We’ve got the sequence we need to enter the Nexus of the Halo ring, and now it’s time to shut down the repair procedure. And from there, we keep going… and going… and going.
What? We’re not done yet!?
Something I’ve said for years is that most big retail release video games are too long, padded in order to fit an abritrary hour count, rather than curated to better suit the story and experience they’re attempt to instill upon the player. Open world games are particularly bad at this, even when focused purely on the campaign and ignoring most side activities. I was genuinely hoping to wrap up Halo: Infinite in this session, which is why I was willing to take the extra time until the loss of progress from the game crashing.
This feeling only got compounded by the fact that the game felt like it was trying to wrap up and hit the conclusion several times over, and just refuses to hit that finale. The climb up the Nexus, where Chief and The Weapon have their big blowup, and sebsequent heart-to-heart, was the first place that felt like a natural stopping point. Then there was the fight with Escharum to rescue the pilot, which made the point to try and fail to characterize and make me empathize with him before he bit the dust. That too felt like a good place to wrap it up, and then we just… didn’t. I’ve looked it up now, and the Silent Auditorium is truly the last level of the game, but this is the third finale we’ve had to stomach and I was already eager to wrap things up.
Out of all the games in the Halo franchise, I’ve only ever had this problem with Infinite. The campaign would’ve been better had it chosen to make a few choice cuts in the editing room before release. I don’t hate it, but my opinion is starting to rapidly drop. Hopefully next week, we’ll either finish or be finished with Halo: Infinite.
As it turns out, not only does our enemy seek to make use of the Halo ring, but the ring itself has a self-repair functionality that makes their plan possible. Of course, we cannot allow them to succeed. So it’s time to sabotage those plans… assuming we can get the sequence required to open the way.
The more I play Halo: Infinite, the more I realize that the only way to answer the question of whether or not I like it is to first ask if the open-world elements add to the game, and even now I’m not sure if the answer is “Yes” or “No”.
On one hand, it suits the new Grappling Hook, which on its own adds a whole new sense of movement and momentum to each fight, closing gaps and creating distance, or taking the high ground as the situation demands. Having a large map to work with gives the tool even more utility because there’s more space to work with during these fights over FOBs, checkpoints, and key story objectives. There’s also something to be said about the freedom to approach an objective from different angles, even if the execution always boils down to shooting everyone.
The counterpoint is that many of the objectives we’re getting have felt like the open-world busywork I associate with much of Ubisoft’s output. When I’m told to assault three anti-air towers or siege four locations to find part of a sequence, my mind starts to think of it as filler content. We’re not meaningfully advancing the plot, just getting some errands done before we can make headway. And if that same objective is presented as a linear level, or like the semi-sandbox that we had in the first Halo game, it doesn’t trigger that same impulse in my brain. This sense of discomfort is something I only get in the open-world context, and I’m still interrogating those feelings.
Hopefully, as I work through my feelings and continue the campaign, I’ll arrive at an answer.
If you told me that I would be doing Savage content in Final Fantasy XIV when I started playing in August 2020, I would not have believed you. And yet, here I am with a group of friends, gathering twice a week seeking to challenge the current high-end content for Endwalker.
Even more strangely… I’m having fun.
Though I am fortunate enough to have a static to raid with, a lot of people have no choice but to raid with a group of randos in Party Finder. To be honest, I can’t imagine doing that. What’s made this so much fun was just hanging out with the static, learning, joking, and getting better at each fight together. While I also enjoy getting better at playing my class, the experience would be a lot lesser if I had the added pressure of performing for a group of people I will never speak to nor care about.
I’m glad I was able to capture this moment on stream too because we had been banging our heads on P2S for a couple of weeks now. It was a big accomplishment for us, and now we can move on to the third ring.
I’m blown away that this is the very first Final Fantasy XIV content I’ve put on my channel and blog, considering how deeply I’ve dived down that hole over the past year, but I’m happy to finally share my experience with the game. It’s been a wonderful ride.
The Banished have had free reign over this Halo ring for long enough, and now that we’re here it’s time to turn things around. To that end, we know they’re searching for something in an old ruin, excavated by a Forerunner laser.
Whatever it is, it can’t be good for us if they claim it. Let’s beat them to the punch.
We’re starting to unravel some of the pieces of the story, and what’s at play, but we still don’t have a complete picture, if one even exists. To be honest, the villains still don’t appear to have anything particularly interesting going on, and all I can gather is that they’re after some form of “Ascension”.
I freely concede that this might be because I’ve not played Halo 5, but shouldn’t there be some form of Covenent-aligned allies here helping us fight against the Banished. I have a difficult time believing that they would allow a splinter group free reign to just demolish all of the forces of their newfound allies in half a year. It feels like something that was just forgotten by the writing team.
I’m not happy with the pilot yet, but I appreciate character growth and development. Depending on where they go from here, I can forgive someone starting out from a point of abject, crippling fear and slowly growing more confident and assured in their bearing. Even better if it can be done while also giving the Chief a rare moment of humanization. It’s genuinely pretty good.
It’s a mixed bag, but so many stories in the medium are. I look forward to seeing what else the team at 343 has for us.
I’ve made no secret that I love card games. I’ve played so many of them on stream and written about them so much on this blog, that it should be obvious. What I don’t often get to talk about is how I got into card games in the first place: Yu-Gi-Oh.
Back when the anime first hit America, I bought the original Yugi and Kaiba starter decks and learned to play the game with my neighborhood and school friends. Nobody played Magic at my school, but Yu-Gi-Oh was super popular among the student body. I eventually had to stop playing during the Synchro era, but that was less because I wanted to stop and more because I could not afford to keep playing Yu-Gi-Oh and video games, so one had to give.
I’ve been on and off a few times since then, but for the past few years, I’ve been on an “off” period. Of course, now everyone has become obsessed with this new free-to-play game, Master Duel, and there’s no better time to dive back in.
So let’s dive back in.
The Yu-Gi-Oh of today is an entirely different game than it was back when I left all those years ago. For that reason, it is tempting to shake my fist at the clouds and proclaim that it’s been ruined. However, I’ve long since made peace with the fact the Yu-Gi-Oh I knew back then is long gone, with no chance of coming back.
And though I still have my gripes with it, the game that has been built on its bones has become a different and equally impressive game in its own way. From a game design standpoint, after getting familiar with other card games and how they operate, I am impressed how Yu-Gi-Oh created systems and methods to summon monsters with powerful stats and abilities, without any form of resource mechanics like mana.
