At long last, our time-twisting, dimension-diving adventure has reached its end. And what better place to do so than at the place and moment it all began.

Yes, welcome back to 1996. On an archipelago off the coast of Australia, a mad scientist set upon a plan, building an army of mutated animals to take over the world. One bandicoot is selected to be the general of this army, and thus a blundering hero was born.

It’s up to us to make sure that remains the true course of history.

Thanks to ProsafiaGaming for their footage of the secret endings.

Watching the two Drs. Cortex interact with and play off of each other is some of the best dialogue in the game. Lex Lang once again turns in an incredible performance that captures the bumbling, yet clever and opportunistic nature of the character, and his contrasting younger counterpart.

And honestly, there’s no better way to end a game where “It’s About Time”, than this. In terms of the story, this gives us a strong bookend, where we return to the first scene of the original PS1 classic from a new perspective. For the gameplay, since Crash 1 was infamously difficult, the continual escalation in difficulty is justified. Factor in the element of nostalgia, and the finale could really only be set here.

While I clearly have my criticisms of the game, It’s About Time shows that Toys for Bob have fresh new ideas to bring to the franchise. Given what we’ve seen, I have no doubt that they could make an even better game now.

I’ll be honest, this isn’t the type of game I normally play. Simulation/”freeform” games where there’s no real goal but to play with the systems to see what can be done with them don’t capture my attention. I’m the kind of player who needs a goal, or some other hook that gives me something to work towards.

But I’m also not one to shy away from a new experience, especially when that comes on somebody else’s dime. Thanks to Wil/anaphysik, from the Disclosure Alert/Closure Alert Let’s Plays for gifting me this over the Holidays.

I’m very pleasantly surprised that I got into it.

I’m not going to say I’ve “mastered” Stellaris after playing for a grand total of 5 hours, but I feel like I understand enough to the game to start to grasp the mechanics of the game.

What I found after playing it was that once the initial intimidation subsided, and my comfort level grew, Stellaris turned out to be quite relaxing. This is exactly the type of game I could find myself zoning out to while watching something on YouTube/Netflix or listening to a podcast in the background.

There’s a lot here to learn, but thanks to the real time w/ pause system and low stakes, I have all the time in the world to do so. Admittedly, I don’t know often I will find myself coming back to it, but I’m glad that Wil introduced me to it nonetheless.

With the aid of our new companions, we’ve finally defeated Dr N Tropy and his female counterpart from another world. Together, the quantum masks use their power to repair the fabric of spacetime. Our world saved, there’s not much more to do aside from hang out in the Sn@xx Dimension until we can hitch a ride back home.

Shouldn’t be too complicated, right? Nothing’s going to go wrong and… who am I kidding?

Thanks to GarlandTheGreat for the video we used in lieu of finishing The Crate Escape.

The more I think about that set-piece, platforming over falling shipping containers, the more convinced I am that a simple mechanic to slow down or stop time when the player stands still would have gone a long way to making it a little more doable. I remember having trouble with it in my casual run, but even then it didn’t kill me anywhere near as many times as it did here.

A problem that my stream chat also helpfully pointed out is that the adaptive difficulty system really can’t do much to make that section any easier. It could (and did) provide me Aku Aku masks, but those aren’t terribly useful. Most of my deaths came from mistiming jumps and falling, which isn’t something the masks protect from. A checkpoint would’ve been more helpful, but because the whole segment is fully in motion, there’s no safe zone to place one.

Which means if a player is having trouble, there’s not much that can be done to make it easier on them. They just have to grin and bear it, even after the Cortex section. I’d hardly call myself the best video game player around, but I’ve been around the block and played my fair share. I can’t imagine handing a segment like this to the 10-year old demographic that this game is rated for.

Hopefully, if Toys for Bob is given the chance to make another new Crash game, they can correct for some of these mistakes and make a better one for it.

Our adventures have proceeded apace and we’ve already found ourselves in possession of three of the four quantum masks. With one more left, our oldest enemy, Dr. Neo Cortex, has chosen to show himself.

Though our power has yet to reach its peak, we must nonetheless confront that would-be tyrant and stop his plans for world domination. Once he’s taken care of, surely there will be no twists. No other threats will appear and space-time will be free to mend itself.

Right?

RIGHT!?

This is the part towards the end of the game where the story begins to start playing the cards in its hand. Thankfully, because Toys for Bob made a number of intelligent choices in their cast and storytelling, it’s also one of the most joyous for an old Crash fan like myself to run through. Every character was handled with love and care, both for their backstories and how they might be brought to a modern audience.

In particular, I want to talk about Cortex’s characterization, especially after we defeat him once more. In this canon, where nothing beyond the PS1 games has happened, this is the fourth time he has lost to Crash Bandicoot. At this point, he’s not so much out to take over the world as he is to salvage what might yet remain of his pride. Once N Tropy reveals his own betrayal, that just tips him over the edge.

It’s fun to watch a villain join the good guys, and try to wrestle with what it means to “switch teams”. Even moreso when there are multiple axes to explore that position from. One could interpret this as merely an act of self-preservation, since N Tropy has outright stated he intends to erase Cortex from existence. Another might say it’s simple revenge for being slighted by his so-called partner. Still one more explanation is that he’s concluded that evil can’t win, so the only way to achieve that long-sought victory is by switching sides. Any one, or any combination, of those theories has enough evidence in the text to support it.

