Sometimes a game can just sneak up on me, without my knowing it becomes a large part of my playing time – even if it is always a little too far from the front of my brain when talking about favourite things to play, or games that I come back to. For the last few years, No Man’s Sky has been that sort of a game for me. I picked it up when it first came out on PC and have played through it several times, usually when a big update came out. Unlike other games I regularly come back to, whenever I return to NMS I end up playing it far longer than I intended and it is often only stopped by me questioning the purpose of my space farming life and desire to try something new. With the new, very big, update releasing it was my thinking that a new playthrough on PC GamePass might be a quick way to clock up a few achievements to help with getting that free GamePass coupon. So, I got myself into a fresh starship and thought I would report back on the new mode – Expeditions.

Expeditions sets itself up as a streamlined, community led, game mode that sits somewhere between being a ‘battlepass’ type season of targets and an ‘arcade’ mode for the original game. Essentially the player is tasked with running through a series of goals and objectives which unlocks rewards, tech and story missions for them and some of the goals are tied into an established part of space the Hello Games team has mapped out for players to follow. This means the areas around the rendezvous points are teeming with other active players and bases when you are playing; previously only being on the nexus or a part of a dedicated community would let players see this much hustle and bustle in the game. As NMS’s biggest selling point is the sense of discovery, I’ll try to avoid spoilers for the new update outside of general points and things revealed to the player early on but also talk through my experiences with it.

It is at this point I should probably point out a rather rash decision on my part. Going into playing the Expedition mode I didn’t want to read up too much on it before I went into it, but I also felt that I needed a bit of a refresher on how NMS gets the player going in the normal mode, especially as there had been a couple of updates I’d not tried since my last playthrough. This ‘refresher’ ended up with me playing the game through to the first opportunity to warp to a new galaxy and clocking up a not insignificant play time in doing so. I wouldn’t say I was the most speedrun fuelled player, but I think I did a pretty good job not getting too side-tracked and focused on the things that would get me to the centre of the galaxy as fast as I could. It still took over 40hrs to do so, and by the end I had a considerable concern that I might have had my fill of NMS before I even got to the new mode. For anyone thinking of jumping back in, don’t do this! Expeditions more than sets you up with the various reminders of what does what and forgoes the various overlapping narrative missions that I have often felt muddy the progress of the game rather than propel it along. However, I will say that this playthrough put my brain in the right mode for wanting to have a more streamlined way to progress my explorer through their journey, it also reminded me of a couple of personal shortcuts and items to be trying to obtain to make my life that much easier in game (gotta love me an S-Class scanner upgrade for them Units).

Getting into Expeditions is much like the previous iterations, starting a new game gives the options of the three older modes, Normal, Survival and Creative but now with the added option of Expeditions too. The biggest change becomes apparent once the scrolling loading starmap fades away and the game kicks in to the (for me anyway) very familiar setup of “I’m all alone, my stuff is broken and I need to find my spaceship on this conveniently supplied and mildly harsh planet”. While the broken stuff and search part is still there, the ‘all alone’ couldn’t be further away. As I warped into existence and my PC slowly popped in all the details around me, active player dots were everywhere. So too were player bases, uncovered buildings and a bucket load of starships ready to be repaired and primed for take-off. The planet was teeming with activity. I can’t be sure if the player is allocated a ship, or much like when a crashed ship is found in the normal mode, the player can begin to repair any ship that they jump into as I hopped into the first one I came to without thinking to check. I then found myself back in the game loop of harvest, refine and repair, except this time three other astronauts did the same to their own spacecraft next to me. This completely changes the feel of that early part of the game, where previously the apparent isolation and independence is the motivator to get going, this version of the game feels like the start to the Cannonball Run (or Gumball Rally irl) everyone running to their vehicle and gabbing all that they can to get off and going as fast as they can. This feeling doesn’t change at all in those opening few hours of the game. The path to get those early bits of necessary tech, meeting the first Expeditions objectives and finding a path into the galaxy is profoundly changed when there are tens to hundreds of people doing the same thing around you. I was shocked at just how populated the solar systems in the immediate region around the start were, I know the game has continued to be popular since its release 5ish years ago, but I hadn’t expected it to still be, or even seem, this active. It was only when I was in the last quarter of the of the playthrough that I found myself in the more recognisable lonely space traveller role as I pushed to mop up some of those last few missions.

The missions themselves are a mixed bag of quests to push the player on in the game and I have conflicting feeling on whether they are more advantageous to those that have played before or those coming to the game fresh. As a player with multiple ‘completed’ saves under me I baulked at my first glance at some of the things I was expected to do – I felt the potential for a lot of grind there - but conversely, I could see that there was the possibility for a good amount of overlap where the natural process of progressing would incorporate quite a few of the required tasks. For those coming to the game new I worried that it wouldn’t be apparent that some of the questlines have multiple ways to get through them and several actions that would add to the cumulative totals that the game doesn’t explicitly explain, and this played out to a certain extent. In the years of updates NMS has had it has made it possible to get most of the key ingredients and blueprints needed via a host of play styles, some more time effective than others, and not knowing all these routes can cause the game to veer into the no-fun type of grind. Even I had a huge blind spot by not having ever really set up an underwater base before and the section of the expedition centred around gathering an underwater resource was something that very late on realised I could have obtained with only a fraction of the leg work I had put in. For all the improvements the game has added over the years the handholding it does is both too much and way too little at the same time – the objectives for progression pop up incessantly in the HUD but there is very little in the way to prompt the unknowing person to the fact that rather than doing a prolonged story collectathon you can find everything needed with a little wander around a particular environment type and visiting the odd landmark. On early playthroughs I would be the person that after a tiny bit of grind would look up a guide on farming this or min/maxing that – often finding it hard to navigate the online arguments over what does or doesn’t work – only to find out that while there will always be exploits the game rewards you highly by just getting out there and doing stuff. One specific milestone is tied to marking waypoints, which as a person who lands on a planet and then walks off scanning everything I come across, trotting from one building to the next, it was still the last-but-one that I completed. So, for the players who are much less planet based this might take some time, or worse push the player into something they don’t enjoy to just tick those boxes.

I got my final milestone in about 20 hours into the save, which was about a third of the time it takes me to meander to the centre of the galaxy looking over old saves. I think this could be done a lot faster given I faffed around underwater for much longer than I needed and completely forgot that the frigate missions are anchored around a real-world timer so had a fair amount of wasted time taken waiting on those. Conversely it could take much longer if someone ambles their way through the phases one at a time, and I guess that has always been one of the game’s strong points after the first update or so, the flexibility the player has on how they venture out once they launch into space. Once finished the game plays on as if you are in Normal mode with the bonus of the rewards and hefty amount of resources gathered from the process of completing the milestones.

This new way to deliver the content comes with a trove of quality-of-life updates too. The scanners are more user friendly, missions seem to be much better organised and linked together and there has been a rebalancing of the cost of some crafting items. It is hard to notice some of these things as the game has evolved slowly over time, but I guess that’s a compliment in itself to the developers.

Starting out with an Expedition might just be the best way to start out a new game, even if coming to it for the first time. What it isn’t though is a way to bring back on board those who didn’t love it first try, or those thinking they are getting a wholly new experience. It is still No Man’s Sky, it still has its distinct characteristics that will either draw a player in or push them away in revulsion, it is now just in its most polished, streamlined and populated suit. As there is a timed restriction for completing this and the Hello Games Update notes say future ones will run under new themes and with different lengths it does seem to line up with the battle-pass type of ‘keep people coming back’ addition to the game. With the need to start a new save potentially each time, I’m not sure I have the commitment to run these monthly, or even quarterly, but for those who NMS is their go to game (and from reading some community forums there are great deal of people for who this has been their go to for a number of years now) it’s a great way to keep a now ageing game fresh – ‘aging’, very weird to think that about a 2016 release but there you go.

As I said at the beginning, No Man’s Sky is a game I would forget, or not consider, to put on a top ten list of mine this long since its release, but I still find myself re-installing it and having a flurry of hours dedicated to it more often than games I would more frequently gush about. For me personally, the game still has a big and sudden drop off of motivation to keep going, something that games filled with busywork can be sufferers of. Sea of Thieves, Destiny 2, NMS and other live/service games will generally hook me in when there’s a new update, but once I’ve ticked a few things off the list my brain start to question what I’m doing it all for. Which, considering I will often finish one of these games to play Euro Truck or some purposeless job simulator says more about me than the games themselves perhaps. Either way, Hello Games have done a good job of continuing the “there’s never been a better time to get into…” with their game again; which they should be commended for, given how many other teams abandon or microtransaction the heck out similar life-spanned ventures. There’s not long left to get into this current Expedition but if you’ve been thinking of jumping back into the game, when the next one pops up it might be worth trying it out.

I get very influenced by the video output of the GB Team. I will completely forget how I might love to watch fighting games but rarely like playing them; only to see a clip of Jeff playing a Street Fighter game and I am re-installing every version I have, playing them for 10 minutes before promptly uninstalling them again. I love games, all sorts of games, but I am often made very aware there are game genres I should maybe reclassify as having respect for rather enjoying. But I still can’t help myself get drawn to them if I see other people having fun with them. Knowing myself this well has been a great help with curbing my terrible habit of impulse buying games, which I am thankful for given my current financial situation; but I still get the itch.

