2012 The Year of Disappointment

In terms of gaming, it's been opposite year.

Mass Effect 3, probably one of the most anticipated games of the year, shocked the public with its day one DLC and its ending, which caused untold amounts of nerd rage on the internet. The recent Extended Cut DLC made it even worse, because Bioware capitulated to pressure and showed their utter distaste of the famous "indoctrination theory".

Kingdoms of Amalur; wait, what's that again? An unsuccessful Skyrim-esque game, it didn't take off enough. 

Deep Black, marketed as a truly unique underwater TPS, was a crappy, unfinished product that was like a even more poorly-made Hydrophobia. Boo.

Diablo 3, heralded as a triumphant return for the series, was absolutely ravaged by launch errors and bugs that locked out huge chunks of the gaming populace. Then there was the auction house controversy, and these days I don't hear anyone talking about Diablo 3 anymore. After Tera failed to gain a following, it now falls to Guild Wars to try and unseat WoW.

Binary Domain and Inversion were both games that had great concepts behind them; the first concerning the theory of singularity, the second a gravity-centric game hopefully being better than the below-average Dark Void. The first was so utterly bland it immediately slipped my memory the moment it came out. Inversion was so much built on the GoW template that it looked exactly like Binary Domain, with gravity wells which to be honest were too far apart. 

Steel Battalion; Heavy Armour, hoped to be the first hefty Kinect game with the absence of Ryse, turned out to be a huge pile of excrement, mixing heinous Kinect controls, useless story and character stereotypes and genuinely un-fun missions.

Counter Strike Global Offensive turned out to be a reskin for Counter Strike Source, neither killing nor reinventing anything major. It certainly didn't create the waves that its predecessors did. 

In contrast, games with generally less hype and expectation such as Max Payne 3, Fall of the Samurai, Sleeping Dogs, Ghost Recon Future Soldier and Spec Ops the Line were actually quite well recieved, though aside from the first game sadly none will break it into the big AAA stakes.