In March of 2020, NBA 2k20 was added to Xbox’s Game Pass service. In hindsight, this is ironic timing as March of 2020 was also the month COVID-19 exploded in the United States. One of the early regional events was an outbreak of the disease at a nursing community near my home of Seattle, but I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say the country really took notice of the disease, its spread, and its seriousness only after Rudy Gobert of the NBA’s Utah Jazz tested positive and suddenly games were postponed and cancelled.

I was fortunate in that my job was not seriously affected; I had some travel cancelled but the work remained. Still subject to lockdown or shelter-in-place orders, I had time on my hands. Animal Crossing took up plenty of that time, but I was looking for a new game. Long disillusioned with the NHL series, I decided to give NBA 2k20 a shot. I’m not the biggest basketball fan but I could recognize most players’ names and teams...or a team that had played for recently at least. Plus, I was I intrigued by “MyTeam,” the mode that let you mix and match a team of current and former stars - provided you could acquire their cards via in-game challenges, an auction house system, or by the luck of the loot box.

Throughout the NBA’s pause and eventual return, I played a lot of NBA 2k20, and I spent even more money on it than I invested time. I want to be clear about something: I have a good job, I have disposable income, and I don’t spend beyond my means. But money that would previously go to dinner with friends? A trip to visit family? Dry cleaning (It was clear we weren’t going to be working in offices or around others ANYTIME soon)? Buy a couple boxes of digital basketball cards - chase the guys you remembered from when you were a teenager, chase the players you’d come to know from a new interest in the game, or put together the Celtics Big 3 you used to watch with your dad - no, not KG, Allen, and Pierce, the originals of Bird, McHale, and Parrish.

I acquired a LOT of digital basketball cards.

Like every sports title, the season wound down after the NBA’s bubble return, and content for 2k20 stopped in anticipation of NBA 2k21. The new title brought a new concept, cribbed from other sports Ultimate Team modes, known as “seasons.” 6 weeks of timed content. Bite-sized breakdowns really of the chase for the best cards, facilitated by daily and weekly and season-long XP challenges. I liked the sound of fresh, regular content and shorter term goals to work towards. Plus, NBA 2k21 was a next gen launch title when those were few and far between.

The game launched, and I was back in my hamster wheel of buying packs, trying cards, and grinding XP for questionable digital rewards. As a mostly offline player, some things were flatly not available to me, and others seemed out of reach. Seasons 1 and 2 continued this way, but with Season 3 I felt like if I dedicated myself, I could earn the season’s ultimate reward, a “galaxy opal” tier Dwayne Wade for future use. I grinded, and grinded, and grinded. I played modes I didn’t enjoy when there were rewards for doing so that didn’t require winning. I added Dwayne Wade (a player it should be noted I had no historical or emotional connection to) to my squad. And a few days later...it started again. The season 4 chase would be for Kawhi Leonard, another great card built a player I had no connection to historically or emotionally.

I did it again. For 6 weeks. I didn’t enjoy playing digital basketball for...the last two? Maybe three of those weeks?

So when Season 5 started, I read the dev blog with all the news of what was new; there are always new players beyond just the season end goal. And I just decided I was done. No more packs, no more daily or weekend-specific XP challenges. No more playing a few games while listening to podcasts to kill some time and earn the next card. I’d like to say I’d have come to the conclusion I did no matter what, but a high-level Larry Bird (my dad’s favorite player) might have broken my resolve. But I walked away.

I’ve been happier playing in the sandboxes of Hitman 3, testing out the Bravely Default 2 demo before this weekend’s launch, and downloaded the Control Ultimate Edition as part of PS Plus. I don’t know if there’s a broader lesson to be learned here - the addictive qualities of loot boxes are well established and not even the major takeaway here - but I know what I’m taking from it personally. Life is too short and, even in a pandemic, free time too limited to waste on games that you’re not truly enjoying. I hope I can remember this the next time I start to think “I’m just not digging this as much as I used to.”

Every (okay, most) years I write something about my games of the year. Sometimes it’s a numbered list. Sometimes it’s a categorical summary like this one. Sometimes it’s several blogs over several days in who knows what kind of format. When I sat down and looked back at what I played in 2020, the games seemed to align themselves into the categories you see below. With apologies to Giant Bomb's own Game of the Year entries from years past, here's my Games of 2020 entry.

Best Card Game: Monster Train

I’m a sucker for a card game, whether we’re talking about Collectible Card Game genre mainstays like Hearthstone and Magic: The Gathering Arena or deckbuilders like Slay the Spire or Griftlands. And while Slay was ported to the Switch, Griftlands continued its Early Access development, and Hearthstone and Magic continued releasing new sets, Monster Train was the new card game that caught my attention this year. Then sad thing is I feel like

I have a backlog of 4 or 5 other card-based games I haven’t even gotten to yet thanks to these all being so fun and replayable.

Early Access Done Right: Hardspace: Shipbreaker

Griftlands got its due above, and my other runner up is Baldur’s Gate 3. Where BG3 impressed was by launching with the early part of a game and a seemingly solid implementation of the D&D rule set, and that’s no small feat. But Hardspace: Shipbreaker launched feeling like a game that had slowly expanded in development like a game opens up after a tutorial. The game added bigger and more complex ships to dismantle, different tools to accomplish that job, and new systems to work with at the meta layer of the game. And on a personal level, I just found it very relaxing to load up my O2 tanks and jet pack, make sure my cutter was repaired, and go methodically dismantle a well-constructed space ship.

Sports Game of the Year: MLB The Show 20

NBA 2k20 and 2k21 get honorable mention spots after a Game Pass trial of 20 showed me that the game was fun and how exploitative their version of an “Ultimate Team” mode could be. PGA Tour 2k21 is a surprisingly fun and customizable golf sim of the kind I didn’t realize I had been missing since, let’s say Tiger Woods 05? But MLB The Show 20 was something special this year. They launched just before our world got turned upside down and put on pause, along with the baseball season. The already excellent and excellently rewarding Diamond Dynasty mode has relied recently on “live content” updates and without that coming from a real baseball season, developer Sony San Diego leaned into throwbacks from games past. It kept the game afloat until baseball returned, and resulted in one of the more positively received Diamond Dynasty years in recent memory.

Let’s take a break and get the more negative categories out of the way:

Game About a Dystopian Future Where Corporations and Technology Conspire Against You That Is Also a Buggy Mess: Watch Dogs: Legion.

What, you were expecting something else? Everyone’s experiences can vary, and while I’ve had a relatively fun but bland time with the OTHER game you were looking for here, Watch Dog Legions inexplicably just lost hours of gameplay upon attempting to save and exit. Twice. Fool me once - shame on me. Fool me twice - maybe imma just play other stuff for a while.

Game I Didn’t Want to Play in 2020: The Last of Us Part 2.

This was my hardest decision. Runner up XCom: Chimera Squad launched in late April and is a strategy and tactics game in the XCom universe about a hyper-militarized police force fighting “insurgents.” This launched in April. By late May, I was in the Seattle streets marching against an overfunded, unaccountable war machine known as the SPD being turned on our own citizenry. The fantasy layer of abstracting an extraterrestrial invasion that led to this scenario in game wasn’t enough for me to want to keep playing. Not every piece of art had to reflect the onserver’s values to be enjoyable, but I had no problem walking away from this in the summer of 2020. I’ll probably go back to it in the future. But now to our winner: The Last of Us Part 2 launched in mid-June and is set in a post-apocalyptic world where some people work together and others have been turned into bloodthirsty, selfish monsters following the outbreak of a global pandemic. HARD GODDAMN PASS, 2020.

