Best Games of 2020 (That I played)

 Its New Years goddamn Day and therefore it's time to look back at all the stuff I played last year and pick a few games to say a short few things about.  Before I get into it though let me just make clear that this is not a "best games of 2020 list", this is a random assortment of shit of games that I PLAYED LAST YEAR.  Meaning stuff I talk about might not be from 2020, I just played it in 2020

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Lets go!

Best Game of 2020

 Looking back at the list of games I beat last year, I didn't actually beat that many games from 2020 so I really have no choice but to give it to Final Fantasy 7 Remake.  While it's sort of annoying that it's being split up into a trilogy, the things they have done with the game play and story are, so far, good enough to have me wanting more.  I'm looking forward to seeing where they go with parts 2 and 3 after the ending of the first one and I'm even more looking forward to seeing more of High Definition Tifa Midriff

Runner up goes to Shin Megami Tensei 3 Nocturne HD Remaster.  I might have put it in my best game slot but its a remake of a game that came out in 2003 so even though I love it, it can fuck right off. 

Best non-2020 Game wot I played in 2020 (for the first time)

This award is for a game that I played this year, that was a first playthrough but didn't come out in 2020, and the winner is 

Challenging yet satisfying game play? Check

Killer soundtrack? Check

Built in counters for hitless/deathless challenge runs? Double check

Furi was easily one of the best games I played this year with its easy to understand yet hard to master game play and it's quirky bosses it pulls you in pretty quick.  Even after you beat it though, the extra difficulty level that comes with new attack patterns to deal with makes a second playthrough even more fun than the first.  It does an annoying thing where during the story you have to slow-walk between each stages but after the first play you can just select bosses off a list and avoid all of that so I guess it can be forgiven.  If you haven't played Furi yet, do it

Most Pleasant Surprise

When I first fired up Illbleed during the (still ongoing at time of writing) Horror Gauntlet, I'll be honest, I kind of hated it.  It has a weird brand of game play where damage can quickly spiral out of control and you can be left completely fucked and hidden traps that have to be marked before passing them can mean that at first, you'll be blundering into game overs constantly, but once Illbleed clicks, it becomes a really enjoyable experience.  With its absolutely bonkers plot about a killer theme park and terrible voice acting you're not only in for a challenging "horror" game but an absolute laugh riot to boot 

Worst Game of 2020

2020 was a special year for me, because Outlast 2 wasn't just the worst game I played that year, it was the worst game I have ever played IN. MY. LIFE.  

Takeshis Challenge, Super/Virtual Hydlide, Action 52 or any other shitty game you care to mention PALE in comparison to the absolute train wreck that is Outlast 2.  I plan to do a longer article about this absolute shit show but to summarize, Outlast 2 is a poorly written, poorly designed "horror" game that relies on nothing more than cheap shock value which will leave you frustrated and angry rather than terrified.  The first game was already a gigantic pile of shit and Red Barrels really outdid themselves on this one.  

Do no play Outlast 2, stay well away.  I could write a dissertation on everything that's wrong with this one and that's what I plan to do but until then just don't play it, don't even think about it.  Some people say that playing video games is a waste of life, and while I don't agree with that sentiment at all, I think that they may have a point when it comes to this one.

Runner up goes to shitty, generic open world zombie game Days Gone for being a boring buggy mess, but still leagues better than Outlast 2

Serious Sam: The Second Encounter HD

 

Recently I finished Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter and I wasn't really planning to write anything about it because who gives a shit about Serious Sam in 2020?  But upon putting the game up on my Twitter as part of a tweet train tracking my game clears over the course of the coming year, it got a bunch of positive feedback on it.  People saying how much they remember enjoying playing the game and I'm nothing short of completely baffled by the comments.

To start off, I enjoyed First Encounter quite a bit.  It wasn't anything special but it was fun, fast paced, had fun weapons and some decent-ish level design.  The kind of game that you can just fire up, switch your brain off and shoot things.  When I finished the first game I quickly jumped into the follow up expecting more of the same and while it is sort of more of the same the game is just kind of lacking and ended up feeling like a boring slog more than a fun murder romp though fantastical settings.  

