Most Dishonorable: Sonic Frontiers

“I am a pervert. I am a disgusting little worm who craves pain. Let me feel your hate, Sonic Hedgehog. Destroy my hopes, my dreams.” This is the prayer of The Sonic Fan. This is the creed that we the aggrieved live by. There are fits and starts, there are highs and lows and lows and lows, but there is only one canonical ending to this life sentence. Behind us, hell. Ahead, a desert. There is no oasis. The only solace we might find is that this will all be over very, very fast.

Sonic Team’s latest Lament Configuration is Sonic Frontiers, a game that commits the gravest sin of being utterly fascinating yet torturous to play. This dime store stab at cobbling together a few disparate open worlds with the broken bones of 3-D Sonic is the most interesting Sonic the Hedgehog has been since ever and one of the worst games I've ever finished. While Sonic Mania was a great game and perhaps the first and only great Sonic game, it was more or less a sanded down compilation of 2-D Sonic’s greatest hits. Here we have a 3-D Sonic that still feels rotten to play and still cannot grasp that slowing down our Blue Blur absolutely kills his gimmick. Sonic Frontiers reaches for heights much higher than any of its three dimensional predecessors but falls six feet deep into the dirt.

This whole, hateful mess really feels like someone at Sega said “do Breath of the Wild, but Sonic. You have six days.” I’d love to know how they got to this point. When the trailers for this game hit, the marketing team really pushed the Breath of the Wild-ness of it all. When word hit Sonic Team that the folks in marketing cut a trailer that leans into the Zelda of it all, they got pretty miffed and pushed back against the suits. Now that it’s in my hands, it’s impossible not to compare the two. Lush but mostly bland worlds littered with mini-puzzles, a race of tiny little freaks scattered everywhere you can collect for enhancements, an either/or upgrade path you use to build either health or stamina, and a mess of shrines that pop you out of the world. It mashes all this stuff together with absolutely none of Zelda’s elegance, constantly pestering the player with an updated map or training tutorials or brief but frequent and unskippable cut scenes that really take the legs out from under a character whose entire appeal is speed.

The five overworld maps are littered with points of “interest” where Sonic can solve “puzzles,” like pressing the dodge button seven times in a row, parrying projectiles, or scurrying to a platform in the short to middle distance. No real brain busters to be found. Completing these “challenges” will award you one of the 45 different currencies Sonic has to collect to move this nonsense along. Spiky hearts for offense, blue fruit looking things for defense, Coko spirits for speed or ring capacity, rings, purple coins for fishing, meteorite pieces to unlock chances to get more purple coins, skill points for skills, gears to unlock levels, keys from those levels to unlock Chaos Emeralds, and either pink hearts, medallions, or wrenches to unlock forward the story via your cyber ghost pals Amy Rose, Knuckles and Tails (respectively).

In keeping with Sonic’s grand tradition of aimless, mindless level design, these worlds are a miserable time to navigate and explore. There are 2-D sequences lodged all willy-nilly into the 3-D world you can get trapped in and have to find your way to one of the exits because the game suddenly decides to ignore that whole third dimension thing. If you can rustle up enough gears to activate the shrines that send you to more traditional 3-D Sonic levels, well, congrats: now you have to play through 3-D Sonic levels. Like I said, this is a hateful video game. The levels are predictably bad and offer next to nothing other than some occasionally cool music, though the tracks aren’t especially memorable or up to snuff with the musical legacy of Sonic the Hedgehog. There’s not even any aesthetic variety level to level, as you’re just flipping between Green Hill, Marble Garden and Cyberspace themes. From there, you clear challenges to score keys that help you unlock Chaos Emeralds. Then it’s just Sonic running to and fro between Chaos Emeralds and his dipshit buddies (not you, Knuckles you rock) while a Cybergoth Hologirl learns the true meaning of love by eavesdropping on Sonic and Tails figuring out their relationship. I guess that part is kinda cute.

At first I thought the most aggravating sequences are the boss fights. Visually indecipherable and soul suckingly tedious, these boss fights bring Frontiers’ mind-numbing combat to a new low. It's like eating slapdash shit sandwich of quick time events, button mashing and confusingly timed parry sequences all while struggling to wrestle the game’s unwieldy camera and out-hustle a timer. The only saving grace is the emocore anthem that kicks in during each boss fight. Yes, this game’s saving grace is emocore. These are truly dark times.

But then came the pinball sequence. There are little minigame quests that pop up throughout the game that range from awful to inoffensive. But this fucking pinball thing, man. Near the end of the third map, this game grinds to a halt to make you score 5 million points in the floatiest, jankiest virtual representation of pinball I’ve ever had the pleasure of suffering through. Out of nowhere, a cave door opens and you have to beat this rinky dink pinball board to activate the shitty boss fight. You plink and plunk this gravity defying pinball around and pray to hell that you get lucky and don’t lose your multiplier by dropping a ball. Lose three balls and you’re fucked. Imagine sitting there playing a perfectly fine video game, something not at all like Sonic Frontiers, and suddenly someone shoves you onto a golf course and says “go play 18 holes, dickhead. And if you wind up over par, start the fuck over.” This game hates you. It hates your time. It might even hate Sonic.

The whole thing mercifully ends with a bunch of incomprehensible bullshit. Sonic’s flesh is being eaten by the cyber corruption after saving his pals, then they give him a group hug and he absorbs them. Then he does a bunch of stuff and beats the penultimate boss (“Supreme”), but that boss has a final form that Sonic has to fight in space. So Cybergoth Hologirl hacks into the final boss right before it’s revealed that she’s Dr. Eggman’s daughter. Then Sonic and Supreme go into outer space and Supreme grabs Sonic and rips a speedball that sends Sonic through the moon and then the game ends. And all his pals are back to normal now, no longer absorbed into Sonic’s corporeal form. And then there’s a song about how Cybergoth Hologirl loves her dad, Dr. Eggman.

Now this might be the little blue hedgehog talking, but I believe life is a disease inflicted upon the unwilling. Earth is a bad place, humans don’t belong here, and my greatest nemesis lives inside me. We hold these truths to be self evident. I cope with these truths by playing video games. Good ones, bad ones, funny ones, short ones, long ones, I don’t give a fuck. I love ‘em more than anything in the whole world. That’s my business. That’s what I do. But I hate this game, Sonic Frontiers, as much as I hate being alive. This game is so agonizing, so baffling and unreasonable that it might as well be reality. It truly hurts that much. I’d be better off reading a book or meeting someone new than playing this video game. Sad, sick shit. I hope Yuji Naka rots in prison for bringing Sonic Hedgehog to life. Or insider trading or whatever it is he’s clearly guilty of. Fuck Sonic and fuck it all.

So welcome to my video game year in review for 2022. Enjoy!

Pour one out for: Fuser (2022)

I wrote about how much I loved this game back in 2020, but wished for more music to tinker around with. I finally got some, including the best band in the world, The Cure! Then the DLC dried up. Now it’s all getting de-listed and so is the game. Turns out nobody was playing Fuser and the music licenses are all expiring and we’re forever losing another great game to the sands of time and evils of corporate America. Epic Games bought Harmonix and all the stuff that made them fun and weird will be washed away while they’re probably stuck coordinating a Machine Gun Kelly concert you can watch in Fortnite. Can’t we de-list him instead?

Pac-Man Museum+, ranked

14) Pac-Moto (2007)

This video game is an affront to God, or as I call him, Pac-Man. Originally from Namco Museum Remix for Nintendo Wii, this game is a remix of Namco’s not at all popular Motos series. It plays like a herky-jerky version of “Bumper Balls” from Mario Party. Fuck this game.

13) Pac-In-Time (1994)

This platformer is a bad idea from the jump. I don’t think Pac-Man should step foot outside of his mazes. Frankly, I don’t think Pac-Man should have feet. Too sexy, too distracting.

So an evil witch drags Pac-Man back in time almost 20 years to 1974, which is a paltry five years before he was born. Doesn’t seem all that exciting or consequential to me. Watergate and ‘Nam were already wrapping up, and I don’t think the invention Betamax would’ve exactly blown his mind. If this video game was just Pac-Man drinking Tequila Sunrises (which was modernized and popularized in 1973!) and watching the first five years of Saturday Night Live, I’d be interested. That’s exactly how I would’ve rode out the Carter administration. But yanking Pac-Man out of his natural habitat and dropping him into various landscapes where he clumsily hops around and tries to find all the pellets replaces all the thrill and urgency of classic Pac-Man with the meandering dullness of Cool Spot. Cool Spot isn’t fit to change Baby Pac-Man’s dirty goddamn diaper. Get out of here with this nonsense. What are we doing here?

12) Pac-Land (1984)

Goddamnit, what did I just say? At least Pac-Land has the decency to simply move from left to right and just end. The charmingly gaudy MS Paint backgrounds are at least worth a laugh. But I’m done laughing. Pac-Man is serious business and business thus far is a damn joke.

11) Pac-Attack (1993)

This half-assed sketch of a Pac-Man puzzle game just shows how much shit they threw at the wall with this cool video game dude we all know and love and how little of it stuck. There’s no depth, personality or imagination to be found anywhere in this bland, brown puddle of mud. They don’t even use all the colors for the ghosts. This game is all the worst parts of a bootleg and none of the fun stuff, like copyright infringement or the main character doing bong hits with Goku. More like Wack-Attack.

10) Pac ‘n Roll Remix (2007)

This is the furthest a Pac-Man Museum+ entry strays from the Pac-Man original recipe while still being playable. It’s not very good, but it’s undoubtedly more playable than any other bastardized experiment mentioned earlier on this list. As our great hero, you roll around 3-D landscapes and engage in kinda, sorta platforming and ramp jumping while collecting enough pellets to unlock the gate to the next area. The levels are over fast enough and rolling Pac-Man around super fast is at least somewhat fun. It’s not what anyone cool and smart wants out of a Pac-Man video game, but it doesn’t send me into a blind rage. That’s a damn rare thing these days.

9) Pac & Pal (1983)

We’ve reached the top nine, where some of these games are still pretty bad but at least Pac-Man is back where he belongs: in a maze surrounded by ghosts. Pac & Pal was another failed attempt at recreating Pac-Man Fever following the general disinterest in Super Pac-Man. Ms. Pac-Man was a monstrous hit from Chicago legends Midway, but it had a bit of step-child status as it wasn’t a Namco original. Unfortunately for Namco, Ms. Pac-Man was more fun and popular than anything else the Japanese developer could sell to arcades at the time. Wanna know why? No pellets! The lack of pellets in Pac & Pal (allegedly) made arcade goers sick to their stomachs, causing widespread yakking (the clinical term for “blowing chunks”) and giving arcades their signature stench that would never quite leave. It also wasn’t very fun.

Our hero frolics around his little maze as he is wont to do, but instead of gobbling up pellets, he flips playing cards that unlock different items across the map. Then a little green thing named Pal runs around and occasionally grabs the items for you. And it just goes on like that. It’s perfectly fine and quite cute, but it’s not Pac-Man. Very few things can be Pac-Man. It’s a burden we all must live with.

8) Super Pac-Man (1982)

Super Pac-Man is a little more fun and a little less cute than Pac & Pal. The little green thing is gone, as are the pellets… but they’re all replaced with fruit! But those are supposed to be the bonus items! What in the world were they smoking they were making this one? The sheer audacity.

The fruits are locked in tunnels that you need to eat keys to unlock unless you get the Make Pac-Man Big power-up, in which case you can chomp through the gates. It’s not all that interesting of an idea for a sequel. They should’ve kept the game almost exactly the same but instead make Pac-Man a lady. Put a bow on her head. Maybe give her a little mole. Some fishnets wouldn’t hurt. Just a thought.

7) Pac-Mania (1987)

We’re half way through this 14 game collection and the games are finally, actually getting mostly good. Pac-Mania ditches the useless gimmicks of Super and Pal and sticks to the original recipe of clearing a maze full of dots while ghosts chase you around. Oh thank fucking god almighty.

Pac-Mania turns the perspective to an isometric view and zooms in tightly, leaving only one sixth or so of the map visible at any one time. It moves much slower than other Pac-Man games, but it does have something those games don’t: a damn jump button. Armed with the power of hops, our hero can now gracefully leap over those treacherous ghosts that have haunted him so, like the grim specter of gravity that has cursed him for so long. The faux 3-D and the small tweaks show that using a light touch on the classic formula was all Namco needed to make an interesting if still inferior followup to the game that made them famous.

6) Pac-Man Arrangement (arcade) (1996)

The arcade version of Pac-Man Arrangement takes a bit of artistic inspiration from Namco’s own Galaga ‘88. Bright, chunky pixels and a diverse color palate make the game look like ice cream scoops chasing each other around. The look is a bit garish and uneven, but there’s a bit of carnival-like charm here; everything all at once til you puke.

We get some new bells and whistles here – speed boosts and new power-ups – as well as a new ghost named Kinky. Kinky uses a whip to make Pac-Man submit, then ties him down and smothers him while the player watches helplessly and becomes aroused. I’ve lost several hundred credits playing this game and never made it past the first level. I always need a nap whenever I get a game over.

5) Pac-Man Arrangement (console) (2005)

The home version of Pac-Man Arrangement was released nine years later on one of the many Namco Museum collections. We trade the sprites in for hot polygonal action and get a much brighter and bouncier look for this go-round. We get a few more minor tricks and treats here, like lifts and teleporters, but the core game remains; gobble gobble, wakka wakka.

We do get some fun boss fights for the sake of variety. They aren’t too complex, but they offer a fun diversion from your standard maze chase action. This is a good one.

4) Pac-Man Battle Royale (2010)

Ah, the jewel of the arcade. Pac-Man Battle Royale is a stand-up cocktail style four-player cabinet that cops some of the mechanics from Pac-Man Championship Edition but adapts them into a multiplayer format. Like CE, eating the food near the center of the map morphs and resets half the map, starting the cycle all over again. Here, eating power pellets allows Pac-Man to devour not only ghosts, but the other players’ Pac-Men. Seven rounds of hot and fast action for a quarter a pop. You’d have to hit Times Square in the 80s to get that sort of bang for your buck.

3) Pac-Man Championship Edition (2007)

The third best Pac-Man game on a 14-game collection should be a cause for celebration. Instead, this game’s standing and very inclusion only highlights the disappointment with this collection. CE is a fine game by itself. In 2007, it breathed new life into the Pac-Man franchise and lit the Xbox Live Arcade on fire. The game changed the Pac-Man formula by making the whole game a single, evolving map that changes every time you eat the bonus food that appears when you clear the pellets. Five to 10 minutes at the time, pack as many points into one run as you can. It captures the simplicity of the original Pac-Man but doubles down on the speed and precision. It is a thrill. Or was a thrill until 2010.

See, in 2010, Pac-Man Championship Edition DX happened. That game is one of the best games ever made. More music, more strategy, more modes and more skins. More and better everything. It is an arcade-style masterpiece. It even got a vastly inferior sequel in 2016, which like this collection is also available on Switch. CE DX+ however is nowhere to be found in this collection or anywhere on the eShop for that matter. The disrespect Namco Bandai has shown by not including DX in this collection is tantamount to popping Pac-Man execution style while Ms. Pac-Man and Junior gaze on in horror. Disgusting. Reprehensible. Ridiculous.

2) Pac-Man 256 (2015)

Originally released as a micro-transaction monstrosity on mobile, Pac-Man 256 is an endless, isometric, upward scrolling Pac-Man inspired by the original Pac-Man’s glitched-out killscreen and developed by Crossy Road makers Hipster Whale. Eat dots and swallow power-ups to escape an ever-encroaching glitchy corruption crawling upwards from the bottom of the screen. The power-ups are bigger than just power pellets, too. Tornadoes swarm, lasers shoot and fires blaze to straight up merc the parade of ghosts headed your way.

While the mobile version was hamstrung by ads that dissuaded players from giving the game more than one play per day, the console version is hard to put down. This vastly improved port is the probably the number one draw of this collection, as most of these other games are either a) not worth playing or b) available elsewhere. This one rules.

1) Pac-Man (1980)

The best Pac-Man in this Pac-Man collection is Pac-Man. If things were different and Pac-Man Championship Edition DX+ was here, it would win in a bloodbath. It might even kill every game ever except for DOOM. Or Breath of the Wild. Or Burnout Paradise. That’d be one hell of a Fatal Four-Way. I’m picturing a 60 minute broadway draw where Pac-Man, Doomguy, Link, and a really fast car are all bleeding profusely from their head in their respective corners while the closing bell rings. But Pac-Man is still a good video game. You may know Pac-Man as God or Ms. Pac-Man’s husband. He’s good people.

Best 2021 games of 2022

Unsighted

A roving gang of lesbian cyborgs are here to stop the world’s hourglass from running out of sand by slicing and dicing their way through an army of robuts. No, this isn’t a lost episode of The Morton Downey Jr Show. It’s Unsighted and it owns. The core gameplay is pretty by the numbers action/adventure stuff; upgrade attacks and learn new abilities to access new areas whoop more ass. As the game progresses, it pulls off enough little tricks along the way to stay interesting. The key here though is the quick and hard hitting combat that it rides all the way home. Gorgeous background art and blood soaked pixels kept this game at the forefront of my mind all year long. While roguelikes and Metroidvanias are a dime a dozen these days, I haven’t played a straightforward 2-D action adventure game this good in some time. Hell, I played this one twice.

Unpacking

Moving is a royal pain in the ass. Whether it’s changing domiciles or getting your lazy ass off the couch, we can all agree that being active is abhorrent and something we as a society should avoid at all costs. Stay inside! It’s too bright out and there’s a whole lot of people out there who will try to talk to you! Your TV gets lonely when you’re not watching it, and that’s no way to treat an electronic device. Instead of moving, try Unpacking, an organizational box-emptying simulator with chill beats to unpack to.

Using zero text and strictly environmental storytelling, Unpacking unfolds over the course of several years in a young lady’s life. Through changes in school, financial hardship and romantic relationships, the player learns about our unseen and unheard from main character via the things they carry and the things they’ve left behind. From essential items like game consoles and DVDs to useless crap like toothbrushes and shoes, every item in every box has a place. Certain items don’t fit where they used to, perhaps due to embarrassment or shitty boyfriends. Other items get tucked away in corners or even replaced over time. Some photos are destined for junk drawers never to be seen again, while others get primo positioning on the fridge.

The game part here isn’t so challenging. Some items have specific spots they must be dropped in, while others have a generalized area where the player is allowed to place them. Does your Gameboy go on the nightstand or the desk? Nightstand in case of a nocturnal emergency, obviously, but the game allows the player to make their own mistakes. As soon as everything is in its right place, it’s time to move again. This is a game about either what clicks or doesn’t click anymore. And boy howdy does clicking items into place here feel fantastic. Great clickin’, great clackin’, no doubt. But nothing quite fits until our unknown lead finds a place to click into themselves. After moving away from home to tin can apartment to shitty boyfriend after shitty boyfriend and back home again, this game tells a wonderful, simple story about finding a place for your life and yourself without using a single word.

Picross S Genesis + Master System Edition

This is a game that knows when to show its cards. Picross (aka The Devil’s Math, aka Button Crank, aka Poor Man’s Sudoku) is a game of patience. Find the big numbers, work the edges, and wait for the pixels to come together in glorious fashion. Not just household names like Squime from Alien Syndrome or Duke Oda from ESWAT: City Under Siege, but inanimate objects like Stop Watch from Puzzle & Action: Tant-R and Spring from Sonic the Hedgehog. Use your noodle and spacial awareness while rocking the fuck out to Outrun tracks and other Sega tunes chopper-lifted in for the soundtrack, then be rewarded with a pixelated portrait of all of Sega’s greatest heroes. Heroes like Gwyn from Beyond Oasis or Sieg from Record of the Bahamut War. Wow, are those the Yellow Frogs from Puzzle & Action: Ichidant-R? You bet, pal! It’s like the Hollywood Walk of Fame, but in puzzle form!

All the stars are out and more...except Knuckles the Echidna. Where the fuck is Knuckles? You know, The Echidna? Listen, my love for Tyris Flare from Gauntlet II knows no bounds. And my adoration for Kaiser Greedy from Ristar goes without saying. No offense to RinRin & MinMin from Kung Fu Kid, but where the fuck is Knuckles? He was the shining star of the hit Hollywood blockbuster Sonic the Hedgehog 2. He beat Ernest Borgnine for People’s Sexiest Man Alive in ‘97. He co-hosted MTV’s Spring Break with Daisy Fuentes. WHERE the FUCK is Knuckles? Larcen Tyler from Eternal Champions isn’t exactly as boffo at the box office as he used to be, but they gave him a payday here. What gives?

I’m 149 puzzles into this disre-goddamn-spectful embarrassment. This scar on the face of the legendary Sega/Sammy/Atlus brand. And their own god king of everything, heartthrob dreamboat to some, badass motherfucker to all, Knuckles the Motherfucking Echidna is nowhere to be found. I mean they’re treating him worse than Tonga from Gain Ground! False profit Sonic the Hedgehog is here! That little punkass Miles “Tails” Prower is here! Hell, even the goddamn Spring showed up!

Then in the golden hour, right at the buzzer when all hope was lost, when this pathetic world was ready to finally collapse in on itself, there he was. Standing in the doorway with a holy sun shining on his back. Puzzle 150. The final boss. The grand finale. Knuckles the Echidna. He came back to save us. I can’t think of a better ending in video games and neither can you.

Itty Bitty Vidi Game Committee

Dead Cells – Queen and the Sea DLC

Four years later and Dead Cells is still getting better. Still the hottest action in 2-D roguelikes and poised to get even better by adding Castlevania content next year, including music. Adding Castlevania music to anything makes it exponentially better. Group sex, funerals, you name it.

They Always Run (2021)

This game owes a lot to Flashback, and to me that’s a bad thing. The marionette-like animations make the combat far too stilted and so encounters feel overly scripted. These painterly landscapes sure look pretty though.

Nightmare Reaper

While I love the look and concept of this one, it just couldn’t get its hooks in me. Love a game with a cold open, though. And the Gameboy Advance SP pause screen is neat.

Welcome to Elk (2020)

I think the worm has turned on these dreamlike allegories for purgatory stories. Enough is enough. You can see it coming from a mile away at this point. Welcome to Elk is another one of those, but it’s got a cute coloring book look and a funny script. It even blends in some FMV sequences, so I’ve gotta give it up.

Inertial Drift (2020)

There’s not much to this one beyond the sick drifting and dope breakbeat soundtrack, but I’m a pretty simple fella. Just ask my wife, a couch.

Donut Dodo

Old-school arcade action for all ages at the price of a Fugazi ticket in the late 80s. This is what comes out of a blender when you throw Donkey Kong, Petter Pepper and Bounty Bob into one. Mmm, viscera smoothie.

Bummers 2022

The Ascent

This one lands right on the line between the good and naughty list. I want to love The Ascent so much more than I do. This is such a vibrant world with such engrossing art direction. It feels like no two characters are of the same species. The twin stick combat is simple and adapts well to the open world. The writing is foulmouthed and funny without being showy. This is a deep dark cyberpunk future where the your only allies are in middle management. Shit is bleak, but The Ascent manages to squeeze some humor out of it.

But goddamn is this game a slog. The scenic route through these lovingly detailed grimy, neon backgrounds is visually engaging, but the boredom is only broken up by annoying enemy ambushes. Moment to moment combat feels good, but encounters are frequent and often unavoidable. Enemy swarms feel relentless and even adding a second player via co-op can’t seem to stop the flood. Victory feels more like a relief than a reward, like beating your brains against a wall and being more thrilled that it’s over rather than the fact that you bashed your whole head through brick. The difficulty curve and technical snafus (of which there are many) keep this game from reaching greatness, but they got close here.

Splatoon 3

See, Splatoon 2 had an excuse for being a glorified WiiU port. The sorta-port/sorta-sequel rescued a super cool franchise that too few people played from being trapped forever in the pitiful WiiU ecosystem and brought it to a console that you can fit in your pocket if you wear JNCOs. I have played a lot of Splatoon 3. I’d like to play a lot more. But there is no excuse for Nintendo anymore. Their Two Cups One String concept of online gaming must end. It’s 20 goddamn 22. They still put only two maps per hour in the hopper. There’s still constant disconnects. The squid ladies still need to yap at you every time it’s time to change out the TWO LOUSY MAPS (though you can at least relegate their yapping to the background now). Every time you put your console to sleep, it still has to remind you that a) you disconnected from the internet and b) kick you out to the Square to reconnect. Just reconnect! Or stay online, like the console already does to download updates! Why is Nintendo still so bad at this?

Beyond their never ending shortcomings when it comes to online play, there is next to nothing new here. There’s a pretty boring back-alley card game now. Great. You can play the Salmon Run mode whenever you want now. Cool, but that was a self-created problem in the first place, so they don’t really deserve credit for solving it. The maps and music are both worse this go round, too.

The concept and world of Splatoon is awesome. It is such a uniquely Nintendo property, and that’s the biggest bummer of it all: only Nintendo could Nintendo something this bad.

Nobody Saves the World

On it’s face, Nobody Saves the World is a perfectly fine game. It’s got a gnarly, mid 90s Nicktoons sort of look to it, a huge world to explore and an everloving assload of boxes to tick and meters to fill. What bums me out about this one is that the Guacamelee folks made it. Drinkbox made two extremely underrated luchador themed Metroidvanias prior to this here open world dungeon crawler.

This could’ve been their chance to explode, but something about this game feels flattened out. It’s like they had all the ingredients for a perfect game but no recipe to tie it all together. There’s a nakedness to its systems that just give up the game to a degree where nothing feels organic. It feels like the goal is more to level up characters and check boxes rather than defeat bosses or clear dungeons. Combat is monotonous and the only motivation to move onto the next dungeon is leveling up enough to unlock more dungeons. This would feel so crass if it was $60 and published by some giant like EA or whoever else is left, but as a $20ish indie game it’s just disappointing.

Pokemon Legends: Arceus

I thought Arceus might finally be the jump forward this franchise needed. No more plodding, linear adventures through the same stories we’ve been seeing since the debut of Red and Blue. Arceus starts out promising but still doesn’t go far enough. The echoes of Breath of the Wild in the early marketing were almost entirely superficial. We are once again grinding through battles and mashing the A-button through every bit of dialogue. It is still repetitive as all get out. Maybe someday when the Pokemon games stop selling venerable assloads of copies, GameFreak will have its back against the ropes and can finally take a chance with something completely different. This feels like a half step towards something exciting.

Redout II

In the not too distant future of Redout II, this dreadful rock we call Earth has been given a major upgrade; we moved humanity to Mars and scarred the planet’s natural beauty by erecting anti-gravity racetracks everywhere. From the Grand Canyon to the cherry blossom orchards of Japan, no site is too sacred to have some luminescent loop-de-loops plopped right on top so that hover cars can go real fast through ‘em.

These vast improvements to the planet make for a great lore backdrop in what is essentially a game where all you do is floor it. A nice AI lady is more than happy to calmly explain to you the historical significance of the landmark you’re about to disgrace with your relentless need for speed. While the game controls great and the sense of speed is excellent, I wish there would’ve been more improvements to the core game. Six years after the release of the first game, there’s really no new mechanics to speak of. It’s still the same shallow campaign with the same types of races. Going fast rules or course, but these four driver races are never feel dynamic. This game coasts on the same Budget Wipeout vibes as the first one. I’m a big fan of those vibes, as this game has the right look and sound to make it work. I don’t think we’ve got the next great racer here, just some cheap thrills. Nothing wrong with that, but I would’ve loved a little more.

Forza Horizon 5 Hot Wheels DLC

The Hot Wheels gimmick made a lot of sense for the Horizon franchise and was pretty damn fun the first time around when it hit Forza Horizon 3 in 2017. While Horizon is more arcade-y than Forza Motorsports, it’s not exactly an arcade racer. But its open world and cross-country friendly map lends itself to the wild and wicked world of twisty/turny blaze orange Hot Wheels track. It was fun and novel, but ultimately took away from what made the Horizon half of the Forza series so distinct from every other racing game around. There’s a rampant goofiness when you can go so far off road on so many different types of terrain that the confines of a Hot Wheels style track just don’t allow for. I greatly preferred the Lego expansion in Forza Horizon 4. The Lego-stylized cars looked way better and the map maintained the openness of the Horizon series that these Hot Wheels tracks lack.

