T w e n t y S i d e d

Before I talk about my games of 2021, I want to circle back and talk about a couple of older games. I spent a lot of time with them this year, and I didn’t get around to writing about them at the time.

Let’s start with…

Two Point Hospital

Maybe it sounds weird, but when I got out of the hospital I had a sudden urge to play the 2018 management sim Two Point Hospital. This game has you training medical staff, building facilities, and curing endless waves of patients from various pun-based diseases. It’s kind of admirable how far the game is willing to go in service of these lame puns, which gives the humor a bit of charm.

I think I spent about a month with the title, although I can’t be sure. I didn’t write about it at the time, and my post-hospital memories are a bit of a blur.

The campaign scenarios were mostly an exercise in frustration and tedium. Each map would be built around a single concept or disease. One map teaches you the importance of keeping people warm in a cold climate. Another teaches the importance of keeping the place cool and clean in a warm climate. Then you get one near a ski resort where you need to deal with lots of broken bones. Each scenario takes a few hours. So it ends up feeling like the whole game is one excruciatingly long tutorial, where 20 minutes of learning are stretched out over 40 hours of gameplay. Then to keep it challenging, the designers make your buildings small and inconveniently shaped.You can’t change the footprint of your buildings. You only get to decide how the interior space is divided up.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Dénouement 2021 Part 2: The Disappointment”

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.

This was not a great year for me. My health took a turn for the worse in May, and things sort of spiraled out of control from there. Eventually there was some surgery that went poorly, some drugs with bad side effects, some complications, and a small but permanent downgrade to my quality of life. And then just to keep things interesting, my wife was injured this August, right when she had a ton of stuff to do at work and I needed a lot of help at home. 

I turned 50 this year, and I felt every bit of it.

My wife is back on her feet now and I’ve adjusted to my new condition, but still. What a year. I had several months where I didn’t really play much in the way of games, or I played familiar low-stress “comfort-food” style games. I’m pretty sure my Factorio series was cut short by the hospitalization. I seem to remember I had more posts planned, although I can’t remember the details now.

So this was a weird year. Normally I look over the industry and try to find a trend or theme to tie the year together, but I spent most of 2021 looking inward and not paying attention to the news. Did I miss anything important? Did Half-Life 3 finally come out? Did Rockstar announce GTA VI yet? Did a new MMO displace World of Warcraft? Did EA finish rehabilitating Anthem? What’s going on? What was the big story this year? I wasn’t paying attention.

I don’t know about any of that, but I do know I’m cold all the time and I suspect my blood pressure medicine is to blame.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Dénouement 2021 Part 1: I Need a Medkit”

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.