The editorial staff and most regular contributors of TheSixthAxis have cast their votes. We’ll be telling you what we think is our Game of the Year for 2012 very soon. But every year, when we run our Game of the Year series on TSA, we want to include our community in some way. With the hectic end-of-year workload we have – making sure there’s fresh material on the website, even when game releases and news slow down – that hasn’t been possible. This year, we’ve made it possible.
The categories are the same as the ones we used for the staff vote and, while it’s impossible to perfectly define modern videogames into easily recognisable boxes, we think they’re fairly representative.
There’s a category for each of the genres that we felt were well represented this year and, because some genres don’t have a specific category (Fighting and Platform, for example, because there wasn’t a great wealth of games in those genres in 2012), there’s a category called “Genre Agnostic”. This is the place for games which weren’t easily deposited into any of the other categories, for whatever reason.
Some games may appear in more than one category. Uncharted: Golden Abyss was a great Action Adventure game which some of our staff felt should be included in that genre’s Game of the Year discussion but it’s also a great handheld game. Football Manager is a great Strategy game but it’s also a Sports game. As I said, genres in modern games are tricky to define so we had to just do our best.
Likewise, it’s worth mentioning the Mobile and Handheld categories. I think that this might be the last year they’re worth considering as separate categories, because of the great leaps forward mobile gaming is making and its immense popularity. But this year, it didn’t feel right to consider games like Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation alongside games like Super Hexagon. So we did our best with defining categories.
There’s a space for you to enter any game title you wish (please try to be accurate with spelling, it helps with collating results!) but there’s also a drop down menu, which will hopefully make it nice and easy for most to cast their votes. The contents of the drop-down menus show every game nominated by a member of TSA staff for each category, they show what we considered for our voting but every gamer is different so feel free to add your own.
We’ll close voting on Friday the 28th, so you have time to consider any games you get for Christmas and I still have time to collate all the results before we announce your winners.
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bunimomike
Lovely stuff, guys. Votes submitted and looking forward to the staff/official GOTY article too. :-)
BrendanCalls
As I was reading the article my first instinct for GotY was Velocity, and even seeing a list AAA titles I wasn’t shaken. Its still the most fun I have had on my PS3 all year I think
Dan Lee
You are now my favourite person :oD
blackredyellow
I had no idea that I had hardly played ANY new games this year until I just voted!
I played so much from a backlog that it appears I missed out on almost a year of games!
Peter Chapman
the really bad news is that your backlog for 2013 is now massive!
blackredyellow
That, sir, is NOT bad news!
Unterred
I’m in the same boat. Gave no vote at all for all the sections except game of the year because I’ve hardly played any games released this year. There’s just too much to enjoy on PS+!
david24
shame dayZ didn’t get nominated, it’s easily my Goty.
david24
also its surprising to see f1 2012 get forgotten from the racing list, not that i would of voted for it but considering its popularity on tsa it’d would of been in with a good chance of winning.
Peter Chapman
not forgotten, just not nominated by any of the staff. There’s a box to input your own nomination here.
freezebug2
Not all that surprising I guess, only Tef possibly might have voted for F1 2012 out of the staff, but there’s always the “other” nomination box anyway.
Not sure if we can vote for two but I chose from the drop down and “other” for the racing vote selection. :$
Peter Chapman
DayZ is a mod, dependent on owning (or buying) a different game, so I think it would be exempt anyway.
Crazy_Del
Man so many fantastic games this year….. had to take my time. So voted all!
Brilliant Year I must especially with Vita.
yogh_wayne
NIce :) Tough choice for a few categories, will have to think about them first.
But why is Dust 514 nominated as best shooter of 2012? It’s not actually been released yet, it’s just a closed beta, or did I miss something?
Peter Chapman
This was questioned during the nominations process but I left it in because it was possible to buy the game this year and play it – they sold a pack on the PSN that bought you access to the “closed” beta.
It’s an endlessly debatable point which is only going to become more of an issue as payment models and “beta” access changes (what about early access due to Kickstarter backing? I bought access to the Prison Architect alpha this year – is that “out”?) but I think that if they charge you money for it, it’s out, regardless of what the publisher wants to call it.
Then there’s the question of how different is a continuously improving beta that you paid for from a continuously patching “finished” game you paid for? Add in free (and premium) DLC and you could have a “finished” game that completely different a year after it was first available.
Basically, I think you make a valid point – and we thought about it – but the lines are so blurred these days that it could have gone either way and, for this one, we went this way.
Dom El
Voting done! Looking forward to seeing the results!
TSBonyman
Voted, looking forward to the results!
tactical20
Nice! Voted. Be interesting to see the results! Good work, as usual!
XisTG
Votes in, go Rayman go! :D