So, this year I’m going try to sate those itches with my unplayed back catalogue, which I think is stupidly big enough to be able to find a suitable replacement formost things, stopping my quick purchase of the next new and shiny game. My current itch is to play Valheim, watching the team’s recent Playdates have really made me want to give it a go but I know that my drop off rate with this sort of survival game is big. I tend to want to play solo, I’m never big on combat heavy survival and the dreaded corpse run so I am a little worried Valheim might not actually be the thing I’m looking for even though it’s the new shiny thing I want to try. Having a browse through my various backlogs I found some games I thought might be what I need to reduce the itch and found few to have a bash at. The first is Medieval Dynasty by Render Cube, the second is Ark: Survival Evolved by Studio Wildcard and Praey for the Gods by No Matter Studios, or as I like to call them, ‘Valheim with No Monsters’, ‘Valheim with Guns and Dinosaurs’ and ‘Valheim with Colossi’.

Medieval Dynasty is not Kingdom Come, which in my head it was, so when I stopped to actually read the blurb I realised this was actually more of a ‘Farming Simulator – Olden Times Edition’ than an RPG, which is why I’d passed over it so many times recently. It is still in early access, so I wasn’t expecting to get the longest of experiences with it but its promise of building a medieval settlement without hordes of beasts trying to stop your advancements, harsh biomes and bosses seemed to tick the right boxes for me. The opening hours of the game are unfortunately plagued with the early access, or perhaps lower budgeted, problems survival/simulation games can have. Poor tutorials, tools and their use not always being clear, very challenging to find resources, a bafflingly complex menu and the age-old favourite - doing many things okay rather than less things very well. But these barriers are mere trifles for someone as versed in half built and abandoned trash I got in a Steam sale because I didn’t read the reviews. And, after a quick restart once I worked out what it was I was actually supposed to be doing and where the resources were that I’d been blindly walking past, the game quickly put some hooks in me. The hooks of gathering sticks, chopping down trees and fetching all sorts of things for the local villagers was pleasant and the rough-around the edges but perfectly adequate countryside was a grand setting for it all. Speaking of the villagers, they are more like automatons in some knock-off WestWorld like setup than representations of actual people. Their speech is filled with knowing nods to other games and pop culture and I can’t work out if I like it or not. Their Fallout 3 level of movement and pathing is perhaps a bit more jarring than making a reference to a certain arrow in a certain knee.

The gated way simulation games tend to use to drive the player along does hamper the speed with which Medieval Dynasty progresses and while hampering the player can prevent them getting in too deep, too fast in other games in this one it feels too restraining. I think Medieval Dynasty would have been better having all the tech unlocked from the start, I mean the story basically says you already know how to do all the things you need to survive the world, so why hide it all behind a levelling and tech tree. I would have been happy to be on the route of, “if you can get the resources, knock yourself out.” For example, the player can only build one rabbit trap at a time early on. This is a low resource item, the avatar knows how to make it, why would they only be able to make one? Maddening. If I want to starve to death because I have spent all my time and resources on an overly ambitious house rather than gather food, I should be free to do so. All that said I ended up getting a slightly automated worker run farm going, was paying off my taxes without too much worry and was enjoying my time with it. Eventually the low budget/early access roughness was becoming less endearing and more frustrating, the busy work became more chore than trip into the woods or to the next village over, so I drew a curtain on my Medieval Dynasty.

I got a copy of Ark: Survival Evolved back in March 2016, which seems like a century away rather than 5 years ago, but I thought I’d wait for it to get a bit more spit and polish before getting into it. Only to find myself here in 2021 having never started it. As it’s on GamePass with a buttload of DLC I thought I’d fire it up from there – which is where the first hindrance to my enjoyment of the game started; with all the DLC the file size was over 200gb, which took me a bit of hard drive shuffling to free up and then took so very, very long to download. I was losing the will to actually play it at all with the extended time taking to just access it, this might be why I have favoured smaller (in size and scope) titles recently. I did eventually get to loading it up and after getting a solo campaign going and dying a few times very quickly into my adventure I decided I didn’t like Ark much. I’d never make much of a critic as I am perhaps a bit too positive about most games, but every now and then one comes along that even my ‘look on the bright side’ struggles to argue in support of, and Ark might be one of them. It’s a bit of a shame really as on paper this is the game 10-year-old me would have been dreaming of. The thumbnail has someone riding a T-Rex with some kind of space shotgun, it’s like they were looking through my childhood doodle pad. Ark has been around long enough for the major pros and cons to have been discussed at length but as my salve for the Valheim itch it just wasn’t doing it. While I don’t mind a challenge in the early stages of a survival game, I felt too punished by the opening of Ark. Two runs ended so shortly by a very large, very upset dinosaur right next to my spawn in and the other runs had me bow out by poor food management and not paying enough attention to my surroundings while I was looking for all the important things. Other games that have a tough start can make me feel like there is the need to approach something from a different angle, Ark just made me feel a bit like it didn’t want me to play it.

Ark is not a bad game and I can see for those more into the pressurised survival format this would be a great, entry but it was not for me. I also found its aesthetic not really doing it for me either, particularly the menus and UI, not sure what it is exactly but they just look off – like going back to early 360/PS3 era games and being reminded how much work there was still to do regarding UI design in complex modern open world games. It would be safe to say Ark did nothing to hold back the itch, if anything had I been in a situation where I could have scraped together the funds for it, I’d have gone and got Valhiem there and then.

Now, I had been confident that Ark was going to be the game that would have been the fist punch to the air moment of my new joyous survival experience, no Valheim needed! With it clearly not being that I dove back into my unplayed games and found Praey for the Gods – the Steam page checked the boxes of survival, Norse-adjacent mythos and crafting, all that and a file size and launcher that got it ready to play in minutes – big tick on the lack of waiting check-box. First, the rather terrible spelling of the prey/pray/praey is from an out of court settled name infringement so I shall resist throwing too much shade its way from that (and it was discussed on the UPF that Brad played this game on), but to help my gag reflex I might just go with PftG (which looks like an onomatopoeic vocalisation of what I think of the name anyway). PftG isn’t just filled with strange beasts, it is kind of is its own strange beast too. Reading the developer’s description on Steam, PftG sounds like the type of game that is maybe trying to fit a few too many elements into a limited space. The elevator pitch would probably sound something like ‘Shadow-of-the-Colossus-meets-Breath-of-the-Wild-meets-Tomb-Raider’ which, with the knowledge of the game’s very small development team, makes it very hard to not pre-label the game as a too much ambition project, or worse, a project that doesn’t deliver on any of anything.

I am very thankful to report, even in its early access state, PftG seems to have avoided both those tags so far. More than many games I have played in recent years it clearly wears its influences with pride and for the most part has done a good job of cherry picking the highlights from the games it is indebted to. The first giant is almost a carbon copy of the first or second colossi from SotC but it being there feels more like a knowing nod than a rip off and an excellent way to rapidly reduce the tutorialisation on the nature of the game for those in the know, and it’s a pretty spectacular opening for those that aren’t. And while closer inspection does make the game start to maybe show the grunts and groans of an ambitious team (the protagonist’s run is very reminiscent of PS1 Tomb Raider, which I both love the aesthetic of but also makes an otherwise very natural looking game take on a robotic aspect), it still runs and plays better than I think it has any right to. Which put me in the quandary a few hours in of whether or not to stop before I met the end of the early access and pick it back up when it more fully formed, but given how that went for Ark, maybe I should just enjoy it while I’m enjoying it. (Shortly after I wrote this the team announced it was very near to a 1.0 release so I have put myself on pause until that comes out)

To the matter in hand, did PftG make me forget the pull of Valheim? Not really, but it did alleviate the need to do one of my semi regular events of digging out the PS2 to play Shadow of the Colossus for a while. The lack of proper base building mechanic was the biggest missing part in its Valheim comparison but of the three games I tried this gave me the most pure enjoyment which I would have missed out on had I not been spurred on to jump on a zeitgeist.

As a thought experiment I came to the conclusion that if I had been able to afford Valheim, I am confident that I would have thought it fun, totally seen what the fuss was about and then dropped off it as soon as the level of dedication and teamwork the game looks like its asks of the player for the later stages got too much for me – the boos fights look a bit like a slog the more I see of them. It might have taken around 40 years, but I think I might have finally dropped the mental desire to grab a game when the cool people are playing it and instead enjoy something that maybe gives a tangential good feeling.

Oh, and for what it’s worth, the right answer for me personally feeling a part of the Valheim zeitgeist? Turns out it was Minecraft with some Norse skins and mods. Minecraft, so often the answer to every need.

How about yourselves? Any good suggestion for the filling the Valheim hole in your life?

Coming up with top ten lists, especially only looking over games of the last twelve months, has been tough for me the last few years as my time and budget to keep up with all the things I’d like to becomes less available to do so. 2020 has seen a turn of events that might have afforded me the time to try out more things but certainly not the budget to do so. Looking over the activity in my Steam, PC Game Pass and various other launcher accounts this year I would be struggling to make a top 10 of 2020 games because I can only find evidence that I played a total of 15 games from this year (and that counts games I might have owned in early access for an age too). I have had some great standout moments this year from playing games and, with the need to escape the outside world that little bit more than usual this year, I am all the more thankful for them. All following award titles are arbitrary ways for me to cover some of the excellent and less excellent times I’ve had while hiding from the global hellscape outside. It’s quite long, apologies.

