[greed]

My personal game of the year is METAL GEAR RISING: REVENGEANCE, it's a fantastic brawler with hilarious writing that takes itself just seriously enough to be exciting and engaging as well as really goddamned funny.

Other big games that really got me this year

Wonderful 101 for the WiiU is well a lot like the above, same company, it's also a brawler just not quite as good as MGR, it suffers a little from an overabundance of non-Brawler segues which aren't as good, also it doesn't quite strike the right balance between funny and serious like MGR did.

Super Mario 3D World is a fucking amazing platformer and the best 3D platformer I've played.

Pokemon X was a lot of fun, it's a Pokemon game but the main improvements are it finally includes a online design that works outside Japan and huge amounts of available Pokemon, including a strong effort to make Pokemon that historically appeared too late for in-story use available early.

Bravely Default is an excellent JRPG in the mold of FF5 with a lot of modern conveniences, such as a very nice online setup that rewards playing with friends. It also has fantastic writing with a lot of humour and emotion. The game is good at getting you to hate it's villains and love it's heroes which for a classic JRPG is very important. This game really makes me feel like I'm playing FF9 or 6 or DQ8 again for the first time. I cannot recommend it enough for EU/Australian NPFers to get now and Americans to get in February (yeah this is what we got as an apology for no SMT4).

GTA5 and AC4 are both pretty fun though both kinda lost my attention before the end. I also lost a lot of time in Spelunky, Starbound and Skyrim.