I have said it before, and I will say it again: to really understand the nuance of class-based game systems, play support. The healers and strategists are the unsung heroes of multiplayer games. To play a support class is to embed yourself into deep system analysis out of simple necessity. While exclusively reinforcing your teammates can be a burden, support classes remain one of the most compelling roles in games. Until recently, Team Fortress 2’s Medic class held the title for best support class in a first-person shooter. Now, with the release of Gearbox’sBorderlands 2, Maya the Siren handily deserves our praise as an incredibly well-designed support character.

Like the rest of Borderlands 2’s cast of playable characters, Maya can actually level up, in the traditional RPG manner, three different skill trees. The Cataclysm tree focuses primarily on elemental effects, increasing her offensive capabilities. The Motion tree emphasizes crowd control and, coupled with Maya’s healing-focused Harmony trees, creates a very satisfying support-focused Maya.

Being an admirer of The Binding of Isaac and having recently found myself coming to appreciate Super Meat Boy, I decided that I should probably have a look at what is probably Edmund McMillen’s most controversial game, Cunt.

I had known of Cunt by reputation only.  I knew that it bore the stamp of Edmund McMillen’s central aesthetic, the grotesque, and thus, that it wasn’t going to be pretty.  I also knew that some had been made very upset by it.

Binary Domain is a third person cover shooter that has the gall to not insult my intelligence, but to respect it instead. In fact, it has the audacity to challenge my mind along with my thumbs in a the way that good science fiction does. It asks what is like human nature as represented by an individual, a society, and a species without condescending to the player by offering blatant and clear-cut choices but, instead, by weaving its questions into the very nature of the conflict that you are engaged in.

It is the year 2080. You play as Sergeant Dan Marshall, a member of the international Rust Crew hailing from the United States that has been sent into the flooded streets of Tokyo to bring in Yoji Amada, the founder and head of the Amada Corporation, for violating the “New Geneva Convention” on robotics. He created robots that can pass for human called Hollow Children, which are so convincing that they don’t even know that they are robots themselves. The opening sections of the game reveal all this information in well paced, well crafted scenes in between action sequences that concern getting past security and the floodwalls. It sounds like a standard opening to another generic third person action shooter, featuring enemies that are security robots instead of zombies or soldiers. And you’d be right, but thankfully Binary Domain moves forward with its premise.

Tekken might not have as long a history as other arcade fighters like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, but it is at least as important in the fighting canon as its 2D precursors. For years, it’s been a staple in airplanes, movie theaters, and cafeterias and is probably one of the precious few arcade boxes to have survived after the local arcade disappeared. It was the first fighting game to actually “get” fighting in a 3D space from a functional perspective, and it’s continued success on consoles and in pro-gaming circuits guarantees that Namco is as happy with their star child as ever.

Namco developed a fighting style unique to Tekken early on, and they haven’t needed to reinvent the wheel since. The only thing that changes from game to game anymore is the expanding cast of characters. The series is supposed to feature fighters from all over the world, representing unique styles indicative of their region of origin, appearance, and personality. But for featuring such a huge array of playable characters, there’s a very homogenous pattern of bodies, particularly in terms of the game’s women.

In many ways, 2012 seems to be shaping up as the year of the little game. While the holiday glut from the big publishers has yet to be seen, those games that build massive worlds to play around in have largely been absent from the shelves this year.

We decided this week to take a look at one of the few games of the summer that attempted to fill the open world void, United Front Games’s Sleeping Dogs.