Praise should also go to Lex Lang for clearly having the time of his life reprising the role. Cortex is exactly the kind of over-the-top, completely absurd villain that completely steals the stage whenever he’s on screen. That larger-than-life (and certainly taller-than-its-owner) personality is so accurately captured in his performance. We haven’t gotten to see the best of Cortex yet, but what we have seen is truly delightful.

This is the work of a team who knows these characters and how they tick, and I hope they’ll get the chance to continue their work after this game. They’ve certainly earned it.

I have been writing the Highlights and Disappointments features as annual projects since 2015, and for the past 2 or 3 years I have been grappling with a weakness of the format I’ve chosen: That I have only ever counted full retail releases that have occurred in the year of a given piece. Occasionally, I’ll fudge it with justifications like a new Yakuza or Ace Attorney game hooking me into the rest of the games in the franchise, but I’ve always stuck to that general rule.

And thus, I decided after writing up the pieces last year that I would do something more this time. Often, people who play the sheer volume of games that I do will go back to titles that came out in prior years, but either came out at a bad time or otherwise got lost in the shuffle at the time of release. Or maybe there was an update that added a cool new feature. Hell, maybe it just had a positive impact on us still after the discourse™ had settled down.

I wanted a space to talk about those games, and so I decided to create one. Here’s to the games that I played in 2020, but weren’t released in 2020.

Starting with:

Final Fantasy XIV (And All Expansions)

For what feels like years now, I have had numerous people in several different friend groups tell me that Final Fantasy XIV had some of the best writing and world-building in the entire Final Fantasy franchise. Unfortunately for my friends, there is no earthly way they could ever convince me any story in all of video games outclasses Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions…

…but Final Fantasy XIV gets closer than any other game in the franchise has, and I truly mean that. It delves into the kind of deep political intrigue that would be right at home in my beloved Ivalice. No matter how straightforward a situation might seem, there is always another side to it that might add color to the black and white. Having fully caught up with current content, I can safely say that the fanbase is attached to Eorzea and the people who live there with good reason.

Yet, none of that would have been worth a damn if the community was toxic or the game itself wasn’t fun. And while I must say that I do have the occasional annoying party member, the vast majority of the time I’ve paired with people who are either completely silent or fun to chat with for the brief 15-30 minute span our paths intersect. That said, it probably also helps that the moment I announced I was playing, at least 2 dozen people on my friends list were immediately eager to help me get started and comfortable.

I can think of no more ringing endorsement other than the fact that I started in August and continue to login almost daily because I genuinely enjoy running the Duty Roulette. If you knew me, and specifically how much I despise “lifestyle games,” then you’d understand exactly how big a deal that is.

Mortal Kombat 11: Aftermath // SoulCalibur VI DLC

I’m giving these both a slot here because they did roughly the same thing for their respective games: Gave me an excuse to re-engage with them.

As one of the six people on Earth with an almost encyclopedic understanding of the SoulCalibur lore, I am ever eager to learn more about the backstories of the various cast members and how they intersect. Since SoulCalibur VI is a rough retelling of the events of the first two SoulCalibur games, each of the DLC characters come with a storyline that explains what they were doing during this time. For characters like Hilde and Setsuka, who were introduced in “future” games, this gave the development team a chance to better fill out how they got involved in the fight over Soul Edge. It might seem small, but that’s more than enough reason to dive back into a tale eternally retold.

And the Aftermath expansion to Mortal Kombat 11’s campaign did an even better version of that, by creating a much-appreciated epilogue chapter that seamlessly incorporated all of the characters that had been introduced as DLC up until that point. Netherrealm continues to put more thought and care behind what was once seen as a flimsy excuse for buff people to beat the crap out of each other is reasonably, and it shows.

It used to be a truism that nobody played fighting games for their story, but thankfully both of these prove otherwise.

Tekken 7 // Dragonball FighterZ

If the past couple of years represent a growing interest in fighting games for me, 2020 might mark how I’ve begun to grow disinterested. And since both of these games were the ones I had fallen most for, they were the ones hardest hit by that.

In hindsight, this was probably inevitable. I have a good chunk of my friend group who gets together to play both of these games, but particularly Dragonball FighterZ, regularly. Because I have so many diverse interests, not just in gaming but in my real life, it feels bad to dedicate so much time to practice any one game. I started to fall behind as everyone else’s skill grew and mine began to stagnate and eventually recede. With that, a vicious cycle kicked off that only further alienated me from games that I otherwise still liked.

I hope that I can someday bounce back, take my lumps, and dive back into both of these games whole-heartedly. But for now, I think whatever is keeping me from them still needs to run its course.

Ring Fit Adventure

In the middle of lockdown, many people around the world had difficulty finding ways to keep active. For me, I was more than happy that I snagged Ring Fit Adventure well before then. It feels good to see the numbers go up in response to your exercising. That extrinsic motivation can be extremely valuable to people like me because it gives us a material reason to keep pushing.

Beyond that though, something about my relationship with the game changed as the months wore on, for the better. Minor spoilers: Once I beat the main campaign the first time, I unlocked New Game+ mode, where the main villain Dragaux was freed of the dark influence and took it upon himself to be my personal trainer. The Four Masters, who serve as his lieutenants, were also on hand to help him assist in my training.

While the actual campaign was more or less the same in terms of what each level was and what exercises I was doing, I found myself looking forward to each interaction with these characters on the path. It was fun to watch Dragaux and Ring go back and forth like old friends and massive dorks, or watching Dragaux deal with the fact that he has a crush on the Leg Master, Allegra. Eventually, the vignettes became my primary motivation for coming back to the game four times a week. It felt like working out with friends that I had slowly grown to know over the past year.