We’re back to Hot Wheels for Horizon 5 and all my complaints persist. Maybe I just have more nostalgia for Legos (which rule) than Hot Wheels (which suck). In any case, this DLC followup to what was one of the greatest racing games since Burnout Paradise just doesn’t cut muster. Or pass the mustard, for that matter. Might be time for a major shakeup on the Horizon side. Motorsports can go screw as far as I’m concerned. Car dorks are the worst. They’re lamer than I am with only a fraction of the self-awareness.

Hitman 3 Ambrose Island DLC

In the end, we all get it. Most of the time, we don’t even see it coming. While it feels a bit unfair to call this totally free Hitman 3 update a Bummer of the Year, this might be the worst level IO Interactive has put together in the entirety of the modern Hitman trilogy. Aesthetically, it’s a little too close to the Santa Fortuna map. Layout-wise, it’s far too sprawling and disconnected to ever feel tense or even remotely exciting. Zero story missions to be found and a complete absence of voice work from our hero Agent 47 turns what could’ve been a fun, surprise encore into a cold, humorless corpse.

House of the Dead Remake

Amateur hour at the Curien Mansion. Cheap, cash-in remake trash. Even Sega didn’t want to put their name on this. That should’ve been a tipoff and frankly, I blame myself. I will forever be a sucker for House of the Dead, but nabbing this ground-up remake to play at home on my Switch was a rookie mistake. Looks, sounds, and feels like pure crap. I’d be better off watching the 2003 Uwe Boll film, because it rules. Sega put their name on that one!

Old Games, 2022

Mother 3 (2006)

For years I’ve dreamed of Nintendo bringing Mother 3 to the states. I’ve crushed and snorted the rumors, I snagged the Mother merch, I bought Nintendo’s ports of Mother 1 and 2, and still I sit here putzing with my fuzzy pickle while Mother 3 stays stuck in Japan.

I sat on the English language fan patch for years hoping Nintendo would finally just do the damn thing to no avail. Until this year! I finally tapped out and played Mother 3. And you know what? That was a bad idea. I ruined it. It should’ve just stayed on that pedestal I kept it on for years and kept thinking it was some lost classic I’d never get my hands on. But now I know it’s really just a 16 year old Gameboy Advance RPG that couldn’t keep my attention for more than an hour or two. I could’ve had hope. I could’ve kept dreaming. But all I got was this totally fine GBA game.

Hell is Other Demons (2019)

A single-screen, level-based action-shooter/platformer. If your game has chunky pixels, pounding synths and The Devil in it, I want to play your game. I’m an easy mark.

Each level is a bite-sized bullet hell where you (a demon) kill stuff (other demons). Upgrades get stronger and the four-color scheme changes shades, but you still gotta hold that rapid fire trigger til the bloody end. Killin’ stuff’s fun!

GoNNER 2 (2020)

GoNNER was an off-kilter, ramshackle rougelike in 2016 when the world was flooded with every flavor of the rougelike rainbow. It had a unique look, but nothing else to set it apart from the pack. It controlled in a wobbly kind of way that gave it a fun sort of looseness but in turn sacrificed precision. While it gave the game a unique feel, that’s a hard sell for a game that is pretty strictly combat based, especially when competition within the genre is so stiff. It skated by mostly on charm and sale price.

GoNNER 2 doesn’t do anything new for rougelikes, or even for the GoNNER Franchise, but it does everything GoNNER did well even better. This is especially true with regards to sound design. More bleeps, bloops and pops! An avalanche of clicks, clacks and gunfire thunders down the mountain. More everything! Psychedelic splashes of color and an ever explosive array of firepower keep this game humming through its hellish difficulty. Though tough, this game does a great job of scaling its challenge via pre-run loadouts. The various ability and weapon unlocks allows the player to adapt their own playstyle, providing so many different ways to attack the game.

The action is acrobatic and incredibly tense. That wobble dee wobble dee from the first game is still here, but I feels like it adds to the game more this go-round. Everything is very bouncy and extremely combustible. The screen is constantly exploding in GoNNER 2. It’s a great feeling. And when all that stuff is popping off and you end up getting actually good enough at the game to beat it, it all swirls together to make magic. And just like Hell is Other Demons, this one also takes place in Hell. I bet that place rules.

Valfaris (2019)

There ain’t much fancy about Valfaris. It’s solo Contra but with a Heavy Metal magazine twist. Chunky, grimy pixels laid over driving metal arrangements provide the setting for our intergalactic adventure. Our hero looks like John Romero by way of Metalocolypse, religiously banging his head in celebration after every addition to his arsenal. Guns, melee weapons, and special attacks saw through enemies leaving wayward torsos and stumbling stems spilling blood all over alien landscapes.

Valfaris isn’t trying anything new, but its confidence in its style and simplicity goes a long way. It’s challenging because it has to be. Without that grind, it would be a pretty lifeless affair. Fortunately it’s forgiving enough to curb the occasional frustration found in tricky platforming sections or difficult boss fights. There’s enough give and take between power-ups, checkpoints and secrets to keep the challenge fair from start to finish. That mix of old-school challenge and modern sensibility is a shaky tightrope to walk but Valfaris stays fluid and adaptable throughout. It certainly lands on the tougher side of modern action games but it manages to find the right balance.

Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle - Donkey Kong DLC (2018)

It was nice to see Nintendo’s one true hero reunite with his evil nemesis Mario after so long, even if it was DLC to Rabbids crossover game that came almost a year after the initial release. Donkey Kong deserves better.

Maybe that’s not fair. Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle was a great game that overshot expectations by a mile and this DK DLC adds enough new mechanics and characters to liven up the original game. But we’re talking about Donkey Kong here. The name that put Nintendo on the map. Their original arcade hit sure as shit wasn’t called Jumpman.

I think it’s time our primate pal got back into starring roles. A gritty reboot called The Donkey Kong where DK works as a union busting muscle, beating up plumbers and other tradesmen until he learns the power of organized labor and turns on his masters by murdering them with barrels. Maybe a family drama about a single gorilla dad who has to raise two chimps all by himself in the midst of a war against crocodiles. How about a two-hander starring him and Bowser where they get shithoused and commit crimes together? Realistically, I think Nintendo could and most likely will do all of these things.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Cowabunga Collection (1989-1994 via 2022)

May The Devil themself bless/curse the retro wizards at Digital Eclipse with eternal life. No developer past or present does as comprehensive a job on old school collections as they do. Frank Cifaldi (Video Game History Foundation), Chris Kohler (formerly of Kotaku) and Drew Scanlon (formerly of Giant Bomb) along with many others are the premier team in archival re-releases. Their work in the field of digital museums is unparalleled, and the Cowabunga Collection is no exception. From flattened cardboard box art to arcade maintenance manuals all the way to illustration style guides for our teenage mutant heroes, this had to have been the most extensive archival work they’ve done until Atari 50 came out a few months afterwards. This collection is filled with era-contemporary ads, animation cells from the TV show, and even from scratch strategy guides outlining tips and tricks for the various games.

It’s not hard to play these games on any PC or tablet you have lying around. A quick Google search will have you emulating Turtles in Time faster than you can say “Big Apple 3AM.” Digital Eclipse knows this and makes their experience better than any emulator would allow. If you want to play it as close to the original experience as possible, you can do that. If you want to make these old, cold and covered in mold games easier to play by modern standards, you can make them so much more enjoyable with a few minor difficulty tweaks.

Make no mistake: most of these games are not fun to play in 2022. Just watching a playthrough of The Manhattan Project is agonizing. But the thought and care Digital Eclipse put into this release is admirable. They are doing god’s work here. Long live these Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and long live Digital Eclipse. Cowafuckinbunga.

Best Music 2022

Honorable Mention: Arcade Paradise

Lemme talk to you for a minute here as a working man. A blue collar fella. The kinda guy Springsteen would write a song about (and probably has but I’m far too humble to know or acknowledge it): Work bites the big one. You gotta go do a bunch of stuff you don’t really wanna do but you’re earning money but you hate money but you need money but you forgot to jack off this morning and you miss your dog and your television is lonely and there’s no hot dogs on the rollers at Kwik Trip and it’s all a giant ball of bullshit. Arcade Paradise often feels like work. It’s tedious and monotonous but if you do it fast enough and calculate the perfect way to play the game, you get to finish workday and play video games. So in this endless, dastardly, fateful loop that is life, I spent dozens of hours playing a video game where you work your ass off just to be able to play video games after spending dozens of hours a week working my ass off just to be able to play some damn video games. Nothing matters and this is all a sick joke. No respect. Ba-ba Booey.

Arcade Paradise lives in a weird world. It exists in some sort of 80s hangover that lasts through 1999 or so. It blends all its era-specific reference points like style and technology together with its pop culture stand-ins/knockoffs to give off a very charming bootleg vibe. Nothing fits here, so everything kinda fits. You spend the game building a coin-op empire by first running a bizarre laundry mat where you wash and dry people’s clothes for them. You use the money you earn from this to order arcade games off the internet and hide them in the back room so your dad doesn’t see how big of a slacker loser you are.

Most of the arcade games offered are bad. Some of them are fun enough to play in order to farm more cash for upgrades, while others aren’t worth the quarter. The concepts are fun; there’s a Pac-Man clone with a Grand Theft Auto paint job. There’s a Space Invaders switcheroo where you get to be the titular characters. There’s a damn Vector graphics tribute to Super Hexagon in this game. Some of the games seem to be straight up making fun of how you’re wasting your time, a la No More Heroes; games where you stack boxes on other boxes, mine for gold, or two separate games with different skins where you chop down an infinite tree. The highlight of the arcade’s roster must be the Outrun clone because it must be. A space-age hover speeder races down an endless series of forked roads at top speed with while new wave synths blare. That’s where I belong.

While the games are hit or miss, the jukebox is the crown jewel of this arcade. Unlockable songs are often the highlight of any game they’re in. We get some breakbeat, some Soul Asylum-ish corndog alternative, and some sludgy metal, all ranging from awesome to hilarious. I don’t think the Arcade Paradise soundtrack is something I can listen to outside of the game. I don’t enjoy this music on a song-by-song basis, but I cannot deny the charm of a jukebox filled with 90s pastiches of Nine Inch Nails, wretched rap/rock and drum and bass tracks. Affectionate but assy. Laughable junk food. They found the voice of the 90s here and really nailed the corniness. The music fits perfectly into the game’s hodgepodge alternate universe where 80s arcade games and 90s tech intermingle to bring forth this off-kilter Pee-Wee’s Playhouse sort of world full of hard edges and bright colors.

Runner-up: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge

The golden age of the beat ‘em up is long gone, and that’s probably for the best. These types of games were made when games were still fairly young and only cost a quarter a play. Beat ‘em ups rarely made sense on home consoles where they were extremely repetitive and very short, hardly worth whatever the price tag said. But the Turtles are back now, so fuck everything I just said.

Shredder’s Revenge is a blast. It’s breezy, goofy and damn good looking, relying on the vibe of the original animated show more than anything. The six player drop in/out online co-op is key here, as playing this game alone is a sad affair. That’s what Raphael would do. Don’t be a Raphael.

This is a pretty no frills beat ‘em up, but it does everything it sets out to do very well. The few alterations it makes to the formula all work very well, but developer Tribute Games ain’t breaking any ground here. They made a brilliant move hiring Lee Topes for the soundtrack, though. The Sonic Mania vet bangs out some grade A buttrock to raise shell to. These songs are built from brawling. Two to three minutes and they’re gone baby gone. In and out, nobody moves and nobody gets hurt. Big, bright 80s sounds bang and crash to match the game’s flashy fervor.

While I throw my W up for the Wu-Tang Clan and adore Ghostface and Raekwon most of all, their track here (“We Ain’t Came to Lose”) is just pure crap. First of all, Ghostface drops Little Caesar’s references when we all know goddamn well that a) the Turtles eat Pizza Hut in the NES game and b) the deluxe edition came with Pizza Hut coupons. There is no greater sin than disrespecting the advertising partners. Secondly, he rhymes “pizza pizza” with “Easter Easter” and uses the phrase “facial features” twice. After Ghostface sleepwalks through the first verse, Raekwon picks up the refrain, then half-asses his way through his own piss poor verse. Topes is no RZA, but he does his best here for Ghost and Rae to lay down a hard hitting kung-fu canvas for them to fuck with. Always happy Starks and The Chef got a payday, but what seemed like a fitting partnership goes tits up. I don’t think that Microsoft made Wu-Tang Clan RPG will ever come out, but I’d love to see Shaolin square up with our heroes in a half-shell. Man, Mikey and ODB woulda got along gangbusters I bet. GZA and Don sharing secrets of the universe while Meth and Splinter get ripped and scarf sushi. Picture that. Live in that world. Thank me later.

Soundtrack of the Year: Tunic

Lifeformed and Janice Kwan have music for all of Tunic’s moods. The expansive three hour set they put together blends atmospheric synths with traditional piano to give the world of Tunic so much texture. Sharp, quick strikes wrench up the tension during battles while playful, tinkering chimes breathe curiosity into the world’s dark underbelly. There have been many synthrock/electronica soundtracks this year (The Ascent and Rollerdrome are other standouts), but few feel as married to the game’s voice as this Tunic soundtrack. More on Tunic in a bit.

Honorable Mentions, 2022

Rollerdrome

Rollerdrome flows. Grind, grab and kill without the fear of bailing. Each level is an arena of death where it’s shred or be killed. It’s a little Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater with a Sable-like look and the developer’s own OlliOlli World’s self-contained laser-precise challenge. Cheers to Roll7 who did some damage this year. Rollerdrome feels like a lot when the late game hits and it’s firing on all cylinders, but if you can pull it all off it feels amazing. I wish the levels had a bit more visual variety because this game is one of the best lookers of the year.

Demon Throttle

This is not the first or last time I fell for a marketing gimmick. I’m in the key demo, dude. I’m the belle of the ball for a few more years and I’m gonna bask in it, goddamnit. Demon Throttle is a cartridge only, never digital 8-bit vertical shoot ‘em up with all the bells and whistles of the era its paying homage to. It is Waffle House steak tough. Its moody, Ninja Gaiden-esque cutscenes are simple but hilarious. We follow the story of a cowboy who’s chasing down a large-hogged demon that fucked his damn wife. He teams up with a sexy vampire lady to avenge his cuckolding and regain some chalices the sexy vampire lady needs.

Demon Throttle is a bit more involved than vertical shooters of the era it’s imitating, but it’s pretty strictly an unforgiving bullet hell. The light RPG elements and upgrades take some of the edge off, but this game is a motherfucker for its four level length. And of course you’re not gonna get the canonical ending without navigating the extremely thin rouge elements and finding all the secret doors.

Demon Throttle feels pretty dated and much slighter than it should be, but it’s engaging, funny and makes good on its marketing gimmick/homage.

Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope

After blowing expectations away with the first game, I can’t give this followup the same grace I might have otherwise. This is a fun game and a smart streamlining of the first unholy crossover but never amounts to much more than that. But that first game was pretty great, so that’s still a pretty fun and cool thing to be.

Super Mario Strikers Battle League

Mario’s long neglected soccer franchise returns from a 15 year hiatus with an extremely thin but rather fun outing that’s the best Mario Sports game in quite some time (probably since 2014’s Mario Golf: World Tour). There’s very little to do here other than play some soccer. You can unlock some equipment that will boost various stats or make your character look like a cyber-doofus or soccer samurai, but the way the characters are balanced makes all that feel pretty inconsequential.

The core game is a hoot, though. Or it was until the online pool dried up a month or so after launch. Nintendo once again hamstrung the online play by making menus more cumbersome and the downtime between matches take longer than it should. Shortly after release it was hard to reliably matchmake with anyone willing to stick around for a full four minute match. The matches themselves move fast enough that you can cram a bunch together in a relatively short amount of time, but there’s no penalty for quitting and no real reward for winning or any sort of stat keeping, so there’s no point to any of this if you can’t find any decent competition. And as a 34 year old loser with nothing better to do, I whooped a lot of ass at this Mario Soccer game. I’m not afraid to embarrass your little shitbag kid, so jump if you’re feeling froggy ya little brats.

It’s a bummer that this undeserved franchise finally got another shot only to fall flat, especially considering it’s last iteration (Mario Strikers Charged for Wii) was so much fun. Nintendo seems pretty content to pump out pretty bare bones sequels to all of their sports games for each new console, with each one either the same as or worse than the last. But if you put Mario in the title, it usually sells anyways. Disappointing but not surprising.

Hyper Demon

I think the lack of simplicity in this Devil Daggers followup hurts its replay-ability, but I really admire the nightmare Sorath constructed here. While Devil Daggers was run and gun in a Quake-ish void full of hell’s forces, Hyper Demon has you air dashing, butt stomping, timing out dodges and managing power-ups. You’re still trapped in a void but this time it’s a shiny and flashy ocular assault that whiplashes between beautiful and inscrutable. Most of the time I’m playing this game I don’t know what the fuck is going on. The tutorials are well done and helpfully remove some of the mystery that obscures the high-level play, but putting those learned skills into practice during an actual run never seems to happen for me. In a game where one hit ends your run and you have to move top speed at all times just to stay alive, that tension pushes all those lessons you learned in training right out of mind while you simply try to survive.

This deepening of the Devil Daggers experience is an extremely cool and interesting idea, but in the process it loses what made that game so special. The glistening coat of chrome this game is bathed in adds to it’s breakneck insanity, but that same maximalist philosophy is what makes Hyper Demon a fun and flighty curiosity rather than a stone cold classic like Devil Daggers.

Best Games, 2022

Atari 50

If there were a Developer of the Year award it would go to Digital Eclipse (with a silver medal for Roll7). Their work on Cowabunga Collection set a new standard for archival work, then they raised it a scant few months later with Atari 50. They even started releasing original games on Itch.io and co-developed that Garbage Pail Kids game. I cannot gush enough about these folks as stewards of gaming history. Imagine Digital Eclipse having access to Nintendo, Namco Bandai, or even the late great Midway. There are so many worthy candidates for the Atari 50 treatment and I hope this is just their first stop on a long journey through gaming’s past.

I knew next to nothing about Atari’s influence on video games. All I knew was the wood paneling and shitty graphics. The most important thing this collection provides is context. Rather than just a cluttered library of old games and a partitioned off museum of concept art and promo material, Atari 50 is laid out in five different chapters across a timeline. Each era of Atari is represented in detail with video interviews, artwork, manuals and the opportunity to play the games by order of release. I can’t honestly recommend playing most of these games in 2022, but there’s certainly a few worth digging around in for awhile. Some feel suprisingly predictive of current gaming trends, with a few seemingly establishing long lasting genre tropes. Digital Eclipse went the extra mile to modernize some standouts by doing whole cloth remakes of games like Breakout and Yar’s Revenge. There’s a wholly new mashup of Atari’s vector graphics arcade games called VCTR SPCTR that brings together Asteroids, Lunar Lander, and Tempest. Digital Eclipse dug even deeper to unearth unreleased prototypes and modern day homebrew 2600 games made by enterprising dorks. This is an astonishing package.

The highlights of this collection are the parts you don’t even play. Video interviews with former Atari staffers are often informative and frequently hilarious. They might forget how a game came together and who worked on it, even as they were working on it because of how many drugs they were passing around the office at the time. But if these interviews are any indication, they never forgot all the times management tried to ruin their day and fuck them blind. There’s a reason why the main bad guys in video games are called bosses.

Atari gets a lot of well deserved shit for what they’ve become in recent years. There’s the (still pending) hotel brand launch, their dalliance with crypto currency, the there and gone VCS console reboot and many other embarrassments. I’m glad Digital Eclipse took the time to showcase what this company used to be so the good stuff isn’t lost to memory.

The Quarry

I hope this game was a hit. Developer Supermassive’s games feel like the natural evolution of FMV games. They’re over the top silly, prioritize story and involve little to no skill. Supermassive has been pumping out games under the Dark Pictures banner every October for the last four years, but The Quarry is very much a followup to 2015’s Until Dawn. I’m so happy to have a new batch of moron teens to kill off in the woods.

The actual gameplay here is slim to nil, as all you’re really doing is clumsily guiding counselors around a haunted summer camp and occasionally engaging in quick time events while doing the whole choose your own adventure thing. Do you want the horny teens to kiss? Do you want to run away like a coward while your friend gets eaten? Do you want to load a pocket full of shells into Ethan Suplee? You can do all of the above!

It seems like you can save or kill everyone here. Some characters seem too stupid to live, while others feel destined to be the Final Girl/Guy, but the choice is yours if you play your cards right. The cast of characters is pretty archetypal in that Breakfast Club sort of way, but all the actors are pitch perfect in their roles. The script is often hilarious, as the writers are never afraid of making these characters look like total dipshits in social situations.

The horror stuff is appropriately over the top, and the stable of genre vets they’ve assembled here are all more than game. Semi-famous sibling Ted Raimi is here! Laura Palmer’s mom plays a fortune teller! Former WCW World Heavyweight Champion/divorcee David Arquette shows up for a little while! The only one getting short shrift here is the fella I was most excited for, god-king Lance Henriksen. He doesn’t come on strong til the end and even then he’s barely there. It definitely feels like the more an actor cost, the less they were in it.

The motion capture work and facial tech is at the forefront here and it all looks great, which is good because the rest of the game looks pretty shitty. It doesn’t hamper the experience and actually lends well to the budget horror spectacle of it all. This game is great for a laugh. I’m really tired of people saying video games are bad at being funny. You’re either playing the wrong games or are too humorless to have your own fun.

OlliOlli World + Void Riders DLC

Shred til yer dead, baby. I don’t know how they made a whole game out of the worst Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater level (“Downhill Jam”) and made it rule, but here we are. Gotta be the style. OlliOlli World looks sharp, fresh and fly as fuck. The cel-shaded pastels and wild ass outfits certainly don’t hurt. Everything here from the fashion to the art style to the lo-fi hip-hop instrumentals hones in the game’s upbeat vibe.

The OlliOlli games have always been my jam, but this third entry is the best yet. World plays basically the same as the first two games, it’s just more filled out and streamlined; hit sick tricks, clear the challenges and don’t bail even once before you hit the end. It feels like a Simon-like memory puzzle playing out by way of fighting game combos. There’s challenges to slay, leader boards to climb and rivals to own, and the only way to do that is to run never ending trick combos from the starting line to the finish. Quick restarts are essential in games like this and it is so easy to just keep replaying each level countless times until you nail the perfect run. When you’re in the shit, it’s hard to put down.

Everything comes together here for OlliOlli World. Then the Void Riders DLC threw a bunch of weird alien shit on top of everything and made it even goofier. Happy to see this pretty simple game from a small team grow into something so wild and vibrant.

Rogue Legacy 2

Maybe time has passed Rogue Legacy 2 by a bit. The original felt so exciting when it hit in 2013. The music and graphics were a little under cooked, but the Rogue of it all felt so novel yet so simple and accessible. It was not only instantly accessible and playable but infinitely replayable. At the time of its release, it was at or near the top of its class in the genre. A decade later after a few failed games and nearly two years in early access, Cellar Door returns with a sequel to their defining work and it’s… totally fine. Well it’s better than fine. It’s one of my favorite games of the year. But in my dreams, the sequel to Rogue Legacy is a world beater. After Dead Cells and Hades, Rogue Legacy 2 just feels like a game to me. Every aspect of Rogue Legacy 2 is better than the first, from the Adobe Flash looking graphics and boring, repetitive music on up. More traits, more classes, more weapons, more biomes, more mechanics, more everything.

It just doesn’t grab me like it used to, hold me like it used to, love me like it used to. And yet I still poured dozens of hours into it. That’s how highly I regard Rogue Legacy. It so simple and it all just works perfectly. It’s a steady hand. It’s old hat. There are lots of cooler, newer hats, but this one still fits really well.

Vampire Survivors

This is a one button game if you consider the joystick a button. Vampire Survivors allows you to become a roving pillar of exploding death, shooting out violence like fireworks. With a Castlevania visual flare, your Gothic flavored sprite spits out every subweapon of the rainbow on auto-pilot. Gone are the olden days of such foolish nonsense like jumping or pressing the attack button. In Vampire Survivors, game play you.

I struggle to call this game fun or interesting or anything like that. Vampire Survivors simply is. I don’t know if it’s good or bad or anything like that. It’s fascinating. It’s ridiculous. I don’t know what it takes to make a video game, but it feels like this game could exist in some form or another in any era past or present. It’s dirt cheap and anything with thumbs can make sense of it. That’s such a wonderful thing. I feel like a dumbass describing this game and often feel like a dumbass playing it for however many minutes I lose when I sit down to play it. It’s so purely a video game and could be nothing else and often feels like nothing, but it’s everything. Playing this game is like being unconscious; I barely notice it happening but I am so grateful for it.

Runner-up: Spider-Man: Miles Morales

This is very much a modern day, triple-A open world action game. There’s a big map, lots of icons, junk to collect, and tons of side missions to pop in and out of. The story is well told, but standard superhero fare. The combat isn’t anything new if you’ve played the Batman Arkham games, the Lord of the Rings Shadow games, or anything like that. Boy, that Arkham Asylum shadow looms forever over big budget licensed games when it comes to combat. Thirteen years later and developers are still aping that combat system wholesale.

What makes all this work so well is our number one webslinger, webhead in chief, he who is having me for dinner tonight: Spider-Man. For the first time in video games, we get a new Spider-Man. Peter Parker is on workcation with MJ so we get Harlem’s own Miles Morales in his first (video game) starring role. Miles is still as big of a nerd as Peter and has a lot of that same awkwardness, but he’s a lot less corny and much more endearing. I love Peter Parker as all spiderfriends should, but every iteration of him is beyond played out at this point. Miles and his cobbled together though slightly fractured family are at the center of this story and the game is all the better for it.

I think Spider-Man endures for many reasons. He’s always the underdog. He’s always barely holding it together, he fucks up a lot, but he makes it work while still showing scars. Even most of the people he saves in this game are asking where the “real” Spider-Man is. Shit stings, man. His personal relationships with his rogues gallery always adds a layer of stakes as well. Miles knows the people he’s fighting against and still sees the good in them when others can’t. It’s the heart that makes this game special, and it’s the unimpeachable work by the voice cast keeps it beating. There’s Miles’ mom Rio, who’s still dealing with the death of her husband while trying to run for mayor. There’s his drifting friendship with BFF Phin (who’s got a heel turn up her sleeve). There’s a shaky mentorship with his Uncle Aaron (who is also itching for a turn). All these characters and actors both major and minor have tremendous chemistry together. You can feel all the weight of these relationships crashing down on Miles. Like I said, this is pretty standard superhero stuff, but it’s all executed so well with the most enduring character in comic books this side of Gotham.

All the video game stuff like upgrading skills and completing missions and crap like that feels more like a backdrop than anything, which is fine with me. I play so few of these big open world games that when I’m looking for one I’m pretty much just looking for a skin or flavor I’m into. Aside from the amazing array of bitchin’ Spider Suits you can unlock, there isn’t anything super interesting to be found in the gameplay. I love Spider-Man but have hated most of the movies and so this is my ideal way to enjoy my favorite radioactive dork.

Game of the Year: Tunic

The People’s Elden Ring. My people, anyway. This is the mysterious, obtuse open world adventure that I need in my life. It looks cuter than Elden Ring, the music is better, it’s closer to Zelda and it only lasts like 20 hours. I don’t need the sword lore or the boss with the eternal backstory and the impenetrable combat for someone with as little skill and patience as I have. I want the cute little fox with the titular tunic to waddle around and slash stuff. And if the slashing gets too tough? I can go into the menus and turn consequences off. Save your brain for the puzzles and give your thumbs a rest. It’s been a long year, you’ve played a lot of video games and those puppies are tired. I don’t want to be punished anymore. My Sonic days are over.