At its core, it really is just more of the same thing as the first game.  Lot's of running around, shooting monsters and finding trinkets to open doors that lead to more monsters for you to shoot with your fun array of weapons.  But The Second Encounter is extremely lacking in its level design and it has exactly one trick up its sleeve to try and kill you that it uses over and over and over again for it's entire playtime 

Every single level in The Second Encounter is just a big room, usually square, sometimes rectangular and if the developers were feeling particularly mean they might put you in a corridor.  Upon entering the room, you will quickly notice an exit on the other side and as you are crossing it the game will spawn in enemies for you to shoot and the door will not open, in most cases, until all those enemies are dead.  Now when I say the game spawns in enemies, I mean A LOT of enemies, it can easily feel like hundreds per area depending on the type of enemy they decide to use too and with every room being a flat box this kind of encounter gets very boring very quickly.  

There are a few exceptions to this rule, for example there is one room that sticks out in my memory where Sam and the enemies are bouncing off the walls like crazy and shooting shit while things are flying all over the place sounds like fun, the whole thing actually just makes aiming anything a massive pain in the dick and it becomes a test of patience and frustration instead.

It wouldn't be fair to call The Second Encounter a "bad" game per se, it's still a competently made shooter with fun weapons and interesting enemies but after the first episode of the games content, the game feels like a slog.  More flat rooms with more endless waves of enemies for you to kill ad nauseum  until you either see the ending or get bored and turn it off.  It crossed the brainless threshold JUST enough to go from cathartic to boring, and it's a damn shame

Imagine If... Shin Megami Tensei AR Game

 

I remember when Shin Megami Tensei Dx2 Liberation was announced.  It was around the time that Pokemon Go was still riding a wave of popularity and I got the (mistaken) idea that Dx2 was going to be that kind of game but when it came time to download I was sorely disappointing.

 When I spoke about Dx2 on the blog I had a few nice things to say about it.  Despite the awful gatcha system and some legendary amounts of grinding that needed to be done, for a shitty little mobile RPG it wasn't actually that bad.  There was even a mode available to some phones where you could use an AR thing to take pictures with your demons in the real world but it didn't really have anything to do with the game itself.  So I'm going to use this post to sort of dream up what I think a proper Shin Megami Tensei AR game would be like and hopefully someone at ATLUS will stumble on this page and steal the idea.  Probably not but a mans gotta dream.

Your phone in this hypothetical game would take the place of the COMP or maybe the gauntlet from SMT IV.  In fact the gauntlet from SMT IV makes a little more sense because in that game you buy "apps" with "app points" as you level up allowing you to store more demons, get more skills or make various features cheaper.  From your phone then you'd manage your team, manage your items, buy player focused skills and you could probably put the Cathedral of Shadows in the main menu too.

The main meat of the game I suppose would be the same thing as Pokemon Go.  You would go outside, walk around and get into encounters on the map where you would fight demons. In those fights you could kill the enemies for EXP or you could do demon negotiation to recruit them into your party.  That of course isn't enough to hold an entire game by itself so you'd have to lift some things from Pokemon Go, mainly the raid system.  Instead of calling them raids though you could take a page from the Nocturne book at have "Fiend" battles where groups of players would fight a single enemy.  For the 6 people in the world that have played Dragon Quest Walk, sort of similar to how raid battles work in that.  When you beat a raid in Pokemon Go you are granted a chance to catch the rare monster but that wouldn't really work in a game like this, so pulling from the SMT3 book once again, a Fiend could drop a menorah that you could use to access a dungeon.  These dungeons would be separate from the walking around and be done in a first person view, a nod to the classic games for the long term fans, and in these dungeons you'd have a chance to get rare items and recruit strong demons.  Although it would be unfair to lock out players from this side of the game if they aren't strong enough to do the fiend encounters so randomly around the map you could spawn "Amala Terminals" or something like that.  Players could walk to these and take part in a sort of mini dungeon-crawl  and these areas would have their own loot and demons to gather.