Further, while I dislike the concept of “handtraps”, as I’ve played more I’ve started to understand their purpose. Since there was no such thing as mana, old Yu-Gi-Oh would have players broadcast whether or not we had a response by placing cards on the board face down, and to a large degree, that’s still true. However, there are now many cards that allow us to negate our opponent’s plays by discarding them from our hand in response.
This still bothers me, but it has a clear purpose. Decks and strategies have vastly accelerated since the time I played Yu-Gi-Oh, to the point where it is highly possible for even decent decks to build up powerful boards and card advantage on the first turn before the player going second has a chance to make a move. Handtraps solve that problem by giving them a chance to have instant speed interaction against the turn one player. One can argue, as I have, that the speed of the game is a problem, but accepting the game for what it is, handtraps serve as a good compromise.
The game isn’t perfect, far from it, but I respect what it has become, and found fun within the new form it has taken.
We’ve finally completed Infinite’s opening sequence and arrived at the open world on the new Halo ring. Let us see how much Halo has learned from other contemporaries in this space.
I’m not surprised that 343 chose a very Far Cry model to work with for their open world. It’s a well-known model that does the job, even if it’s dated. Though, unlike Far Cry, Halo still has a strong core with its combat mechanics and no illusions about being anything other than a shooter. Combat has always felt snappy, that’s no less true for these more wide-open engagements.
Adding in the grappling hook only further adds to the combat, with a vast utility that never gets old. When we’re on foot, we can use it to move faster, and climb up objects that the Chief normally can’t. If we need to back out of a fight, we can use it to quickly create distance and find a place to hide. And when we’re ready to go in, we can use it to get around or close the gap. It’s useful at almost every possible moment, and that’s rare for a new feature in an old franchise.
The only place the game seems to fall apart, at least so far, are the boss battles. I have not had a good time fighting any of these leaders, with their inflated health bars and damage output compared to a regular enemy. Halo isn’t suited to having fights like this, with bullet sponges that can drop us way easier than we can drop them, which is why they’re so rarely done in any of the other games. Infinite only underscores that point.
That said, it’s always good to come back to Halo. A few bad fights won’t change that.
I thought we were done with Hitman 3, but as it turns out IO found a way to draw me back in. In the time since we last left off, they announced their intent to provide support for Year 2 of the game.
The first aspect of this is their new Elusive Target Arcade. Let’s give it a whirl.
As abysmal as these performances were, I’m actually happy with how they turned out in hindsight because it showcases what makes this next mode special. Adding these extra conditions can completely transform the target in ways you might not expect. The best example of this was that first round, where killing him in broad daylight would have been trivial… except for the fact I had to hide all the bodies.
The extra challenge means that even before like me, who have done these targets before, have a reason to try out the arcade. They breathe new life into old content.
And with the rest of Year 2, I look forward to this and other incentives to return to Hitman.
2021 was another year where we all spent most of our spare time cooped up in our homes due to the circumstances we all live in. That meant more time with our PCs and consoles. Given that many games are being delayed due to the effects of this prolonged pandemic, and release schedules were sparse, the ever-looming backlogs that we’ve all accumulated could start to see movement.
This is the space for those games: Those I played in 2021 that came out in years prior. Starting with:
Monster Train
At this point, the roguelike deck builder is such a cliche, and yet they still keep making good ones. The premise is simple: Hell has literally frozen over and the angels are winning, so we marshall its remaining forces, place its final flame into the titular monster train and defend it from our angelic opposition.
To do so, we draw cards that represent spells and monsters from the various tribes of hell and use them to construct a strong enough defense to repel the angels in a tower defense-style setup. Like most roguelike deck builders, part of the fun comes from discovering how these cards and their effects interact in order to create powerful combinations that decimate even the big boss encounters.
Credit must also be given to its toony art style that gives each enemy and ally a distinct visual identity and silhouette. There’s a certain charm that goes a long way to giving the game a unique visual identity.
It’s the kind of game I know I can always come back to if I need something to stream, and rare is the game I can say that about.
Bunsnax!
The only thing you need to know about Bugsnax is that it has Bunger, and Bunger is adorable. So much so that they’re gearing up to sell a plushie of him. This is an endearing little game where we help an isolated island community by catching Bugsnax.
They’re half-bug and half-snak. They’re Bugsnax. Just remember that we are what we eat! And as people who watched my streams would know, there is definitely nothing insidious going on behind the scenes. It’s just a cute, innocent adventure where nothing bad happens and there are absolutely no secret government conspiracies or insidious monsters.
That would be crazy. Just look at how precious Bunger is. How could anything like that be dangerous?
Adastra/Winds of Change
I put these both on the list for largely the same reason. For the longest time, I deliberately avoided playing games like these while logged onto Steam or Discord because I didn’t want to be mocked for playing “furry bait” visual novels.
But it’s the Covid years, I am a furry and I no longer care whether or not people know it. The games were fun for me, certainly. However, in truth, they’re on this list more because getting comfortable playing these games without concerning myself if I was doing so in Offline Mode, or in private, no longer mattered to me this year.
It sounds dumb, largely because it is, but it was a huge personal accomplishment for me.
Umaragi Generation
A friend of mine gifted me this game just as I was on the verge of finishing up my highlights article from last year. Since I was in the middle of writing that and my other end-of-the-year article, I just didn’t have time to get around to it until January.
Smarter people than I have alreadygiven Umaragi their attention, but at the risk of echoing their points, Umaragi is an excellent example of how to use gameplay mechanics to bring the darkness of its world into focus. We assume the role of a photojournalist, using our camera to fulfill commissions for specific photographs in order to get paid in a bleak, apocalyptic world.
It’s a game that trusts its players to be able to connect the dots and figure out how bad things are without throwing it in our face directly. Instead, it shows it through a list of objectives and the lens of a camera.
But even within that framework, there’s a strange joy in fiddling with your lens and filters, exploring the levels in order to find those perfect money shots. To some extent, it reminds me of the campaigns in the old PS1 Tony Hawk games. We have a list of objectives, a level to explore, and a time limit on how long we can take before we have to wrap it up. So it’s up to us to complete those objectives (possibly even the optional ones) before time runs out. Despite that, I never felt rushed while playing the game. If anything, it was oddly relaxing and peaceful, as I slowly figured out what my perfect run would be.
