Ed Zitron is the CEO of PR firm EZPR, and he loves to play games to forget about work.
Hello everyone! This is my first top 10 list for Giant Bomb, and this has been an especially peculiar year for gaming for me, in that it was the first I can think of where I didn’t necessarily love ten games, and hated several major releases (Doom Eternal and Spider-Man: Miles Morales). But for the most part, the games I loved I absolutely fell head over heels for.
10. Animal Crossing: New Horizons
I listed this game not because I think it’s great--in fact, I think it’s got the worst user interface in a game anywhere in existence--but because of the experience I had playing it with other people. I cannot think of a game I’ve ever played with my nephew, half of my friends, my wife, her friends, my family, her family--everyone! Everyone wanted to play this, they all wanted to trade fruits and do the turnip exchange and try and make more bells to upgrade the house. It absorbed my life for an entire month, and then disappeared like it had never been there. Amen.
9. Fuser
I love Harmonix, even if they never gave me Rock Band: Queens of the Stone Age. Fuser is probably one of the weirdest games anyone has ever made, let alone Harmonix, and it’s incredibly endearing as a result. It’s basically a mashup simulator, with you dropping in parts of songs (vocals, drums, guitars, etc.) constantly, trying to match up the beats and fucking around with the timing of the songs. You can truly make some monstrosities--it features Smash Mouth’s "All Star", Rage Against the Machine’s "Killing in the Name Of", LMFAO’s "Party Rock Anthem", Dolly Parton’s "Jolene", just to name a few. It’s a nightmare machine, but there’s so much going on under the hood that it always makes the songs fit. There have been several moments in the game where I’ve laughed with actual, real-ass joy at how well something blended--the guitars off "Killing in the Name Of" work in a lot of places--and then at the actual comedy of any Smash Mouth song. Please play this game. It’s so good. I want more songs.
8. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2
Going to go ahead and preemptively apologize for the sheer number of remakes on this list, starting with this one. THPS is a game that rocks because it knows that you want to play a video game, and does not try and make you pretend otherwise. This is a very straightforward update, adding manuals to the game (were they always there? Where are my pills?), graphical updates (obviously) and a few new objectives. But that’s fine. This game has always been good. All it needed was updating. And here it is. Except they removed Alley Life’s "Out with the Old", which is a crime, and everyone involved has now been arrested and imprisoned.
7. Maneater
This was my surprise top 10 game of the year. It takes a little bit of time to get going, but the mechanics of Maneater are so good--it’s so fun saying “I’m The Big Shark” and eating things and levelling up your shark. It doesn’t pretend to be deep, it doesn’t pretend to be a huge story, it’s just fun. You are a big shark that eats people and the people scream, and Chris Parnell gives glib reality TV-style voiceovers the entire time. It’s very funny, very enjoyable, a really fun goof and a spoof on the whole open world genre.