Of course, this is just my personal dream of what an SMT AR Game would look like, I'm sure some actual game designer with many years experience over me could put something better together but it's nice to dream about something that could be.  Although, being really honest, I'd rather ATLUS just get SMT 5 out rather than focus on side projects like this.

 

Days Gone

 

Does anyone actually give a fuck about zombies any more?  The zombie genre, for both games and movies is so played out that whenever I see something that features zombies in it I now reflexively groan and roll my eyes.

Now the big mother-fucker of zombie fiction is The Walking Dead.  While it's not so popular now, just a few years ago people were going fucking CRAZY for that show.  One of the most popular characters in that show was Daryl, a rough and tumble biker type with a lone-wolf type attitude and the kind of guy to not take no shit from nobody, no sir.  So one day a bunch of stupid wankers had the brilliant idea of making a zombie survival game where all the characters were Daryl and everyone behaved like they had fallen off their motorcycles and landed on their heads one too many times.

I'm going to skip a real description of the story to this game because it's very long and very stupid but I'll do my best to give you a cliff notes version.  You play as Deacon St John, the most Daryl-like of all the people in the land, and while riding around the zombie infested mountains you get jumped by a bunch of cultists and your friend, Bald-Daryl, gets his arm messed up by a blow torch.  You then gotta help him out, help out a bunch of camps, kill the cultists, join the army, find your wife and then murder the army before they start an outright holy war on all the people of the land.  The game ends with the army dead and nothing solved as you ride off into the sunset.

But who really gives a shit about the story when its such an obvious "the real monsters are us humans" kind of tale so what we are really here for is the game play.  Well sadly, the game play is simple, generic over the shoulder 3rd person action bullshit like you've played a million times.  The enemies are daft, the zombies are stupid and easy to kill and every mission is basically go somewhere and shoot shit or go somewhere and chase shit on your bike.  The survival elements are non existent because the getting camp money is easy as fuck and even if for some reason your run your supplies down, almost every car, building and bush is bursting at the seams with supplies for you to craft stuff.  

 The games big draw, the one thing that anyone remembers from the E3 demo that they showcased that one year, is the zombie hordes.  Dotted around the map are HUGE numbers of zombies that will all aggro you at once if you alert them.  The problem with the hordes is that throughout my entire play through I couldn't find a reason to give a shit about them.  There's a few missions throughout the campaign where you HAVE to fight a horde but outside of that you just very easily avoid them as you do all your other shit.  The horde fights aren't even interesting either, you just let them chase you around and when they bunch up around something explosive you shoot it.  Throw molotovs or napalm while your being chased and once the numbers thin out finish the job with your gun.  It's a test of patience rather than a test of skill or preparation.  A lot of hype for a non-feature.

But the absolute worst aspect of this game is the bugs, there are, SO MANY bugs in Days Gone that it's actually embarrassing.  I didn't bother to update the game upon first putting the disc in and before the 28gb patch I was getting hard frame rate drops, textures not working, AI bugging out, missions not working, the whole shabang.  There was one mission in particular where I had to rescue a guy from a camp.  Upon arrival one guy took the guy into a back room and I had to gun my way through the other guys.   What was supposed to happen is that when I killed the guys outside, I would jimmy open the door, kill the leader and rescue the dude inside.  What actually happened is that the game bugged out and it would not recognize the henchmen as being dead so I would go to the door and it would just throw up a message saying "clear the area of enemies to rescue to hostage".  The problem is that this was a main story mission and despite many attempts at restarting the game, reloading save files, resetting the mission the thing WOULD NOT PROGRESS at all.  

 That's when I caved and installed the 28gb patch that it was pestering me for on my Playstation menu and that fixed that mission bug but the game still suffered from constant broken textures, crap AI, crashes and there was one mission near the end of the game where collision with the floor just crapped out and I couldn't progress for a while AGAIN because I kept falling into the abyss under the world.  

This game really is the whole package of long, tedious, broken and predictable.  If you saw the E3 trailer all those years ago and were thinking about picking it up, just don't.  Save your money and use it to buy something better than this such as Dying Light. 

