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Game of the Year 2020: Bottom 5

This year has seen its fair share of great video game experiences worthy of both praise and recommendation, but it’s also seen plenty of stinkers too. Now this list isn’t meant to imply that these games are the worst games of the year, because they simply aren’t. These are just some games that I happened to play this year that I really did not enjoy for one reason or another. A lot of the games in this list either already have or will eventually see significant fixes and updates that can technically fix a game I had issues with, but some of the games on this list are beyond what a bug fix can rectify.

GHOST OF TSUSHIMA

Ghost of Tsushima isn’t a bad game, but it definitely left me wanting something more engaging and technically proficient than what I played back when it launched. I wrote about my issues with the game back when it released, focusing on a bevy of story issues and just the mechanical weirdness I had encountered during my truncated play time. I found the camera to be the most formidable foe in the game because I would die more often than not due to its ineptitude.

But that was all back in July. I would imagine that after several months of existence some of the rougher edges of Ghost of Tsushima would have been ironed out through patches and updates, ultimately leaving the game in a much better place. This could very well be the best time to jump back in, especially considering that there’s a new cooperative mode where you and 3 other friends fight demons and stuff. That alone kind of makes me kind of want to boot it back up, but considering I lack any friends who have any interest in doing that, I don’t know that I’ll be able to enjoy that particular aspect of the game.

While that all sounds cool, it doesn’t change the fact that I was deeply underwhelmed by Ghost of Tsushima upon release. Unlike most of the other games on this list however, I do think that with a lot of the technical jank fixed Ghost of Tsushima could be a really fun stealth/action title. It’s one of the few games here that I would actually consider revisiting, and that’s kind of the highest honor one can achieve on this list.

CYBERPUNK 2077

Where do you even start when talking about Cyberpunk 2077? I tried to capture as much as I could in a short post a few weeks back, but there’s so much to take issue with in that just thinking about all of my grievances is exhausting. What I will say is that it’s a buggy mess of a game that falls apart the second you look too closely at anything, boasts a introductory sequence that’s just a real slog, contains an abundance of convoluted and confusing menus, and doesn’t even feel especially fun to play. I don’t see the silver lining around Cyberpunk 2077, and I don’t think I ever will.

From lying about mandated crunch for their employees, lying and misleading investors, getting pulled from the PlayStation store, and having a couple of retailers issue refunds for the game, Cyberpunk 2077 has destroyed the goodwill that CD Projekt Red earned throughout their time working on the Witcher series and the GOG platform. It’s absolutely nuts to see how hard everyone turned on the company for their unfinished and unpolished game in just like two weeks, although it seems entirely justified.

The worst part is that even if the game worked perfectly, I still don’t think it would be very fun. People have told me that the game doesn’t really get going until about 8 hours in, which is an insane requirement for someone to endure in the hopes that they might be interested in a game. Aside from that, I don’t think the combat, driving or conversational stuff is that good, at least from the little of it that I saw. Truth be told, I think Cyberpunk 2077 fails to encourage players to stick it out for 30 or 40 hours of gameplay, and it doesn’t sound like that argument ever really gets made.

WATCH DOGS LEGION

It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say that I had some issues with Watch Dogs Legion. From its nonexistent story and its horrendous performance on PC, I found that Watch Dogs Legion felt like an afterthought rather than sequel to a very positively received game. Watch Dogs Legion‘s failings are only exacerbated when compared to the previous game in the franchise, Watch Dogs 2, a title that had its fair share of issues but was way more of a cohesive and complete product than this latest release.

I’ll stand by the assertion that the core gameplay mechanics are still solid and rewarding, but outside of that, Watch Dogs Legion offers nothing new or interesting aside from the incredibly lame ability to “recruit anyone” in London to fight alongside you. The mechanic sure sounds nifty, but in practice it’s an incredibly tedious element of the game that I eventually abandoned because you would just get cooler playable characters after completing story missions anyway. The incentive to hunt for NPCs with unique and helpful characteristics and abilities vanishes under the weight of being upstaged by story progression unlocks, and by how monotonous it really is. It also feels so firmly rooted in the traditional “Ubisoft open world formula,” that it’s just a complete bore to progress through.

Watch Dogs Legion just feels like a complete misfire of game that failed to not only capitalize on what made Watch Dogs 2 so successful, but completely abandoned any attempt at providing a cool story or characters in favor of a stupid mechanic that wears out its welcome after a few hours. If I haven’t made it obvious enough yet, I really did not enjoy Watch Dogs Legion. It’s yet another example of a game that even if it was technically solid, it would still be an absolute slog to play through.

MARVEL’S AVENGERS

Unlike my severe distaste for Watch Dogs Legion, I don’t actively dislike Marvel’s Avengers. In fact, I’m not even that disappointed with the game because I never really had any expectations for it. For as long as I’ve wanted a good, big-budget Avengers game, when the news came out that it would be a live service game I kind of just wrote it off.

The weirdest part is that it’s a pretty decent game, but by being shoehorned into this business model that just didn’t make sense for the license, it just felt overly convoluted and messy. Unlike other games on this list, I can’t really point to one aspect of the game that’s particularly bad. The issue is that there’s nothing particularly good or bad about Marvel’s Avengers aside from being a really weird and oddly dated feeling live game. I would love a great Avengers game, but this isn’t it.

The main issue is that the game is constantly undermined by being a live service product. With an abundance of tiered gear and currencies, Marvel’s Avengers, despite having a decently interesting superhero story, was diluted by being a licensed game that tried to offer a lasting live experience for players without being able to get too wacky with the property. None of your gear was visually represented thanks to Marvel being overly precious about their characters, which led to a bunch of invisible items that just made numbers in the background go up. The whole game just seems like it was designed by committee, which left it feeling bland and forgettable.

SKATER XL

I was so excited for the return of skateboarding games, especially when you had some of them trying to illicit the same warm feelings people got from the Skate series. Skater XL seemed like the game that would bring that pseudo-realistic style of skateboarding game back from the dead, but it was more of a wet fart than anything else.

Skater XL allows you to ride a skateboard and do all sorts of tricks and grinds, albeit in a messier way than expected. The thing that made the Skate series so approachable was the way it made you feel like you were being technically adept while not having to really do that much. All of your tricks were done with the right analog stick and maybe another button for a grab or spin. It was simple but required a level of competency to pull off more advanced tricks and lines.

Skater XL on the other hand ditches that approachability in favor of turning your controller into a game of Twister for your fingers. The controls are overly complex and require you to do unnatural things like steer with the triggers. It never felt intuitive or satisfying because for every successful trick I managed to pull off, there was a trail of blood and viscera behind me that chronicled my failure. Also, there’s not a game in Skater XL. There’s no story or challenges or anything that could qualify as connective tissue. It’s just a level select with some overly convoluted controls at this point.

