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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.

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.

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.

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!

Blog: Whoa-vember – 11/18/20

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I don’t know if you’ve noticed it, but it’s gotten really weird and bad out there recently. Like, shit is so bizarre that it’s genuinely hard to keep track of anything anymore even when it isn’t whatever horrible thing is happening in the news. But let’s try and take a fun little sojourn in the opposite direction of the grimness of our world, and instead discuss some video games for a change. That should be fun, right?

Earlier this week I published my review of Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, a game I truly loved despite it boasting some truly god awful technical performance. Aside from just being a mostly superb game, it also made that urge to upgrade to a PlayStation 5 feel more urgent and necessary than ever before. To be clear, I know that none of those things are true but I just really want one, and Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales just was that last push I needed to confirm that.

I know there aren’t any real games for it at the moment unless you’re into Demon’s Souls, which I am not, but I guess like a lot of people out there I’m captivated by the shiny new thing that’s on the market. I know that launch hardware is notoriously suspect and bound for a refresh that doesn’t make it look like a penguin with a popped collar, but it still doesn’t change the fact that I want the damn thing now.

I want to get my hands on that controller and see what it’s all about. I want to play the pre-installed Astro’s Playroom, a game that people have been championing since the console released. Yet none of this would be an issue if I could literally find anywhere that was selling one. You’d probably be reading articles on this very site about the PlayStation 5 and all the stuff it brings to the table. The reality is that I’ll eventually get a hold of one, I just would prefer it to be sooner rather than later.

Other than playing Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales and pining for a new console, I dipped into a little bit of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and boy howdy is it just another one of those games. It isn’t bad or anything, it just doesn’t feel especially outstanding thus far. To its credit, it at least runs on my computer at a decent frame rate unlike the previous Ubisoft release, Watch Dogs Legion, so that’s a plus. I’m going to put more time into it though because I’ve had this desire to play a big action/adventure game recently and was really hoping that Assassin’s Creed Valhalla would do the trick.

I’ve been looking for a game to really sink my teeth into lately, and aside from Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, nothing has really done the trick. Even games I was really into like Baldur’s Gate III and Solasta: Crown of the Magister seemed like perfect candidates, but they’re both early enough that I ultimately decided to back away from them until they receive some more updates.

I don’t know, maybe all the shit going on in the world right now is eating away at my ability to truly engross myself in a game or something, but it’s been kind of underwhelming for me on the gaming front lately. I think more than anything I think I’m just tired. Everything is so fucking exhausting these days, and I just need it to stop for a bit. I feel like I’ve aged twenty years in the past 4, and these next few months might put me into an old folk’s home if the past few weeks have been any indication.

Blog: More Than Games – 09/23/20

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Welcome to another fantastic edition of this blog where I sometimes talk about video games. Boy howdy are there a ton of video games I want to talk about this week, I’m basically swimming in rewarding gameplay experiences that I’m eager to discuss. It’s hard to convey sarcasm through a written piece, but that was all a big fib. I did a lie. No, this week has mostly been about me reading a book, hearing about how people are enjoying games I know aren’t for me, and watching the slow and steady erosion of our democracy continue unabated. So hell yeah, video game blog time!

Honestly it’s been a week of just reading through the latest Dungeons & Dragons module, Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, and preparing to run that for my group. You can read more about what that process has been like in September’s Master of Disaster feature on “prepping,” but to quickly summarize, it’s been a lot of work and a lot of fun. It’s consuming most of my time these days but I’m enjoying the process of it all.

*Rime of the Frostmaiden – Wizard’s of the Coast (Image Published on IGN)*

Otherwise I’m just kind of watching people lose their collective minds over the release of Hades and Spelunky 2, two rouge-like games that I know aren’t for me. But seeing all of this praise being dumped on these games is making me feel like I owe it to myself to at least give them a shot. I’m really in a holding pattern until next week when Baldur’s Gate III enters early access and the desire to play other games will leave my body.

Oh, and there’s that clusterfuck of a “pre-order” situation that Sony and Microsoft both waded into unwittingly that’s been interesting to watch. For those who don’t know what happened, both Sony and Microsoft had some pretty rough pre-order snafus, with people even ordering the wrong Xbox in some cases. It was bad, and even though I literally just wrote about my wanting both Sony and Microsoft to delay their consoles, I still keep trying to get a PS5 anyway. Like, there’s barely anything to play on launch day as is, but I just want the new shiny thing! I can’t buy a 3000 series graphics card because I’d literally have to upgrade everything else in my computer to accommodate it so I want the funny looking PlayStation instead!

But hey, all of that is small potatoes when stacked up against the deluge of bullshit that’s currently going on in the world. So do yourselves a favor, check your voter registration and make sure you vote on November 3rd. Seriously, it’s fucking grim out there and it’s getting worse every day.

Blog: Console Bore – 09/09/20

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As of writing this, Microsoft finally saw fit to confirm what might be the worst kept secret in the gaming industry, in announcing the existence of the Xbox Series S, the all digital and budget model of their next console. I could talk about how odd and wildly different from the upcoming Series X it looks, but instead I’d like to add to the cacophony of voices asking, “Should these boxes just be delayed?”

Honestly, I think they should be for a multitude of reasons. First, it’s 2020 and things are a fucking mess with a lot of folks (myself included) out of a job and unable to justify buying a $500+ video game machine. Things are tough out there with people not only possibly being unable to afford the thing, but supply chains being what they currently are might make for a difficult production and distribution pipeline. It’s like if Rolex was trying to pitch me on their newest line of expensive watches where normally I’d say “no thank you,” but trying to sell it to me in this economy is just fucking wild.

But maybe you’re Captain Moneybags, sitting upon your throne of gold coins and job offers with plenty of disposable income to throw around. First of all, how about throwing some of that cash my way, and secondly, what are you gonna play on these boxes anyway? Launch lineups are generally pretty forgettable, but this time around it’s downright miserable.

Sony has Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales coming day and date with the PS5, but that’s kind of it. Without a doubt both Microsoft and Sony will get some sports games, some sort of dancing game and an Assassin’s Creed, but that doesn’t seem worth the price of admission to me. Sure I’ll play Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and the Spider-Man game, but the first one I’ll be able to play on my PC or PS4, while the latter is more of an expansion pack that’s built on the same bones as its predecessor. That’s not a dig against these games but there’s nothing that’s jumped out and made me eager to buy a new console.

Then you look at Microsoft who basically just has third party stuff coming out with nothing else to show especially after Halo Infinite got delayed into next year. Like the PS5, they’ll get some sports games, some Ubisoft titles and the next Call of Duty, but they’ve got even less going on than Sony does. Sure they have Game Pass which will allow users to play a variety of stuff, but you can already play those games right now on your current generation of Xbox or a PC.

Maybe by the end of the month both companies will announce some super amazing games that I just have got to play on day one, but as of now there’s like one thing I want to play that’s exclusive in Spider-Man and that’s it. Personally, I wouldn’t mind a cool March release for these bad boys, or even just a full year delay. But it’s expensive to just store product in a warehouse for a year, and it’s unwise to do that with what will be rapidly aging technology. A delay could see a drop in price and a better lineup though, which is something I’m into but these companies certainly will not be.