Well, there’s a new Pokemon! I tend to not really review Pokemon unless something new is done. I mean, you’ve reviewed one Gen 7 or lower Pokemon game, you’ve reviewed all of them. That’s why I didn’t really review the Diamond and Pearl remakes in my post about them, but I did review Legends Arceus, because that was a more unique spin-off.

And in this case, it’s different enough to be worth reviewing… so yeah. I played the story and did some post-game shit, I’m about done with it myself though. I will do things a bit different than usual reviews because the usual format doesn’t work for this.

Let’s talk about it!

I find this a weird nostalgia bait thing. Like… Kids cared a little bit about this back in the 80s, and it even got a really crap movie because of the success of the cards, but I dunno if all that many people really look back that fondly on Garbage Pail Kids, beyond it being a product of its time. However, I’m kinda into this concept of making new games for old systems, especially now if you make sure to, you know, make them available on modern platforms too. One of the best examples of this is Battle Kid, a game that was stuck on NES for a bit but is now available on Xbox and hopefully will come to more platforms.

So I figured I’d grab this on a sensible system so I got the PC version. It will come on an NES cartridge later if you like spending like 7 times more than the game costs to get a collectible version of it… Yeah, not a fan of that price point.

So let’s see if this is a good NES game or whatever!

Well, I’m going in with this post a bit earlier than usual. The reason why is the same reason I posted my Sifu review before fully finishing it… because things are about to get WILD. Monark is out tomorrow, Elden Ring is out on Friday… and March has a LOT of games. So I’m just getting a bit ahead of the game here, basically.

For March 2022 I’m highlighting: 15 multiplats, 7 Switch games, and 2 PC releases. That number doesn’t look like anything special in a vacuum, but what IS special is what games are there.

Literally, I’m buying at least 8 of these for sure, and there are several “maybes” as well. And even some of the games I’m not interested in myself ARE huge, or look really cool but might not be something I’m that interested in. This might be one of the biggest months in gaming in YEARS.

Let’s go!

Disclaimer: I only list games that I think are worth mentioning. This includes games I’m personally interested in, games that will likely be popular, highly advertised games, small interesting ones I may notice, and such. Not just games I care about myself, I highlight as much as I think makes sense. And of course, I can’t see the future, so I may be missing games and I may be listing games that may get delayed.

2021. It was 2020 again, but weirder. On my side, I’ve been stuck in my house, working from home, since March 2020, I’m fine with that. Just working, working out, watching an unhealthy amount of vtubers and playing an unhealthy amount of video games. I had cataracts all of 2020 and early 2021 so I could barely see for a while, I got those fixed this year so that’s nice. I don’t really have much else to say on the non-gaming side of things, no big health emergencies in the family this year so that’s good. Not much activity overall. That said there was SOMETHING new… this website. I talked about this in the first post I made here, but I had a different site before this (called The Save Points, which originally was a group project but became a solo project fairly quickly), but ran into some DNS issues and decided to abandon the site I had built for the last 13 years. Switched how I did a few things, but yeah, having fun with this new site now. Definitely want to improve things a bit, I want to post more than I do.

As far as gaming, 2021 was actually pretty solid. I don’t know how it happened, but I constantly had something to play. Every month had at least 2 great games (plus a bunch of smaller decent games) which is not something that happens in most years. I didn’t even play all the games I was interested in this year, it was too busy. I didn’t even play too many stinkers, pretty much just Outriders, Axiom Verge 2 and NEO TWEWY.

So I have my own way of doing things for the GotY. Instead of being lame and choosing one winner, or being even lamer and doing a bunch of weird meaningless categories that have a ton of shitty nominations (made by people who hate video games), I just choose, like, 7 winners. I do put one winner on top of everyone else for maximum subjectivity, but yeah, 7 winners, the 7 best games of the year, let’s fucking go.

Since this IS an end-of-year post about the top games of the year, I do want to take the time to look back on some things, so I’ll rant about the console manufacturers a bit and whatever else catches my fancy, then select the 7 GotY winners. I also list a bunch of honorable mentions because I’m just a nice guy like that.

Oh hey I conveniently linked to the relevant sections if you want to skip my inane rantings. You’re welcome.

• Rant (seriously skip this part if you just want to see the winners)
• Games of the Year Winners
• Games of the Year Super Winner
• Honorable mentions

I will note before this that there are in fact games I haven’t played. So if a game you liked isn’t on the list, know that it’s either that I didn’t play it, or it sucked balls. It’s okay, you’re allowed to like bad games. Also I didn’t get a PS5 this year (for reasons I might rant about), so the one good exclusive on it is also a game I didn’t play. I’m sure Ratchet is great (impressions are basically all positive), I just didn’t want to buy a PS5 just to play that one game. I didn’t play Village (though I did analyze the gameplay from watching Gura playing it, it needs some help). I hear great things about Inscryption, I didn’t buy it. And there’s other games I’m interested in I didn’t play like Cruisn’ Blast, Super Robot Wars 30, Eastward and probably some others. I also literally just got a few other 2021 games that I will review later, maybe they’re good too.

Without further ado, let’s do this thing. 2021 Games of the Year let’s fucking go!

Hey there! This is Jobocan. This may seem like a whole new website, and that’s because it kinda is.

Previously I was running a blog called The Save Points, which started back in 2008. It originated as a project between friends where we’d be several people reviewing games and doing different kinds of posts. We started with 4 people (and added a couple more early on). After not too long people other than me stopped writing for it and it became pretty much a solo site, and visually had not updated in a long time. We experimented with many scoring systems, different kinds of posts and, overall, it was just something for me to have fun with.

That site had domain name issues recently (unfortunately not long after I posted a pile of year-end posts like GotY 2020 and my most hyped games for 2021), where it wasn’t renewed and thus expired. I took a while during that to figure what I’d do, either wait 65 days for the domain to be buyable again, or just make a new website and start entirely from scratch. So… here we are! I do have the old site archived on my side but I doubt I’m bringing any of it back.

Just thought I’d introduce how I’ll do things here. Read on!