Sometimes, the best thing to do is pull out a camera and just enjoy the moment as the world burns around us.
Astro’s Playroom
A pack-in for a new console has no right to be anywhere near as good as Astro’s Playroom is. It may only be a 4-hour platformer, but those are some tight, finely crafted hours of play.
Even more than that though, as someone who grew up with PlayStation as my primary console of choice, this was aimed squarely at me. Every minute is packed full of references to and love for the games I grew up playing, from major icons like Crash to the more obscure ones like Sir Daniel Fortesque.
It was a joy to share Astro’s Playroom on stream because it’s one of those games that always made me smile from start to finish.
A Short Hike
When I told a few friends of mine that I had enjoyed playing Lake, they recommended that I also try A Short Hike. They were correct in doing so, as it too gave me that relaxing experience I was in the mood for at the time.
My playtime was short, just over one hour, but in the hour, as I hiked to the top of the moment, I had fun stopping to help the people I met on the way, whether it was playing low-stakes volleyball or helping someone work up the nerve to talk to their crush or just collect a bunch of seashells. It’s been months since I played it and I still have a vivid memory of the experience.
I’ve played entire 40-hour games where I can barely remember a single thing that happened, but this short little indie title still sticks with me.
Devil May Cry V: Vergil
I’ve made no secret about how much I loved Devil May Cry V when it came out, and the Vergil DLC was the perfect excuse to return to it.
Having played the Vergil campaigns in DMC 3 and 4: Special Edition, I was almost instantly familiar with the way he played in V before I even began, and it felt good to know that my skills had not rusted over in my time away from the game.
I don’t have much more to add here that I haven’t already said about Devil May Cry V, but this is a series I have quickly fallen in love with in recent years, and I hope that we’ll see more before long.
Killer7
I’ve had Killer7 recommended to me so many times by so many people that I’m sometimes shocked that it took until 2021 to finally play it for myself. It’s one of the most fascinating and non-conventional video games I have ever played. Surprisingly, it also holds up well despite how long it’s been since its release in 2005.
Admittedly, Killer7’s uniqueness also meant that it took me a solid hour just to understand the control scheme and mechanics. That said, my experience was smooth as silk once I got over that hump. I have difficulty explaining the story, mostly because it defies explanation, but I loved every aspect of the experience from start to finish.
It’s the kind of one-of-a-kind game one truly has to experience for themselves before they truly understand the hype.
FUSER
As a child, games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero passed me by. They’re the kind of games that are best played in a party setting, as everyone takes turns acting like a rock star as the rest of the group encourages them to let loose, and I didn’t really have the headspace and friend group necessary to enjoy them to the fullest.
While not exactly the same, FUSER continues in the tradition by allowing players to take the reins as a DJ in an island paradise where the party starts early and ends late. Our job is to make our own original mixes using sections of popular licensed songs.
Fun fact about me: I have no ear for music whatsoever. And yet, even I was able to have a ton of fun playing the game and learning how the systems work. This is the kind of experience I would want to have on stream, but the nature of the beast means that’s a non-starter, given that licensed music is the bread-and-butter of the game’s central hook.
I never finished the campaign, but just because I didn’t beat the game doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy it.
Halo 3 (& ODST)
Though my opinion of Halo 3 has cooled somewhat in the time since I played it on stream. In hindsight, I was much kinder to the story than I probably should have been. I imagine part of that is just because I was still relatively new to the franchises campaigns at the time. Of particular note is how little they utilize Arby in the story, despite the fact that he’s one of the most interesting characters in the series.
And yet, in the moment as I was surrounded by enemies and fighting them off in tense and exciting combat, none of that mattered. All that I needed to worry about is what weapons were scattered about the field, the enemy placement, and how to best use the former to neutralize the latter.
ODST takes it to a whole new level. I was fascinated by the new mission structure they introduced in the form of a semi-open world map. It’s also cool to play as non-Spartans, ordinary (if highly trained and skilled) people who don’t have the enhancements Master Chief does. It fits the darker tone and mood of ODST to a T.
I was more than happy to finally cross this game (and its siblings) off my list.
Stellaris
Stellaris isn’t the kind of game I would normally expect to be in my wheelhouse. Historically, I’ve bounced off “freeform”/simulation games lightning-fast, at least normally. But when a friend gifts me a game over the holidays and dares you to play in on stream, it’s difficult to refuse. Doubly so when I’m making a point to try to go outside of my comfort zone.
At first, I found the game intimidating since I didn’t really have any idea what I “should” do. I still don’t have a complete grasp on the mechanics, but I have a solid enough understanding to play without worry I’m making any huge mistakes. Once I got over that bump, my time with Stellaris was, almost similar to Lake and A Short Hike, relaxing. Sometimes, I really want that kind of low-impact game just to defragment the background processes of my mind.
I might not play it often, but I’m happy I was introduced to Stellaris.
Wandersong
I will almost always be in favor of subversions to the traditional Hero’s Journey, so Wandersong already had one foot in the door. Rather than assume the role of a brave hero out to save the world, we play as a humble bard who wants to be a hero. And over the course of his adventure, he does so, not because he was chosen to (the chosen one is a jerk), but because he wants to and is willing to listen to other people.
And since we’re a Bard, we don’t have any combat ability. Instead, we have a lovely singing voice, which we can use the right stick to modulate. While that seems like a one-note mechanic, Wandersong manages to find many diverse ways to make use of it through that 10 to 15-hour campaign. It never felt like it overstayed its welcome, and I left feeling oddly impressed by what I had played.
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And that wraps up my time with 2021. Good riddance, and may the next year at least suck a little less.
It’s been over half a year since we last left off with the Master Chief. Though we’ve played more than a few multiplayermatches, we’ve yet to touch the campaign proper on the new Halo game.
That changes now. Just like before, we’re going in mostly blind to Halo: Infinite.
Although we’ve only just begun, I’ve started to notice a glaring problem that reared its ugly head in Halo 4, the villains aren’t very interesting. The Banished occupy the same space in my mind that the Didact did in Halo 4. Neither one appear to have much going on beyond the stereotypical villainous need to conquer everything in their path.
