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Point-and-click adventure games have been pronounced a “dead genre” time and time again.

And Phoenix Online Studios has a name synonymous with rebirth.

Phoenix’s first released game was The Silver Lining, the King’s Quest-inspired adventure that earned them both a loyal fanbase… and a cease and desist. In 2012, I started following their work on their first commercial episodic series: Cognition: an Erica Reed Thriller. In my review, I visited the ups and downs of the game’s first episode. The “ups” were enough to encourage me to give the second episode a try… and, at PAX this week, I got a chance to chat with Phoenix’s Katie Hallahan for some previews of the third. We also talked about some of Phoenix’s other upcoming projects in the adventure game world.

I’m going to start this feature off without any real spoilers, but if you like dark supernatural mysteries, it would be worth your time to check out the Cognition series before reading. The second episode in particular gets … amazingly gruesome, and I must say some late-game twists warmed my sociopathic heart.

With Bioshock Infinite only days away and the recent re-release of System Shock 2 on Good Old Games I figured now would be a good time to dredge up this article from the darkest depths of my drafts.

When I was writing my Games of 2011 there was one game I wanted to include but couldn’t because a) it was released in 2010 and I’d restricted myself to 2011 releases, and b) I’d already written most of this as a separate article. That game was Bioshock 2.

I picked it up on Steam for £3.49 during a summer sale and in truth I didn’t expect an awful lot from it because, while it had generally been well received, it apparently didn’t measure up to its much lauded predecessor — a game which I didn’t share such a glowing fondness for. Whatever expectations I had however, where blown out of the… uh, yeah, I’ll leave that pun in my head where it belongs.

2012 was a lot of things, as most years are. My colleagues have discussed most of these things quite entertainingly, and so I will spare you from further use of the words “Kickstarter,” “Greenlight,” “Entitlement” and so on. Except for right there, just then.

If you’re intensely plugged into the independent gaming scene then you probably consider 2012 a banner year for the continuing rise of the indie. I’m only slightly plugged into that scene, so I consider 2012 an okay year in which The Last Guardian still saw no light of day and increasingly slight hopes for a new Half-Life could be taken off life support with rumors buzzing that Valve intends to focus their energy on entering the console market.

However, those disappointments have been quelled almost wholly by my games of the year…

When I read Brandon’s post on ‘gamer’s block’ I took a step back to consider whether I’d suffered from it at any point and, truth be told, I don’t think I have. Like many others around here, I’ve got an absurd backlog of games and while the size and my distinct lack of time to make even a dent in it intimidates me, it also excites me, especially when I’ve finished off whatever it is I’m currently playing and have the time to pluck something else from my virtual shelf.

In the dawn of 2012, I tore a leaf from my Starcraft 2 Jim Raynor Wanted Poster keepsake notebook (best thing about that game, really), determined to write down great titles as I played them. I always draw a blank when people ask for stuff I should remember, and Games of the Year articles are too important to leave to memory… especially mine. For twelve months that increasingly defiled sheet survived the chaotic sluice of cords, bills, beer cans, notes to self, and discarded gaming mice that is my desk. I exhumed it the other day.

Now, I admit this hasn’t been the best year for games, but there were more titles scrawled on there than I have medals for. After all, we don’t hand out awards like candy around here. So a whole lot of thinkin’, and even a fair amount of replayin’, was to come before the tally was in. This year I humbly offer five titles worthy of Tap-Repeatedly Special Achievement Awards, plus a handful of mentions of the honorable variety.

It’s 2013, which means we all survived the end of 2012. Despite those rumors we might not! So break out the bubbly, as it’s time for some of us to discuss our games and game trends of the past year.

This year I have the honor of being the first Tap contributor to write a Games of the Year list. My list starts with five games that stuck out to me personally this year. This isn’t just games I enjoyed (though it’s all games I enjoyed). It’s also a list of games that I feel represent some important trends that happened in 2012.

After the game list, I’m going to talk briefly about looking at games from the developer side in 2012 also, so you can get the full perspective of where I lived this year!

Can games mean?  How?  And when they do, who’s responsible?  AJ and Dix take on authorship.  Read on!

Year’s end: to some, respite; others, opportunity and new beginnings. To most everyone though: reflection. As many of us here look back on another year in search of inspiration or some meaning, I need to look deeper, farther back than a “year-in-review” will permit.