Tunic is a wonder. It gives you next to nothing at the outset and trickles out enough little breadcrumbs along the way to make every discovery feel like mind blowing. The NES style instruction manual pages you find and reconstruct is such a neat way to dole out critical info, but it’s never so explicit that it ruins the game’s mystique. Piecing together clues via friends and forums at launch was such a thrill and brought back that playground feeling of deciphering meaning behind certain sequences or unknown objects. This was the game this year I was thinking about whenever I wasn’t able to play it.

It’s so damn cute, too. It uses a pretty restrained color palate and fairly low detail modeling to achieve this shiny plastic playset sort of look. If you find a secret area, you can change your fox’s fur and tunic. Though the cute factor is strong, this game certainly gets spooky when it needs to. Shadowy caverns and ghostly figures from another world give this game the push it needs to go from whimsical to hardened. That second step into the Other Side is the part where all the secrets and breadcrumbs and tension crash together and turn this game into something truly special I could not put down. There’s a whole separate layer to this game I couldn’t even engage with because I (surprise!) didn’t have the brains or patience for it. It sure looked fun for the weirdos that completed it, though!

Tunic was put together by a tiny team that used minimalist storytelling and a widdle bitty fox to achieve it’s big ideas. That Tunic was able to do so much more with so much less than so many gigantic games are able to do is so inspiring and encouraging. The world needs more games like Tunic.

A bad year for video games to go along with a bad year for everything else. Unless you’re the class of asshole that is closer to a target from Hitman than an actual human being, in which case you really cleaned up this year. To you I say: congratulations and get fucked to the moon. Of course the reality is growing ever closer that these people might actually get fucked to the moon and leave us here to rot on this cursed rock, so once again they just might get their wish. This is your annual reminder that the house always wins, you can’t beat city hall, and good is dumb.

Fear not, fellow wastes of space. For I’ve heard tell of a new world over yonder. Another world, where the exact same class of assholes are doing their best to exploit you at every turn. Where the digital goods are scarce and humanity is scarcer. Allow me to introduce you to the Metaverse, brought to you by Meta, in association with Disney, sponsored by the Providence organization – a Shinehart Wig subsidiary. In Metaverse, your fiction beats the hell out of your truth. In Metaverse, game download you. In Metaverse, we all shall perish to serve a sad dork named Mark who only sees us through a snow globe in the series finale. Exciting, isn’t it? To watch pop culture eat the world and then the world eat itself? In these unprecedented times, due to an abundance of caution, I think I’m going to hijack one of these moon vessels, make a nice home for myself in a cozy little crater, and start building a weapon powerful enough to kill the sun. We won’t all be happy, but at least we’ll all be even.

But one last time, for old time’s sake, we must crown the final DOOM of the Year. Not because the world is ending (unless it is), but because the Doomslayer’s reign is over. He biffed it. Slipped on a banana peel and broke his ass. Now, there is another. Another ice cold murder machine sent here to stave off the forces of hell. There can be only one. Well technically there were 46 others before him, but now there can be only one.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, I give to you: video games.

Best 2020 Games of 2021

Spiritfarer

I’ve always heard Death has a cold embrace, but Spiritfarer is anything but cold. This game is a warm and fuzzy ride down the lazy River Styx. I bet a fella could get used to the Great Beyond. Transform into like a big ‘ol hog or a sad, weird wolf and float out to sea until my bell tolls. Order the captain around telling them to feed me more Paella. Run an onboard record shop or something. Gotta be better than living, right?

Spiritfarer pits you as the captain of the ship that brings souls from the nether to their final resting place. You’ll bring animal spirits from far away islands to their natural end while (*long sigh*) farming resources and crafting stuff. Some of these souls seem close to you, others not so much, but each has their own baggage to sort out before the long goodbye.

This is a game chock full of hard goodbyes, but the hardest goodbye for me was deleting it after realizing I couldn’t take anymore of its resource farming nonsense. I kept wanting more of its writing and way, way less of its gameplay. I buckled beneath the weight of its farming/refining/crafting/combining mechanics before the ending. The tedium of it all wore thin quick, but this game’s warmth is hard to forget.

Huntdown

This game has a good ka-chunk to it. Somehow this 2D action throwback is the best selling point yet for the Switch’s HD Rumble. This game has a grit and grime to it like a rusty sewer drain. A great affinity for cyberpunk and Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Four worlds, five levels a piece, 20 boss fights. Pulsating synths and thumping bass to back the shells rattling on the ground and grenades exploding. This game is a powder keg of 80s action movies and Megadrive chunkiness.

This game has weight. It punches hard and heavy but with fancy footwork. On a control level, it nails everything. It also nails playability. Pick which world you want to start with, swap out bounty hunters, drop in/out co-op, generous checkpoints and a very fair difficulty curve. This is a very old school 2D action game, but it nixes the unforgiving difficulty and cruel checkpoints. Its encounters feel more thoughtful and puzzling than those of yesteryear. More like Katana Zero or Hotline Miami’s murder puzzles and less like Mega Man or Ninja Gaiden’s infuriating enemy respawns or platforming guesswork.

Huntdown fucking OWNS. It’s simple and weird and looks/sounds like a million bucks, yet it costs only $20. Hail Huntdown.

Ori and the Will of the Wisps

Just finish this list and you’ll find that there are an everloving shitload of Metroidvania variants these days. Few flow quite as smooth as them Ori games, though. That spermy lookin’ little imp can flip, flop, and fly like no other. The sequel’s so-so combat is improved from its predecessor but still plays second fiddle to the liquid quick traversal. Ori’s gravity defying antics only get wilder as the game plays on, eventually rendering the platforms in this action/adventure platformer obsolete.

Even on the Switch, Will of the Wisps is a looker. Soft glowing lights pop through lush backgrounds while Ori whips and whizzes by like a bolt of lightning. I want to take naps on this games foliage. I want its moss to grow on my ass.

Old Games, 2021

Guacamelee 2 (2018)

This is Ori’s slightly older, combat-heavy cousin. The movement mechanics and power-ups are still fun (and awfully similar to Ori’s, as they often are in Metroidvanias), but Guacamelee 2 just isn’t quite as light on its feet as lil’ Ori. Its workrate is off the charts though. This game is quick and technical between the bells, chaining special maneuvers and combos together like a young Rey Mysterio Jr. at Halloween Havoc in ‘97. You’re doing some seriously technical ticky tackin on them buttons.

I happened to play Ori 2/Guacamelee 2 back-to-back. While the sequels – which are two years apart – are from different teams with vastly different budgets and backgrounds, it was hard not to compare the two. Those Metroidvania tropes run deep in both these games, almost to a fault. This formula has been reused and refined countless times in the genre’s thirtysomething history. There’s no shortage of budget priced 8-12hr indie romps for peanuts on Steam, and these two are outstanding representatives (that are also conveniently available on the one true console, Nintendo Switch). But this formula just flat out works. It’s The Formula for me. Just unlock secrets til the map is full. When it’s done right, it’s pizza. It’s undefeated.

If you want your Metroidvania combat flavored with a luchador mask on it, Guacamelee 2 is the best. If you want it Mother Gaia flavored and you’re zippin all over the screen like a ropey load on fire, Ori and the Will of the Wisps is the best. This is the golden age of prestige Metroidvanias.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night (2019)

REDEMPTION. This game was one of my biggest bummers of 2019. I Kickstarted this game when it was still a WiiU game, changed my platform when that console cratered, then sucked it up and waited for the delayed Switch port only to find it was ugly and broken. I dropped it pretty quick. Two years later on a deep Steam discount, I find myself head over heels for the game I dreamed of all those years ago.

This game is beaming with personality. The way Miriam agonizingly stabs herself in the gut with magic shards when she defeats certain enemies. The over the top voice acting and over-dramatic death rattles from bad guys as they slowly perish and burn away. The sheer goofiness of its enemy design. This game absolutely feels like it’s a part of the Symphony of the Night lineage. It takes all the lessons learned from that game and its GBA followups while blowing them up and expanding on them. If anything, this game feels like it tries too much. The crafting and cooking stuff might be a bridge too far. The sheer variety of magic shards and abilities is a bit overwhelming. The work you have to put in to get the true ending grows a bit tired by the third false finish.

This is Metroidvania by its most strict definition. The Guacamelee and Ori games are both undoubtedly Metroidvania games, but they spin that formula into their own distinct flavors. I don’t think Bloodstained does that, but this is Iga, the master of the form, showing he can still hang with all the developers he inspired. I don’t think this game shakes the foundation of video games like Symphony of the Night did. Though considering how well it sold, it certainly shows Konami that they’re dumbasses for giving up on Castlevania. Any time Konami gets exposed as dumbasses is cause for celebration.

SNK vs Capcom: Match of the Millennium (1999)

It’s nice that we can play a NeoGeo Pocket game on our Nintendo Switch in 2021. I just think it’s neat. Be happy that it’s possible. Is Zangief’s love for suplexes not infectious enough for you?

The Mummy Demastered (2017)

There once was a time when every popular movie had a terrible, no-good, very bad video game tie-in to suck money out of dopey, unsuspecting parents so their little shitbag kid could have a few miserable hours with their favorite swashbucklers from Cutthroat Island, or comb beaches with Cool Spot. This phenomenon was at its most destructive in the days of the NES, but lasted through the PS3/360 era where the games were mercifully budget titles and at least had the decency to provide quick and easy trophies/achievements for gamerscore perverts. Those games have either disappeared completely or retreated to your phone’s app store, and good riddance.

Yet here I sit in 2021, Switch in hand, with a shockingly competent 2D movie tie-in game for a movie that absolutely nobody saw and never will. The Mummy Demastered digs up all the characters everyone forgot from the Tomb of the Universal Dark Universe and drops them into a cheap yet solid Metroidvania (take a drink) template. Look ma, it’s that soldier guy from the movie, Soldier Guy! There’s the titular Mummy! Wow, it’s Russel Crowe’s non-union equivalent barking orders from afar!

Not only were those early licensed games largely terrible, they often had nothing at all to do with the license they were using. No matter the movie, the games were simply transformed into platformers with an endless array of generic baddies to mow down. Lots of birds, snakes, and spiders to exterminate or faceless gun toting thugs to mow down. The Mummy Demastered is filled with generic animal fodder for your nameless shadow ops tactician character to massacre. Between the glut of enemies to push through and the often punishing platforming to get past, this game shares a lot of DNA with those terrible tie-ins of yore.

But somehow Demastered manages to find its own voice in the darkness that is corporate synergy. Developers WayForward are old hat at making great looking and sounding 2D action games. They found a way to stretch their budget across a well constructed Metroidvania frame and sprinkle on enough flair to give this corpse some life. The enemies and backgrounds are generic and tiresome, but the pixel art still shines. The jams are straightforward 2D chiptune jams, but they’re really good 2D chiptune jams. This game is stretched thin, sure. Boss fights are simple and sponge-y and the environments don’t shine much. Still, there are some really fun weapons and lots of secrets tucked away. Somebody cared here, which is more than can be said for most licensed tie-ins.

While this game has every excuse to suck, I admire its refusal to do so. WayForward did way more for The Mummy with the paltry budget they were handed than Tom Cruise and Universal could with a blank check. The Mummy Demastered may be forgotten at some point and join the rest of its movie tie-in sisters and brothers in a bottomless memory hole, but its better than being buried in the unmarked grave of the Dark Universe.

Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen (2013)

K-Mart Skyrim. Charmingly janky. Absolutely worth the Blue Light Special price. Dragon’s Dogma is a Capcom game, but it feels like a Midway game. It has that fake video game made for Law & Order vibe. I feel like Lenny Briscoe is about to roll his eyes over my corpse (which is obviously clutching two Joycons) and say “looks like game over for him.” Stiff animations, gobbledygook dialogue, and a real flat look. But here’s the thing: this game hovers around $7 on most platforms. This is the jewel of the dustbin. There’s a lot to do and a lot of fun to be had if you can find it in the clearance section. I usually hate sword and sorcery nonsense, but my undying love for bootleg, knockoff crap shall overcome all.

Assassin’s Creed Origins (2017)

There aren’t a lot of triple-A open world games where you get to be a horny, married couple who made a vow of violence to avenge their dead kid. Unless this is a recurring theme in the Assassin’s Creed franchise, of which I have played zero other games. In 2017, Ubisoft had not yet driven their patented open world formula into the dirt. At this point they’ll serve you any variation of triple-A open world you can ask for. This Egyptian murder simulator just happens to be a particularly tasty flavor.

I can’t speak for the other games in the franchise, but this one is extremely easy to get in and out of. The overarching narrative is there if you want it, but there’s more fun to be had in the side-quests and smaller moments. The pre-teen orphan who sounds like he smokes two packs a day and tasks you will hunting down his shoplifters was a particular favorite of mine. The map is bloated with icons and people are constantly fighting with each other or you, so there is never of shortage of shit to do. That “shit to do” typically involves murder, but I think the title gave that away already.

This is a game you could lose a whole day playing or jump into an hour before you have to go to your job as an actual assassin. These games are usually over 100 hours long so if you ain’t going anywhere, neither are they.

It’s also super expensive looking. When you’re like me (I pray you’re not) and play mostly small indie games and scaled down Switch ports, the big blockbuster stuff is fun to look at, even if it’s mostly sand. Rough, coarse, gets everywhere? Sure. But it still shimmers and shines under a nice heavy coat of bandit blood.

Octahedron: Transfixed Edition (2019)

A snappy action/puzzle platformer with a neon trance pulse and a harsh difficulty curve. Without the dancehall bangers and Lite-Brite explosions, I probably would’ve spiked my Switch out of frustration and tuned outta Octahedron. Please don’t stop the music.

PUBG (2017)

I did it. I finally did it. I fucked that chicken up, son. Served with a side of five kills KLAK KLAK KLAK KLAK KLAK. Split it with my boy Arty B. And now, I will never play PUBG ever again. So long, PUBG, and thanks for all the murder. You were more fun than Fortnite but less fun than Tetris 99.

Super Mario 3D World (2013)

An extremely challenging detour in the realm of 3D Mario games. A skyway between the New Super Mario series and the fully 3D lineage of Mario games, Super Mario 3D World offered some of the snappiest and most challenging platforming under the Mario umbrella when it came out in 2013. It still shines in 2021, especially if you can muster up the testicular fortitude to track down all the collectibles and unlock the endless punishment that is World Crown. That pure, uncut murderous Super Mario challenge Nintendo tends to hide in a secret world at the end of the game is here and it’s here to destroy you. You, not me. Because I beat it with my boy Arty B.

The Super Mario Maker games are their own brilliant bit of magic. Super Mario Odyssey is a sprawling, gigantic epic that captures the wonder of playing Super Mario 64 for the first time in an incredibly fitting and exciting way. But there’s always something to be said about that Nintendo level craftsmanship when it comes to some Mario-ass Mario levels. There’s a flow, a pace, that they always nail. Often replicated never duplicated. 3D World has that unmatched level of Nintendo craftsmanship to it. Which is why its cartridge co-habitant is such a bummer.

Bummers, 2021

Bowser’s Fury

Bowser’s Fury brings an exciting concept that ultimately falls flat. There’s a pace or flow to Mario games that this offshoot is missing. The wide open, one-level layout is just too meandering. It’s a neat idea; the whole game being one big Mario level. But it lacks that aforementioned snappiness of 3D World and the immediacy of other large connected world Marios. That big dumbass dinosaur is not fun to ride. Oil Spill Bowser popping up every few minutes like an unwanted relative is annoying as all hell. “ARE YOU SEEING A GIRL YET? DID YOU TAKE CARE OF THAT LUMP GROWING ON YOUR BACK? WHY IS YOUR SHIRT STAINED WITH VOMIT?” Back off, Meemaw. This game takes the idea of Bowser vs Mario kaiju fights and makes them lame and boring. For that, I must send it to hell. The Games Press was shooting in their shorts for this game when it came out. They are all dumb and wrong. Don’t make this the future of Mario, Nintendo. I’m warning you.

Back 4 Blood

These one hit wonder types always gotta go back to the well way too late. Look at how long it took Cris Carter to make his return to the FBI’s most unwanted only to screw the pooch for two awful seasons, vow to never return without Gillian Anderson, then renege again and say “lol jk nvm let’s give it another go.” Look at how long it took David Chase to return to the world of The Sopranos (and how little he did since) only to give us a made for TV prequel without a damn thing to say.

Left 4 Dead was a phenomenon when it came out in 2008. Thirteen years later, long after Steam took their franchise from them, after another asynchronous multiplayer game that flopped hard (as most have), developers Turtle Rock had to go back to the well with none of the excitement or innovation that made the first game so fun. You can’t stall this long for your triumphant return if you’re just gonna do the same damn thing again. Shooters have changed in the 13 years since Left 4 Dead hit, but I don’t think anyone told Turtle Rock. It’s a great vehicle for shooting the shit with your best friend, but when your video game time is limited, so is every other video game.

I mean, zombies. Zombies man. AGAIN. In 2021. Zombies. Christ.

DOOM Eternal: The Ancient Gods – Part Two

It might be telling I completely forgot that the electrifying conclusion to the sequel of one of my all time favorite game came out this year. Could be COVID brain, or time collapsing in on itself for two years running. My bet is on id leaning to so hard into the high fantasy, D&D aspect of the Doom lore. I don’t know where it all went wrong, but considering that you kill THE LORD OF THE UNDERWORLD in this game and it barely registered with me means something went sideways.

I don’t know how Doom Eternal will be remembered. Hopefully more fondly than Doom II. Certainly not as well as 2016’s DOOM. I think we’ve been conditioned to expect all stories be told as a trilogy these days, and it’s probably for the best that this seems to be the end of our hero the Doomslayer for now. Doom Eternal mostly ruled, but it went too far up its own ass with lore. Tacking on two DLC episodes to further flesh out the Heaven vs Hell stuff is overkill on overkill. It sours me on Doom Eternal as a whole, but cannot and will not impeach what will stand as one of the greatest games in one of the greatest generations of video games. DOOM.

Road 96

This is a #Resistance Twitter adventure game with baby teeth. While the game bills itself as a procedurally generated road trip where “every trip is different,” I’m not really sure how the choices you make change your story in a meaningful way. And while story beats or endings for each of the game’s seven chapters might be different, nothing you do seems to make much of an impact. Whether you die, get arrested, or make your way cross the Petria border (our fictional stand-in for Trump’s America), you simply move on to the next chapter. The “characters” you choose are faceless and voiceless, defined only by how much cash they carry and how much energy they start with. The characters you meet along the way are stock and corny and look like if Life is Strange was a modern day CG Nicktoon.

I adore the idea; an ever-changing road trip to escape a tyrannical country while people help or hinder your adventure. Hiding out at bars and diners, stealing cars, fighting militia men… all good stuff. But there’s nothing here worth digging any deeper on. There’s no subtext to any of this, just text.

New Pokemon Snap

Developed by Bandai Namco, hamstrung by Nintendo, New Pokemon Snap fucks up a good thing. Rather innovate on a 20+ year old game, New Pokemon Snap’s gameplay is as unimaginative as its shiny new title. Still stuck on those tracks, still throw fruit at pocket monsters, and still woefully small but now with new and improved Agonizingly Long. With longer load times and 10x the tedium, your thumb will blister skipping through whatever these annoying amateurs have to say about your work. Why? Because you have to play through each area several times before you unlock the same level but at night. Sure, the map morphs slightly, but you still have to play that variation another dozen times to unlock Super Secret Double Twilight! Then play through that variation multiple times! Like, what the fuck!

Though none of those hindrances change the fact that Pokemon are adorable. This game is as sweet and snuggly as it gets. I took a lot of cute pics of Pokemon, which I guess is the point of the game. I did that. I did that a lot. But I didn’t enjoy it.

Halo Infinite Campaign

This campaign really puts its worst foot forward. A boring slog through a mostly empty enemy station that shows off none of the game’s open world fun. Holograms monologue at you while Master Chief drops (and repeats) some ready-made tough guy quips that really show how utterly lame this character is. “What are you gonna do, Chief?” “I’m gonna disappoint them.” “They’re headed for the cannons, Chief!” “They’ll be disappointed.” I can confirm that someone here is certainly disappointed.

Doomguy works because he never talks (until he talks a little in Doom Eternal, which absolutely does not work). Master Chief just comes off as a less badass version of him. Master Chief is killing aliens for the military. Doomguy kills demons because he loves blood. I mean, he also works for the military, but his primary motivator is bloodlust. I wish I knew what people see in the Halo lore, because holy shit this writing is poor. I was skipping cutscenes before I touched grass on Halo Zeta. Your old quirky smartass AI is replaced by another quirky smartass AI and I just can’t do it anymore.

The bummer of it all is that it feels fantastic. It feels tighter and less floaty than Halo ever has. Halo vehicles seems forever destined to feel miserable, but shooting and grappling is tuned perfectly and feels like it took cues from other modern action games rather than sticking so strictly franchise’s ethos. I think sticking with the fun, fast and free multiplayer is the way to go here. Then I can get my lore on the side via the Halo tv show.

If you ever catch me watching that I want you to beat me with a bag of rocks.

Rankingvania: Exercise in Futility

Before we rank the Castlevania games collected therein, let’s talk about these Castlevania collections themselves.

Castlevania Requiem from 2018 sucks ass. While it has the two greatest games in the franchise, it has nothing beyond sub-par ports of the games. This is the easiest way to play Rondo of Blood, but probably the worst way to play Symphony of the Night. It’s also exclusively available on PS4, which is a travesty. Symphony of the Night has been ported to damn near everything, but Rondo of Blood is trapped on PSP, Wii Virtual Console and this piddly two game collection. Put these out everywhere. My dog could run Rondo of Blood. Let me play it on her.

Castlevania Anniversary Collection from 2019 also contains some outstanding games, but the lack of visual options and total absence of any archival material makes this slightly better than Requiem but vastly worse than the next collection.

This year's Castlevania Advance Collection has some outstanding games and more archival content than the previous piddly-ass offerings. These should all be one big thing under one umbrella with all the historical context they can cram in. The Castlevania franchise deserves the best. These soundtracks are the greatest in video game history. The games are some of the most important action games ever. Konami’s penchant for ignoring their IP and fucking over their creators would be shameful if corporations were capable of feeling shame. Onto the games.

14) Dracula X (1995)

A hackjob SNES port of Rondo of Blood, Dracula X needs to get the fuck outta here. Begone, Dracula X.

13) The Adventure (1989)

Though the siren song of the Gameboy’s sound chip is hard to resist, you should not play this game. Looks bad, feels horrible, doesn’t even have sub-weapons. This is no adventure of mine, my friend.

12) Belmont’s Revenge (1991)

In this Gameboy followup, sub-weapons are back. Everything else still sucks. Skipsville.

11) Kid Dracula (1990)

The Star Parodier of Castlevania, I guess. A pretty straightforward action platformer but all cutesy wootsy instead of gothy wothy. Instead of a Belmont, you play as Kid Dracula and throw stuff at other stuff. The variety of new environments is a nice touch, but it’s just not that fun to play. But it is fun to hear classic Castlevania tracks remixed and goofed on.

10) Simon’s Quest (1987)

What Simon’s Quest lacks in almost everything, it makes up for in ambition. Its ideas were way too big for the NES. This game has more in common with Zelda 2 any other Castlevania game. That’s not a good thing.

This game is trash, no doubt. The soundtrack is on point as ever (featuring the debut of legendary banger “Bloody Tears”), but everything else about it is torturous. It looks horrible. It still plays as stiff as the first one. It’s impossibly opaque. There’s only one boss fight. It’s slower than syrup in Saskatchewan. With all of that in mind, it swung for something entirely different from the first game, and for that I give it one gold star.

9) Circle of the Moon (2001)

The first and worst of the Gameboy Advance trilogy. While the soundtrack whips (tee hee), the game looks and feels miserable. Boring-ass boss fights, monotonous castle design, and not even considered CANON. Pointless. There are a lot of Circle of the Moon fans/apologists out there and they’re all wrong. Go home and go to bed you dorks. Or play some real video games. Ridiculous.

8) Bloodlines (1994)

Castlevania’s brief fling with Sega certainly has a bootleg quality to it. A non-canon spinoff that leans harder on the Bram Stoker novel than the Castlevania lore, Bloodlines should be better than it is. It looks great, but feels worse than Super Castlevania IV. It sounds off, too, especially when it comes to the franchise’s two greatest tracks, “Vampire Killer” and “Bloody Tears.” The novelty of it all gives it some shine, but it doesn’t do anything to move the franchise forward considering it comes three years after its superior SNES counterpart.

7) Castlevania (1986)

The one that started it all. This is where Bram Stoker ripped off all his ideas from. There’s no Metroid in the DNA yet. This is an action-platformer with what we in the business call “pre-good” controls. No air control while jumping, devastating knock-back when hit by enemies, and some mean boss fights. This game doesn’t feel great by today’s standards, but it’s Castle-fucking-vania. The music, the look, the horror business. THE LORE. It started here. Even if it got a lot better from here, that has to count for something.

6) Dracula’s Curse (1989)

The third NES entry in the franchise ditches all the ideas from Simon’s Quest and instead fleshes out the ideas presented in the first game, adding more playable characters, branching paths, and multiple endings. It’s still a grind, but it does so much more than its predecessors. We also get the debut of Alucard here, Dracula’s angsty goth son who hates his daddy and wants to love human ladies instead of kill them. Leave him be, Drac. He just wants to get laid and brood. Is that so wrong?

5) Super Castlevania IV (1991)

This remake of the original game is a vast improvement in every way. More control, less difficult, better music, and crazier visuals. Mode 7, baby. Recognize. I’d wager this stands as one of the best remakes in video games.

Whereas Bloodlines really fucks up “Vampire Killer” and “Bloody Tears,” IV saves those two songs for the ass-end of the game. Both renditions absolutely rip. The best thing about the Castlevania games will always be the music, and IV has one of the best SNES soundtracks around and maybe the best in the series. Oh those tight drums and plucky bass. Turn that shit UP.

4) Harmony of Dissonance (2002)

Circle sounds great and looks like shit, Harmony looks great and sounds like shit. Aria sounds and looks great, which is why Harmony will never catch it. This was the beginning of Iga’s legendary run on Nintendo portables, running for five games until 2008’s Order of Ecclesia for DS. It is insanity that they cranked out five outstanding Castlevania games in seven years. Konami rewarded him by taking the franchise away from him and turning it into a 3D game for the third time (which they failed at for the third time). So that sucks.

3) Aria of Sorrow (2003)

A real technical showpiece for the GBA and a stunning portable rendition of the Metroidvania (drunk yet?) formula for 2003. This game takes place in an imaginary castle during a lunar eclipse. The visual design team makes the most out of this gimmick. The enemy design is wild here. Werejaguars, spinning skulls with eyeball tentacles, ghoulish jousters on two legged horses, and a bunch of other crazy shit that’s all over the place. There’s not much consistency in the art here, but I’ll take the zaniness over samieness.

Circle of the Moon probably takes the cake for soundtrack on the GBA, but Aria’s sound is an improvement over the chiptunes its predecessor Harmony of Dissonance. This game is a huge technical achievement considering it’s a 2003 Gameboy Advance game. This is Symphony of the Night in the palm of your hand.

2) Symphony of the Night (1997)

Ah, to be the moody, sullen son of the world’s most famous vampire. To sulk endlessly and stare out stained glass windows while listening to new wave. What is a man but a miserable little pile of extended 12” dance singles? Symphony of the Night is an undeniable stunner. It forever shook the foundation of video games to the point of over-saturation, leaving years and years of impostors in its wake. Trust me, I’ve played most of them. They rule.

This game totally holds up in 2021. It’s kind of shocking how little this formula has changed since 1997 while still feeling modern. These types of games are such an essential chunk of the video game landscape that I think they’re always gonna be here in one form or another. It’s a bummer that they’ll no longer fly the Castlevania flag, especially when this game right here still plays as well as today’s best iterations.