And I’m not going to lie, another driving factor was that Dragaux is hot. There is pretty much a 100% chance that whatever team worked on his design was horny-on-main.

Life is Strange 2

Life is Strange 2 hit me so much harder than the first game did, in a way I was not expecting it too. A large part of that is due to the era into which it was spawned and which I played.

Without spoiling too much, Life is Strange 2 is a tale about people who live on the fringes of society, though no fault of their own. As a game with a Latino-American teenage protagonist in the Trump era, difficult and painful subjects like racism, police violence, parental abandonment, and religious cults. Many of the characters we get to know throughout the game are people who are genuinely just trying to do the best they can but have been failed by the systems that make up American society. While I’ve never personally had to deal with circumstances that intense in my own life, I couldn’t help but feel for the two lead characters as they struggled to pick up the pieces of their broken lives in a cruel and unforgiving world.

I’ve also had the pleasure of watching my friend Novra stream this game immediately after playing through the first Life is Strange, and when played side by side the improvements in writing and animation are stark. Where a lot of the conversations in the first game fall flat in the way that one might expect of adults writing dialogue for teenagers, this script feels much more natural: Voice actors creating believable performances with the material given.

More than that though, while attending Novra’s streams, all of us started to use the game as a jumping-off point to have serious and earnest conversations about the topics being brought up and how they touched our lives in personal ways, or the lives of people we cared about. I have no idea if Dontnod ever intended to serve as a facilitator of discourse, but that’s exactly what they were.

Even if it was just a brief moment of catharsis, that was an invaluable outlet for me.

Sea of Thieves

Sea of Thieves served as an excellent excuse for my friends and I to casually chill together in the same virtual space for a few hours. It’s the perfect combination of exciting activities to do as a team, like raiding a zombie pirate ship or uncovering a box of buried treasure, and minimal stakes to lower the severity of losses.

Credit should also go to Rare for continuing to love and care for this game well after its initial release. Features like fishing, cooking, and bringing pets onto the ship add just that extra sense of life to an already entertaining pirate fantasy. And that’s before we get to the new Tall Tales, which serve as a form of campaign that players can tackle together to uncover the myths and legends of the high seas.

When I needed something to do with a small group, this was almost always on hand to give us a reason to get together.

Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishment // Sherlock Holmes and the Devil’s Daughter

As someone who adores detective fiction, particularly the Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie stories, I’m shocked it took me so long to play these games from developer Frogware.

The thing both of these games excel at more than anything else is selling the fantasy of being the world’s most famous fictional detective. As the player, we’re the ones using his sense of perception and analysis to soak in details like the stained cufflink or old watch on a suspect, to draw conclusions about the kind of person they are before we’ve even asked a single question.

Once we’re established the facts relevant to our mystery, the deduction board, which would be later brought into The Sinking City as the “Mind Palace” mechanic, is where most of the big choices are made. Basically, by looking at what we know, we’re able to form deductions about what could have happened during the commission of a crime. And when a series of deductions are linked together, they form one possible conclusion to explain the circumstances at hand.

The trick here is that it is up to us, and our interpretation of the data, to decide which possible conclusion is the correct one. In most cases, I spent a good chunk of time on this menu agonizing over the many choices at my disposal, second-guessing myself over and over until I eventually arrived at a case I was willing to stand behind.

But of course, we’re not the police. We’re Sherlock Holmes. And the tale doesn’t necessarily end just because we’ve found a culprit. Perhaps our killer only acted in self-defense, or they otherwise had no choice in the matter. We can certainly turn them over to the authorities, or we can absolve them of their guilt, and give the police an alternate satisfactory conclusion to let them live out their life in peace. It makes us question whether or not the case “should” be solved in the first place, and I like that the game asked me to look inward to see if I believed that justice was being served by “solving” the case.

Not many detective games give you that choice, and it added so much more to what could’ve been just another adventure game in a sea full of them.

No More Heroes

Friends have recommended this game to me so many times over the years that I couldn’t help but be curious about it, especially since it was released on the Switch at a time where I needed something to play.

I’m told that in playing with a Pro Controller, I did so “incorrectly”, but despite that I had a blast. The protagonist, Travis Touchdown, is an idiot loser who thinks he’s tough shit, and it’s fun to watch the world around him treat him like the scumbag he is. Normally, I’d be stone-faced for a game with a “wacky” sense of humor, but I found myself genuinely laughing at many of the gags and jokes present throughout the story. Moreover, there was an honest good-nature to the game’s sense of humor. It never felt like it was punching down.

And while I’m reluctant to read too much into it beyond that, I’m fascinated by some of the readings and analysis that people have made on No More Heroes.

“Trust your force, and head to the garden of madness” (but not the sequel. That game sucks.)

No Man’s Sky

This one has been on my wishlist ever since the game was released back in 2016. I’m no stranger to the many controversies of No Man’s Sky, but I figured it would be worth trying if it ever went on sale for a deep enough discount. Thanks to a friend who bought it for me as a Christmas present I no longer had to wait. When the Covid crisis started to break in March, and I found myself in need of ways to pass the time, this was the game that kept me company.

I don’t have a frame of reference for what No Man’s Sky was like at the time it launched, so I can only judge it by the state it was in when I played it. From that perspective, it’s exactly what I needed it to be at the time. More than anything, NMS captures the idea of learning about other people, cultures, histories, and how they shape the world we occupy.