To be fair though, it’s been a while since I’ve actually checked in with the game, so maybe they’ve incorporated more usable control schemes or some sort of progression system. But I genuinely have no interest in returning to the game after the bad taste it left in my mouth when it launched.

DISHONORABLE MENTION: SHITTY CONSOLE LAUNCHES

That’s right motherfuckers, I took some time off of complaining about this, but by far it’s my least favorite trend of 2020. I have been inducted into a miserable realm of the internet where I’m following people who track the stock of consoles in several different retailers. You might be thinking, “Ari, that sounds insane,” and you’d be absolutely correct in that thought. It’s beyond wild that I’ve had to invite a bevy of Twitter notifications to light up my phone whenever they please just for the opportunity to spend $500. It’s maddening.

Overpriced bundles, terrible website infrastructures, scalpers and bots, all of it is absolutely infuriating on its own, but nothing is more annoying than these Twitter accounts trying to capitalize on this sudden surge in followers by constantly trying to build a community around people who are being fucked over by retailers. I don’t want to watch a live stream of you checking retailer websites so you can announce a stock drop. I get it, you gotta capitalize on whatever little slice of fame you can get, but when all I want is to know when I can be disappointed by Best Buy, getting notifications for YouTube videos, shouting out other people who are tracking the same shit, and the really bad memes, are all things I could do without.

I don’t mean to go so hard at these people who are just trying to help, cause I do appreciate their efforts. But every tweet that isn’t about stock availability is just another reminder that what I am doing is crazy, and it didn’t need to happen. Look, I know that COVID went and fucked up everything this year, especially manufacturing and shipment lines, but despite knowing how constrained stock was going to be, neither Microsoft or Sony did anything about it. Because at the end of the day, seeing an entire company’s stock of their console vanish with seconds is great news for them.

You could write this off as me being salty about not being able to get my hands on one of these new funny looking boxes, but it’s been genuinely demoralizing to finally be in a position in my life where I can actually afford to drop half a grand on console, but I just don’t have the chance to. Every logical part of my brain screams at me when I feverishly click on links to retailers because deep down I know that there isn’t really anything to play on these boxes. I also know that eventually I will be able to get my hands on one of these things, but that’s the power of consumerism I suppose. I don’t need this thing, I just really want it. Unfortunately the whole release of these consoles has been a colossal shit-show from top to bottom, which is hands down my least favorite gaming trend of 2020.

This has been day 3 of The Bonus World’s Game of the Year 2020 coverage. Check back tomorrow for our final list about video games from this year.

Blog: It’s Almost Over – 12/30/20

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Well hey there everyone, I hope you’re enjoying all the Game of the Year stuff thus far cause we’ve only got two more days of it to go. It was extremely difficult for me to pull this all together just because despite this being a massive year for video games, not a lot of things really got their hooks into me. Regardless, this isn’t about Game of the Year stuff, more of that is coming tomorrow. Instead, I’d like to get a little sappy here on the last blog of the year.

First, I want to thank each and every single one of you for coming and reading all of our articles, day in and day out. It’s honestly been shocking to see how consistent our readership has been for the past couple of months, and I genuinely appreciate that. The Bonus World is a massive labor of love for me that’s been an incredibly important project for my sanity here in 2020. I don’t know that I could have made it through this year without my hobbies and projects, and this site is at the top of both of those lists.

Secondly, 2020 fucking sucked. It was without a doubt the worst year I’ve ever endured in my life and I’m so glad that I was able to make it through to the other side. Although I don’t want to jinx next year, here’s a preemptive “fuck 2021” just in case. I specifically can’t wait for January 20th when I don’t have to live in a country that’s run by a petulant baby that’s thrashing about in the hopes that someone will pay attention to him, but that’s 21 days away. Till then, I expect a lot more bellyaching and complaining while desperately trying to undermine our democracy, so that’ll be fun. My hope is that Donnie actually refuses to leave the White House so I can have video evidence of that big baby being forcibly removed from the premises.

And lastly, I want to thank everyone who kept me going throughout the year. From the readers of this site that justify my efforts in keeping it going, to my groups of friends/DnD parties that provide me with endless joy on a semi-regular basis, to my partner and my family who are always there for me. 2020 was miserable, and I couldn’t have made it through this year without all of your support.

And with that, I’d like to say goodbye to 2020, and remind everyone that there is a light at the end of the tunnel that will encompass us all on January 20th, 2021. But hey, the main thing I wanted to say is Happy New Year. We’re gonna make it through and we’re going to be okay. Also, wear a fucking mask. How’s that for a New Year’s Resolution?

Game of the Year 2020: The Trends I Missed

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One of the things that’s been most interesting to me this year has been seeing the types of games that unexpectedly exploded in popularity. The fanaticism around games and forming communities around them isn’t anything new, but in more typical years it was inevitable that someone might miss a big trend or event in gaming. Considering I’ve been home most of the year however, I was able to see these wild surges in popularity among various games and genres in a way I hadn’t ever been able to before. Despite all of this, I feel as if I’ve dipped into several of these big trends that took the internet by storm this year and managed to bounce off of most of them.

Like I said, big trends in gaming is nothing new. A few years ago PLAYER UNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS exploded onto the scene and thrust the battle royale genre of games into the spotlight. There was Overwatch, which arrived in 2016 and prompted every company in existence to try and take a stab at the hero shooter genre, with newcomers like Valorant releasing this year and finding an audience, while games like Hyper Scape, Rocket Arena and Crucible, all games which released within two months of each other, failed to gain any traction. Hell, even years ago we saw plenty of MMO’s get conjured into existence in an attempt to dethrone World of Warcraft… which definitely happened.

My point is that these big trends in gaming isn’t a new phenomenon in the slightest, but it’s been particularly interesting for me to watch them come into existence and either explode in popularity or just fizzle out into obscurity. So I’d like to highlight a few big things that happened in the game-o-sphere in 2020, and discuss how they all managed to pass me by.

DREAMS

February sure feels like an eternity ago, but we definitely had one of those this year. In fact, I was still working in my office, a concept that feels completely foreign to me now. But back in February, specifically Valentine’s Day, Dreams, the wildly ambitious game creation tool by Media Molecule, released on the PlayStation 4 and was immediately heralded as an impressive piece of software more so than being a fun game. It allowed creators to make their own games within the Dreams engine, either through hand crafting everything themselves, or collaborating with other users by importing their characters, settings, objects, sound effects and more into their projects. Dreams smartly credited every piece of content used to the user who made it, which encouraged a sense of community that seems to still be active to this day.