Game I was enjoying the most before it started feeling tonally off in March 2020 – Division 2

Honourable Mention – Plague Inc.

When the Warlords DLC came out I thought I would finally give Division 2 a go. It had been a game I’d wanted to get into after getting a great deal of fun out of the first one. I got about a third of the way through the main campaign as the seriousness of the spread of COVID was starting to take hold. As I sat there with my headphones on, immersed in the ruins of D.C. each audio log and piece of environmental storytelling started to hit that little bit harder. Sadly, this wasn’t a result of excellent world building and the quality of Ubisoft’s narrative skills but just the creeping feeling that the world was slowly catching up to the game, except our version had more onus on toilet rolls. Very quickly I just lost all motivation to get back in the game despite my enjoyment of the gameplay loop itself. As I have gotten older the appeal of first-person real-world war games for me has ebbed away as coverage of actual wars became a 24/7 broadcast channel. I now fear that the Division franchise might be a bit unpalatable for me for quite some time now. And even with the ‘fight the pandemic’ mode added to Plague Inc., I can’t see myself reinstalling that in the foreseeable future.

My favourite game world to escape to – theHunter: Call of the Wild

Honourable Mentions - Euro Truck Simulator, Stranded Deep

Games that provide the ability to escape the outside world in the most zen-like manner were a high demand in this household this year. Many came and went, like mini daytrip’s to other worlds, but a few stuck with me time and time again. As all travel plans dried up with each passing month, taking the time to drive to some the places me and my partner had hoped to travel to and visit people in were achievable via the medium of the digital motorway logistics of Euro Truck Simulator 2. Never has driving through central Europe in the rain felt so exhilarating.

For days when the weather here was all too British, I would just drop into a bit of Stranded Deep and sit about on my desert island. Much like the winner of this award, I played the game all wrong. Rather than explore, taking the risks to get more items from the other islands to return to civilisation, I just got self sufficient on my one little island. My little shack, tiny garden and regular crab visitors kept me alive for a whole month before my avatar capitulated to suntan issues after a particularly long staring out to sea session.

However, this year my ultimate place to holiday were the varied parks of theHunter: Call of the Wild. I would rarely take a shot at anything unless it stumbled across my path, tried to eat me or charged at me with the intention to make me into paste. Instead, I would pop a waypoint on some distant corner of the map and just start walking and use my trusty binoculars to see any wildlife before my clomping feet, or occasional quad bike, scared them all away. In all seriousness, I think this is one of the best-looking games my PC can run and the only one apart from RDR2 that my partner will look up at and say “ooooo, that pretty” to. The fantastic variety of locations to take a walk in meant I played way more of this than I ever thought I would this year. I had savannah, snow capped mountains, Spanish farmland and many more places at my fingertips. I might never get into the hunting aspect fully, but the wandering has been more than enough for 2020.

The game the GB team made me want to pick up again – Minecraft

Honourable Mentions - Wreckfest, Kerbal Space Program

I am one of those people that is very easily reminded of the fun I’ve had with a game by watching other people play it. This year, the semi-imposed high level of watching GB videos old and new has meant a lot of reinstalling on my now mostly full hard drives. A re-watch of the KSP series very quickly set me back to wanting to get back to voyaging the planets. Soon I was making a poorly built but surprisingly useful rocket to cash land on Duna, leaving another “this-is-your-home-now” pilot in a far-flung place in my now years old science career save.

The ever-fantastic Matt Rorie ran a couple of Wreckfest streams and although the time-difference meant I missed them as they happened it did make me get back to the track. There were a few months this year where I’d while away several hours on a no rules server, doing terribly, having a ball and watching the better players lose their minds in the game chat. The ultimate driving game for the person who genuinely has little interest in finishing place over just making to the end. And, really well supported this year – good seasons, a rare thing these days.

A combination of one of my favourite series this year and an amazing server set up by members of this community meant returning to Minecraft was just one of the highlights of the year for me. Playing on the community server was my first ever online experience in Minecraft, and I’ve bought 5 different platform versions over the years (because I’m a mug). It was amazing – a really fabulous, organic thing. For me I went to the server to do a bit of my own build and have a nose around some of the other things popping up all over the map but I would just vicariously watch these amazing things unfold on the server via the more active members. Having the text commentary of a group of people venturing into nether while calmly picking the right wood for my arches was never tiring. Such were the hooks that the game had sunk into me I installed the bedrock version on my PC too so that I could easily just play with a game pad when my keyboard claw hand got a bit much. I will always be thankful for the GB community for that server and how it helped my sanity this year.

The game I really meant to come back but still haven’t got back to yet – Hardspace: Shipbreaker

Honourable Mentions - Main Assembly, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate

Those times where I boot up a game and immediately think, “this is amazing, and I don’t want to play it at all right now,” is more frequent than I’d like it to be. Partly down to my life and living space, playing games can sometimes come with no sound, a need to be able to pause without fear of in-game death and other general distractions. This means games where I know how good any aspect of the sound is, or a narrative I want to focus on sometimes have to take a seat on the bench until I can given them the attention they deserve.

I live in London but have seen very little of the city outside of the little area I live in. I’m not the biggest fan of wandering about the tourist filled spots but I was missing the sense of living in a city, especially in the summer. So why not have a go at playing AC Syndicate in grimy Victorian London to relieve the itch? Why not, apart from the fact that I started to really enjoy all the story gubbins which I just couldn’t always keep up with at the time. Sadly, it is waiting in the game inbox until I can get a better window of time to give it undivided attention.

Main Assembly got shelved and unfortunately gathered a bit of dust down to a mix of thinking that I’ll wait for a bit more content before committing to this, then not being able to have the mental capacity to get through an entire set of tutorial instructions without realising I’m no longer listening. How I will improve my attention span? I don’t know, but I need to before I’ll feel I can give the game the time it deserves.

I know I will love Hardspace: Shipbreaker. I have a fondness for mechanical job simulators, grimy sci-fi and the overused ‘space-cowboy’ ‘space-trucker’ tropes so this seems right up my alley. I started playing it, sound muted, and had a bit of fun working through the first mission. Having the opportunity to pop my headphones on I very quickly realised how much of the world building and immersive qualities I was missing playing it without the sound on. And now I keep forgetting to come back to it during any time I could dedicate to it, which is frustrating as I can only blame my own brain for that.

Hardest Drop Off – Trackmania Nations

Honourable Mentions - Destiny 2, Fall Guys, Animal Crossing: New Horizon

The games in the previous category never really got a good start, these are games that went from “this is all I am doing right now” to “I don’t need to see this again for a long while” in an instant. The downfall of having so many games at my disposal thanks to GamePass, Humble subs and previous Steam Sale idiocy is that should one not tickle the right brain bits it is so much easier to drop it and move on. The days of playing Dynamite Dux on the Master System for days, weeks and months as it was the only new game I had are long gone. This year there were maybe a few more instances of a hard stop on a game than I would normally do, but then I was at home a lot and the opportunity to sample more of the perpetual backlog was like those restaurant conveyor belts, temping me with treats as it scrolled along.

This year I fell foul to the JoyCon drift. Too expensive to replace, couldn’t get them sent off for repair so my Switch essentially put itself into retirement as of May/June. One day I’ll get back to my nice little island but not until I can stop my little islander from wanting to chuck themselves off the western coast at every opportunity.

Destiny is a game I start knowing full well I will fall of it very shortly afterwards so it is only deserving of an honourable mention. It is a game with so much I love in it but more than anything I’ve played has a feeling of emptiness so quickly. Once, where Diablo 3 could just keep those feel-good hormones flowing just with the prospect of the next bit of loot, Destiny just doesn’t. I genuinely can’t place the exact reasons why but each time I go back to it the same thing happens. One day I might stop going back but probably not just yet.

When I first played Fall Guys I was completely blinded by the fact that I was actually playing a Takeshi’s Castle game. The Craig Charles dub of Takeshi Kitano’s game show was surprisingly popular in the UK and its influence is stamped all over Fall Guys. I had a great time playing much better versions of the mini games I would try and build, badly, over and over in Little Big Planet. It was fun, the jellybean people are a hoot and (when it worked) the online was a great quick thing to dip in and out of. But the combination of the loads-of-hackers effect that steps up once an online game gets popular and eventually getting completely worn out by some of the events/races meant Fall Guys very soon became a “I need space, I’ll delete that” game.

The winner is a game I am very sad to give the award to. I loved the new Trackmania overall, it had its questionable design choices, but it was great to think there might be a more unified community around the game. After a few weeks though I was in the usual state where any of the communities still active were way above my skill level and there just wasn’t the crazy number of new servers to discover for new tracks. I will get back to this, but right now I just don’t need a continued feeling of inadequacy this wonderful, wonderful game gives me. Coincidently, one of the skins I made of a Giant Bomb show was shown on the Quick Look which made my bloody year.

Multiple run games I ran the most multiple runs on – Streets of Rogue

Honourable Mentions - Too many to mention

I do like a run and re-run affair. They can be rogue-likes, rogue-lites or those of games that get called rogue-types but in doing so seems to upset some groups of people but whatever they actually are they frequently fall into my regularly played pile. Going over my recently played list Rogue Legacy, Dead Cells, Spelunky, Ape Out and Enter the Gungeon, among many others, all got a short reprise this year. More than any of them though, I got thoroughly into Streets of Rogue.