It’s the combination of interactions that together form a tapestry of experiences. I would relish landing at a new space station in an unknown solar system because I knew it afforded me a chance to talk to the locals. Every new person met was an opportunity to further my understanding of their language, and the more I explored the easier it became to communicate with those who I encountered on the path.

And tempering my curiosity were the dangers that lurked on my way. On an oceanic planet with few solid landmasses protruding above sea level, my mining laser accidentally awoke a horror that had been disguised itself as a valuable treasure for the taking. It’s one thing for that to be an expected story beat in the campaign, but this was a wholly organic encounter. As I realized what I had done, a combination of panic and thrill permeated my being as I frantically ordered my avatar to swim as far and fast as they could, shooting their weaponry back at the monster before it was able to kill us. I failed, costing us hours of valuable progress as the materials we scavenged were lost and I had forgotten to save for some time, but that too was a learning experience.

Topping it off with a story that kept enticing me with the promise of intrigue and mystery in the throws of deep space; Whatever problems that might have been around at the time of release appear to be naught but a distant memory.

Halo 1 + 2

As you might know, I’ve been streaming my blind playthroughs of the Halo campaigns. So far, we’ve only done Halo 1 and Halo 2, but the experience has been a nostalgic one for me.

I might not have played the campaigns, but I have vivid memories of going to my elementary school friend’s house and spending hours playing splitscreen Halo 2 on their Xbox. We would often compete over the Energy Sword because that was the favorite among all of the weapons on offer. And once it got into my hands, that forward charge as I rammed into the back of my unsuspecting opponents never grew old.

More than that mechanical nostalgia, these Halo remakes, courtesy of the Master Chief Collection, brought me back to that era of video games; The early 2000s first-person shooter design that experimented with all sorts of different weapons, vehicles, and enemy types. The kind of game that offered large rooms with varied terrain that players could use to their advantage, never truly staying in one spot for very long.

Even, and maybe especially today, these games feel great in my hands. And at least as far as Halo 2 goes, there’s some nuance and intrigue to the campaign that kept my attention throughout. If anything, I’m looking forward to continuing onward to Halo 3.

———————————————–

And that’s about it for 2020. It may have been a terrible year for the world at large, but that gave me plenty of time to dive into games and projects that I otherwise would have kept putting off.

May the next year afford me this same amount of free time without prolonging the pandemic that’s affected so many of us.

Dr. Cortex and Dr. N Trophy are still ripping space-time apart as they work tirelessly to achieve their plans and enact revenge. With two of the quantum masks accounted for, and two more to acquire before we can mend the rifts, our journey continues.

It’s About Time.

While I’m certainly not the first person to make the point, it’s worth repeating how much work players would need to put in to achieve full completion: 106%. In his excellent video on the topic, Caddicarus outlines in detail what the requirements are, but that it took 68 hours to achieve them. For reference, my own complete runs of Crash 2 and Crash 3 took about 5-7 hours each.

I don’t wish to regurgitate the contents of his video to you, so instead I’ll add on to his point. Judging by both what I’m seeing for myself and what I’m hearing from people who have tried for full completion, it is even more difficult here than it was back in Crash 1. The Crash fan community has mostly gathered in support of this new game from Toys for Bob, but this is the most consistent criticism of their efforts.

At the same time, it’s important to remember that Crash 1 was also lambasted for it’s unreasonable difficult as well. That was why the second and third games toned down what it took to perfectly beat the game. I hate that Toys for Bob had to learn this lesson the hard way, but this can be a valuable learning experience. If they take the franchise forward, which they absolutely should be given the opportunity here because they’ve more than proved themselves, I have no doubt that they’ll keep our feedback in mind.

It would have been easy to rest on the laurels of just doing everything the old games did without thinking about how they could be brought into a modern era, but that’s not what happened here. Toys for Bob made the bold choice to experiment with ways to update the formula or otherwise change it around to keep things fresh and exciting. While this particular attempt to re-imagine what full completion is didn’t succeed, there are many other innovations that did.

I’m happy this game exists.

It’s been some time since we’ve played some Constructed in Runeterra on stream, so I figured it would be good to dive back and play some of the newer decks that have been making the rounds since we last give it a whirl.

We seem to have picked a good time too. Since new champions have just been released into the wild, people will probably be experimenting with new decks and brews.

For now though, let’s return with a new take on an old favorite: Ezreal, courtesy of Mobalytics.

Deck code: CECAOAIEAENR6JBGGQ5ACAQDBEBQCAYUFY3QCAYECEAQEAIDCYZQA

They made some changes to Ezreal which should be an overall buff to how he plays. Before, he would level up after his owner had targeted enemies 8 times. Now, that number has been reduced to 6, meaning he’s obtain his win condition faster than before.

To compensate, his level-up has been made slightly weaker. Where he once did 2 damage every time we cast a spell, it’s now 1. However, it goes back up to 2 if the spell targeted an enemy. While this is a reduction, the lower level-up threshold and the fact that most of our spells are targeted means this is mostly a non-issue.

We’re light on non-Champion units, but each one them does something useful for us like create a chump blocker, slowdown our enemy by targeting them, or generate cheap spells we can discard or cast cheaply.

