SEGA's best and worst of 2012

[CrazyT]

First i'd like to say merry christmas guys! Hope you have a good holiday. Alex Kidd is finally unlocked in Sonic Allstar racing Transformed so at least have a lot of fun with that!

Anyway, I thought it was time to have a thread like this. What kind of year has 2012 been for SEGA? 2012 has been a year of ups and downs as usual, but what overweights the one over the other for you?

Let us divide this in 2 sections. 1 for the games and the other for the SEGA news in general. IE, What was your favorite or worst game? What was the best or worst SEGA news for you?

My favorite game: Without a doubt Sonic Racing Transformed. Haven't had so much constant and endless fun with a game in years. Ever since I bought it, i've been playing it every day when possible. Sumo Digital achieved something amazing, which is not only making a great game, but also making it have that very distinct SEGA style in it. This is not only evident in the art and level themes, but also in the gameplay imo. I havent gotten bored of it yet so that is a good sign.

Runner ups: Binary Domain and Hell yeah. Great games I thoroughly enjoyed, but not close to the fun I had with sonic racing transformed.

My most dissapointing game: Another tough one between Phantasy Star Online 2(JP) and Sonic 4 episode 2. But i'm picking PSO2 because I never really cared about sonic 4 after episode1's catastrophe so my expectations were low. However for PSO2 they were huge. Not gonna lie that I enjoyed my first 100 hours in the game a lot. Mostly for the fact that I was mostly looking forward to the evolution of the game. The game has evolved a great deal ever since. We got like 5 new environments, 2 new difficulties and etc. The game has shown its true identity and direction in the process, and I don't like it. It is not similar to PSO1. While there are a lot of aspects that do resemble PSO1, its a different game with different priorities.

Best SEGA news: I actually am really happy with SEGA's digital efforts so far. Especially on STEAM. I have had great fun with the HD remakes, but also the introduction of Viking battle of asgard on steam. I hope this helps a lot of franchises get recognized in the process. The restructuring seemed to have done good so far. I mean face it guys, would you rather have a lot of games with half if not more of them being average? Or a few good top quality ones. I go with the latter

Worst SEGA news: Had a hard time thinking about something because I can't remember anything, but I have been very bothered with SEGA's marketing. I don't know if its me not ever paying attention, but ever since all of the closures in europe and west I've been paying more attention. And  games that are worth the marketing either get very little marketing or terrible marketing. I don't know what the guys at SEGA west are thinking, but for "professionals" they have terrible taste and I feel sad for anyone cooporating with SEGA finding out how their potentially great games get such a lame treatment.

In general i'd say 2012 was a great SEGA year. If not only becaus of SASRT! There hasn't been much anounced for 2013, but I hope 2013 becomes an even better year!

[semmie]

best this year: i can not really say cause i havent seen many games. i did like allstars racing 2.
but in a sense of being innovative and explosive i remain in the near past playing resonance of fate and viking battle of asgard at the moment.

wors: sega has decreasingly communicated with her fans and gets silent by the second. sega has made a wall between her and her fans and makes games out of the blue. and re releases every game that had great times


optimism:
i love sega it has ups and downs. i just hope that they will bring something out that will make people get hyped up and awake. so far that sega will be the hot topic on every site

i hope
i wish

and now i wait for the sleeping lion to wake up. fucking sega RISE UP

[Nameless 24]

I personally give the best game to Binary Domain.

As much as I was hyped for ASRT, the glitches are kind of not making me play as much as I liked. PSO2 isn't something I am interested in due to the MMO genre.

Worst SEGA news for me was the marketing for Binary Domain, the best news is that the XBLA/PSN offerings are amazing! VF5S as well as VF2, FV and STF along with Monster World, SoR & the GA collections were awesome! Let's not forget JSR & NiGHTS.

[CrazyT]

I really hope there will be more Japanese RPG's in 2013. What SEGA really needs to do is port VC3 to the 3DS and release it worldwide. But perhaps they are contracted with sony(like yakuza)?

VC3 would be a great addition to the 3DS library imo

[MadeManG74]

I honestly don't think I played many Sega games from this year at all. My favourite is without a doubt Virtua Fighter 5: Final Showdown.

It's just a phenomenal fighting game, I really can't find much fault with it at all. The gameplay is fast, technical and yet completely intuitive. Cutting down movelists to the essentials turned out to be a great idea IMO, it just makes the game leaner and better, the new throw system works well IMO, making it more about reading the opponent rather than execution skill. The little extras like the costumes are fun and the netcode is the best around. It's really just an exceedingly well-made game, and it's been pretty much the only thing I've played on Xbox since it's been released.

Total War: Fall of the Samurai is my runner up, another jewel in the Total War franchise. It's not only a great expansion to Shogun 2, but is a great game on it's own merits too. Complete re-work of the units and strategy map, and introduced some fantastic new features like armoured ship combat, railways and tradition/technology clashes.