Above is a video from the YouTube channel, Ugly Sofa Gaming, a channel that highlights interesting and fun creations from the game. They’re still cranking out videos about the nearly year old game on a regular basis, which to me seems like a great sign for the entire Dreams community, although recent reports make it sound like the player base is waning. I watched a couple of their videos that highlight the cool games people are making in Dreams, and it’s genuinely impressive what people are doing with that engine.

But despite adoring what people were making and mostly catching the wildest things on my Twitter feed, I knew that Dreams wasn’t the game for me. I don’t have the patience to build a game in the slightest, and shelling out the cash for the ability to peruse the user generated stuff back when the game released just didn’t seem like a great investment to me at the time. But looking back on it now, I feel compelled to check in on it and see what people have been able to do in the past 10 months since it released. But it would be absolutely wild of me to, while writing this article, open up a new tab, navigate to Amazon, notice that Dreams is on sale, and purchase it, right? That would be ridiculous…

Let’s move on.

AMONG US

I don’t know exactly when Among Us exploded in popularity, but it sure dominated most of the internet and continues to be one of the most watched things on Twitch. It’s kind of wild when you think about it. Here’s a game that released in 2018 for five dollars and didn’t really make an impact, only to find incredible success two years later during a pandemic. Among Us is another one of those Mafia or Werewolf type games where one or more people are the bad guys who are trying to carry out their grim mission in secret, while the rest are innocents who need to figure out identities of the bad guys while also working towards their own goals. The formula is tried and true, but I’ve never really seen one of those games be as popular as Among Us is.

From what I can surmise, Among Us being as cheap as it is, available on the platforms it is, and existing in a world where people are in their homes more often than they aren’t and are desperate for human contact, were really the things that made Among Us a go to game for so many people. Streamers also helped immensely and that cannot be overstated. For as shitty as 2020 has been, it was the perfect set of circumstances for a game like Among Us to garner such a massive following. It did so well that the developers just straight up canceled the planned sequel they were making and decided to weave the new content into their surprisingly popular game.

Now to inject myself into this story. I played a little bit of Among Us with some friends on a handful of occasions, and it was fun. But it never felt like more than a novelty I could dip into once and a while, and certainly not at the rate that some other people play it. Aside from not falling head over heels for it, there was something weird to me about playing a game solely about lying to people you know. Now, I’ve played plenty of Jackbox games where I have to lie to people, but for every one game in a pack that’s about duping your friends, there’s four others that are about just knowing trivia or being the best at non sequiturs. Whenever the pressure of lying to people was too much, you could just pivot to something else. But Among Us is solely about lying to your friends and playing mindless mini-games. It’s fun for sure, but it just wasn’t something I wanted to play for more than a half hour at a time.

FALL GUYS

I think we kind of all knew that Fall Guys was gonna show up on this list. Fall Guys isn’t a bad game by any means, but it just felt like a game with no lasting appeal, which I mentioned back in the Gut Check from when the game released in August as a “free” PlayStation Plus game. The long and short of it was that to me, Fall Guys was kind of a one-note experience. Yeah seeing the little bean-people flop around and get flung through the air is fun, but it truly felt like a game that relied more on luck than anything else.

Although it’s in my favorite genre of games, the “wacky physics” genre that is, something about Fall Guys just never clicked for me. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that it is a battle royale, a genre of game that I am truly tired of at this point. I exhausted my desire to play any battle royale back when PUBG was big, and never really felt compelled to play another game like it. While Fall Guys doesn’t have any guns or anything and is a different kind of battle royale altogether, it’s still a game solely about competing with other people, something that I feel less inclined to participate in as I get older.

There’s nothing wrong with Fall Guys, I actually think it’s a really neat concept. But in addition to me not digging the genre, a lot of the wind was taken out of my sails by the fact that the first game I managed to play, I won. That’s not some weird flex or anything, it’s just something that happened thanks to an accidental, yet helpful glitch. Within ten minutes of booting up the game for the first time, I was able to clinch a victory, effectively closing the book on my desire to keep playing. But Fall Guys is still going strong with consistent support and updates. In fact, their latest season released earlier this month and seems to be fairly popular, so good for you, Fall Guys.

BLASEBALL

Man, for a hot minute there I really tried to get into Blaseball but just could not. Blaseball is essentially fantasy baseball in a fantastical league where rules can change, referees and players can randomly die, super powers can be bestowed, and all manner of weird shit can happen. None of it is visually represented however, which might sound like a drawback, but it allowed for people to fill in those gaps for themselves with a ton of fan made artwork. In Blaseball you pick a team to follow based on little more than their name and home city. I chose to follow the New York Millennials, a team with a player named Dominic Marijuana on it. They were good… I think.

Honestly, the biggest drawback to Blaseball is how inscrutable and inaccessible it can feel to new spectators. For instance, I just checked the site for the first time in months, and all of the teams now have different names (UPDATE: They’re back to “normal”). I don’t have any idea what just happened, but apparently the weird “sport” got even weirder somehow. I’m having a really hard time describing what the fuck Blaseball actually is, and that’s kind of the problem.

Despite my best efforts to understand this spectacle, I eventually just bounced off of it because of how difficult it was to wrap my head around it. According to the website, I have 22,000 dollars, 6 tickets, and 10,000 peanuts. I can vote on rule changes with tickets, I can buy certain buffs and bet on the outcome of games with money, but I have no earthly idea what the peanuts do. I can however, purchase more peanuts with the money, or buy a squirrel to help me eat the peanuts. It’s shit like this that a wiki could probably explain pretty well, but I just do not have the desire to do that. But hey, Blaseball is going strong I suppose.

HADES

At some point this year, everyone really hopped aboard the Hades train and never got off. Well, maybe they got off, but not in a way that makes sense with this particular train-based metaphor. Look, Hades is an incredibly fun and well made rogue-like action game that has a bunch of different elements from other genres weaved into it, all of which it does incredibly well. It also blends storytelling with the rogue-like genre in an apparently very successful way. It’s a very good game by all accounts… except for maybe the people who just aren’t into rogue-likes.

While everyone was getting incredibly horny for the cast of Hades, I was giving it an honest shot in an attempt to see what all the fuss was about. And hey, even I thought it was good. The problem is that these kinds of games just don’t have any real staying power for me. I don’t find the rinse and repeat nature of rogue-likes to be particularly rewarding, so even in the face of a tremendous one of them like Hades, I still would rather just play a more traditionally structured game.

This has been day 2 of The Bonus World’s Game of the Year 2020 coverage. Check back on Thursday for another list about video games from this year.

Game of the Year 2020: 5 Games I Considered Playing, But Didn’t

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Despite finding myself at home and with an influx of free time this year, for a multitude of reasons I ended up missing out on a lot of big and well regarded games. All of these entries go beyond the obvious, “lack of money and time” argument that might usually pollute a list like this, so I figured I’d shed some light on why there were such glaring gaps in what big titles I played. There are certainly more than 5 games I considered playing this year but didn’t, but I feel as if these were the biggest ones in the bunch. But hey, even if I did want to play every big release, there’s no way I could possibly make time for all of them, let alone afford that many games, so I guess money and time is a factor after all.

FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE

There are certain gaps in my gaming history that for one reason or another, I know will never be filled. Even now, with nearly infinite access to a near infinite amount of games, both past and present, I know I will not ever go and revisit some of these titles. I don’t think there is a series that exemplifies that for me quite like the Final Fantasy series. I recall playing one of them on my NES, but that’s pretty much where that series started and ended for me. Oh, I suppose I did play the demo for Final Fantasy XV, which is surprisingly important for this particular blurb.

That’s my history with the Final Fantasy series of games in a nutshell. When Final Fantasy VII Remake released earlier this year, I figured maybe this was my chance to see what all the fuss was about. Finally, I too could hang out with beloved characters like Big Sword Boy, Gun Arms, and Punch Lady. But seeing how this remake used the same combat as Final Fantasy XV, I hesitated. I didn’t enjoy what I played of the FFXV demo, and the idea of paying for a game with mechanics I don’t like and for a piece of a story I already knew the major beats of, just didn’t seem like a great use of my time and resources.

I’ve heard some pretty conflicting reports about the remake anyway, with most people usually conceding that they enjoyed it but not without first complaining about bad side quests or something. I think I just have to accept that Final Fantasy as a concept is just something that will never jive with me, and that’s okay.

SPELUNKY 2

You can’t see it right now, but on my computer’s desktop exists a little icon of a golden bug with a gem on its back. I have no idea what it is specifically referencing, but thanks to the words below it I know that this is how I can start playing the video game Spelunky 2. Yes, I indeed purchased Spelunky 2 when it was released earlier this year, a fact that might make some of you wonder why it’s on this list. Well since its release at the end of September, that icon has sat there completely unused and gathering virtual dust. It’s a testament and constant reminder that I am terrible with my video game purchasing decisions and need to be stopped.

I thought that Spelunky 2 would be one of the games capable of making me “get” the whole rogue-like genre, something that it might still be able to do, although to find that out would require me starting it. This game has just kind of sat here for months, waiting for me to dedicate some time to playing it, but the truth of the matter is I probably won’t ever launch this game. That isn’t because I think it’s a bad game or anything, because I literally have no way of knowing that. No, I just won’t launch it because whenever I do have some time to boot up a game, I usually end up weighing my options for long enough to the point where I no longer have time to play games, and that’s something both Spelunky 2 and I have to come to terms with.

ROGUE LEGACY 2

Honestly you could just kind of look back at the Spelunky 2 post and it would be the same story. Rogue Legacy 2 is the sequel to Rogue Legacy, a game that I actually enjoyed when it came out a few years back. Without retreading what I literally just said a paragraph earlier, I think the main reason I never booted this game up had to do with it being an early access release. I knew what I had paid for, but the general consensus around the game was that you should wait until it was fully released. I also thought that would be a good idea considering I’m not a fan of the genre as is, and I have a tendency to burn out on games I enjoy by playing them incessantly. Now, unlike Spelunky 2, I do actually intend on playing this game once it sees its full release. Now that I think about it, I have no idea when that might be. It might be out right now for all I know.

THE LAST OF US PART II

Back when The Last of Us Part II released, I wrote a blog post about how I really didn’t have any desire to play it whatsoever. Something about a deadly virus that swept the globe and turned people into hideous monsters, leaving the few survivors to fend for themselves and be exceedingly shitty to one another, just didn’t sit well with me at the time. It turns out, I still don’t want to play The Last of Us Part II for the same reasons.

It’s a real shame too considering I really enjoyed The Last of Us and thought it was a wonderfully crafted game. Hell, I even called it one of my favorite games of the 2010’s. I still think the weakest part of that game was anything that involved zombies, but even with that caveat it was still a veritable masterpiece. It was gritty and raw, providing many emotional gut-punches along the way that still occupy a place in my memory to this day. While I wasn’t immediately dismissive of a sequel, I wasn’t necessarily excited for one either. Like I said, I thought the story stood up on its own just fine and didn’t need another chapter.

Once The Last of Us Part II did release though, I found myself in a pretty dark place myself as my world had essentially crumbled around me thanks to a certain pandemic. I didn’t need to play a game that was going to double down on the misery angle, because I was already pretty miserable myself. Even now I have no desire to play The Last of Us Part II, not because I think it’s a bad game or anything, but because I just don’t need that kind of negativity in my life right now. I don’t know if I’ll ever play it honestly, and I’m okay with that.

CRUSADER KINGS III

Okay, so full disclosure, I did in fact play about 15 minutes of Crusader Kings III, but it still has a home on this list. After it was released I found myself captivated by the sheer absurdity of the images and stories people were sharing on social media about this game, so much so in fact that I had to jump in on the fun. Sure it’s a genre of game I actively dislike, but I play D&D, surely I could handle a complex video game that might make me discover a newfound passion for a different kind of game. Also it was on Xbox Game Pass for the PC, so I had no real reason not to try it.

Within minutes I felt like I was drowning in a sea of menus, tutorial messages and windows displaying words I had never seen before. I was so out of my element and Crusader Kings III knew it. A message popped up, “Oh hey Ari, I see you want to get to the funny stuff that you saw on the internet, but before that you need to read this textbook on feudal class systems in Europe first.” I was out of my depth with Crusader Kings III, and eventually had to ALT+F4 my way out of the game before my brain melted. I was never a great history student in retrospect, and this game seemed like it was made by all of my past history teachers in attempt to get me to turn in some long lost homework or something.

For the people who managed to spend the time with it and really give it a fair shot, it seems like they came away with great experiences and stories that were capable of luring in a rube like myself. But maybe that’s where it started and stopped for me. Maybe the stories were all I really wanted from the game itself, and the mechanics just got in the way of that. Or maybe I just don’t have the patience for a game like Crusader Kings III.

This has been day 1 of The Bonus World’s Game of the Year 2020 coverage. Check back tomorrow for another list about video games from this year.

Blog: CyberFunk – 12/16/20

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With the holiday season in full swing, I’ve found myself falling behind when it comes to completing previously planned projects. In addition to gift shopping, updating this site, planning for D&D sessions, and the general things I need to do to stay alive, it just feels like my free time is become more and more scarce. This is all a long way of saying that it’s going to be pretty quiet around here until the end of the month when the Game of the Year stuff starts dropping. But in what little free time I was able to scrounge together, I did manage to spend some time with Cyberpunk 2077.