Most of the multi run games I’d been playing had enough of an emphasis on skill that my aging abilities would often have me cursing myself after all too many short runs brought on by being a bit slow to react. Streets of Rogue, with its interactive mini city on each level, lends the player a much slower paced, if sometimes a bit chaotic, playground. From chloroforming half the population as the pacifist doctor to laying waste to everyone as a poison toting bartender it was great to build a run around the level of ability I felt I had that day. I’m still not very good (but then that can be said for most games these days) but it’s always more fun to be able to blame an uncontrollable riot for my character’s death rather than a mistimed dodgeroll. I also had a great deal of fun recreating the GB team as tiny Streets of Rogue dudes which is always a bonus to any game.

The 10(ish) Games That Saved My Sanity (in no particular order after Rocket League)

Rocket League

Hotshot Racing

Cook Serve Delicious 3?!

Hydroneer

Littlewood

Assemble with Care

Carto

Slime Rancher

Mini Metro

Doremon: A Story of Seasons

Red Dead Redemption 2

They didn’t all come out this year, some aren’t finished, some are really short, some are very long but they were all games that kept me completely captivated from start to finish. Each has its own little reason for being there, and RDR2 aside, were very generous with the warm fuzzy feelings inside. RDR2 creates so many conflicting feelings for me on its enjoyability as a game – some real immersion breaking moments – but as a European who is a fan of Western movies (so a little removed from the culture around the mythos of the Western, more a fan of the aesthetics) it is hard to not be blown over by its scope, attention to detail and the sheer lushness of the world it builds. It’s easy to overlook the flaws when the highs are so high.

When I look over the other games in the list there are clear schisms in those that take me elsewhere (narratively or virtually) and those that require my focus and concentration or my brain to be zoned in. Hmmm, 2020 the year that made all my mental faculties want to escape. Carto was my Spiritfarer (which I liked but didn’t really think as much of as others seemed to) of the year and finally getting around to Slime Rancher was a colourful hoot! Assemble with Care had a well-constructed narrative and simple puzzle structure lovingly presented while the ambient chimes of Mini Metro were the theme tune to many evening in our house as me and my partner would sit trying to out commute each other on separate devices.

Hydroneer gave me a huge piece of land to pillage the resources from, which I did creating a huge dragon-like hoard which would give me no end of pride (and CPU slowdown) – it made me look forward to further updates to it. I had preceded this game with a stint on some farming RPGs, with lofty plans to digest many more of these games it was not long before I realised my eyes were bigger than my belly and after four back-to-back FRPGs I needed to increase the variety to my diet. The charm and general loveliness of both Littlewood and Doraemon: Story of Seasons stick out as being two of my farming and gaming highlights. Having loved Cook, Serve Delicious the third game repeated that hard to achieve feeling of being both racked with anxiety and in a zen-like trance. And the food still looks so good.

Most of all this year Rocket League became my favourite place to just keep coming back to. It’s hard to believe a game I have played so much of these last 5 years is something I am still just okay at but the high player count means I usually play with people of a similar level so matches stay fun and competitive. The transition to free-to-play has raised the numbers of quitters but then the community has in general been a joy, a rare thing these days. When my two teammates quit after going 2-0 down 30 seconds in on a competitive game on of the other team joined me and we played 2-v-2. People can be really good at times.

If you got this far, thank you. It has been cathartic to write this, not really done one before, hence the slightly rambling journey. I hope you all feel safe over the festive period and wherever you may be I wish that 2021 brings a bit more normal to you. Gosh, do you remember normal? What I would give for a dose of normal right now.

Big thank you to the GB team, front and back of house, and all you guys on here, reddit and other places about the Giant Bomb world – it has been a big part of keeping me going through 2020.

The 80s were a strange time. As a person who grew up in that decade, I have a somewhat difficult relationship with the nostalgia and reverence for certain aspects of that period of time that creeps into modern media, particularly music and games. I got very into synthwave music a few years back, partly down to the rabbit hole that the Drive (film) and Hotline Miami soundtracks sent me down. I found the scene around that music interesting, but most threads and forums viewed or remembered the 80s in a different way than I did. Firstly, I remember the 80s as being particularly brown era – accented with the odd orange and green. Certainly not the Miami Vice-esque, perma-sunset, neon wonderland the r/outrun thread is filled with. And synth music was more often the realm of the not-so-funky studio/tech person rather than the personas formed by the new, new, new wave out there now.

The last few years have seen mass production line formed of racing games, or racing looking rhythm games, that embrace this imagined version of the 80s. Be it the drifty point to point format of OutRun, lap-based loops or even plain old avoid-the-crap-in-the-road type, there’s a plethora of amped up neon sunsets slapped on and shipped out for our enjoyment. And I have a boatload of them (thankyou random humble bundles and previous Steam sales). So, I thought this weekend I’d slip on some wrap-around shades, fasten up that clear plastic tie and climb into my unreliable and horrid to drive DeLorean and head off into some unfathomably pink sunsets. I’ll be marking each one with the clear and unfoggy categories of Racing (marked in OutRuns), Music (marked in Harold Faltermayers) and Miami Viceness (Tubbs out of five, I ain’t no Crockett fan unless it’s his theme music) which will rate the neon colour code everything in the synthwave genre seem to have to adhere to.

Riff Racer – I’d already clocked up a good amount of playtime with this. Riff Racer does that thing of trying to straddle a couple of different game genres and not really being a great version of either as a result. Its rhythm game portion is how it uses music stored on your PC to generate the track, the look of the level and the pulse of the game. Its racer content is a drift and avoid the stuff type of affair. The problem it has is that the controls are far too analogue in nature to be a true rhythm game and the generated tracks are too hit and miss quality-wise to be a great racer. Alongside this it feels like a phone game and as it was developed as an iPad/PC duel release that’s understandable. Riff Racer is soft and squidgy when it should be razor sharp and this isn’t good when the game is asking the player to do some pretty tight turning and weaving. That all being said, I really enjoy playing this game – particularly when using some relaxing synth music to generate the tracks. The difficultly drops and the pulsing rollercoaster tracks become great vessels for some focused music listening instead of a frustrating challenge. I shouldn’t like this as much as I do, even then it is one of those games that’s hard to recommend because while I get a kick out of it the plasticky feel will be a bit much to overcome for most people out there.

Racing – 2 OutRuns out of 5

Not quite perfectly functional, but not so bad as to be unusable.

Music – 0 or 5 depending on your setup.

How much do you like your own music? How much of your music makes fun tracks? These are important questions that Riff Racer will try and answer.

Miami Viceness – 3 Tubbs out of 5

Ramps up the Miami Viceness but falls onto the ‘maybe this is just Tron’ a bit too much.

Horizon Chase Turbo – Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge (a 1990 release but I’m overlooking that) was not only one of my most played Amiga games but one of the games from that time I played have the most in total. When I saw there was a spiritual successor/homage to it out there I was onboard. Getting back into a Lotus style game that runs like my memories of Lotus rather than how Lotus actually runs (which whenever I pick it back up give me a little nudge of how very forgiving most of my game memories are) sounded like an excellent idea. The controls were a jolt after the fluffiness of Riff Racer, as was the concept of a lap but that was an easy enough hurdle to overcome. It’s a case of the game having very much its own physics and handling balance and once that clicks, it all feels right. Horizon Zero Chase Dawn Turbo is a tight game all around and once I was in it, despite the lap format, it felt more like a prototyped OutRun game that was developed between 1 and 2 with some of the other un-numbered OutRun games. The first proper DLC for this, Summer Vibes, only echoed this influence by playing like an OutRun 2 cover version, or tribute album. The game does a great job of ramping up the difficulty like a good arcade racer should – I got a bit snagged up by the old hit restart, hit restart, hit restart when chasing those first places that got away from me on the last turn. But the races are short, and more importantly fun, so it’s not so much of a hurdle to have to overcome, that and the game doesn’t hide things away with win only progress. For a game that has a retro vibe but runs like a newer one it relishes in some features that feel so 80s/early 90s that I almost expected the single player mode to use the spare multiplayer split screen section to a pit crew animation or map to save on the CPU drain. Driving through fuel cans isn’t such a common feature of racers these days, but makes the game have that sense of nostalgia that is more in tribute of its influences than blindly following them. The soundtrack is excellent and is gifted to us by Barry Leitch, who worked on Lotus 2 and Top Gear (the console version/remake of Lotus Esprit) and some of my other favourite 16bit era game soundtracks. The span of the music, and the locations massively detract from a continuous synthwave aesthetic some of these other games go for, which is almost certainly to its benefit unless you are a fully signed up member of the r/outrun club. This is a good game, so good I squidged it into a blog list it barely meets the grade for.

Racing – 4 OutRuns out of 5, with one added Lotus Esprit

One of those games that if you come to it straight off another racing game it will feel odd but it is quick to find the groove again.

Music – 5 Harold Faltermayers out 5

I love this music – it’s not heavily synthwave (huge crowds cheer), but it is truly great.

Miami Viceness – 2 Tubbs out of 5

There are a couple of stages that get the vibe but this is much more Sega Blue Skies than anything else.

