2D GAME OVERVIEW
BattleBlock Theater begins with you and your friends getting shipwrecked (yes, it is a “friend ship”) on an island run by cats. The cats run a theater/prison where they force their captives to perform onstage for the amusement of an unseen feline audience. These performances act as the game’s levels and offer a number of traditional platforming challenges in tile-based worlds made up of isometrically viewed blocks. You will hear applause when you perform well, and each level is bookended by the movement of theater curtains and iron bars.

From the start, the game’s presentation stands at the forefront, with an overblown voice narrating the opening scenes, which are presented in a stick puppet fashion, complete with the movement and shaking you would expect if the figures were being manipulated by puppeteers offstage. While there is plenty of story and many cutscenes to be had – and the narrator’s voice pops in throughout your adventure – this is mostly in place for humorous purposes.

2D GAME OVERVIEW
Guacamelee gets its start in a tequila bar situated on the edge of an agave field. This is where our lowly soon-to-be hero, Juan, works and lives. In the basement of Casa de Juan, he awakes from a hammock that is attached to the boiler and heads upstairs. On his wall are pictures of various luchadores, and there are pieces of exercise equipment here and there, offering a hint as to Juan’s unrealized hopes of becoming a luchador himself.

Today is Dia de los Muertos, and the village is getting ready for a celebration. The village clearly holds luchadores in high regard, as the city has numerous luchador posters on the walls, and there is a huge luchador statue in the center of town. Even the church has luchador-themed stained glass windows. As Juan speaks to NPC’s and helps out around town, we learn that he had once known the daughter of El Presidente and that he may be seeing her again at the Dia de los Mertos festival.


But things quickly go wrong, as El Presidente’s daughter is kidnapped by the Carlos Calaca, the ruler of the World of the Dead. Juan tries to fight back, but he is no match for the villain, and he is killed. And so the story truly begins, with Juan waking up in the World of the Dead and discovering a mask that turns him into a luchador and allows him to return to the World of the Living. He must defeat Calaca and his minions, rescue the damsel in distress, and prevent the merging of the living and dead worlds.

2D GAME OVERVIEW
Incredipede is, without a doubt, one of the most disturbing games ever created. The game focuses on controlling unnatural abominations through a number of physics-based environments, churning your asymmetrical limbs, dragging your one-eyed head across the ground, and constructing various multi-legged creatures in hopes that their wild convulsions will allow you to complete the level’s challenges. But once you get past your gut-wrenching desire to murder these various monstrosities, you will find a unique puzzler that challenges you to think about shape and mobility.

2D GAME OVERVIEW
Super House of Dead Ninjas is a high speed action game that pits the Crimson Ninja against a 350 story tower packed to the walls with enemies, spikes, and treasure. Action is fast and furious from the top of the tower to the bottom as the heroine slices her way through enemies, tosses shuriken to pick off foes from a distance, uses bombs to blast away blocks and enemies (and herself, if she’s not careful), and unleashes ninja magic to bring the pain to everyone around her.

The game offers a quick tutorial area to get the player accustomed to the controls, showing you how to jump, double jump, and crouch. You can also run while crouched, as well as perform wall jumps and wall slides, and you can perform a high jump by ducking for a few seconds and then jumping. There are a couple easy enemies in this area and a place to try out each of your ninja skills. But after you drop down into the next level of the tower, a 30 second clock starts counting down. 30 seconds to get through a 350 story tower may seem like madness (and it is, actually), but there are pickups along the way that restore the meter back to 30 seconds.

2D VERSUS FEATURE
Atari’s Centipede was one of the most iconic games of early 80’s arcade gaming. In this era, an arcade machine’s physical design and attract mode essentially played the part of the carnival barker, offering hints as to the amazing things that lay beyond the opaque curtain (“Step right up! See the amazing Centipede! Cut it in half, and it just keeps coming! Only 25 cents, folks!”).

Centipede lured players in with its amazing cabinet art, unique visuals and audio, and its use of a trackball as its primary control input – one of the first arcade games to do this. The unique mechanics, environmental interaction, visual progression indicators, and tension-driven gameplay kept players coming back to sustain the centipede on its diet of precious quarters.

As is typical of arcade machine design, the game starts out slow and escalates very quickly, offering a balance of engaging gameplay and frequent death, tempting the player to drop in another coin when his stock of lives is depleted. The player character sits at the lower end of a mushroom field, and the player is able to move around in a confined area at the bottom of the screen and shoot upward. At the top of the screen, your multi-legged foe moves back and forth, dropping one level downward and reversing direction when it touches a mushroom, steadily descending on your position.

As the player, you must fire upward at the centipede, but hitting it in the middle causes one segment to be destroyed – and replaced by a mushroom – while the centipede splits at that point, sending one part onward and the other part backward, making it an even tougher target. For each section of the centipede you destroy, a new mushroom is added to the playfield. And the more mushrooms there are, the faster the centipede is able to move downward.

