Favorite Video Games of 2012
World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria
My Tauren Shaman, Gornashkus, is ready to kick some ass.
Yep, I’m a WoW player, and I have been since vanilla. And yes, I do tend to get bored with the game every so often and all but drop completely out of it. But I can never resist a new expansion, and we always pick up the collectors editions. Both Lynn and I are just crazy WoW fans (I say while wearing my Horde hoodie with Thrall staring down at me…FOR THE HORDE!).
So towards the end of Cataclysm I was pretty well done and bored, but of course Pandaria was going to pull me back in at least for some questing. I had no idea how awesome of an experience this expansion was going to be. We both agree that this has been the most fun questing experience we’ve had in World of Warcraft.
Unfortunately, I can’t speak to the raiding experience. I’ve been wanting to get into raiding for a quite a while now, but I never can seem to get the free time I need to gear up for it and then find a group. Hopefully my work schedule will calm down soon so I can get deeper into that aspect of the game.
World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria Collector’s Edition
Mass Effect 3
We all know the issues with the ending, but that’s probablly the only thing that keeps this from being my favorite game of the year, if not all time. Really this game had it all, the characters were great, loved the action, there were a couple of sad moments that actually had me tearing up.
I’d become so invested in some of these characters, to see what happened to them, sometimes was very sad. That obviously changes depending on choices you’ve made in previous games, and that’s what’s awesome about ME3.
But then they had to go and ruin it with the ending, in which all your choices don’t mean a damn thing. Those last 15 minutes of the game just ticked me off. The extended edition helped a little bit, but the core of what was wrong with the ending remained.
I still crave more of this!
Other than the ending the game was great. One thing that really surprised me was the multiplayer mode. My friends and I would have a huge amount of fun playing the co-op multiplayer. I especially liked playing the Vanguard class, and just zipping around the map ramming into shit and giving everything biotic super-punches. That was fun.
So, we’ve got great gameplay, pretty good story, excellent characters. It really is the best of the “playable movie” type games that we seem to be seeing more of. I do love the cinematic look Mass Effect employs. I’ve actually started playing the whole trilogy again, so I can finally hop on the FemShep bandwagon.