Unlike the old Ezreal strategies we used to run, this is a much more aggressive variant. We use removal mostly to clear the way for our attacks, and when we’re ready Ezreal comes in to dish out that final bit of damage we need to clear out the game. If our foe is also aggressive, we can keep them off balance until we’re ready to strike ourselves.

It’s a powerful deck, and one that’s really fun to wield.

It’s that time once more, for us to reflect on the year and think about how we can do better in the year to come. Obviously, I don’t need to tell anyone reading this that 2020 hasn’t been great, but that doesn’t mean good games didn’t come out. Pickings are slightly slimmer than they would be in a normal year. And yet, what did come out was generally strong on its own merits.

As a reminder, 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 2020 are:

Hades

Although I go out of my way to list these in a random order, I am grateful the RNG put this at the top of the list because it would absolutely be my Game of the Year if I did such a thing. I’ve played on stream a few times now and I would be happy to do it more.

I’ve mentioned it in last year’s highlights piece, but since this was the year the game was both completed and brought to the masses with a full release, it’s more than appropriate to bring it up again here. It’s been a treat to see all of the memes and fan art as people fall in love with these characters I’ve adored for over a year now.

In terms of roguelikes, Hades has done a lot to improve both the on-boarding process, with God Mode and the way it chooses to account for the inherent randomness to the genre, meaning the players who ordinarily wouldn’t take to it have a good chance of still having a fun time. Additionally, the developers go out of their way to make it so that players look forward to their next death because they’ll advance either the main story or some side plot afterward.

So if you haven’t already, go play Hades.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons

It is almost impossible to discuss the new Animal Crossing game, and my first AC ever, without going into the environment it was released. The experience of going into lockdown could not have been better for its odds of success.

For better and for worse, New Horizons defined the early quarantine period for myself and almost every other person who owned a Switch. While the world was going to hell around us, and we all had to discover our new “normals”, or what it meant to exist amidst a pandemic, we could take about an hour everyday checking in with our friends at our island home. I fondly remember talking to Coach about his fitness routine or asking Wolfgang about the book he was reading on the bench next to my flower beds.

And later in the game, I had a blast connecting with my friends using it in a moment where physical connection was no longer possible. Just visiting their islands, seeing how they’ve adorned their spaces, and chilling with them virtually was good enough for me. Then, we started sharing decorating tips, giving each other our spare crafting recipes, and compared the ever-present turnip prices to try to maximize profits.

It was exactly what I personally needed to help deal with the encroaching anxiety during these difficult times. I may not have returned to my island home since the end of the summer months, but I still think fondly of the succor my fellow villagers provided for me back then.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2

This was another comfort food game for me in 2020. As a child, the neighborhood kids and I would get together and, using the cheat codes to turn off bailing and gain unlimited balance, play around in the levels to see what we could discover. Then, we would spend hours creating our own skate parks to see what we could pull together.

The remake of 1 and 2 brought me back to those childhood memories. It was smart of the development team to bring in a lot of the additions from later games, like reverts and manuals, into this updated version because Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 doesn’t feel the way it’s PlayStation brethren did, but rather the way my friends and I remembered it. And for me specifically, having all of those old codes available from the first as training/accessibility option allowed me to play the way I wanted to, exactly as I did with my friends in the day. In a year defined by misery and uncertainty, there was value in going back to those nostalgic memories of a bygone era.

Spider-man: Miles Morales

It’s safe to say at this point that Miles Morales is the best thing to happen to Spider-man canon in the past decade. While I have nothing against Peter Parker, it feels great to follow a character who isn’t a white guy in his 20s. Even better is seeing how those differences inform Miles and his ability to don the Spider-man persona. Those who watched Into the Spiderverse will be familiar with the idea, but it’s still a tale worth telling all the same.

I also have a fondness for a particular scene where a character looks at Miles and says “For the longest time, I’ve had a Spider-man looking out for New Your City, but this is the first time I’ve had a Spider-man looking out for me”. I remember getting choked up as I listened to that because it’s easy to forget the importance of representation. Miles is a good kid and as I kept going I couldn’t help but root for him, and the family and friends who stand beside him.

There was also something refreshing about having a GTA-style open-world game that only took 20-25 hours to fully complete. As my time grows more in-demand with every passing day, even in quarantimes, I’ve grown to appreciate games that don’t overstay their welcome.

Yakuza: Like a Dragon

Having spent the last two years getting fully caught up on the story of the Yakuza franchise, it was only natural that I took interest in the latest installment of Sega’s long-running “out Shenmue-ing Shenmue” series.

The twist this time around is that rather than stick to the tried-and-true brawler gameplay that the franchise has been using since its inception, this time around the format is a good ol’-fashioned turn-based JRPG. Even stranger is that it’s a surprisingly good one of those, especially if you happen to be a fan of Dragon Quest or older Final Fantasy games.

It also helps that the main cast are some of the most relatable protagonists I’ve ever seen in the genre. Ichiban Kasuga and his merry band all struggle to keep afloat in a cold and uncaring world, but never lose their passion and joy for life. Especially this time of year, I felt my heart bleed for this man who had to pick himself up after being left homeless and abandoned by everyone he knew.

I’m also endlessly amused by the wordplay inherent to the English version of the game’s title. For those in the know, it’s a well-constructed double entendre referencing both the franchise’s Japanese game and the fact that the main character is a huge Dragon Quest fan. It’s honestly amazing that what started as an April Fool’s Joke evolved into this fully fleshed out and endearing RPG adventure.