Usually I’d do a Gut Check piece about a game like Cyberpunk 2077, but my aforementioned time crunch combined with my overall feelings about the game, a blog feels appropriate. I’m about six hours into Cyberpunk 2077, and I’ve got to say that I’m not crazy about it. And this might sound like another one of those, “Ari just hates video games” things, but the game has some pretty bad problems and I’m not the only one that holds that opinion. All of this fails to mention the constant crunch the team at CD Projekt Red had to endure just to get this game out the door is shitty. It isn’t just CD Projekt Red however, this is a change that needs to sweep through the entirety of the game industry.

Aside from miserable business practices that encourage the exploration of developers, the game itself is riddled with bugs and glitches across all of its ports, but I expect that in time those will all be sorted out. That isn’t me absolving them for launching a busted game, but if you’re kind of person who doesn’t play games in their launch window, the bugs might be a moot point. I’ve only played a handful of hours so far and I’ve already encountered bugs ranged from hilarious to game-breaking, but buggy launches seem to just be the norm these days.

My main issues really lay in the poor performance as well as the sheer content & story of the game itself. The performance isn’t great, but it’s held up for me and my aging computer surprisingly well. I’m also playing it on low settings, which I mention because the game looks surprisingly okay despite my inferior computer components. But like I said before, performance and technical issues will certainly be resolved in the future. From what little I’ve played thus far, I don’t think performance patches can solve the design issues of Cyberpunk 2077.

I just haven’t really resonated with the story or the characters as much as I would have hoped for. The game itself throws a lot at you early on which makes understanding not only the story, but the mechanics of Cyberpunk 2077 incredibly daunting as well. From the jump, everyone is speaking what might as well be another language as they bloviate about “net-runners,” “corpos,” and other cyberpunk jargon that sounds like nonsense. There’s a sequence early on where you’re introduced to the concept of “brain-dancing,” which is this weird form of hacking a specific sequence in time. The tutorial that’s used allows you to live through a convenience store robbery gone wrong. You basically float around this 45 second vignette of a dude robbing a store, and you can bounce around through different camera feeds and perspectives to essentially uncover every aspect of that scene. The concept itself is already hard to wrap your head around, and then they start introducing an editing timeline along with audio and thermal layers to swap between to uncover certain clues about the scenario.

*Look at this map, gang. I feel like I have a panic attack every time I open this thing*

If that all sounds confusing, that’s because it fucking is. For as much bullshit exists on screen at any given moment in Cyberpunk 2077, the game does a pretty bad job of explaining some core concepts to you. For instance, there was a fight early on where a meter kept filling up that said “overheating,” and when it filled I would catch fire momentarily. Why this was happening, I had no clue. It wasn’t till a friend of mine told me that enemy hackers had that ability, that the mystery was solved. Even navigating the menus is a weirdly complex task. There are so many sub-menus in Cyberpunk 2077, that I genuinely missed about 6 different upgrade trees because all of the menus are a mess.

It’s such a shame too because the setting of Night City seems genuinely cool and is a place I’d like to explore, but I don’t really have the desire to do much more than that. Apparently the main story doesn’t actually start until about 8 hours into the game, which to me seems like a massive hurdle to overcome. I basically have to endure a full work day to get to the part where the story happens. It’s this situation where I have to ask myself, if this game was in a technically perfect state, would I enjoy it? And I don’t really know the answer to that. In theory I’d like to play an action RPG in a cyberpunk universe, but even with Cyberpunk 2077 right in front of me, I still find myself wanting something else.

I could prattle on about Cyberpunk 2077, but the summary here is that I don’t think I like that game very much. It seems fine and I’m glad there are some people that are enjoying it, but I just don’t think I have the time to commit to a game that I’m not smitten with. I need to spend that free time getting our annual Game of the Year stuff in order anyway. For reference, Game of the Year articles should be going up during the week of the 28th. There will be a blog next week (UPDATE: there was not a blog next week) but like I said, otherwise it’ll be quite until GOTY week. So yeah, see you all next week.

Gut Check: Immortals: Fenyx Rising

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When talking about Immortals: Fenyx Rising, it’s impossible not to bring up 2017’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, an excellent game that was bound to inspire other developers to build upon its success. Enter Immortals: Fenyx Rising, a game that’s so clearly inspired by Breath of the Wild that at times it feels like plagiarism. However, for better and worse, Ubisoft did not make a carbon copy of Breath of the Wild, because that would be an insult to one of the best Zelda games out there. What we have on our hands is a louder, less subtle, yet still solid facsimile of a modern classic.

Immortals: Fenyx Rising is an action-adventure game that is exactly what you would expect Breath of the Wild to look like if Ubisoft had made it. What I mean is that Immortals: Fenyx Rising tries to copy the sense of exploration and expansiveness that Breath of the Wild had, while pumping the game full of checklists and side activities. The outcome is a fundamentally solid game that seems so conflicted in what it’s trying to do that it ultimately feels exceptionally average in almost every way. It lacks the elegance and charm of its inspirator, which makes sense because Ubisoft made it.

One of the things that Immortals: Fenyx Rising gets right and also happens to be one of my favorite aspects of the game is the breadth and scope of the world. It’s this sizeable landmass that’s beautifully rendered in a lower detailed, watercolor graphical style that’s extremely reminiscent of Breath of the Wild. That classic, “If you see it, you can go to it,” design philosophy is well realized in Immortals: Fenyx Rising, and its art style, world design and the power it leverages from being on consoles other than the Nintendo Switch really make this world worth exploring. The world doesn’t appear to be overwhelmingly large, instead opting for a smaller and more handcrafted experience. While I’m still early on, the world seems to be taking a quality over quantity approach, something I’d take any day over a large, procedurally generated bland landmass… a blandmass if you will.

As you explore you’ll be collecting various resources for crafting potions, upgrading your armor and weapons, and so on and so forth. It sounds more daunting than it is though because resource management isn’t really a thing you have to worry about outside of carrying capacity for certain items. You’ll also come across all sorts of hidden puzzles, friendly animals and corrupted beasts, the latter of which makes Immortals: Fenyx Rising really feel like its own game.

I really enjoy the overall combat experience in Immortals: Fenyx Rising, but the best thing that it does, or specifically doesn’t do, is make you endure weapon degradation. That’s right, Immortals: Fenyx Rising fixed the worst part about Breath of the Wild and needs to be celebrated for that. Within the first hour of the game you’ll become familiar with light and heavy attacks, your bow, one magic ability that allows you to pick up rocks and stuff, a dodge, and a parry that I always forget about. Combat is fast is rewarding, and every last enemy you vanquish is hurled into space as they dissolve into ash which is a really satisfying touch. Immortals: Fenyx Rising also does the Breath of the Wild thing where if you parry or dodge at the right moment, everything slows down for you to get this flurry of blows in that deals extra damage. You’ll unlock additional abilities as you explore more of the world, collect more resources, and progress through the story, which might be the only nice thing I can say about the story.