With those out of the way, some of the remaining categories may sound a little negative, but they do contain games I generally enjoyed this year. For example:

2020’s Nostalgia Play Done Wrong: Super Mario Brothers 3D All-Stars

Runners up Kingdoms of Amalur Re-Reckoning and Need for Speed Hot Pursuit Remastered caught MAJOR breaks by essentially being no-frills upgrades of games I liked - no more, no less. Super Mario Brothers 3D All-Stars is supposed to be a celebration of 2 landmark Super Mario Brothers titles and a third game enjoyed by misguided miscreants that’s a perfectly serviceable 6/10 on its best days. Nintendo did nothing to show these games any care, attention, or to explain why people should give a shit about them. The package is a massive disappointment for anyone hoping for some official recognition from Nintendo of their own history.

2020’s Nostalgia Done Right: Final Fantasy VII Remake

Another tough category. Collection of SaGa: Final Fantasy Legend is a lot like SMB 3D All-Stars, but makes this list instead of the previous one due to my personal history with and love of the series combined with lowered expectations: I’d never in a million years expect a ton of energy or attention be put into a niche Game Boy series compared to MARIO titles. Command And Conquer Remastered Collection was the first entry on these lists where a company truly showed they understood what people wanted from a remaster and how those fans remembered the originals. This concept was then knocked out of the park by interactive soundtrack with a damn good skating game attached to it, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+2. But Final Fantasy VII Remake took a project that probably started as a cash grab fueled only by nostalgia and turned it into a game that’s fun to play, expands upon the story of the original in ways that enhance your experience 20 years later, AND serves itself as an examination and meditation of memory itself. It’s done so well I look forward to paying $80 for Part Two when it releases on the PlayStation 6 in 2028.

Let’s consider transit in 2020 with my Driving Game of 2020: Trackmania.

F1 2020 makes the runners-up list because these games have been solid for a while, and this will be (presumably) the last entry to feature some favorite drivers and NOT include world class asshole Nikita Mazepin. Star Wars Episode One Racer also makes the list since it just seemed to fit better here than the nostalgia lists and I wanted another driving game. Hey, it’s my blog. But our winner is the amazingly quirky Trackmania. For all its monetization weirdness, playing quick time trials with cool physics and deranged user made tracks is how I want to enjoy my driving games: in bite sized chunks I don’t care about that much but can enjoy for a while.

2020’s Flying Game of the Year: Spider-Man: Miles Morales

Star Wars Squadrons is a fun effort and mostly succeeded in bridging the sim/arcade divide people seem to be looking for in their Star Wars flying game, but the operable word for everything about the game is “almost.” Microsoft Flight Simulator leans ALL THE WAY IN to the “flight simulator” in its name. I was trying to decide which of those two games was the one where I had the most fun getting into the air, moving from place to place, and maneuvering the vehicle when it hit me the answer was obviously Spider-Man: Miles Morales. Moving around as Miles and swinging through the air, running up buildings, launching off of corners, and skimming the surface of New York’s streets is some of the most fun I’ve ever had just moving in a video game.

An extra shoutout to MS Flight Simulator for being the 2020 Game That Convinced Me to Buy a New PC.

Game That Makes Me Most Wish I Had a Regular Multiplayer Crew: Among Us

Phasmaphobia gets a special runner-up nod here, as this notorious scaredy-cat would happily put aside his fears to try some co-op ghost hunting. But what I’d most love to do is get together with a virtual lobby full of friends and then watch us digitally sneakily murder each other while lying our faces off about who the traitor is. Among Us is a phenomenon I wish I could share with my pals.

2020’s Damn Delightful Game: Astro’s Playroom

Astro’s Playroom was undoubtedly boosted by the fact that our other contender, BugSnax, takes a hell of a third act turn. It’s still a delightful game, but Astro gets the award based on its combination of PlayStation reverence, gameplay that challenges just enough while introducing the new abilities of the PS5 DualSense controller, and for being a pre-installed pack-in game in a modern console. Well done all around, nothing but smiles for all of those points.

2020’s Hottest Mess: Cyberpunk 2077

If you don’t know why this win the award it did, use Google. But the truth is as I mentioned before, I’m (so far) having an okay, pretty fun, if not particularly super exciting time with this. It’s a (again, in my experience) competent blend of modern Fallout and Deus Ex, and I liked those games a lot recently. Do I hope it improves technically and future DLC content shows better writing? Sure. I also won’t deny everything about this game’s development, publicity, launch, and reception is a hot mess.

2020’s Beat of the Rest: Spleunky 2 and Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla

Our only joint award as these are both games I really enjoyed in 2020 but didn’t thematically fit anywhere else. I enjoy Spleunky’s challenge, but it’s a bit to hard to be called delightful. And while others might blanch around calling a Viking murder simulator where you raid and pillage English monasteries “delightful,” I wouldn’t. What does that for me is that I enjoy the recent Assassin’s Creed titles in spite of the Souls-ification of their combat and the fact that they’re so damn big and packed with stuff to do that it can become overwhelming. Good games, but a cut below those to follow.

2020’s Game I’ve Waited My Whole Life to Play: Empire of Sin

When I was much younger, I had a game that I would play on my Mac Performa 550 named Gangsters. As I remember it, there was real time combat, personnel management, extortion, and buying “legitimate” businesses to act as fronts for your illegal money-making enterprises. Let me be clear about three things: it ran like shit, was hard as balls, and I loved it. There have been plenty of other gangster-themed games since then, but none have been as ambitious as Empire of Sin. Empire replaced real time combat with turn based tactical combat and eliminates the “front” concept around business. There’s a deeper personnel management system and all characters have or can get individual perks. There are factions, there are RPG like quests and missions, there’s loot for your boss and crew. I’ve heard games been criticized as being “a mile wide and inch deep,” and my time with this has shown me it’s more like 10 miles wide in terms of what you can do, but the actual depth could be anywhere from that proverbial inch to miles. I’m very eager to keep playing to see how these systems interact and if they do so meaningfully.

My Game of Any Other Year Besides This Cursed One of 2020: Hades

No pun intended: Hades is simply a hell of a game from top to bottom. With a story based on Greek mythology, this rogue-like has a coherent story that knows and accepts the player is going to fail and weaves that into its storytelling. It encourages the player to experiment and learn new weapons and tactics, and rewards repeated tries, aka failures. Hades got me to get over my aversion to “hard” games by realizing that challenging and punishing don’t have to be synonymous. Play Hades. Play everything from developer Supergiant.

Game of 2020: Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Remember above when I mentioned a few games that really were hurt by releasing amid a global pandemic or a renewed movement for racial and social justice? Imagine after being told that we need to shelter in place in order to deal with that pandemic, being given a video game who’s entire raison d’etre is to put you on a tropical island with nice anthropomorphic animal friends and a checklist of things you can do...or not. Just hang out. Catch some fish. Build some furniture. Plant some trees. Pay off your mortgage - or don’t. No one really cares. I’ve played Animal Crossing New Horizons almost every day since it launched in March. Some days I undertook projects in my island that took an hour or so: terraforming, island decorating, or trying to catch a specific fish. Some days I popped in for 15 minutes to do a few daily tasks, ignored everything else, and went back to my pandemic-tinged real world day. I don’t know if I could have had an experience with this game is any year other than this one. Even considering the enjoyment and escapism it did bring me, I certainly hope not.

