012
02:34 GMT |
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Lots of great shooters have appeared this year across all sorts of platforms. From first-person ones, like Borderlands 2, to third-person titles, like Mass Effect 3, if you wanted to shoot at things in a virtual manner, you had more than enough games from which to choose.
Among them, however, one game truly shined, ... |
28 December 2012
10:26 GMT |
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This is the second time that XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the strategy game from developer Firaxis and publisher 2K Games, appears in Softpedia’s Game of the Year series. It has taken me a lot of time to choose between this game and the runner-up in the strategy category, Sins of a Solar Empire – Rebellion. Fina... |
28 December 2012
05:52 GMT |
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Rebellion is a new standalone package for Sins of a Solar Empire and it’s the second best strategy game that I’ve played this year because it manages to take a formula that was already familiar to gamers and tweak it just enough to make if feel surprising and exciting again.The new Ironclad title basicall... |
27 December 2012
16:41 GMT |
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While certain genres have experienced renaissance periods this year, like the role-playing or puzzle platformer ones, other types of games have remained popular, including shooters, no matter their preferred perspective (first-person or third-person). While some titles resorted to treading on the same ground as thei... |
27 December 2012
08:52 GMT |
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The two reviews that we have for this week are: Party of Sin, an indie game which allows gamers to play a cartoon version of the seven sins of classic Christianity, and New Super Mario Bros. U, the platformer that launches alongside the new Wii U home console from Nintendo.
There are also two Gamer Diaries for reade... |
23 December 2012
06:21 GMT |
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A lot of role-playing games have appeared this year and most of them were of a high quality, even lower-priced independent titles like Torchlight 2 from Runic Games.
While there were a lot of RPG hybrids, which combined the mechanics of a role-playing game with other genres (like Far Cry 3 or Borderlands 2), the bes... |
22 December 2012
15:01 GMT |
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Every time a new racing game launches, the question I ask myself is whether there’s anything more that can be added to the experience that I had many years ago when playing Need for Speed: Porsche, the title I still see as the pinnacle of the genre.
The answer with the new Most Wanted, which was made by Criter... |
22 December 2012
06:41 GMT |
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The role-playing game genre has seen a resurrection in recent years, even if titles that fit into this category don't have "popular" attributes like a multiplayer mode.
We've seen quite a few RPGs appear in 2012, ranging from blockbuster efforts like Diablo 3 to more independent ones, like Krater.
Among t... |
21 December 2012
11:41 GMT |
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I still play FIFA 13 for around one hour every day with one of my co-workers while my brother, who is just a casual gamer, sometimes spends his entire night guiding his beloved Arsenal towards yet another Champions League title.
This does not automatically make FIFA 13 the best sports simulation launched in 2012, bu... |
21 December 2012
05:38 GMT |
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The action adventure genre is one of the broadest in the games industry and this makes it hard to decide if a title belongs in this category or if it features more elements from genres like shooters or RPGs.
While quite a few action adventure games have appeared this year, one of the most impressive is Assassin'... |
20 December 2012
13:31 GMT |
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Max Payne 3 is a third-person shooter created by Rockstar and published by 2K Games that separates players from the legacy of the first two games in the series and takes them on a long journey to the South and to the future. The game also delivers some of the best action gameplay of the year, with gamers controlling... |
20 December 2012
05:26 GMT |
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We have awarded a variety of great games in Softpedia's GOTY 2012 competition, each more than worthy of their various distinctions, but this year hasn't been filled just with great titles, as quite a few games have disappointed.
Among them, Electronic Arts' Medal of Honor: Warfighter is one of the big... |
19 December 2012
12:41 GMT |
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Gods & Kings is the new expansion for the turn-based Civilization V, the most recent installment in the long-running strategy game series from Firaxis and 2K Games.The expansion was supposed to fix all the problems with the original game, build on its innovative hex-based core concept and add new dimensions by introd... |
19 December 2012
05:30 GMT |
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Given the massive growth in terms of popularity of the PC platform in recent years, we've seen a lot of high-quality titles be released by small, independent studios.
We've certainly covered a lot of both triple-A titles and lightweight ones, and among the best, no matter the category, was Robot Entertainm... |
18 December 2012
10:15 GMT |
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It’s hard to know exactly what “indie” means these days, as video games like Minecraft have managed to sell more than established core franchises, on both the Xbox 360 and the PC. Meanwhile, THQ feels that it makes sense to launch a Humble Bundle of its own. But FTL: Faster Than Light, the game fro... |
18 December 2012
06:00 GMT |
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Seeing as how current consoles are quite old, the PC has been gaining the upper hand in terms of popularity in the last year or so. While this results in more attention to PC ports for multi-platform titles, like Far Cry 3, it also results in quite a few exclusive releases.