Dissapointment of the year: Yakuza Dead Souls. I was so looking forward to this title too, but it was just so... dull. The gunplay is pretty bland, the story was weird, side-missions were all but gone... it just wasn't Yakuza, it wasn't a good shooter, it wasn't really anything. Bring on Yakuza 5.

[Nameless 24]

VC3 would be a great addition to the 3DS library imo

Funny you mention this, as this Nintendo fan I used to talk to said to me why would SEGA give VC as an exclusive to Sony without any benefits?

To this day I don't get their logic with that.

[Pao]

Best:

-Binary Domain: Often people ask me what's so great about the game, it has many amazing elements, but I just refer them to this video:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbzOLTXMr1Y[/youtube]


-Shogun 2: Fall of the Samurai
Really took what's best from Empire/Napoleon and Shogun 2, mixed them together to create one of the best, Total War games ever. It's a shame some people consider this a DLC or an expansion pack, I think its pretty much its own game.

-Virtua Fighter 5: FS
Its VF5, only better, and I get to play with Jean Kujo, I just need a PC version SEGA!


Disappointments:

-WHERE IS BORDER BREAK FOR CONSOLES/STEAM, SEGA?

-SASRT PC getting delayed to next year.

[Randroid]

My personal Best of 2012:

Binary Domain - I loved this game. It is criminally underrated. On the surface it appears to be generic, but once you get into it, it has many elements that make it unique. For one, it's a robot shooter, which Sega seems to be the only publisher takes risks in actually making, and I personally find it compelling. There is something very sinister about mechanical enemies. A co-op campaign mode would have made this game perfect in my opinion.

House of the Dead 4 - Bringing this arcade on rails shooter to Move was a great, um, move. I can understand Sega holding out on bringing their arcade titles to consoles but hopefully they'll make us fans happy by doing so once they've had a nice long life in the arcades (2 Spicy, comon 2 Spicy). On that note...

Virtua Fighter 5 FS - The latest iteration of the Greatest Fighter of All-Time made it to consoles this year. Everything about this game is what is right with gaming. Perfect approach, controls, balance, character, community. Everything around VF has a air of sophistication that makes other fighters seem juvenile by comparison. 

Sonic & Sega All Stars Racing Transformed - Anybody who has played this knows why this was a total win for Sega. Redeems any wrong really.

Anarchy Reigns - It felt great to play as Bayonetta again. The controls aren't exactly the same but the basics are there. Fun as hell online. The chaos is awesome, as is the dialog and soundtrack

Worst of 2012:

Anarchy Reigns, specifically the "will they / won't they" of Sega's planned western release date - I'm sure there's some financial reason as to why they held out the western release, but was it really worth sacrificing the business relationship of Platinum in the process? All the language up until the summer was of how great Sega was to Platinum for not getting in the way of their creativity etc. I was hoping that Sega would see the value of a long term relationship with that exceptional studio. They've developed some awesome groundbreaking IPs. To this day more than a year has gone by and I have not played anything as good as Bayonetta and Vanquish. No shooter is better than Vanquish and Bayonetta's depth has ruined me for action games. But now, no more planned future titles (as far as I know), and Bayonetta being temporarily published by Nintendo. Let's hope the Anarchy Reign's January release miraculously gets these two groups together again.

[max_cady]

The best:
By default, the best SEGA game I played this year was Binary Domain.

I'd also like to give a quick nod to Spiral Knights, perhaps one of the most acessible free-to-play games on the market today.

The Jet Set Radio HD port also counts as one of the highest, namely because it's the very first Dreamcast port that gets it right.

Worst, however:

SEGA dropping the ball on Anarchy Reigns. Nuff said about that.
Announcing Bayonetta 2 as a Wii-U exclusive and acting simply as a consultant. I know this is controversial point for a lot of people, but even after getting over it, I am still on the "You gotta be f***ing kidding me!" camp.

[semmie]

Sonic & Sega All Stars Racing Transformed - Anybody who has played this knows why this was a total win for Sega. Redeems any wrong really.

man that game made the world look silly of al karting games of all time. even nintend freaks admit

[Kevin-N]

Binary domain was great and Sonic all star racing transformed also.



The worst thing sega did was for me that sega announced they going more digital than retail, for me as a collector it's hard because i want everything fysical. You just don't have a true collection when it"s on your hard drive.

[max_cady]

There's also that and perhaps waay too many re-releases... I just hope they don't turn into the new Atari that pretty much only does small digital titles. They've pretty much faded into obscurity.

[MadeManG74]

^Isn't Atari just  a brand owned by Namco Bandai?

[max_cady]

Not that I'm aware of. This Atari isn't even the same Atari from the 80's, it used to a french company called Infrogrames that bought whatever was left of the old company, name included. Namco Bandai does own D3P Publisher (they are mostly known for churning out Ben 10 games and a few other CN properties) and I think they bought out Atari's Europeaon HQ, but that's about it.

[MadeManG74]

^ Yeah I know about Infogrammes buying the name from a while back. Maybe I was thinking of Namco Bandai because they are the distributors here in Aus.