Honorable Mention: Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order

I really thought this was going to make my Top 10 list. I like Star Wars. I like single-player games. I like the Uncharted style of traversal and exploration. This game has all of those things. It’s a competently told Star Wars story, and the traversal mechanics from development studio Respawn, at their best, evoke the freedom of movement they revolutionized the first-person shooter genre with in Titanfall and Titanfall 2. My first issue is that this isn’t an FPS title, but a third-person action game, and some of the traversal sections are rough. Even with the addition of Force powers, it can be incredibly frustrating to get from point A to point B in the manner you’re forced to do so due to wonky cameras or inconsistent control reactions. The moment this dropped off my Top 10 games list was during a chase/escape sequence I played during my Extra Life charity stream; the game features a number of these where your character is sliding down a muddy/icy.otherwise slick hill for some reason. This one featured multiple turns and jumps and I spent 20-25 minutes trying to complete a specific “slide, jump, slide/turn, jump” sequence. There were times I couldn’t get past the first jump despite being fairly certain my controller inputs were the same as the last time I did successfully complete the step. It soured me on the game to the point where I haven’t wanted to return to it, and that’s a shame! This was a game with combat that was frequently described as “Souls-like,” and I mentioned in my earlier piece how completely uninterested I am in combat from the Demons’s Souls, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro family of FromSoft games. Fallen order does let you tune the combat with difficulty settings that show how combat is altered, and I applaud this concession to people like me who are more interested in the story/puzzle aspects of a game like this. It also featured a well-done map that color-coded itself with green for areas you’d visited, red for areas that were blocked until you had acquired new powers/gear, and orange for doors you could now return to and re-explore. There were some very, very good parts to Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order but just not enough to overcome the frustrating bits. Sorry, Respawn, you’ll have to make something better, maybe a little more consistent, to make my 2019 Top 10 games list.

With that out of the way, what follows is my Top 10 Games of 2019 list. These are 11 (sorry) games from 2019 that I played and enjoyed. They all have faults, but were all enjoyable experiences in one way or another. The list is ordered out of tradition, but the truth is that in constructing this list, finalizing the order has been far more difficult than choosing which games would be a part of it. I’ve had one game at spots 1, 4, and 7. Another at 1, 2, and 8. a third game has been off the initial drafts, 2, and 4. While this ordering below is a considered effort, I could probably draw game titles out of a hat, call it a list, and be more or less okay with it.

10. Crackdown 3 and Borderlands 3

Two series, two much anticipated and delayed releases, and two experiences that followed previously established formulae for gameplay. There are plenty of quarters of game critiscism where you can read all about how either or both series failed to improve significantly on what’s come before, either in their own past or in what they helped create and inspire with their prior releases. I can tell you that for me, none of that mattered as I was jumping ridiculously high in Crackdown 3 while carrying a semi cab and tossing it into bad guys before running off to find the next ability orb. And I was frequently irritated while examining different guns in Borderlands 3 to try to determine if I wanted to keep the slower firing, higher damage SMG with electric elemental effects or the lower damage, high capacity and fire rate assault rifle. But each offered a kind of comfort in their familiarity, albeit a comfort offset by the lack of modern convenience and things I’d grown to depend on in modern games. These games were what I was looking for from boxes with their names on them, and that was enough to make my Games of the Year list as a package deal.

9. Untitled Goose Game

What a goddamn delight of a game. The controls are simple: you walk or run (or swim), you crouch, you pick things up, you honk. You’re a goose, aka The Wild Kingdom’s Asshole Fowl, and each new area tasks you with a number of things to accomplish in order to inconvenience the residents of this area. Get that gardener wet, steal his keys, and make him change his hat. Lock that child in a phone booth…or frame him for robbery. Be a pest and move on, leaving broken spirits in your wake. Look, these quaint British townspeople look like Tories, so they deserve it.

8. Apex Legends

Remember a few hundred words ago when I said that developer Respawn entertainment would “have to make something better, maybe more consistent, to make my 2019 Top 10 Games list?” That’s what we call foreshadowing. One weekend in late January, rumors started circulating that the makers of the Titanfall series were going to release something imminently, and it was Good. It turns out the sources of those rumors were game streamers and influencers who had been invited to play Apex Legends a few days early and who were at best cagey and at worst in violation of their NDAs. Then it dropped: Apex Legends was a new, free-to-play, multiplayer battle royale set in the Titanfall universe with unique hero characters. Each three person squad could have one of each character at most, and each character had unique abilities to aid the team. If those ingedients had been added to Respawn’s signature mobility and gunplay FPS formula, Apex Legends probably would have been pretty good if not great. But it also introduced a simple way to wordlessly communicate with teammates about the hectic battle royale environment. Not only could you spot enemies, but call out guns, ammo, and equipment and mark them for your teammates to retrieve, or just as easily indicate you were looking for a particular type of ammo or weapon attachment. It takes a lot for a multiplayer focused or multiplayer only title to make my Top 10 list, but Apex Legends was a special blend of systems and gameplay that made an indelible mark on 2019.

7. Magic the Gathering: Arena

I have a bit of a “chicken or the egg” problem when it comes to Magic: Arena this year. I had been playing it in open beta and enjoying the CCG (collectible card game) of my high school years as translated to PC, but it hadn't dethroned Hearthstone as my go to digital CCG. Then two things happened: Magic introduced a “Mastery Pass” that rewarded you for playing regularly, and ActivisionBlizzard shot themselves in the…let’s say foot with their response to a reasonable statement by a Hearthstone eSports competitor in support of the civil rights protestors in Hong Kong. That’s a complicated a nuanced story with one pretty decent summary located here. The confluence of these events brought be back into playing Magic over Hearthstone and I think I’m better off. The Mastery Pass offers meaningful rewards for a small upfront investment and regular play, and I play at such a low level that issues with meta-dominating decks and stale formats don’t bother me. I log in every few days, complete my daily quests and rack up weekly and daily wins, and collect my Mastery Pass rewards. These usually include new cards and/or card packs, so I refine my decks or build new, irritating “jank” decks like by black and blue mill deck, and repeat. It’s incredibly nice to have Magic back in my life in a far more affordable format than the “cardboard crack” I grew up with.

6. Fire Emblem: Three Houses

How can I game I loved so thoroughly only check in at number 6 on my list? The Fire Emblem series has long been known for solid strategy and tactics game play. This Switch entry layered in a deep, engaging story and characters that you were able to get to know incredibly well in the more Persona-like part of the game set in the Gareg Mach monastery/school. I haven’t heard one other person who played this game and didn’t come away with a favorite character or two; I love my Golden Deer members Raphael and Leonie and worked hard to recruit swordsman Felix and the mage Dorothea from rival houses. This was easily my most played Switch game of 2019, and there’s still a part of me that wants to play through it again, twice, as a member of the other two of the titular Three Houses.