I don’t want to say that the Covenant was one of the greatest enemy factions of all time, but they had a lot of layers to their presentation. It wasn’t just conflict for the sake of conflict. There were internal politics, disagreements among the hierarchy, and religious dogmatism all at play to flesh them out and give them much-needed character. One of the smartest decisions Bungie made in Halo 2 was using the Arbiter to give us a window into why the Covenant presented itself in the way it had.
Obviously, my opinion is subject to change as I progress through Halo: Infinite, but for now, I don’t see why people have chosen to work with this group, especially since we already established a working peace with the Covenant at the end of Halo 3. There’s not even an ounce of charisma within their faction leader to explain it.
The pilot is another character I’m not fond of, but I’m happy with the direction they seem to be going with The Weapon. It would be trivial to just make her Cortana 2.0, especially since she has the same voice actress. Instead, while she reminds us of Cortana, she remains a unique a separate individual with her own distinct personality. If we’re only given the models, it might be hard to tell which one is which, but once they begin to talk and act it, their identities would be clear.
It’s a mixed bag so far, but I’m overall having fun with the game.
It has definitely been a unique and terrifying year, in a string of unique and terrifying years. At this point, the state of the world is such a belabored topic that it’s become its own joke of sorts. So rather than dwell on that, let us take a moment to reflect on the games that came out in 2021.
And as it happens, there was a lot to like in 2021, purely in the realm of games (and ignoring the horrificconditions in which they’re made for the moment). Remember that just because a game doesn’t show up on this list doesn’t mean it’s bad. It’s possible that either I missed it or that it didn’t leave a strong enough impression on me to talk about. So without further ado, and presented in a random order, my highlights of 2021 are:
Metroid: Dread
While I’ve played my fair share of Metriodvanias, I must confess that up until this year I hadn’t touched a single game in the Metroid franchise. I knew some bits of the lore from osmosis, but the games themselves were blind spots for me.
This changed when I booted up Metroid: Dread for the first time, and it was love at first sight. I couldn’t bring myself to put it down, making fast progress through the campaign as I compared notes with my Discord friends, helping each other get unstuck and beat bosses that we couldn’t quite figure out.
The biggest two aspects of Dread worth shouting out are the EMMI fights and the parry system. Encounters like the EMMIs, nigh-invincible robots that need to be avoided until the player acquires the tool to beat them, can be frustrating if implemented poorly, but I rarely felt cheated or annoyed by them in my playthrough. Metroid: Dread takes great pains to make sure that players don’t lose an insufferable amount of progress if they are caught, even offering them an admittedly semi-random saving throw in the form of a parry window if they fail to evade them.
And while it is especially satisfying to successfully parry an EMMI, the same could be said of normal enemies too. That sensation of timing my counter and following up with a devastating riposte never lost its luster from the beginning to the end of the game. Shout-outs also go to the bosses that can be parried to both regain a significant amount of health and ammo and trigger a brief in-game cutscene in which the player is free to pelt the boss while safe from further attacks.
Despite the name, there was nothing dreadful about this Metroid game.
Deathloop
Well, this was certainly one of my most anticipated games of the year, for sure. Ever since Dishonored, a franchise that remains on my short list of personal favorites, came out, there has not been a game from Arkane Studios that wasn’t right up my alley. Deathloop is no exception.
Though it doesn’t do any one thing well enough to stand out, the uniqueness comes from how it effortlessly blends the kind of roguelike/timeloop nature of its world with invasion mechanics straight out of Dark Souls and a Dishonored-like approach to immersive sim level design. It’s the kind of game that’s difficult to explain on paper, but in practice almost instantly clicked for me. And with the conspicuous absence of Dishonored’s Chaos system, I was free to murder to my heart’s content.
This is all before we get to the glue which ties the entire game together, which is the performances of Jason E. Kelley and Ozioma Akagha as the lead characters Colt and Juliana. The personality and chemistry of the two characters as they take verbal and literal potshots at each other has made me laugh more than most other games I’ve played this year. They feel like genuine people, strengthening the attachment I have to them.
If I had a Game of the Year, this would be a strong contender. As it stands, it’ll need to settle for a spot on the list.
Neo: The World Ends with You
The fact that this game exists at all astounds me because I never imagined Square Enix would ever make a sequel to The World Ends With You. Though I do not hold the same love in my heart for it as I do the original TWEWY, that merely signals that Neo: NWEWY did its job in modernizing the concepts from that first game.
Being a game from 2007, The World Ends With You comes from an era where the internet had become a fixture in modern society but had not yet been plagued by algorithm-driven social media hellscape that dominates its more current incarnation. Despite being from an entirely different nation and culture, the central cast reminded me of people I knew in my teenage years. The protagonist Neku Sakuraba, for better and for worse, felt exactly like the type of disaffected asshole that I regret to admit I was as a teenager. And its lesson about opening yourself up to other people and the world around you is something I still carry with me to this day.
By contrast, Neo: TWEWT takes the concepts established by the first game and uses them to tell a new story aimed at a new breed of teenager, one who has grown up inundated by mass media and social networking. Rather than act the way teenagers from my childhood would, they act in ways more appropriate to the next generation, who came after mine. And it tackles the more interconnected nature of our society in comparison to the one that its predecessor was designed in. While it wasn’t quite meant for me, I still felt like I gained from the experience.
There’s a simple joy in exploring the streets of Shibuya enough to the point where once the story told me the district I had to go to, I already had a plan forming in my head of not only how to get there, but which shops to hit along the way to buy new outfits for my team. It hits the pleasure center of my brain in the same way that ordering “The Usual” from the burger joint at Scramble Crossing does, having built up my relationship with the staff. These little details give the player a sense of place and belonging that so many other games miss out on.
Maybe it wasn’t for me the way I wanted it to be, but goddammit Neo: TWEWY was a great experience regardless.
Frankly, it’s a crime that The Great Ace Attorney took this long to be localized in America and Europe. With the signature charm and humor that the franchise is known for, the Great Ace Attorney sets its sights on Meiji-era Japan, Victorian-era London, and how the latter, in all of its imperialist tendencies influenced the former and its development. It does so through the lens of Ryunosuke Naruhado, a Japanese foreign exchange student studying and practicing law in Britain. Though it doesn’t go as far as I would have liked it to, discussing these topics, including the racism of British society towards “uncultured” nations like Japan is bold in a way I can appreciate.
Credit also goes to the localization team for explicitly casting actors who, like the protagonist and his assistant Susato Mikotoba, were born and raised in Japan in their early years before migrating to England later in life. That authenticity is reflected in their performances, introducing an air of believability into the characters themselves.
