Samantha Kalman is a Seattle-based game developer currently working at Respawn on Apex Legends. You can find her on Twitter @SamanthaZero.
Friends, it's been a hell of a year. I had approximately three months of normalcy in 2020, if you count studying for a Bachelor's degree in a foreign country "normal". When the lockdown hit in March I was settled in SE London, trying to keep up with my studies and wondering how long to watch the pandemic unfold before I needed to move back home. Lemme tell ya, London is a really cool place to live when you can be out in it! But when you're stuck in a single room it's a different story, even when you have time to make some awful experimental music.
Thankfully I did make it back home and settled in with the help of family. And with a summer vacation from studying I got to catch up on games I didn't get to play in 2019. Here's my top 10 great escapes from a shit year!
10. Fuser
You probably already know I'm a huge fan of Harmonix games! I was really happy to see them making new work, even though it's revisiting their very cool card game DropMix. The timing of the release was coincidental, too. While I was studying electronic music in London, we did a unit on hip hop & turntablism. I felt kind of activated by that content and started falling down a well of studying the history, technologies, and techniques of DJing. My interest grew enough that I invested in my first set of turntables this summer, a couple months before Fuser dropped. After I'd been practicing dropping, cutting, mixing, and scratching in an analog fashion, I got to try it all in Fuser. It's really fun! Fuser necessarily simplifies the physical precision required to be a DJ, but it all still works. I like the variety in its library of music and how it forces me to play with music I wouldn't usually curate for myself. The best part is how it takes away all the most difficult parts of DJing to keep you focused on listening and making purely musical decisions. Whether you make those decisions for good or evil is up to you--I admire the truly grotesque mashups we saw coming out of Fuser social media for a while. It's not easy to make something so fucked up on pure vinyl, trust me I tried! My final take: Fuser is to actual DJing as Divekick is to Street Fighter, and I love it for that.
9. Animal Crossing: New Horizons
Animal Crossing almost certainly saved my sanity while I was still in London. I was looking forward to its release from an increasingly cold and rainy part of the world. I couldn't wait to run around little sunny islands with my friends! It seemed to bring a promise of relief from isolation that was finally setting in as dreadful. But I was subverted! My internet at home was so bad that I would only get errors every time I tried the multiplayer. It broke my heart, truly, to be denied a relief from social isolation. I continued to play on a daily clip, waking up and looking forward to the theme song. My routine of logging on doing my rounds in the morning brought some stability to my life at the height of uncertainty about the pandemic. I'll always be grateful for it for that.
8. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare - Warzone
OK, so every few months for the past couple years I've gone on a twitter tirade about Battle Royale games. Mostly I like to pitch the most ridiculous ideas like "a hundred drag queens parachute onto a catwalk" or dumb shit like that. As more games in the genre have been released I've taken a liking to their individual approaches to game dynamics. I started studying them from a design perspective, if you want to put it that way. Because so many people have talked about Warzone being a legit great Battle Royale, I decided to try it. Friends, this is the first time I've actually played a Call of Duty game. And I gotta admit, Warzone is pretty fucking cool.
It feels a lot more intense and chaotic than the time I've spent with PUBG or Apex Legends. Frankly it's all pretty overwhelming as an experience. I played several games without understanding how to engage with the missions system at all. And when I picked it apart and discovered the focus on hundreds of minute variations of a fixed quantity of weapons, the progression all felt a little shallow. I haven't engaged with the other PVP modes of Modern Warfare or Black Ops so the cross-progression hook doesn't hold any weight for me. But playing it is fun as hell, even without readily knowing my preferred loadout. They've done a lot to maximize the adrenaline factor of the play experience. Speaking as someone who dies a lot, the Gulag revive mechanic works really well. Who knows, this might become my gateway drug to playing other Call of Duty games!