The story in Immortals: Fenyx Rising is bad. Well, that’s not entirely fair, maybe the story is fine, but the way it’s presented is miserable. Evil dragon/god/demon-thing Typhon, who is basically the Ganondorf of this game, has corrupted the land and has turned 4 of the remaining heroes of the gods into his agents of chaos. If this sounds familiar to you, it’s probably because this is almost the exact story in Breath of the Wild. That’s where you, Fenyx, come into play. A terrible shipwreck has you washed up on shore and you come to find that you’re basically the chosen one or whatever and only you can save the world. Sounds fine so far, right?

Immortals: Fenyx Rising is told through an active narration, wherein Prometheus is telling the story of the game to Zeus. This narration tries so desperately to be funny with both narrators cracking wise at each other, usually ending with a joke about how shitty Zeus was. It’s all so brutally unfunny and actively detracts from the good moments in Immortals: Fenyx Rising. And it isn’t just those two dopes that bring the experience down. Every single NPC I’ve met thus far is terrible and actively unfunny. From Hermes being this snark-filled kleptomaniac who is written to be this lovable scamp despite the fact that he isn’t, to an oracle who doesn’t know he’s an oracle because he’s sooooo highhhh, it’s all just so poorly executed.

It’s sad to say, but lately Ubisoft has been churning out nothing but bland and badly written games, and this is no exception. It’s like they saw Breath of the Wild and felt compelled to pump it full of classic open world bullshit. When I think back to Breath of the Wild, I remember a quiet game about exploration and discovery that didn’t hold your hand and was designed with a simple ethos of “the journey should be just as interesting as the destination.” And Immortals: Fenyx Rising is perfectly capable of providing those moments of quiet discovery, but it’s constantly undermined by the chattering old men who crow at you at random times, and the unnecessary amount of cut-scenes that you have to endure. There’s a point where you’re introduced to your hub area where you come to level up and craft and so on, and there are about 6 specific stations to learn about. Each one of them comes with a cut-scene where Hermes comes and snarkily explains these stations to you. Instead of just some text that didn’t have bad jokes in it, I had to listen to that dingus to learn how to upgrade my stuff.

Much like Watch Dogs: Legion and to a lesser extent, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Immortals: Fenyx Rising has it’s fair share of performance issues. I swear, each one of these titles has fucked up in a different way, that it’s starting to feel intentional at this point. Watch Dogs: Legion couldn’t maintain a framerate to save its life, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla loved to hang at loading screens, and Immortals: Fenyx Rising just will decide arbitrarily that you can no longer play the game. Every 15 to 30 minutes or so, Immortals: Fenyx Rising will just freeze up and hang there. I haven’t found any rhyme or reason to any of it, and it’s been the sole reason why my play sessions are cut short. Maybe it’s my PC, but the fact that all three of these Ubisoft titles have broken in three distinct and separate ways is wild.

The worst part about all of this is that if the game would let me, I’d sink a lot of time into Immortals: Fenyx Rising. It’s not a perfect game by any means, but there’s a lot to like about it. The combat, world design, and sense of exploration all seem great, but the story and performance issues really undercut the entire experience. I like Immortals: Fenyx Rising, but it just isn’t as refined or as cohesive of a package as Breath of the Wild was. I know it’s unfair to compare a flagship Nintendo title to a Ubisoft title that’s been pushed out in December as an afterthought, but when you wear your inspiration so blatantly on your sleeve like Immortals: Fenyx Rising does, you can’t help but point out its shortcomings.

Blog: Boba Fett – 12/09/20

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This post contains spoilers for season 2 of The Mandalorian

So I’m just gonna rip the bandage off and say it — I think Boba Fett is a shitty character. You might be wondering where this is all coming from and to answer that I’d point you towards the hit Disney+ exclusive show, The Mandalorian for this particular blog. You can also thank my friends for the part they played in this blog, specifically how every conversation we’ve had since the latest episode went live have included some sore of Boba Fett themed joke. They know I hate this dude, and I’d like to explain why.

When I was younger, my mother introduced me to the world of Star Wars through the lens of the original trilogy. Back then they were the only Star Wars movies, so heaping praise on them and calling them “classics” was an easy thing to do. Yet even as a kid, there was one scene in particular that always made me chuckle. It was that scene where Darth Vader is meeting with all of the bounty hunters he’s hired, and feels compelled to specifically call out Boba Fett with the line, “No disintegrations.” As a kid, I saw this lineup of characters and thought they all looked absolutely absurd. Aside from Boba Fett, you’ve got Dengar desperately trying to look cool while standing next to the very “topple-able” IG-88, along with Bossk, 4-LOM and Zuckuss standing over to the right in the “who gives a shit?” section of the lineup. All of them are perfectly placed to highlight the man himself, Boba Fett, who according to Darth Vader and only Darth Vader, is very infamous for disintegrating folks.

One could argue that back in 1980 these guys looked imposing, but seeing this “rogue’s gallery” as a kid just made me snicker and laugh more than anything. None of these guys registered as threatening to me, especially not when compared to the guy hiring them, Darth motherfucking Vader. But that was kind of it as far as me thinking about Boba Fett until I watched Return of the Jedi and saw him basically get killed in what could be described as a comedy of errors. The dude gets shot in the jet-pack, launched into the sky, and immediately loses any semblance of being cool as he slams into Jabba’s ship and falls right into the mouth of a Sarlacc Pit. As a kid, that was the height of comedy for me.

But when I got older and noticed that the Star Wars fans around me were sincerely into Boba Fett and the things he could do, I was genuinely confused. They were talking about the same guy who flailed in the air, crashed into a wall and fell in a hole to be digested for centuries? This guy was cool? Why? Well the answers I’d usually get involved some books or expanded lore that did nothing but desperately try to paint this joke as a cool guy. That and his equipment was neat.

Tracking the official canon of Star Wars is tricky and to be completely honest, I don’t care enough to it. But my understanding is that all of the cool shit Boba Fett allegedly did in those books and comics are no longer canon now. I don’t know if that’s still the case or if some books are still legit or whatever, but the fact remains that I still don’t care. The official canon in my mind is that Boba Fett shows up in The Empire Strikes Back, has some unearned accolades thrown at him (i.e. “no disintegrations”), and promptly falls into a hole where he is munched on for an eternity. That’s it. I guess he also has a nice lunch with Darth Vader in the Cloud City, but that’s about it.