Additionally, The Great Ace Attorney makes expert use of this setting to revitalize franchise mechanics in new ways. Since most of the cases take place in a British courtroom, where trial-by-jury is the law of the land, there will be moments where the jury will hasten to a guilty verdict. When that happens, we get to use the new Summation Examination mechanic to pit jurors’ contradictory opinions against each other to sway them into continuing the trial, adding a new variety to the traditional gameplay loop of finding contradictions in witness statements.
But by far, the biggest addition lies in the Investigation half of the game. At this point, it’s impossible to have a mystery game take place in Victorian London without invoking Sherlock Hol- I mean Herlock Sholmes, the great detective. With a flair for the dramatic, he’ll swoop in to make bold deductions about the scene of the crime based on the evidence at hand… except he’ll usually make more than a few blunders on the way to his conclusion. What follows is a masterful use of cinematography and presentation as we help steer the great detective back onto the Wright path by changing his objects of focus so that he can form a more reasonable and accurate assessment. If you don’t mind some spoilers, it’s worth watching one of these Dances of Deduction unfold with your own eyes, since my words would be able to do it justice.
If you have any interest in detective/mystery fiction, and you haven’t played any of the Ace Attorney games, the Great Ace Attorney would serve as an excellent jumping-on point.
Legends of Runeterra
I don’t have much to say on Runeterra, admittedly, but in a world where nearly every digital card game has annoyed or upset me in some way, I still enjoy logging in and completing my dailies. I will never have an interest in League of Legends, but I can offer no stronger praise to Legends of Runeterra than the simple fact that it’s the one digital card game client that I’ve yet to abandon in a sea full of ones than I have.
Persona 5 Strikers
This will be the first in two games that make me go “Wait, this came out in 2021!?”. By the time I got around to playing it this past summer, it already felt like a game that passed me by.
Over the past few years, I’ve had something of a rocky relationship with ATLUS in general and the Persona franchise in particular. By the time Persona 5 Royale came into the mix, I had lost interest in Persona, largely because despite all of the gameplay and quality of life changes in Persona 5, I wasn’t as attached to the Phantom Thieves as I was to SEES or the Investigation Team.
But apparently, all it took was for Strikers to go on sale one day for me to at least give the franchise another chance. Taking place over the course of a summer road trip across Japan (complete with yet another disastrous evil plaguing society at large), Strikers did a far better job of fleshing out the Phantom Thieves and their relationships with each other than their original game ever did, and what they see in their leader, Joker. Without social links/confidants, the group takes center stage and the game is honestly better off for it.
It’s also fun to see another take on the typical Persona formula, this time through the lens of a Musou game. Don’t make the same mistake I and many others did at first blush though, because this is a JRPG through and through, with a lengthy 40-50 hour campaign. The battles have been scaled up, but it’s still important to exploit weaknesses and go for those all-out attacks that the series is known for at this point.
And though series composer Shoji Meguro did not work on this soundtrack, having since moved onto greener pastures, songs like Daredevil leave me hopeful that future ATLUS games will still have the chops to maintain the high bar they’ve set themselves musically.
I went in with a vote of no-faith in the Persona franchise, and I came out convinced that the well hasn’t fully dried up despite ATLUS’s fervent milking of it.
Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker
It’s no secret that over the last year and a half, I’ve become deeply engrossed in the hit MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV, with a free trial meme that has officially outlasted the actual free trial due to server congestion as of the time of writing.
For those who have been disengaged from social media over the past month, the latest expansion, Endwalker, has been released. And like the previous expansions, it represents an entire JRPG campaign. Unlike the previous expansions, this one resolves the long-running storyline that has been built up since the original shitty version of Final Fantasy XIV back before it was salvaged into the behemoth it has become.
This makes it difficult to talk about. For those who have been playing FFXIV, saying anything more would risk spoiling their experience if they’ve been unable to play thanks to the queue issue which has finally started to die down. And for those who have not given themselves over to one of the three Grand Companies of Eoreza, any attempt to explain what makes this expansion hit as hard as it does would seem nigh incomprehensible. Part of what makes it work is that there’s a massive body of story and lore established over roughly a decade that has been built up and is being cashed in on.
And while that’s the main draw for me, I’ve also had a blast with the new Reaper and Sage classes. Though I have some issues with the updates to my old classes, namely that Dark Knight got practically nothing and Red Mage’s Acceleration tweaks have been screwing with my muscle memory, I’m generally fond of where they’ve taken the classes I play. (Shout out to the new Astrologian.)
It’s a good time to be a Final Fantasy XIV player, especially if you’re like me and taking part in your first raid static.
Inscryption
Unfortunately, the nature of the beast limits what I can say without ruining the experience for others, but even if you have no interest in roguelike deck-builders I strongly recommend giving Inscryption a try. It leverages the medium in ways that are still shockingly new and novel despite how obvious they seem in hindsight. On top of that, there’s a well-made card game at its core, with some new takes on the genre that I genuinely believe more games should make use of.
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart
I will always be in the mood for another Ratchet and Clank game, but especially one which was built without crunching the team at Insomniac Games. Certainly, the game may be safe in many respects with its overall glow and structure, but with a formula as tried and true as Ratchet and Clank’s, there was little need to make major overhauls.
As someone used to long loading times in modern games, I couldn’t help but be impressed with how Rift Apart leveraged the new hardware it had access to, to accomplish such a technically impressive sequence as the end of the opening, where we’re teleported to almost every level in the game in real-time. Even more impressive on replay, once I recognized the full-level maps that we were transported to in that sequence.
I am also fond of the game’s writing. The series might lack the punch that it had back in the PS2-era, but taken for what it has become it’s still a powerful throwback to the kind of Saturday morning cartoons and Pixar films that I must have watched hundreds of times as a child. Especially in these times, having the video game equivalent of comfort food can help salve the aches and pains of the soul.
That’s what Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart was to me.
Bravely Default 2
Perhaps my favorite games in the Final Fantasy series are FF V and FF Tactics: The War of the Lions. Between them, the commonality is that they have flexible job systems that allow me to mix and match the strengths of various playable classes to create powerful combinations that can wipe the floor with my enemies. Harking back to that tradition is part of what kept me hooked on the original Bravely Default and Bravely Second.
