Super Meat Boy comes down to personal skill, which might be the only reason I didn't fling the controller through the window. In other words, if you fail, it's your fault. If the levels weren't well-designed, or if the controls were off even by the slightest bit, Super Meat Boy would be an entirely different experience. As it stands, it's one of the best platformers I've ever played.

How much you get out of Dead Space 2 is directly proportional to how much you enjoy slicing up Necromorphs (or eviscerating humans in multiplayer). The campaign is designed for multiple plays, with a "new game plus" option allowing Isaac to take his items and upgrades into a new game, even on a new difficulty.

For a game so very, very large, it delivers everything in an easy to understand package no matter what route you take to playing it. The core Civilization experience is still there, but it's like an efficiency expert came in and streamlined everything that had gotten clunky with the series. It's a "friendly" strategy game.

And while it takes a while to build up, and lacks the rich variety of secrets you know from games like Mario 3 and Super Mario World, Super Mario 3D Land eventually becomes a demandingly hardcore, addictive platformer. It's also easily the most beautiful game on the 3DS, and one of the best-looking Mario games.

An imperfect, complex and ambitious reminder of what a game can be when it's unafraid.

The inclusion of surprisingly awesome Kinect features and extra in-game rewards offers new reasons to play and builds upon last year's solid foundation. Finally, the complete dribbling mechanics and First Touch Control dive into the gameplay equivalent of the "uncanny valley," offering an unrivaled sense of realism and unparalleled excitement.

The post game has been tweaked to be more responsive and allow for more subtle movements over last year's effort, and an improved shot stick means players have more options when trying to put the ball in the net. Last second fakes and finger rolls rule the day and are easily accomplished with a little practice.

Borderlands 2 is full of memorable moments and silly, crass folks – and if those silly, crass folks happen to be your friends, it's easily one of the best co-op experiences out there, and one of the best games I've played all year.

It's thrilling, it's satisfying, it's occasionally terrifying, and it's a completely unique take on multiplayer.

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit may have been a late entrant into the race, but it both grabs the checkered flag for this year and may set a land speed record for this entire class of racer.

I haven't smiled as much while playing a game since my first multiplayer run of LittleBigPlanet, and even then I was only smiling because I was terrible and enjoyed frustrating my friends as they ran gracefully through the levels. Fez is comparable to Braid or Limbo in terms of recent indie platformers, but it is infinitely more heartwarming than Braid and less terrifying than Limbo...There's a lot to be said for a game that can make a grown woman squeal with glee dozens of times in a playthrough.

The tale is twisted and terrifying, heart-wrenching yet timeless, much like the infinite, undead existences of the series' antagonists. If stronger emotions have been wrenched from your gut while visiting an art gallery, I'd love to hear about it.

L.A. Noire may not always be "fun" in the traditional sense, but it's also unsatisfied with being "merely fun," and the result of that aspiration is something that no one who cares about video games should miss.

The fact remains that XCOM: Enemy Unknown is an exemplary turn-based strategy game. Firaxis has deftly blended management, tactics and the sort of gut-level, throaty encounters usually reserved for fast-paced action games.

If solo play is your primary motivator, then it's hard to recommend Battlefield 3 as anything more than an audio-visual treat. The times where Battlefield 3 does its damnedest to go toe-to-toe with Call of Duty are the times it stumbles the hardest. But when DICE is doing what it's always done best, Battlefield 3 is a uniquely mesmerizing multiplayer game with a seemingly endless number of ways to feel like a success. It's not revolutionary, but it's the best Battlefield game, and that's saying a lot.

It's a gorgeous game on an epic scale. Rich in character and story, it creates a fantasy world with plausible social rules you can get lost in. It makes you feel that you aren't just exploring a new world, but helping shape it at various levels of society. Inquisition sets the bar for what a blockbuster RPG should be.

Through and through, Peace Walker is easily the best game on Sony's handheld, and walks all over some of great console games I've played, too.

The truest adaptation of the sport available.

The cycle of Dark Souls is essentially the same: Hours of diligent, often frustrating work followed by a surprising, often spectacular payoff.

Modern Warfare 3's multiplayer is some of the series' strongest, and the co-op offerings have been expanded tenfold. But the campaign will leave you yearning, wishing that the characters were differentiated by more than thick accents, or that the gameplay tried something more than aim, shoot, take cover, reload, rinse and repeat.

What makes Dishonored great are the mechanics made possible by the universe in which it exists. There is a level of replayability and creativity available here that isn't seen in most stealth action games. You aren't just figuring out how you need to get from point A to point B, but how you want to get there.

The gravity-shifting sections spliced into existing and new tracks feel like a natural extension of the series rather than a gameplay-changing revelation, but it's a strong compliment to an already enjoyable experience. The social features are surprisingly solid and may even outlive the total course selection, but it helps that the new tracks feel as worthy of a revisit as the series' standouts.

Shovel Knight isn't just inspired by 8-bit classics, it is inspired in and of itself.

I'm giving Torchlight 2 a half-star less. The game makes some minor missteps in design, and I don't think the pacing or the scope matches up to that of Diablo 3...Those complaints aside, Runic has made a phenomenal game here, and fans of the original will be overjoyed to find that most of what they loved is still here, with lots more of it.

Most importantly, the game seems to have been designed with usability in mind, while also maintaining the endless reams of Pokémon trivia and esoteric references that longtime fans demand.

It's this bouncing between serious tone and irreverence that makes The Stanley Parable so special. You never know what to expect and the thrill of discovering something new is reinforced by great narration and often capricious events. But more than anything, it's this choice at the center of it all that makes The Stanley Parable a game about self-discovery.

At its core, Diablo 3 is a series of combat encounters and, when you realize just how carefully it's put together, Blizzard's expertise is staggering.

LittleBigPlanet Vita positively bursts with charm and cleverness. It's more refinement than revolution, but that also makes it the purest distillation of the concept's potential. Don't let franchise fatigue keep you from this latest incarnation; it's the best yet.