Synthwave Dream ’85 – I worry this game might have hooked me up to some kind of bitcoin mining program without me knowing it, that’s the vibe the game and Steam page give off. It is quickly apparent that this is an endless runner (driver?) style of thing with two settings, Dream and Nightmare. The further I got, the more I played, the more this this seems so… …limited. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, I love me some basic games – but this, at £8 ($9.99), one of the more expensive games on this list and it just doesn’t seem to have the content for the price. It handles okay, it looks alright, but it’s just quite boring. I guess there is a very fine line between chill and boring and Synthwave Dream ’85 just about manages to sit on the wrong side of that line. It was also the first of the games on this list I’ve tried that really goes to town with those broken, low quality CRT effect on everything. And I mean everything. They can be turned down, but seemingly not off. I am a person not too troubled by these effects but not being able to turn that stuff off seems weird, especially as it looks like it could be a nice crisp looking game without that gumpf on top. Which leads to the weird controller support. Some menus work with it, some don’t and that becomes a bit tiresome with how often they are a part of the playing experience. This with the other issue that the UI is muddy to navigate at times make the game’s quality feel pretty low. Conversely, the driving isn’t the worst, the controller at least works well for that. The music isn’t bad at all either. Good enough that I looked up the composer – I now follow a Ukrainian Synthwave producer. So, it’s not all bad. Also, my use of an image of the character of Ed Traxler from The Terminator on my Steam profile has never felt so right being used in game.

Racing – 2 OutRuns out of 5

The car moves and has drift functions but fun driving it ain’t.

Music – 4 Harold Faltermayers out 5

I’d not had Ukraine down as a synthwave creative node, but it seems it might be.

Miami Viceness – 4 Tubbs out of 5

Miami is made up of glowing blue lines and red vector mountains, right?

OutDrive – Ahhhh, the intro was so promising! Bad animation, in good way, setting up the fantastic premise of your car being connected to you girlfriend/passenger’s heart – drive steady, keep her alive. So far so good. Then I couldn’t get the game to play for more than 6 secs. The first 6 or 7 attempts can be levelled at me, I repeatedly used the controller when apparently there is not controller support. The rest – down to the game. I couldn’t work out what the dilly-o was going on, passenger dead, passenger dead, passenger dead, over and over. After a bit of a scour of the Steam discussions it first seems that I wasn’t alone in this but also there are definitely people playing more than 6 seconds of the game. I returned, tried again but still no luck. Although now I felt that there was a strange zoom on the playing area that maybe meant I was missing a key bit of information that was game showing me. I will return to OutDrive at some point but there are more games to try and not enough time for faffing.

Music – 3 Harold Faltermayers out 5

I can only really mark the music as that is about the only bit I got to experience. It was okay but by this point I’m getting a bit synth-by-numbers-ed out.

Slipstream – Do you like original OutRun? If yes, you will probably like Slipstream. So much so I am surprised the developer didn’t have to get some kind of sign-off from Sega. Slipstream does for OutRun, What Horizon Chase Turbo does for Lotus Esprit, it polishes your memories. I mostly played OutRun on a Master System, I eventually got to play a good chunk of the arcade version, but the 8-bit version was the mainstay of my Ferrari Testarossa Spider driving time (very thankful it was not on the Spectrum like my cousin had to put up with). Slipstream polishes up that 8-bit to 16-bit look to within an inch of its life and further ruins my memories of how old games run. Currently it also holds the unofficial framerate record for my PC , my slightly potato PC managed a 1000 plus frames a second according to NVidia (never sure how true these things are). Much like the aforementioned Horizon Chase Turbo, this is a game so lovingly crafted it’s hard to pick at it. It does all anyone wanting more OutRun could want.

Racing – 4 OutRuns out of 5

It is basically OutRun, feels good.

Music – 4 Harold Faltermayers out 5

Good enough for me to have saved it on Spotify.

Miami Viceness – 3 Tubbs out of 5

It’s there, you just have to find the night stages.

Retrowave – The advantage Retrowave has over OutDrive is that it works, its advantage over Synthwave Dream ’85 is that it feels a bit more like a proper game, but only just. What Retrowave is, is an old LED driving game simulator with added nice graphics. The gameplay is mostly what I remember from my off-brand LED F1 handheld thingy from the 80s – a stupid amount of really slow traffic and a car that increasingly speeds up until my reactions are not good enough that I can squeeze through the tiniest of diagonals to get through. In some respects, this game is quite rough but it costs buttons and for the price is actually pretty well constructed; it just makes some odd production choices. For example, the default driving view looks almost completely down at the road. So, the nice pink sun and all those cool lines are not even visible until the player alters the view – and the ‘c’ key does that, nothing on the controller. Aaaaaand this default view is even harder to play than the horizon view. It is all so very strange. However, there’s a nice range of courses, you can adjust the direction of the traffic, add some extra obstacles and even quite a short race will add some bucks to put towards a series of almost certainly not licenced 80s supercars. Would I recommend Retrowave? Yes, but for no more than the couple of quid it currently costs, it has a couple of hours’ worth of enjoyable play in there but not much more.

Racing – 2 OutRuns out of 5

We’re into the feeling of dodging rather than driving around things here.

Music – 3 Harold Faltermayers out 5

A good collection of (hopefully) licenced music, I just wasn’t good enough at the game to hear too much of it.

Miami Viceness – 4 Tubbs out of 5

It feels like this game was designed by some r/outrun committee.

Neon Drive – So these last three are primarily rhythm games that use the r/outrun look and vibe on a car-based skin, rather than actually being racing games. I started with Neon Racer which from the outset seemed much more polished product than a few of the other games on this list I’d played. The gameplay is closer to an Audiosurf style game than even Riff Racer’s racing-come-rhythm style. The car pops nicely in and out of one of three lanes and a combination of tetrominoes, and later cars, hurl themselves at the player in time to the music. At points in the level the view shifts from the more standard behind the car POV to a top down one. This makes for a sense of variety that some of these games have been lacking. There really isn’t a great deal more to say about this one, it is a good game that centres on a particular music and stylistic scene. Is it good enough to entertain those that are not in the scene? Probably not, but with this much neon and synth I don’t think the makers were expecting to.

Racing – 1 OutRuns out of 5

The car in this game is purely a visual thing, the handling is akin to Frequency or Amplitude.

Music – 4 Harold Faltermayers out 5

The style doesn’t waver much but it’s a well-stocked jukebox.

Miami Viceness – 5 Tubbs out of 5

There are no synthwave assets this game hasn’t used.

Rhythmic Retro Racer – While Riff Racer tries to straddle the racer and rhythm genres by being a bit of both, early access game Rhythmic Retro Racer splits the two types into two modes in the one game. Unfortunately for Rhythmic Retro Racer it is now a made up of an average rhythm game and a very poor racing game. The racing style sub-game’s handling is like Bambi on ice – it feels like the game is trying to find a smooth drifting style of driving but the levels are all out of whack somehow. There is a disclaimer at the start of this mode regarding the early access state of the driving and I hope that they manage to get it together as there are some things around this game that seem really interesting. The menus hark back to the Megadrive/Genesis Collection 80s bedroom motif and the look of both the game modes is beyond a lot of other games in this price category. And the rhythm game itself is perfectly adequate, which might seem like a back handed comment, but is meant earnestly. When compared to some of the other games I tried in close proximity Rhythmic Retro Racer has a bit more fine tuning needed under that glowing hood. Given the early access state, this might happen, that or it will end up in giant the Steam scrapyard of abandoned early access games that didn’t capture a big enough audience.

Racing – -1 OutRuns out of 5

By adding driving and making it terrible it’s worse than no driving at all.

Music – 4 Harold Faltermayers out 5

Synthy arpeggio after synthy arpeggio.

Miami Viceness – 4 Tubbs out of 5

All the glow and strange coloured suns a game could ask for.

Music Racer – Finally, the last one! Aside from probably ruining my love for synthwave music and the r/outrun aesthetic forever, it has been enjoyable cruising the various neon highways and Music Racer was a good game to end it all on. Feeling a bit burnt out on the random synthwave from the previous games I took the offer of using music from my own collection to power the level generator and re-calibrated my brain to try and ignore all the different control schemes I’d had to work through recently. Music Racer has a lovely UI, more friendly and well rounded in design than Riff Racer, which is cut from similar cloth. While I didn’t get the chance to unlock too many of the level skins to experience them all, their cover screens point to a nice amount of variety, albeit within the aesthetic most of these games have be gunning for. The handling of the level generation from the music feels balanced and has made the challenge such that the first run on a song lets you be good enough to feel accomplished but just keeping that perfect score out of reach without taking a couple more attempts. After a solid seven levels of weaving and collecting to some of the, frankly borderline, synthwave music I’d picked I felt that had I not gorged on just so much this weekend already I’d have probably lumped a few more hours into this. Maybe after a long soak in some acoustic instruments or maybe a shower of some stoner metal and then a long stare at a pastel coloured wall I might feel up to picking this back up.

Racing – 2 OutRuns out of 5

Dodging but in a driving sort of fashion.

Music – 0 or 5 depending on your setup.

Much like Riff Racer there are a few tracks to show off the game but it’s only really as good as your digital music collection.

Miami Vice-ness – 4 Tubbs out of 5

I have lost the will to write the word neon again.