In theory, a game that builds on that by anticipating my attempts to break it and forcing me out of my comfort zone, making me adapt, would only serve to frustrate me. And yet, as one of the early bosses hit me with “Counter Martial Arts”, punishing me for my overreliance on the Monk skills that devastate all of the random encounters, my thoughts instead turn to what other possible skill combination I could use instead, or whether or not it would be possible to just soak the counterattacks and beat them in a DPS race.
It is rare for turn-based combat to routinely engage me as much as Bravely Default 2 did. Building on the systems of the previous games, the development team clearly went in with increased confidence, and the final product is all the better for it. Where the previous games felt like traditional Final Fantasy games that had an additional layer of turn management overlaid on top, those same turn management mechanics feel integrated into the core of Bravely Default 2’s combat. Not only have enemies finally learned that they are also capable of storing and using additional turns in the same way as the player, but they have abilities that bank of the use of those turns to make some truly harrowing matches. Taking an even bolder step forward, players can make use of these extra turns, in the form of “Brave Points”, and spend them in the same way they would spend HP (another very fascinating method of allowing players to use their resources) and MP to initiate even more powerful attacks.
If you often find yourself bored of traditional RPG combat, Bravely Default 2 would be worth trying for how it plays with that formula in bold and surprisingly innovative ways.
Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One
Always looking out for new murder mystery experiences, it was only natural that I would turn my attention to Frogware at some point. After playing The Sunken City and some of their Sherlock Holmes games, they’re a team I know I can trust to give me exactly the kind of genre fiction adventure game I need to satisfy that itch, to pretend just for a moment that I’m the type of great detective I love reading about.
Unlike many others in the genre, there is no one way to solve each case. It is up to the player to ponder the facts and arrive at the conclusion that resonates most strongly with them, even if doing so means that they can sometimes arrive at the wrong one. For that reason, arriving at the truth feels all the more satisfying.
I also appreciated the way they characterize Sherlock through the relationship he has with his imaginary friend Jon, in this prequel that takes place before he lived at Baker Street with Dr. Watson. His playfulness both contrasts and highlights the more morose and dour personality of Holmes himself. It goes a long way towards humanizing the character while toeing the line mandated by the Doyle estate (see: the entry on Great Ace Attorney).
This is all an elaborate way for me to say “Please play this game and support Frogware. I love this dev team and the games they produce and they keep getting screwedby publishers.”
The Forgotten City
This is one of those games that took me by complete surprise. Time loops became something of a theme in gaming this year, and The Forgotten City made strong use of the time loop mechanic in its own right.
The premise is that we are a modern man, thrust into an ancient Roman city that has one rule. Known as “The Golden Rule”, the law states that if anyone in the city sins, then everyone dies. We’re charged with figuring out who will break that rule and stopping them from doing so.
One of the most interesting aspects of the game is that it tackles the uncomfortable implications behind its setting and premise by the horns. Because ancient roman society is so vastly different than our own, our systems of morality clash with that of one the world we’re transported to in fascinating ways that call both into question. Additionally, the idea of what constitutes a “sin”, and how subjective that can and must be, becomes vital to the web we’re tasked with unraveling.
It may have started its life as a Skyrim mod (a fact that becomes obvious once you start the game), but it’s since grown into so much more. Considering the size of the team, I can’t help but be impressed by The Forgotten City.
Psychonauts 2
Like Ratchet and Clank, Psychonauts 2 brought me back to those early days of my childhood with its charming art style and platforming.
But more than that, it deserves mention for the extremely gentle hand with which it handles the mental health issues that it addresses in the course of its campaign. It doesn’t judge its cast for their PTSD, hypersensitivity, or in one particularly touching case alcoholism. Rather, it empathizes with them and allows the player to do so in kind, and a touch of Double Fine’s signature humor to help the darker bits go down more gently.
Although it deserves praise for much more than that, like how much more fun the moment-to-moment gameplay is here compared to the original Psychonauts and how they don’t have a level anywhere near as painful as the Meat Circus, my big takeaway is that I can hold it up as an example for how to address mental health in fiction.
Lake
When I think of Lake, the words that come to mind are “pleasant” and “quaint”. We assume the role of a 1980s tech worker named Meredith, who takes time off work to go back to her small, lakeside hometown in the middle of the US and assume her father’s role as the town’s mailman for a few weeks. Every day, we get our packages, drive around town, and deliver them while making small talk and afternoon plans with the people in town.
That’s about it. There aren’t any bodies to find or demonic cults slowly taking over the town. Here, the issues are far more mundane. The local park ranger wants to stop an apartment complex from being built on forested land, the Blockbuster is going the way of the Blockbuster, maybe a bit of illegal gambling and office politics, but nothing that would raise an eyebrow. It’s weirdly bold and impressive that the developers didn’t feel the need to raise the stakes in any way beyond “will they or won’t they” between us and some of the townsfolk. Nor is there a time limit on our deliveries. We’re free to take as much time as we want before the day comes to an end.
It was exactly the kind of game I wanted to play this year. Not the game with world-ending stakes, but one where I could just loosen up, slouch in my chair, and deliver mail while a beautiful mountainous lakeside forest fills the background. Sure, my character may be going through something of a mid-life crisis, but they seem to be handling it well enough that I could make time to take my old neighbor’s cat to the vet between deliveries.
If my PC was closer to my bedroom, I could probably have played Lake to wind down before going to bed, and that’s the experience I wanted from it.
Guardians of the Galaxy
From just watching the 20-minute reveal in the Square Enix press conference at E3 2021, I was fully prepared to write this game off as another mediocre game in the mold of Marvel’s The Avengers. Up until it came out, I saw nothing that compelled me to change my mind.
Then something weird began to happen, and people whose opinions I respect started to talk about how much they liked the writing and storyline. Then randomly, my friend and former Interactive Friction co-star Sam Callahan and I started chatting one night, and he too started to tell me that he had been not only playing the game but having fun with it, which surprised him more than anyone else.
One impulse purchase later, and I’m sitting with a controller in hand, assuming the role of Peter Quill trying to beat my teammate Rocket in a shooting competition while working together hunting a big space monster in the vague hopes of getting paid. Even more surprisingly, I find myself genuinely laughing as the team encounters Mantis for the first time and she enumerates all of the many, many universes in which the Guardians all suffer excruciating deaths while insisting that we’re “probably” not in one of them.