1) Rondo of Blood (1993)

The best thing about these damn games is the music. I love these games, I really do… but they don’t exactly feel like Mario. The early ones are fairly ugly and annoying as all hell, but the goth vibes and relentless jams have always been more than enough to give Castlevania a forever spot in my cold, dead heart.

Richter may very well be the coolest Belmont. Bitchin’ headband, no sleeves, and star of Rondo of Blood. But it’s foolish not to play this game as Maria. Maria chucks animals at bad guys. Doves, cats, dragons… if it breathes, its a weapon. Playing as Maria is a very welcome Easy Mode. She goes through animals like a Milo & Otis handler. She’s a walking, talking cheat code. With her default double jump, she moves smoother than any Castlevania legend before her. She’s like a young Eddie Gurrero at Halloween Havoc ‘97.

As far as the original formula Castlevanias go, Rondo of Blood is tops. This one is the difference split between Dracula’s Curse and Super Castlevania IV. Branching paths, unlockable characters, but looks and sounds remarkably better than any Castlevania game before it. I like the Metroidvania style stuff more over all, but this is the one action era Castlevania game where everything fits together perfectly.

Soundtracks of the Year

Sable

There’s some indie Breath of the Wild stuff going on here. Not so much in scale, but in spirit. The joy here is finding caves, structures, stories that the map never told you about. There’s no combat here and the only puzzles you’re solving are climbing rocks and managing your stamina. While this world isn’t as fleshed out as Hyrule, but that same curiosity is there. In many ways, Sable presents the ideal world; absolute desolation with your hoverbike and a bitchin’ soundtrack.

Japanese Breakfast cut a few vocal tracks to lead the game off, but everything else is instrumentals. Leading lady Michelle Zauner brings together sounds and shades from 90s games and onward, delivering a night and day theme for each area. You can hear the synths bouncing off those jagged PS1/N64 textures. You can hear other worlds through these fuzzy echoes of old adventures. The transition from heartbreaking indie rock to video game-ass video game music is seamless. I hope Japanese Breakfast does this again.

At an ambitious 90+ minutes and 30 something tracks, this is a score to get lost in. I think the game wants to have it both ways: empty with brief flares of exhilaration. Between the game’s jankiness and the lack of BOTW-caliber thrills, I don’t think it quite evens out. But the soundtrack will give you what you’re looking for.

Axiom Verge 2

Here’s another one easy to get lost in. It doesn’t help that the map looks like puke. It does help that this sequel is so much more desolate and focused on exploration, as opposed to the bright colors and bonkers artillery from the first game. While world is littered with notepads filled with ancient technobabble, the otherwise minimalist setup makes for a quick, immersive start.

Gameplay-wise, there aren’t many surprises here. Its stilted combat may even turn you off. Where this game shines is its pacing. The upgrades/powerups come at a rapid clip and any dead ends you might hit are easy to claw out of.

Though the gameplay doesn’t do much to excite, the soundtrack shocks track after track. One man wrecking crew developer/composer Thomas Happ gets massive mileage out of his sequencer. Overworld tracks blend speedy dancehall drums with synthesized strings, Spanish guitars and Halo-esque chanting. The subworld tracks stick pretty strictly to chiptune rock, but it stays fresh by breaking the soundtrack up. It’s spacey, atmospheric, and like Sable, it pairs so perfectly with the desolation of the world around it.

Best of 2021

Disco Elysium: Final Cut

Another tombstone in the graveyard of point and click adventure games I will never have the patience to finish.

Not like Disco Elysium ain’t trying, though. Seemingly every choice in this game will unlock or lockout your next move. Some real sharp writing jives with some real grimy illustration to put together a darkly funny and often uncomfortable world. You’re a drunk cop investigating a grisly murder by a union that acts more like the mob than a union. Most people hate you. Many of them as ugly and fucked up as you are. This game builds a dreary world around a dark core, but it’s far from hopeless. Those beams of light that shine through the pitch black are what kept me going through a style of game that I really don’t care for at all no matter how hard I try.

No More Heroes 3

It’s fitting that the framing device for these boss encounters is Travis Touchdown binge streaming anime, because that’s probably what the No More Heroes franchise should’ve been from the jump: something you can watch. While the motion control gimmicks of the first two games were novel at the time and certainly fit the hack and slash nature of the combat, that thin level of immersion is gone from the third. Though the combat here is fine enough, it’s rarely fun or rewarding. The peanut buttery center of No More Heroes is the balls out, cuckoo story of otaku horndog/intergalactic assassin Travis Touchdown.

If you’re not down with Suda 51 and his gonzo sensibilities, I’d turn around right quick. This is a punk rock stoner romp by way of Dragon Ball Z with Xavier: Renegade Angel cutscenes and a Deadly Premonition-esque open world structure. The stakes here are much less personal than those of the previous two games. We get bits and pieces of Travis’ story from the last few games – a returning Sylvia, a cameo from his brother Henry – but our hero takes more of a backseat this time around to FU, our intergalactic threat for this go round. He left earth 20 years ago on an E.T. like quest to return home, only to come back hellbent on ruling Earth. As is always the case, Travis must fight his way through the rankings to save everyone and prove himself to be the hungriest, bloodlustiest assassin this galaxy has ever seen.

These games aren’t for everyone, but there’s a bonkers psychedelia at the heart of this game I can’t escape. I figured Travis Touchdown was gone for good long ago, left in stranded in a distant, different time. It felt good to see him again and put his saga to bed.

Metroid Dread

Where does the Metroid franchise fit into the modern video game landscape? You can’t browse your favorite digital storefront without tripping over one of the countless games Super Metroid and Symphony of the Night helped spawn. Look at how many are on this list alone. I’m a sucker for this shit. While the anticipation for the first brand new 2D Metroid in TWO DECADES was thick, I wondered what it could do to keep up with your Guacamelees and Oris. Would it dare to go further and shoot for a Rouge Legacy or Dead Cells level of innovation? What can Metroid do at this point to stand out other than charge $60 for the privilege of playing it?

Dread is certainly no reinvention of the wheel. You are a bounty hunter with an arm cannon. You get powerups and clear a map. You fight aliens and fuck em up real good. In that regard, Dread is a letdown. It will not launch the endless array of impostors that Super Metroid did.

Instead, Mercury Steam made an extremely technical action/adventure game with tightly wound and rewarding combat. Boss fights require pinpoint precision and acrobatic ability. There’s a pacing and smoothness to Dread that doesn’t let up. Like Mysterio vs Gurrero at Halloween Havoc ‘97. That goes for the combat as well as the exploration. Dread has a very natural flow to its progression and exploration. Though the world is as open as your current power set allows, it finds a way to keep pushing Samus forward.

The Metroid lore is a bit much for me, but there are some fun story beats near the end of the game that went way over my head but were fun nonetheless. I don’t have a clue where 2D Metroid goes from here. As the best selling 2D Metroid ever, I have to imagine Nintendo is finally ready to show Metroid the love it so deserves.

Chicory: A Colorful Tale

This is a game about not feeling good enough. While the world around you falls apart and sinks into a dark emptiness, you bring color back to it. You bring joy to the cuddly characters scattered throughout the world of Picnic. You are the chosen one, the Wielder, tasked with saving this world from darkness. And you do it, because you’re good at it. They hang your art all over the place. You help other animals grieve, help them grow, help them sell more pizza, and make them laugh. Yet you still don’t believe you’re good enough.

But you’re also not alone. You’re not the first Wielder and you’re not the last. Picnic is filled with characters who need you, who support you, who want you to believe that you are good enough. That you’re the one actually doing the thing you think you’re not good enough to be doing.

Chicory shares some developer lineage with Celeste, another game that deals with mental health head on. While both games approach mental health in a way that might be too simple for some, I appreciate how straightforward both games are with regards to talking about it. These are two games anyone with a Switch can pick up, play and understand. Anything that can make depression or impostor syndrome easier to talk about for anyone suffering from either is a very good thing. These are games families can play together and make hard, seemingly impossible conversations much easier to have. Beyond the plainspoken way both games discuss these issues, the style of each game is universally identifiable as a video game-ass video game. Celeste is a platformer; run and jump ‘til you reach the end. Chicory is like Zelda, specifically like Link’s Awakening in both size and scope; you run around and explore caves. Both games also go above and beyond in regards to control and difficulty accessibility. You’re not going to get destroyed by the same boss over and over. You don’t even have to die if you don’t want to.

This is a thrilling adventure game and the painting is so fun and relaxing and Lena Raine’s score is wonderful as it always is. More importantly than all of that, this is a game that shows you video games can do anything and help everyone.

Forza Horizon 5

But in this game you get to drive really cool cars.

They don’t make driving games like they used to. In fact, they barely make driving games at all anymore. Remember Outrun? Remember Burnout Paradise? Of course you do. They were the best times of your life, you useless shit.

The Forza Horizon games are lifetime games. There’s no reason to stop playing them. The Forza Motorsport games can go screw. The Horizon series is as close as we’ll ever get to Burnout Paradise in the modern era, and we should all be grateful for that. Go have sex with people you love. Go repopulate the planet or build farms or destroy the Earth as you do. I don’t care. I won’t say a word to anyone but my dog. But when I wanna drive virtual cars with bottomless gas tanks in a never ending, ever changing virtual world, I just ask that you leave me be. I wanna blast my records and drive my GokuMobile around until my eyes fall out and I want you to shut up and go away. I am born to run and you are born to fuck off.

Pac-Man 99

Pac-Man (real name Packford Hugh Man) was born in 1980. He fathered countless sequels and spinoffs and was recently emblazoned in ink directly over my cold, dead heart. Previously known for convincing Mikail Gorbacev to “break the walls down,” Pac-Man spun-off his success as an early Antifa agent into a lucrative career in arcade games, gobbling up quarters like the endless stream of dots (pills) that would later haunt him and his family following his sudden rise and sharp decline.

Though yellow as Moe Syzlak, Pac-Man was no coward. He served dutifully in the Console Wars and played a pivotal role in the defense of the Japanese front on the Game Boy Player adapter for the Nintendo Gamecube. Asymmetric gameplay just couldn’t catch on at the time. It still can’t. But he waka-waka-waka’d on, a man without a pack.

After a short-lived stint in the nWo (he was removed by legendary piece of shit Hulk Hogan for being “too over”), he soon got back on track. His TRL appearance broke records, forcing cable company holdouts to finally give people their MTV. He still remains friends with Hall and Nash to this day.

Upon the release of Pac-Man Championship Edition in 2007, Pac-Man was once again an international star. While being considered for Leno’s replacement, the followup Championship Edition DX+ dropped and Pac-Man exited the stratosphere, causing his asking price to skyrocket. The game was soon named the greatest game of all time by everyone everywhere. Anyone who said any different was considered a very stupid liar. From then on, every Tiger Beat from here to Zaire has been plastered with that big beautiful smile. By the time Nintendo surprised dropped Pac-Man 99, Pac-Man’s long war was over. This was merely another tribute among many that would be served to the one who we now know as God, Pac-Man. May he emblazon the chest of us all, as the prophecy foretold.

Considering Pac-Man is a bonafide A-lister (and currently tapped to star as Rick Blaine in Steven Spielberg’s Casablanca remake), it’s a damn shame this game is absolutely deadsville before the year is out. You can jump into a Tetris 99 game just as fast as the day it launched. Much of that is thanks to the various updates and tournaments that are still going on almost two years after release. Pac-Man 99 has received none of the support Tetris 99 got and each game starts half-empty. Frankly, I blame myself. I think I kicked everyone’s ass too hard and scared them all off. Pac-man deserves better. Someday when I finally ascend and get to meet the man himself, I’ll tell him so.

Runner-up: Death’s Door

This game always feels dangerous. Every combat encounter feels like you’re just barely pulling it off. You have to learn each enemy’s rules, attacks and speed while managing different types and keeping nimble and elusive. Health comes at a premium. Checkpoints can be ruthless if you die before opening up shortcuts. This game is a mean motherfucker.

While it borrows a lot from the structure of early Zelda games, it leans much harder on hard and fast action than exploration. You’re wandering around an open world, traveling to different temples and slowly carving them out from the inside. You can see what sorts of power-ups you’ll need to find to progress in each temple, then use that power-up in the open world to get to the next one. Not having a map is frustrating, but the slow unraveling of the temples and the overworld are perfectly paced. That sense of wonder never lets up. Even after the game is over, there’s more weapons, collectibles and upgrades to hunt down.

The writing is dry but sharp. It’s funny without trying to be cute. There’s some goofball shit here and there, but its voice rings clear throughout. The story itself is pretty straightforward, but also thoughtful and compelling. Every character has their reasons to fight their fight. The villains here are doing dastardly, villainous stuff, but their ultimate goal is the same as every other character’s: survive in this world.

There’s not much fault to find in Death’s Door other than I suck at it and it pisses me off. Of all the 2D action games and Metroidvanias (last call) I played this year, nothing hooked me harder than Death’s Door.

DOOM of the Year: Hitman 3

Hitman 3 is the culmination of more than five years of work on Agent 47’s world of assassination. When Hitman launched in 2016, it laid the foundation and set expectations for what this series could become. But with each sequel, it subverted those expectations not only to keep the formula fresh and the gameplay exciting, but to bring our emotionless murder android and ICA’s favorite son Agent 47 full circle. The Hitman trilogy is the story of a man no fucks to give finding the most important fuck imaginable. In 2016 we got Hitman: six maps and a barrel of laughs. Each target done up as an easily murderable absolute shitheel. Hitman 2 blew it up further: more maps, more targets, and this time more story. This is where our hero and Petri dish assassin finds his conscience. We get to the heart of the Providence organization. Their schemes, motives and cast of deplorable characters. It sets the table for the end of either Providence or the ICA.

Because Hitman 2 was able to breathe life into a lifeless killing machine, Hitman 3 was able to twist and turn this story to the point where the final level isn’t even a Hitman level: it’s a dark site bullet train murder spree through a snowy mountain pass. No more the silent assassin, Agent 47 is going loud. Blasting black ops soldiers off of a speeding train until you reach their commander, steal his disguise, and make every soldier left on the train salute you moments after you merc’d all their pals. Your last target, the game’s “final boss,” stands there fixing his tie while he asks you politely to murder him. As a Hitman map, it’s kind of a let down. No exploding golf balls or sucking enemies into submarine engines or any Rube Goldberg style death contraptions. But as the finale to this journey, this masterfully done trio of games, it absolutely earns it.

The game manages to subvert the formula leading up to the finale as well. While the rest of the maps are laid out in a more traditional Hitman style, the objectives and targets aren’t as clear cut. The impeccably designed Berlin dance club warehouse level pits you as the target against a mess of ICA agents who believe you to be turncoat. We get a mansion murder mystery where you get to play detective. There’s a rare scripted escape sequence through an underground Chinese lab. There’s a tango with you handler Diana for her first in-level appearance in the trilogy. I’m not sure the gambles Hitman 3 take always work out. I wonder if this game would’ve been better if it was another half-dozen massive murder playgrounds. But when taken all together as an entire trilogy, I think this is a perfect thing.

The one constant thread that ties all three games together is without a doubt the humor. I think modern games still struggle a lot with humor, especially the games that bill themselves as comedy games. Video games are by their very nature extremely mechanical. You might have the greatest script in the world and the best voice actors around, but there’s a human physicality lost when translating it to a video game that no mo-cap can cap. I think the Hitman franchise understands this and leans into the video game-ness of it all. It’s the stiff and silly costume change animation that shows the disguise pop right on as soon as the animation ends. It’s the self-awareness in the NPCs commenting on your ever changing appearance or letting you know what kind of clearance you need to buzz right past them next time. But more than anything, it’s Agent 47’s dry, deadpan and dialect ambiguous delivery hilariously undercutting every smarmy asswipe who dares to give him their big bad guy monologue moments before they get murdered. These moments are played for comedy, but Agent 47 is never trying to be funny. The dialogue is always written in a way where every word he says is true. There’s certainly some puns thrown around for funsies, but the specificity of the way people talk to Agent 47 and the degree of vagueness with which he responds is key to this whole enterprise. These morons are so self-involved and obtuse that they have no idea that Agent 47 is literally just telling them flat out that he’s about to kill them. Three games in five years and it never got old. These are truly some of the best written games I’ve ever played.

Your winner here is Hitman 3, but this is more about the total achievement that is the Hitman trilogy that began in 2016. This reboot began as an episodic, map-by-map rollout published and owned by megapublisher Square Enix. The decision came shortly before the game launched, but played out wonderfully. A new Hitman map would come out every month, allowing players to dive deep into every nook and cranny of each little murder dollhouse IO would drop. It helped showcase what this studio has done best with this trilogy: detail. Rather than rushing through an entire campaign all at once, the piecemeal roll-out allowed you to build up XP and unlock more and more tools of assassination for the next map. But more than that it gave you a chance to experience every story IO wanted to tell, every boobytrap they wanted you to set, every Wile E. Coyote scheme you could concoct. Learning AI scripts and paths and interrupting them or intertwining them with each other to conduct this symphony of death was mesmerizing. Like watching a Swiss watch tick while adding or removing different cogs just to make it explode into bits.

Financially, the episodic model didn’t work. It was critically acclaimed but sold like ass. Square Enix divested from IO but miraculously let them retain their IP. They remained in limbo until Warner Bros stepped in to publish Hitman 2, which wound up being more successful than the first in every way. IO still wasn’t done telling their story.

Now fully independent, IO Interactive did the damn thing again with Hitman 3. But not just Hitman 3, they managed to house the entire trilogy in one single executable. Every map from all three games under one roof, with all the progression you’ve made along the way so that you can become the master assassin you’ve always dreamed of being. As a packaged product that contains all the upgrades and tune ups they’ve made in their five year journey, it is hard to beat Hitman 3. And after running through two major publishers and coming out alive on the other end, they made their most successful game yet. They opened up a second studio, wrapped up the story of Agent 47 (for now), got their hands on the James Bond IP, and started work on an entirely new game. They fucking did it, man. They escaped. They made magic happen. There was a while there where this studio looked like it might stop existing. Now they’ve got the greatest trilogy in modern games under their belt. Bow down all hail 2021’s DOOM of the year, Hitman 3. Man, Hitman lost to DOOM in 2016 but came back around to whoop its ass. Video games rule. Tune in next year to find out who will be crowned HITMAN of the Year.

Well howdy, stranger. I didn’t see you there. In my home. Watching me sit very still as I listen to records and watch wrestling. Don’t do that to people, it’s unsettling. You're giving everyone (me and my dog) the heebie jeebies. In any case, you’re here now, so, just lemme quickly swipe all these Cheez-It crumbs off my chest/couch and… there we go. Kick back, grab a drink, keep these six footlong chili dogs between us and let me take you on a journey to a world beyond time, space, and quarantine, to the splendiferous world of Galaga II!

Are you tired? Overworked? Underfucked? Kids got you down? Wife leave you? Do you struggle to feel love for anything other than your television? We don’t have a pill for that… we have A WHOLE ISLAND FOR IT. Book your next vacation for the sandy shores of Galaga II, a 5-star getaway from reality!

You’ll fall head over hooves for residents. Whether it’s Felicity (a cat named after Keri Russel’s titular character who hates prog rock), Lucy (a pig whose house is decorated like a Lynchian funeral parlor) or Muffy the sheep who loves 90s television and The Cure.

Why, is that Riverdale’s number two redhead Archie Andrews frolicking in one of our spacious backyards? No, idiot, of course not! That’s an N on his sweater and this isn’t Riverdale! He doesn’t wear glasses either!

Take in a match at The Hideout, where residents sit quietly and listen to records or watch wrestling. What else could you possibly want out of life? Here’s Night Cobra, being told his gimmick sucks and that he’s doing the job tonight. Best of luck on your future endeavors, pal!

Chain smoke and play video Mahjong on the arcade boardwalk outside one of our many (two) brick and mortar retail establishments. A boardwalk arcade outside a brick and mortar retailer? In Galaga II, every day feels like The Future.

Tweak on, tweakers. If you need a quick pick me up, feel free to stop by one of our quaint little seaside methlabs to get cookin’! Set sail on crystal blue meth near our crystal blue shores. Just like our local sea life, you’ll be hooked!

You’ll spend dozens upon dozens of hours sinking your heart and soul into a fictional village while the world around you burns to a crisp. Even if you want to leave, you can’t! Nintendo runs the wifi here and they do a really shitty job of it. Besides, you’re under quarantine now. Youin the Galaga II jungle, baby. You gonna die. Coulda been worse. Coulda had a wife and kids. But you know, while you’re stuck here… you could read my List of Video Game Things, 2020. If that’s your bag.

Mortal Kombat 11: Aftermath cast, ranked worst to best

12) Fujin

Fujin sucks, fuck Fujin. Raiden is boring enough. Did he need a more boring little brother? Wind god? Get the fuck outta here.

11) Kotal Kahn

If Shao Kahn is HHH, a relentless and unapologetic conqueror/megaheel, Kotal Kahn is John Cena; a royal, do-gooder asshole who thinks good is good. They both have their place and serve their purpose, it’s just that Kotal’s purpose is so lame. Kotal Kahn is for troops and babies.

10) Kung Lao

Another also-ran. Points for getting absolutely obliterated by Shao Kahn, though. A worthy demise. He doesn't even get a damn picture.

9) Raiden

Listen. Raiden is fine. Thunder is a cool thing, no doubt. But he’s just kinda there. He’s Leonardo. His personality is leadership. He doesn’t party, he doesn’t do machines, and he’s only rude when his eyes glow red. Props to them for cutting Chris Lambert a check, though.

8) Kitana

Kitana is cool. I feel for her. Momma Sindel does her real dirty. She just happens to be a regular, cool lady lost in the shuffle of some real kooky cats, so she doesn’t stick out much.

7) Fire God Liu Kang

I’ll admit that the whole Fire God thing is a major upgrade for Liu Kang, who is effortlessly cool but ultimately less cool than most other Kombatants. He’s good and cool and I trust the sands of time in his hands.

6) Nightwolf

Nightwolf can summon wolf spirits and carries TWO axes. Next question.

5) Kronika

There’s a monotonous evil to Kronika that jives well with her bald, pitch-white visage. Her stern, robotic scolding works well when you consider your ultimate goal is to split her the fuck in half (see: above). She’s a great villain, but not a cool villain. And now, for the folks at home: it’s time to talk to your children about Cool Villains…

4) Sindel

Mother of Kitana, husband of Shao Kahn, bows to no one. She rocks that long white witchy stripe right down the mane and makes Shao Kahn, ruler of Outworld, do her bidding. She’s quick to the cut and also has wiccan summoning type spells. Bend the knee.

3) Sheeva

Sheeva is lady version of Gorro. They both own. Best of luck with her, Johnny Cage.

2) Shang Tsung

Retaining the services of Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, the actor who played Shang Tsung in the 1995 Academy Award Best Picture hopeful Mortal Kombat was crucial to this whole Aftermath enterprise. Tagawa chews the set to pieces and has a blast doing it. That punchable little smirk of his just shines right through the screen. If Shang Tsung had better backup than Fujin and Nightwolf for this little road romp through time and space, I would’ve had a much better time with this expansion. If only publishers Warner Bros had the rights to Jay and Silent Bob. But Tagawa revels in his role as Shang Tsung and puts this game over the top as one of the best fighters in years.

1) Shao Kahn

BUT GODDAMNIT SHAO KAHN AIN’T SHOWING UP TO WORK UNLESS HE’S GOING OVER. A humble servant to Sindel, Shao Kahn is a brooding, growly beast who lives to own and owns to live. He carries a gold sledgehammer and does not give a fuck. His helmet crown is a skull. He also thinks Kotal Kahn is a fucking jobber. Shao Kahn will conquer nations for his woman without even blinking and he’ll savor every moment. Like Akuma, Shao Kahn gets his rocks off to one-on-one Kombat and has more muscles than hairs. KING OF KINGS.

Honorable Ownage: Robocop

They added Robocop to Mortal Kombat 11. They should do this to every video game. Until then, please enjoy these fatalities.

Best 2019 Games of 2020

Super Mario Maker 2

I think Mario’s 35th birthday got me a little nostalgic. I had a pretty hard Mario Maker relapse in 2020 and ended up pouring a couple dozen more hours into making my very first Mario World. There’s just something about this chubby lil’ plumber, man. When I boot up that game, it still feels like magic. It’s the dream fulfilled. This game lets me make my very own Super Mario worlds. I’ve wanted to do that since I was three years old. And now, stinky and loveless at 32, I can!

Eliza

Eliza the game is about Eliza the app. Eliza is a mental health service/AI program that turns the operator into a mental health counselor and allows patients a quick, affordable, and trusted outlet for mental health care. You run therapy sessions with people, navigate the ins and outs of Silicon Valley while trying to balance your personal life, the highlight of which is hanging out with your electronica artist galpal Nora.

Eliza isn’t subtle. The game paints its bad guys pretty dark. The game’s core message is that Silicon Valley is filled with assholes that cannot solve something like the mental health crisis with money/technology.

There are some truly lovable characters here, and much of that is owed to the voice acting. The whole cast is wonderful, but Aily Kei as leading Evelyn is tremendous, having electric chemistry with everyone in her orbit. You should play Eliza.

Islanders

From the makers of 2017’s very neat Superflight comes the self-billed minimalist city builder Islanders. So you get a heavens overhead view of an island, right? Then at the bottom of the screen you have various buildings/structures, like houses, city centers, breweries, fish hatcheries, Teri Hatcheries, the whole megillah. It’s kind of like you’re connecting/overlapping different Venn diagrams, with each building having its own compatible/incompatible radius. So if you stick Building X next to Buildings Y and Z, X might score points for Y, but lose points for Z, dependent on the nature of the building/structure. Shaman aren’t compatible with mansions, city centers shouldn’t be too close to each other, and be sure to build your racetracks near glue factories. Then you just click away at the island and build stuff near (or far from!) other stuff to max out your points to unlock the next island.

And they who build their island best climbs the scoreboard until they are the true Islanders champion. They are the most, chill, mellowed out low-stakes city builder this world has ever known. Because this game’s core loop and cute look is so mesmerizing and relaxing. You just find the biggest number and click it and then the points go up and you click again and click some more and click and click click click click click click...

Dark Pictures: Man of Medan

The Dark Pictures anthology is a great continuation of the formula Supermassive cracked with their cult hit Until Dawn back in 2015. Man of Medan starts as more of a thriller than a straight up horror, but the hot and horny choose-your-own young adult adventure mechanics are still intact. The fun of these games will always be choosing the dumbass option; forcing horny Iceman from the X-Men movies to suckerpunch his captors at every opportunity, making cowardly husband cower like a husband, or letting blonde lady do whatever the hell she wants. Nabbing horror vets Larry Fessenden and Graham Reznick to pen these adventures was a good move, as the two are intimately familiar with the genre’s tropes and how to twist and turn them. I can think of few greater traditions than Supermassive popping out an easy, breezy multiplayer horror game every year.

Regrets, 2020

Dark Pictures: Little Hope

With all that being said, I regret not playing more of this one. The three hours I spent with it was over Zoom with bottle of wine, so I have nothing to report here other than a much needed, laugh-a-minute blackout with my best friends.

Kentucky Route Zero

I regret not having the patience for Kentucky Route Zero. I can’t read a 10hr video game that moves this slow. I can’t do it. Where are the power pellets? Why can’t I eat the ghosts? Where’s the timer? What’s my high score? What’s my age again?

Umurangi Generation

I regret not powering through Umurangi Generation, a game that hated me. Slow, restrictive movement and objectives that really don’t seem to pop when you complete them. My obsession with photo modes helped sell me on this one, as the game’s central mechanic is finely tuning photographs. I just can’t stand playing it. A fascinating world and premise that I wish I loved.

Paper Mario: The Origami King

I wish I would’ve liked this enough to play it more. The battle system was clever at first blush but lost its luster after a few hours. The writing is fitfully funny, winky and self-referential but not over the top annoying. It’s a charming little romp and looks cute as a button but it really loses momentum as the battles wear on.

Ion Fury

I regret buying Ion Fury, formerly known as Ion Maiden until Eddie unleashed the lawyers. And not to be confused with Ion Storm, developers of Daikatana. For some reason I thought the “Duke Nukem BUT A LADY” pitch sounded good. That was in the Before Times. I was somehow even stupider back then.