With my journey over I feel I have learnt several things. Firstly, I totally understand why many people have felt that this aesthetic is overused and getting a bit hokey now, something I hadn’t but then had only dipped my toes into previously. I’ll still enjoy it, I make music that sometimes falls into this genre myself and I’m sure that I will return to that at some time but mixing things up is good for the soul. I have concluded I should probably stick to what I'd been previously doing, applying r/outrun style paint jobs to my cars in much better racing games. Which leads me to the knowledge that I plan to play a lot more of Horizon Chase Turbo and Slipstream. I’ve missed having easy access to OutRun 2, so they will keep me afloat until I hook up my 360 again. And finally, I have also learnt that having periods of time with restricted social contact, not having any writing work coming in and an underactive brain means I write excessively long blogs. If you actually got to the end of this, I thank you and hope you managed to have a much more varied game diet over your weekend!

So, a while back now I thought I’d start a series of blogs on here about trying out various faming games, with a leaning towards the Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons games. After having a good go at Littlewood (which has had some great updates since that blog) my plan had been to dive head first into Doraemon: A Story of Seasons. And dive in I did – I was up to Spring of year 3, and I’d written most of a blog about my time with it when suddenly the world around us all changed rather dramatically. Suddenly, my time at home, mildly enforced by unemployment was governmentally enforced because of a global pandemic. Not what any of us, save the most dedicated Bill Gates fans, were probably expecting and certainly challenging to prepare and live through. Thankfully, despite the financial worries many of us have during this time, both me and my partner has stayed safe and fed. Which, considering some of the other stories coming out of London, I feel I can count myself lucky for. But that isn’t to say the situation hasn’t had more than a bit of a shake up on what games I’ve been playing and the feelings I have towards some game loops, narrative subjects and what I do and don’t want from a game.

So, the original blog idea I had for my time with Doraemon was love letter to a lack of choice that game gives you, relative to similar games like Stardew Valley, and even other Story of Seasons games. The very prescribed layout of the farm, the reasonably ridged storyline and the enormous care and attention to detail into the look of that game was just what I needed after some of the very open RPG Farming Sims I’d tried before. It meant the day loop for that game was shorter, felt less of a race against the clock and gave the game an idyllic quality that is sometimes missing from games that approximate a rural life. Then a massive amount of my real-life choice was quite rightly taken from me. Suddenly my couple of thousand work paean for taking choice away felt a little off the mark. Granted, I was linking it to a good restaurant with a limited menu being superior to a crazy big menu all done poorly (I’m looking at you Harvester Pubs) comparison but the sentiment seemed very much against my current mentality and rather insensitive given the global situation. I quickly screwed my laptop up into a ball, chucked it in the bin, got a fresh one out and started again.

Then I dropped off playing the game completely. Reduced attention span, needing a break from a game that I’d lumped a stupid amount of hours into in such a short amount of time, feeling deflated as my oh-so-clever idea to talk about it was redundant – all the excuses. But I just couldn’t face it, let alone write about it.

I thought I’d jump to a similarly themed, but wildly different styled game for the blog. And, as if it came like a gift from the gods, Farming Simulator 2000-and-very-recent popped up on PC Game Pass. Perfect. I’d played a reasonable amount of a Farming Simulator games on the 360, I remember enjoying it, so downloaded it got myself to a nice South American farm and got on my tractor. For close to ten hours over three shifts it was great, just the palate cleanser I needed. I was growing, delivering, enjoying the not too terrible looking scenery and driving in many, many, many straight lines. I totally get why this game has as big a following as it does, especially wih the mod scene attached to it. It’s like the Gran Tourismo/Forza of farming, getting those accurate engine sounds, collecting all the “insert your favourite farming machinery manufacturer here” bits and bobs. I grew up in a rural area, I had my fair share of Britain’s Farming Toys but I’m maybe not quite hooked enough into the scene to put up with the intensely slow build to getting any of the exciting vehicles. The task of refilling, refuelling and unloading on the entry level machines is so frequent it really starts to become tiresome and the specificity of the higher level machinery means that it’s a challenge to work out the most efficient upgrade path. I felt like I’d been dropped into Souls or other tough RPG where every level up feels like such a stressful choice to not paint myself into a progression corner. So I quickly succumbed to cheating money, getting all the things and paying drones to do the laborious sowing, fertilizing and harvesting. I was no longer playing Farming Simulator, I was knee deep in Farming Voyeur 20-something-something and not enjoying it.

It came to me that I’d probably over estimated the possibility of this digital farming blog being more than a few words I’d written about Littlewood, which was frustrating given how much fun I’d had playing the game and writing the post. I had four or five games in the docket to do as follow on post and now couldn’t really face any of them.

Then came Animal Crossing. I know this is no farming RPG, but it hooked me fast. And, more importantly, it’s real time clock gave me an excellent natural breaks and made me feel like I was not just tethered to a ‘just one more day’ cycle Doraemon got me into. Now, a month on from its release my hybrid flower focus has made AC:NH my own little farming RPG with an extensive decorative side quest. And huge debt.

Getting into AC:NH and then writing this has been a cathartic time for me. It would be fair to say I wasn’t dealing with unemployment very well, but it being in that state I don’t think the social distancing/lockdown affected me as noticeably as friends and family suddenly without their usual daily routine. As this situation has drawn on it’s gotten tougher to get into anything, and just keeping up with the real life chores it a challenge, which logically is madness given how much time we’re both at home for. The amuse-bouche of AC:NH has piqued my interest into some games again at least (might hold off on returning to the Division 2 anytime soon though). The news and media repeatedly use the phrase ‘the new normal’ when referring to the post measures situation most of us will be returning to and I hope for all of you, this is a side step, not a worsening of the old normal. And I hope for everyone whose small escapes from reality with whatever games you love get back to ‘old normal’ soon especially if, like me, this has not been the time of a game playing renaissance that the teenage me thought a lockdown would be.

Stay safe all of you; and a big thank you to the East and West coast teams for keeping a very much appreciated bit of old normal in my life during all this.

2019 was a particularly rubbish year in our little house. We went through losing family members and job redundancies which pushed us into challenging times mentally and financially, which alongside all the other life stuff changed the way I was able to approach and play games – up until recently a major part of my life.

Having a high load of real-life stresses affects people in different ways. Personally, I get a terrible loss of focus – not great for gaming – and huge guilt that I should be doing something more useful, even if there is nothing more productive for me to do – even worse for gaming. So, at the bequest of my partner, I needed to get a few things back into my life that perked me up and would try and lift me out of my funk. Distractions from the wonders of navigating the welfare system and looking for work are important and being assured by my partner I was still entitled to some down-time I had a look to see what I might pick up to ease myself back into playing games more.

I have a thing for farming games, going right back to Harvest Moon’s eventual EU release in 1998. I had a second-hand Super Nintendo and no games other than Mario All Stars, Mario Kart and F-Zero when our little indie game shop guy suggested I get his only copy of Harvest Moon. I’d like to think it was because he knew it would be just the sort of thing I’d never try but would like if I did, more likely it was because in 1998 I was about the only person browsing his SNES section of games in his shop and he needed to shift new stock. Anyway, I got it and lost most of that year to it. When I got a GBA SP I bought HM: Friends of Mineral Town and lost weeks and months of time to that. Since then I’ve been snagged by the odd Rune Factory, 360 era Faming Simulator and later Stardew Valley. It’s something about a series of repetitive tasks, the drip feed of new crops, tools and things to do and, weirdly, an in game grind that I don’t mind all running together to make that “I’ll just get this thing done” feeling strong enough keep me hooked. I’ve fallen foul to a few farming games that don’t get the balance right and become as tedious as farming games sound to almost everyone who doesn’t play them.

So, when I was looking to find something to hook me back into a bit of mental down-time, and few of the more intense (or maybe just active) genres just didn’t help, I thought I’d try and go back to a bit of digital farming. I had played a lot of hours of Stardew on Steam before migrating to another boatload on the Switch (so as not to hog a screen for countless hours of sowing, watering and harvesting) and as often happens after one of my farming binges I got burned out on the genre for a bit. I found that I had a number of farming games accumulated in my unplayed pile on Steam so thought I’d pick a few and see how they were to get up and running over the next few weeks. To stop myself falling down the trap of just playing for playings sake guilt I’ve been suffering I thought I would look at the games against what I’ve enjoyed in this genre before and put the ramblings up here. Writing something that isn’t a personal statement on a job application is a mental godsend! And with that here are my thoughts on the first farming game I ploughed into.

Littlewood is unfinished. I didn’t realise that as I idly clicked to start it up, after investing a good few hours I thought to read up about it a bit more and saw all the early access notices and updates. Usually I would have held off starting it until a full release but now that I was knee deep in the grind I thought it might be worth seeing how an early access farming game worked without all the systems balanced and the game loops that these games live or die by not quite refined to full release standard. And, after getting to the end of the first year, it’s much less early access than I anticipated but still a little way off being a full game.

The first thing I really get from Littlewood is that it’s a game that seems to have been born from a Venn diagram of a number of other games. This particular one has Harvest Moon/Animal Crossing/Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past at the heart of it. It proposes that the adventures of a Link-like character have come to a close and it is now the time to rebuild the village and world after a destructive evil force has been vanquished. This setup also helps with usually inexplicable amnesia that all these games’ protagonists seem to suffer from and why everything has gone to pot, leaving you with the task of putting everything straight. The tone, backstory and graphical style draw from the SNES Zelda frequently and lovingly; making it easy for anyone familiar with that game to just hop right onboard the narrative ride it takes you on. The rest of the game seems to sit comfortably between the broad strokes of the Animal Crossing series with the slightly more focused aspects of micromanagement present in the Harvest Moon games.

