If 2012 has shown us one thing, it’s that video game development is truly in the “crossover era.” GamesBeat’s 2012 Game of the Year, The Walking Dead, was first available as a downloadable title, not a retail release. Other downloadables, such as indie-developed darlings Journey and Faster Than Light, garnered plenty of votes as well. And in our staff’s and contributor’s top games of the year lists, we even see mobile releases — like Fieldrunners 2.

Gaming has changed, and it’s nice to see that it’s more than just big-budget console and PC titles that have earned Game of the Year attention. Here are the top games as chosen by GamesBeat staffers and contributors. Let us know what you think about our picks in the comments — especially if you feel we’ve left something off our lists!

Editor-in-chief Dan “Shoe” Hsu

XCOM: Enemy Unknown
Platforms: PC, Xbox 360, PS3
Publisher: 2K Games
Developer: Firaxis Games

Little green men — yesteryear’s poster boys for mysterious invaders from outer space — are about as menacing as Oompa Loompas armed with toy guns. XCOM’s little gray men, however, are scary as hell. It’s not the ashen skin, bulbous eyes, or creepy-crawly walk. It’s what these Sectoids represent: a greater threat that we are simply not equipped to handle.

In the strategy game XCOM: Enemy Unknown, we mere humans bring dull knives to plasma gunfights. And just when we start to catch up in weapon technology, the bug-eyed bastards bring bigger guns and meaner friends. These jerks even cheat with mysterious mind-control powers. Meanwhile, we’re barely keeping the checkbook balanced between research, manufacturing, facility construction, aircraft, and an ever-decreasing budget due to world nations pulling out of the program if you can’t keep them safe (and you can never keep them all safe).

It all adds up to an incredibly exciting and stressful experience. Each decision — whether it’s which tree to hide your assault trooper behind or which whiny country gets your last airspace-monitoring satellite — feels monumental and permanent. Humanity’s existence is at stake, and we just want to make it to the next month, when a few more pennies come rolling in and a few more traumatized soldiers get out of sick bay.

It’s a desperate fight. And boy will we celebrate when those little gray men are dead.

Shoe’s other picks for best games of 2012: Fieldrunners 2, Dishonored, Journey, Fez

Lead writer Dean Takahasi

The Unfinished Swan
Platform: PlayStation 3 (PlayStation Network)
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment America
Developer: Giant Sparrow

The Unfinished Swan is one of the most creative titles yet for the PlayStation Network. It’s an interactive fairy tale where you lob blobs of black paint at a white screen. As you do so, you uncover part of a 3D space hidden within the white scene. Uncovering each scene is a mind-bending task, as you have to navigate perplexing puzzles. You explore the unknown, and as you do so, you uncover a new segment in a fairy tale about a boy who loses his mother. It is a touching story that will remind of you of the zany Alice in Wonderland. Ian Dallas, the game creator, feels that a child who is abandoned is like an unfinished work of art. But just when you think that the game has become predictable, it changes. In some ways, the story seems unfinished. But the title is a wonderful first effort for Giant Sparrow, a new studio bankrolled by Sony.

Dean’s other picks for the best games of 2012: Halo 4, Far Cry 3, Journey, Call of Duty: Black Ops II

Culture editor Sebastian Haley

Hotline Miami
Platform: PC
Publisher: Developer Digital
Developer: Dennaton Games

Indie sensation Hotline Miami is best described as the film Drive, but in a retro, pixelated and somehow even more violent form, with subtle hints of Rockstar’s Manhunt sprinkled on top. The short-but-sickeningly sweet levels allow you to carefully orchestrate your symphony of murder and mayhem, filling the floors with maimed corpses and spraying the walls with crimson, all while its surreal, Miami Vice-inspired soundtrack beats in the back of your mind. Basically, if you own a Wii or like looking at livestreams of kittens, this is not your kind of game.

Sebastian’s other picks for best games of 2012: Trials Evolution, Far Cry 3, The Darkness II, Final Fantasy XIII-2

Staff writer Jeff Grubb

Mark of the Ninja
Platform: Xbox 360 (Xbox Live Arcade), PC
Publisher: Microsoft Studios
Developer: Klei Entertainment

For these Game of the Year summaries, we’re supposed to look above and beyond the individual parts of a game. We’re supposed to write about why it is important, but in the case of Mark of the Ninja, it’s those parts that make it so special. Developer Klei’s 2D stealth action game for Xbox Live Arcade and PC is a master class in well-executed gameplay mechanics. Whether it’s a soundwave that ripples off your ninja’s feet to indicate how much noise he’s making or a vision cone that indicates where an enemy is looking, Mark of the Ninja is constantly communicating with the player. It then provides the player with a great controlling character to poke and prod the world with.