And yet, in almost the same breath I’m grieving alongside Drax as we dive into his head to truly understand how much he misses his family, further exploring how that grief can be warped and twisted to deceive others into believing obvious falsehoods. There’s a genuine soul to Guardians of the Galaxy that, as someone suffering significant MCU fatigue, I didn’t think was possible.
I fear for this game, because after The Avengers so many people will treat it as I was prepared to, as nothing more than a disposable MCU tie-in game. It’s so much more than that.
The Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes
Even since Supermassive Games started releasing their Dark Pictures games, I look forward to the next installment coming out every Halloween so that Chris and I can play it together. This year, we even went the extra mile of going through the game’s asynchronous multiplayer mode, where the second player sees events that the first will never get the chance to see and vice-versa.
Out of the three, this one is by far the best of the set. When I was told it was going to be set in the Iraq War, I admit that I was a little nervous at first, but the game managed to thread that needle, giving the subject its due without letting it dominate the story they wanted to tell. Without spoiling it, I’ll say that I didn’t expect them to go in the direction they did, which again pleasantly surprised me.
If you’re ever in the mood for a spooky game, and you’ve got a friend to come with you on the adventure, you can do a lot worse than House of Ashes.
Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye
At the time Echoes of the Eye was announced, I was skeptical. It wasn’t that I doubted the skill and ability of the team at Mobius Digital to follow up their incredible indie darling, but rather that I felt that Outer Wilds was already a complete experience that didn’t need an expansion. I felt that it stood alone on its own merits, and still do.
Echoes of the Eye does an excellent job at integrating itself into the base game without feeling intrusive. More than that, it serves as a counterpoint to the pioneering spirit showcases in the base game, opting to explore the same premise from a more conservative and fearful viewpoint. To say anything more would be to ruin the experience if you’ve not played it yourself.
What I can say is that my fears this expansion would be nothing but superfluous filler weren’t realized. It’s as much a companion piece to Outer Wilds as it is a true expansion, and fans of the base game owe it to themselves to play it.
Shin Megami Tensei V
For a long time, I wasn’t even convinced SMT V was coming out, since we had no real word on it between 2021 and the announcement back in 2017. Suddenly, it was out in the wilds for everyone to play.
Ironically, despite being made by the same company, using many of the same designs, and possessing a similar mechanical focus on exploiting weaknesses to press the advantage, Shin Megami Tensei comes from a completely opposing JRPG tradition to its sibling Persona series. Where Persona focuses heavily on its story and characters, spending most of the running time either in cutscenes or hanging out/dating people to strengthen your relationships, Shin Megami Tensei places the combat and world exploration center stage.
It’s a grindy and crunchy game at its core, one that expects players to be prepared and adaptable unless they wish to go to an early grave. Having played Nocturn among many, many other SMT games before this, I went in fully prepared… until I saw that the DLC I purchased included ways to easily grind out experience and cash. I’m not ashamed to admit I made use of those options in place of grinding the old-fashioned way, and I still had a great time with the game.
That’s because even though the story isn’t the main focus, what is there was worth sinking my teeth into. For once, this isn’t a JRPG where we attack and kill God. No, by the time we hit the scene God has already been killed. We, a fusion of human and demon known as a Nahobino, are one of the few capable of claiming his throne and reshaping the world as we see fit. And as simplistic a construction as that may sound, it was enough to make me ponder how the world in-game reflected upon our world, with the lucky few privileged as they are to do what they wish, the rest of us pawns upon which to build their ideal paradise.
If you’ve ever been curious what draws so many die-hards to the SMT franchise, this is probably the best opportunity there’s ever been.
Boyfriend Dungeon
I confess that when I first heard about Boyfriend Dungeon, I was ready to let it pass me by. I’m an asexual and aromantic person, and as much I like to crack crude jokes on the subject, the truth is that sexual relations and romance in games do very little for me. One of my most vivid memories of romantic relations in video games was the time when, during my first playthrough of Mass Effect 2, I chose all of the top options in almost every dialogue. And as a result, I accidentally convinced the game that I was in a romantic relationship with Miranda when all I wanted to do was be nice and not hurt anyone’s feelings.
What sold me do Boyfriend Dungeon hearing that if I wanted to stay true to myself and remain aromantic, that was a valid option. I could befriend all of the available options while making it clear that I like and appreciate their company, but have no interest in pursuing anything more than a friendship. It’s rare that I see a game go so far out of its way to cater to explicitly me and people like me, and for that alone, I had to at least try it out.
And while that was true, there was a tension between that reality and the story on offer, which compelled me further than I would have presumed. That’s because the story being told is one about figuring out how to live with and deal with unwanted affection, and what it means to be the victim of a stalker who can’t take no for an answer. My dates understood my choices and were content to be friends with me knowing that romance was completely out of the question, but my stalker could not accept that and hounded me all throughout the story. In theory, this should have bothered me as it did many other people (understandably so), but I instead couldn’t help but dive further in.
Perhaps the game could have been longer, but honestly, I’m at a point in my life where I can respect and appreciate a game that does not feel to bloat its runtime with pointless filler. Boyfriend Dungeon stays as long as it needed to, and I appreciate it for the time I spent.
Hitman 3
As I write this, it still doesn’t feel right that Hitman 3 was released in 2021. I’ve spent so much time playing it on stream, and the pandemic has gone on for so long, that in my mind it must have been out for at least two years already. Yet, the fact remains that as of the time of writing Hitman 3 is not even a year old.
Like its older siblings, Hitman 3 became a regular fixture in my life, to the point where I’ve long since run out of things to say about it. However, this highlights list would feel naked if I didn’t at least mention it given that I’ve played almost every Elusive Target and Escalation contract released so far, and completed each of the new maps Silent Assassin, Suit Only.
All I can say is that we already know that a whole new year of content is coming, including brand new maps and targets, and I look forward to extending my time in the World of Assassination.
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Unfortunately, not every game can live up to its potential. For a multitude of reasons, there are games that just make me sad when I think about it. This section of the list is dedicated to them: My Disappointments of 2021:
Magic: Legends
As Magic: Arena continues to suffer under the weight of one of the worst economies I have ever seen in a digital card game, I continue to seek ways to engage with a game and a brand that has brought genuine, much-needed joy and stability to my life in an era dominated by… the exact opposite. I’ve made friends and relations through Magic that I intend to hold fast to in the long-term, and those people know who they are.