5. The Outer Worlds

How can a game I loved so thoroughly only check in at number 5 on my list? How much did I love The Outer Worlds? Reader, I finished it. In under a month. I don’t finish games. Part of me finishing this one was that despite being from Obsidian, a studio known for making expansive role playing games, The Outer Worlds had a clearly tighter focus. There were still tons of side quests to find and complete and NPCs to talk with and terminals to investigate, but I never felt overwhelmed. One of the game’s strengths is the writing of the companions, and no one embodies this more than Pavarti. Pavarti is likely the first companion you’ll recruit, and played a pivotal part in my resolution to the first main quest, pitting a corporate middle manager against a splinter group fighting against corporate control. By the time we reached the next major area, the space station Groundbreaker, and Pavarti met the engineer in charge of maintaining the ancient structure, I was almost more invested in my side quest to help her work out her romantic feelings for the chief engineer and help them have a pleasant date together than solving the mysteries along the “main path” of The Outer Worlds. It’s an incredible character arc, and a standout among equally solid writing for others characters and factions. This was the Fallout-style RPG I’ve wanted since Obsidian’s New Vegas.

4. Slay the Spire

How can a game I loved so thoroughly only check in at number 4 on my list? (I promise, the gag is over now.) Slay the Spire is a deckbuilding roguelike (roguelite?) where players choose their starting class/deck and try to work through multiple floors of multiple encounters. Each floor has a map with predefined paths, and the player can choose each step they take. A little worse for wear after a tough fight ? Choose the path that takes you to a healing campfire quickest. Wanting to test your luck? Look for ?s on the map that could be a fight, a merchant, or an encounter with multiple choices and potential outcomes. The magical part of Slay the Spire for me is the lack of guessing in combat; every enemy’s next actions are shown while you’re taking your turn. If one enemy is planning a major attack but you’ve got enough to damage it lethally? Go for it. Don’t have that damage available? Better find a way to block it or reduce its attack efficiency. But either way, you’ll KNOW what’s going to happen. Finding a way to manipulate those outcomes makes for one of my favorite games of the year.

3. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare

A confession: as I write this, I’ve not touched the campaign at all. I used to be the outlier who played Call of Duty games for the campaign and eschewed the multiplayer completely, going as far back as…checks notes, does double take… 2007’s Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare? 2007?!? 12 damn years?

The campaign has some textual issues. Despite being a game called “Modern Warfare,” focusing on conflicts between the US, Russia, and a fictional Middle Eastern nation, and in referencing the name of real life war crime but attributing it to the Russians instead of the actual American perpetrators, publisher Activision and developer Infinity Ward claim the game “isn’t political.” That’s not how “politics” works. I also don’t give a damn when playing such refined, engaging, rewarding, balanced multiplayer matches. Give me Hardpoint matches in Azhir Cave. Revel in the insanity of Kill Confirmed in the smaller-than-Nuketown-map of Shipment. Let us run wild in Team Deathmatch in Hackney Yard. The addition of daily challenges and longer term, curated challenges encourages experimentation with weapons loadouts. Just the other night, I knocked out two challenges at once by recording 60 kills with a shotgun (one challenge) with three modifications/attachments (a second challenge). Before this year, I don’t think I had ever used a shotgun in Call of Duty in my prior, limited multiplayer attempts. The more I play of Modern Warfare’s multiplayer, the more guilty I feel about not getting to the campaign yet, and the more certain I am it will be even longer before I do.

2. MLB The Show 19

Several weeks ago, when I last checked, The Show’s website had my total playtime for this year’s game at north of 480 hours. Now, some of that is a bit inflated by the fact that I might play a game or two of baseball and step away to walk the dog or use the restroom myself, leaving the game idle for…20 minutes? 5 minutes? 2? And while that time adds up…I think it’s fair to say I’ve played a LOT of baseball. This year’s Diamond Dynasty mode was incredibly fair in terms of rewards for players who didn’t want to spend money for quality pieces for their team, with the addition of monthly-ish Inning Programs, "Moments'“ challenging players to recreate or change history, and other means of securing free players for this “Ultimiate Team” like mode. I won’t lie, my love of this years game was helped by those changes, the removal of “souvenir grinds” that we faced last year, and real life. When my Washington Nationals started the real MLB season 19-31, The Show provided a welcome getaway where Trea Turner wasn’t injured, the bullpen wasn’t imploding, and key hits didn’t die in outfielder’s gloves. As the season turned around, my digital teams performing well were a reflection of the confident Nationals - go 1-0 each day, or 8-0 if you had time to grind out more games on the PlayStation 4.

1.Disco Elysium

What a weird and wonderful thing Disco Elysium is. At first glance, it looks like traditional CRPGs - Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Planescape Torment. Playing Disco Elysium feels bit like those games, except in key ways. You don’t play as a Dungeon and Dragons type fighter or mage - you’re a detective. You have a partner assigned to you, but your “adventuring party” is really the voices in your head. The encyclopedic knowledge you have, your sense of empathy, your enthusiasm for drug and drink…your connection to other planes of existence. There are 24 different skills, all of which can be leveled up and could pop up in your head with pertinent information or pushing you towards distracting impulses in any conversation. There’s also a “thought catalogue” system that reacts to how you play. In my games, I lean towards Communist ideology so am usually asked if I want to embrace that aspect of personality. If I do, I ‘internalize” the thought for a set amount of in-game time, then new dialogue options may be available as I interact with the denizens of Revachol.

But what do you do in Disco Elysium? You talk to people to solve a murder. To find your badge and gun. To find out who you are - no, seriously, you have amnesia. “Combat” is handled like every other skill check - as a 2d6 dice roll based on your skill set and the difficulty of what you’re trying to do. In truth, I’ve only made one “combat” check and that was trying to punch a 13 year old (he had it coming). I failed and fell down, and that felt right for my character.

Disco Elysium is a lot of reading text and deciding how you want to react to people. It’s also forced em to play an RPG like this in away I never would have before; not EVERY dialogue option presented to you needs to or should be explored. In fact, doing so may set you back further than anticipated. There’s no need to ask the murder witness who clearly hates you out on a date when you can just ask what she knows about the ongoing management and labor conflict crippling the town.

For being something new in familiar clothes, for containing clever, genuinely funny video game writing, and for setting the standard for a new style of RPG, Disco Elysium is my 2019 Game of the Year.

Did you think your chance to donate to Extra Life had passed? Were you only interested in donating during a poorly produced amateur stream? If those two things are true, I have some fantastic news for you!

This Saturday, December 7th, I'll be doing my 3rd lifetime "Extra Life for Slackers" stream. From 9 am PST Saturday until 9 am PST Sunday, I'll be playing games on the PC, PS4, and Xbox 1 while trying to convince folks to donate to Extra Life in support of Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, OH. What can you expect? I tend to stream slower paced games - more strategy, tactics, or management sims. As a solo streamer, those give me things to dicsuss as I talk about what moves I'm making and trying to set up for the future. This year, I plan on playing some BattleTech (with all the new expansions), Magic: The Gathering Area, Battlestar Galactica Dreadlock, Prison Architect, Hearthstone, Slay the Spire, and plenty more. For more action oriented games, I'll probably dip into Hitman 2 (including the legacy pack maps) and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. I also wouldn't rule out some MLB: The Show on PS4 and a tour across Star Wars games from Jedi: Fallen Order to Rogue Squadron to Tie Fighter.