It’s not rare that a game makes you feel like a badass, but with Klei’s game it’s not about how powerful you are — it’s about how in tune with the environment your character is. You have so much visual and aural information that every moment is an opportunity for experimentation. You can spend 10 minutes laying out a detailed plan that involves deadly traps, or you can play the entire game without a sword.

In video games, we don’t usually get a lot of new ideas, we just get different takes on old ideas. Stealth is an old idea at this point, but Mark of the Ninja distinguishes itself by executing the concept better than any other game before it.

Jeff’s other picks for best games of 2012: The Walking Dead, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Trials Evolution, FTL: Faster Than Light

Copy editor Jason Wilson

FTL: Faster Than Light
Platform: PC, Mac, Linux
Publisher: Subset Games
Developer: Subset Games

I’m low on fuel. My crew raced around my starship like a colony of ants, hastily putting out fires as doors opened to the cold vacuum of space. The Rebels are closing in on me. Do I take a chance and see if I can gain more fuel in the next nebular cloud, or do I make a mad dash for the next sector and hope to find friendly forces instead of angry adversaries? These are just some of the choices the player faces in FTL: Faster Than Light, the indie roguelike that’s swept upon a number of Game of the Year lists in 2012 (including ours!). What makes FTL so compelling to players is that a take on Civilization’s “one more turn” addictive nature — but instead of furthering your game, you’re driven to see if your next attempt takes you closer to escaping the pursuing Rebel forces. And it’s this that makes FTL one of the most interesting, fascinating, and, yes, best games of 2012.

Jason’s other picks for best games of 2012: The Walking Dead, Crusader Kings II, Torchlight II, Dragon’s Dogma

Contributor Rus McLaughlin

Far Cry 3
Platforms: Xbox 360, PS3, PC
Publisher: Ubisoft
Developer: Ubisoft Montreal

Something visceral. Something primal. Most shooters don’t have these. They settle you into a safe, comfortable role. Veteran soldier. Seasoned cop. Career criminal. A hero … or an antihero. But Far Cry 3 makes you run blind through the jungle while murderous pirates hunt you like a piece of prey. You’re just a terrified kid. Never held a gun before. Never seen anyone die before. Now you’re covered in your own brother’s blood and getting high off the giddy thrill of mere survival. Then you’re turned lose to roam two amazingly rich, open-world islands where you can really start enjoying yourself, slowly and cautiously picking your tormentors apart. Before you know it, the elation you get from destroying a criminal empire hardens into a different kind of drug: revenge.

That’s when Far Cry 3 surpasses the standard shooter fare. An aimless twentysomething becomes a killer of killers, as feared as the insane warlords he wants dead. Between coolly tense stealth play and straight-up gunfights, you become the predator, stalking intruders in your jungle and murdering them at will. It all culminates in a moment where you must decide just how much you enjoy that particular power fantasy. Enough to abandon your humanity? Maybe.

Far Cry 3 goes there. Solid gameplay — minus a weak-tea multiplayer — and incredibly detailed environments lift it far enough, but its secret weapon lies in how it takes you into that dark, primal place. And then it dares you to ignore your basic animal instincts.

Rus’s other picks for best games of 2012: The Walking Dead, Fez, Halo 4, Journey

Contributing editor Rob Savillo

Contributor Rob LeFebvre

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best video game stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week, Zynga lost more executives but announced new games from its partners, Nintendo announced the North American price and release date for the Wii U, and Apple unveiled the iPhone 5.

You’ll also find reviews for Tekken Tag 2, Tokyo Jungle, Avengers Initiative, Joe Danger 2, Fractured Soul, and LittleBigPlanet Vita.

News:

• Obama runs presidential campaign ads in EA’s online games
• The DeanBeat: A stellar week for gamers
• Activision is finally swinging for the fences in mobile games (interview)
• Shocker! A video game trailer’s popularity foretells sales
• Startup Seeds makes a game out of microlending
• Take it to Vegas: 80M Madden 13 online games match NFL’s Week 1 results (infographic)
  
• Zynga confirms it hired real-money gambling chief
  
• Magic fingers: SoftKinetic is at the core of Intel’s ‘perceptual computing’ technology (video demo)
  
