2021 started off with me getting a sleek and shiny new 3080 in February! SMILES! It broke in September! FROWNS. But I got it RMAed by NVIDIA! I was back to smiling at that point, and here we are, with another long year in the books.
Those of you who know me from the site know my tastes, probably: I like big flashy games with lots of guns and explosions and I like them to look very nice indeed with a high framerate. There’s a reason that DOOM Eternal was my GOTY last year! This year I felt like my gameplay habits were somehow even more along these lines, as I wanted to stress my video card and big-ass monitor as much as I could. So most of what I gravitated to this year was big flashy AAA stuff. I've become a gaming basic bitch and I’m pretty OK with that.
As always, I probably spent more time on Magic: Arena than any other game this year. I play it every day and I like it a lot, not so much of the “Arena” part but more because of the “Magic” part of it. The client has gotten better, though, so, as always, please play some of it if you so desire. I’ve spent most of January playing Vampire Survivors and Cyberpunk, but I guess I’ll have to write those up next year!
Games I Wanted To Mention But Didn’t Play A Lot Of For Whatever Reason
It’d feel weird to let 2021 go by without any mention of New World, one of the biggest Steam launches of all time. Well, I have mentioned it, and maybe we can just let this one go. It’s baffling how popular this is! I’m glad that people like it but it truly feels like a 2008 MMO transported into the future. I apparently played 15 hours of this but can remember not a single event or standout moment from it. Mostly I remember spending 15 minutes walking to a quest destination only to find that a level 18 quest was surrounded by level 22 mobs so I couldn’t complete it. That sucked and I hated it and I didn’t want to play any more of it after that.
I was kind of surprised at how quickly I stopped playing this; I got around three hours in and kind of just…dropped it. That was maybe the most shocking development of last year for me, as I absolutely love the first Psychonauts, and this seems like a more-than-decent sequel to it, but for some reason the controls just seemed so clunky that it was actively distracting me from being able to get into the story. The way you have to remap your powers frequently in order to use more than four of them is kind of absurd in 2021, and the “connect the thoughts” mechanic flew over my head more than a few times, so I’d just have to sit there and wait for Raz to shout out the actual answer because I guess I didn’t understand what I needed to connect like I’m a big dummy! I don’t like feeling like a big dummy, but the evidence is there.
I mean, it’s true that I’m a big dummy in general but something about this game just felt off to me around the time I got to the casino level and the big cube with multiple faces you could jump into which also confused me so I put it down and haven’t really come back to it since. I definitely want to pick it back up but we’ll see when that happens, since the February mega-release month is almost here. They can lure me back by adding a PsychoAK47 that Raz can shoot people with.
Resident Evil Biohazard / Village
Sometimes Yolanda wants to sit down and watch me play a game front to back, but that can be kind of a challenge: I mostly like playing on my ultrawide monitor and the technology has not been invented yet to let her see through my big-ass noggin. But we put Biohazard and Village up on the TV in our room and got a decent chunk of the way through them. Biohazard seems like the worse game of the two (and I gather most people think this way): just brown and sludge-y and ugly all the way around, with frustratingly unkillable bosses.
I didn’t really care for that one all that much and stopped playing it around the 1/3rd mark according to the walkthrough I checked out, but Village seems to shift modes into something way more campy which was a better fit for me. In the end it’s still kind of surprising how little the gameplay has changed since RE4, for better or for worse, but they remain fun and we should really get back to it.
One wish I would have for these games would be to have a difficulty toggle that you can change mid-game; I had to restart Biohazard over and replay a good hour of it after I realized that I didn’t want to play it on the default difficulty. I’m into these games for the scares and plot twists; the inventory/ammo management aspect of it is supremely boring to me so I’d prefer to just blast through the enemies and get moving with the story. Got to get back to Village but hopefully we’ll do that soon!
Games I Played A Lot Of But Which I Don’t Consider To Be GOTY Candidates
Outriders was a pleasant surprise! It was neat to find a cover shooter that also vigorously rewarded you for getting up close and personal with the enemies coming your way. I only ever played this single-player, so I can’t speak to the online variants of it, but it was a good game to flip on when I wanted to kill some stuff and not think too hard about it which was most of the time. It was pretty janky in a lot of ways and the try-hard, sub-Gears-of-War toughguy writing was completely unmemorable, but I never got tired of doing that warping move where you land on an enemy and they explode. That’s fun and more games should let me do that.
I never played a Forza before Horizon 4, which I liked, so I went ahead and bought Forza Horizon 5 as well. It’s pretty much the same game in a different location! It’s fun and maybe you should check it out, but don’t expect a reinvention of the wheel. Although that’d be cool because it’d be fun to see what a car would look like without wheels.