2020 was a remarkably good year for me. There's not many who can say that but I wound up with employment, therapy, a new bicycle and a whole bunch of wacky online performances. Not much writing but we'll be rectifying that this year. Let's dish out some awards for games I played that year!
The Ooze (1995) Award For Most Nostalgic Toxicity: Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2
I began 2020 with an itch to play every Westwood Command & Conquer entry. The remasters of the first and Red Alert were on the horizon so I wanted to look at them in their original contexts. Turns out the first two are great, Red Alert 2 / Yuri's Revenge is better than I remembered and Tiberian Sun had almost none of the quality of life UX improvements I remembered it introducing. Those were all from RA2.
What was even more fun was installing access to custom servers and playing some multiplayer again. 1v1 is still an early-mid game macro-heavy tankfest. That's great! The sheer speed you have to make decisions at while managing your platoons means a game rarely takes more than ten minutes to play. You rush in, get your head knocked off, shake your opponent's hand (figuratively; this is still pandemic conditions) and begin it all again. The time consumed could be compared to a fighting game but the emphasis on timing attacks and denials reminds me more of Puyo Puyo.
Team matches are a whole different affair. Sure the Soviets are rushing to tanks and making use of their initially more efficient economy but the Allies are purely a tech unit faction. When you've got teams backing you up it's a whole lot easier to defend against blitzkriegs. This actually makes the Allied options stronger in teams. As soon as a player has a single battle fortress loaded up with Guardian GIs the flow of battle rapidly changes. Soviets don't really have methods to snipe down a single anti-everything box of rockets. Matches still take like 20 minutes at most. Great fun and you should play with me some time.
Sadly, the scene is mostly Gamers with a heavy emphasis on that capital G. Homophobia, racial slurs, furious kickbans for not already knowing the secret community rules for how you're meant to play certain maps. Everything that was there in 2002 is still there today. What's most interesting about all this bigotry is that it's exactly the same as it was in 2002. Not just that it's toxic; the language hasn't changed at all. This game was released in a time when Something Awful had only just implemented its $10 subscription fee. 4chan and its even more nazi offspring were still a year away. The Web was firmly still in 1.0. The sheer speed of modern communication obscures this but the way we talk has changed to much. That includes hatred. It's remarkable how a scene can manage to become so insular that even its insults resist the march of time.
The Guilty Gear AC+R Finally Has Rollbacks Award For Best Fighting Game With Functioning Netcode: Maiden & Spell
Killer Instinct Seasons 2 and 3 designer Adam "Keits" Hart remarked a few weeks ago that the fighting game genre has fossilised. It's got all the adrenaline rushes of lightning chess, combat sports and gambling rolled into one for sure but there's very few games questioning or challenging the base layout of Street Fighter 2 at the moment. There's plenty of examples throughout the years (Psychic Force 2012, Astra Superstars, Hopeless Masquerade, Divekick, Nidhogg, SNK Heroines: Tag Team Frenzy) but very few of late.
Well, except for Maiden & Spell. In many ways it's the game you'd expect Senko no Ronde or Acceleration of Suguri to be. Both of those titles look like a head to head shmup but are both far closer to Virtual On in actual play. They also both have systems that dominate the play in a way that separates them from both shmups and fighters. Senko is about timing attacks and managing when you will use your BOSS mode. AoS is about the risk-reward that the dash system kicks in. Maiden & Spell has very few movement options besides your standard 8 directions. It has no meters to manage beyond your character-specific defensive tool's cooldown. It's a game about either whittling down your opponent like a player character in a shmup or laying out a nightmare barrage your opponent runs into. Both can feel incredibly oppressive and exhilarating.
In a period where it's like pulling teeth to get even the expensive licensed games by obscenely rich mobage publishers to follow best practice for online experiernces, Maiden has them beat. I can play this game with people across the world and all I have to worry about is the occasional rollback making my death animation look really funny. Play this game.
The Granblue Versus Award For Best Fighting Game Without Functioning Netcode: Touhou Spell Bobble
It's Taito's Puzzle Bobble! It's a Touhou fangame! It's built towards competitive play! It's... a rhythm game as well? Touhou Spell Bobble is my brand of weird ambitious hipster computer gaming through and through. The win state isn't when a player's field covers past the death line; it's the player with the highest score at timeout. This allows the various selection of modern Touhou fan arrangements and ZUNTATA interpretations to play all the way through. It also means you have to be smart about how you time your offense. If you feel yourself too hard after KOing an opponent for big points, their revenge bonus can kill you right back.
I'm still getting a handle of what to expect from high level players and how to handle those locally better than me so I'll probably write about this game again in a year when I've got more data. Sadly there is absolutely no netplay for this game at all. A tragedy for a game that has Taito prices released in a year where local meetups were a dangerous endeavour.