I think this game sucks ass. It feels like shit on Switch and I couldn’t make it out of the first level. It looked and sounded bad and it was not funny. It launched with un-invertible controls. The unmitigated gall.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2

I regret paying Sonic the Hedgehog 2 for the millionth time. I don’t even think I like this game anymore. What is it about Sonic that still makes my pointy blue ears perk up? Is it all nostalgia? Is it the music? The morbid curiosity? The inexplicable, Ninja Turtle-esque longevity? The answer may surprise you:

Knuckles. It’s Knuckles. My favorite color is red and Knuckles is red so I love Knuckles. I think he’s cool and bad and he can fly and climb. He’s kind of in that Proto-Man or (*fawns*) Akuma tweener category, which makes him that much cooler.

So there’s my secret. I love Knuckles. Nevertheless, I think, I hope, I pray that this is the last time I play Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Until next year.

Old Games, 2020

Gone Home (2013)

A great game with a heaping helping of riot grrrl flare. A love story. A ghost story. A tragedy. A tour through the hurt of 90s alt-indie scene in the pacific northwest. Fullbright’s knack for storytelling was clear from the jump. Their 2013 debut became synonymous with the tag Walking Simulator and was a critical breakout, having since been ported to everything under the sun. I’ve played countless games like Gone Home since it came out seven years ago, but it was nice to finally sit down and see what it was, especially because I had no idea that they threw so many great licensed songs in there. Both this and Tacoma are shining examples of grounded, emotional storytelling in video games.

I hope now that Fullbright has proven time and again that they can draw compelling characters and tell great stories, they make their games more fun to play. More quirky or goofy or… something. Maybe VR should be their next step. Wherever they trek, I’ll follow.

No More Heroes 1 & 2 (2008, 2010)

In 2008, No More Heroes was a great gateway drug to the weird, wild world of Suda 51 for me. It was an M-Rated, Wii exclusive open-world game about some geeky burnout named Travis Touchdown who buys a Technically Not A Lightsaber™ online and gets into the business of hot, grim death.

The gameplay was never this game’s strong suit, and the 12 years since its release have not been kind to the mashy, repetitive combat. The “open world” was totally barren with none of GTA’s zaniness and served as more of an activity menu than a living world (a common review complaint at the time that they ended up taking to heart by removing the open world from the sequel and replacing it with: a menu). Travis’ Tarantino tough guy schtick and overall grossness might test your patience in 2020, but this bizzarro Wick-esque world where anything can happen (and everything does happen in this game’s fourth wall breaking ending) is a lawless, punk rock wasteland of low-brow grime that was just not happening much in 2008. No way is Ubisoft publishing a game this gnarly, dark and weird these days, especially as a Nintendo exclusive.

The 2010 sequel Desperate Struggle doubles down on the weird, but two games worth of this stale combat is just too much to bear. Some of the boss fights are fun curveballs, but they serve mostly as a distraction from the banality of the combat. If you’re playing this game for more than one or two missions, you’re in it for the story. This gross-out exploitation flick staring a lonely, horny dork. The world probably doesn’t need these games right now, but it was nice to find this dark and grimy alleyway in the world of the Nintendo Wii back in last decade. Also, shout outs to Lay the Pipe, the 8-bit puzzle mini game that should be a full NES game.

Return of the Obra Dinn (2018)

My lifelong struggle with adventure games rages on. I want nothing more than to love them deeply but the act of playing them either befuddles me or bores me to tears. Obra Dinn looks unlike any other game out today. Its concept: you are an insurance agent tasked with reconstructing the fate of the large sea vessel the Obra Dinn. You find and chase spirits, cross reference clipboards and sheets and all sorts of homework-y bullshit that I just don’t want to spend my free time doing. A truly alluring world with a bonkers concept that seems poised to be a sci-fi classic. But what if you could, like… win a Lightsaber™ on eBay in it, though?

Shenmue I & II (1999, 2001)

There’s a dull, numbing rhythm to the world of Shenmue that hypnotizes me. It’s Pro Golf-like in that way. I always want to nap during it, but will happily, groggily blink awake while something incredibly mundane happens on screen at an excruciating pace. You got 3rd again in the forklift races. The dock boys politely clap. Have a forklift figurine. Just a few more shifts, then we’ll make like Horatio Sanz and Boat Trip.

These games are like if warm butter tasted nutritious and gross. Drippy, slow and sticky with a slightly gray taste. Uncomfortably damp rather than melty. If I had to play these games myself I don’t think I would last. I couldn’t take this world and take it straight. I was happy to ride shotgun with my designated forklift driver and BFF Arty B. Not only did he have to be the one to hold the controller, he had to listen to me get cranked and cackle at my own one-liners the whole time. Blessed are the Arthurs, for they shall inherit my records.

I cannot tell you that the Shenmue games are good and that you should play them. They’re ambitious games, no doubt. But a game so committed to being dull as shit can only be so interesting. I just cannot break its spell, though.

Burnout Paradise Remastered (2008)

I lost track of how many different versions of Burnout Paradise I’ve got now, but I know this: it’s not enough. I plugged another 50ish hours into this all-time classic when it hit Switch in March. Twelve years on, the goddamn thing still runs. At 60 frames per second, this game was Born to Run on Switch. Thank you.

Sleeping Dogs (2012)

Slick and shiny Hong Kong crime thriller. Broken and goofy in all the right ways; ways that benefit the player. I’ve been trucked and flattened in the middle of the street like Wile E. Coyote only to wind up on the other side unharmed with my sick motorbike still intact. I’ve mowed down enough cops and crooks to afford anything I need. The controls feel slippy slidy here and there, but once again it’s always to the players benefit. It’s a merciful wonkiness. You’ll almost always get lucky on edges and angles.

Deadly Premonition (2010)

If you like drugs, whistling, Twin Peaks, Tommy Wiseau, and wrestling with a controller, I’ve found the game for you. I found it 10 years too late but I’m still very happy I found it.

Doom 64 (1997)

Doom 64 is a fun curiosity but a pretty poor Doom game. Originally developed by Midway, Nightdive Studios put out a faithful but modernized port of the 1997 N64 exclusive that can’t quite shake the shackles of its native console. Doom 64 feels like two separate games with a canyon of quality between them and the second game kicks in way too late. By the time you finish floatily running through blurry, muddy space stations and get to the good stuff (Hell™), the game has already worn out its welcome. Levels are small yet somehow confusing and directionless. The challenge is barely there until the game’s home stretch. The ambient music is absolutely lifeless throughout and feels like an affront to Doom itself.

It’s a perplexing yet noble endeavor making this game playable in 2020, but it’s just not fun to play. The developers at id have often professed their love for Doom 64 in the run-up to Doom Eternal’s release, so there are bits of 64’s lore in Eternal, but none of that really makes it worth playing.

Small Stuff, 2020

Super Mario 35

The only thing that matters about this game is that I won. I won a lot because I’m better at Mario than you. This is not an endorsement of the game, this is not a review, these are all just facts.

Star Wars Squadrons

It turns out that Star Wars feels pretty dope in VR. Flying around in an X-Wing popping off TIE-Intercepters and shit. PEW! POW! BIFF! ZOODLE! LOOK AT ME AUNT BERU, I’M A FRIGGIN’ B-WING OVER HERE!

There isn’t much going on in Squadrons beyond the novelty of flying around in Star Wars ships, but I must admit that it’s quite novel.

Pac-Man Championship Edition de-make

Stranded on a recent Namco archival release of boring NES ports lies Pac-Man Championship Edition, an 8-bit inspired retro-prequel of the XBLA classic by the same name. While slight, including only a 5-minute or 3-minute mode, it’s a fun diversion on an otherwise ho-hum collection. But more importantly than anything, it has a Sound Test screen. God save the Sound Test. It even has some dancy, crunchy chiptunes tucked away that went unused in the final game.

It certainly earns its status as retro de-make throwback. Gone are the slow-mo almost had-em’s and ace in the hole bombs from 2010’s Pac-Man Championship Edition DX, making it harder and therefore more faithful to the game’s fictitious NES roots. The maps are tighter and take less time to complete, there are fewer ghosts, but this somewhat hidden offshoot offers a fun, accurate take on what an alternate universe CEDX for NES might be like.

The Ancient Gods part 1

Doom Eternal’s combat was a massive expansion on the 2016 reboot. It took the run and gun pacing and explosive combo-chaining of the first game and extrapolated those concepts into largescale combat chess puzzles. You’re forced to feed into its resource recycling system while plotting out which demons get owned in which order. While the combat transition in the main campaign is largely successful, the game was far more frustrating far more often than the last one. The various systems often overwhelmed and collapsed in on me at the worst times, leading to me banging my head against certain sequences for hours on end.

Turns out I didn’t know how easy I had it until The Ancient Gods pt. 1 DLC. While only three maps long, Ancient Gods was stunningly punishing on Ultra-Violence. These battles feel like the peak of id’s combat arena design. While the main combat mechanics remain the same, the demon-specific weaknesses and demonic hierarchy feels like a much larger part of the battle puzzle for Doomguy to solve. Aside from one eye-roll of a boss (shoot the flying… haunted steel boxes!), these are the sleekest, hardest maps id has made since the reboot. They might destroy you. They might be too much. But this is what Doom is made of.

Music, 2020

Soundtrack of the Year: Final Fantasy VII Remake

There aren’t many video game songs that tug on my heartstrings as hard as “Tifa’s Theme.” It’s that, “Sheik’s Theme” from Ocarina of Time, and the 8-bit cover of “Hell Song.” There’s a lot of nostalgia tangled up with this soundtrack. The re-arrangements surely shine, but the new tracks sing loudest. The Wall Market dance sequence is a thrill, and any game where you can find unlockable songs out in the wild is a winner. And these picture discs, good Gaia.

Song of the Summer: “Paradise (Stay Forever)” by Epoch from the Paradise Killer soundtrack

I’ll always have a soft spot for theme songs that reference plotlines within the material. Most Bond movies. Lots of Martin Lawrence movies. The lyrics/references in this song won’t make a lick of sense to passerbys who haven’t played the game but that bangin’ ass beat will make fans out of ‘em anyway. Those big, corny synthesized horns. The tropical rhythm. That groovy, plucky bass. This puppy can dance, fella or madam. The soundtrack is filled with bright and shiny citypop funk, but this here track is the only tune with vocals. They soar here, even if the lyrics are mostly mishmashed nonsense from the game’s story that fit the melody.

WKKZ Top 10 Countdown

#10) “Drivin’” by K.K. Slider

Starting off our countdown is the Sunday driving classic “Drivin,” an ode to the open road by none other than touring troubadour K.K. Slider. Drop the top, crank the volume, and make sure to tune in next week to see if “Drivin’” can still hang on!

#9) “Techno-Pop” by K.K. Slider

In the nine slot this week is electronic artist K.K. Slider and his groovy, movey dancehall romp “Techno-Pop.” K.K. has manufactured countless hits in the lab, so stay tuned for more of the mad doctor’s wild experiments on this week’s countdown.

#8) “Jongara” by K.K. Slider

World artist K.K. Slider is the man behind this week’s number eight song, “Jongara,” a plucky guitar trip through the land of the rising sun. This is Slider’s 7,945th time on the countdown but only his 7,945th time in the eight slot. Enjoy!

#7) "DJ" by K.K. Slider

Hold on to your hats, DJ K.K. is in the house. This week’s lucky number seven is K.K. Slider with “DJ.” The international super producer has been spotted on Instagram recently with Englebert Humperdinck and Dan Fogleberg, so here’s to hoping the fruits of that hot collab end up on our countdown soon.

#6) “House” by K.K. Slider

This week’s number six is for the gym rats. The unstoppable beat of K.K. Slider’s “House” is sure to get your heart rate running. Here it is at number six.

#5) "Metal" by K.K. Slider

We’re halfway through this week’s countdown, and still stuck at number five is “Metal” by Birmingham’s K.K. Slider. Make sure you hide this one from the kids, mum and pop pop. Wouldn’t want them to turn out cool! A countdown stalwart, guitar god K.K. Slider will shred ‘til he’s dead. Number fiiiiiiiive…

#4) “Disco” by K.K. Slider

We’re getting ever closer to the top of the pops, but disco is still not dead. That rhythm that goes from your tip to your toes is this week’s number four, “Disco” by K.K. Slider. Stay tuned for the top three songs in vibration nation on this week’s countdown.

#3) “D&B” by K.K. Slider

The kids just can’t get enough of that drum and bass, but will “D&B” ever break through that three spot curse? The same curse that befell “Forgot About Dre” on TRL? K.K. Slider has proven to be an eccentric stalwart in the three spot, but you’ll have to tune in next week to see if he can break through to one or two. Are you having trouble breaking through to the one you love? Stop by this week’s sponsor Cupid’s Playpen to find the perfect lovemaking apparatus for your special someone. Use the offer code “FUXGOOD20” for 20% off your next curbside pickup. Cupid’s Playpen: a place for pervs. We’ll be back after these messages with a big number two.

#2) “Go K.K. Rider” by K.K. Rider

It seems the duel between longform story songs and fusion jazz never ends! This weeks Number Two Dookie Doo is “Go K.K. Rider” by K.K. Rider (no relation). The epic tale of motorcycle mayhem and the decline of western civilization told through the eyes of former stuntman and current outlaw drug runner K.K. Slider is still trading spots with this week’s upcoming number one hit. Stay tuned for this week’s top song on the K.K. Slider Top 10 Countdown.

#1) “Fusion” by K.K. Slider

Here it is, this week’s number one song sweeping the nation from station to station. Jazz fusion legend K.K. Slider wins again with “Fusion.” K.K. recorded this song between sessions with Magma and Chick Corea, playing all the instruments himself. Slider has lived a life, and we’re happy to have him here at number one again for the 7,945th time in a row. Tune in next week to see if literally anyone else ever cracks the top ten on the K.K. Slider Top 10 Countdown on WKKZ FM, THE KOKZ.

Video Games, 2020

10) Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity

This game is mostly the mindless, button mashing marathon you’d expect from a Dynasty Warriors clone with a Hyrulian paintjob, but that doesn’t stop it from being fun. You get to fuck shit up as Zelda, which is cool. Goron hunk Daruk is in it, as is the baddest bitch in Gerudo desert, Urbosa. Are the kids still shipping these days? I’d like to ship Urbosa and Zelda, if I may. Merge them kingdoms, ladies. Who needs Link?

Reimagining Breath of the Wild as Dynasty Warriors turns out to be a fun experiment. BOTW’s elemental attacks/weakness are intact, as are the game’s Sheikah Slate special attacks. The resource hoarding and crafting is still here too, but it feels more superficial and less meaningful this time around. This is still very much a Dynasty Warriors game, but most of the Zelda stuff they layer on top is tasty. There are some cute, weird Star Fox and F-Zero references tucked away here, too.

9) Black Mesa

They finally finished Black Mesa! Maybe someday I’ll finish Black Mesa, too.

8) Yakuza: Like a Dragon

Once upon I time was merely happy to know Sega was bringing this cult favorite to the US. Yakuza’s goofball take on hardboiled crime thriller somehow struck the perfect tone game after game, giving us some of the funniest writing in games over the last decade. Come 2020, we’re drowning in a sea of Yakuza ports, remakes and remasters. As the Ryu Ga Gotoku finally wrapped their seemingly endless victory tour by modernizing and finalizing the Kiryu Kazuma saga, they celebrate 2020 with a series refresh starring rookie lead Ichiban and entirely revamped turn-based combat system a la actual, licensed Dragon Quest ™.

Few open world games are as confident in their script and voice actors as the Yakuza games. At once, it dangerously dances between gritty gangland epic and screwball comedy with grace. There’s always a sweetness to Yakuza that other, more expensive games in the same genre can’t seem to nail down. While dear, sweet Kiryu is gone for now, hopefully dad-joking around and aiding sex-workers in street disputes, Ichiban takes the reins on our trip through Kamurocho.

Like most games, the Yakuza games are too long. I will probably never finish a single one of them. But I’d sure like to, because they’re funnier than any other series going.

7) Fuser

Out of the blue and into the black comes Fuser, the game that makes YOU some douchebag EDM DJ with a pill habit. Fuser lets you mix and mash Today’s Golden Oldies into the perfect nightmare so a bunch of hot, young fuckups can do drugs and screw.

It’s hard to stop playing Fuser. Just drowning in a sea of stems wondering “which song won’t work with the ‘Bodak Yellow’ vocal track?” The answer of course is none. None songs.

The magic of this game is everything it doesn’t show you, how it beat matches and adjust tempo on the fly so some dickhead like me can feel like DJ Shaquille O’Neil. The campaign falls under its own weight near the end when it keeps piling on tip after trick to make your mixes sick. The game’s high-end play seems more complex and far less fun than making silly mashups, but those tools are there if you want to get down to the nuts and bolts of it. At some point if you’re going that far, I feel like you’re better off getting actual music editing software to get your jollies.

This game is at its best when it’s strictly fuckaround shit. I wish there were more songs available and bigger crates so I could just freestyle endlessly. The co-op freestyle is fun, so is watching and voting on other people’s mixes. I just wish there was away to break this game wide open so we could get wet and wild with it. Fuck your DMCA takedown, you hear me Lars Ulrich?

6) Paradise Killer

What happens when the gods fuck up? What happens when Heaven goes wrong? In the 25th rendition of perfection, there’s been a murder. The suspect is in custody, but something doesn’t add up.

Paradise Killer is a first person adventure game laid out in 3-D but told as a choose-yer-own ending text adventure. It’s filled with trans-human gods and goddesses that you can flirt with, fuck and interrogate. The only one up for the job is Lady Love Dies.

The character design here is inspired, blending humans and animals together with high future fashion. The rest of game doesn’t look great, but traversal functions well enough in that jumpy, jagged sort of way the Bethesda games do. This one just has more grace. Yes, it could run a little faster on Switch. And some of the budget/indie constraints definitely get in the way here and there. But the jumping and running around is forgiving in a way that makes all your dumb, risky jumps pay off. Any game without fall damage will always get the nod from me.

This game’s greatest strength is its pacing. You can end it whenever you want, it just depends on how much of the mystery you want to unwrap yourself. It only lasted me five hours, but it turned out I only figured out half of it. That pacing/structure lends itself well to the game’s replayability, something I didn’t think I could say about a text adventure game.

5) Animal Crossing New Horizons

I played this game for far longer than I ever actually enjoyed playing it. I made a cute AF town and dressed my little fella up in all sorts of costumes, but Nintendo always manages to Nintendo something up along the way. The countless quality of life features they could implement but won’t. The unreliable, tedious online functionality. Hope falters that they will ever find the righteous path. But that didn’t stop me from plugging almost 200 hours into it, so who’s the fuckup? Hint: it me.

I love this game, but at some point it became less of a game I play and more of a thing I do, like brushing my teeth or wiping my ass. I would wake up, boot Animal Crossing, go to work, pay my bills, turn the game off, go to work, pay my bills, turn the game back on, rinse, wash, repeat. Can you fall in love with a habit? Is a second life something I really need when I barely even like this first one? I need to figure some shit out. Right after I check my turnip prices.

4) Final Fantasy VII Remake

I wasn’t sure this game would actually ever come out. Like countless reboots or reinterpretations, it seemed destined to disappoint. The impact that Final Fantasy VII had on RPGs is hard to overstate. It sold by the truckload to become the breakout JRPG in North America. One reason is this game’s flavor of mid-90s dark edginess. Cloud is so cool! His sword is so big! Barret swears a lot! Tifa’s bazungas are ginormous!

The nostalgia for that deeply corny sense of cool hung like an anvil over this game, but I think it did a great job of modernizing this cast of characters. Cloud is far less punchable now. Barret is no longer an extended Mr. T riff. We get to see Jesse fully fleshed out in what turns out to be the game’s strongest bit of storytelling. We get some incredibly sweet moments between Wedge and Biggs, making them much more than a tossed off Star Wars reference this time around.

This game reaches for some of the tongue in cheeky, self-referential stuff, but it surprisingly (mostly) lands. The silly, pseudo-immersive quick time events and tedious traversal sequences are recreated here and doubled down on to the point where I think they’re havin’ a laugh on us. “Let’s all unlock the door at the same time, but three times this time!” “Let’s make monkey bar sequences slower!” As far as the winky, self-referential stuff goes, the game’s ending is executed a little wobbly, but it still sets up an exciting future for whichever timeline this series will continue in.

Radical Mention:Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2

The only reason this is number three here is because it feels unfair to other games that this game exists, so it gets handicapped. This game feels like staring into the stupid face of god and doing a wallplant off it. The early Tony Hawk games are some of the best video games of all time. That they are now fully redone on modern consoles with the same feel and same soundtrack (almost) and even more stuff to do makes this package one of the best games you can play. Like ever. Like, man… they really did it. Tony’s back, man. Tony. Developer Vicarious Visions deserves all the belts for this. This should be the remaster all other remasters are judged by. Besides records and wrestling, what else could you want?

Runner-up: Doom Eternal

Doom Eternal didn’t have the element of surprise on its side. The highly anticipated follow-up to 2016’s DOOM would have to carry the weight of not only the franchise’s 20 something year legacy, but the quality standard set by the absolute and unequivocal ownage of one of the greatest games from this generation, DOOM. When DOOM came out, it felt like an underdog. Expectations for the game were low. It spent years in developmental hell, the multiplayer beta was met with shrugs, and Bethesda refused to screen it for critics. You know what kinda shit doesn’t get screened for critics? Eragon. And yet, DOOM owned. It owned so fucking hard. It is unquestionably the best Doom game. It is the best reboot of anything ever. It is a masterpiece. And despite carrying the burden of the Doom franchise and all the expectations that come with it, it managed to come out of nowhere.

Eternal could’ve been just another Doom II; a more-of-same sequel with a little more spice and far worse level design. I think what id did was ask the question “what CAN’T a Doom game be?” and answered with Doom Eternal. This game takes big series risks. Doomguy speaks. Doomguy swims. Doomguy lores way, way too much. Doomguy gets actually called “Doomguy” by name in the game. There is an abundance of 3D platforming in this game. This game breaks Doom Rules with abandoned, to varying degrees of success.

Doom Eternal expands greatly on the series’ lore to the point of oversaturation. It feels like Doomguy is getting way too involved with inter-realm politics. Killing gods and angels is honest work of course, but I you don’t need to tell me why. I also never needed or wanted to know Doomguy’s actual, canonical origin. It’s a little midichlorian-y.

At times, the gameplay falls victim to the same problem of too damn much. Eternal’s systems are a lot. Too many skill/perk trees and a dizzying array of buttons to press during hellfire combat can cause the game fall beneath its own weight. With a mouse and keyboard, I feel like I can’t keep track of which key is which. With a controller, it feels like there aren’t enough buttons. But when that tension meshes just right with the games resource recycling tree (glory kills for health, chainsaws kills for ammo, set them on fire for armor drops), it feels like Hellzapoppin. That’s when the Doom hits, baby.

While I don’t think Doom Eternal is better than DOOM, it’s a far better sequel than Doom II and dared to stretch in ways the 1994 sequel didn’t. It doesn’t always work, but the when the challenge matches the tension matches the chaos and you’re bashing your head against a perfectly balanced encounter, it feels so goddamn good to finally smash your head through it. It’s the Doomslayer way.

DOOM of the Year: Hades

Hades is about rebuilding. It’s not about making things the way they were, but letting things begin again. It’s about letting light in and second chances. It’s about relationships and how foundational they are to a home or community. You don’t necessarily have to be good at Hades for it to be rewarding, you just have to keep playing, keep trying. The game rewards you with story, with love. It feels like you’re always making Hades a better place.

In Breath of the Wild, you can complete a series of quests that eventually lead to you building a town from the ground up, filled with houses and shops and people and everything. It takes a lot of time and there’s countless fetch quests but you get to buy and sell shit there and watch this town that never was now become a part of this game, this world you helped build. What Breath of the Wild did for the “Hero of Time” narrative, what MGSV did for the “Legendary Soldier” narrative by having you take down SEVEN TANKS ON HORSEBACK, was give weight to these tired ass, taken for granted hero worship cheats, where you just talk about how cool these protagonists are by talking about shit they did off screen. Those moments made you feel like the Hero of Time or the Legendary Soldier of the Doomslayer. Hades works every bit of its gameplay mechanics and narrative back into you feeling like you as Zagreus are making literal, actual Hell better. You’re reuniting lovers. You’re repairing fragmented relationships. You’re making the fires of Hell warmer for everybody.

This game’s ultimate work is instantly making me fall in love with lead Gorgon ‘Dusa, the caretaker/bar maiden of Hades. ‘Dusa gets her split tongue tied anytime she’s in the presence of the hot, dark, cut prince Zag, but I was the one who spent the whole game showering her with nectar and Ambrosia. Buying shots for the bartender who is so cute she turns you to stone. Hades: not unrelatable.

Everybody be fuckin’ in this game. Fuckin’ or flirtin’. The games first boss is your ex-girlfriend who is also your domme. You kinda have a thing with your stepbrother, who is Death. Your mom and stepmom maybe sorta have an open thing with your dad? Aphrodite is of course more than happy to sling her thing around. Personally, I think I lean towards Nyx, the whiskey throated mother of Death and Goddess of Darkness. I want an Elvira in the sheets and endless, unwavering destruction in the streets. Simple tastes for a simple mind.

All that would be for naught if Supergiant didn’t nail the progression formula, but they so totally did. Rogue Legacy and Dead Cells are both roguelike classics because they have the adrenaline dosage worked out. Hades has it, too. But Hades has a sense of self-awareness with regards to its genre that is a) not cheeky/embarrassing and b) pushes rouge-like storytelling further than any game before it. The sheer volume of writing in this game is insane, and yet it never felt tiresome or repetitive. I spent dozens of hours and 100+ attempts on my way to the credits and still couldn’t put it down. Hades sets a new standard for this style of game and is easily the best game in Supergiant’s already impressive oeuvre.

It feels like an off year for games in some respects. A lot of games were very solid this year, but even the best ones this year couldn't stick their landing. None quite reached the heights of the past few years. A few console bests and all-time greats have come along since the Switch hit the market. Between Breath of the Wild, DOOM, and the Hitmen, we have seen some of the new Best Games. In that respect, none of the games I played this year ever felt like the 2019 runaway favorite. Except maybe one of them.

But 2019 gave us a stable, varied crop games that really pulled people in a lot of different directions for so many different reasons, whether they were decent/just or otherwise. While Triple A continues to politically sanitize their nakedly hoo-rah military shooters and iterate on their monetization techniques to diminishing returns, it feels like the Gamer Middle Class is growing. It feels like that b-game/double A/Triple I/Kickstarter tier is becoming a real thing again. As Microsoft continues to merge its Xbox brand with PC and with every publisher on the planet wanting a piece of that Switch action, those $20-40 dollar tier of games will have more chances to get in more hands than ever before. Steam and Epic are fighting. Epic is giving developers more money than any other distributor would dare. If anything, games feels more democratic in 2019.

There were a lot of exciting ideas in games that didn’t quite come together. It felt like everything had a gigantic But attached to it, only in the bad way with just the one “T.” Maybe the tech is finally hitting the ceiling this generation. I’m excited to see whatever it is they come up with next, but I think if I cling to my PC and Switch for dear life, I’ll be just fine. We won’t achieve our true potential until Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony are all putting games out on the same platforms, which is why Project xCloud or Google Stadia are ever gonna be the answer for me. Platforms and publishers will fall but the games, my friends? The games remain the same. Don’t hate the games. Don’t ever hate the games.

Now… onto this year’s Best Letdowns!

Bummers, 2019

The Division 2

I was so ready to find love in the hopeless place that is drab, always online multiplayer military shooters. Most of those games don’t allow you to throw hats at inanimate objects to possess them or take drugs that make your enemies edible, so I typically steer clear of that sorta fare. In 2019, I was finally willing to give one an honest shot. I picked The Division 2 out of a figurative hat. Maybe like a real dope, snapback, figurative Charlotte Hornets lid.

