Video Game of the Year: A Cracked 64 ripoff

The beginning of the year is the time to look back on what has just passed us by - through Top of the Year lists.  While many will be publishing their lists of the best of 2012, I'm more interested in what happens over at Cracked; they try to identify what typified the year that was.  This is, to me, far more interesting, and so, I will be offering my take on the same 8 categories that Cracked's columnists wrote on.

Movie

Tweet

Person

Song

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Video Game of the Year: Diablo III

Diablo III was the hugely anticipated third installment of Blizzard's PC game.  So highly anticipated in fact, that when it was released in May, it promptly crashed due to an overload of their servers.  It was finally worked out, and players have been doing their thing on it since.  I'm not sure exactly what 'it' is, so I'm speaking generally on purpose.

The reason I say it is the game of 2012 is that, even in the one-player, solo campaign mode, you need to be logged in online.  To me, this is absurd; when I play my video games, I want to do so without distractions.  I don't want to gripe too much, because I know that the prominence of online gaming is here to stay, and that a lot of people love it.  Myself, I like platformers and RPGs; Mario is my video game messiah.

Now, Diablo III is my choice because it was so used that it rendered the servers unusable  and it's because every major release seems to have online play.  Hell, the Wii U console, to the best of my knowledge, requires you to be logged in at all times.  This means that, even when you are not playing a game online, alerts and messages will pop up on your screen.  I've owned every Nintendo home console since the SuperNES, but I have no plans to purchase the Wii U; it's just not my thing.

Several years ago, I was fairly into video games, while now, not so much.  It's just that the industry is not trending toward what I happen to like, and that's alright, I just won't partake.  Until they make the next Mario adventure on the Wii U - then I'll in all likelihood succumb to its majesty.

Nope, nothing weird about this.

Runner Up: Journey

When this game dropped, I heard great things about it, but it wasn't until I read Cracked's rundown of video games of the year that I learned what was being praised.  I won't spoil it here (though if you're into video games, you likely already know), but suffice it to say that it utilizes the online trend beautifully.