While Harvest Moon and Stardew offer many things to busy yourself with, whenever I play them the largest portion of my time is filled with the crops, animal care and the mining/foraging. Littlewood makes these tasks important but much less time heavy in the day to day routine of the game. This is achieved in part by simplifying the process required for these jobs – for example, once a crop is planted there is no watering or care, just a wait for it to be ready to harvest. The game also changes the mechanic many of these games use to push things along – the ticking clock of the day and the stamina bar are merged into one single countdown. So, any activity that uses stamina moves the day along, any that doesn’t, such as walking about, talking to folks can be done with no expense to the day. This takes such a lot of pressure off the game and made each day less about a feeling “of will I miss anything?” to a much more gentle stroll through the chores.

One thing that has already that got me hooked is a simple Hearthstone-esque card collecting game that on the surface has a nice level of complexity to it. Any farming RPG trying to get a bite of the market needs to have its hook that the others don’t have to set it apart from its peers. Littlewood might have just that in this card game. I’ve not ever really engaged in standalone card collecting games but I got hooked into this as much, not more than some of the more common aspects of the game. If this becomes a multiplayer function this game could really have more of a catch for me beyond getting the village and farm all spick and span.

The grind of the game is pretty generous thus far – new crops, décor and items drop frequently enough to keep the player’s interests up and the other parts of the wider world that are available to visit offer a nice amount of variety given the early access status. Mining, forestry, trading and friendships are all present and correct along with bug gathering, museum donating and fishing – the cornerstone of any good farming RPG. The game never slips from being anything other than charming and the world is a place I found myself invested in making a better, and far more organised place.

There is a definite point at which the game reaches the visible walls and barriers of being incomplete though. After a busy summer season, autumn is noticeably barren of events and change. Winter seems much less polished graphically than the other seasons and has less of an impact on changing the gameplay often seen in similar games. Then there is the frequent “insert text here” placeholders for certain achievements and signs that bar your entry from “soon to be added” locations. The developer seems very open with the game’s state (if unlike me you actually look at the discussion page before jumping in) and from looking over the blog it seems the updates and expansions come frequently. However, for games like this where they hang so much on that drip-feed of content, it makes it hard to recommend starting something that you know will be much more full experience should it be given time to get to full release.

Littlewood was like dipping my toes into the shallow end of the pool before committing to an actual swim. In hindsight, had I jumped straight into a game asking for a much longer commitment to see through to a feeling of achievement I might have found myself giving up. But, as a way to limber up to something asking a bit more dedication from me it has been a great starting point. Should the progress on this game continue on the trajectory it’s currently on I could see this being a really great title for PC owners that want that little bit of Harvest Moon/Animal Crossing in their life. Maybe even to Stardew levels of appreciation – especially if it is as mod friendly as Stardew is. Hopefully the wait for Littlewood to get to a finished state isn’t too far off but even like this there’s a few good hours there of lovely game to maybe be enough for some.

I hope 2020 brings more good times to everyone, although it seems to be determined to carry on with the vein of 2019 so far. Personally, I aim to get back a level of normality and, hopefully, employment that makes playing a game a treat again rather than a distraction from the actual daily grind. Until then I am off to pick a finished farming game from the backlog to move onto and test out the chore-factor of.

EDIT: A week after this blog an update added load more events to the game - although still a little light on content comapred to some RPG farming games the events are better spread through the year now.

(Old Blogger blog from April 2015)

State of Decay has been a wonderfully clunky, not quite what it could be but still a great deal of fun to play addition to my digital pile of games that I hope that one day I get to finish. As I am unlikely to ever probably invest my time in the franchise behemoth that is a GTA game again it has been a nice alternative and stopped me having to return to Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare for a third time. Both Rockstar and Undead Labs’ games are very close to giving me exactly what I am looking for in a zombie based videogame barring the odd ‘if only it had’ moment. If I could go back in time to when I was sat in the makeshift computer den under the stairs tap the hunched over me on the shoulder and pull the Amiga joystick from my grubby mitts and say,

“Hey, stop playing Horror Zombies from the Crypt don’t you realise there is going to be much better stuff to come? In fact you will have so many zombie games you could fill your entire collection with games that involve the rotting hoards in some way shape or form.” I’m pretty sure that 11 year old would have jumped out of the cubby hole and spent the next 15 or 20 years being so excited about this prospect that he would have never slept again and as a result actually become the sort of shambling monstrosity himself that he longed to headshot to kingdom come in a videogame.

My love of the shambling, rotting flesh-bags started sometime between seeing staying up to see the TV premier Michael Jackson’s Thriller video and the between fingers viewing of Dawn of the Dead at friend’s house. This viewing was on a video that must have been a fifth generation copy; the kind where the shadows of the film have a strange static effect that added an air of eerie and ambiguity to any night-time scene. The slasher horror films of the day, which my friends seemed so obsessed with, and their supernatural, unkillable killers such as Freddy, Jason and Michael always freaked the hell out of me with their inescapable bad guys, to the point of putting a self-imposed ban on myself watching them. Zombie movies however – for all the gore they contained – never seemed as hopeless. I had always felt that with a bit of common sense I would be able to survive the worst zombie apocalypse the world could have thrown at me unlike most of the fools that populated the films. They became my go to horror genre and although now when I try to recall them my entire memory squeezes them into one big maggot infested endless escape sequence, at the time they all stood out as wonderfully diverse catalogue of grease paint and prosthesis.

So fast forward to 2015 and the ubiquitous role that the undead hold in the videogame market you’d think I would be covered in the glorious sheen of bliss at all the various ways I can smash the groaning hoards. Yet here I am about to unload my grump at them. For a brief moment a year or two ago I thought everyone had grown sick too and things were about to take a turn for the less rotten style of enemy. But the exponential success DayZ and other releases from the same time dragged them all out of their graves again. My displeasure at the vast majority of the current crop of undead hack-a-thons is not down to the a misrepresentation of the less than living stars of them. I am not a zombie fanboy about to start jumping up and down because the zombies can jump up and down, or pop a gasket because they use weapons, or even start bleating on about the disparity between the classic Romero-esque animated corpses and the newer sprinty models. For a start, these are entirely fictional creations and suggesting the blueprint set by one director in a couple of films is more than a little bit obsessive. Personally I don’t care too much if the undead are a bit more fleet of foot or are able to hold a baseball bat to help open a brain or two. It always puzzles me how people who get so upset about running zombies don’t seem to question how a body with no blood-flow can see, hear, smell and touch which they all seem to do without too many issues. But then what do I know?

No, my issues are more to do with the lack of imagination that the undead are used in the exceptionally vast range of titles they find themselves being the antagonists in. The sandbox style of State of Decay and Undead Nightmare are great exponents of recreating the way in which I had imagined myself in a zombie movie. While the visceral combat is key there is also a large amount of eerie wandering about, making often difficult decisions and scraping about for every last bullet and bandage. Adding a new member to this group of games shouldn’t be a sin, especially as new technology gives developers more scope to create more of whatever they feel is missing. I also feel the rotting figures work very well as the target of the players’ ammunition within a hoard style game which has been so soundly illustrated by Treyarch in their Nazi Zombie mode. But even this after a few games becomes more about the enjoyment of the arena itself than the enemy models being faced.

This is where I feel our (or certainly my) patience is being pushed somewhat within the whole ‘zombie as the bad guy’ game. As an enemy the poor old zombie is criminally unimaginative which is only highlighted by its overuse.

George A. Romero proved to film-makers that with a limited budget and small crew the zombie genre was an excellent way of making something that felt much bigger, a much more expansive film than the receipts and shooting time would lead you to believe. The film’s high percentage return meant that many others followed suit and tried their hands a getting some of those hot zombie box office dollars. While a few of these coat-tail riding flicks are interesting in their own right most are nothing more than cinematic fast food - cheap, bland, regrettable and ultimately unsatisfying. While there were many games featuring zombies before it, Resident Evil (and admittedly Doom with its reanimated soldiers but that played more in influencing FPSs) and its acclaim and success had a similar effect on the games industry that NotLD did on movies. Many zombie filled titles followed over the years some great, some imaginative if a little shonkey but mostly they were poor to average games hiding behind their rotting cover models. It could be said that this is a trend for all videogames but the problem is when the poor to average games sell in the numbers that other genre games can only dream of. Which leads us onto another reason why the poor zombie becomes so heavily peddled.

Can’t be bothered to programme complex combative AI? Use zombies. Your ambitious complex combative AI doesn’t work properly? Use zombies. Can’t think of a suitable enemy for your game set in the jungle (or any other non-military setting)? Use zombies. Can’t think of a suitable bullet sponge? Use zombies. Need some DLC but can’t think of a sensible way of expanding your existing story? Use zombies. (You are exempt from this last one if you are a certain Western themed game that I mentioned earlier)

Am I alone in thinking that the zombie becomes an easy excuse for things not being quite up to muster? Why does this enemy continuously walk into the wall? It’s a zombie. Why has this particular enemy not spotted me? It’s a zombie. Why is this character’s eyeballs rolling around in a really creepy manner inside their skull? It’s Assassin’s Creed Unity. Or a zombie. It would seem not only are zombies popular they are also very easy to pass the coding blame onto.

