Jason Rayes said:
Mass Effect 3 came out in early March actually. Go much further back and its 2011. Sleeping Dogs is a newer release than ME 3 as it came out in August. Just to argue semantics, the OP is asking us to pick what we think is the game of the year, that includes pretty much all of it till now. Not "Games prior to March when Mass Effect 3 was released because its too new"
March? Damn, but hasn't time really flown this year... Ah well, whatever.
Point still stands that people are surprisingly malleable when it comes to 'GOTY' candidates. I remember a poll for the every escapist's best game done be a now-banned poster called urprobablyright that had portal as, like, the third best game of all time. Behind LoZ:OOT and Half Life 2 (HL2 was understandable as escapist used to be a heavily pro-valve website)
It isn't that good, but people all voted for it because it had been released with the Orange box only about a month earlier. A later edition of the same poll was done just after Skyrim was released, and shamefully I'm quite sure it won first place. Neither of these games are that good, in terms of impact, concept, execution, revolution factor, polish, etc. I mean Portal was great in many of those cases but it's story was weak, it's gameplay really short and it's variety disappointing. It wasn't the third best game ever made.
And so, the point stands that people who say Resident Evil 6 could very well be voting that way because they forget what games they played 8 months ago, it's kinda lame. It ruined those Escapist's Choice polls when people forgot the best games they ever played because they probably last played them half a decade beforehand, too.
(rambling and hard to follow? I've got a fever that would put a golem to sleep)