• Nvidia launches two new Kepler-based graphics chips
• 4 things gamers will appreciate in the new Wreck-It Ralph trailer
• Satirical new puzzle game brings out the fun in arguing about politics (exclusive)
• Report confirms that social casino games have hit the jackpot with $1.6B in revenue
• Clay Jam is a Michael Bay-infused explosion of color and crafts (with exclusive screens)
• Two game developers arrested in Greece under suspicion of espionage
• Half-Life remake among first batch of games cleared in Steam’s Greenlight approval program
• With Kinect-like gestures, SoftKinetic leads the way to Intel’s perceptual computing
• Coming to consoles: Dig deep and build high in the exploration game Terraria
• Everything you need to know about Planetary Annihilation, before it completes funding (Exclusive)
• Intel reinvents the PC for the age of ‘perceptual computing’
• Harvard’s ‘wise men’ tell Silicon Valley: Our country is losing its competitiveness
• Agawi to use Microsoft’s Windows Azure to bring cloud-gaming services to Windows 8
• Executive turnover continues: Zynga loses its chief marketing officer Jeff Karp
• Zynga cloud guru Allan Leinwand departs for ServiceNow
• Blast your way through Unova with the new Mythical Pokémon Genesect
• Valve launches beta for Steam’s Big Picture Mode: Now you never have to leave the couch
• Zynga launches first batch of partner games, adds nine more third-party studios

Wii U:

• Nintendo’s touchscreen TV service for the Wii U plays catch-up (hands-on video)
• Catch Mario, Bayonetta, and Sonic in these Wii U game videos
• Here are the Wii U games you’ll be playing at launch (or close to it)
• Nintendo targets the living room with Nintendo TVii
• Nintendo’s Wii U console lands in stores Nov. 18 in two flavors, base price of $300
• Nintendo announces Wii U price and launch details in Japan

Mobile news:

• BitGym brings motion gaming to mobile devices
• The iPod’s A5X vs. the iPhone 5′s A6: Does it matter for games?
• Natural Motion shows off cute Clumsy Ninja app on the iPhone 5
• iPhone 5 allows ‘ghost racing’ against another player’s best time in Real Racing 3
• In a twist, Zynga to import two mobile games from its Japan division
• From bikes to games to video games to…tablets? Toys ‘R’ Us bets on Tabeo

Interviews:

• Clumsy Ninja’s 10-year journey to make it to Apple’s iPhone 5 launch stage (video interview)
• Firefall dev discusses major gameplay changes and its Kickstarter-inspired monetization strategy (interview)

Previews:

• Guns of Icarus Online developers want to make ‘the most co-op game’ imaginable (hands-on preview)
• Contagion aims to save the zombie game genre from itself (hands-on preview)

Reviews:

• Tokyo Jungle is a comically rewarding journey through the vicious circle of life (review)
• Even with robots, dinosaurs, and tons of action, Joe Danger 2 repeats the same stunts (review)
• Touch controls make LittleBigPlanet Vita the series’s definitive entry (review)
• Fractured Soul is a clever, challenging platformer that requires all your brainpower (review)
• Tekken Tag Tournament 2 delivers entertaining yet uninspired beat downs (review)
• Avengers Initiative delivers thrilling bite-sized superhero combat but not much else (review)

Pieces of flare:

• GamesBeat’s massive 92-character Street Fighter tournament: The deadly preliminaries!
• Katamari’s Prince rises as a webcomic star
• Cool gaming demos at Intel’s developer event (gallery)

Tokyo Jungle is a game that shouldn’t exist. In such a risk-averse climate where only the top triple-A titles can seemingly turn a profit, no one in their right mind would green-light a project as bizarre as a free roaming postapocalyptic animal-survival simulation. That is, no one but Sony Computer Entertainment Japan, and Tokyo Jungle’s developer, Crispy’s.

Remember that hunting scene from the film I Am Legend, where a lioness takes out a lone deer in an overgrown Times Square? The world of Tokyo Jungle is a lot like that. It’s simultaneously harrowing, funny, and even touching. It plays like nothing else in the market right now.

And it might just be one of the best games of the year.

WHAT YOU’LL LIKE

It’s an interactive Discovery Channel documentary
The goal in Survival mode is to hunt, eat, breed, and die. You age one year for every minute of game time, and death is permanent. How you manage to survive, and the strategies you use, depends on the type of animal you’re playing as — a predator, who hunts other animals for food, or a grazer, who eats plants.

The beauty of permanent death is it really trains you (and a friend, if you play local multiplayer) to pay attention to what works and what doesn’t: My first foray as a spunky pomeranian lasted all but five minutes, thanks to my foolishness in trying to take on a wild boar. When you factor in the environmental dangers — toxic smog, disease, fleas, blistering temperatures, limited visibility at night and in heavy rain — that randomly occur, Survival is an unpredictable experience every time you play.

