TSA’s Top 100 Most Anticipated Games of 2013: The Intro

Here we are again with TSA’s annual end-of-year look at the games we’re most excited about for next year. Each year, we compile a list of games with a reasonable chance of coming out in the next twelve months and then all of the staff votes on how eagerly they anticipate each one.

The list will start in earnest later today but for now, I just wanted to let you know it was coming and explain how we arrive at the Top 100.

It begins some time in November, usually with an email from Kris that says something like “Are we doing the Top 100 again this year?” That email thread invariably descends into Kris and I swearing a lot and stressing about how much still needs to be done for our yearly Christmas-period content.

We don’t like leaving the website empty over the holiday period but there’s no news and no games are released so we have to generate other interesting and/or fun stuff to entertain you – like the Top 100 list.

I then spend several days scouring the internet for news of games coming out next year. Usually, there are a good number that are fairly certain to make an appearance but there are also quite a few with vague “2013” dates. I also include anything that has been heavily and credibly rumoured, as well as one or two that are a long shot for a release within 12 months but we all retain hope. Once I have the initial list, I send it to staff and ask them to reply with any amendments or additions. Usually there are a few additions to be made or a couple of cancelled projects that slipped through the net of my initial compilation.

We catch almost everything in this round of checking but this year, one game did manage to evade both my initial compilation checks and the scrutiny of our entire staff. Bizarrely, it’s not a niche PC game or an indie 3DSWare title. It was Fuse, which I’d included twice on the list because I also had it under its original title of Overstrike.

Nobody caught the error until voting had begun and then several people spotted it all at once. So, when I collated the results, I took the score for both inclusions (which were incredibly close, as you’d expect), added them together and divided by 2 to find the mean. Then I awarded that score to Fuse and removed Overstrike from the list.

What about how we vote? Well, I built a form with all of the games listed. Each one had a drop down box where the staff could choose a number between 1 and 10, with 1 being no interest and 10 being maximum excitement. I then pulled the data from that form and ranked the games by their total score. Only a single game didn’t receive any interest whatsoever from any of our staff, a 3D dungeon crawler for the 3DS currently being localised by Atlas for a western release in early 2013: Etrian Odyssey IV.

So, now we have our top 100 and the list is with Kris, several members of staff will be delivering summaries of each game on chunks of that list over the coming weeks. We’re starting later today and we’ll be bounding rapidly through the first half so that we’re all caught up with the most exciting ones around Christmas.

We hope you’ll enjoy the series and let us know what you think of each selection in the comments.