I tell you that so that you might understand exactly why I’m so frustrated with Magic: Legends and how it was treated by its developers and Wizards of the Coast. The translation of the world and fiction of Magic from a card game into a Diablo-style multiplayer dungeon-crawling action RPG should be an exciting and wondrous event. I would have frankly been happy with a mediocre game than nonetheless brought to life the creatures and spells I cast nearly twice a week with my playgroups.
It wasn’t enough that the game was insufferably dull and ran horribly despite not appearing to push the graphics department. As I’ve now come to expect from Wizards of the Coast, Magic: Legends has one of the most predatory business models I have ever seen in a video game. I discuss it in the stream I ran to actively discourage people from playing it. Everything, from costumes to spells to new classes, is acquired through the purchase of overpriced packs unless players want to buy them from each other for real money at incredible prices.
Fortunately, the game has since shut down since I was far from the only one to drop it the moment I understood what it was. Good riddance to this steaming hot pile of garbage.
Back 4 Blood
This is less a disappointment with the game itself and more a disappointment with me. I love Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2. Although it is much rarer now than it was back in the day, I still have people I can ask to join me for a round of either game and they would be quick to reinstall it so that we can enjoy an evening of each other’s company. The drop-in, drop-out ephemeral nature of the game made it easy to just pull up a random map and get started with almost no fiction.
From what I can gather from my time with the beta, there are traces of that DNA woven in the core of Back 4 Blood. And yet, the new mechanics added to the game introduce just enough friction that what I like most about Left 4 Dead has been smothered out. The new deckbuilding system encourages players to acquire cards and build decks of perks and abilities means that players no longer start on the even footing they once did. It is entirely possible to drag your team down before the match even begins because your deck is just not good enough to pull your weight in comparison to theirs.
I didn’t pick up the final release of Back 4 Blood, not because I didn’t want to or that I didn’t enjoy what I played of it. On the contrary, I had fun with that beta. The problem was that I knew if I couldn’t get a consistent group together to play and remain at a similar power level. And without that, I was destined to start falling behind other players who would stick with it far easier. There was no universe in which it clearly slotted into my gaming time, so I couldn’t pull the trigger.
That hurt more than I thought it would because I was eager to jump back into a game like it. In its current state, Back 4 Blood just inspired me to reinstall Left 4 Dead 2 and share an evening with one of my friend groups as we talked about Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure.
Twelve Minutes
There exists a timeline where Twelve Minutes is my game of the year. On paper, it had everything going for it. A time loop game taking place in a small apartment over the span of 12 minutes, where we try to figure out why a hitman disguised as a police officer has come to kill us and our pregnant wife is such an intriguing setup that I couldn’t help but throw myself into it without a moment’s hesitation.
Unfortunately, the fun of a timeloop game is in poking and prodding at the setup and scene, to see how it may be best manipulated to your advantage. And it is in this act that Twelve Minutes starts to unravel. The number of times I had to watch “Wife”, played by Daisy Ridley, slowly, uncomfortably, agonizingly, violently get choked to death by Willem Dafoe as “Cop”, just to acquire a new piece of information to take with me into the next loop, began to raise eyebrows.
Though I never did it myself, I have seen players who chose to have the protagonist “Hubby”, played by James McAvoy, do the deed themselves with a kitchen knife. Hubby is not immune to his own gruesome deaths, yet it seemed strange the degree to which they linger on her demise as opposed to his.
Normally, this is where I would say I want to avoid spoiling the experience for you, but the “truth” at the crux of the time loop, which brings the game to its conclusion is so stupid that I cannot fathom how the game came to exist in this state. Hubby and Wife are half-siblings, with the same father. While Wife thought she killed their father, her half-brother Hubby, who she never met, actually killed him while they were arguing about his incestuous love for her, his half-sister. So he hypnotized himself into getting amnesia, and later remet and fell in love with her again. Cop wants revenge on Wife for killing her father despite the fact the real killer was Hubby all along.
How does this resolve the time loop? How does this cause the time loop? I don’t know, and I’m not sure the writers did either. The star-studded cast of talented actors turning in mediocre performances for a bad script lends credence to the idea that this game seems to exist as the industry’s equivalent of “Oscar Bait”. Further, I don’t understand how this has been in development since 2015 at least. It just doesn’t make any sense to me.
Don’t play this game. Don’t shake its hand. Don’t look it in the eye.
Backbone
This is one of those smaller indie games that I backed on Kickstarter, so it pains me deeply to include it in my list of disappointments, doubly so since it has such a strong start. I’m a sucker for noir stories, and this was shaping up to be a good one.
The problem came with the big twist of the second half, where our raccoon detective gets bonded to an eldritch horror that the company he was investigating was experimenting on. From then on, the game shifts from the story of a noir detective in a furry world caked with a thick layer of discrimination into something of a cosmic/body horror story. I don’t hate that genre, but I came in expecting a detective story, and I couldn’t help but walk away more than a little disappointed.
I don’t necessarily regret backing the game, but at the same time, if I had known this was the intended direction, which has since been confirmed by the dev team, I don’t know if I would have backed it. This is exactly the reason I don’t call this list the “worst games of 2021”. It’s not bad, it just hit me the wrong way.
New Pokemon Snap
People I know have always talked about Pokemon Snap with reverence, the kind one gives to the staff of legends. Back in those days, I didn’t play Pokemon games. As a PlayStation kid, it was one of the experiences that passed me by. While I never bothered to try to go back to the old version, the new one coming out on Nintendo Switch seemed like the perfect chance to see what all the fuss was about.
I gave it a solid six or seven hours to try to grip me, but I found myself quickly slipping off of it and getting bored of the affair. I can see why others wanted this game but for me, the idea of having to rerun the same course time, after time, after time just to try for those few high-scoring shots that would unlock the next track just got under my skin. It felt like a form of padding and grinding, and I just wasn’t having it.
And that’s a shame because otherwise, I did enjoy the time I was having. It was fun to engage with Pokemon in this more passive manner, observing them as they existed in their native biomes with naught but a camera and a handful of other tools. The enjoyment just started to slip after I missed a few shots and needed to rerun an entire 5-10 minute track just to take another shot at it.
At the end of the day, I value my time more than that.
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And there you have it. Despite a couple of clunkers, a world on fire, and a fundamentally corrupt industry, there were a lot of strong games this year. Hopefully, as time marches on we start to address those problems and move on to a world where even better games.
