Ed Zitron is the CEO of PR firm EZPR, and he loves to play games to forget about work.
Hello everyone! This is my first top 10 list for Giant Bomb, and this has been an especially peculiar year for gaming for me, in that it was the first I can think of where I didn’t necessarily love ten games, and hated several major releases (Doom Eternal and Spider-Man: Miles Morales). But for the most part, the games I loved I absolutely fell head over heels for.
10. Animal Crossing: New Horizons
I listed this game not because I think it’s great--in fact, I think it’s got the worst user interface in a game anywhere in existence--but because of the experience I had playing it with other people. I cannot think of a game I’ve ever played with my nephew, half of my friends, my wife, her friends, my family, her family--everyone! Everyone wanted to play this, they all wanted to trade fruits and do the turnip exchange and try and make more bells to upgrade the house. It absorbed my life for an entire month, and then disappeared like it had never been there. Amen.
9. Fuser
I love Harmonix, even if they never gave me Rock Band: Queens of the Stone Age. Fuser is probably one of the weirdest games anyone has ever made, let alone Harmonix, and it’s incredibly endearing as a result. It’s basically a mashup simulator, with you dropping in parts of songs (vocals, drums, guitars, etc.) constantly, trying to match up the beats and fucking around with the timing of the songs. You can truly make some monstrosities--it features Smash Mouth’s "All Star", Rage Against the Machine’s "Killing in the Name Of", LMFAO’s "Party Rock Anthem", Dolly Parton’s "Jolene", just to name a few. It’s a nightmare machine, but there’s so much going on under the hood that it always makes the songs fit. There have been several moments in the game where I’ve laughed with actual, real-ass joy at how well something blended--the guitars off "Killing in the Name Of" work in a lot of places--and then at the actual comedy of any Smash Mouth song. Please play this game. It’s so good. I want more songs.
8. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2
Going to go ahead and preemptively apologize for the sheer number of remakes on this list, starting with this one. THPS is a game that rocks because it knows that you want to play a video game, and does not try and make you pretend otherwise. This is a very straightforward update, adding manuals to the game (were they always there? Where are my pills?), graphical updates (obviously) and a few new objectives. But that’s fine. This game has always been good. All it needed was updating. And here it is. Except they removed Alley Life’s "Out with the Old", which is a crime, and everyone involved has now been arrested and imprisoned.
7. Maneater
This was my surprise top 10 game of the year. It takes a little bit of time to get going, but the mechanics of Maneater are so good--it’s so fun saying “I’m The Big Shark” and eating things and levelling up your shark. It doesn’t pretend to be deep, it doesn’t pretend to be a huge story, it’s just fun. You are a big shark that eats people and the people scream, and Chris Parnell gives glib reality TV-style voiceovers the entire time. It’s very funny, very enjoyable, a really fun goof and a spoof on the whole open world genre.
6. Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered
I didn’t like Spider-Man: Miles Morales--it felt hollow and off somehow, at a mechanical level, to the point that I immediately started the PS5 remaster of the original Spider-Man from PS4. The reason that Morales didn’t work for me was that it didn’t feel like you were Spider-Man--you were doing electro-punches and constantly having to kick guys with guns on different buildings. However, the original Spider-Man rocked, and the graphical flare that the remaster adds is significant to the point that it feels like a totally different game. They apparently also remastered the faces of everyone too, which is cool, but for the most part the ray tracing and high resolution and all that just added a huge layer of wow factor that makes me want to just swing around constantly.
5. Ghost of Tsushima
I was shocked by how much I enjoyed Ghost, but got it off of a strong recommendation from a buddy. While the story is a little bit cheesy, it really is one of the best open world games I’ve ever played. The best open world games reward you for investing in the systems and exploring the world, and Ghost continues to do that even if you completely and utterly avoid the main storyline (which I still enjoyed). At some point about halfway through I did become a little too powerful, to the point that it was almost impossible to die (I guess I could’ve upped the difficulty), but there is something to the power fantasy of becoming The Ultimate Samurai.
4. MLB The Show 20
I never thought I’d write how much I enjoyed a baseball RPG, but The Show 2020 has really improved the single-player Road To The Show mode that has you building relationships with your fellow players (and rivals) as you play the game. It’s still what you buy The Show for--a good-looking and technically marvelous baseball simulator--but adds the ability to fuck with other players to raise certain attributes, adds in boss challenges (challenging batters or pitchers) and rewards to go with it. I never touch the rest of this game and it could all be awful, but I will always put 30+ hours into the baseball RPG to level up my stats.
3. Demon's Souls
Demon’s Souls feels like more than just a graphical upgrade. It’s smoother, you can move in more directions, the menus are significantly improved, and the loading times change how you feel about deaths--they suck, there were two times I threw my controller (5-1 and 5-2), but you don’t hate yourself as much as you would when the loading screen was 30 seconds long. The remake’s speed and fluidity really enhance the fact that, deep down, a lot of Demon’s Souls is a puzzle--finding the right combination of moves to get through a particular bit to move onto the next one. It looks great, it feels great, yet retains everything that I loved about it the first time.
2. Final Fantasy VII Remake
I had wondered if my nostalgia might get the better of me with Final Fantasy VII remake. I loved the original, and thought that I’d be willing to forgive a lot in this game if they made it well enough that it hit the right buttons in my brain. Sure, it did that, but it also told a cohesive and new story, and has the single best combat I’ve ever played in an RPG, to the point that I resented the game at times for not giving me more chances to fight things. It’s so rewarding and fun.
It also features some of the best narrative movement in gaming, especially in the music. They’ve got what sounds like a fully or partially orchestrated remake of the original’s soundtrack, but what FF7:R does with music goes beyond that--it constantly flows around what you’re doing, timing in and out of combat like a well-made TV score. It’s beautiful, moving and engrossing, and doesn’t rely on you to remember the source material. I also really like where they’re taking the story. The whole game feels refreshing after movies and TV entirely focused themselves on subverting expectations--it knows what you want, and it gives it to you.
1. Hades
I was astounded by Hades. It’s beautifully-made, visually and aurally, clearly made with an immense amount of love and care in a way that you just don’t see with games. And that might have usually made me be a little kinder on the mechanics, if it wasn’t for the fact that Supergiant has become the first and only company to ever create a game that does Diablo better than Diablo. The rich roguelike system is so well-tuned, so rewarding, so perfectly executed that I ended up doing about 50 full clears of the game on both Switch and PC. I cannot express in words how good Hades is. I can’t think of another game that had such beautiful presentation and tight mechanics.