We came, we saw, we played. We nominated, we debated, we decided. Here, in alphabetical order, are Kotaku US' top 12 games of 2014.

Here we go again. For the ninth year in a row (since 2006!), I've counted up how many video games I either started or finished in the past 12 months. Let's see how I did.

In 2014, Kotaku US covered game developers who had been laid off. Amazing new software developments. The ups and downs of the Mario Kart 8 scene. So which US stories were the most popular?

Love may be a many splendored thing, but that doesn't mean we don't screw it up from time to time. This year, we decided to hire a guy who might help with that.

This year has been amazing for first person shooters. The genre has languished, recently, forcing players to mostly settle for shooting galleries with the occasional twist.

2014 was a funky year for new games. Lotta ins, lotta outs, lotta what-have-yous. Several games I was hoping would be great were disappointments, and many of games I wound up liking best came out of nowhere.

We're too lazy to make our own New Year's Resolutions (we'd never keep to them anyway), so Leon and I decided to make some resolutions for video games instead. Here's what we'd like to see from games in 2015: more of the good, less of the bad.

Sure, you could say that video games get more beautiful every year. Graphics technology gets better, game developers get more adept, and as a result, games get more beautiful. All the same, 2014 felt like a special year for video game beauty.

It's an arms race out there in superhero-movie-land. Seems like everybody wants to adapts comics into something else. That's cool. But let's not forget the ancestral medium whence all that excitement originates. Because comics had a damn good year this year.

Christmas is a super time for catching up on that mountain of unplayed Steam-sale/impulse purchase games. At least, in theory. In practice, you mostly end up sleeping, eating and visiting people, and barely have any personal time.

In 2006, when I was writing for MTV News, I suggested what seemed like a novelty: that gamers had enough sway in gaming that one should be able to make a list of elite gamers, not just high score kings and queens but gamers who had made an impact on gaming. I wrote.

2014 was a weird year for video games. Lotta ups, lotta downs, lotta what-have-yous. But while the year had its share of bummers and disappointments, it was not without some lovely surprises, too.

In 2014, eSports and competitive video games were everywhere. Some games and their finals invaded regular sports channels on TV, filled huge stadiums, and the streams pulled hundreds of thousands of viewers. At this point, it doesn't look like the eSports craze will end anytime soon.

In a perfect world, we'd spend all of our time actually playing video games. But if 2014 has taught us anything, it's that our world is not perfect. And so, among other things, we must spend a percentage of our time watching loading screens.

2014 was a weird, wooly year for video games. The big new consoles were finding their feet, and most of the games we were expecting to play got pushed back to next year. Some of the ones that did come out were great, but others, well... weren't as great.