Why so late? My career's busy time is from October through November. As soon as I commit to anything non-work related in that time frame, much less streaming video games for 24 hours, I can almost guarantee there will be some "crisis" at work requiring my attention. So I wait, I watch the GB and friends streams and support as many people as I can, and then try to get in this stream as one final reminder that Extra Life donations are welcome year round.

I rarely stream so I don't have much of a following, but this community has always shown up for Extra Life. If you can donate, great, and if not, I'd love for people to just pop in the chat for a few minutes and offer moral support. Or spread the word about Extra Life. I hear it's all for the kids.

https://www.extra-life.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=donordrive.participant&participantID=399234

The past weeks have seen a lot of discussion around game difficulty, accessibility, and what should or shouldn't be available to players. This has spawned a whole Discourse involving designer/artist intent, gatekeeping, the definitions of "difficulty" and "accessibility" and probably a number of other related conversations I haven't seen and don't necessarily care to seek out. While this has largely been driven by one game in particular, I want to share my experiences around difficulty and accessibility as they relate to one of my most played video game franchises, MLB The Show, and how a recent update has brought this issue to the forefront of my thinking.

For years, I played MLB The Show's annual mode spread across two single-player modes: Franchise and Road to the Show. Franchise is your standard sports game, single player, multi-year quest to run your team and manage short term victories like winning a Division title or World Series along with setting your franchise up for extended success by scouting and drafting players, trading, and managing staffing and club financials. Road to the Show is the game's more focused RPG-like-lite mode where you create a player and guide his on-field career from prospect evaluation through minor league development and through (hopefully) a long Major League Baseball career. With last year's entry, MLB The Show 18, I dove into their on-line focused "Diamond Dynasty" mode, which is fairly compared to the more well-known and ubiquitous EA "Ultimate Team" modes. Here, you buy packs of cards with virtual currency to acquire better players to earn more currency to buy more packs, and on and on. And while the mode is heavily focused on on-line play, there was an option to play against CPU opponents. This was how I played 99% of my games, playing against the CPU to complete "programs," which were specific challenges to be completed with a specific player, position, or players from a specific team in your lineup for specific card rewards.

MLB The Show 19 maintains Diamond Dynasty, but has overhauled how players progress to earning some of those card rewards. New to the game this year are March to October and Moments. March to October has the player select a team and challenges them to complete scenarios during a simulated season; win your Opening Day game, mount a comeback in the late innings, play an entire game as a specific player to boost their performance for the rest of the year. Moments is similar, but a more curated collection of these scenarios, presenting a handful of scenarios focusing on a specific player's career (Willie Mays and Babe Ruth through the years), a specific year in a player's history (Bryce Harper's Rookie Season), or a franchise's journey to triumph (The Chicago Cubs from the Bartman game through the 2016 World Series). Each bite-sized mission in these Moments and the March to October journey the player selects has a difficulty associated with it, but a recent patch has made them nearly unplayable for me personally and drastically altered my perception of the game and the "difficulty vs accessibility" discussion.

MLB The Show also has a set of difficulty modifiers called Sliders - this isn't uncommon in sports titles. The Show's sliders let you control things like how fast breaking pitches or fastballs appear coming out of the pitchers' hands, how frequently players get injured, the impact of the wind of ball flight, how often the CPU throws strikes vs balls, and how player contact is treated with batted balls. I've mentioned mostly hitting-specific sliders because, despite almost a decade of playing this franchise, I am what's called "a garbage tier hitter." Successfully hitting a baseball thrown by a Major League Baseball pitcher requires that the batter, in nearly the blink of an eye, recognize the speed, break, and location of the pitch, decide to swing the bat or not, and do so while the ball is in a narrow window where doing so results in solid contact. This is true of real baseball and The Show; I've simplified The Show's mechanics because I can barely perform those tasks on the easiest difficulty, much less add in manipulating the swing plane of the bat with the analogue stick.

An update to the title today removed the ability to influence Moments or March to October gameplay via sliders. One one hand, I understand and respect the decision; these modes offer in-game rewards used in an on-line competitive mode. They also had a set difficulty associated with them the designers seemed to have intended. I also understand the argument that allowing this to continue would have allowed for players to “cheat” or at least “cheese” these modes. But on the other hand, if these options exist for all, where’s the harm? As someone who completed two of the Moments campaigns with varying levels of sliders adjusted, I didn’t feel like I was “cheesing” a challenge, but adapting it to my skill ceiling, which I recognize from nearly a decade of playing the franchise. With certain values adjusted for my known deficiencies, I still had challenges that took me a dozen restarts, and some I attempted multiple times and still failed to finish before the change.

How does this tie into the larger discussion around difficulty and accessibility? I’m not comparing my inability to distinguish between a change-up and a 4 seam fastball to a physical disability, but this does color how I feel about my experience with the game. For roughly a week, I had new, interesting, engaging game modes that offered fun new experiences, collectible rewards, and a fresh way to play a game I loved in a franchise I’ve loved in a new way. Now, the announcement of new Moments to be released tomorrow has as much impact on me as the hypothetical announcement of new DLC for a game like Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (Did you think it WOULDN’T get mentioned here?). I know Souls and Souls-like games aren’t for me. They don’t offer what I’m looking for in a gaming experience, so I avoid them. We’ll see how the new Moments play tomorrow, but I expect to quickly lump one of my favorite franchises in with a game style I actively avoid, and I can’t help but be disappointed. Losing the ability to slightly modify the MLB The Show 19 experience to account for my own shortcomings as a player isn’t a tragedy, but I can’t see myself playing 400+ hours of this year’s installment like I did last year.

I wrote in my Game of the Year list about MLB The Show 18 getting its hooks into me through Diamond Dynasty, which is this franchise's answer to EA's Ultimate Team mode. It's exploitative and grind-y in all the ways designed to keep player engagement and spending up in gross ways, but I couldn't resist the appeal of building a team with Johnny Bench in his prime at catcher, Bryce Harper and Ted Williams in the outfield, and a double play team of Chipper Jones and Roberto Alomar up the middle, finishing to Frank Thomas at 1st base. And now that Giant Bomb's Game of the Year list is out, I wondered if I could construct a baseball team, positions 1-8, out of this year's best video game protagonists. Here's what I came up with:

2018 Video Game All Stars Batting Lineup

1. Celeste (Celeste), CF - You want range and speed in the middle of your outfield, and that speed is also going to set the table when it comes time to bat.

2. BK (Donut County), SS - Not the strongest hitter i nthe 2 hole, but crafty enough to get a bunt down and move our lead-off hitter over. BK's real strength is in the field, where sure paws will help make tricky plays, and anything he misses can get swallowed up by the hole he moves around the infield. We'll probably need a ruling on if he can use this against opposing baserunners, but I'm telling him he can until the umps say otherwise.

3. Spider-Man (Marvel's Spider-Man), LF - Your best all around hitter hits 3rd. The combination of enhanced power and his Spidey Sense's help in pitch recognition means I expect him to be a solid, consistent hitter. I almost put the acrobatic superhero at 3rd base too, but I think someone with the nickname of "wall crawler" is better suited to help us rob home runs.