The Division 2 is so mechanically sound yet so dreadfully boring. Ubisoft’s decision to yank out any sort of political agenda from this game’s narrative is in and of itself cowardly, but ultimately forgivable. Choosing modern day Washington D.C. as backdrop for the whole shebang is even more cowardly, but so long as there’s even a minimal effort of competent, compelling narrative to shove me along, I’ll be fine. This game is so embarrassingly toothless that it can’t even muster up a conflict let alone a motivation. There is no sense of who these people are, why they do the things they do, who they’re fighting, why they’re fighting or what happens when they win/lose.

Storytelling in video games has gotten a lot better over the last decade, but so many major titles struggle to tell a coherent, memorable tale. The big failures in those spaces are not only more memorable, but often more admirable. This felt like a new low for inoffensiveness. It was like chewing a damp rag.

The Division 2 feels polished beyond the point of recognition. Everything runs great and feels good and tight and responsive. The AI is probably some of the smartest and toughest I can recall from recent years. But when no one has a name or a face or a voice and every gun is just letters and numbers jammed together and the world is so void of personality, scars, flaws or scrapes, I’d rather play something with some bugs and some beauty than something so shiny and flat.

But I’d still like to pitch a sequel. Here, try this one on for size: What if the real Division…is politics? Sorry, did I just blow your mind? Find out in The Division 3’s new and exclusive multiplayer mode where you get to play as both sides.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

There was a time when you could’ve said to me “fork over $60 and we’ll give you a brand new Symphony of the Night game by the guy who made Symphony of the Night.” That time was 2014 and I damn sure laid my money down and backed the Kickstarter. Come 2019 when this game launched for $40 as a miserable little pile of bugs, I realized I chose…poorly.

I don’t think Bloodstained is a bad game, but it was certainly a broken one on Switch. It was nearly unplayable at its June launch until its eventual October update made meaningful steps forward yet still left a lot of work to be done. That sour taste has stuck around and pushed me off of this one until the PC version is both cheap and complete.

Last year’s 8-bit prequel Curse of the Moon was a clever, quick twist on the OG Castlevania formula that played wonderfully with all the tropes afforded to it by its spiritual forefather. I’m not excited about an indie Metroidvania the same way I was five years ago, but Ritual of the Night seems to approach the Metroidvania era of Castlevania with a similar flare. The core structure of Metroidvania remains the same, but tweaks and tricks are Jenga’d into the games framework and used to explore every nook and cranny of a castle designed by the leading architect in post-modern Castlevanianism and He of Sword and Whip, Koji Igarashi. It’s a shame about all those termites in the Switch port.

Sayonara Wild Hearts

The idea of a pop album as a video game is immediately fascinating. What does the term “album” mean and how would one reconfigure or reinterpret the inherent structural differences between the two mediums of Game and Album? What would Disintegration be as a video game? Incredible? Absolutely. But how? How do you turn a song into a level? How much interaction can the player have with the game/album before it just becomes a video game soundtrack? Wherever the answers to these questions are, I could not find them in Sayonara Wild Hearts, a pop album video game that isn’t remarkable in either regard.

This game has no shortage of style. Shiny, dance-happy synth serves as your music while iPod commercial silhouettes race around and battle to the beat. It’s not a rhythm game. It’s not a racing game. It’s not an action game. It’s an auto runner where you collect stuff that doesn’t really matter and trip on a few quick time events.

There are few concepts more exciting to me than merging an album with a video game. I love both of those things more than almost anything. And this game failed to get even a spark out of me. The music, while fun and bright is mostly forgettable fluff that doesn’t rise to the heights of its inspirations.

Trials Rising

When a series gets too far off track, its often demanded or expected of them to go back to basics. “We’ve heard your feedback. We made this one for the fans.” I think the problem with a series like Trials going back to basics is that Trials is very, very basic. They needed more of a hook here. It’s good and cool and fun because it’s Trials, but I’ve played a lot of Trials. The umpteenth Trials game needs to be more than back to basics.

Travis Strikes Again

Why have you forsaken me, Suda 51? I carry a torch for Travis Touchdown for this damn long and this is the thanks I get?

This game was mildly fun for like a level or two, and then like 20 more levels happened and holy shit what a drag. Some fun story beats and that Suda 51 sense of humor I’m still a reluctant sucker for, but this game was agonizing to play. For a game that worships Jeff Minter as hard as this one does, it should really be more fun.

Unrendered Verdicts & Incomplete Grades

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order

This game’s opening salvo is the most gripping intro level since the 2016 masterpiece DOOM. It leans hard on some pretty linear canned action sequences for that first chapter but developer Respawn has such a knack for fluid movement and high wire traversal that it still feels exciting. These folks might know the ins and outs of an Xbox controller better than anyone. Their affinity for and skill at telling stories about dorks and their robot buddies gives me hope that I’ll enjoy this game once I get to dig deeper into it, but I’m just so tired of all these Star Wars right now.

Remnant: From the Ashes

If this were a game by any other title, I might’ve tried to play it. Maybe next year.

Fire Emblem: Three Houses

National Lampoon’s Anime House. Is that a joke?

After Party

I like booze and I like The Devil, so I hope to get to this one despite the mixed reception.

Outer Wilds

I bounced off this one a good four or five times before throwing in the towel for the year. Will the hype eat this one alive? Will I love it? Hate it? Ever even play it again? Tune in to fuck off.

Best Multiplayer, 2019

Tetris 99

Though 2018’s Tetris Effect is a high watermark for one of the most important franchises in game history, its hippy dippy, Live Laugh Love attitude robbed us of any sort of competitive multiplayer for the puzzle-based new age feelings simulator. The excitement and elation of raining garbage on your friend and destroying them in a round of Tetris seemed too out of touch with the game’s core philosophy of unity and togetherness and T-Spins and whathaveyou.

Hot on its heels was Tetris 99, a tense and ruthless battle to the death. What seemed to start as a lame message board joke (“100 TETRIMNOS FALL OUT OF AN AIRPLANE LULZ”) done came true and got good. AND I WON. LIKE FOUR TIMES. I had to wait until they made a Tetris one, but I finally won a Fortnite-like. I have only myself to thank. Long live the Tetrisaince. Bow down all hail Tetris.

Forza Horizon 4: The Eliminator

This is the first battle royale game I’ve played where I don’t feel like a coward. In PUBG or Apex Legends, I am constantly running for cover and trying/failing to mask my inadequacies from my teammates. In The Eliminator, I’m as subtle as Soy Bomb. I’m swerving all over the countryside like a drunk mall Santa with a stolen golf cart bashing my Al Czervik car horn and begging any Mini Cooper in shouting distance to FUCKING FIGHT ME. It rules.

Every one of the 72 players starts with a Mini Cooper and either searches for loot drops or beats another player in a head-to-head race to upgrade their whip. I think it comes down to one big race as the field gets smaller, but I’ve only gotten as high as 8^th place. There’s room to improve the core structure of the mode. Challenging other racers doesn’t feel very smooth and it hurts the overall pacing of the match. I think with solid support this whole car battle royale thing could be my new favorite thing.

Most importantly, in a video game landscape utterly devoid of major arcade racing games, Forza Horizon 4 continues to be as close as it gets to playing a new Burnout game. For that I am grateful.

Heave Ho

A goofy, gassy four player local co-op game that requires skill, concentration, and your friends to not be assholes and fart bomb you to your death. You will laugh and yell and snap at your asshole friends. It is a delightful time with some soda and chips.

Best Music, 2019

Wattam

Keita Takahashi and the best music department in games returns for another collection of songs from the wholly singular genre that is Keita Takahashi music. Wattam’s spirit is softer and more curious than that of Katamari Damacy, which often felt anarchic. The game’s music reflects that in a way that makes it less vibrant but more cohesive. I hope Takahashi and his entire music team never stop chipping away at the walls of sound.

The Division 2

Loopy, polyphonoic synths layered over industrial percussion prove for a striking background to what is otherwise a totally sterile third-person military shooter. I didn’t expect to find dreamy, atmospheric goth-rock under the Tom Clancy banner but I’m glad I did.

LSD Dream Emulator/LSD Revamped by Osamu Sato

Clicky-clacky, bleepy-bloopy PS1 era Redbook audio fully revamped on three discs of wax with remixes and more. A worthy celebration for an obscure Japanese Playstation era oddity. Loopy drums and trippy synth ticks/tocks make for good space out and tinker with your toys jams. Lo-fi chill electronica to Tetris to.

Celeste Farewell

The third and final soundtrack for Celeste cements this whole Celeste enterprise as one of the best things in games this past decade. Lena Raine’s work on this series has been astounding, as has the work of her collaborators on the b-sides/remixes. Farewell is a shorter, more focused piece than the first soundtrack, but it still has its share of surprises. The elevator muzak finale is perhaps its finest.

Best Super Mario Making, 2019

This game was never going to have the earth-shattering impact that its predecessor had, but this is still a video game where you can make your own Super Mario levels, you know? It’s a very literal dream come true. Here is the best Mario Making I did in 2019.

Nakatomi: GRC-SQ7-TDG

This subtle, tasteful homage to a certain late 20^th century action film offers up a modern retelling of a regular, blue collar fella shooting his way up and down a skyscraper. You’ll never guess who portrays Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber in this daring reinterpretation.

Mt. Whiteclaw: WCG-XH2-BRG

As a legion of lifeless, immigrant plumbers lie beneath his feet, one man looks upon the piles of working men’s corpses and smiles. His name is Smit69. He is the only one of the 109 challengers to scale the peak of Mt. Whiteclaw. May he drill his name into the mountain’s snowy face with his hot, steamy piss.

Campfire Kansas: 0B2-T8X-S9G

The Get Up Kids’ generously lent out the title of their fan favorite On A Wire cut “Campfire Kansas” for this twisty, turny woodland tale featuring branching paths and secrets galore. Get up, kids! This one is something to write home about.

This n That

Lonely Mountains: Downhill

“ARE WE LIVING IN THE GOLDEN ERA OF SUPERFLIGHT-LIKES!?” shouts James Kujawa to a stunned crowd of no one.

There’s a touch of Trials at work here that feels just right. The checkpoints are a bit ruthless but they inspired me to experiment with shortcuts or shave off some corners here and there.

It’s unfortunate how much of the game is gated off at the jump. You’re forced to replay the first level a few times before unlocking the second which turns out to be pretty damn similar to the first one. Fortunately, the gameplay is so fun and snappy that it’s hard to put down. It feels like each run is fine tuning a speedrun. The tracks leave lots of room to make touch ups here and there for optimum run times, and we all know how much those rock.

A Short Hike

A Short Hike is a simple, meditative experience that lasts as long as its title suggests. Little old bluebird you takes a cute, curious little jaunt through the park to find cell reception and get out of your own head. Go outside. Go be friendly. There is no grand climax or reward. The hike is the reward. You get to glide down the mountain at the end in a fun little bit of business, and that’s about it. It’s just nice, you know? I just think it’s neat.

We Met In May

A very brief, very cute mini-game collection about a couple’s first few dates. Fucking obnoxious who needs it go play Galaga ya fuckin’ ingrates.

Manifold Garden

This game’s biggest moment is learning that each platform exists in infinite, symmetrical space. If you fall off a platform, you can land on that exact same platform directly below you or keep falling infinitely into the great beyond. Somehow, there is always a breathless brace for impact every time I hit the platform below. Otherwise it’s a pretty straightforward environmental physics puzzler. Hell of a looker, though.

Baba is You

A good puzzle game turns you from a fucking genius to an absolute dipshit in the blink of an eye. Baba is You is a good puzzle game. It’s weird, it’s funny, and it has a rewind button. It tells you everything it possibly can without giving you the solution. It does so much with so little. Wrap a simple mechanic (“push”) around some impeccable level design and boom: you are Baba is You.

Katana Zero

Think Hotline Miami but sidescrolling instead of top-down. That’s pretty much it, but it’s done well. Hyperviolence and psychiatry has been done before (and that’s only two of the many post-modern action/sci-fi tropes at play), but Katana Zero stays exciting and weird throughout. That murder puzzle action game gimmick works, dammit.

Top of the Pops

Control

There were times I really hated playing this game. When the combat really clicked, it felt like a dream. Juggling powers with weapons and shields has such a nice flow to it when you can pull it off. But a lot of the time, combat just felt messy and began to really drag down the pace of a mystery I was really into.

There were points in that game where I flat out thought I was playing it wrong. I was getting owned mercilessly by low level jobbers on the regular. I didn’t understand. After about 30 attempts from all different angles, it finally just kinda clicked. It felt wrong. It felt frustrating. It felt unrewarding. By the time the payoff hit, I was so beat that it just washed right over me. All that fun, weird intrigue around the fringes of this game ended up being the best part. Everything else got in the way.

But holy shit what a world Remedy built here. This perfect balance of mid 90s cynicism towards the shadow government mixed with their specific brand of supernatural sci-fi is endlessly fascinating. I never could quite tell the story Control was trying to tell, but I wanted eat up every word, redacted or otherwise. Imagine the worlds you could create just within the game’s Oldest House. When a game or tv show can find a place to confidently proclaim to its audience its intention to steer the ship anywhere it damn well pleases, that game or tv show is in the most exciting spot it will ever be in. Control lives in that moment. It is a game about the very study of endless possibilities.

Ape Out

Ape Out is joyous, brutal blast of blood and jazz. Get this: You (as Ape) are tasked with getting out (as in Out). Ape Out bangs, booms, and pows its way through four LPs worth of pure primate adrenaline. This game just kinda shouts “GO!” at you and then shuts up and lets the jazz drums do the talking. It’s that sort of thing I always fall hard for; a simple mechanic refined to a tee with a heaping helping of wild style right on top. The arcade mode update lets you shoot for high scores with all your Friday night Ape Out buddies. This post-modern deconstruction of Donkey Kong Jr. begs for a sequel called Ape Shit.

Astroneer

I lost whole days to this game when it finally hit 1.0 this year. I think this is the game I wanted out of No Man’s Sky. I didn’t want the universe, I just wanted my half. That and to ride my space tractor along its vast plains while I listen to lo-fi chill beats to plow and mine to. I love the Lego-ish look. I love modular fashion that everything snaps and clicks together. I loved just taking the space tractor out for a space drive to gather space junk to build my space farm. It was a simpler time back then. We called it “February.”

I don’t know if I’ll ever figure out what Astroneer is really about, but 70ish hours in, I don’t think it matters any more. Space tractor is life. No before, no after.

Kind Words

A game where you can write letters to strangers asking for or offering help. A seemingly positive, wholesome corner of the internet that seems to have escaped the dooming shadow of evil that is Online. Also a game where a maildeer makes you mixtapes.

Kind Words seems like a big risk. It allows players to share their most vulnerable, worrisome thoughts to a random mass of strangers. Developers take the care to offer links and resources to players, but one would think that some very hurtful things might slip through the cracks. According to developers, the community has been remarkably positive, with less than 3% of total letters getting flagged for any sort impropriety.

A game willing to take this big of a risk on earnestness is inspiring. That it has successfully fended off an army of toxic trolls with an insatiable appetite, even more so. This is a game that could theoretically be used for so many things but is actually being used to bring people together and to help them feel less isolated. This is why video games are good.

Runner-up

The Outer Worlds

It’s fun to watch this game tick. It’s meticulously detailed. It allows so much room for your character to grow or shrink or swerve or what the fuck ever. It feels like that even if you don’t quite understand everything that’s going on in that world, you always have a good sense of who you are and how you will handle a situation. All compliments of a snappy, earnest script brought to life with some ship shape voice acting performances.

I think it’s the detail put into the script and how it expands as your character’s lie/cheat/steal/etc. attributes rise is really what makes this game better than whatever Bethesda Studios is cooking up these days or even has in the past. Please for the love of god more 25hr breezy funky space romps. Or westerns or grindhouse or whatever. Just have fun with it.

I don’t like every character here, but I know every character here. The tone always feels right. Off kilter, but true. The “tell my mom I’m dead” quest is a screwball riot. It’s bizarre, funny, and can take several turns.

The exposition dump as an ending was a real fucking bummer. Slideshow endings are always the hardest dickpunch, but I loved the rest of this game so much.

DOOM of the Year

Mortal Kombat 11

This is the first MK game that feels good to play. Injustice 2 felt a million times better than any Netherealms game before it, but this followup feels even snappier. Fatalities more glorious than ever, a batshit crazy story mode, and The Redemption of Johnny Cage. A tale for the ages.

This game dares to be so goofy and self-referential and then tries to pivot to earnest, heartfelt storytelling all while brains are getting sliced open and eaten and does it all gracefully. Mortal Kombat is video games. And now, I finally enjoy playing it. I finally get to experience all this cyborg ninja martial arts splatter house trash without being a fucking trainwreck at it. I am overjoyed. Bow down all hail 2019’s DOOM of the Year, Mortal Kombat 11.

We did it, gamers. We played The Greatest Generation, just as Brokaw foretold in the latest Warframe update. We’ve got one last chapter saved for 2020, but shit is gonna get weird from here on out. Xbox is erasing generations. Sony is trimming their executive roster and moving further towards PS5 development for next holiday. Nintendo still can’t figure out how the fucking internet works, but they’ve always got that goofy shit like Tetris 99 and Ring Fit Adventure on lock.

It feels like our fully integrated synergized overflow gaming future is nigh. Microsoft has their talons in both Sony and Nintendo at this point, with their various publishing, cloud, and networking deals. Sony is publishing on PC. Nintendo is publishing on mobile. Apple is putting out good phone games. Google could fuck up a cup of coffee at this point, but everyone else is making love not war. Maybe it’s all family fun variety hour from here on out where we all game together because it unites us all and is good marketing. Or maybe not. I don’t know where it’s gonna go from here, but it’s exciting and scary. I say no more borders. Put it all on PC. Let Nintendo just crash on PS+’s couch for a while. Make Halo run on Switch. Put one of the guys from Nintendo’s Kung-Fu in Playstation Battle Royale All-Stars in a free update. BREAK THE WALLS DOWN.

But the future is for suckers. For now, let's talk about Outrun.

The New Age Outrunz

Outrun 2006

OUTRUN IS BACK, JACK! THE ARCADE CLASSIC HITS HOME THIS HOLIDAY SEASON FOR THE PLAYSTATION 2.

This game offers so many ways to play Outrun. It has the biggest soundtrack in the history of Outrun. It is rendered in full 3D, which is a major setback, but having never played this game before 2019, I can definitively say that it’s the most excited I’ve been about Outrun since Outrun.

SEGA AGES Virtua Racing (1992) /Outrun (1986)

2019 was quite a year for world renowned game developer Yu Suzuki. Both of these games hit Switch and absolutely nothing else happened. After years of sweaty anticipation, Sega finally gave the fans what they’ve been waiting for: Outrun and Virtua Racing, but for Switch. We won! The war is over. Our letter campaigns/ransom notes paid off. I never have to leave bed to play Outrun again. I’d like to thank the house that Shenmue built for reading my year end video game blogs and responding in kind to my demands.

Slipstream (2018)

Slipstream is a game that very much bites on Outrun’s speedy, scenic, arcade racer vibe, but throws in enough modern tweaks to keep it from feeling like a clone. The blocky pixels, branching paths, and sense of speed are all there, but it’s far more racing focused as opposed to Outrun’s “just drive” philosophy. There’s drifting, drafting, rivalries, and multiplayer. It loses some of that Sunday cruisin’ purity, but it adds more flavor. Aesthetically, it trades more in nightclub neon and synthwave instead of the tropical pastels and sunny calypso of that other game.

Slipstream does neat stuff. It makes good use of its backgrounds to give subtle visual hints on turns. The warm, synthwave sound over the blocky, bright 90s pixels goes really vibes well. It’s a pretty straightforward racer and never feels all that dynamic, but if there’s an Outrun sized hole in your life that cannot be filled by woman, god or beast, Slipstream might do the trick.

Good Bad Not Good Award

Detroit: Become Human (2018)

This is a bad video game. And that’s fine, you know? Honestly, in the grand scheme of things, a bad video game is a totally fine thing to be. There’s a shitload of ‘em. Hell, I’d consider a great deal of them dear friends. But this video game also thinks it’s an important video game which it is most definitely not. Now, as that guy from O*Town almost surely said on his episode of Cribs, “this is where the magic happens.”

I’ve always been a big fan of watching a work of moronic ambition fall off the tightrope it so desperately walks. Detroit: Become Human is a big old belly flop. But you know what? Fuck you anyway. Because David Cage doesn’t need your safety net, man. He’s out here to evoke emotion through storytelling, man. Are you ready for the truth through the power of video games, DUDE? Because David Cage has some shit to say about SOCIETY, MAN.

Quantic Dream squanders a pretty good cast and some impressive visual tech on a game that is basically trying to be Academy Award winning piece of shit Crash but a video game and with future robots. Remember: this is a video game from a man who watched Blade Runner and thought the replicants were the bad guys. This is a video game about ROBOTS in DETROIT that shows ZERO reverence for ROBOCOP. IT’S FUCKING CRIMINAL.

It’s all just so naïve and hackneyed and misses the mark so hard that I just absolutely loved watching anybody but me play it. That anybody happened to be a somebody named Arthur so it was a good time.

Old is New Again

Link’s Awakening (GB 1993, GBC 1998, Switch 2019)

Link's Awakening often carries unearned baggage of being Diet Zelda. It's certainly slighter than 1991's A Link to the Past, but it does many of the same things that game does just as well on much more limited hardware. While it lacks the scope of its console predecessor, it greatly streamlines the level design without hampering exploration. The overworld has such a nice flow to it and the dungeons are so tightly wound that this game is out the door before it wears out its welcome. I love its cameos and its secrets and its music and just how delightfully weird it is. I love this Zelda game.

This remake doesn't go as far as it could have, but the changes it makes are more than welcome. The new look and sound shines much brighter than what the Gameboy was capable of. The bounty of buttons the Switch has makes inventory management much easier. I would've liked to see a more ambitious remake that manages to pay homage to the original as well (a concept art museum might be nice), but this is still a good way to preserve a very good Zelda game for the next crop of fans.

Old Games

Hotline Miami (2012)

I don’t know how this game hid in plain sight from me for seven years. Crime. Violence. Grimy ass electronic music. Action/puzzler. These are a few of my favorite things. Planning out these hit-and-run killing spree symphonies with Wick-level precision to bangin’ ass murdersynth filled me with levels of delight unforeseen since The Guest or Crank 2. The mask mechanic was cool, the story was good, pulpy fun, and then they made a sequel. More later.

Warframe (2013)

Warframe’s sheer audacity is infectious. Warframe is a spaz on a sugar rush. Laser bullet space ninjas jump and fly around while fuzzy FMV Twi-lek Klingons prattle on about royal alien diamond mines or whatever the fuck this game is about. You shoot stuff. You get too fucked up too late at night and shoot your teammates too much and shamequit. I think you can build spaceships in it now. Warframe is now like some sort of Bizarro Star Citizen: it’s a video game that everyone can play right now on anything and it don’t cost nobody nothin. Also you can build spaceships. Maybe. That game is a lot.

Hyper Light Drifter (2016)

There’s a crackle and hiss to this game’s desolation that kept me on edge throughout. Every step felt new. Every screen drew me in. Hyper Light Drifter’s greatest asset is its minimalism. It has style for days, sure, but offers little to nothing with regards to narrative or sense of direction. When those big moments pop after a steady hum of quiet, empty beauty, they really pop.

Capcom vs SNK 2: Mark of the Millennium (2001)

Akuma vs. Terry Bogard is a main event anywhere in the country. In Capcom vs SNK 2, you can grease these hogs up and make ‘em wrassle. The PS2 era's polygonal fighters feel stiff and look worse, but this 2D bombshell still looks and sounds as crispy as ever.

Street Fighter x Tekken (2012)

In this game, you can team Akuma with King and absolutely wreck house. In Akuma’s ending, they show you about to fight this other, darker, more badass Dark Akuma. I think he’s Oni? Maybe Oni is Asura from Asura’s Wrath? Fuckin whatever, baby, KING AKUMA LIVES.

Sigil (Doom 1993 megawad)

John Romero made some new Doom in 2019 and it was some pretty good Doom. I played it and liked it.

Worst Old Sequels

Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number (2015)

I can’t believe this game was just the same damn thing as the first. Playing that first one for the first time (even years after release) felt so exciting. It was so stylish and novel and fun. For the second one to just be a repress of the first sucked all that excitement out.

Star Wars: Battlefront II (2017)

I can’t speak for the multiplayer, but this campaign was some good dumb fun for a little while. You get to play as this TIE fighter pilot and gun down a bunch of traitorous rebels and then turn coat yourself and gun down a bunch of Stormtroopers who were by all accounts just following orders. Also, it’s a Star Wars game from one of the industry’s biggest publishers (EA), so you can see every cent of the moon sized budget on the screen. It looks stunning and ungodly expensive.

But then they had to go all backdoor pilot on it and shoehorn the Skywalker clan into the main story and suddenly it got real low rent real fast. All these off-model, cut rate sound-alike, dead-eyed, royalty-free jobbers stroll in to ruin your good time. So then you play as Luke (but not Mark Hammil) and Han (but Harrison Ford’s third twin cousin’s babysitter, twice removed) and whoever the fuck else felt like leaping out of their respective Star Wars fanart blogs and do a bunch of stuff that doesn’t even control like the rest of the game.

So it’s not as good as Dark Forces and that really sucks.

Best Old Game of 2019

Tempest (1981)

“I have always been a storm” – Stevie Nicks

My shelter from the storm this year was the arcade. Video games really are better than they’ve ever been. Hitman. Hitman 2. Breath of the Wild. DOOM. TWO NEW TETRIS’Z. But that crystalline purity of a joystick and a button backed by the power of the Great American Token hits me like I owe it money. Of course, Tempest has a wheel instead of a joystick, but we’re all adults here. Just roll with me.

In my yearlong arcade pilgrimage, I kept coming back to Tempest. At Tapper’s in Indianapolis, they have a cocktail cabinet and free play all day. At Beercade in Omaha, a standup machine. Galloping Ghost in Brookfield, IL also has a standup machine. What’s most surprising about Tempest is how faithful it is to The Bard’s swan song. The wireframe tube-shooter and crunchy, glitchy explosions really capture Shakespeare’s famous tale of avoiding spikes and using the superzapper.

If there ever was a heaven, Galloping Ghost is it. It is the most comprehensive arcade I’ve found on this godforsaken planet. It has everything an arcade needs and most things you'd want. I hope that when I'm an old, gray dirty street person they'll let me hang around out front. Maybe they'll let me windowplay when the demons finally steal my brain and my only job is staying alive and shouting at random passersby and feverishly extolling the virtues of Robocop to anyone in earshot. It’ll be a lot like this but even less coherent.

I built my frist PC this year. “No, that’s not right.” Arthur helped me build my first PC this year. “Mmm, closer, but still not right.” Arthur built my first PC for me this year. “Ah yes. Perfect.”

Arthur built my first PC for me this year. It’s big and it sits on a desk next to my Akuma action figure and all the stuff on it looks really pretty. It has memory in it, a mouse, a keyboard… pretty much everything! I can play games on it, too. In fact, it’s what they call a “gaming PC.” Pretty cool, right?

My Steamy Year

Devil Daggers/Super Hexagon/Superflight

Life is all about balancing out your uppers and your downers. A good rule of thumb for me is two bumps, one hit, repeat. It may differ for some people, but physiologically everyone is basically the same, so it doesn’t matter.

First Bump: Devil Daggers

Imagine if you could play Geometry Wars but it was rendered in first person but also in a hellish void painted with Quake textures. Sounds pretty fuckin’ righteous, right? Devil Daggers is that. Twitchy, run based, score chasing, edge of your seat, demon-blasting action. Sounds…familiar, in some way.

Second Bump: Super Hexagon

This one is all about the tune-age, dude-age. Speedy, crunchy chiptune music set on top of a pretty simple gameplay frame where you move left or right to avoid walls as the music picks up and the camera spins to the rhythm. A wise man once told me “you can get something done well, you can get something done fast, or you can get something done cheap, but you can’t have all three.” Super Hexagon is good, quick, cheap bump. So that man is dumb and wrong now.