December Events and Incentive Changes

 

The year is coming to a close so its time to run down some events and updates for the blog and the stream

First thing I want to announce is that thanks to some extremely kind donations to the charity the Celeste 2  players 1 controller event has been met.  Things are still being planned but due to scheduling this is more than likely to become a bit that will be run at weekends once a month rather than just a one off marathon.  Once things have been finalized I'll be doing a separate post with more details.  

Next is the main December event which I am planning for the 19th which I'm dubbing The December Derust.  I've not really been doing any speedruns of any game for a long time so I thought in the coming year I'd like to get a bit more into it again.  So for the December long stream I will run through all of my current speed games AND one extra game which I've been meaning to learn for a while in order to set some new splits.  There's quite an array of games in my speed list so I'm sure there will be something for you to check out at some point no matter what

 I'm also changing the way the incentives page works from now on.  This is due to the fact that I'm funneling money from Twitch bits and subs into the charity so I'm now using an "incentive score" system.  This means that from now, there will only be 1 incentive at a time, with a fairly high "score" that you have to meet in order to make it happen.  To add points to the score you can do things like cheer bits in the stream, sub in the stream or donate directly to the charity, here's how it works.

100 Twitch bits = 1 point (I'll keep track, and add a point for every cumulative 100)

1 Twitch sub = 5 points (10 tier 2, 25 tier 3)

Just Giving Direct Donation = Donation value x2 (e.g donate $10 = 20 incentive score)

This way, people can still cheer and donate for things like wheel spins, game requests or any other stream specific things while at the same time helping to reach a goal for a fun event.  Incentives that currently have money put into them will be started at their current value, so the progress you already made won't go to waste!

I will also be adding some new prizes to the wheel of prizes in the coming few days so keep an eye on that page to see what's up for grabs

How About Get It Right the First Time?

 I'm almost certain I've written things on this topic before but very recently I had a very bad experience with some game bugs so I'm going to talk about it again.  

So if you've been watching the stream you know I've been playing a game called Days Gone and while I have a lot of bile to spill about that game one of the things that really sticks out about it is the number of bugs, glitches and hiccups the game has.

I've had textures not loading in, glitching through geometry, audio bugging out, frame rate stutters when its trying to load the world, escort characters just forgetting what they are doing along with a few other things.  The worst however came during a story critical mission where I had to clear a camp of dudes and then rescue a guy behind a locked door.  What was SUPPOSED to happen is that you kill the dudes and then you use your boot knife to jimmy open the door and save the guy.  What was happening to me was I'd kill the dudes, go to the door and then the game would pop up a message saying "Clear the area of enemies to rescue the hostage".  What I think was happening was that the guy in the room who had the guy at gunpoint that you're supposed to kill last after entering was being recognized as an enemy in the previous area and because he was alive it wasn't allowing me to open the door.  The problem with this, is that if I didn't clear this mission, the story WOULD NOT PROGRESS, I was essentially locked out of finishing the game.

The fix came in the form of a 28 gigabyte patch that I had been putting off downloading because space on my PS4 was running rather low.  In a desperate attempt to not have my time wasted by this shitty game I downloaded the patch, reset the mission and THEN thankfully it worked and while I'm happy about that, I can't help be mad about why the fuck it just didn't work in the first place.

This is a pretty big problem with games nowadays where companies will hype a game up, get it out as soon as they can and then fix shit later which is probably one of the shittiest practices I can think of along side gouging money out of idiots with loot boxes.  When we got the ability to download patches and fixes for our games it was a GOOD thing initially because it allowed developers to fix something unforeseen or missed during development but now its being used as a crutch by shitty companies so they can get your money out of you as soon as possible and then MAYBE fix any easily missed issues down the line.

Now when I've moaned about this shit in the past there's always some half-brained bellend who likes to open his stupid halitosis mouth at me with the comment "But game development is really hard! there's always going to be bugs and glitches in software this complex". and you know what? to some degree they are correct.

