Brad Gallaway's blog

It feels like it's been a while since I've done a proper blog post, and there's a lot of stuff to catch up on, so let's get right to it...

So in the last post, you saw my top ten games of 2012. However, I think the last twelve months were fabulous for gaming overall. It seemed as though there were a neverending stream of titles that ranged from "pretty good" to "pretty great,"and I never had much trouble finding something that was worthwhile.

Something interesting I noticed this year was a trend of push-back against "choice" games in which the player did not get to control every outcome. The two biggest examples which spring to mind are, of course, The Walking Dead and Mass Effect 3.

Without fail, every single person I've ever asked about Damnation said it was utter trash, but the box was so intriguing and the subject matter (Steampunk/Wild West/Civil War/Robots/Magic) was just too much up my alley to ignore. I think I got it for something like $4, and at the time that I picked it up, the clerk literally told me that I shouldn't buy it.

Another year, another breakdown of the year's best games…according to me. Before writing this list, I went back to my archive and looked over what I'd said in years past. The funny thing is that while plenty of folk were saying that the "big" games disappointed in 2012, I also found that to be true in 2011 and 2010. Perhaps the trend is becoming more noticeable now, but in hindsight, it definitely seems to be a trend that's been happening for a while.

Welcome back to a semi-regular feature here at GameCritics.com: TouchTalk. While this series was inspired by one of my old features, the Bargain Basement, I've got an all-new focus for an all-new phase in gaming. Rather than highlighting discounted gems in the used section of a retail shop, I'll be reviewing downloadable mobile games and apps that you might want to check out… and maybe some that you'll want to avoid.

This year we asked our readers and listeners for their top three favorite games of 2012. We also asked them for the single worst. Our intention was to tally the results and have a "popular vote" alongside that of our staff critics, but we got so many well-written rationales that it seemed like a shame to let them go to waste. As such, we've assembled these write-ups as a companion piece to our year-end podcast.

However, since we did not originally plan to publish these, we've removed the names from each piece to protect the privacy of the authors. We've also rearranged the order of the comments to make them a little more readable. (We may have done a little spell-checking as well, but we won't talk about that right now.)

In any event, we here at Gamecritics think that there's always value in hearing someone else's opinion. To that end, here are some of the reader and listener testimonials for The Best of 2012.

The good people at GungHo recently released six "classic" Japanese PS1 games on PSN. They are currently available in the "Imports" section for $5.99 each, and they're in their "original, unaltered" Japanese state, meaning that no localization work has been done on any of these. In the interest of disclosure, it should be known that GungHo PR sent me a code for all six games for the purposes of evaluation. It should also be known that I had never heard of any of these titles, so I was walking into all six with a totally clean slate.

I'm quite happy to say that my oldest son, age 11, will be flying in this weekend to spend Christmas with us. We plan on chopping down a Christmas tree and catching a showing of The Hobbit, but other than that, I think we are going to lay low and just hang out as a family… we may play a few video games as well. Maybe.

So, Far Cry 3. I can't say that I've been a fan of this series, but all the pre-release chatter had piqued my curiosity, and it seemed as though the game was going to attempt to tell a more serious, darker sort of story.