4. Kratos (God of War), 1B - Big, slow, and powerful. Seemed like a no-brainer for position and line-up spot.

5. Dead Cells's Protagonist (Dead Cells), RF - Another outfielder who's good at jumping, even if I've never personally seen his highly acclaimed "wall jump" ability. I'm sure I will someday. You also want your 5th hitter to be aggressive (which is why I almost put Kratos here) and adaptable to the situation. Put a bat in this guy's (or gal's? I don't really know) hand and he'll figure out a way to make it work.

6. Florence (Florence), 2B - Playing second base takes adaptability, and you're going to make mistakes, or maybe even make the right play but have things not go your way. I want someone here who can learn from these experiences and move on.

7. Insurance Investigator/Adjuster (Return of the Obra Dinn), 3B - The hot corner takes quick thinking and super fast reactions, which may seem like an odd fit for this combination. But when an opposing batter just absolutely murders a pitch, I want a third baseman who can quickly pull out his supernatural pocket watch, go back in time, and figure out what happened at the moment of impact. Look, this might be where the analogy falls apart a bit.

8. Arthur Morgan (Red Dead Redemption 2), C - Catcher's gear has been called "the tools of ignorance" in baseball for a long time, but for the past decade or so it's been done ironically. Catchers are the on-field manager, setting the tone by hopefully controlling the game through pitch selection and preparing the pitching staff for what they'll face each day. They need to know hitters' tendencies and preferences as well as the same for their own pitching staff - both starters and relievers. They're also traditionally slow and awkward moving. Can you name a better catcher than Arthur Morgan? I guarantee between innings he'll be jotting down notes in his journal so the team is better prepared for the next series, game, or even inning.

I didn't want to get into a pitching staff, so that's our daily starting line-up. But baseball seasons are long and grueling, so I thought it would be a good idea to call out a few key bench players.

John Marston (Red Dead Redemption 2), Back-up catcher - Someone's going to need to step in to give Arthur a break now and then. Catching is brutally hard on the body. Marston might not have the same savvy for the game yet, but he'll get there.

Agent 47 (Hitman 2), Utility player - Utility players can play damn near anywhere, depending on the situation. That's what Agent 47 brings to the team; give him the right glove for any position and watch him fill in flawlessly. Fans won't even notice the starter's getting a day off unless they're super-observant, like season ticket holders who attend every game.

Monster Hunter (Monster Hunter World), Utility player - Another utility player, but one who we usually keep at a corner outfield or infield (LF, RF, 1B, 3B) position because of their bias towards hitting with power. They can be on the more agile side, but tend not to be in my experience.

Hosea Matthews (Red Dead Redemption 2), Middle infielder - I know I skewed heavy to RDR2 characters, but Hosea Matthews is my favorite character from Red Dead Redemption 2 even if the writing has been on the wall for him since we came down out of the mountains. He's the crafty veteran who doesn't see as much playing time as he used to, but whose council between innings and in the clubhouse is invaluable. He's lost a step for sure, but he can still fill in at second, first, or maybe third when needed. Just expect routine plays, not the spectacular ones.

That's my 2018 Video Game Protagonist All-Stars. Did I miss any obvious positional connections? Leave out someone?

We all had fun during Extra Life, didn't we? Dave Lang played dress up. Alex put his body on the line and drummed like his life depended on it to raise a ridiculous(ly great) sum of money for sick kids. Rorie took his shirt off. Dan built a model. And then there's The Quiet Man...

Who says the fun times have to stop? My 9-5 job is busiest every year from late October through early November, so I'm bringing back my 2015 creation: Extra Life for Slackers. Starting at 9:00 am PST on Saturday, December 1st, I'll be doing my own 24 hour streaming stint for Extra Life as part of Team Giant Bomb. My goals are far more modest: I'm hoping to raise $500 to help Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, where I still have a lot of family and friends (aka potential donors).

So I'm asking the Giant Bomb community for support, mainly in the form of visitors and viewers. Don't get me wrong, I'f love your donations, but I know a lot of you already gave and gave as much as you could during the Giant Bomb proper Extra Life streams. If you can contribute, that's great and December 1 is still in calendar/tax year 2018 if that's something you'd like to make note of/talk to your financial advisor about. But I'd really love some company during my stream!

I'm no pro streamer, but I did stream an entire play-through of Xcom 2 during 2017/2018 mainly for an audience of one - a dear friend who lives in Korea and I get to see very rarely. And having him in chat from time to time was super rad! So if you have some time between 9 am, Saturday December 1st and 9 am Sunday, December 2nd, please consider stopping by. I have a tentative plan for my stream that I'll outline below. The last time I did this in 2015, I had a similar plan and it all got blown up when I got sucked into Fallout 4 and played that for like 18 hours at the urging of chat so feel free to stop in and tell me what is and isn't working.

Here's the plan: 6 "blocks" of 4 hours each alternating between PC and console (PS4 and/or X1). This will help me vary the games and give me built in breaks to stand up, move a bit, stretch, scarf down a granola bar, etc. And here are the way I've tentatively planned the blocks. Listing a game doesn't mean I'll play it for sure, just that I think it fits well in the time slot/anticipated mental state and is a strong consideration (So sorry for the spacing. I had each block single sspaced, hit Ctl-Z to undo a typo, and then got this. I'm not redoing it.):

9 am to 1 pm (PC)

Two Point Hospital (This is 100% the first game I'm playing. It's a hospital game. For Extra Life.)

Dead Cells

Hearthstone

Opus Magnum

1-5 pm (Xbox1)

Red Dead Redemption 2

Fallout 4 (Throwback to 2015's stream)

Hitman 2016 (Colorado & Japan, probably)

Hitman 2

5-9 pm (PC)

World of Warcraft (I have never played WoW before)

Shapeshifting Detective

Mark of the Ninja Remastered

Heat Signature

Fallout: New Vegas

Alpha Protocol

Anti-Hero

9pm to 1 am (PS4)

Spider-Man (end game of main story, DLC 1, open world stuff)

MLB The Show 18

Dragon Quest XI (Early game)

Hitman 2

The Witcher 3

1-5 am (PC - The Dead Brain Zone)

Hearthstone

Diablo 3

Spleunky

Slay the Spire

5-9 am (Console mix - the home stretch!)

Diablo 3 (PS4)

MLB The Show (PS4)

RDR2 (X1)

Borderlands 2 (X1)

Fallout 4 (X1)

Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 (X1)

Anything else I can play well/hilariously while half asleep?

I'm also open to suggestions - I've got a decent sized Steam/console library and just want to have some fun while raising money For The Kids. Hope to see you on December 1!

Once upon a time, not too long ago, I was one of many people very excited for Destiny 1. There was an aura of mystery around Destiny, promising epic stories; a new shooter from the creators of Halo without all the baggage of that series was also reason enough to be excited. There were two preview periods, an alpha and a beta, and I played a fair amount of both. I remember those periods as the time when public opinion started to shift from "I can't wait for this" to "Is this all there is? Really?" I understood the concerns and, honestly, shared them to a degree, but was also perfectly happy with a loot-grindy shooter that felt as good as those alpha and beta periods did. I even actually liked Peter Dinklage - uninspired delivery and goofy-ass lines about moon wizards included. I wanted nothing more than to give the completed Destiny a fair shake.

