Who needs AAA games anyway?

(I haven’t posted in a while but thought that I’d use my crippling illness to try and get back into the swing of posting regularly, because I do enjoying bashing my head against my little random corner of the Internet and seeing what spills out. And of course by crippling illness, I mean severe man flu)

I have had a very productive day finishing three games. Ghost Recon:Future Soldier, Tiny & Big in Grandpa’s Leftovers and Dead Pixels. I also started and finished Resident Evil 6, but when I say finished I don’t mean completed like I do with the other three games. I mean I started it and quickly put the game back in its rental case ready to be sent away, out of boredom and frustration.

I don’t know if it’s just me but it seems like the indie game scene has totally exploded in 2012. I know there’s always been a few really good indie games every year, shit last year Bastion came out, and that was one of my favourite games in 2011. But this year the number of great indie games seems to be outweighing the number of great so-called big games.

Take Resident Evil; there were two big console releases in the series this year. Twenty year old me would have probably had an aneurysm trying to wait for that to happen. Too bad for that perpetually half drunk student that both games are only useful as drinks coasters. Because they suck. Big time. And they’re not even great coasters on account of the great big holes in the middle of the discs.

It’s not just Resident Evil. Mass Effect 3 imploded, Assassin’s Creed 3 was uninteresting. Christ Resident Evil was crap twice.

But it’s cool because there’s loads of games just below the over hyped, underwhelming AAA titles flooding the shelves of GAME. Which makes me wonder if there’s always been this many great smaller games around or if my perception has just shifted because I’m looking elsewhere for my gaming fix. Or because this year was the year I got back into PC gaming big style. Or maybe I’m just playing way more games because of the stupid fucking NHL lockout.

Mass Effect 3 wasn’t great. No problem, I can get my sci-fi fix from FTL or Endless Space. Assassin’s Creed 3 was as interesting as watching golf. That’s cool because Mark of the Ninja was fucking boss.

I’m not going to go completely mental and start pronouncing the death of the AAA game like I’ve seen others do. There’s been loads of amazing big game releases this year (to name a few: XCOM, Max Payne 3, Spec Ops, GRFS). I guess it’s just really cool that when a game like Resident Evil 6 disappoints Levi can load up something like Tiny & Big (as I did today) and have an absolute blast.

Plus the logo for Resident Evil 6 looks like giraffe getting a blowjob, which did it no favours.