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

Best Card Game: Monster Train

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

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

Early Access Done Right: Hardspace: Shipbreaker

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

Sports Game of the Year: MLB The Show 20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2020’s Nostalgia Done Right: Final Fantasy VII Remake

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2020’s Damn Delightful Game: Astro’s Playroom

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

2020’s Hottest Mess: Cyberpunk 2077

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Game of 2020: Animal Crossing: New Horizons

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