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

FAR CRY 3

The images in Far Cry 3 are unforgettable. They’re either beautiful or horrific. Not so much in between.
Ubisoft is showing this big-budget, open-world, first-person shooter game once again at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the industry’s largest trade show, in Los Angeles, Calif. A year ago, the company introduced the story, the main character, and the villain. It was creepy to see such unrestrained violence right next to the beautiful, realistic graphics of an island paradise. Now, the more Ubisoft shows, the more intriguing this game gets — and the more insane.
In the game, you are Jason Brody. Your girlfriend is missing. You’re stranded on a beautiful tropical island. And the mercenaries on the isle are psychotic. No one is quite as crazy as this character, Vaas. He says the definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting shit to change.” He adds, “The first time somebody told me that, I thought they were bullshitting me. So, boom, I shot him.”
He complains, “I already killed you once” and then tries to drown Brody once again. Brody survives, strangles a guard under a beautiful waterfall, and then he starts looking around for a way out. The mercenaries are murdering everyone. Then the combat starts, either loud or quiet. Your choice. You pursue Vaas throughout the game, and he gets tired of killing you (or so he thinks) over and over again. With Vaas, I have no doubt that Ubisoft has created one of the most memorable villains in games.
“He is indeed an incredible bad guy,” said Yannis Mallet, head of the Ubisoft studios in Montreal and Toronto.
From the beginning of the new demo, things are different. You wake up with a skin-painted, nearly naked islander woman sitting on top of you. As you get up, you see a bunch of natives doing a dance to the sound of drums. You walk to a cliff and then dive into the see-through blue-green ocean. You swim under water until you get to a dock. There, you pull down a guard, stab him, and turn the ocean red.
Then you get up and walk into the jungle. You see two guards talking. You can shoot them or go up to one quietly and slit his throat with a knife. Then, by pushing the left joystick in the correct direction, you can immediately move to slit the other guard’s throat. You pick up a bow and arrow and use it on the next sentry, who is standing on a tree platform. Then you infiltrate a compound with big walls. There are tigers there, and you shoot the cages to let loose the powerful cats, who then attack the guards in the yard.
At that point, it’s time to open up with your semi-automatic rifle and greet all of the guards that you can. You can blow up cans of gasoline to take out multiple enemies at once. But if you aren’t careful, the enemies will flank you and bring you down. At some point, you break into a warehouse and fight in the near darkness. Then it turns into a kind of weird fun house.
Once you start walking through the warehouse, you find that somebody is trying to drive you insane. There are dozens of TV sets all broadcasting gibberish. It’s as if you’re in a drug-induced nightmare. Far Cry 3 is a beautiful shooting game, but the story about lunacy may make it into something all together different from what you would expect with such a game.
With cooperative multiplayer, you team up with three other players and go on missions. You first have to repair a train car and then kill everyone trying to stop you from doing that. In that scene, three shooters have to stand guard over the one repairing the locomotive. Then you walk over to a bridge and get some target practice with sniper rifles.Later in the game, there is an entire archipelago of islands to explore.
The game uses the new Dunia 2 engine with a physics system integrated into it. It is under development at Ubisoft Montreal with help from three other studios. The title looks lovely.

The game debuts in September on the PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360.bydeantakahashi