Role-playing mechanics, as represented by various health bars and animal stats, blend well into this chaotic system. Since some stats pass on to your offspring, the game encourages you to build the healthiest animal you can through successive generations. It’s no small task, as you’ll have to claim territories before you breed, but it feels immensely rewarding once you reach certain milestones, as when I first surpassed 75 years with my pack of jackals.

Containing this madness is Tokyo, a never-ending playground full of collapsed streets and derelict buildings. After over 20 hours of playing, I was still finding new places to explore. Mother Nature’s large, twisted vines “bridge” many disparate parts of the city together, so conquering it feels manageable despite its large size.

A surprisingly poignant story
Spread across 14 chapters (and a multitude of in-game “archives”), the Story mode is the other half of the game. It’s underwhelming at first, serving as little more than an advanced tutorial. But you’ll quickly learn that each chapter, despite focusing on different animal species, connects with one another. These animals have a sense of personality and humor, portrayed through subtitled dialogue, as they try to adjust to their new urban jungle.

Some chapters focus on the tragedy of losing one’s family, others about slaughtering entire packs of animals to reclaim territory, and one or two thrives on the absurdity of the situation with hilarious anecdotes. It’s when you’re finally nailing down just what happened to the world, and the rest of humanity, where the story mode truly shines. You’ll never guess how it ends.

Rewarding moments
I was ready to give up on Tokyo Jungle multiple times, whether it was because I grew tired of the in-game challenges or angry that yet another hyena ambushed me, killing years of progress. But when I do, the game always manages to reel me back in. Sometimes, this was in the form of a entertaining chapter in the story; more often than not, it came from the chaotic, and unscripted, events that punctuate the Survival experience.

One memorable instance happened when I was playing as a gazelle: As I cruised through the Shibuya shopping district looking for food, a frightened pair of roosters suddenly scattered past me, but I thought nothing of it. Then a pack of wolves appeared in pursuit of their prey, and chasing them were two lionesses; at this point, I had to follow them. All of them converged at the end of a block, where a single alligator happened to be sleeping. When it woke up, the situation turned into absolute insanity as the animals viciously attacked one another. Only the alligator (and me, hiding in the background) got out of that mess alive.

WHAT YOU WON’T LIKE

Stealth mechanics from the last decade
While some games may be pushing the stealth genre to new heights, Tokyo Jungle is intent on keeping things the way they always used to be. Stealth is a must if you choose to play as a grazer, since they’re generally poor fighters, and you’ll have to stick to hiding from predators in tall patches of grass or by sneaking past them.

It’s impossible to tell how well you’re hiding: Sometimes, I can stand a few feet away from an animal in a wide-open space but still be completely invisible to them. Other times, as when I was playing a hyena, I carefully crept past a sleeping wolf, who immediately woke up and killed me. The lack of visual information to let you know how you’re doing leads to repeated failure, and it can get to the point of controller-throwing levels of frustration.

Odd A.I. behavior
For the most part, the nonplayable animals in Tokyo behave naturally, but some quirks in the artificial intelligence can make the game feel broken. When you’re traveling as a pack, your fellow siblings can get stuck in corners or in buildings if you move too fast. And the more sensitive predators can whip into a frenzy over the smallest thing, as when I was traversing through the sewers as a beagle, and a large group of alligators a full story below me picked up my scent and started to jump and snap at me in an endless animation loop.

The A.I is at its worst when paired with the mandatory stealth sequences found in the Story mode. Too much of it feels like it’s left to chance, rather than pure skill.

Atrocious loading screen
Every time you manage to save your progress, die, or begin a new game in Survival, the same five-second video of a broken TV signal plays over and over. I have no idea why it does this, but I suspect that it might be masquerading as a loading screen. It’s incredibly annoying.

CONCLUSION

For the longest time, I couldn’t decide whether I loved or hated this game. The lack of polish in some areas and questionable design decisions in others can overshadow Tokyo Jungle’s moments of brilliance. As I finished the story, however, I realized I couldn’t stop smiling: It knows how absurd it is, but it doesn’t care. The developers takes the ridiculous concept and runs with it all the way, mainstream tastes be damned. That’s something you really have to admire.

Score: 85/100

Tokyo Jungle will be available exclusively on the PlayStation Network on Tuesday, September 25 for $14.99. The publisher provided a review code for the purpose of this review. I logged 22 hours across both the Survival and Story modes, completed the campaign, and unlocked about a quarter of the animals.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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