First Hit: Superflight

The game procedurally generates big blocky, rocky chunks of terrain while you float around the physics, fly really close to stuff, and just kinda…go, you know? It just feels good in your hands. Sometimes it really is that easy.

SUPERHOT/SUPERHOT VR

I think SUPERHOT is the smartest, coolest, hippest shit going. It kind of breaks my brain. These developers put so much thought into how the player interacts with the game in their reality that even if I could figure out what the fuck to say here, I shouldn’t. I think you should play this game.

SUPERHOT VR is its own separate thing that mostly ditches the main game’s more mindfucky meta-interactive elements and focuses on the fun as hell run-based gameplay part. You will look like a goddamn moron playing it in front of people, but you will feel like John Wick from The Matrix while you’re under the hood.

Redout

Redout asks the question “what if Wipeout was downresed and streamlined?” and dares to answer that question by being that video game. Smooth, slick, low-poly chrome with techno pumping and good-looking particle effects.

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City

This was probably the last Rockstar game I really got into. The novelty wore off the Grand Theft Auto franchise fairly fast for me and Red Dead Redemption hit me like a warm, wet fart. Not a cool, funny one that smells bad and makes me laugh, but like how most people would react to a warm, wet fart.

While the GTA formula has been hashed and rehashed and re-rehashed so many times by not only Rockstar, but also an entire generation of developers and studios, Rockstar will always have Vice City. Vice City is one of my favorite worlds to inhabit. It’s riddled with crime, drenched in neon, and Tom Sizemore is there. It feels over the top in a way that comes back around to be actually good. It’s grimy, jagged, loud and violent. I find the hallmark of good media is when every character is a selfish piece of shit. GTA: Vice City is filled to the brim with dirtbags, voiced by a cast of motherfucking ringers in the field of low rent crime fiction. A return to Vice City feels like the only thing at this point that would get me back into a Rockstar game. Everything else they’ve done just feels less than to me.

Astroneer

2019’s earliest DOOM of the Year contender. I found this early access game during my second bout with No Man’s Sky and it absolutely ate that game’s lunch. I decided to nuke my Astroneer save file so that I could go in fresh for the 1.0 update in December, only for it to get pushed back to February. Can’t wait to fall for this one all over again next year.

Faith

Faith is a game that reveals itself very organically. It’s a game that is patient with you if you are patient with it. The story slowly unwinds as you saunter around a Commodorian 64ian landscape while chunky, grimy synth chimes ring out. Faith sets a goddamn mood. From its campy ass voice modulation to its most excellent game over screen, Faith does so much with so little. I am in love with this game.

Dead End Road

This is another lovely little bite of simple, effective design. Dead End Road is such an immediate game. After its unsettling, obtuse opening, Dead End Road pushes you, tells you to run and reminds you not to blink. Its core concept is “get the fuck out of here.” It feels like everything from the psychological terror to the objectives in the road to the economy is left to a dice roll. These two ideas merge in a way that might sound frustrating but feels thrilling. It seems to position itself as a game that maybe can’t be beat, but its core concepts are executed so effectively that I can’t help but keep playing and keep wondering about where the road leads. I am in love with this game.

Her Story

A twisty, turny evidence room simulator that asks the question "is this really a video game?" You watch interrogation videos and let a lady tell her story. It's barely interactive but incredibly captivating and well worth its short runtime.

The Beginner’s Guide

There's a lot to unpack in this game about creators and their relationship with their work, their fans, and their fans' relationship with their work. It deserves another playthrough from me after I play a shitload of other games that I've been meaning to play.

Everybody loves a let down. Let's take a look at the very best ones!

Biggest Bummers

A Way Out

I wanted this game to win so badly. The gameplay reveal had me stoked, EA publishing a game in realm that barely exists anymore had me intrigued (b-tier, budget priced, same couch co-op), and EA was due for a win after their tumultuous 2017. After director Josef Fares cut a promo on the Oscars, I started rooting fort A Way Out even harder because fuck those stuffy assholes.

What I got was a stiff, poorly executed mess of a game that’s only redeeming quality is its potential for MST3K-style riffing. The voice work ranges from competent to embarrassing, the animations are comically wooden and often reminiscent of the green screen lips bit Conan used to do on Late Night, and the dialogue isn’t even fit for a fucking Segal flick. I guess you could say I enjoyed my time with it because I could squeeze joy out of anything – church, Russian Roulette, having sex with my own damn wife – if it offered same couch co-op with Arthur. Except for…

The Halo 2 co-op campaign on the Halo: Master Chief Collection

What is up with the wack as hell AI in this game? Between Elites doing donuts in Ghosts or grunts straight up not engaging you as you walk past them, I’m left wondering why I ever liked this game at all. That sounds extreme, but it really is that embarrassing at times.

Some of these levels are stretched so mercilessly thin. The pacing grinds to such a halt at times that I thought me and Arthur’s whole “let’s play all the Halos” project would derail after the pilot episode. I had half a mind to go back and work my way though the original release on the OG Xbox, but when posited with the forgone conclusion that it would either be a shitty game with the same problems as the remaster or a good game with the same shitty ending there’s always been for Halo 2, I voted firmly in favor of “fuck that noise.”

Mega Man 11

Mega Man 11 is perfectly competent and wholly uninspired. Clever, snappy level design has been replaced by grindy, bland action. Levels drag on forever. The music is totally unremarkable. It was time for a franchise facelift, for sure, but this new look feels just as flat as its 8-bit predecessors. It all just feels so slapdash. It feels like a first pass. It feels like Mega Man in theory, but not in practice. There are echoes of Mega Man 8 here and that is not a good thing.

SNK Tag Team Heroines Frenzy

I did not know that this was an anime boobie fighter when I bought it. I swear I just wanted to see Lady Terry Bogard rocking the “Fatal Cutie” hat. And that’s what we’re all gonna tell the cops, okay?

God of War

This was my first time with a God of War game. I always assumed those games to be a brooding, bloody, QTE-filled Frank Miller-ish hunk of machismo that was too agro to be taken seriously. When word spread that the 2018 reboot was a grave departure from my expectations of the franchise, I was excited to give it a shot. Unfortunately, I felt that it mostly met my original expectations, maybe with a touch more heart.

This is a PS2-ass PS4 game. All of those much maligned mechanics of that generation’s crop of third-person action games – lever pulling, box pushing, button mashing, quick time events – were shockingly still there to me. Combat robbed of its satisfaction by cheesy-ass QTE finishes. Ginormously stupid story beats. Layers upon layers of weapon/armor customization that don’t feel like they pay off in any meaningful way. This game has a fucking elevator brawl a la some old licensed arcade beat ‘em up out of 1992.

I think Sony is trying to take an Ubisoft-like approach to first party development in a certain way. They’re developing a core, almost checklist-y template for their games and building a different style around the same game each go-round. Horizon: Zero Dawn and God of War are by no means the same game, but I had the same sorts of problems with them. Worlds that felt big, but mostly lifeless. Combat that felt mostly fine, but rarely exciting. A bevy of vaguely RPG-ish equipment upgrade elements that sure are there but sure don’t feel impactful.

Ubisoft has been making their nut the last few years by teasing out their massive open world, questlog having, tower climbing third-person action prefabs with different styles. Cyber Style, Victorian Style, Military Style, and so on. These games vary in appeal to me, but they’re usually quality products that are mostly critic proof and very commercially viable. I think Sony wants to play that game but with somber looking, technically stunning third-person action games in Samurai Style, Zombie Style, and Kojima Style. That’s all well and good. Some of those games will appeal to me, others will not. But seeing how Sony’s video game sausage gets made kinda bums me out. Right now it feels like Sony needs a surprise and doesn’t have one handy. With Nintendo always down to get weird with their own games and Microsoft’s willingness to make some moves on the first party development front in tandem with both of those brands’ eagerness to build their indie relationships, Sony feels stale. But apparently I’m the only person on earth who thought this game was bad, so what the hell do I know.

[Ed. Note: I wrote this God of War take awhile back, soon after I beat the game and long before Spider-Man came out. Anyways, back to the show!]

Regrets

These are some games I wish I would've given more of a chance to but will have to wait until 2019.

Marvel’s Spider-Man

AGAIN WITH THIS SHIT. BEING RIGHT IS THE WORST.

Honestly, I can’t really tell you how similar this Sony published third person open world skill tree simulator is to the previous batch of them because I couldn’t stand it beyond the first two or so hours.

It was the writing that sunk this one for me. None of those jokes felt like jokes a good, fun Peter Parker as Spider-Man would make. They captured none of his neuroses or wit, none of his charm, and made him seem downright fucking dumb as a stump at times. Spider-Man: who gleefully taps into NYC’s security grid at the drop of a hat. Spider-Man: who signs up to be a fucking narc with a thumbs up to his cop friend. Spider-Man: who’s quickest mid-fight zinger is “it must be National [Noun] Day” when he gets hit with said noun during a brawl. I cannot condone this Spider-Product. I really, truly love Spider-Man and when they fuck it up I get bummed out. And you know what? Outside of the comics, they almost always fuck it up. Homecoming is the only good movie they made. Those Toby McGuire movies sucked ass and you know it. Someday, I might regret not giving Marvel’s Spider-Man more of a chance. Maybe. I always want to love Spider-Man, it’s just so rare that I actually do.

Yakuza 6/Yakuza Kiwami 2

Sega, when I promised to always buy whatever Yakuza shit bring over to the states after Yakuza 0 came out, I never promised to play them. These games are of a style and sense of humor that I admire so, so dearly, but the gameplay just never keeps me sticking around. I love the everliving shit out of that big dope Kiryu and hope to someday see more of his exploits as a single dad, but 2018 just wasn’t the year for it.

Return of the Obra Dinn

This game sounds like it might bore the hell out of me, but goddamn what a look.

Astro Bot: Rescue Mission

My fixation with VR comes and goes. By the time I got a hold of this game, I was kind of off cycle. Soon, though. Soon I will be the Robot Boy.

I never really fucked with fighting games much, so this year I tried to play all the fighting games I could get my hands on. Then I ranked them all.

Heels to Faces: A Ranking of (Some) Fighters

1.) Street Fighter Alpha 3 (1998)

This is my perfect Street Fighter. Every inch of the presentation in this game is so on point, from the way the “KO” swoops in on the kill to the all the big bulky neon flair that fashions the transitions. While Street Fighter III might be best looking entry (or at least most looking entry), Alpha 3 looks just as good and the fights just feel so much faster (and in this case better). The songs might not be as memorable as Street Fighter II, but the chip they use still sounds so crispy. If I had my druthers, this would be THE Street Fighter to build off of. It all feels so, so right.

Can you play as Akuma?: Indeed.

2.) Garou: Mark of the Wolves (1999)

Garou: Mark of the Wolves owns. The roster owns, the art owns, the moves owns, and it has a guy named fuckin’ BUTT in it. I don’t know shit about fighting games, but if there is one truth, it is that Garou just fucking owns.

Can you play as Akuma?: No. Rats!

3.) Dragon Ball FighterZ (2018)

I like fighting games. Fighting games are anime. Therefore… Oh, don’t make me say it. The prettiest game in whole wide world is also fun as hell to play. Even as a total bottom of the card jobber, smashing my controller with closed fist and pulling off some of these Kame Kame Yeahs makes me feel like Lou “Super Saiyan” Thesz.

Can you play as Akuma?: Negatore, partnerino.

4.) Marvel vs Capcom 3: A Tale of Some Stuff (2011)

Much like Dragon Ball FighterZ, this game makes me feel like I own even though I most certainly do not. But gimme Dante, Thor, and my main man Akuma and I will wreck some shit.

Can you play as Akuma?: Fuckin’ A right you can.

5.) Tekken 7 (2017)

I enjoyed this one, but I can’t quite wrap my head around the complexity of a 3-D fighter yet. Still, this game taught me a lot of shit in regards to fighting game controls, combos, grabs, juggles… you know. The good shit. There’s a guy with a jaguar head that’s a wrestler and you can make him wear a Bullet Club t-shirt and a championship title around his waist and he can dole out tornado DDTs. So overall, this game is a win. Also?

Can you play as Akuma?: You guessed it! You can play as Akuma in this one, too!

6.) Injustice 2 (2017)

This story mode, gang. Aka “the good Batman v Superman.” Nagging ass Wonder Woman all “you’re gonna let Bruce walk all over you like that YOU FUCKING CUCK!?” to Superman. Superman taking it out on his niece or whatever the fuck. I think Black Adam threw Aquaman into the hull of Brainiac’s ship. Freddy Krueger plays Scarecrow. Batman owns everybody. Gimme more. Also, WCW’s own Glacier is no longer in the basement for ice villain also-rans. Thanks, Captain Cold!

Can you play as Akuma?: Nope. Boogers!

7.) Street Fighter V: Arcade Edition (2018)

Try as I might, I still don’t know shit about fighting games. But I know I like Street Fighter V. There’s weightiness to the hits that I really appreciate. I love the look of it. It felt like the most accessible Street Fighter I’ve played. I got a good hang of a handful of characters (Juri, Laura, Zangief) and found one I am happy to call my main. GUESS WHO IT IS GUESS WHO IT IS!!

Can you play as Akuma?: YES YOU CAN COS’ IT’S THE COVER BOY FUCKIN AKUMAAAAAAA!

8.) Real Bout Fatal Fury Special (1997)

The moves in this game look so cool. That I love the way the stage stages go from day to night or vice versa. That Franco Bash sprite looks so goddamn good. I like this one just a touch more than Real Bout 2, but only slightly. These games feel good as hell.

Can you play as Akuma?: No dice.

9.) Mortal Kombat XL (2015)

The violence is absolutely delightful. I had a lot of fun with this game, but to me it just feels like a rougher draft of Injustice 2. It’s solid, and I’ll always have a soft spot for Kombat, but there are shaping up to be a lot of fighting games I really like!

Can you play as Akuma?: Nah. Sorry.

10.) Real Bout Fatal Fury 2 (1998)

I’ll give this one the edge in sound. Plus, Geese Howard is right there on screen from the jump. Otherwise, I like Special more.

Can you play as Akuma?: Absolutely not.

11.) Tekken Tag Tournament 2 (2011)

This roster is good and fun and the tag mechanics seem impactful and I seemed to take to it pretty quickly so that was good. Armor King, huh? Seems like a cool fella.

Can you play as Akuma?: No, but maybe Armor King catching some side eye here.

12.) Tekken 3 (1997)

So much faster and smoother than Tekken 2. Bonus points for making King’s street clothes alternate costume a Road Warriors riff.

Can you play as Akuma?: No, but after all the Tekken I’ve played this year, I can say with confidence that King is my #2 man. So that’s still a no to Akuma, but I’ll survive.

13.) Waku Waku 7 (1996)

I just want to hug this game. Or go to a pool party with it. It’s so nice and bright and relaxing after getting my fucking shit rocked by M. Bison for the twelfth time in a row. I don’t quite understand all its systems, but I like it all the same.

Can you play as Akuma?: You wish, pal.

14.) Street Fighter EX 3 (2000) I bet I would really enjoy playing these games with a fightstick because they look and sound so good. Using a Dualshock 2 just makes me want to cry.

Can you play as Akuma?: No. Believe me, I’m as shocked as you are.

15.) SoulCalibur VI (2018)

I want to love the SoulCalibur series so badly, but it just makes me want to play more Tekken for whatever reason. But I’ll keep trying.

Can you play as Akuma?: There is an expansive character creator mode in this game, so there is at least potential for Akuma. Admirable.

16.) Tekken 2 (1996)

My vague memories of playing this game as a young’n were much more pleasant than playing this in 2018. Tekken 3 seems to do everything better.

Can you play as Akuma?: That’s a big no.

17.) Fatal Fury Special (1993)

This just feels so much worse than the Real Bout games to me. Also, I don’t think the stages change with the time of day like they do in Real Bout Special. That’s bad.

Can you play as Akuma?: Nope nope nope.

18.) Tekken Tag Tournament (1999)

The lesser of the Tekken tag games.

Can you play as Akuma?: Not a chance.

19.) Tatsunoko vs. Capcom (2008)

This game looks sort of jagged in a way I like, but it feels kind of sluggish. The Street Fighter characters don’t translate very well and I am mostly unfamiliar with the rest of the roster. Some of them were fun, but this game didn’t offer much that I couldn’t get out of way better fighting games.

Can you play as Akuma?: You’d think “well, maybe the game is bad, but the Capcom gang is here, so at least I can play as Akuma.” Nope. Can’t play as Akuma. No wonder why this game didn’t work out.

20.) Street Fighter EX plus a (1997)

What an odd look and sound for a Street Fighter game. That alone earns it a shitload of merit. But playing this game on a Dualshock 3 is fucking torture.

Can you play as Akuma?: Affirmative.

21.) Soul Calibur II (2002)

I want to like the Soul Calibur games, but I just can’t truck with them. I like Street Fighter and Tekken a lot, Mortal Kombat is cool, and I don’t like Soul Calibur or Virtua Fighter. It took me 30 years to come to this conclusion, but it’s good to know now.

Can you play as Akuma?: No. But you can pick Link, Heihachi, or Todd MacFarlane’s Spawn, depending on which console you’re playing on.

22.) Tekken 5 (2005)

The PS2 era seems like an awkward time for fighting games. The cutscenes and character models hold up well enough, but the fighters just don’t look great when they’re banging together. There’s meatiness to the strong style combat of Tekken 7 that really gets my rocks off and Tekken 5 just wasn’t quite there yet. Also, this is a 2001 ass 2005 game, presentation-wise. I am not into it on any level.

Can you play as Akuma?: Not from what I’ve heard, no.

23.) Samurai Shodown 2 (1994)

This game is too hard and I don’t understand it and therefore it is almost the worst fighting game ever in the history of time that I have played.

Can you play as Akuma?: If you could, would it really be ranked this low?

24.) Virtua Fighter 4 (2001)

I don’t get Virtua Fighter. I don’t understand it. I just don’t have room for all these fighting game franchises in my life and I’m sorry.

Can you play as Akuma?: Fuck no.

25.) SNK Heroines Tag Team Frenzy (2018)

There is indeed a fighting game buried beneath this anime boobie dressup sim, but it at least it has the common decency to play like fucking trash so I never have to touch it again.

Can you play as Akuma?: I would for sure check out a Lady Akuma a la the Lady Terry Bogard they modeled for this game. That being said, no you cannot play as Akuma in this game.

A Ranking of (Street) Fighters: A 30^th Anniversary Collection Rundown

1.) Street Fighter Alpha 3 (1998)

This one is the best one. Probably the only fighting game I’ve played that can hold a candle to Garou: Mark of the Wolves.

2.) Super Street Fighter 2: Turbo (1994)

I’m glad I finally understand this game now that I have a greater context for fighting games. This game is good because applying even the basest of fighting game technical prowess to it still feels like a good time even if you kinda get owned. Akuma’s first appearance (via cheat code).

3.) Street Fighter 2: Champion Edition (1992)

Bare bones as hell as therefore far more enjoyable to a guy who has never played these games before. Kinda ugly compared to other entries but very good for early learners.

4.) Street Fighter Alpha 2 (1996)

Holy shit these character portraits are atrocious. A good game, but would probably never play it again if Alpha 3 is hanging around.

5.) Street Fighter 3: 3^rd Strike (1999)

Some of the prettiest 2D fighter art to grace my television screen. Goddamn is it slow, though. It is so impressive on a technical level but so agonizing to play. Such a shame.

6.) Street Fighter 2 (1991)

Fascinating, but won’t do much revisiting to it on account of the other two Street Fighter II’s on this list.

7.) Street Fighter 2: Hyper Fighting (1992)

I want to be a cool kid and be good at this game but that seems so far away right now, maybe even impossible. Fun as shit to watch, I bet, but too much for my young, nubile thumbs to take.

8.) Street Fighter Alpha (1995)

Nothing about this game felt good to me. Alpha 2/3 feel like absolutely massive jumps up.

9.) Super Street Fighter 2 (1993)

Considering I played this between Hyper Fighting and Turbo, this game has been rendered entirely forgettable to me.

10.) Street Fighter 3: 2^nd Impact (1997)

This game has Akuma in it.

11.) Street Fighter 3 (1997)

This game does not.

12.) Street Fighter (1987)

No thank you.

OLD FUCKIN’ VIDEO GAMES, kids. Some say the old ways are still best. Frankly, I think we’re living through gaming’s greatest generation right now. Frankly, the old shit feels like it’s getting harder and harder to play. But my heart still bleeds for that old shit, so here we are.

2018’s Best Games of 2017

Polybius

The story of Polybius’s development was all I needed to give the game a shot. The way the game looked, sounded, and felt was enough to hook me in. But playing the game in VR shook me to my core the way few games have. I don’t know if Polybius will stand as tall to me years from now as games like DOOM, Super Mario Maker, or Galaga do, but that first hit of it in VR felt like experiencing those games for the first time. It tapped into that pure, uncut, Columbian videogame-ness that I am a fucking fiend for. It felt like a videogameass video game. It was perfect. I was so happy for once. It was an odd sensation.

The story of Llamasoft’s 2017 game Polybius traces back to another game from an unspecified developer at an unspecified date named “something like” POLYBIUS. The story of POLYBIUS is a crazy, dumb wormhole to go down, but the long and short of it is this: a small group of people insist that they played an imaginary arcade game called POLYBIUS that was developed by the government to train child soldiers or some other insane shit. The game was most likely an early version, bootleg version, or flat out misremembered version of another arcade game called Tempest. Llamasoft’s Jeff Minter helped develop Tempest 2000. Jeff Minter decided to develop a game called Polybius. Jeff Minter rules.

Polybius is ostensibly a very fast, very fun, old school arcade shooter. It is colorful, fun to look at, and has excellent sound/music. There are lots of numbers on the screen that seem meaningless. There are bonuses and things of that nature. I don’t know how they are activated or why they matter. If you hit something, you lose a shield. If you lose all your shields, you lose the game. Sometimes the game says weird stuff to you. On the surface, this is Polybius. I enjoy it.

I think Jeff Minter figured out that the secret to enjoying virtual reality is the virtual part. I don’t want my VR to feel real, man. Real fucking sucks. Real is why I’m in virtual, so gimme that VIRTUAL virtual reality, motherfucker. Polybius is that reeeeeeal virtual shit. That good good.Though the game does not directly draw from any commonly shared POLYBIUS “testimonials,” it trades on arcade history by mashing together bits and pieces of arcade classics into concentrated blast of nostalgia. It feels like a faint memory of a video game that is just out of reach. “What does this music remind me of? Is that sound effect from Star Wars Arcade? Is that even legal? Wait, is that a Space Invader?” It feels so real you’d swore you’ve played it before. It’s like Road Blasters. It’s like Space Harrier. It’s like Galaga. It’s like Tempest. Polybius is somehow this loving tribute to arcade history and a riff on its own Urban Legend and yet entirely its own lighting fast fever dream thing and… it just fucking owns so hard. And then you put the VR headset on.

My limited experience with VR went exactly as expected, which is kind of a shame. There’s one game where you’re in a Guy Ritchie-ish flick and you shoot some Vinnie Jones lookin ass motherfuckers. It went as expected. Another game had me deep sea diving, where I saw a bunch of fish and ran into a shark. It went as expected. I watched someone else play DOOM VFR. It went way fucking worse than expected. Polybius seemed so familiar at first glance, but when the VR headset was on, it wasn’t like anything I ever expected. It made me feel like I was inside an arcade machine, like I was suddenly a part of one of those things I’ve spent my whole life playing. It was sex. It was sex with an arcade machine. It was everything everybody ever wanted, I assume.

As I blazed through each of the games 50 levels, a lot of what I thought was the game’s oddball nonsense started to add up. The absurdist subtext that accompanied each level name began to feel more like hints or strategies (“Let go, Luke” prompted me to maybe just not shoot indiscriminately for awhile). The game does a tremendous job of very subtlety teaching you its fairly basic concepts and then eventually asks you to betray the ideas it taught you. It’s easy to look at this game and see it as bait for the niche retro market. It’s low-poly, doused in neon, and trades on every last quarter of your arcade nostalgia. By the time I hit the final screen, it felt like every part of the game had purpose. All those invisible moments where the game was teaching me how to beat it suddenly appeared. The scores got higher, the jokes got funnier, and the colors got trippier.

There’s a bit after each level where it runs down your score, let’s you know how many shields you have left, and generally breaks up the game’s pace a little. But if you want that raw shit and you want it faster and don’t have time to dick around with a level break, all you have to do is push up that there controller stick that kinda looks like the plunger end of a syringe a little bit and THE TRIP HITS YOU FASTER. Considering this is a game that spends a lot of time throwing pills at you (that both hurt and harm), I think these Llamasoft folks know what the fuck is up.

Polybius on its own is very special. The mindfuck that is Polybius in VR feels like discovering Video Games again. BOW DOWN ALL HAIL 2018’S 2017 DOOM OF THE YEAR Polybius. The real one. Also, I don’t mean to be a narc, but I’m pretty sure I heard some very faint Super Mario sound samples sprinkled in there. I really hope Minter and Llamasoft get away with it. I hope they never stop getting away with it.

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice

Hellblade is a grim but gorgeous mood piece about depression, loss, and identity. The more traditional video game parts sprinkled throughout range from irritating to tolerable, but at the heart of the game is a cacophonous blend of audio/visual psychological terror.

We follow our heroine Senua through a constantly evolving landscape that transitions gracefully between reality and delusion. The art direction is striking throughout, mixing Norse and Celtic mythology together to create a look that might evoke Horizon: Zero Dawn or 2018’s God of War, but the game’s masterstroke is the way it blends warring visual styles together. The game’s static state has a grainy, ashen look to it, but it often gives way to extreme lighting and lens flare while also throwing FMV at you. Photo filters fight with each other and fade away on a whim, giving each cutscene/set piece its own distinct feel. Despite so much clashing visual trickery, the game always feels so bold and confident in its own skin.

As stunning as the game looks, it’s the sound design that takes the cake. Playing this game with headphones on feels like a brand new experience. Depression has often been described as a brain in a shouting match with itself. Hellblade really takes that idea and runs with it, but does so to great effect. Voices pop in and out to both help and/or hurt, depending on what the narrative calls for. Dread and paranoia lurk throughout, causing the player to keep Senua’s head on a swivel.

The polygamous marriage between art design, sound design, and narrative is so thematically in step that it makes it all the more heartbreaking that the gameplay just can’t quite jive with it all. This is a game about being comfortable with whom you are, how you see the world and forging your own path… so long as you follow the extremely linear path laid out before you. It’s a bummer, but it can’t detract from how expertly crafted the rest of the game is.

While the gameplay leaves me wanting, developer Ninja Theory’s stylistic ambition is inspiring. Their dedication to authenticity and sensitivity with regards to mental health is commendable. It might be a long time before I play another game like Hellblade. That at once totally sucks and is also pretty fucking rad.

What Remains of Edith Finch

Maybe it’s a silly subconscious tick, but every year I seem to save up all of the year’s “walking simulators” and binge through them during Oscar Season. Those types of games, your Firewatch’s, Tacoma’s, Gone Home’s and many before them have been catching heat for years from certain corners of the internet for being “glorified walking simulators.” Unfortunately, people who write and talk about games just kinda ran with it by naming the genre after that exact criticism for a while. In fact, I think people are still calling them that. That’s a really dumb thing to call a genre of games. But then again, genre tags are mostly pretty fucking useless.

I don’t think I save up all these games for Oscar season because walking sims are like movies. They are not. But they’re the closest approximation the medium of video games has to movies. I think people see a video game “trying to be a movie” by making a narrative driven, carefully paced and combat-free experience and launch labels like “artsy fartsy” and “indie darling.” I think that’s dumb as hell. But maybe that is why my brain tells me to play walking sims during Oscar Season, because deep down I’m just the same pud on the internet I’m currently bitching about.

