Atlas

+1 for 1440p.

I only got into Taskmaster last year, but I watched pretty much every series straight with my sister and then watched the latest series as the first one I was watching as it happened. I've always been a big fan of UK panel shows and knew Alex Horne (and his band) and Greg Davies from appearances on things like 8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, and had always seen TM advertised on Dave but never actually watched any of it until last year. So yeah, was pretty excited to see so many people discovering it, especially non-Brits.

Favourite series is a tough one. Most times picking series will be based on which contestants entertained me the most, because there hasn't been one so far where there hasn't been someone I really loved watching. The first series I watched was 4, but series 5 was a great all-around crew that also had my favourite contestant and one of my favourite comedians, Bob Mortimer. Series 10 definitely had loads of laugh-out-loud moments, and I think Johnny Vegas was an inspired choice for the show, but Daisy May Cooper ended up being my favourite, although watching Katherine Parkinson's mind unravel was also a big highlight (same thing with Series 8 - watching Paul Sinha be so befuddled by the tasks while walking around in a dressing gown and pyjamas was never not hilarious).

Hell yeah new Mario Golf.

Breath of the Wild 2. I'd love to see Nintendo trying out a new IP, but in terms of their established titles BOTW 2 is miles ahead of all others.

Dualshock 4. It's my second favourite PC controller ever, after Xbox 360.

I saw this pop up a couple of days ago and skipped right to the end to see the top ten list, because there is no universe in which I'd watch/listen to seven hours of three people debating GOTY in 2020 when the only member of the trio that I have an actual real liking for is Mary.

Was 2020 a really weird year, or was this just a really weird list? I'm pretty checked out on video games that aren't in my genre wheelhouse, but it's not like I'm expecting every list to have Crusader Kings 3 or Mount & Blade: Bannerlord or the games I cared about on them. Super Mega Baseball 3 was definitely one of my favourite games of the year...except the game has had a major bug for the last couple of months that intermittently introduces a stuttering that renders the game completely unplayable, and they've had major updates since that haven't fixed it. As you can imagine, I've soured a bit on the game as a result.

Kentucky Route Zero being on GOTY lists in 2020 is just so weird to me - the game's first release was in 2013 and it's won awards and been on GOTY lists many times since. I bounced off of Ori after only a couple of hours, because I didn't want to play a hard, demanding game at the start of the pandemic - the pandemic was also the reason why I had zero interest in playing something as miserable as TLOUp2. And then a VR game, a remake, a tactics game that I know almost nothing about (I've been meaning to play Blades of the Shogun for ages but haven't gotten round to it), and some PS5 thing, all ahead of DOOM and Spiritfarer and Horizon Zero Dawn on PC and everything else.

Dunno, just seems weird, and I'm never going to actually listen to the discussions to find out why they made their decisions.

No way, no how. The game is completely toxic in my eyes, I have no interest in supporting CDPR and their business/design practices. It's also a bummer to me that this seems to be a completely superficial interpretation of cyberpunk, stripping it of social commentary and nuance and just cribbing the aesthetic and pushing edginess. I was never consumed by the hype because I'm past the point in my life where I feel the need to consume every piece of pre-game coverage, and I never watched a single trailer for it. It was on my radar, and maybe if the reviews had been more overwhelmingly positive I might have changed my mind. I'm sure I'll get it on sale at some point. All that being said, I still haven't played Witcher 3.

If you're buying the game at launch/have bought it and are enjoying it, then all power to you. If you're not bothered by the politics or toxicity, then all power to you. It's a shame that the game became a lightning rod for all this commentary and negativity (of course it's CDPR's fault that this happened because of how they marketed the game), but that doesn't mean that people shouldn't be able to enjoy the game.

The most recent example I can think of is the Red Dead Redemption 2 epilogue where you play as John Marston. I rolled straight from the ending of the "main" story into the epilogue without a moment's thought. You don't actually see the credits roll until the end of the sequence, so maybe it's not a "true" epilogue, but aside from finishing the story I also spent a fair amount of time in the open-world cleaning up sidequests and other content - my goal was to get to 90% completion in single player, which I did.

At this point in my life, I only really get to the end of a game if I've really enjoyed it, and in that case I'm almost certainly going to feel compelled to jump into more content if/when it's available.

I bought Spiritfarer yesterday so I could have something to play on my Switch.

My goodness, what a desperately, heart-achingly, superlatively beautiful game. I cannot say enough about how much I'm enjoying it, how charmed I am by it, how much I want to see more but not race to the end lest I no longer have an excuse to play it. The art and animation are both utterly, breathtakingly gorgeous, the music is fantastic, I like most of the writing, and the mechanics are designed to tap straight into the management sim centres of my brain and tickle them to bits. My first time guiding a soul through the Everdoor was one of those special moments in gaming that took my breath away.

I'm totally in love. Something would have to go very, very wrong in the back-half of the game for me not to rate it ten out of ten, and rank it at the very top of my games of the year list.

And here's me still rocking a 1070 Ti, like some kind of knuckle-dragging caveman.

I understand that Rorie has bigger demands due to his job and his setup with that crazy monitor - my monitor is just 1440p 16x9 - but I think I'm still at least a year or two away from my next big upgrade. The two most GPU-intensive games I've played the last year or so are RDR2 and Horizon: Zero Dawn, both of which looked damn pretty and ran well enough on my setup (RDR2 had a million infuriating technical issues, but resolution and framerate weren't the big problems for me).