Favorite Games of 2012 Halo 4

 

the idea of proclaiming a single one as the best of 2012 strikes us as a little limiting. This year, and write about the experiences that brought us the most enjoyment this year-- and that's the point of playing video games, isn't it?

I guess it should come as no surprise that Halo 4 is one of my favorite games of 2012. The first entry in a new trilogy -- and helmed by Microsoft's internal developer 343 Industries -- does an admirable job of resurrecting everything I love about the series. Halo 4 consistently lives up to what I expect of a Halo game: polished gunplay, a unique visual style, and engaging offline and online features that makes the repetitive act of shooting feel satisfying hours, weeks, even months later.

 Halo 4 isn't the standout of the series. It tinkers with ideas which came before and assembles a strong overall package to fit modern shooter standards. To frame it as some second coming for the series seems a bit naive. Outside of some story beats involving a dormant forerunner threat and the fate of Cortana, nothing that happens in Halo 4 hasn't happened in some form before. But I say what's wrong with more Halo? What's wrong with more missions that tweak existing ideas and enemy counts to feel bigger and better over time? What's wrong with introducing new hardware and vehicles that continue to expand the satisfying combat? Halo 4 takes a slightly conservative approach to updating one of the most beloved shooters in video games, but the results still feel on par or better than anything else out there.

Shooters come and go every year -- with impressive efforts by Gearbox and Ubisoft in Borderlands 2 and Far Cry 3,but few deliver the satisfying gunplay that keeps me coming back to Halo 4 months later. jose otero

Oculus team building immersive gaming goggles

Strap on the headset and adjust the goggle to your eyes. Look down and you'll see the floor of a space station. Look up and pipes weave above your head. Turn left or right and the tight walls of a dark corridor flank your sides. An alien bursts through a door. Look at the monster, pull the trigger and mow it down.
Palmer Luckey cobbled the headset together from spare smartphone parts. His partner Brendan Iribe is rallying the videogame industry to build the games. The result is a relatively affordable, next-generation headset that eventually will allow players to disappear into virtual worlds.

Virtual reality experiences have been the stuff of dreams for decades, with movies such as "The Lawnmower Man," "The Matrix" and the holodeck on "Star Trek: The Next Generation" popularizing the idea. So far, though, systems to take people to other worlds are expensive and built only for niche uses, such as military training.
Luckey and Iribe, the founders of Irvine's Oculus VR, have raised $2.4 million through online crowd funding to build a system that offers a virtual-reality experience to at-home gamers.
"It's the future," Luckey said. "It's the matrix."

The task facing anyone working on a virtual-reality experience is two-fold – create a device inexpensive enough so people will buy it and improve upon the current state of gaming.
"If there's not something additive or functionally better, it's not going to catch on," said Jesse Divinich, vice president in charge of analysis at video-game research firm EEDAR. "It has to do a better job than the market standard that existed before."

Luckey and Iribe are trying to tackle both problems and look to succeed where others have failed. Luckey is using low-cost smartphone components to make a headset – called the Rift – that costs hundreds of dollars rather than thousands.

"A lot of things we're doing weren't invented by us," Luckey said. "They were invented by other people. And we happen to have the luck to be in the right decade to make it happen."
Luckey is the 20-year-old co-founder of Oculus. A passionate gamer from Long Beach, he's also obsessed with virtual reality. His workspace is covered in disassembled gadget guts, and he's like a walking encyclopedia of all things VR. He perused government auctions, hospital liquidations and university sales to add to his collection of headsets, which is now more than 40. He also worked for about a year under Mark Bolas, a leading researcher in head-mounted displays at USC.by ian hamilton