Jeff Gerstmann saw a dude skitching along the side of a minivan while he was going up the 5 this summer and it was the illest thing he's ever seen. You can send him questions for "Jeff Gerstmann Presents Jar Time 2021" by PM'ing the account "Jeff" on this very website.
Ya know, it's pretty funny that the Macintosh Plus single that released at the very end of 2019 asked the world (well, it asked the artist, at least) to go outside not long before we kinda had to stop going outside so much.
A lot has happened since then.
Before I get into my ten favorite games of the year, here's some other stuff about my year that was.
I'm really thankful for Discord, which is where I did around 98% of my socializing in 2020. It's been a real joy to recapture a lot of the dumb IRC vibes of 1990s, but it's also been nice to have tight clusters of folks to hang out with, too. I pay for Discord's subscription service, but I think the only part of it I actually use is an animated emote of Ryback nodding his head. I also lucked my way onto a server with a bunch of super-talented musicians and it's both made me want to make more music or a video mixtape or something and it's also made me think "wow, I'm not sure that I have the skills or energy to make much of anything right now." Energy's a weird one these days.
As for the real world, well... hmm. I don't really have a lot of comparison points, so I don't know what parenting is supposed to look like. But I think you're supposed to occasionally be able to have a family member over from time to time so they can watch the kid and give you and your wife a brief break from things. Circumstances haven't really allowed for that, so we've been on our own. Balancing the schedule around here isn't easy, and my wife is the true star of the household for keeping the rest of us going, but honestly, I love a lot of things about it. I think if I were still driving to San Francisco every day I would have lost my mind by now. Getting home at 8PM when the baby goes to sleep no later than 5 got just a little bit more soul crushing every single day. Being able to spend real time with my daughter every day is, undoubtedly, the best thing to happen this year. Even if she wants me to read the same book to her eight times in a row. I just keep thinking: if I spent all of 2020 driving 80 miles a day, five days a week, and only saw her before leaving for work in the morning, would my daughter even recognize me? Would my wife?
Anyway, the game industry thrived in a lot of ways last year, but we also saw a lot of games become casualties of the work from home experience. Some games were lucky to have just been delayed. Others came out in states that they... really shouldn't have shipped in. The way games and consoles got announced twisted and changed in ways that quickly got away from what we think of as the typical E3-style announcement, and ultimately that's probably a healthy thing for video games. I can't imagine there being an E3 this year, but hey, we'll see.
I do not know what 2021 will look like. But I think everything is going to work out OK in the end. More on that later.
My Ten Favorite Video Games in 2020
10. Teardown
As an ongoing early access experience, at times Teardown feels more like a brilliant idea than a fully realized video game, but this little voxel world that you can blast apart with a sledge hammer or a blowtorch or propane tanks or hey, maybe just drive a truck through the house you want to blow up. Why not?
The game part of Teardown has you do things like intelligently plot a path of destruction that leads you past all of a level's key items, so you can grab them all in 60 seconds and escape for the the law shows up. It very different than the first couple of levels, which are really just there to let you get used to breaking stuff.
Blasting the voxels apart feels great, and even though the performance isn't great (on my machine, anyway), the way the game slows down and chops up when you set off a huge explosion gets me amped just like when I used to crash a Garry's Mod server by filling it full of way too many objects (dominos and/or bikes, in case you were wondering).
9. Fuser
The big problem with Dropmix was that it wanted you to play Dropmix instead of just dropping cards and making bad, terrible, no-good mashups. The trouble with Fuser is that the game part of it isn't actually much fun! But the freestyle mode is so rad that it's extremely easy to forget that the game part of the game is too bossy. I mean, some of that has to be there, it's also kind of a tutorial.
Whatever, I'm not here to pick this thing apart. It's great! Being able to load into the freestyle session and screw around with all these different stems is extremely satisfying and extremely goofy, if you're doing it right. Or wrong, I guess. Point being, you can make a lot of things that sound legit good in Fuser, but I'm here to generate nightmares. Heavens to Betsy, they've invented a soundclown machine!
8. Genshin Impact
It is 2021 and you must choose one game inspired by The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild to represent you in the coming year. Will you choose Immortals: Fenyx Rising? Or Genshin Impact? Choose fast, it's already January.
I went the Genshin Impact route.
The developers of Genshin Impact have made a world that's fun to explore with just enough going on out there to keep you coming back. The anime art style, mashed up against some Breath of the Wild-like effects and world design, worked for me way more than I figured it would. I found myself getting invested in leveling up my various characters, feeding weapons to other weapons to power it all up, and so on.