2nd November
Assassin's Creed III
Need for Speed: Most Wanted
WWE '13
Football Manager 2013
6th November
Halo 4
13th November
Call of Duty: Black Ops II
20th November
Hitman: Absolution
23rd November
Lego The Lord of the Rings
30th November
Wii U console + launch titles
Far Cry 3
Zone of the Enders HD collection
This doesn't take into account the numerous cash in games like Little Big Planet Karting, Avengers Kinect, Zumba, Andrew Lloyd Webber sing & dance along which will no doubt be average to poor which are purely designed to take advantage of well meaning Christmas shopping.
With the average price of these games around £40 in the UK if you wanted to get your hands on the big games of the season you would be looking at a whopping £400 this month not including the new Nintendo console (£250 for the most basic model, not a bad price to be fair for a new console launch with the premium bundle packs with one game coming in at £330). Ouch, unless you have a health bank account or family happy to spend a fortune on you during the holiday season people are going to have to economise. That doesn't even cover some of the big Christmas gift games like Fifa.
With advertising for some of these titles beating you about the eyes and ears all day every day (Halo, Assassin's Creed and Call of Duty being the key offenders who have been pushing their new title for what seems like forever) so you can be forgiven for being swept up in the Hype.
Most of these games aren't an unknown quantity, if you are fans of the franchise or genre you are unlikely to be disappointed with the products but do you NEED them immediately? For some of you the answer will be a resounding yes, at least for a few, highly competitive on-line players of games like COD will feel a desperate need to get on the leaderboards early otherwise they will be forever be left behind.
Taking the example of COD the question is with Modern Warfare, World at War, Modern Warfare 2, Black Ops and Modern Warfare 3 still swelling with 30,000,000 players of the franchise is it likely that you will either be the global number 1 or be short of players in the earlier iterations? Even someone who has every COD released to date (and I do) it is fair to say they have not significantly changed to the point of making the earlier versions redundant in terms of fun or visuals. Not to mention that this current model has done a great job of turning a great single player experience into little more than a few hours worth of tutorial for multiplayer and none of the production values or voice talent will convince me otherwise. I can say for experience that if I look at the accounts of people of my friends list very few of them even touch the single player campaign in the first week or release where I personally experience the narrative of the story, feel short-changed with the length and depth of the experience so play multiplayer to get some more life out of the title only to get my teeth kicked in by the online community.
The fact of the matter is that some of these games are shown to be or are sure to be good, in some cases really good, although reviews aren't necessarily anything to go by you are unlikely to see anything below an 80% average for any of them. Not bad at all, a rating like that pretty much promises you a game that will at least be enjoyable to most gamers whether you like the genre or not. As of right now Assassin's Creed III is sitting at around 85%, Halo 4 at 87%, Need for Speed at 84%, FIFA 2013 89% and WWE '13 at 80%.*
If you are the sort of person who only gets games at Christmas or only want the absolute best here are a list of games that have been released in 2012 that have an average review score* as high or higher than the new high profile Christmas release titles mentioned above.
- Journey
- Mass Effect 3
- Xenoblade Chronicles
- Guild Wars 2
- Trails Evolution
- Mark of the Ninja
- Borderlands 2
- Dishonored
- Xcom: Enemy Unknown
- The Walking Dead
- Max Payne 3
- Darksiders II
- Sleeping Dogs
These games are hardly hidden gems and some of them (*cough cough* Mass Effect & Borderlands) have some highly questionable DLC practices but it might be worth considering that for those of you that don't spend much money on their gaming collection that there are always alternatives to the big titles of the minute. Not to mention that with the exception of Hitman, Zone of the Enders and Far Cry these holiday season launch games are sequels of games that were released in the last 12 months.
Just look at Batman: Arkham City, as great a game as it is and as much as I love it if I knew that waiting a year would give me the game for a fraction of the price with all extra paid content included it would have been bumped down my list and I would be picking it up now instead.
At the end of the day shop around, do your research, have patience and be confident that any game publisher needs us far more than we need them.
*review aggregate obtained from gamerankings.com
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