X-Play's Best of 2012 Awards Results - 2012 Game of the Year and More!

X-Play has announced the winners of their Best of 2012 awards! Once again the internal fights have been had, the votes have been tallied, the event has been held, and now they've handed out hardware honoring the year's best in gaming across a huge range of categories. Relive all the action and find out if your favorite games won right here!

Game of the Year

Borderlands 2

Best of 2012: Game of the Year

Check after the break for the full list of winners in all categories, including Best RPG, Best Multiplayer, Best Shooter, Best Writing, Most Original Game and more! All nominees are listed, and the winners are in bold.

Best Multiplayer Game 

Awesomenauts
Day Z
Assassin’s Creed 3
Halo 4
Call of Duty: Black Ops 2

 Best Multiplayer Co-Op Game 

Halo 4
Guild Wars 2
Borderlands 2
Mass Effect 3
Journey

B

Best Sports Game 

NBA 2K13
Madden NFL 13
NHL 13
UFC Undisputed 3
MLB 12: The Show

Best Downloadable Game 

Fez
Mark of the Ninja
Journey
The Unfinished Swan
The Walking Dead

Best Shooter 

Halo 4
Call of Duty: Black Ops 2
Max Payne 3
Far Cry 3
Borderlands 

Best Role-Playing Game 

Mass Effect 3
Guild Wars 2
Xenoblade Chronicles
The Witcher 2 Enhanced Edition
Dragon’s Dogma

Best Fighting Game 

SoulCalibur V
Persona 4 Arena
PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale
Virtua Fighter 5 Final Showdown
Skullgirls

Best Art Direction 

Journey
The Unfinished Swan
Fez
Halo 4
Darksiders 2

Best Animation 

Hitman: Absolution
Skullgirls
Far Cry 3
Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two
Max Payne 3

Best Writing 

Borderlands 2
Spec Ops: The Line
Far Cry 3
Assassin’s Creed IIIThe Walking Dead: The Game

Best Soundtrack

Guild Wars 2
Assassin’s Creed 3: Liberation
Darksiders 2Spec Ops: The Line
Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two

Best Sound Design 

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2
Diablo 3
Journey
Transformers: Fall of Cybertron
Sound Shapes

Best Action/Adventure Game 

Assassin’s Creed 3
The Walking Dead
Mark of the Ninja
Sleeping Dogs
Hitman: Absolution

Best Racing Game

Forza Horizon
Need For Speed Most Wanted
LittleBigPlanet Karting
Trials Evolution

Best Social Game 

Simpsons Tapped Out
Marvel: Avengers Alliance
Draw Something
SongPop
The Grinns Tale

Best Platformer 

Fez
Journey
Sound Shapes
Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two
New Super Mario Bros. 2

Best Puzzle/Strategy Game 

XCOM: Enemy Unknown
FTL: Faster Than Light
Vessel
Botanicula
Hotline Miami

Best Mobile Game 

The Pinball Arcade
God Of Blades
10000000
Bad Piggies
Plague Inc.

Best Fitness Game

Dance Central 3
Just Dance 4
Nike+ Kinect Training
Your Shape: Fitness Evolved 2013 (Wii U)

Best Voice Acting Performance 

Troy Baker - Jazz, Transformers: Fall of Cybertron
Adrian Hough - Haytham Kenway, Assassin’s Creed 3
Nolan North - Walker, Spec Ops: The Line
Jennifer Hale - Female Shepard, Mass Effect 3
Will Yun Lee - Wei Shen, Sleeping Dogs

Best Remake/Retro Release 

Okami HD
Double Dragon: Neon
The Ratchet & Clank Collection
The Pinball Arcade
Jet Set Radio HD

Android Games

Catch My Nervous Balls

iPhone games top rated

Olive's Adventure!

Super Monkey Ball: Banana Splitz

Super Monkey Ball: Banana Splitz's disappointing collection of minigames can't live up to the standards of classic Monkey Ball gameplay.

The Good

• Classic Monkey Ball levels are nicely challenging   
• Colourful visuals.

The Bad

• Minigames are dull and often confusing   
• Multiplayer modes rely on those same minigames   
• Edit mode doesn't let you create your own courses.

The beauty of Monkey Ball has always been in its simplicity. Those teetering-on-the-edge, twitchy moments as you coaxed your monkey-filled ball across treacherous platforms, moving obstacles, and gaping chasms were wholly compelling, and a lot of fun to boot. And so they remain in Super Monkey Ball: Banana Splitz, for the most part. While the standard Monkey Ball challenges are largely well-designed, colourful slices of classic Monkey Ball action, Banana Splitz's other modes are a convoluted, frustrating mess. The minigames range from dull to horribly confusing, giving you little reason to try to compete against others.

