T w e n t y S i d e d

It’s pretty common for critics – movie critics in particular – to end the year with twin best / worst lists. That’s a good way to organize things, but it doesn’t really suit my habits. I’m not obligated to cover particular games by an editor. I pay for the vast majority of my games, and I’m not keen on spending $60 and a week of my life on something I know I’ll hate. Which means I rarely play games that could qualify as “terrible”. So instead of WORST games of 2019 we get “disappointments of 2019”.

I realize that’s not nearly as fun or enticing, but feisty hyperbole isn’t really my style.

Now that your expectations for excitement have been sufficiently lowered, let’s talk about what I didn’t dig…

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Dénouement 2019 Part 3: The Disappointments”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Whenever I make up my end-of-year best / worst lists, I inevitably get people asking why I didn’t review X, Y, or Z. I played less than half of the games that were nominated for industry awards this year, and it’s natural for people to wonder how I could have missed groundbreaking game X or indie darling Y or AAA juggernaut Z. Questions about why I missed these games are common enough that it’s become a tradition to preemptively answer them before I talk about what I did and didn’t like.

This isn’t a complete list of all the games I didn’t play this year. That would be silly. Instead, this is a list of all the games that either:

A) Fall in a genre where you’d expect me to play through them.

Or:

B) Were popular enough and intriguing enough that people have asked me what I thought of them.

Or:

C) I seriously considered playing – and perhaps even announced my intention to play – before changing my mind.

So stuff like FIFA doesn’t make this list because it’s not part of a genre I care about, I never considered playing it, and nobody cares what I think about it.

So here are the games that I didn’t play, but could / should have…

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Dénouement 2019 Part 2: The No-Show List”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

It’s almost 2020! Welcome to the future, I guess. It’s a shame Cyberpunk 2077 didn’t come out in 2019, since that would have been thematically appropriate for a year where the AAA publishers all went full-on corporate dystopia.

Right now the gaming industry feels like the lamest cyberpunk novel ever written. 2019 didn’t give us any razorgirls, brain implants, or flying cars. No robo-arms. No glowing nano blades. No AI escaped out onto the internet to pursue its own agenda. No body-swapping. No robo-geishas. No glowing cyber eyes with a built-in HUD. There aren’t any 20 meter holographic billboards. If someone is cyber-jacking, it doesn’t mean they’re cracking through the corporate ICE layers to steal the designs for the new security bot while soaring on amphetamines, it means they’re watching PornHub.

While we didn’t get much in the way of cool cyberpunk shit this year, the big publishers went out of their way to behave like childishly cliché cyberpunk corps.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Dénouement 2019 Part 1: The Year of Corporate Dystopia”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.