Legends of Runeterra

People who have followed me for a while know that I began playing Legends of Runeterra as it came out in open beta, and later full release, this year. To that end, the game succeeds on two very crucial axes.

First, the act of playing an individual match, either against another player or the AI. Mechanically, it combines some of the strongest aspects of Hearthstone, including the consistent build-up of mana as rounds pass and the use of effects that could only be accomplished in a digital card game, with some of the strongest aspects of Magic: The Gathering, specifically the flexibility in deck building and combat which forces the defender to make tough decisions and weigh their options carefully lest they’re taken by surprise with enemy assaults.

More importantly than that, is the economy surrounding it. I do not believe I have ever seen a more generous collectible card game, digital or otherwise, than this. Without exaggeration, just by completing daily quests and collecting the rewards for them, most players can build to a top tier competitive deck in less than 2 weeks of semi-regular play. Currently, I’m swimming in so many spare shards and wildcards despite taking a few weeks off to play other games, that every time I have the inkling to test out a new deck I can just build it with in-game currency, not spending a single time of my real money.

Not to say it doesn’t have ways to make money, because I’ve certainly purchased emotes, card backs and boards to play on, but that seems to be the way they intend players to invest: In the cosmetics aspects rather than the actual game pieces. And to be honest, I think that’s the more consumer-friendly way to go when it comes to this genre.

Riot may have had its share of controversies, but I can’t deny that they did right by the player base when they set up Legends of Runeterra.

Final Fantasy 7: Remake

This was another nostalgia game for me. Though I waited until the early 2000s to play Final Fantasy 7, it remains a very formative experience for my gaming canon. Even after the announcement of this game on the Sony stage back in E3 2015, I didn’t actually believe I would live to see this game get remade on modern technology. There are few times I am happy to be wrong, and this is one of them.

I knew that the team responsible for heading up the project were the right people for the job right after I got my hands on the playable demo for the game a month before it was released. This wasn’t the brooding, perpetually depressed Cloud that had become disastrously commonplace in supplemental media and cameo appearances. This was the Cloud I remembered: An idiot tryhard who wants so badly to convince everyone around him that he’s tough shit.

Nor was this the demure, pure maiden Aerith that other writers insisted on. This was the worldly version of Aerith that, though one of the kindest people you’ll ever know, had sass and personality. This was the Aerith who reacted to a ladder crumbling as she hurried to climb up by exclaiming “Shit!” while Cloud rushed to catch her. The Aerith who took a folding chair to a mafia goon’s head like a pro wrestler, smiling as it made contact and knocked him out cold. These were the characters I grew up with.

To top it off, out of all the attempts Square-Enix has ever made to blend turn-based ATB systems with real-time action-oriented combat, this was by far its most successful iteration. No matter how many battles I fought, I was always eager to enter the fray just one more time against another group of enemies. There’s a high degree of skill in the systems at play such that mastering can bring what was once a 30-minute boss fight down to a short 5-minute encounter.

And with the additions made to the story, I am eager to see what they’ll do in the next part of this new FF7 remake series.

Ghost of Tsushima

I wasn’t sure whether or not I would play Ghosts of Tsushima right up until reviews had come out for it, mostly because up until then I wasn’t sure what kind of game it was. As it turns out, it was an Ubisoft-style open would game that came out at a time when I was looking for a good one of those that wasn’t made by Ubisoft.

And were that everything, that might have honestly been enough, but there’s a solid story about one samurai’s ultimatum to stay true to his moral code and die, or otherwise adapt to a changing battlefield and thrive. It’s neither a historically accurate or original concept, but the performances are solid and the executive of it left me satisfied as credits rolled.

It’s a junk food game, but it’s a tasty junk food game that I was glad to consume.

The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope

After streaming Man of Medan with Acharky last year, it was only natural that we would do the same with the next feature of The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope.

We were not disappointed. Little Hope improves upon the core gameplay of its predecessors, including Until Dawn, by giving players a warning before a QTE comes up so that they aren’t ambushed by a random event while they’re watching the story unfold. That extra couple of seconds is crucial, especially for players who have poor reaction times.

Additionally, both Chris and I were blindsided by the plot twist at the end. Fortunately, it wasn’t one of the bad ones like in Heavy Rain. If we were paying close attention, we would have seen the foreshadowing and been able to figure it out, we just didn’t because we were otherwise too engrossed in the experience of making sure our crew survived the night to make the connections.

If you need a good horror game, especially to play with friends, I would gladly recommend this.

Resident Evil 3

After playing the Resident Evil 2 remake on stream last year, how could I possibly ignore the follow-up?

I don’t know if there was ever a moment where I felt truly scared playing Resident Evil 3, but I nonetheless had a spectacular time with the game. Jill is an excellent protagonist because even when the odds are against her, you as a player always feel like she has the ability to fend for herself. She’s far from powerless, and her improvisational skills are second-to-none. Carlos was also a lovable meathead that I couldn’t help but root for as he did his best to support the girl he was obviously crushing on.

While the story won’t win any awards anytime soon, I’m still awestruck by how capable the RE Engine proves itself to be time and time again. Not only are the character models and environments packed with detail, but I never had any major technical issues and it ran well on my PS4.

Capcom has been producing a lot of great games lately, and they deserve to be applauded for it.

Murder by Numbers

This game takes the award for “cheeriest way to say ‘murder’s never far away’” thanks to its opening theme song.

