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!

Oooooooooooooooh boy. There it is. THE most hype game of the year.

The previous game in this series is Metroid Fusion, in 2002. Prime is a separate series, both in gameplay and story, while Other M is a spin-off (despite being a direct sequel to Super Metroid and it has references to things that happen in Fusion and contradicts… stuff from Prime… it’s for sure non-canon despite what Sakamoto says). But even counting Prime and Other M, the Metroid series has been rather dormant for a good long while. The only other Metroid games since Fusion were Zero Mission, a remake of the first Metroid on NES, and Samus Returns, a remake of Metroid 2 from the Game Boy. THAT one is important, because it is made by MercurySteam, the developers that would go on to make Metroid Dread, and adds some plot context that the original version of it didn’t have. It feels like a “if this game is good you can make the next one” kinda thing.

I’m a big fan of the Metroid series, and it’s great to finally get closure to the main storyline of the original series, after 19 years without a new mainline Metroid. My favorite of the series is Super Metroid (and probably still is), but the desire for more normal, non-3D Metroid (alongside more 3D Metroid, of course, Prime 4 getting its development reset was unfortunate) is always there. Metroid is a series that should be bigger than it is, and maybe Dread will be the breakout hit.

Nintendo seems to have gone all-out as far as spoiling this game before release, but thankfully for me all I had seen before release is the E3 announcement trailer… and one very spoilery screenshot. It’s nice that they were advertising it a lot, but they could’ve done so without… showing what seems like everything.

So yeah, this just came out, I finished it, and it’s time to review the game of the year (probably), let’s fucking go.

Actually got several posts out in September, that was decent. 2 of them were reaction posts, which is fine. I don’t always do these, but sometimes I feel like it makes sense. I wouldn’t do a reaction to the Smash showcase on october 5th, for example. That’s not really worth reacting to. As far as future posts, I do still have a so-called “backlog” (i.e. games I want to play but haven’t bought yet), I haven’t bought No More Heroes 3 yet, or Axiom Verge 2 (amongst many others), and I was made aware that Deathloop may actually be an okay game so I just started that. And there’s obviously upcoming games I’ll write about. So I still have plenty on the go writing-wise.

So this month I’m highlighting: 17 multiplats, 2 Switch games, 2 PC games and 1 PS4 exclusive for some reason. For me, in all that, there’s only 2 “getting for sure” games, 2 I’m probably getting, and a couple that are going on the maybe list. It’s actually a weirdly quiet month despite having the hypest game of the year, so I might be able to get into some backlog games.

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.

Well I guess before I get to the Nintendo Direct, I’m gonna write my usual intro.

In-between my last post (the disappointing Squeenix direct) and this one, there’s been a few presentations, they weren’t good. Back 4 Blood got a bit presentation, it looks fine. PC Gaming Show was fairly boring but it had some interesting indies. The Future Games Show was pretty boring. Take-Two wasted everyone’s time with something WORSE than the Koch Media presentation. Capcom did nothing, might have been more useless than the Gearbox thing. Wow this E3 is bad.

And now it’s Nintendo’s turn. Literally only they can save this terrible E3. The bar is set so low.

Nintendo has a LOT of rumors going on. 2D Donkey Kong game by the Mario Odyssey team, a 3D Kirby, a 2D Metroid (this is a leftover rumor that ended up false last year lol), something Fire Emblem (so many different versions of this rumor), an exclusive RE game, new Mario Kart, and probably a bunch of other stuff I don’t recall because there’s so many fake rumors I can’t keep track. The big one is the Switch Pro… which won’t be shown in the Direct if it’s a real product Nintendo wants to release. I don’t know if any of those rumors will be true. The safe bet is to say they aren’t but some of them are certainly interesting and possible.

Outside of the rumors, there’s a lot of things we can assume will be there or not. BotW2 is almost definitely showing up though I believe it will only come out early next year. We’ll see at least one Smash character (maybe 2). Seems like we’ll see a new Monkey Ball, that got a real leak. Maybe we’ll see some Zelda 35th anniversary… stuff (I’m not counting on it). We’ll NOT see Metroid Prime 4. We’ll probably not see Bayonetta 3 but there’s a chance I guess. I don’t think we’ll see Splatoon 3. I don’t think we’ll see any Pokemon but there’s a small chance since there was no pre-E3 pokemon direct. Pikmin 4 has been “sort of” announced for years, a real announcement would be… a thing. And Nintendo generally does announce actual things at E3 so… I figure we’ll have one decently-big announcement maybe, whether it’s something from the rumors or not. After how bad the rest of this E3 has been, I’m not keeping my hopes up, but it would be hard for Nintendo to fail as hard as any of the other presentations.

As usual these are my “live” reactions to the event, I’m gonna edit those to make them readable and write overall thoughts at the end. The intro is written before seeing the show of course.

So anyways, let’s go. PLEASE Nintendo save this terrible E3. It really needs help.

Note: No I won’t do a post about the Treehouse stream, but I may talk about it in my “overall” E3 post after the event is over if there’s something shown there.