Checkpoint 16: Back At It With A Best Of
For our end of year we talk about some stuff we enjoyed during and around the last 12 months.
Hey happy new year folks! Hope everyone’s had an atleast decent holiday break and got to spend some time alone and comfortable and warm playing or doing something they enjoyed. You deserve it, you always deserve it. Apologies for the missed months, my excuse being a combo of moving house and a general lack of motivation to spend much time outside of my comfort zone (Destiny 2 with Minecraft videos in the background), which I imagine most folks can sympathise with. For our end of year.. list, in place of any tiers or top tens or anything like that we decided to talk about some stuff we enjoyed during and around the last 12 months. Maybe not the most exciting or groundbreaking list but goddamn it’s been a fucking exhausting year so I reckon that doesn’t matter that much. The cool exciting stuff’s not going anywhere, and we’ll all get to it when it’s a little easier.
Destiny 2: Beyond Light
This was the year of Destiny for me. I have poked at this game numerous times since it launched but it never really clicked. Now I am watching hours long lore videos, I have 4 different apps on my phone to manage my inventory, I'm following fan art accounts,... I'm in deep is what I'm saying. Turns out I had a lot of extra time this year to sink into a sprawling sci-fi world where all the guns have cool names like "Izanagi's Burden". It's what I played when I wanted to turn off my brain for a bit, or I would play it until my brain got fried (I count doing the raids together with total strangers among my favorite moments of 2020). It's also how I've kept in touch with people I couldn't hang out with and I wish more of my friends would get into to it so we can all chat about our day while shooting a gun that's powered by an angry bug. — J
There’s a lot to like about Destiny 2. The guns have cool names, like J mentioned. It feels good to run around and shoot aliens, and the PvP is actually properly fun and a whole other game in itself honestly. There’s always 100 things to do, and a big chunk of those, and their respective rewards, come back around every Tuesday. The new planet and all the content added back in November totally shred ass. But the big thing that I figured out over this hard long year, the main reason that Destiny 2 has properly become my mmorpg; it’s full of books (neeeeerd! — J). Reams and reams of unlockable lore, actually exciting and compelling world building, scattered across the solar system. Some of it you get just by clicking on this weird dead robot, some is locked behind tougher challenges. I can’t explain how nice and peaceful and calm it is (and how important its been for me) to sit down with a coffee and dedicate an hour or two to finding a couple missing pages of a story I genuinely care about. — S
Kimimi The Game Eating She-Monster
Kimimi's personal blog is one of the most wonderful sources for games writing you'll find on the web. Just the amount of posts she puts out is staggering, generally leaning towards older games, you can find reviews, personal reflections and detailed deep-dives into the weird and wild. Kimimi is over here doing her thing, seemingly unbothered by the latest game fads and trends, like a comfy chair by the fire where you can read about summer simulator Boku no Natsuyasami 2or the joy of hot air ballooning in Kaze no Notam. — J
I initially discover Etho through watching the newest series of Hermitcraft (a bunch of Minecraft YouTube share a server, build stuff together, prank eachother. Good soft fun.) and his videos have been a genuine joy to watch over the last few months. A real noise came out of me when I saw he had a new video up a few days ago. You’d think the personality behind one of the most well liked and long running Minecraft Let’s Plays would be some loud shouty Fortnite type but the guy is properly sweet, and genuinely cares about what he does and what his audience likes. I can’t imagine it would take anyone longer than a couple videos to fall in love with what he does, and I can’t recommend it enough. Go get your snacks. — S
Probably the most well-produced let's plays on the internet (easy yep — S). Chip and Ironicus love playing games and they love talking over them! After wrapping up their odyssean series on Metal Gear Solid last year they kicked off 2020 with a return to the odyssey of Super Mario. Right now you can watch them play through all of Final Fantasy VII Remake, there is a great introduction video that starts of the let's play. The boys are funny and smart and they go out of their way to show off every detail of the games they play, including Mario's taint or Cloud failing to pull a lever in time. — J
Jack & Kat Present Crusader Kings III
When Crusader Kings III launched earlier this year, Kat Brewster and Jack de Quidt embarked on an epic conquest filled with subterfuge, all-out war, family drama, and whacking off (it doesn't mean what you think it does!). It filled me with joy to hear Kat and Jack discuss going to war with an actual baby, just a thing that happens in this game. The streams aired on Twitch but are all available on YouTube for your viewing please. — J