Among the most impressive PC exclusive gam... |
17 December 2012
10:35 GMT |
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The best sign that the Xbox 360 is nearing the end of its life as the main gaming console from Microsoft is the way the company has been treating exclusives for the platform, carefully making sure that a number of them are delayed to the spring of next year in order to power sales during the last few months of the co... |
17 December 2012
05:50 GMT |
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We have three reviews to offer this week, as we seek to travel through some of 2012’s back catalog before we move onto next year: ZombiU, the survival horror for the new Wii U, Karateka, a revival of an 1984 title that mixes rhythm mechanics with a martial arts theme, Frozen Hearth and Lucius.We also have our c... |
16 December 2012
06:01 GMT |
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2012 was a good year for gamers as quite a lot of high quality titles have appeared over the months, from blockbuster sequels, like Mass Effect 3 or Far Cry 3, to all-new intellectual properties, like Dishonored or Sleeping Dogs.
While most games impressed through different mechanics or through their stories, by far... |
15 December 2012
16:51 GMT |
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Ever since Homeworld, a segment of the gaming world has cried out for a solid, complex, engaging real time space-based strategy title that offers long-term replayability and, in 2012, developer Ironclad Games and publisher Stardock reminded us that it already exists, in the form of the new Rebellion package for Sins ... |
15 December 2012
06:53 GMT |
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There are many ways for a game to fail: bugs at launch, mechanics that don’t work, graphics that don’t attract players, horrible characters, no story.But it’s hard for a title to completely disappoint as long as it has a strong core concept around which the entire experience is built and this year, ... |
14 December 2012
13:31 GMT |
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Innovation in the video game industry is a risky thing, especially this late into the console cycle, as most developers and publishers prefer to play it safe and counter-balance any sort of innovative feature with lots of tried and true mechanics that can't possibly fail or result in bad sales. One game that we... |
14 December 2012
04:15 GMT |
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We're nearing the end of the console cycle which means that developers have practically mastered the likes of the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360, resulting in great graphics for games on the two consoles.
As more and more gamers start to migrate to the PC, studios are putting more work into the computer versions of... |
13 December 2012
10:26 GMT |
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I’m a PC gamer at heart and that means I usually tend to unfavorably compare the current generation of home consoles to the PC when it comes to graphics quality and generally prefer to get all multiplatform launches on my home computer even if I have to wait, rather than play them on the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 3... |
13 December 2012
05:39 GMT |
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Multiplayer is a core characteristic of practically all big games nowadays, for better or worse. Sure, there have been some very successful titles that didn't feature any sort of online mode, like Dishonored or The Walking Dead, for example, but they were largely exceptions that reinforced the rule.
While many ... |
12 December 2012
10:05 GMT |
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I am not of a social gamer, which means that I tend to focus on the single-player elements of the games I enjoy, but in 2012, as well as last year, I have played one multiplayer experience almost every day: FIFA 13 from EA Sports.
There are plenty of options for those who want to compete against another human being ... |
12 December 2012
07:00 GMT |
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Video games, ultimately, are judged on their gameplay. Sure, their story, graphics, or sound also impact the overall score but if a game doesn't play well, then it can have a story worthy of the Song of Ice and Fire books or the most realistic graphics ever devised, but it still wouldn't matter.
2012 has b... |
11 December 2012
10:37 GMT |
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Gameplay is a big category and there have been some standout experiences this year, with interesting new mechanics and significant impact on players, but for me, the most impressive was XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the strategy title from developer Firaxis and publisher 2K Games.
XCOM is a game of two layers, a strategic on... |
11 December 2012
05:52 GMT |
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Before you rush to the comment section and criticize me for picking Mass Effect 3 as the game with the best narrative of 2012, please consider that we're talking about a story, not about an ending, no matter how controversial it might be.
At first, I was a bit disappointed with Mass Effect 3's conclusion, ... |
10 December 2012
10:28 GMT |
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There have been plenty of video games this year that tackled story in video games in a simple but effective way, giving me a basic set of rules and then allowing me to create my own narrative by confronting my failures and reaching my own goals.But when it comes to pre-determined stories, 2012 was a little barren and... |
10 December 2012
07:35 GMT |
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