I don't think I ever played "the completed Destiny." Of course, I downloaded Destiny 1 on release day in September of 2014 and played semi-regularly for a few weeks. What pushed me away was not the game itself, although the third time playing through the content from the early access periods made the game's shortcoming abundantly clear. My problem with Destiny centered around that fact that even when running "single player" content, you couldn't truly pause the game. You could go to a menu screen, but things would continue happening in the world around you. You could hope to find a quiet place with no enemies, but there was risk that they would respawn or idling in the world would reset some counter or timer. I understand connected games and games with significant online portions as games as a service, but I couldn't play a game this way.

Since my freshman year of college, I had dealt with ulcerative colitis. If you're not familiar with UC, it's an idiopathic, inflammatory disease of the large intestine. Crohn's disease is essentially the same thing, but located in the small intestine; the two are frequently bundled together. For example, The Crohn's and Colitits Foundation is the biggest education, support, and advocacy group for those with either or both diseases. MY course of UC was classified as "moderate," but was stubborn in that it would respond to a medicine for a period of time, then stop. My doctor and I would then have to try something else which either wouldn't work at all or would work for a short period of time, then stop. Repeating this cycle for 15 years, along with a disease that makes it harder to absorb nutrients from food can leave you very tired, but I had adapted and learned to live with the condition and manage it. One part of that was always knowing where a restroom was and how to get there quickly, as one of the symptoms was the need to use the restroom frequently and very urgently. This was unpleasant, but again, manageable with some planning and lifestyle changes. For example - I saw 99% of movies at home and seeing something in the theatre meant it was SUPER important to me to see it on the big screen and at the time of release. By now, I think you can see my problem with Destiny - I couldn't commit to a strike or even a story mission without the possibility I'd have to bail out (and I mean HAVE to bail out) at an inopportune time which would lead to my death.

So I played a bit of Destiny. I stopped because I couldn't commit to it physically, and I've always wondered how I would have reacted to The Taken King. I would have loved to have found a group to raid with. I wish I could have heard ALL of Dinkle-bot's lines before he was excised from memory.

Fast forward to September of 2017, and I'm eagerly waiting for a countdown timer to tick down to 0 and fire up Destiny 2. Why would I do this to myself? For all the talk of what's improved from the final incarnation of Destiny 1 to Destiny 2 - never mind from vanilla Destiny which was my experience - I know the nature of the persistent, online, active world hasn't changed. Fortunately what's changed is my own situation. Almost a year ago, after moving across the country and seeing a new doctor, he said the words I had dreaded for 15 years: "Nothing is working and you need to seriously consider surgery." So in September of 2016, I had the one "cure" for UC in the form of two operations to remove the diseased organ and then reconnect my digestive system. It was a difficult 3 or so months, but I had awesome medical care and supportive family who could come spend time with me and aid in recovery.

The results have been truly life-altering: I saw Rogue One - in theaters. Twice. I've seen other movies, too - I can go see any one I want. And I can play a game like Destiny 2 without the dread that I'll have to abandon my character or my team to an uncertain fate. And with all that taken care of, I'm having a truly fun time with Destiny 2. There's a story I can appreciate even if I don't have the same deep connection that Destiny 1 players had to The Last City. The shooting feels good and varied by weapon, and my insatiable loot lust loves seeing new weapons and gear pop into my inventory pretty frequently. I'm looking forward to doing more public events, teaming up with my clan for strikes and Nightfalls (Is that a thing people say? "Doing the Nighfall?" I'm really a Destiny noob.) and eventually Raids. I'm glad Destiny has evolved as a franchise over the past three years. I'm more glad I'll get to grow along with it from this point forward.

Last spring, following the release of Street Fighter V, I thought I was done with fighting games. This had nothing to do with Street Fighter's troubled launch, but was more the acceptance of multiple realities. I had almost no history with fighting games outside of some Mortal Kombat II with friends in junior high and high school and occasional casual play of a few others. I've never been very good at competitive fighting games on the few occasions I did play. I had an, at best, rudimentary understanding of key fighting game concepts like zoning, footsies, and rushdown. I've always been a button masher; even if I knew certain combos or special moves, I struggled to input them successfully and have never had a feel for the key concepts of when to use them and how to do so effectively. Finally, Street Fighter's launch without a story mode to keep me engaged as a casual player crystallized that these types of games simply weren't what I come to games looking for. I appreciate well honed mechanics and responsive controls in all games, but execution for execution's sake isn't what I'm looking for – I want either a story that I'm participating in a la The Witcher or Persona or Mass Effect, or a story I'm helping to craft like in Skyrim or even in sports titles like MLB The Show and Madden. The problem is I'm a sucker for loot in video games. The bigger problem is I'm a bigger sucker for Batman.

Injustice: Gods Among Us was a 2013 fighting game from NetherRealm Studios, the people behind Mortal Kombat. While they had made a DC vs Mortal Kombat game years ago, Injustice was focused solely on DC Universe characters and told a story of Superman, driven mad with power and forming a regime (cleverly named The Regime) to end all crime and war on Earth at the expense of minor annoyances like freedom and free will. The heroes and villains of the DC Universe reshuffled themselves in support of Superman or, of course, Batman in an effort to shape the world into either the terrifying hellscape Superman envisioned or the terrifying hellscape that more closely resembles the modern world. Like all of NetherRealm's games since Mortal Kombat 9 in the Xbox 360/PS3 generation, it played really well and told a story that I wanted to follow. I didn't really have the same connection to the story of Mortal Kombat, but news of an Injustice sequel piqued my interest enough for me to watch some previews, follow roster reveals, and still think this wouldn't be the game for me.

I really am a sucker for Batman. Even though I wasn't impressed with some of the other roster decisions (Captain Cold? Really? When we know you're going to put Mortal Kombat's Sub Zero in the game as a cross-over thing?) I thought I might be enticed by the addition of loot – gear that is character specific that you can apply to your characters to boost their stats. Fighting games have so far resisted the gaming trend to add aspects of other genres and their systems, but this RPG-like feature spoke to my need to get better equipment. I bought Injustice 2, expecting to play through the story on Very Easy mode once and maybe get pulled back into the comic book series based on this story arc. Injustice has surpassed every (admittedly low) expectation I had for it and turned me into a die hard fan of the series, even if that might not translate to fighting games as a whole.

Injustice has a pretty good tutorial that helped ease me into the game. It certainly didn't hurt that you play as Batman. But not only did it demonstrate basic inputs and built on those into combos, it also explained some very, very rudimentary things like air dashes and air escapes and wakeup attacks – all concepts I was aware of from hearing people talk about fighting games but didn't really understand their application. There are also character specific, guided tutorials for everyone on the roster, showing key moves to be familiar with and starting to give you a feel for the character's style of play. This is immensely helpful, as the story has 12 chapters, and each one has you fighting as a different member of the DC Universe, or possibly choosing between two paired characters for each fight in a specific chapter. I completed each fight in one early chapter as Black Canary, jumped into the tutorial for her husband Green Arrow to see how differently he handled, then completed each fight in the same chapter with him using a completely different style. By the time I completed one playthrough of the story, I felt like I had a basic enough understanding of Batman, Harley Quinn, Black Canary, Aquaman, Cyborg, and Supergirl that I could complete match without just button mashing. I probably wouldn't win, but I'd at least know what I was TRYING to do with each character.

