Top 100 of 2012 Recap: 80-76 – Fez, Ridge Racer and Brothers in Arms

We’re continuing our recap of the games that, at the end of 2011, we were most looking forward to seeing arrive in 2012. Today, we’ll take a look at an indie darling that got released, a destructive driver that was quite largely overlooked and a game that turned to Kickstarter to raise funds.

Let’s get started, then.

80 Dead State

It’s another zombie game and, let’s be honest, that’s almost completely exhausted now. If you’re going to launch a game that features zombies, you’re going to have to come up with something pretty special to grab the attention of anyone other than the hardcore zombie-loving lunatics that will eat the brains of anything that itches and shuffles. So that’s what DoubleBear did.

Dead State is a role playing game with a focus on resource management and group dynamics. It’s turn based and open ended so could theoretically go on forever. After its initial announcement in 2009, when it didn’t even have a proper name yet (it was called ZRPG), the husband and wife team behind it (who happen to be two of the people behind Obsidian’s early Fallout games) struggled to acquire enough funding to make the game. This year, they turned to Kickstarter to secure that funding, as so many others did.

Dead State reached its goal of just $150,000 in 13 days and went on to more than double their launch goal by hitting over £330,000. Unfortunately, for us, that means the game saw a delay and is now scheduled for release in December 2013. That’s more than a year away!

79 Fez

Fez seems like it spent years on the brink of a release before disappearing for months at a time and coming back with tweaked visuals and another expected release window. This year, the XBLA indie darling finally got released and was received well. Phil Fish is the head of Polytron, the small team who made Fez and he featured heavily in Indie Game: The Movie. That film partially charted the trials and tribulations, tantrums and tears Fish went through while trying to get his hotly anticipated and popular game onto the Live Marketplace.

The quirky puzzler saw you guide the eponymous hero through a series on 3D worlds viewed from a 2D perspective. The core mechanic meant that you could rotate the 3D world at any time and that would, in turn, change the landscape of the 2D world you were platforming around.

Unfortunately, after its release things weren’t quite so smooth. The game had a series of minor bugs which were quickly fixed with a patch. The patch caused a save-breaking bug for some users and was swiftly pulled. After a few months working on a new patch, Polytron announced that they were going to stop trying to fix it and re-released the first bug-fixing update.

78 Fatal Frame

This one is a bit of an enigma. The fifth Fatal Frame (known as Project Zero in Europe) was listed as a 2012 release but there’s no firm evidence that it’s even in development yet. The survival horror franchise eschews proper weaponry like guns and blades in the pursuit of a more pressurised, tense atmosphere.

What we did see this year was a release of the second game in the series, Project Zero 2 on the Wii. We also got a 3DS release of the spin-off game, Spirit Camera: The Cursed Memoir.

It’s possible that these two releases were the cause for confusion in listing the fifth Fatal Frame for this year but whatever the cause, there’s still just as little firm information on this game as there was in November last year when we first spotted its listing.

77 Ridge Racer Unbounded

Everyone loves driving fast, causing explosions and watching cities come apart as you smash through bits of them in a seemingly indestructible car, right? Ridge Racer Unbounded came out in March this year and was generally reviewed well.

The track editor, in particular, was lauded as something quite special. It was very easy to use and allowed swift creation of some quite epic courses. But after an initial buzz, things seem to have died down quite quickly for Namco’s destructive racer. The game still hasn’t been released in Japan, having been delayed for unknown reasons with many assuming the destructive themes were putting Namco off releasing in a country still recovering from the devastating earthquakes and typhoons.

It was quite unique though, and a very enjoyable arcade street racer so fully justifies its place on our list.

76 Brothers in Arms: Furious 4

This one has dug itself a foxhole and taken cover from the preying eyes of the videogame community. It was announced at E3 in 2011 and looked like it was going to take the usually emotive and serious tone of Brothers in Arms games and throw the mout the window in favour of some quirky comedy and explosive squad-based action. And then it all went a bit quiet.

The game is still in development but it won’t be coming in 2012. Gearbox has spent most of the time since Furious 4’s announcement working on Borderlands 2, the sequel to a game which seemed to heavily inspire the tone of Furious 4 itself. Now that Borderlands 2 has gone gold, it’s reasonable to assume that Gearbox is working on the DLC packs but we can also hope that they’re going to start focussing on Furious 4 too. With the release date being sometime in 2013 at the earliest, we might also assume that this could end up on the next generation of home consoles.