A full list of every game I've played this year, regardless of release date, along with occasional notes I had while playing them.
Showing 1-10 of 163 items
2020 One of those 'just wouldn't die' games for me. I don't think Cyberpunk is an out-and-out failure as a game, more a fun, shoddy Deus Ex-like with wildly uneven storytelling capability and art direction. Yet, I kept playing and playing it. Maybe it was the years of anticipation or maybe it was the story threads CD Projekt managed to follow through on, but either way I found myself booting this up over and over again until I saw credits. The closest equivalent to Cyberpunk 2077 for me is probably 'b-games' of the PS2 era in spite of the supposedly better, prestige-tier classics in your library; it's like Enter the Matrix or something. Just fun enough - and just *broken* enough - for me to enter a perpetual cycle of 'eh, why not one more try at it.'
2018 A ton of fun and just as resplendent as I'd been lead to believe, but the entire time I had this nagging feeling like, without VR, I was only getting about two thirds of the requisite Tetris Effect experience.
2020 I wasn't a huge fan of Bastion, Supergiant's first claim to fame, both because I thought the combat was loose and unsatisfying and because I thought the storytelling was largely only pretty good. By contrast, I like Hades so much that it's got me questioning my own take on Bastion. Roguelikes are a perfect vessel for that 'one more run' style gameplay that used to be mainly the purview of arcade titles and as such aren't typically suited towards complex narratives. Hades layers an award-worthy narrative over each element of its rogeulike loop with so much elegance...it's a genuinely wild take on the genre. It feels revelatory, even.
2020 Still digesting what's going on with Fuser. I love the conceit, and the energy is there, but the core mechanics are still a little up in the air to me. Fuser seems to be inherently less of an arcade title than Rock Band, which is fine, but it's got the same scoring structure of one; or, at least, if it *is* similar in structure the parameters for a 'perfect run' are unclear to me. What really stuck out with me after trying this out one weekend was what a tremendous, hilarious time the free mix feature is. Spent literally hours just experimenting with different pitch values and time signatures to make the perfect nightcore/pseudo accapella mix, and it *swallowed* me. I meant to mess around with this mode for maybe 15 minutes and set it down hours later. I don't mean this as a pejoritive, but it's an incredible toy for music nerds.
1981 (NES)
1985 (NES)