But what would I do once I finished the story? Besides replaying the chapters where you choose to fight as one character or the other and playing the ending to see the non-canon "Superman wins" ending, I had no intention of playing online multiplayer. Fortunately, NeatherRealm has built in two modes that I do find fun: The Multiverse and AI Battle Simulator. The Multiverse is the DC-flavored spin on Mortal Kombat's Challenge Towers: you're presented with a series of fights and completing that series will result in rewards (more on those in a moment). Each series of fight may have modifiers like "Gift of Health" that sees health "power ups" appear in the stage and give whoever touches them first a small boost of health. There may be a "meta challenge" to complete each fight without jumping, or you may be prohibited from using any special moves. These are time limited but refresh regularly, providing new challenges and new options to earn loot boxes. Finishing these fights and completing pre-defined objectives results in being rewarded with various tiers of "Mother Boxes," a blind box with one to 5 pieces of gear for a character. Gear is further tiered into Common, Rare, and Epic, and each piece changes the character's cosmetic look and can enhance one or all of their core statistics, like health or strength. I love Diablo. I love Borderlands. I love this game in the same way for letting me find a new way to improve Batman. This also encourages me to try out other characters; that cool Aquman trident looks awesome and makes me harder to beat – let me mess around with him and level him up to where I can equip it!

The mode I'm having the most fun with is AI Battle Simulation. In this, you set a team of three defenders, then are provided with a list of other teams available for battle. These are set by real humans, but you don't actually fight them. You see their chosen characters and each character's level, then choose who from your roster you want to attach with and the battles play out with both teams controlled by the CPU. It's a blast to watch, you can alter your AI behavior some by changing a character's gear and some more meta-stats like focus on rushdown or escapability, but the fight is largely out of your hands. You can even speed these up and watch at 2x, 4x, and 8x speed. It's a blast, and, winning a fight gives you a "gold" tier loot box (up to 5 a day while attacking) while losing nets you a "bronze" tier box. There is a limit on how many loot boxes you can win per day while attacking, but winning fights still adds some XP to your characters who participate and your overall profile level. You also win boxes if you're chosen to defend by another player, and I don't know if those are time limited. The mode is a blast and rewards me for watching DC characters fight without the stress of having to be good at anything beyond stat management.

I'm honestly stunned to be enjoying Injustice 2 as much as I am. I love that the story embraces its comic book nature, is over the top, and makes Superman a real jerk. I feel like even if I'm not good at the game, I am getting better and understanding the concepts behind fighting game strategy and character strengths and usage. And the "loot lust" to get one more piece of better gear keeps pulling me back in for a few more rounds in the Multiverse or AI Battle Simulator. And of course, if you want a friendly match, expect me to use my main, Batman. (You'll still win)

(And I'm sorry about the title. I couldn't help myself)

The early part of 2017 has seen four games released that I've played to varying amounts. Horizon: Zero Dawn came out in late February, and I played it until The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was released. Both games are fantastic, but are similar thematically and in what your characters do mechanically, but different in how you execute the controller inputs to do those things, so I decided I would shelve Horizon until I had finished Zelda so as to not create short-term muscle memory confusion and poor outcomes when trying to do something in either game. Mass Effect: Andromeda followed those two, and my early time with the game was engaging and reminded me of how ready I was for another Mass Effect-style space opera adventure, but reports of technical problems that potentially limited quest completion made it an easy call to shelve that as well until I had finished Zelda and the developers had had the time to address these issue via patches. Finally, Persona 5 hit in late April and when faced with the sprawling, largely unguided world of Zelda and the tightly defined and regimented morning-afternoon-night gameplay loop of the Persona series, I decided my best bet at completing one of these 4 games in 2017 was to focus on Persona 5.

Throughout this, I've had handful of games I could and di go to for brief respites from grand, involved, story-driven titles. I still complete my daily Hearthstone quests and am trying to move up this month's ranked ladder, Marvel Puzzle Quest provides bite-sized fun with its match 3 style gameplay and frustration with the frequency of great rewards, and MLB The Show 17 allows me to imagine a world with a stable Washington Nationals bullpen and Wilson Ramos healthy and behind the plate for my team. These games and styles of games are familiar and comforting and easier to play in smaller chunks; where progress in Persona 5 is frequently measured in 10s of hours, these all allow for shorter bursts of play, but didn't present the kind of excitement from winning a difficult encounter in the other four, larger style games I have on my plate.

This week I finally tried PlayerUnknown's BattleGrounds, a game in Early Access on Steam that has blown up as "the next big thing" in gaming by selling over a million copies in its launch weekend. A brief explanation: PlayerUnknown is the handle of an Irish modder who has created game mods for ARMA III and H1Z1 that created new modes of play for those game that replicated the theme of the Japanese film Battle Royale or American Young Adult fiction The Hunger Games. A large number of players are set in an expansive but limited play area; the winner is the last man or woman standing. The play area constricts as time passes, funneling survivors to a smaller and smaller area and forcing confrontation. PlayerUnknown's BattleGrounds (known as Battlegrounds from here on out for brevity with no intention to shortchange PlayerUnknown) is one of the first stand-alone versions of a game like this. Players start with no useful items – just clothing of various looks – and anything helpful must be scavenged on the island you are fighting on. Guns, armor, healing items, and vehicles are all Procure On Site for you and up to 99 other people intent on using those tools to kill you in the name of their own survival.

BattleGrounds is not the type of game I usually play. The last multiplayer shooter I spent any real time with was...Call of Duty Black Ops II...I think? I"ve never had great twitch reactions, and this being PC-only for now was another barrier to entry – I've always preferred the simplified, less precise controllers for shooters to help compensate for my lack of precision and skill. BattleGrounds is different. There is no persistent progression that will impact gameplay in a meaningful way. Instead of needing to unlock the weapon I want to use and improving it via unlocked attachments, I have to start every match by finding a new gun, as does every other player. The tension of needing to find a weapon, ways to protect myself, and tools to survive ratchet up the tension more than the constant hail of bullets I remember from Call of Duty and its ilk. And once I've died in a solo player match, I'm free to walk away or start another round, which in my case will probably last about 6 minutes until I'm murdered by another player. Haven't gotten my fill? Ready up. Played three or four tense matches in a row? Walk away and let the shakes subside. I'm not missing out on anything; there's no grand story beyond each match's self-contained set up of "Parachute onto this island, and kill or be killed." There are no characters I'm invested in; even my own avatar from match to match is a highly disposable set of pixels.

Many years ago, I remember someone bringing up the idea of a video game "chaser," something you played after finishing a grand experience like Mass Effect or Red Dead Redemption or Grand Theft Auto. This could be a smaller, shorter game or something familiar to the player that helped recenter them after a long time spent with one set of characters, one art style, one set of mechanics. BattleGrounds feels different to me – more like a video game affair or a fling. I'm still completely invested in Persona 5. I care about the unfolding story, my character's redemptive arc, and the relationships being built between my character and the other people in this world. But sometimes it's all a little heavy and a bit much. Battlegrounds has offered a respite – something different and new and disposable that still provides a thrill but doesn't require the kind of commitment required for an epic that will last 100 hours. The quick, easily accessible thrill and charge of a BattleGrounds match will be there, at least for a while, when I don't have the time or energy for hours upon hours of dungeon crawling or shrine hunting or alien dialoguing. I still want to and plan to finish those grand adventures, but what's 7 or 8 minutes out of 100 hours enjoying something different?