I honestly thought Disc Room was made for me; a bunch of the folks behind one of my favourite games from last year making a cool looking, ace sounding disc dodging game? I love dodging shit. Give me an overhead camera and a bunch of fast moving objects to avoid and I’m happy. Disc Room gave me a spaceship full of that, rooms full of different disc dodging challenges, dodging puzzles, unlockable special abilities (a fuckin’ dash) and they even added a perpetually on screen leaderboard so Joes has to see how much better I am than him whenever he plays. The perfect game. — S
It's a general rule around here that the games made for Sam are generally not for me. Sam is really good at the dashing and dodging stuff, I am... not. Sam is a Sekiro boy, I had a lot more fun with Dark Souls. But! Despite Sam's insistence on crushing every single one of my completion times, I really enjoyed Disc Room. It feels really good, the art is super slick, and thanks to some cool unlockable abilities the dashing and dodging stays fresh throughout the entire game. — J
Dia Lacina's Audio Logs
Dia Lacina launched a new feature over at Paste Magazine called Audio Logs: A Journey into Gaming's Most Memorable Soundtracks. Since its inception back in May, Dia has covered a wide range of video game sounds and music, this includes a celebration of black composers (Part 1 | Part 2), the best summer jams and spooky tunes, and a look at the influence of 80s house on the sound of the Sega Genesis. — J
Unboxing Dads
Although I was adamantly unexcited by the prospect of the PS5 and the.. new Xbox (there aren’t any games), I gotta admit to getting swept up in all the pre-launch hype. This is 100% down to watching the Giant Bomb dads gleefully unbox the new consoles in their exactly-how-youd-picture-them home “studies”. Under equipped, overtired and visibly excited, watching these industry veterans struggle to get the full PS5 box in shot was a joy, and listening to them talk their initial experiences with the actual consoles and software inside of them had me considering whether a newly unemployed me spending a chunk of the only money I have for the forseeable future (“I’ll just buy crappier wine”) on a big piece of metal and plastic I don’t care about would actually be.. all that bad. — S
These dads are great! If you are a Giant Bomb premium subscriber you should check out The HotSpot (get a free taste here). It's a podcast about video games (supposedly) but regularly takes long detours into talk about coin collecting, what hard drives to get for your NAS, or how Vinny got his daughter's account banned on PSN. — J
Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality
The gaming deal of a lifetime happened in the summer of 2020. 1,741 games for $5. Over 1000 creators submitted their games to a collection that raised a whopping 8 million dollars. This includes some of the best games of recent years. Games like Night in the Woods, Celeste, Minit, Wide Ocean Big Jacket, and Anodyne. Plus literally hundreds of other incredible gems, theres Can Androids Pray, Extreme Meatpunks Forever, You Died But a Necromancer Revived You, Sewer Rave,... The list is absolutely mind-blowing. And I haven't even mentioned theres also soundtracks, assets, physical games and comics! If you picked up the bundle and need some suggestions on where to start, you can find some recommendations here. And there is a neat site that serves you up a random game or let's you search the collection with powerful filters. — J
A Short Hike
I finally played adamgryu's A Short Hike when it was released on Switch and I absolutely loved every minute of it. Sam already did a nice writeup when he played it last year but this ticks so many boxes; it looks great, has a sweet story with charming characters, some fantastic music, and lot more going on than you would think. It's the perfect game for a lazy day snuggled up in bed. Some extra stuff was added when it came out on Switch so a great reason to get it now or go up that mountain again for another hike. — J
Nice Puzzles
A Monster’s Expedition, Spring Falls, Good Sudoku… it’s been a good year for sweet smart puzzle games! The kind of games that actually probably aren’t all that hard but still make you feel smart, give you something to feel good about. Some days it’s easy to beat yourself up at the end of a day for not “achieving” anything, even if you know that’s all manufactured learned bullshit, and returning to a cute little island and figuring out the right order to push and roll the logs can be enough to stamp out that toxic little feeling, at least for while. — S
Special Mentions
Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Waypoint Radio, The Game Pube, Bad End, Cloud Gardens, Video Games Are The Worst Thing On Earth, I Am Dead,mossbag, Braytech, #destiny-mr-freeze-dlc and Grimoire Reasons, Fall Guys, Game Studies Study Buddies, The Vineyard w/ Funké, Pigstep by Lena Raine, and If Found.
Thanks for reading! Hope you are as happy, sane, and healthy as you can in these times. And hey, here is some good news: only 17 more days 'til Hitman IIIcomes out! Take care!