No, this is a life-in-review. I guess video games played a part in it.

Ben Hoyt is an old friend and longtime industry veteran – he did a Celebrity Guest Editorial for us a while back, and has appeared as a guest star in some of my posts over the years. We’ve been meaning to do a sort of sweeping discussion of the Mass Effect series for some time now, and it’s ready at last!

It’s been a while since a few of us got together for a group impressions piece. The last one we did for Bloodline Champions was, in all honesty, a bastard to organise. The ‘A Weekend With’ feature should have been called ‘A Painful Exercise In Arranging A Group Across Multiple Disparate Time Zones’, but that didn’t quite have the same ring to it. This time however, things have been a lot simpler, mainly because Matthew ‘Steerpike’ Sakey and Max ‘xtal’ Boone are a lot simpler, but also because they both share the same time zone (Center of Universe Time, I’m told).

With the help of our not-so-trusty AI gunner (who Max affectionately named ‘Chesty Larue’), the three of us were intent on conquering the skies in Muse Games’ aeronautical multiplayer shooter Guns of Icarus Online. However, our intent was one thing, the reality was quite another…

As gamers, boss battles are practically in our blood.  They go back at least as far as 1975.  They’ve long been the go-to climax for a game adventure, the final goal for players of all ages.  Sometimes they are epic set pieces.  Sometimes…not.

Recent years have seen several titles get criticized for weak boss battles, even become notorious for them.  Has gaming outgrown bosses?  Has the march of progress left boss battles as vestigial as so many instruction booklets?  Dix and Steerpike clash in the bottommost dungeon to find out.

My biggest game-writing project to date wrapped a while back, and I thank you who chose to explore even part of it. Like all things, the story grows in the telling. I never planned to publish the Dark Souls Diaries. It started as nothing more than an email series to disinterested friends. The first several installments were just heavily edited versions of those emails.

When I elected to put them on Tap, it stopped being a goofy thing and became a matter requiring a degree of journalistic integrity. As the Diaries grew in popularity, so also grew my responsibility to be accurate. As such, the evolution of the Diaries took place alongside the evolution of my knowledge regarding the game. This epilogue is the story of that journey, plus the final moments of the game upon which the Diaries are based, and a short look at the recent Prepare to Die PC port. It may not be the last thing I’ll ever write about Dark Souls. But it is the end of this particular (and for most of you, unendurably tedious) chronicle.

Earlier on in the year, Harbour Master and I got together to play Terry Cavanagh’s dithered local co-op curiosity At A Distance (which you may remember me mentioning in my Eurogamer Expo coverage last year). It’s an enigmatic oddball that few people have played — despite it appearing at countless game shows and indie shindigs — and one that even fewer have experienced through to the very end. You see, most people who finish At A Distance, don’t really finish it; they see just the beginning. We saw the end, and we’re not afraid to talk about it.

While you’re over there, you may notice that changes are abreast. Until now the good ship Electron Dance has been a solo affair, captained by part-man, part-machine Joel Goodwin aka Harbour Master. Well today HM has welcomed Eric Brasure aboard, a man who, according to his about page on Charles Wallace on Camazotz, ‘used to do stuff at SecondQuest.vg’. For more information on him and a brief primer on his Dialogue Tree podcasts (which is what originally attracted HM’s attention and what will be re-appearing on ED over the coming months) I recommend reading the welcome post and having a listen to the short four minute chat between the two of them.

To contact the author of this babble email greggb@tap-repeatedly.com

Hidden Path Entertainment kickstarted the viability of commercial-grade tower defense games with 2008’s critically acclaimed Defense Grid: the Awakening, and has now turned to Kickstarter to partially fund the development of more Defense Grid – potentially up to the Big Prize, a full sequel.

I electronically buttonholed Jeff Pobst, the CEO of Hidden Path Entertainment, for an exclusive Q&A about the company, the Kickstarter, and the future of Defense Grid.

It was the final Guild Wars 2 closed beta last weekend before its highly anticipated release on the 28th. My brother, Lewis B, who left Tap a couple of months ago to write for MMOG site Ten Ton Hammer, invited me and fellow MMOG noob Steerpike to join him to see what all the fuss was about. Between the two of us, our combined MMOG experience before the beta weekend amounted to making a character in Ultima Online, killing a carrion spider in Dark Age of Camelot and spending eight minutes in Rift. We were surely destined for doom.