Then there’s his “cool stuff.” First, the helmet is cool. It’s always been cool and I will never take that away from the Mandalorians as a people. But aside from the helmet, Boba Fett looks like a kid trying on his dad’s clothes and pretending to be cool… oh wait, that’s exactly what it fucking is. He’s got these dumpy sweatpants, piss colored cape, big dumb orange lifting belt, and the stupidest looking knee-pads on, all of which paint the picture of a man who is desperately trying to look cool. The dude looks like he just rolled out of bed and hastily slapped something together that might look imposing. Eventually however, I was able to stop thinking about Boba Fett and Star Wars all together.

Then The Mandalorian came out, and I was genuinely scared that they’d try to redeem the eternally shitty, yet somehow beloved character of Boba Fett. The first season came and went without him rearing his stupid face, but the second season decided it was time to justify this character’s unearned fandom. As if Disney had been listening to my complaints for years, they sought to make an episode in which Boba Fett did a bunch of dope shit. They even went so far as to make his stupid fucking knee-pads shoot missiles, which I took personally.

The entire episode felt like a ret-con of everything I had specifically called Boba Fett out on for years, and I think that’s what’s pissing me off the most. Like, they went out of their way to do this knee-pad bullshit. But if I’m being completely honest, seeing Boba Fett actually do something effective for once was pretty cool. It was a good action sequence that really seemed to do right by the expanded lore of the character, and that’s fine in my book. Don’t get me wrong, I still think the titular Mandalorian is a much better character than the Fett-man, but I’ll give credit where it’s due. But nothing that Grandpa-Fett can do will make me forget the time he was bested by a blind man and his big dog which resulted in him residing at the bottom of a living hole for a couple of centuries. But I’m sure they’ll ret-con that too.

Blog: One Last Rant – 12/02/20

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I know I’ve repeatedly complained about my inability to secure a PlayStation 5, but I promise you that this is the last bespoke article you’ll have to endure unless something truly buck-wild happens. The majority of issues that are plaguing the launch of both the Xbox Series X/S and PS5 can be summed up with “not enough stock,” or “scalpers.” It’s truly been an exhausting and underwhelming experience that’s made me question why I’m fighting so hard for the chance to spend $500.

What started as the casual perusing of digital store shelves eventually devolved into obsessive behavior and a complete monopolization of my spare brain capacity. I started simply by following a Twitter account known for alerting people of sales and other announcements surrounding video games. With Black Friday coming up, why wouldn’t I follow someone who had their finger on the pulse of deals in a way I did not? I enabled notifications and went on my merry way.

“Wal Mart is restocking at 9pm ET” one tweet read. “Cool,” I thought to myself, I’ll load up the page on my computer as well as my phone just as an additional precaution. This is a hotly sought after item after all. 9pm arrives, I abuse the F5 key to reload my webpage after every instance of the “error adding item to cart” message I’d receive. No worries, I’ll just keep doing this until it… oh, it’s completely sold out and it’s not even 9:01pm yet. This is where things took a turn.

Every major retailer’s PS5 page, both physical and digital editions of the console secured a prominent display on one of my monitors. Several tabs dedicated to both editions across various retailers are left open on my screen, occasionally receiving a refresh just in case one of the 4 PS5 stock notifying Twitter accounts I follow, just happen to slip up. I think we can all agree that I was being very sensible and not at all crazy.

And with this idea in my head that these Twitter accounts could fail me, I found some websites that track the stock of items in several retail stores. Even better was that they refresh automatically and even have alarms for when something comes back in stock. With alarms and notifications in place, one could reasonably assume that I could just go on with my life until I was alerted of something changing. That was the intention at least.

No, it turns out that I’ve been unable to find joy in literally anything else for fear that I might miss out on my one chance to buy this stupid looking console. It also doesn’t help to see that the only consistent “in-stock” options are eBay and a site called StockX, both boasting nothing but scalpers selling their wares at extremely reasonable prices. $1200 for a console that retails for $500? Sounds like an excellent deal to me. There were several listings for PS5s in the range of $30,000, but shout-out to the person listing a PS5 for 1 million fucking dollars. Thankfully shipping is included in the $1,000,000 price tag, unlike some of the other ones that were charging 500 bucks for shipping on top of a $28,000 price tag.

It’s been so infuriating to follow all of this, but this is exactly what so many others predicted would happen in a world where manufacturing and shipping lines had been disrupted by a deadly virus. It’s the reality of the situation, and until we can get to a place where the stock can meet the demand this is how it’s going to be for a lot of people. I desperately want one of these stupid boxes so I can play modern games without them either looking or performing like garbage, and getting a PS5 just happens to be the cheapest way I can do that. It’s that or spend at least a grand on upgrading my computer.

What bothered and continues to bother me the most is how unwilling any retailers or even Sony themselves seem to be about offering people a better shot at buying these consoles. Sites like Wal Mart and others put as little in the way of obstacles as they can to prevent you from buying something. That means there’s no verification process for an automated script to bump up against when trying to secure a dozen new consoles for resale. Meanwhile Sony has a queue system in place that isn’t perfect, but at least gave me the passing impression that I might be able to buy a PS5.

*These are the prices for just the boxes!*

I guess the ultimate question is “why do I want this thing so badly?” It’s an extremely valid question that took me a bit to come up with an actual answer that wasn’t just, “cause I waaaaaaaannnntttt one.” The way I see it is, there are some really big games coming out soon that I really want to try, things like Cyberpunk 2077 and Ubisoft’s terribly named Immortals: Fenyx Rising. My base PS4 isn’t going to do a great job with either of those games, and my PC is showing its age in a way that makes me certain that the clock is ticking. But in reality I could definitely hold off until next year to buy a PS5 and I’m well aware of that fact.

They always say that you shouldn’t buy the first iteration of any electronic product because it’ll inevitably be flawed in some way. There are reports of failing USB ports, incompatibilities with external drives and plenty of user interface issues that seem to be affecting people, all of which are great reasons to wait for a firmware patch or a new iteration. But in a year that’s been fundamentally broken and busted, why shouldn’t my new $500 console be a complete representation of the year 2020? Ultimately, I just want the new shiny thing and got really obsessive about it to the point where I’d get genuinely upset when I couldn’t purchase one online. It was at that point I decided to close out all of my tracking tabs and just try my luck at finding one in a store, which considering that I live in a fairly small town, might actually be my best option.

Gut Check: Fuser

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Somewhere between my first and fiftieth Smash Mouth and Carly Rae Jepsen mashup, the comedic flair that initially attracted me to Fuser faded into the background and was replaced with a genuine desire to make a song that actually sounded good. While Fuser isn’t much of a “game,” it is a pretty powerful and accessible piece of software that’s capable of generating some genuine ear-worms of songs in an easy and accessible way.