In all seriousness, I’m always looking for a good mystery game, and when I saw this game randomly pop up in the Nintendo eShop I was intrigued enough to give it a shot. What I found was a quirky little gem about protagonist Honor Mizrahi’s journey from professional actress to amateur sleuth by way of hilariously implausible circumstances and a robot friend with a penchant for finding clues.

While the story takes the form of a visual novel, most of the gameplay involves solving puzzles to identify new items and evidence that the cast will use to solve problems and draw conclusions about the murder cases they’ve been unceremoniously thrust into.

It also came out at a good time for me, since lockdown had only just begun and I was in dire need of something to do while I waited for bigger tentpole titles to come out and occupy my time.

13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim

I can’t seem to get enough of Vanillaware’s hand-drawn sprite art or their bizarre obsession with food and dining, and 13 Sentinels certainly has both of those in spades. And if you’re a fan of their previous work, you know they also have a tendency to use multiple protagonists to explore the same story from different perspectives, culminating in a total picture stronger than the sum of its parts.

In order to avoid spoilers, I’ll not go into too many details here. Yet where The Dark Picture Anthology: Little Hope blew my mind a single time towards the end, this game serves up twist after twist, each time completely recontextualizing everything I thought I knew about the world and the people inside of it. Despite this, every detail remains internally consistent, and each world-shattering revelation brought the gears in my head closer and closer to perfect alignment until I began to understand the true extent of the mysteries at play.

The RTS mode, where the cast of 13 characters teams up to defeat kaiju in giant mech battles is surprisingly fun. Admittedly, it’s on the easier side, but it is immensely satisfying to see a whole swarm of killer robots felled by a railgun or anti-aircraft fire. The total package here feels like it shouldn’t work, but it does and I’m glad I made time to pour the 35 hours or so necessary to see it through to its conclusion.

Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time

After playing through all of the games in the original Crash trilogy, and Crash Team Racing, for your amusement on my streams, and what feels like hundreds of times over the years, nobody should be surprised to discover I loved the first new Crash game since…

*checks note*

…2010!? Seriously!? It’s been a decade since we’ve had a fully-original Crash Bandicoot title!? Well, thank god it’s good.

Toys for Bob ought to be proud of the work they put in with this one. This is far from a cheap knock-off. Crash 4 is the real deal, down to the hyper lethal platforming that defined the original games. I’ve seen many Crash games, especially in the PS2-era, get bogged down by gimmicks and mechanics that ultimately detract from the core platforming the series is known for. The Quantum Masks that serve as our power-ups and special twists avoid that trap because they’re powerful supplements that augment the game while still keeping the focus on that strong core Crash is known for.

The same can also be said for the addition of other playable characters like Tawna (complete with an incredible new design that I instantly fell in love with), Dingodile, and Dr. Cortex himself. Each of them has their own skill-sets and toolkits, bringing in a variety of new playstyles, and yet they all feel as though they belong, adding to what was already there.

As a long time fan of the games and the characters, I can happily say that I fully support the direction they chose to take them with this story. Crash Bandicoot always took its inspiration from the cartoons all of us used to watch every Saturday morning in the 90s. That feeling is perfectly captured, and other fans no doubt had as much fun searching for all the continuity nods and easter eggs as I did. I’ll never 100% this game because I practice self-care and a lot of the levels are hard when attempting to beat them in 3 lives or less, but seeing credits roll left me smiling with a sense of satisfaction.

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Normally, this would be where I leave off with a positive sendoff and leave you with a teaser for the Disappointments article. However, I have something different planned this year. So instead, since the list of disappointments is so small compared to previous years, I think it’s appropriate to just add them here to make room for my new concept next week.

Once again presented in a random order, the Disappointments of 2020 are:

Doom: Eternal

If I had to summarize my problems with Doom: Eternal, it’s that it learned all of the wrong lessons from its superior 2016 counterpart.

Part of the charm of that game was that it didn’t take itself or its story too seriously. DoomGuy just wanted to find a gun and slaughter an army of demons… and did not care about anyone else’s thoughts and opinion on the situation at hand outside of that. The whole was that the lore didn’t matter. This makes it strange that Doom: Eternal decided to make that one of such a large focus.

Beyond that, it also doesn’t play as smoothly as I remember from Doom 2016. The best way I can think of to describe it is that I could almost see the game design document in every aspect of play. Each of the weapons at the Doom Slayer’s disposal has certain enemies and enemy types that it is particularly efficient at cleaning up. The cacodemon, for example, can be instantly defeated with a glory kill after it has swallowed a grenade. Because of the number of foes the player has to fight at any one time, failure to take advantage of these weaknesses will likely result in swift and ignoble defeat.

And I couldn’t complete this segment without talking about both the infamous Marauder enemy, who is the only foe in the entire game that is somehow immune to the instant kill weapons players can otherwise use to “Nope” out of tight situations. That might not be a problem except that he is the one enemy that I would absolutely love to take out instantly if I could. The same could be said of the final boss, which doesn’t feel like it comes together the way it should.

Doom: Eternal wasn’t a bad game, but it pales in comparison to that which came before.

The Last of Us: Part 2

People way smarter than I have already gone into laborious detail as to where The Last of Us 2 went wrong, and I see no reason to retread all of that since I don’t have anything further to add. The writing itself is poorly paced, telling a story that is woefully misguided at best, and actively malicious at worst.

It’s also personally hard for me to reconcile the fact that this game represents some of the worst and most harmful business practices in the industry. These are working conditions that are disturbing even by game industry standards. I won’t deny that Naughty Dog’s work is impressive, it’s not worth the human cost.