The classic Monkey Ball levels are bright and colourful.

It's best to stick to the classic Monkey Ball mode. There, you must guide the cute monkey ball of your choice by tilting platforms with the analogue stick and rolling the ball around a devilishly challenging selection of courses, which are spread across beginner, normal, and advanced difficulty levels. Each course sports a different and wildly colourful theme that sets the tone for the challenges ahead. The beginner levels are bright, palm-tree-infused affairs with wide platforms, simple curves, and easy-to-reach bananas. Normal ushers in dinosaurs and prehistoric objects that try to smash your ball out of the way, while advanced brings the pain with heaps of jumps, holes, and impossibly thin platforms to navigate.

The advanced difficulty level almost errs on the side of being too hard, but there's always a way to make it through each level and towards the goal at the end, even if the solution isn't immediately obvious. That's so long as you stick to the analogue stick controls, though. Trying to complete anything but the easiest of levels with the motion controls is a painful experience--they simply aren't accurate enough, not to mention that it's difficult to see the screen when you're tilting it away from your face to slow your monkey ball down. That lack of precision also makes collecting bananas all the more difficult, which you need to do to earn high scores, or extra lives and continues should you fall off the edge of a platform one to many times.

You can relive those glorious moments of failure by saving replays of them to one of 16 slots, and you can share them--along with replays of your successes--with other Banana Blitz players. It's nowhere near as useful as sharing full-track playthroughs, but there are some amusing bailouts to be found online. Speaking of online, Banana Blitz features a full multiplayer mode via online and ad hoc connections, as well as simple pass-the-handheld play. Unfortunately, the multiplayer modes don't make use of the franchise's classic gameplay and instead focus on a series of minigames.

And those minigames are something of a mess. Things start off promisingly enough with Monkey Target, where you launch your monkey ball off a ramp and float it through the air, pass through checkpoints, and attempt to land on a platform at the end. There are three variations of the mode that change up the layout of the final landing platform--including a neat pinball-inspired layout--but all variants quickly become repetitive. So too does Monkey Bowling and its touch-screen controls that make it far too easy to score a strike each and every time, even on levels where there are warped lanes or gaps.

Monkey Rodeo is just one of the poorly executed minigames in Banana Blitz.

Those are the best of the bunch, though. Take Monkey Rodeo, an infuriating game where you have to collect bananas by bouncing ball-riding monkeys around with the rear touch pad. It's nigh on impossible to control your monkey and earn points, and the overly aggressive AI relentlessly smashes into you. There's the sluggish Battle Billiards too, which, despite the injection of monkeys in balls, fails to make playing billiards at all exciting. But the very worst of the lot is Pixie Hunt. Here, you're asked to use the Vita's camera to take photos of objects that match the colour of the reticle and…that's it. That's the whole game. The fact that someone, somewhere, at some stage in this game's development thought that was entertaining is maddening.

Similarly maddening is the promisingly titled Edit mode, which isn't actually a way to create your own wacky Monkey Ball courses using the touch screen. Instead, it's a simple random course generator that lets you snap a picture using the Vita's camera and use it as a background. That's incredibly disappointing. Fun (if not wholly original) as the classic Monkey Ball mode may be, it's not enough to prop up the rest of this confused mishmash of mundane minigames.

Mass Effect Trilogy

When BioWare announced the Mass Effect Trilogy in September, the developer slated the three-pack to arrive for PC and Xbox 360 on November 6, but kept quiet on a release date for the PlayStation 3. That has now changed, as BioWare has confirmed the Mass Effect Trilogy will be available for the Sony faithful on December 4.

The original Mass Effect never released for the PS3, but not only will Sony crowd get to play the game for the first time as part of the Trilogy, the title will also be available as a standalone download on the PlayStation Network.

The Trilogy includes the original Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2, and Mass Effect 3, and will be available at retail for $60. A price for the standalone Mass Effect game through the PlayStation Network was not announced.

BioWare also detailed what PS3 fans can expect in the way of downloadable content for the Mass Effect Trilogy. The company said the PS3 version will include the original Mass Effect's Bring Down the Sky content, while Mass Effect 2 will feature the Cerberus Network (which includes the Kasumi, Overlord, and Lair of the Shadow Broker content). Lastly, BioWare said Mass Effect 3 for PS3 within the Trilogy will be "exactly as it originally shipped."