Just like previous Harmonix titles such as the Rock Band series or the early Guitar Hero games, the fun doesn’t necessarily stem from making your way through the career modes, but rather in the simple act of playing the game is the real draw. Just like those games, Fuser has a story mode that grants you different unlocks as you progress, but in reality it’s more of a tutorial than anything else. During the course of a set you’ll get some requests for certain instruments and genres as well as some objectives that usually revolve around you utilizing a technique you just learned.

The idea is that you’re an amateur DJ who like anyone at this event, is just allowed to hop on stage and mix it up at what must be the weirdest music festival in the universe. There’s no logic to it, but there doesn’t really need to be considering that no one is actually coming to a music game for its story. The career is split into several sets of levels spread across a few different uniquely themed stages where you’ll be taught something new. The first stage is about the basics of timing, whereas later on you’re taught about soloing certain tracks, queuing up new sets, and adjusting tempos.

It’s incredibly helpful and provides you with a decent amount of cosmetic and song unlocks depending how well you score in a level, but Fuser isn’t really good about giving you feedback which isn’t great if you’re trying to improve. I rarely understood why I got three stars on a level versus four or five, because the game only seems to show you what you did right without offering anything in the way of criticism. It wouldn’t be such a bummer if it wasn’t for the fact that songs and song currency are usually unlocked when you reach a five star score.

But once you complete a few stages and learn some of the advanced techniques for mixing, I’d suggest you just leap into the freeplay mode and never look back. That’s what I’ve done, and I’m truly having a great time just mixing up songs for half hour sets at a time. Without the pressure of having to keep the crowd happy or worrying about the various objectives that might pop up during a set, freeplay is the actual mode you’ll be spending the majority of your time with .

You start any session by picking your crate of 30 songs to bring on stage with you. There are a lot of songs from different genres and eras, all of which have been broken into up to four tracks: vocals, bass, drums and guitar. Sometimes the guitar and bass will be synths, pianos or horns, but the idea is that you have four pieces of a song to play with. That means you can use Smash Mouth’s “All Star” vocals, with A-ha’s “Take on me” drums, and some other stuff that shouldn’t ever be in the same song, and make them be in the same song.

Fuser will force these songs to work together under any circumstance, even if that means ruining the very concept of music for you. This will manifest in the form of incredibly sad sounding pop songs that are in a minor key and played really slowly, or the exact opposite where “Linger” by The Cranberries suddenly becomes a high octane pop song. It’s wild and shouldn’t be capable of producing anything other than ear poison, but it all manages to hold together while producing decent sounding music

It probably took me a total of ten minutes in freeplay to create something I actually would listen to in my car. That realization was both comforting and horrifying because none of this should be working, but yet I still find myself nodding my head along to the music I create. I truly have loved my time with Fuser but I do fear that it might not have the legs that Rock Band did. It seems like a fun thing to show your friends that might ultimately not have the longest lasting appeal, but for a time it can be a genuinely good time.

Blog: A Big Bloated Blog – 11/25/20

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It’s almost Thanksgiving here in America, which traditionally meant that we all had an excuse to break any diets we were clinging to, were subject to horribly racist and misguided “conversation” with distant relatives, and would ultimately result with hiding in a bathroom to avoid your family. Luckily you don’t have to engage with any of that shit this year and that’s fucking great. Don’t get me wrong, I would have loved to have eaten a traditional Thanksgiving dinner this year but between the whole pandemic thing and the election thing, I’m super good with just staying home.

And you should be too, quite frankly. I don’t know if you’ve checked recently, but that COVID-19 thing that our nincompoop of a president and his deluge of moronic followers consistently bellow is a “hoax,” much to the surprise of nobody turned out to be real. But people are going to travel out of spite and ignorance regardless of how much that “liberal science” keeps pleading for them to stay home. So do yourself a favor and stay the fuck home if you can. I know that not everyone is in a situation where they can do that, but for those who can make that choice, pick the option where you don’t endanger the lives of everyone around you.

Yeah, stay home and distract yourselves by maybe watching some movies or reading a book. Definitely don’t refresh certain retailer websites in the hopes that a certain stupid looking console might suddenly become available. If everyone could just ignore the internet for a short period of time, that would be so ideal. I must have signed up for so many notifications for when the PlayStation 5 is back in stock that I’m certain my phone will explode when retailers make the console available again.

What else is going on? Oh, the president is still trying to undermine our democracy and erode the foundation that our country is built upon with frivolous and baseless lawsuits, but what else is new? It’s kind of like when you see a kid throw a tantrum in Target or something, it’s loud, annoying, and inescapable unless you just leave the store altogether. That’s basically what these past few weeks have been like, except it’s a grown man with a bad spray tan that’s doing it in front of the entire world. Hopefully this all comes to pass without too much more damage.

I don’t have a great segue to pivot off of that, so I’ll just say that I’ve been playing some Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and boy howdy is it unremarkable. On the plus side, it runs on my computer at a stable frame rate and looks gorgeous while doing it, unlike another Ubisoft release from a month ago. But on the flip side of that coin, it’s just kind of boring. Admittedly I haven’t played too much of it, but I haven’t found the story, characters or mechanics to be all that interesting. Honestly, it just seems kind of bland.

Remember when Assassin’s Creed started pumping out sequels that were basically the same game crammed into a new setting? That’s what Assassin’s Creed Valhalla feels like. It isn’t a bad game at all however, it’s just unremarkable. Not every game needs to be revolutionary or anything like that, but Assassin’s Creed Valhalla just kind of feels like another solid entry in the series and nothing more.

Also, I couldn’t play it for the first day because I kept running into an infinite loading screen that stopped me from actually ever starting the game. I tried a bunch of different options and tweaks to try and get on the other side of this blank void of a loading screen, but nothing sufficed. But for the first time in history, I have to say that a game streaming service saved the day.

I noticed an ad on Uplay+ that alluded to a glut of Ubisoft games, including Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, were currently available on Amazon Luna. Amazon Luna is Amazon’s (surprise, right?) game streaming service. It works fine, but is not the way I’d ever play these games. That is unless they offered cross-save functionality that would allow me to get through a busted loading screen and then take that new save back to the version I had installed on my computer. But what are the odds of tha… oh wait.

Yeah, for the first time in my life I’m thankful I had access to a game streaming service. Oh, and for those of you worried about my finances, I have no intention of keeping the service after the free trial is up. But hey, maybe before the trial is up I’ll try to whip up an article or something about it.

Also, with the holidays coming up and the end of the year approaching it’s time for me to start thinking about Game of the Year type stuff again. I’ve got some ideas and loose plans for things, but we’ll see if they pan out the way I want them to.

I think that’s about it for me this week. Hey, thanks for stopping in and reading this rambling mess. I appreciate your support. Be safe, be smart, and enjoy Thanksgiving if you can, and you’re an American. To everyone else, enjoy your week and ignore all retailer websites for a few days so I can get the funny looking console. Thanks!