fisk0

I'm not sure it was a direct causal relationship, but, yeah, I haven't played anything in months and haven't felt like playing anything either.

I have an 'essential job' though, so I was never off work, couldn't work from home and still had to meet hundreds if not a thousand people daily, and was rather overwhelmed with stuff for a good part of last year, got covid twice and we only got to use masks in the last 8 months or so.

The Norwegian jazz musician Nils Petter Molvær put out a new album this year, and I've been kinda obsessed with the single "Nearly Invisible Stitches". Back in the 90s he was one of the pioneers of future jazz, incorporating elements of drum and bass. This most recent album leans a bit more towards progressive rock-ish vibes, but the electronic elements are still in there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wKEvdqgOaE

Can't say it's a regular thing, I rarely feel the pressure to play something because it's the thing people talk about. One that does come to mind is XCOM 2012 though, it was pretty hyped at the time and I had been missing something scratching that X-COM itch for years at that point.

And, well, initially it absolutely bummed me out. People were talking up all these cool aspects of it, but it really wasn't doing what I wanted out of an X-COM game (what do you mean you can only have one squad, one base and one drop ship, just let me actually try to tackle all these terror missions at the same time instead of forcing me to pick) and fell off it pretty quickly.

I returned to it around the Exquisite Corps as less of an X-COM game and more on its own terms, and enjoyed it a lot more. Still haven't managed to turn that corner on XCOM 2 though.

@asylumrunner: oh yes, the Section 8 games were great budget shooters, really scratching that Tribes itch at a time there was nothing else like it out there.

Dust 514, MAG and Defiance come first to mind. Really enjoyed all three, covering slightly different niches of MMO shooters.

There are also two that got shutdown before I felt I could get my money's worth out of them. Landmark and Darkspore. The PC I had when I purchased Landmark couldn't run it properly, I upgraded about a year later but by then the game had been shut down. I tried marathoning through Darkspore in the last week before its closure, but didn't get all that far. It getting shut down was particularly annoying since so little of it was actually online, it essentially only made online checks for the inventory, seems like they could've patched it to be playable offline, but they didn't.

I guess the first thing that comes to mind is Diablo 1's theme song. Everybody knows the Tristram theme, and they keep repeating that one in every game, but they've never really revisited the original theme song, which I think is an exceptional song, setting the tone perfectly for the game (a tone which I felt the sequels lost too). Just really evocative of the whole journey the player makes through the game.

Yup. There are a lot of things that are good but somehow held up as the pinnacle of their genres or whatever. Sometimes it's crazy stuff like marketing slogans catching on - Citizen Kane was marketed as "the greatest movie of all time" before any critics had seen it for example.

1. While I think it manages to create a unique enough look and feel of its own, it's pretty clear that the Wing Commander games take some heavy inspiration from Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek, and to a lesser extent Star Wars. The humans have their federation, that in the first couple of games are kind of depicted as an analogue to Star Trek's utopian Federation, though later games take a darker turn. Wing Commander 2 essentially copies the whole "the klingons have a ship that can fire when cloaked!" plot from Star Trek The Undiscovered Country.

The Kilrathi are pretty much a hybrid of the Cylons, Klingons and the cat species from the Star Trek Animated Series, the music is extremely evocative of the Star Trek: The Motion Picture music, with occasional ventures into Star Wars music and the ship designs are all very Battlestar Galactica inspired, with the first enemy ships you encounter, the Dralthi Fighters, basically just being the disc shaped Cylon fighters, and the second ship players get access to essentially being the BSG Viper.

2. Carmageddon is just Death Race 2000, straight up. A couple of cars are nearly identical to cars seen in the 70s movie, and the third Carmageddon game even has the subtitle TDR 2000, though they claim it's short for "Total Destruction Racing".

Huh, I kept thinking of that as a 2012 release, but, yeah apparently it was 2011. Might make my list too, though I didn't like it anywhere as much as Demon's Souls.

I remember people absolutely hated Ace Combat: Assault Horizon. It was a bad Ace Combat game, but still a great arcade air combat title. The multiplayer modes had several years of staying power for me. There also was the very good 3DS launch title, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon - Shadow Wars, which was an XCOM game made by one of the original X-COM and Laser Squad developers.

Trackmania 2: Canyon was also released in that year, and it's probably my second favorite TM2 entry next to Valley (never liked Stadium much, but you kinda have to play it since that's where all the servers are).

Aside from those three, it was almost entirely an FPS year for me, Battlefield 3 still holds up really well, its absurd browser based game launcher aside, and I still have fond memories of Crysis 2 and Hard Reset, even though I haven't revisited them in years.

So, yeah, my list would probably be:

• Battlefield 3
• Ace Combat: Assault Horizon
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
• Crysis 2
• Deus Ex: Human Revolution
• Hard Reset
• Trackmania 2: Canyon
• Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Shadow Wars
• Killzone 3
• From Dust

Honorable Mention: Achron (Incredibly cool concept - time travelling RTS, not quite there in the execution)

Most disappointing: Darkspore