2D GAME OVERVIEW
Anodyne is action-adventure game starring a white-haired bespectacled boy named Young who must save his dream world from a great evil called The Darkness. The game’s presentation and gameplay are inspired by The Legend of Zelda, featuring interconnected single-screen environments that pan into view as you move from one to the next, and the world is divided into overworld and dungeon-based environments (although the acquisition of equipment for completing dungeons plays almost no part here). A fitting retro-themed soundtrack accompanies the simple yet well-designed visuals.

Rather than a sword, our hero wields a rather unlikely weapon: a broom. One of the snarky statues you encounter along the way even comments about Young’s chosen weapon, joking that this was just as was foretold in The Legend. The game’s humor falls along the lines of Earthbound or Working Designs-localized RPG’s like Lunar. It’s not afraid to poke fun at itself and laugh about some of the innate silliness involved in the overall setup, but it has some serious moments here and there, offering a few dark vignettes before heading back into the otherwise lighthearted world.

The world map is large but a map helps the player keep track of previously explored areas and as yet inaccessible locales. The 160x160 pixel screens offer up a great deal of variety, with beaches, caves, cliffside trails, pastoral plains, strange red landscapes with walking trees, and no shortage of rivers and lakes. There are also a number of less fantasy- inspired areas, including paved roads, towns, and a hotel.

2D GAME OVERVIEW
Maldita Castilla is a game that harkens back to a number of mid-80’s action games, most notably Ghosts ‘n Goblins. Here, the player takes on the role of Don Ramiro as he travels the lands of Tolomera in 11th century Spain, defeating the evil creatures that have ravaged the land, on a quest to unseat the great evil that has taken over the kingdom of Castile.

The game is meant to emulate classic arcade games, and it even starts up with a RAM check, ROM check, and test pattern grid, just like an arcade machine being started up, and it features scanlines and a minor curving effect on the corners of the screen. The game’s soundtrack and effects – created by Gryzor87 – are also modeled after the throaty FM synth found in so many arcade titles and Sega Genesis games.

As in Ghosts ‘n Goblins, your primary abilities are to jump and toss whatever weapon you have in your possession, as indicated by a box at the top of the screen. You can toss your projectiles to the left or right, straight up, or downward while jumping. You can also duck to avoid enemy attacks and toss projectiles at enemies positioned lower to the ground. Projectiles are unlimited in supply, and each has its own strengths and weaknesses.

2D GAME OVERVIEW
Pretty much everything you need to know about No Time to Explain occurs in its first 30 seconds. When you boot the game, rather than being taken to a title screen or menu, you see a happy guy doing a little dance in his living room when suddenly the wall of his house explodes, revealing another identical-looking guy – in different clothes and carrying a weapon of some sort – who says “I am you from the future. There’s no time to explain.” Just as suddenly, a giant crab claw emerges from the side of the screen and grabs the future you and pulls him away as he spews blood and screams. Fortunately, the attack caused him to drop his powerful laser cannon, which you pick up before giving chase.

END OF YEAR AWARDS
It is time to celebrate the greatest 2D video games of 2012, where we award the best games from multiple genres, offer up some interesting categories, and discuss the year's biggest disappointments. And of course, we have selected what we feel is the overall best 2D game of 2012. If you enjoy watching people and horses discuss great 2D games, then you have strange and wonderful tastes that will be well-satisfied by the video below. Enjoy!

UPCOMING 2D GAME OVERVIEW
As the name implies, Platformines is a cross between a platformer and the now-popular mining sub-genre of action-adventure games. Players set out across a large procedurally generated world to hunt for valuable minerals, destroy monsters, uncover hidden treasures, and even fight off other explorers along the way. Collected resources can be used to increase your life bar, add to your carrying capacity, and increase your firepower… all of which are needed to get back into the mine and fight your way through more dangerous territory and toward greater rewards.

2D GAME OVERVIEW
Knytt Underground presents the story of a young female sprite named Mi who is fated to prevent the end of the world by ringing 6 bells. The girl is unable to speak, but she meets a pair of fairies early in her adventure that speak for her. After the world above was destroyed by war, the creatures from the surface moved underground, and the entire game takes place within the confines of an elaborate cave system, made up of over 1,800 interconnected screens. The floor, walls, and ceiling are solid black, but most of the backgrounds are detailed and colorful, with the background imagery and ambient effects changing based on the region of the cave system.

2D GAME OVERVIEW
Black Knight Sword is an interesting experiment that mixes simple gameplay with a unique visual style, drawing influences from eastern European art, as well as papercraft and theater. In fact, the entire game takes place on a stage, framed by red curtains on either side with foreground lighting, and new backdrops are lowered into place as you transition from one location to another. This is not unlike the stage presentation in Cave’s Nin2-Jump, except that there is no audience in the foreground and the presentation here is far more elaborate.

2D GAME OVERVIEW
Big Sky: Infinity starts off small and works its way toward… infinity. The game is an updated and enhanced version of the procedurally generated PC shmup Really Big Sky, offering 4P co-op in the PS3 version and some touchscreen play on Vita to manually detonate claymores. While the Vita does not feature 4P simultaneous action, it does offer asynchronous multiplayer via a “Horse” mode where players take turns attempting to not spell out a given word. One purchase gets both games, and cloud saving allows you to continue your progress between the handheld and the big screen.