The Cyberpunk 2077 Award For Most Time I Spent On A Single Game: Sega Ages Fantasy Zone (Switch
I'm slowly expanding my repertoire of speedrun games. It's a way to maintaing that fighting game thirst for self-improvement without needing to attend illegal meetings - let alone organise them! The culture around how they are presented at broadcasted events also scratches a level of artistic performance for me. I may have exhausted wonky philosophical rambles' potential with Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance but I'm sure other ideas for how to present a game in a way that's informative, entertaining and uplifting will arise.
As a moment of self validation: here's my first Fantasy Zone speedrun in the middle of the year.
And here's me doing the same category at the end while in excruciating pain and having only woken up ten minutes prior:
And that's how it wound up my most-played game at just over 200 hours.
This Game Hurt Me And Not In The Kink Way I Like: Arknights
Having spent several years playing Fate/Grand Order I was convinced to go into a second mobile game. Arknights is a tower defense game where everyone's a gay catgirl in a post-cyberpunk/apocalyptic world. Every "turret" being a unique character with increasing deploy costs based on rarity means that even a rich player with an optimised roster has to think strategically.
Tragically, it's a mobile game. All the tight level design and improving writing is undermined by the need to consume both your wallet and your spare time. Need to level up units quickly to have strategic variety. Need strategic variety to deal with the endless onslaught of events. Need to micromanage your factories to give the supplies needed to level units up. Need to produce the correct crafting materials to make your skills function. Need to allocate 20 minutes for each Annihilation fight so you can gain the optimal amount of free gambling resource. The level of thought that goes into making every part of a mobile game intersect with everything else so you never have enough of what you need or the time to acquire it is genius.
Lots of mobile games use all their disguised hamster wheels to keep you so busy you don't notice how little joy or self-expression the game allows. That's not the case with Arknights. If it were a complete package sold at a retail price where you could play through levels, unlock characters and experiment with high challenge extra levels I would rave about it all day. Instead it denies you interesting gameplay for two months, loads it all into a two week event and demands you stop doing anything else you enjoy in life for a brief moment of fleeting fun. Cruel.
Did I mention the anarchist catgirl with a chainsaw? I will never see her again now I've quit.
I Guess This Game's My Brand Now Award: Darius Cozmic Collection
In these bleak times where fascists can storm a powerful nation's capitol and my own nation's arguing about cheese branding, M2 keep providing glimpses of what a world that cares can be. Not in particularly revolutionary ways mind you. This isn't a company out trying to agitate for workers owning the means of production or abolishing unjust hierarchies; they're just a bunch of old nerds preserving old computer games. Yet even that is a small glimpse of what a world that's interested in art and history can be. One where long-redundant skills and knowledge sets are preserved and handed down to future generations so we understand our past. Let it inform our view of the present. Give us the tools to build what comes next.
While not as absurdly feature-rich as M2's ports of Battle Garegga or ESP Ra.De, the Cozmic Collection still understands the little things in preserving the context of games. Make hidden information visible so players can understand why things happen. Give access to all versions released of a game so players can see how it changed over time, how people across the world may have experienced a game differently and come to your own decision about which interpretation of the game is the most enjoyable.
This set also contains Darius Gaiden which is now part of my daily meditations. OGR's weird synth and dissonant tones set to a backdrop of wild colours and nasty fish ships calms me in a way few computer games do. I can just sit back, blow some stuff up, hum to music and walk away from the typical tragic Taito endings refreshed and capable of facing another day.
I still spent twice the play time of everything in this on Fantasy Zone. Chasing that speedrun world record sure lit a fire under me, huh.
RPG Of The Year: Sakuna: Of Rice & Ruin
It's made by two people and its intricate rice-crop-quality-as-character-sheet-level systems are an emotional rollercoaster. Play this game.
Adventure Game Of The Year: 13 Sentinels - Aegis Drift
No game deserves the title of "Adventure Game" for 2020 quite the way 13 Sentinels does. When I say "Adventure" I mean in the same way that Myst, The Secret of Monkey Island, Quest For Glory and Hypnospace Outlaw are all kinda the same genre despite playing nothing like each other. I'm not much of one for hiding information about spoilers. If a text is worth recommending to people then it should be able to engage you even if you know what's going to happen. Capturing you and placing you in moments in time is a key part of a work's pathos. Even so, I think it's worth saying very little about 13 Sentinels until someone has played it just because it's so good at making you think about what the hell computer games even are. How much gameplay does one actually need? When the more gamey gameplay emerges, do you even want it based on previous narrative pacing?
It also has piloted robots.
Game Of The Year: F**k Me Royally!! Horny Magical Princess
Hell yeah girl, you go get some.
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