Over the last few months, I haven’t had a lot of money to pick up most of the popular releases and even less time to play the ones I have been able to grab. With my lack of variety and experience this year, I don’t really feel qualified to join the typical game of the year discussions. So I thought, rather than writing another article on how great Skyrim is, I’d talk about a couple of quality games that surprised me this year, and a couple not-so-quality ones that were pretty disappointing.

First, I have to get in my plug for Bastion. I was anticipating this downloadable game mostly due to videos on Giant Bomb, but most of that coverage revolved around the people of Supergiant Games and the trials and tribulations of the development process, not so much about the game itself.

When it was finally released, I was pleased to find out that the art style was vibrant and beautiful, the narrator was every bit as good as promised, and the soundtrack was one of the best I’ve ever heard. Most of all, the gameplay was solid, which seems to be an item often forgotten with releases that tout their story and style loudly before they come out. I ended up beating it twice within a couple days of purchase, and it’s probably one of the best Xbox Live Arcade games I’ve ever played.

Second on the surprises list is Dark Souls. It wasn’t even on my radar until a week after release. Listening to the stories about how hard the first game was really intrigued me. Hearing discussion about how difficult to understand the game was and listening to phrases such as “tough, but fair” being bandied around finally pushed me to rent the game for a weekend.

The sheer complication grabbed me in a way that no other game had in quite a while. Not only was I exploring the world, I was also exploring the mechanics and figuring out how to play as I went. Sometimes, the learning process was rough, but the complete lack of hand-holding appealed to me and I had put almost fifteen hours into it by the time I had to return it. I’ve checked it out a couple more times since then, and I’m hoping to pick it up when I next have some spare cash.

Unfortunately, not all of the games I played this year surpassed my expectations, and Test Drive Unlimited 2 was the worst offender. I was a pretty big fan of the first Test Drive Unlimited. There’s something about cruising around Hawaii with a bunch of buddies and no real goal, but also without all the demands your regular directed experience puts on you.

When the second game was announced with more cars, better physics, and more roads, I preordered almost immediately. The original had its problems — problems that I thought would be fixed; come release day, though, that hadn’t happened. In fact, the multiplayer servers were so broken that it was almost a week before I even got in the same game with one of my friends. The Casino DLC (which I had to pay extra for) didn’t work for another week after that. The controls were still loose, and the Xbox steering wheel certainly didn’t help things.

Finally, the new storyline structure and the added “lifestyle” elements (some of which have been talked about on this very website) lent a bad taste to what was already a mediocre game. It still sits on my shelf, having dropped in value so fast that it’s not even worth trying to sell back for store credit.

Dead Island suffered from a lot of the same multiplayer issues. I got in on a Steam four-pack at the last minute on the merits of a four-player open-world zombie romp. What I got was a barely operable game that I could play with maybe one or two others, if the connection held long enough to get a mission done.

I thought I could get by on the single-player, but even that got boring after a few hours. Since everything is strictly leveled to your character, there was no fun of discovering a new awesome item or fighting a particularly hard enemy, and no point in completing all the pointless side quests to level up. On top of that, I seemed to pick the most worthless starting character, so by the time I made it to the end of the city that made up the second act, I was tired of fighting people with guns by trying to run up on them with a dagger. My save game still lies there, halfway through the story.

So there you go: a couple of good games worth trying during the new year, and a couple to avoid. Hopefully you make better purchasing decisions than I.