I am not suggesting we should invoke an undead ban in games, but just that videogames featuring zombies should be videogames about zombies. Stubbs the Zombie, despite being a touch short, was an imaginative attempt at being a role reversal zombie game. The Left 4 Dead games offer a situation where without key teamwork you will almost certainly fail, or worse, have to leave the stragglers behind for the greater good. Recently State of Decay has helped wean me off Destiny and get back to actually playing a variety of games instead of just chugging away at one. This is mostly down to the relative freedom of pace the game gives you. While many of the objectives have a time based window to do them in the consequences that arise if you don’t are more about living with the guilt, or the lack of a shiny new stick to hit the undead with than a simple fail state or end of progression. All these feel like zombie games specifically. There are a few others too that although I have not had the opportunity to play myself have read or heard good things about. It really isn’t all bad when it comes to zombie games.

But while filmmakers might have turned to making zombie movies as an effective genre to use their limited budgets this shouldn’t have to apply to videogames. In the last few years small teams and indie devs have shown that when it comes to games some imagination and time can create incredible worlds, wild and unexpected stories in settings that a filmmaker on a similar shoestring budget could only dream of (although recently homemade CGI movies are certainly changing the limitations of this). Recently I played The Swapper, Jazzpunk and Kentucky Route Zero, all small(ish) projects with very interesting ideas on the worlds they present the player with, and, as far as I have seen no ‘traditional’ zombies. I get that by slapping a lipless, rotting face on top of your bog-standard shooter or your parkour simulator will shift those extra few copies but they won’t make it a better game. And isn’t that what creators and consumers alike are looking to achieve, better games. The potential for imagination within games is limitless so why are we continually clipping our wings with a shoehorned walking corpse.

Of course if we just replaced all the zombies with aliens or robots I’d be happier but then that’s what you get from growing up on a diet of 2000AD. Of course, zombie alien robots are fine.

(Moving posts over from Blogger to here. This is from Feb 2105.)

Two weeks, five days, twelve hours and a handful of minutes. That figure was the total amount of playing time I clocked up on the Gamecube version of Timesplitters 2. I was confronted with that figure when I thought I would take advantage of a rare day when I got the chance to break out one of the old consoles to try and remind myself of the golden age of my gaming life. Granted the figure is far below what I see people clocking up on DOTA 2 via my Steam account or other such time sinks but was still enough to knock me back into my seat.

I looked through my recent forays into games to see what the modern me had clocked up in comparison. Bungie, in all their worldly wisdom, have a rather in depth collection of data for Destiny which is where I have spent most of my recent digital vacation time so I headed on over to my profile. A discussion of the high and lows of my life within Destiny are large enough to warrant their own article but regardless of that it is unquestionably the game I have played the most in the last 6 months or so and yet when I saw the figures I saw that I had barely scraped into three days of continuous play. I was taken aback. I questioned whether the rather large amount of time waiting in lobbies was being counted but then as I didn’t ever play Timesplitters 2 outside of a same screen local multiplayer it would be just as fair if it isn’t factored in. The strange thing is, I wouldn’t have ever counted Timesplitters 2 as being the most played game I had at the time. I played it quite a lot but looking back I know I ploughed much more of my time into Halo: CE, Metroid Prime and Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker (and probably more) than I did Free Radical’s time traveling FPS. Currently, I feel that all I do is play Destiny. Sure, I dabble a bit in Minecraft when I get the Lego itch and there are a few other games I’ve started to see what they are like but not seen through to completion. This made me really think about what I was doing then to have so much time available to achieve such gaming hours and yet still function as a human being that I don’t seem able to do now.

I should point out that during this period of the 128bit console releases I had not long left university and was in a reasonably interesting full time job. Thankfully I no longer have access to the game files for the systems I had while studying as I fear the hours clocked up while there would give my brain even more problems on how I managed to fit so much controller based entertainment into the week. Although, if I did, I could fully explain the lacklustre mark I got at the end of my university career. On the surface the me at the start of the 21^st Century was not much different to the me of now. If anything, aside from working full time and being in a relationship I would even say that I socialised more then and had the time to play Sunday League Football every week. Yet past-times me was racking up the finished and replayed games at rate which I couldn’t even buy them at now. What happened? Am I just a big gaming flake?

A great deal has happened and not just to me. In particular, the games industry changed enormously. The internet got broader, options got vaster and the entire history of games got bundled up and made available to those who wanted it. All this in little more than 13 years. And despite on the surface feeling no different to the me who was venturing through his twenties, the late thirties me is a catalogue of worries and brain-freezes that seem to be common amongst almost everyone I know of my age. So while I fit into the tail end of the largest game buying demographic and consider myself an ardent gamer I’m clearly doing it wrong. So where am I going wrong?

So I did a little comparison of playing in the 2000s to the present by doing time log of an evening playing Destiny.

It read as follows:

1700 – Powered up 360

1701 – Looked through current Gold member offers

1709 – Wait while unnecessary and probably unaffordable purchase of a game I probably won’t play downloaded.

1715 – Think ‘while this is downloading I shall check on the slow cooker’ even though I have no need to as it is a slow cooker.

1720 – Select Destiny.

1723 – Get through the selection menus to the menu that lets you pick an actual part of the playing part of the game.

1727 – See who else is playing and then wait for them to finish their Crucible match to join up.

1735 – Find out they were about to log off have a chat about the price of DLC and whether it is value for money.

1745 – Go back to the selection screen, decide that I don’t fancy the daily heroic so have a browse around before going back to the character select screen to pick another save game to play. ‘Surely I will have more to do with a lower level player’ I think.

1750 – Start a story mission too high to play with my Level 6 Warlock get two thirds through and then die continuously until I eventually give up.

1805 – Go back to the menu screen and go back to a higher level character.

1808 – Select Crucible match.

1813 – Actually start a crucible match.

1817 – Leave Crucible match to answer the door.

1823 – Make a cup of tea for the visitor who shows an interest in playing Destiny. No local multiplayer means I get to watch them play.

1910 – Visitor leaves and prompting me to shut down 360 to have some dinner and actual real life interaction with my partner.

1940 – Turn 360 back on and reload Destiny.

1943 – Go straight to Crucible selection screen and try to actually start playing.

2010 – Everyone else who resides in the same block of flats as me decides now is the time to use their internet too thus rendering my data speed to a trickle and as a result convert my online game into a strange series of events that mostly involves other players glitching through time and space. Give up on Destiny.

2015 – Start browsing games to look for an alternative thing to play.

2045 – Come to the conclusion that everything I own is either too long, needs someone else or isn’t what I fancy right now.

2046 – Start the browsing again because I can’t believe amongst all those games I can’t find one to play.

2056 – Come to the same conclusion I had ten minutes previously.

2100 – Give up and start watching the news.

Compare this to a time log of me in 2002.

1700 – Turn on Gamecube.

1701 – Start playing Timespitters 2.

0200 – Realise I have to be in work in less than 6 hours and so turn off Timesplitters 2.

I do feel a bit bad using Destiny as the example as it is not the only culprit of this problem but it has been the most recent offender of prolonged menu viewing. This is mainly down to me only ever electing to play it in the vague hope I will one day get an Exotic Hand Cannon, which seemingly has the same likelihood of a positive outcome as buying lottery tickets instead of working to earn money would have. Sure it’s a nice chance to chat with your fireteam members over such interesting topics such as the loot we’ve not yet got, the stress of finding relic iron and why the eff I have still not managed to get any kind exotic bounties yet.

The thing is, it isn’t just the drawn out process of getting to start an online only game that is slowing things up in terms of actual game time consoles and PCs provide so much more other things than they ever did before. Upon turning the machine on we are bombarded by a series of links and adverts for other products we might be interested in. I realise that I am a sucker for this, perhaps a bit more than most, but surely I am not alone in pining for the days when slotting a disc or cartridge into a system almost certainly meant going straight into the game when powering up. I think I have spent more time browsing what I could buy on Steam than using it as a hub to start playing a game.

Maybe I am a bit of a relic now and I need to adjust to a changing marketplace. But it also explains my reluctance to purchase any of the current generation of consoles (or upgrade my PC). Added fidelity and even more space to make games larger than the ones I already found too large to complete anyway just aren’t enough to convince me to make the jump. I use the, “I can’t justify the spending.” line when asked but I haven’t ever really been able to afford any of the consoles I’ve owned but when you really want something you make the effort. I can’t ever say I would want retire as a ‘gamer’ but by not staying up-to-speed with the current platforms I fear I might give off that impression to those that do.

Strangely it is quite apt that it was the Gamecube version of Timesplitters 2 that I used as reference, as in that particular generation of consoles Nintendo’s little purple box was the first I got a hold of (not counting a brief fling with the Dreamcast that went no further than a quick cuddle before Sega neutered it). By the end of that round of console births I had a PS2 and Xbox but always favoured the Nintendo line-up more. Now, having had a Microsoft and Sony themed front room for nearly a whole decade for the first time in all that time I am tempted by a Nintendo home console. The Wii U for all its failings and questionable time of continued support seems to be the only console of the generation that seems to be about playing games and not taking over my entire entertainment setup. That and the fact that Mario Kart 8 plays like a dream and the upcoming Legend of Zelda game looks quite special might push me the closest to buying a new system since 2008.

However, if I decide to work my way through my backlog of games on the 360, PS3 and Steam it could be 2025 before I get around to getting one.