What I'm not saying is that I expect every game to be perfect on release, they are complex beasts worked on by many people and a few bugs here and there are probably going to slip through the cracks when being play tested.  This is especially true for small indie teams putting out games as passion projects where they just don't have the time or budget for long, drawn out play tests and they just want to put their labor of love out into the world.  But I'm not talking about those guys, I'm talking about big developers like the gigantic sacks of shit who developed days gone or the gaggle of sad fucks that work at Bethesda putting out AAA, full price games that are so badly broken that they suck to play and in some cases can't even be finished.

Even in those games, especially big open world ones I'm willing to let some shit slide.  Things that don't happen often like path finding going wrong or the occasional fall through the floor I can just deal with but HOW THE FUCK did main-plot, progression critical mission bugging out get missed in the initial launch batch?  A full price AAA game, unbeatable at launch, embarrassing.

Like I said, games are complex and bugs are inevitable but if you're going to charge me $60-80 to play a new game on the latest hardware then you better make sure it at the very least fucking works from start to finish.  But if you're attitude is anything like the likes of Bethesda or SIE Bend Studio then I sincerely hope that you studio goes under and every sandwich you have from this day forward is a bit dry and always has slightly stale bread.

Mobile Rhythm Game Bullshit

 

Recently I started playing a game on my phone called Project Sekai: Colorful Stage and despite the bile I'm about to dispense under this introduction, I'm having quite a good time with it.  It's a rhythm game sort of similar to Chunithm in the arcade but watered down and all of its songs are Vocaloid tunes.  Being the huge Vocaloid weeb boy that I am I downloaded it straight away and I'm actually quite pleased, for a game that I fiddle with for a couple of minutes at a time while dropping a log it's actually a lot of fun 

However there's something that Project Sekai does, as well as many other mobile rhythm games, that pisses me off to absolutely no end and that's song grading.  When you clear a song in basically any rhythm game the game spits out a results screen to tell you how did you, how many points you got and how accurate you were, things like that.  Usually taking front and center on these results screen is an overall grade for your performance.  For example in DDR if you fail a song you get an E and if you do nearly everything perfectly you get a AAA. While in every normal rhythm game this is based entirely on your skill as a player, in Project Sekai and many others it's based on something entirely different.

Like every mobile game and it's dog, Project Sekai has a "gatcha" system where you spend some in-game currency to get characters of varying rarity.  With those characters you build a team and in the context of a rhythm game like this they will have skills in order to boost your score or recover lost life bar under certain conditions.  Each of these characters also has a "power" level which increases as they level up and their power dictates how many points per note hit you get and I'm sure you can see at this point why this is a problem.

So when I play Project Sekai and I Full Combo a song on Expert or Master difficulty do you know what rank I get? A fucking B.  Not because I made any mistakes, not because my accuracy was off or anything like that, but I just haven't done the pre-requisite grinding for an S rank so I'm not allowed one.  While this doesn't seem like a big deal, in game rewards, especially timed event rewards, are tied to your song grading so I'm just missing out on a whole bunch of shit because my party just isn't generating the score I need for it.

Now you would think that this would only be a problem for new players, that after a while you'd build a team and start getting ranks no problem right? Well no, because of course there's a bunch of other bullshit that gives passive score buffs to certain characters or certain TYPES of character that you also need in order to get the grades that you actually deserve which of course means, more fucking grinding.

I know that complaining about grinding in a mobile game is akin to pissing in the ocean but there's something about its inclusion in a rhythm game of all thing that really irks me.  There's no reason it couldn't have just been a standard rhythm game and premium currency used to unlock songs or videos or other cosmetic features like note skins or whatever, I mean it's a Vocaloid game for mobile for fucks sake, it's basically a money printing machine in a market like Japan.

Anyway like I said, Project Sekai isn't the only game that has been guilty of this shit.  Idolmaster did it and Bang Dreamin' did it just to name two others.  Truth be told I'm actually sort of impressed at just how little Project Sekai seems to be pushing the premium currency side of things, they constantly shower you with it and the button for the premium store is a TINY thing in the bottom left of the main menu, much better than what I've seen for other titles.  Plus this game has the benefit of being 100% Vocaloid music which means that it could break down my door and murder my family and I'd still probably play it.

Moral of the story: Tie ranks to player skill, not to my fucking waifu collection, goddamn it!