2014 was bad if you didn't own a Wii U. Mario Kart 8, Bayonetta 2, Donkey Kong: Tropical Freeze, Smash Bros., Shovel Knight, Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, all great games. Seeing Shadow of Mordor and Dragon Age walk away with all the awards while games like MK8 and Tropical Freeze were left in the dirt just baffles me to this day.
2012 was the real bad one. I understand why people love Journey, but it left no lasting impact on me. Same with The Walking Dead. Dishonored was pretty great, and NSMBU was a lot better than I had expected. Apart from that...ehhh...
We're in a similar place with this.
Anyone answering with 2014 clearly didn't own a Wii U and didn't get to experience its peak. On the Wii U it was heaven. It was also Hearthstone's first and freshest year, before it was inundated with expansion creep or hampered by lengthy stretches of a stale and homogenized metagame.
2016 was probably the barest in recent memory, especially for a Nintendo-centric player, and I'm someone who strongly liked Star Fox Zero. For me the year was propped up almost entirely by Fire Emblem Fates, the Factorio alpha, and Stardew Valley. In a way I'm glad those had room to breathe to the tune of several hundred hours combined, as they deserved it, and I didn't mind the dearth of competition. It was a good year to play the hell out of a very small selection of games.
2012 felt rather dire: I don't think I got much out of that vintage at all outside of NSMBU, XCOM: EU, and Mark of the Ninja, and the first two come off as better games now than they did at release thanks to their respective expansions in 2013. Oh, I suppose Xenoblade (NA) is in there too. Let's see what else I associate with that year: Borderlands 2, Mists of Pandaria, Kid Icarus: Uprising, Nintendo Land, Diablo III, The Walking Dead—well, all right, I spent a fair bit of time with all of these and maybe it wasn't as empty a year as I remember (and I caught up on several of these titles long after their release), but place this next to most other years since and the bulk of these games would have trouble competing for a spot on my year-end shortlist. Lots of competence across the board, a few audacious gems that were exemplary but flawed or limited in scope, and no real unqualified masterpieces. I think it strikes me as a bad year because the peaks were not that high and even my favourites were replete with shortcomings or reservations. Most of its offerings, decent as they were, felt ephemeral and just wore off.
