T w e n t y S i d e d

Now that it’s finally 2020, it’s time to talk about what games I loved in 2019. Keep in mind that I’m just one over-the-hill nerd and I don’t have a staff of younglings helping me to achieve Total Coverage. As a result, I only play a tiny fraction of the games that come out in a given year. Moreover, I try to play a mix of AAA and indie stuff. The result is that there are probably a lot of really good games that I never got around to playing.

Also, I don’t always pounce on games at release day. You might see a few games in this list that actually came out at the tail end of 2018, but I didn’t get around to playing until this year. Given how much publishers like to fight over the Christmas shopping season, I have to allow a bit of slop in the dates or some games would never get a chance.

I’m not very good at putting games in order. The expectation is that the list should be sorted in the order of ascending quality, with the #1 spot going to some sort of “Game of the Year”. That’s a reasonable expectation as a reader, but the ordering of these things is inherently and inescapably arbitrary.

Hm. Do I give the #3 spot to Landmark Game That We Never Thought Would Get a Sequel? Or maybe I should put that one space below Niche Game I Was Personally Obsessed With? And hang on, shouldn’t both of these be lower than Smash Hit That People Are Still Making Memes About? Oh crap, I didn’t leave room on the list for Surprise Hit That Everyone Thought Would Be Terrible! And what about High-Profile Remake that’s Better than The Original, or Gem From Last Year That I Didn’t Get Around to Playing Until This Year! This is a mess. I need to start over.

So don’t give me a hard time about the ordering, okay?

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Dénouement 2019 Part 4: The Good Stuff”

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 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.