There’s a moment in What Remains of Edith Finch that is so unabashedly video-gamey in the coolest way that it feels like it proves not only the genre’s worth, but the medium’s as well. Books are read, movies are watched, but games are played. They require your tactile input. D-pad to move, A button to shoot, B to shit, Y to fuck, X to suck. Edith Finch pulls off this one crazy trick about midway through the game that crystalizes the difference between video games and everything else so distinctly that it belongs in a museum. It blends the player’s physical interaction with the controller and its onscreen narrative so carefully and subtlety that by the time I realized what was happening I felt hypnotized. Or duped. Or maybe even violated. But it felt like a moment that was only possible because I using an Xbox One controller to basically throw non-stop Hadokens for fifteen minutes straight. If that sounds stupid or doesn’t make sense, it’s only because video games are the coolest and not because I’m bad at this. Trust me. I’m good at this.

Tekken 7/Injustice 2

Tekken 7 was the first step in my quest to become The Ultimate Fighting Game Champion* (*marginally competent at fighting games). I’ve found that fighting games speak in a language all their own, with terms and symbolism that sometimes carry across different dialects, but sometimes don’t. Tekken 7’s 3-D plane hasn’t translated to many of the other fighters I’ve played this year (as I’ve been fucking with mostly Kombat, Street Fighter, and a shitload of NEO GEO games), but discerning differences between character types in this game was huge for me. Naturally I took quite well to the wrestler fella (King, in his finest Bullet Club garb with the strap around his waist), but toying around with faster characters or more ranged characters or Akuma (more on that later) was a good way to find common ground with Tekken’s 2-D counterparts. I got to a point in Tekken 7 where I was able to stand toe-to-toe with the CPU in versus mode, which was huge for me. I promptly got owned online and never looked back, but Tekken 7 felt like good entry point into the genre.

If Tekken 7 got me in, Injustice 2 kept me hooked. Stripping away the third dimension was a huge relief to me, a dirty rotten low down piece of shit fucking n00b. On top of that, everything is just easier to do in this game. That may sound like sacrilege to fighting game pros, but it’s a revelation to a know-nothing like me. I can have Joker throw some jobber like Captain Cold into an electric chair all with two pulls of the triggers. Wanna see Scarecrow slam whoever the fuck Doctor Fate is around like those sleeping bag babes from Jason X? L+R TRIGGERS WHILE METER FULL. It owns.

On top of that, the story is the best kind of batshit, cheeseball, comic booky bullshit this side of… fuck, I don’t even know anymore. All of Marvel’s movies try to be smart and all of DC’s movies try to be not Marvel. Injustice 2’s story seems to occupy a space in comics media that doesn’t really exist outside of actual comic books anymore: epically told, silly, nonsensical team-ups with little regard for canon. That may sound exactly like what modern comic book movies are to some people, but Injustice 2 just embraces its dumbness so well. “Quick, we need to super charge Aquaman’s trident and throw it at Brainiac’s warship because he started conquering planets while Wonder Woman was being a nag and convincing Superman to kill everybody” is basically a thing that happens. It is the best kind of dumb.

Everything

Everything always looked dumb as hell, but I bought it because it was the first game ever eligible for an Oscar and that felt important at the time, so I took the plunge. Unlike the 4K Out Run reboot that SEGA won’t give me, Everything plays itself! You can just kinda sit there and watch a dust particle turn into a mollusk, then a martini, then a French horn, then a hippo, then a pyramid, then Neptune, then you can turn into ACTUAL NOTHING. And once in awhile, a British philosopher spouts some nonsense while you asexually reproduce a fleet of oilrigs or polar bears.

A full year after this game came out, there still isn’t much information on it. Scour the regular dark corners of the innernette where the chudly dorks discuss weird indie shit (Reddit, Giant Bomb, etc.) and you’ll still have trouble finding any sort of guide or interpretation as to what the fuck is going on. This is precisely what made my favorite trip into Everything’s world so appealing. I found the “Golden Gate,” one of the few online breadcrumbs scattered across Everything forum posts. Once you descend into a Golden Gate, you wind up in actual, literal Hell.

Throughout the game you’re bombarded with kitschy, quirky daily affirmations and post-it note philosophies from the world’s various objects. When you get to Hell, these objects are wracked with guilt and disdain for the life they once lived. It just feels like people should’ve talked about that a little more is all.

Katamari Damacy/We Love Katamari

In recent years, my heart has found enough room in it for games that really aren’t so fun or great in the gameplay department but have a distinct enough style to keep me hooked. Katamari Damacy’s gameplay is fine enough; it’s simple, goofy, and fun. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say that the best part of the game is its music. Pumping “Dan Don Fuga” through old, built-in CRT speakers was the highlight of many a weekend this year. There’s calmness to the low stakes gameplay that is always welcoming, but that soundtrack will always be A-#1 in my book. Until I can jump into that Switch remaster, you can find me nose to the screen, volume at 100, putting the moon back together with sumo wrestlers and king crabs or whatever the fuck.

Mega Man Legacy Collection 1 for Nintendo Switch

Brother, you haven’t lived until you got fucked up in bed on a Sunday morning and cheated your way through Mega Man 2 like a dumb, drunk asshole because THAT BAD BOY’S GOT A GODDAMN REWIND BUTTON, BAYBEE! The paralyzing self-indulgence of drinking alone in bed watching Aqua Teen Hunger Force matched with the mental and physical mountain climb that is defeating Dr. Wily will make you feel like a motherfucking god.

Getting Over It with Bennet Foddy

I will never beat this game, but I think the whole point is that I need to be okay with that? And I am. So. Well done, Bennet.

Remaster-piece Theater

Burnout Paradise Remastered

You’re welcome. After years of evangelizing on Burnout Paradise’s behalf, I singlehandedly got a 4K remaster made for modern consoles. I’m sorry I couldn’t get the Switch port out the door, but this Xbox One port looks pretty damn… well honestly it looks about the damn same but who gives a shit MORE BURNOUT PARADISE, MOTHERFUCKER. YES there’s a severe lack of arcade-ish street racing games around these days and YES EA’s other franchise has been chewing turds for years now but none of that has anything to do with why Burnout Paradise Remastered dropped. I did it. Me. King Burnout.

After nabbing an “Old Game of the Year” nod from yours truly in 2017, Burnout Paradise hit the body shop and was speeding down the streets of Paradise City by March. There’s no doubt that a new Burnout could and should rectify some of Paradise’s more dated shortcomings (messy UI, no waypoints, no fast travel), but the core feel of the driving, sense of speed and overall world immersion still put the game at the top of its class a full decade after release. It’s kind of mind blowing. If there is any justice in this world, EA sends Need for Speed to the bench for a couple years and gives us some sort of spiritual successor to Burnout Paradise, the game of a motherfucking generation.

Lumines Remastered

It took me 60 hours of thumb-numbing, eye twitching anger and a metric ton of dancehall j-pop/j-house techno-beat contemporary, but I unlocked all the skins. It’s a shame I got so pissed at every last one of them by the time I reached level 100, otherwise I would’ve loved to make a playlist and run through all of them for fun. But I don’t know if this game is fun anymore. I think it may have broke me. Tetris Effect is here now and it doesn’t make me want to bash my head in, so I’m okay with putting Lumines Remastered down for a while.

Old Games of the Year

Pac-Man CE DX+

Let’s not mince words on this: Pac-Man CE DX+ is a masterpiece. It has been a staple of my GaMeR LyFe since it came out in 2010. Its rapid fire, twitch based arcade frenzy lends itself quite well to quick drop-in/drop-out play sessions. You’d think that it would take succinct, sober focus to really master the game’s finer points. YOU’D BE WRONG.

At some point during the year, I went on this little streak where the more fucked up I got, the higher my high score would climb. Every week or so I would get absolutely blitzed, boot up Pac-Man CE DX+ and bask in the glow of my arcade prowess. This whole thing most likely ends with me dying of alcohol poisoning as I plant my flag at the top of the Xbox Live leaderboard. I cannot wait.

Watch Dogs 2

Whenever a game like Watch Dogs 2 or Saints Row IV or Just Cause 3 comes along it reminds me of how much fun Grand Theft Auto used to be. Every GTA that came after Vice City just felt like more GTA to me, whereas the aforementioned games felt like they were pushing the boundaries of what open world games could do. The Saints Row franchise began as a GTA knockoff but eventually went so far over the top that it more or less turned into a superhero game (that Grand Theft Auto V ended up riffing on). Just Cause 3 was far more grounded than say a Saints Row IV, but maintained the massive scale while leaning on its batshit physics to keep players entertained. Watch Dogs 2 feels like a pretty good balance between the two; you can do some crazy shit in this game (hack cars, start gang wars via smartphone, drive some really fucking sick four-wheelers), but it still feels human.

A lot of that has to do with the cast of characters. The Deadsec cats are a fun bunch of dorks to hang out with. They goof on bad movies, know how to party and do everything in style. From the clothes to the cars, every customizable skin in this game is so distinct. I would award this game “Most Style” if that were a thing. Everything from the hats to the UI to just feels so slick. This game just makes me feel cool and happy.

The game does a great job of building its heels, too. They could’ve plugged in any old Silicon Valley techbro as a villain and it would’ve been enough, but Watch Dogs 2 does such a great job of making you want to see these assholes lose hard and get punched in the fucking mouth while doing it. Despite a few character beats that cheapen the story and some major pacing issues near the endgame, Watch Dogs 2 is a vital entry in modern open-world action games and promising template for the future of the franchise.

Garou: Mark of the Wolves/Waku Waku 7

Garou is my dom. That game owns me so fucking hard. Just straps it on and rams it right in my fat, shitty ass while I beg for more. I CANNOT BEAT GATO. FUCK YOU, GATO. With all of the 2-D fighters available on the eShop, my Nintendo Switch served as a NEO GEO for a good portion of the year. Garou was the easiest one to wrap my head around. It looks phenomenal, feels tight as hell, and frustrates me endlessly. So whenever Gato or Rock get done fisting me into oblivion, I tend to turn to Waku Waku 7, another game that frustrates me endlessly but is just so damn cute.

If it weren’t already made clear by its more vibrant aesthetic and fantasy-based characters, Waku Waku 7 has a much more generous learning curve than Garou and makes my ass beatings just a little easier to take. Whenever Garou was on the edge of making me punt my Switch into the sun, Waku Waku 7 would level me out, like Galaga would for Baldwin during his 80s coke benders. Me after a Garou beatdown is “gah fuck this, fuck you, fuck me, fuck it all.” Me after a Waku beatdown is “hah, oh well. Look at the cute purple guy/thing. I’ll get him next time.” It’s such a delicate dance keeping me sane.

Donkey Kong/Out Run

Two of my video game dreams came true this year. I got Switch ports of two of my favorite arcade games ever.

Nintendo and the port wizards at Hamster put Donkey Kong in the palm of my hand. Not the hacked up NES port. Not the Gameboy game from 1994. For the first time ever, we got the OG arcade release of motherfucking Donkey Kong. The first appearance of Mario. The game Billy Mitchel always cheats at. THAT Donkey Kong. They said this day might never come, but we got there fam. Now, we celebrate.

And Out Run! I can get cranked on my couch and cruise to “Passing Breeze” ‘til the lights go out in Georgia. This game still needs an endless mode, though. That way I never have to see any of you fucking people ever again.

We begin in our usual way, with a diatribe on kayfabe and the inherent beauty thereof.

The Shapeshifting Detective

Kayfabe is a beautiful thing, my friends. It’s a constant, calculated work by a cooperative of likeminded individuals hell-bent on convincing the world that it’s a shoot, brother. It’s a shared reality within another reality that thinks its invisible but is most definitely not. What fascinate me most are the cracks in kayfabe where reality shines both in and out. In one of those cracks, there’s a mass grave of WCW storylines where kayfabe tries desperately to reach out into reality. It’s the same place Jeff Jarrett built that six-sided ring on top of. In other cracks, reality reaches out to kayfabe.

When people are in desperate need of hope via fantastical, spontaneous escape, kayfabe reaches back. Sometimes it’s wrestling, sometimes it’s a good record, sometimes it’s a video game, but it’s always something you can’t quite figure out. There’s some secret to be found or someone’s in on it or you’re getting worked, bro. Dusty Rhodes happens. Daniel Bryan happens. Becky Lynch happens. And reality just kinda forgets that kayfabe is kayfabe for a minute and suddenly everyone is having the time of their lives. Maybe reality has been having a rough go of it lately, reality needed a day off work with their best friend and reality kinda just needed to get fucked up on a couch for awhile and goof on some shitty looking FMV game.

And there she was: The Shapeshifting Detective. I thought I knew what I was getting into. I thought it would be a corny-ass, cheaply developed cashgrab for some niche, foreign market that I could make fun of for three hours. Maybe it was and maybe I did. But for a while there, I wondered to myself “are these people for fucking real?” They were not of course, but that’s why I loved it. For a little while that crack in kayfabe was a keyhole instead of a wide, blinding tear. I waffled between “get a load of this ham fisted, up its own ass trash” and “this post-modern, meta-deconstruction of modern video game narrative is good, actually” multiple times. I didn’t know the secret yet. But as soon as I knew they were in on the joke, it didn’t matter anymore. We drank what we had, got our riffs in, smashed that screenshot button and went on our merry way.

Even if it was just some shitty/amazing FMV game, it felt good as hell to believe it was something more, some grand human ambition that damn near fell flat on its face but managed to bring itself back from the brink in its twilight moments. It was enough for me to just believe for a while, or to believe I was getting fooled at least. Maybe you’re afraid to believe. Maybe you don’t think anyone will join you. Maybe you think you sound like an idiot. Maybe you think nobody cares. Yeah, maybe. But I think you should get jacked up for the shit you like, even if it’s kayfabed. Dig for those secrets. Or maybe let yourself be fooled by them for a while. You should celebrate the silly bullshit you love with the friends you love. Get lost for a while. Take care of yourself. Laugh more. Be good. Play more video games. Especially The Shapeshifting Detective, which is terrifically silly bullshit.

Honorable Mentions

Tetris Effect

I challenge you to find a better pairing than Tetris and Tetsuya Mizuguchi. In addition to being perhaps the most recognizable and successful video games of all time, Tetris is a monument to simplicity and accessibility. It has endured for three decades under a myriad of incarnations but has remained the puzzle game that all other puzzle games are measured by. Who better than to take the most universally beloved puzzle game of all time and fuck its shit up with synesthesia and psychedelia than Tetsuya Mizuguchi? This game got people absolutely jacked to play Tetris in 2018. Tetris! In 2018! What a wonderful thing!

There is a joyous, undeniable spirit behind this game. It wants nothing more than to make you feel good. It wants to wrap you in a blanket and fill you with peace and love. It wants you to know that you’re not alone, that we’re in this together. It has turned me into some new age hippie asshole that I grew up spitting on. It wants you to know that through the universal language of blocks falling and lines clearing, we are all one. At the end of the day of course, this is still Tetris. I wanted more out of the VR component and some multiplayer would be nice, but a really great Tetris game on a bad day is still better than most games on their best day.

Dragon Ball Fighterz

I can’t recall a game that swept me off my feet as swiftly as Dragon Ball FighterZ. I fell in love with it after my very first fight. It is hands down one of the prettiest games I’ve ever seen. To say it looks like the anime would be doing it a disservice, because it looks so much better. As a no good bum ass fucking scrub fighting game player, this game feels pretty damn accessible. I have as much fun playing it as I did watching it at EVO this year, where god-tier world beater SonicFox took home the title. There was a time where I thought this game would be my favorite game of the year. Some other stuff came along, but this game’s moment in the sun felt pretty huge.

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

While I doubt my love affair with the long running franchise will be quite as torrid this go round, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate has to be the finest entry thus far simply by virtue of being the MOST Smash Bros. This is a finely tuned and fully honed Nintendo Product. It is packed with a staggering amount of musical arrangements, a fully loaded roster, and a king’s ransom of Nintendo history. It is perhaps the one game that every video game fan I roll with will roll with. This is most likely the last Smash Bros. I will ever really need. It wins no points for innovation, but goddamn is it a blast to play.

Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon

It’s en vogue for indie developers to play with clay the Metroid-vania template offers them, but so few bother to tap into the roots of the suffix in that hackneyed term. Considering Metroid (or more specifically Super Metroid) does the heavy lifting in that mashed up term for the subgenre, most Castlevania games are described as “like Metroid.” It’s true at this point, because “most Castlevania games” means every Castlevania game since 1997’s Symphony of the Night. All of this makes it easy to forget that Castlevania is rooted in pretty straightforward platformers that are ruthlessly archaic by today’s standards. While there was no shortage of 8/16-bit 2-D platformer homages in the indie game explosion of the 21^st century, most developers kind of skipped over the Castlevania tributes because… well, the Castlevania games mostly feel like shit these days.

Enter Bloodstained. In plotting his return to the subgenre he co-authored (the yet to be released fully-fledged Metroidvania Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night), former SOTN director Koji Igarashi and Inti Creates decided to take a stab at those pre-Metroidvania ‘Vania games with a prequel titled Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon, a wholesale ape job of the Castlevania I-IV formula with enough refinements to make the game feel (mostly) modern, (almost too) faithful, and pretty damn fun to play.

The mixture of 8-bit and 16-bit art bugs me and the way deaths/game overs are handled in this game is annoying as all hell, but the game feels better than any pre-SOTN Castlevania game ever did. For a $10 prequel that basically doubles as promotion for the main course that’s (hopefully) just around the corner, you could do a lot worse and not much better.

Celeste

I didn’t expect a tough as nails, speedrunner ready platformer to be the game I went to for a touching, relatable, authentic take on depression, but 2018 was a goddamn ride, wasn’t it?

Celeste is a brave game. It tells a story most games with quintuple its budget won’t dare to with mechanics as old as the platforming genre itself. It mixes pretty standard platforming gameplay with pretty simple but effective storytelling and lets both of those things evolve very naturally throughout the course of the game. You rarely see platformers try to pull off this kind of storytelling and you rarely see platformers this tightly tuned. It is of two minds yet so in sync. It’s design principles and narrative mesh in a way that pixel art platformers never do. It is without a doubt an indie classic.

Dead Cells

This game is so moldable. It feels like there are infinite ways each run can play out and no matter how it ends you can always adjust your play style to your liking.

A bad loadout never feels like a death sentence. Even if you lean on brutality early on, there’s ways to make up for poor defense or less than desirable secondary skills. If you want to speed run it, you can do that without losing out on rewards. If you want to take it explore every crevasse, feel free. If you want to kill everything or nothing, that’s fine too. You can get permanent upgrades to find more levels, or run straight for the castle and fuck shit up.

Unfortunately, Dead Cells stumbles in the home stretch. Each failed run feels more and more repetitive, especially when any permanent progress starts to plateau. As the game wears on and the combat doesn’t strike as hard as it did at first blush, I stopped wanting to spend time in that world. All of the art has a clean and crisp edge to it, but enemy design and environments feel uninspired. Attempts at world building fall flat with such a minimalist script. Some of that stuff was cute (primarily in weapon descriptions), but when the combat gets old, the mysteries behind all those doors were not mysterious enough to keep my interest piqued.

It’s just… the combat feels so good, you know? This game does next to nothing for me in the style department and feels pretty off balance progression-wise, but the fights just feel incerdible. There’s something about the way those weapon/skill combos feed off of each other like the cast of Cheers, in perfect harmony for maximum violence. I don’t know if there’s anything else I particularly like about Dead Cells. Maybe it’s all just stuff I put up with between brawls. Perhaps the same could be said of all video games. What is a video game but a miserable little pile of secrets? Enough talk, have at you, yada yada yada…scene.

Donut County

2018’s Soundtrack of the Year right here. Sharp writing carries this one through its two-hour runtime. Though slight in the gameplay department, I think there’s a solid foundation here for a more puzzle-based sequel or an arcade-y run-based spin-off. All things considered, Donut County was a fun little place to spend time. Points for Trashopedia, too.

Minit

Minit skates by on concept alone. Imagine if the item swap chain quest from Link’s Awakening was extrapolated into a full game but broken down into 60-second chunks. It’s an exciting and novel concept (at least in this short form) and is executed damn well here. I got my fill of Minit exactly as it met its end, but I’ll be excited to see this concept evolve if more indie developers decide to fuck with it.

The Messenger

I think it says a lot about how weird this 2-D action platformer/Metroidvania gets that for a while there I talked myself into thinking that it was maybe a secret Kojima project used to stealth promote Death Stranding. Or maybe it says that I’m a dipshit. But let me lay this out for you anyway:

-The story is about a messenger or deliveryman who has taken on various video game character archetypes over time. Ninjas, tomb raiders, soldiers, cowboys, things of that nature. The guy in Death Stranding is like a mail man for babies or something, isn’t he?

-The final stretch of this game feels like a flat out troll. The last level is so punishing and goes on for so long that it feels downright mean. Sounds like someone I know.-The story is ridiculous to the point of hysterical laughter. It’s as if they brought in the Cybernetic Ghost of Christmas Past from the Future whenever it was time for a cutscene. Rambling, incoherent nonsense plot? SURE SOUNDS FAMILIAR. This is an 8/16-bit platformer with a goddamn 13 (13!) minute cutscene. Imagine shoving a 13 minute cutscene that goes absolutely nowhere into the middle of Ninja Gaiden in 1988.

-It’s very preoccupied with death and rebirth, like the baby mail man from Death Stranding.

-At some point a dude in tactical gear and night vision goggles pops by, says hey, then dips. Was it Solid Snake? You can’t rule that out.

-There’s a shopkeeper that is filled to the brim with what are basically codec calls. You know who else put really long conversations in their games?

Basically Hideo Kojima shadow developed this 2-D platformer. Now if you have a spare moment, I’d like to talk to you about how the Rosanne reboot and its subsequent cancellation was a false flag operation perpetrated by the Obamas.

KORG Gadget

“It’s Drum Loop Meditation: the Video Game! Smoke weed in bed and pretend you’re the drum machine from Big Black! Tickle the digital ivories with your limited knowledge of music but penchant for mindlessly pushing buttons endlessly! Become a Youtube chillwave sensation in your own desperate, slowly deteriorating mind!” Well, whattaya think? Wanna play Korg Gadget?

Ending of the Year

The Hex

I was ready to abandon The Hex at a few different points throughout its brief six-hour runtime. For as many great comedy bits it has and how much fun it has playing with video game tropes, playing this game can feel like a real drag. The “hub world” is not fun to move around in, the puzzles can be pretty frustrating, and the various gameplay vignettes it breaks up into go on for far too long. Even my favorite part of the game, its grand Stanley Parable riff of a finale, sticks its head a little too far up its own ass. But then it hits the turn and it all snaps into place. Even if I can’t really admire this game’s execution, its ambition is admirable.

Best Writing

Subsurface Circular

I’m very glad this game has zero voice acting because the only voice I can hear in my head for the main character is Humphrey Bogart, specifically his performance in The Big Sleep. You sit in a train car as fellow Teks (labor robots) come and go and every conversation you have with them is an interrogation. You can be a smartass, a know-it-all, a goodie two-shoes, or a bit of each. What never changes is how sharp and snappy the dialogue is. Each passenger on the Subsurface Circular is so well defined and would fit so perfectly into framework of a noir film and each response to these characters help you define your lead character in your head. And wouldn’t you know I really wanted mine to sound like Phillip Marlowe on the brink of madness.

While the game is played entirely in dialogue trees, the tricks you need to finesse your way towards the truth are spelled out so cleverly through a sad, hilarious honest script. My character always had the response/answer that felt right. I had full pictures of what these other Teks’ lives were like and who their Bogey flick analog would be. There’s a bite to this game’s script that is damn near unheard of in modern games or films. The plot is fine and mostly inconsequential when compared to the straight fire the characters are spitting throughout, and that’s kind of the most fitting thing about it. Old noir films were never about the plot. They were about Bogey and Bacall flirting hard enough to make a nun squirt and not giving a fuck about the butler that accidently drove off the pier. This game gets that.

The Main Event

10) The Shapeshifting Detective

09) Dead Cells

08) Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon

07) Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

06) Tetris Effect

05) Celeste

04) Dragon Ball FighterZ

03) The Messenger

Runner-up

Forza Horizon 4

I’m not good at this game. It doesn’t drive like Burnout: Paradise. Despite this glaring flaw, I cannot stop playing it. What it lacks in handling it makes up for in spirit. Horsepower? No. Spirit. Spirit.

There is a hefty dose of driving game history in Forza Horizon 4. It feels like the culmination of so many racing game dreams realized. Not only does this feel like what the Forza series has been working towards for a long time, but also what Burnout Paradise and Test Drive Unlimited were working towards. There’s even some Out Run here, too.

There’s a set of challenges in this game inspired by all the driving games that helped shape Forza Horizon 4. You drive cars either directly from or inspired by driving games of yesteryear while the narrator namedrops the game and gives you a quick rundown of each one. The way the narrator gushes about Out Run and others makes it feel like they just let 10 members of the development team geek out over their favorite driving games and the various cars therein. As a huge sucker for developers lovingly rambling about the games they love, this was far and away my favorite part of Forza Horizon 4. While it might feel like they’re just trying to catch a nostalgic rub from old games in order to get a cheap pop, the whole sequence works because this game truly lives up to those games’ legacies. This grand experiment where a bunch of cars decked out in anime character decals share a massive and constantly evolving open world somehow worked out. It feels like they made a driving game for everyone without sacrificing the Forza identity. It feels like the best driving game since Burnout Paradise. Fucking finally.

DOOM of the year 2018

Hitman 2

There isn’t a whole lot to say about Hitman 2 that hasn’t been said about 2016’s precursor Hitman. The maps are all brand new, there are tweaks here and there, and it looks nicer. It’s mostly what you would expect from a standard game sequel and not a whole lot more. But this big stupid Rube Goldberg machine that is the Hitman franchise is such a reliable but exciting foundation. As long as the jokes stay funny and the levels stay fresh, it feels like IO Interactive could do this forever. For a while there, it felt like they might not. After Square Enix dropped them, Agent 47 was in limbo. I’m glad IO got their boy back. To see them top their franchise best again after the shit they went through with Square Enix (publishers of The fucking Quiet Man) just makes my heart sing a beautiful song about missing my dead mother’s secret recipe for marinara sauce.

Hitman 2 is a butt ass naked video game. It hides nothing from you. Everything you could possibly need is laid out before you so that you can be the absolute best assassin you can be. You can pretty much watch the game’s gears turn while in Hitman vision. If you know how to hold a controller and have the patience, you could go ice-cold silent assassin from the jump. Even the overarching narrative’s barely-there layer of pretense is relegated to the illustrated cutscenes and stays out of the gameplay. Hitman 2 shows you exactly how it works and then dares you to fuck with it. And boy oh boy when you fuck with it does it feel so good.

As far as locations go, I didn’t think IO could top the impeccable design of their Sapienza map from the 2016 game. It was gorgeous, sprawling, and brimming with secrets. It balanced out its space so elegantly, seamlessly blending its more intimate areas with wide-open vistas. As huge as that map felt while exploring each main area throughout the city, those areas always felt so tightly connected. And then after they laid out this masterclass in level design, they threw all of their best jokes on top of it, including composing a goddamn 80s synth-rock ballad about a man that misses his dead mother’s secret recipe for marinara sauce. I’m telling you, that whole level is a goddamn masterpiece. And they topped it! Twice!

The one-two punch of Hitman 2’s final two levels feels like IO’s magnum opus. From the pitch black humor of their suburban Vermont map to the showstopping finale at the John Wick: Chapter 2 island castle, the end of this game feels like the Hitman machine running at maximum power. It is the funniest, sharpest, most panic inducing work IO has done since the 2016 soft reboot. Sure, that’s only two full games, but this team packs so much content into each map that each one of these games feels massive.

I hope this game sells better than the first one. I hope these developers make a shitload of money for their work. I hope all their dreams come true. I hope they get to make Hitman games as long as they want to. I hope they keep making their Elusive Targets funny as hell. I hope everybody plays Hitman 2, because BOW DOWN ALL HAIL 2018’S DOOM OF THE YEAR Hitman 2.