I have a very clear memory of two major camps setting up in response to The Last of Us: Part 2. On one side were those who were literally comparing it to Schindler’s List. On the other were those calling it one of the worst games they ever played. Meanwhile, I found myself unimpressed by what I was seeing. In fact, a lot of the “detail” that the dev team was proud of, like the way Ellie and Abby painstaking install each modification to their weapons by hand in animations that last 30 seconds, actively detract from the experience.

It’s disappointing to see such mediocrity in both management and, frankly, in gameplay, get lauded as the best gaming has to offer.

Magic the Gathering: Arena

Those of you who have been following me will know that I haven’t logged into Magic the Gathering: Arena in the past 2-3 months. Part of that is my time being occupied by other long-term “lifestyle” games now, but that’s not the core problem keeping me away.

There are two primary issues with the game as a whole. The first is that the Standard format for Magic, which uses only the sets from the past 2 years, has had a really bad showing for a while now. Out of the 5 sets that are currently legal in the format, 3 of them had a card that was so powerful that it was being used in over half of the most competitive decks in the format. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t be a big deal, because players could instead play one of the myriad other formats available.

Except, Arena has a problem where there are only so many formats available to that specific client: Standard and Brawl being the two premier ones that use the exact same pool of cards. One could play the new Historic format, which was created to give Arena players a way to use their old cards when they rotated out, but then they would run into the other issue: The economy.

Content creator Saffron Olive already made an excellent video and article talking about Arena’s economy. To summarize the point, getting the cards required to keep up the latest formats can often be more expensive than it would be in paper Magic, and there’s no ability to cash out on your current collection, either via trading or, as many other digital card games allow, dusting cards to for currency to buy new ones. On top of all the cosmetic options like special card art, player avatars, and pets, which can often only be purchased with real-world money, it feels like I’m being gouged at every turn in unhealthy and coercive ways. I’m embarrassed by the amount of money I spent on Arena, even more than I was by the amount I spent on Overwatch, or at least I imagine I would be if I had any idea, and I just can’t take it anymore.

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And that’s a hell of a way to end this reflection of the games that came out in 2020, but not the end of our talk about gaming in 2020. Next week, I’ll have an experimental piece that I think you’ll enjoy. Until then, remember to take care and stay safe.

I can’t think of a more appropriate subtitle for this game than “It’s About Time”. Discounting the recent remake via the N Sane Trilogy, and the Nitro-Fueled version of Crash Team Racing, the last Crash Bandicoot game to come out was Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 2 for mobile phones in 2010. If we further remove mobile games from the equation, that would be Mind Over Mutant back in 2008.

Either way, it’s been over a decade since the orange marsupial has had his time in the limelight. I and many other fans, for the longest time, assumed that the franchise had been fully abandoned by Bobby Kotick and our Activision overlords. While the N Sane Trilogy rekindled the hope of seeing the symbol of our childhood once more, it wasn’t until this game was announced back in June that we were able to truly celebrate his triumphant return.

And frankly, I’ve waited long enough to talk about it on stream.

Bringing back a classic franchise is never an easy task, even more so when that task involves making new content for it rather than remaster that which has already been released. Even though Toys for Bob had people on staff who were familiar with the old games, it was still necessary for them to do extensive research into what would work best.

While I enjoyed both The Wrath of Cortex and Twinsanity, it only makes senses, when creating a new Crash game, to set it immediately after the end of Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped. The original trilogy is the only set of games that most, if not all, fans consider core to the franchise. So when making a new game, it would only make sense to focus primarily on those games, both PS1 and modern versions, as the object of inspiration.

And it shows. This is the exact type of platforming that one would expect from a Crash game, with a few modern design sensibilities throw in to keep gameplay fresh and exiting. We’ve already seen two of the four quantum masks, and one of the three new playable characters, but already they’re making their effects known. Praise should also be allocated to the new Modern mode, which ditches the archaic system of lives since they always a holdover of arcade game design than a truly necessary aspect of the experience.

There’s smart game design a foot, and It’s About Time I gave it its due.

Obviously, this year has been defined by the outbreak of a deadly disease which keeps many of us quarantined and many more terrified that we’re going to kill our loved ones by going to work and contracting something that’ll spread to them.

So what better way to deal with our fears than by facing them head on, playing as a contagion aiming to eliminate the human population. That’s right: We’re playing Plague Inc.: Evolved.

The most clever aspect to this game is that it’s less of a game of more of a system that players can work in and play with. At the end of day, Plague Inc is a simulation of what might happen in the world today if a disease was spread under specific, player driven criteria. The goal, of course, being to manipulate that criteria to create a scenario where the pathogen they have built managed to infect and kill every living person on the planet.

But just because the simulation was designed purely to model real-life diseases, does not mean that it can’t be engineered to perform other, similar experiments. There’s a strong modding community building their own custom scenarios with it’s toolkit, and way back in the college days I remember using them to blow off steam. In particular, I was fond of the alien symbiote-related scenarios, creating situations where everyone on Earth was bonded to and merged with an alien creature.

I’m also impressed with how much love the game still receives from the development team. Some of what we experienced, like the Fake News scenario, had to have been recently brought into the game. Not to mention some of the random situations that are ripped straight from the headlines: The Olympic outbreak comes to mind.

It’s simple to understand, even if the algorithms at work may not be, but that simplicity allows for it to be built upon in ways that one wouldn’t necessarily see coming.
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