It's that time of year again where I talk about the small handful of games that released in 2020 that I actually gave enough of a crap about to try. Fair warning, I do mean a small handful.
Here are the games we're talking about so you don't have to scroll down to see if I touched on one or not:
Animal Crossing: New Horizons
Cyberpunk 2077
Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary (Master Chief Collection)
Super Mario 3D All-Stars
I said "small handful".
ANIMAL CROSSING: NEW HORIZONS (Switch)
Verdict: Lost my interest after about 4 months but still pretty great
I already briefly talked about this one earlier this year but I guess I can just briefly talk about it again. Animal Crossing is a series where you live in a little town with a bunch of giant-headed animal neighbors. You get money to get stuff then sell other stuff to get more stuff, finding more ways to get money and pay off your home loan. Your home loan turns into home upgrades until the game runs out of ways to upgrade your house, then I guess by that point you have "beaten" Animal Crossing. New Horizons works a little differently than previous installments and it's part of what makes it great and slightly refreshing for people like me who have been in a vicious cycle with this series for roughly 20 years. New Horizons puts you on a previously uncharted island with Tom Nook, his nephews, and two other randomly selected villagers. Now there's a crafting system, which usually makes me groan immediately. This game actually pulled it off because now if you break your shovel at 2am, you can just grab resources to make a new one instead of waiting until the store opens the next day. Or time-traveling. The crafting system relies on recipe cards you get either randomly or from doing various tasks, some of which give you different specific random recipes. Different seasonal events spice this system up along with DIY recipes you can only get during that specific time. A soft issue I had with every main Animal Crossing game before New Horizons was that once you drain your town of resources, you kind of can't do jack until the next day. New Horizons has randomly generated islands you can fly off to. They cost a specific form of in-game currency to get to but now you can do the monotonous chores you do in your hometown to your heart's content! Everything else about the game is more or less the same just with a way more accessible character customizer. Almost everything is just streamlined to work with the game's new island theme. I am really struggling to think of an example where this new system objectively makes anything worse. As I said above, I lost interest in this game. I have played it maybe three times in the past four months and I was starting to fall out of it pretty hard the 3rd month I played it. The first month is also noticeably slow. I think this is just because I've been playing this game since the Gamecube version, played way too much of New Leaf, and refuse to pay one cent for Switch Online. If you already give into Nintendo's corporate garbo and/or have people in your house to play the game with then this game is probably the game that keeps on giving and won't take you nearly as long to progress as it did for me. Otherwise; meh. It's great and all but it's still just Animal Crossing. I would argue it's probably the best one but it's still Animal Crossing. Also, with all of the updates they've been giving it to avoid spoiling everything for players who haven't gotten to a certain season or month of the game yet, I'm not really sure how well this game is going to age. They say they're still going to be doing some sort of update in 2021 but I can't imagine this going on for much longer than that, nor do I think I really care if it does or not. When the Switch hits the same dirt that the 3DS recently did, is New Horizons still going to hold the same weight and be the experience everyone praises it for today? I guess time will tell. If you want some cute animal time and some weirdly satisfying, grindy bullshit to soothe you during the good old pandemic, you can do a lot worse than Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
CYBERPUNK 2077 (PC)
Verdict: my full experience with Cyberpunk 2020 and I never tried again
Go back to sleep, Samurai. It's not December 10th yet!
- John Ghostcock
December 10, 2020
HALO: COMBAT EVOLVED ANNIVERSARY (MASTER CHIEF COLLECTION - PC)
Verdict: alright
I bought the Master Chief Collection. The games included released in a set sequence, most of which landing this year. I still haven't played most of them. I did fuck around with Halo 1 though. It's fine. The graphical updates are kind of nice. I particularly like that they don't take away with the old Xbox charm of what the game originally looked like but still look polished. It has been a long time since I have played the original Halo so I can't speak to too many blatant improvements that an actual fan might notice right away. Halo 1 and 2 were the ones I played the most as a kid so, with that minor authority, I would say that this version holds up pretty solid. I can't think of anything mind-numbingly annoying. Halo 2, I still haven't played the new version of but in a general sense, that is one of my favorite first-person shooters ever. That's mostly because I don't really like first-person shooters but I digress. I say this just to let people know I'm really out of my element talking about this one but if you want to experience Halo for the first time, The Master Chief Collection is the way to go, especially if you can get it on sale.
SUPER MARIO 3D ALL-STARS yeah, I know, fuck Nintendo (Switch)
Verdict: well...
Super Mario 64: definitely an emulator for Super Mario 64
Super Mario Sunshine: they patched it but still kind of just the Dolphin emulator
Super Mario Galaxy: a kind of fucking stupid emulator for Super Mario Galaxy, the original is better
Super Mario Galaxy 2: what's that?
Okay so fuck Nintendo for the business decisions made here. I already pre-ordered it before I realized the full gravity of the situation. But I also knew that buying Super Mario Sunshine physically otherwise would cost way more than this licensed pack of emulators. So let me start off by saying this: you are better off getting the original version of all three of these games. But if you can't afford to do that because finding physical copies of Sunshine and Galaxy isn't super cheap these days, maybe you'll get this digitally before Nintendo kills it off. Did I mention fuck Nintendo? Whether or not it's generally worth it to play these versions at all depends on the version and if you are experiencing these for the first time or not.
Super Mario 64
This is probably the best one because it's kind of hard to fuck up. Despite lazily sliding emulators onto a 3DS cartridge, they still went out of their way to take out some stuff from all of these games. In the case of Super Mario 64, this will probably only matter if you're a speedrunner. Casually speaking, this port is fine. It's not worth the price of admission but if you're going to get this compilation bullshit with actual money for some odd reason, this is a welcome part of the package. Alternatively, I don't think an original 64 cartridge is that expensive but I understand not everyone has a TV or hookups to play that shit anymore. This game can also be downloaded on Wii and Wii U as well as the DS remake on Wii U. Or fuck Nintendo and just pirate it, it's probably not even half a gig.
Super Mario Sunshine
This was the most fucked up emulator in the bunch but I have been informed that they got rid of one really stupid decision that I'm still baffled about even after it's been fixed. So this is a Gamecube game ported to a system that supports a USB adapter that lets you use your dusty Gamecube controller on it. They purposefully locked off use of USB controllers for Super Mario 3D All-Stars because Nintendo isn't about joy anymore. Again, I've been told that now you can use a Gamecube controller on it. Most of the issues with the emulator with that instilled are essentially what you would expect from any given Gamecube game played on your PC with legally gray methods. This was the main thing that made me want this in the first place because I had never really played Super Mario Sunshine for more than a couple of minutes as a child. I never had my own copy and the original version is a bit more expensive than it was just a year or two ago. One day, I might honestly make some Switch collector's day and sell them this shit for like $20-30 and use that money to get an old crusty Gamecube disc.
Super Mario Galaxy
I fucking love me some Galaxy. But not on Switch! The Wiimote shake is now almost completely exchanged with a button press which is nice. Under circumstances out of Nintendo's hands, this is the version of the game that will lead me one step lesser to the ledge of carpal tunnel, of which I teeter back and forth on. Not so fast though! You don't need a sensor bar for this version either but you still need a little cursor to do stuff, which is just the invisible mid-point of the controller's shoulder-button-gooch. Whether or not this is better I guess is up for debate. I personally think a lot of the issues I find with this port are like the ones in Sunshine where it's just because it's an emulator. Little rare frame drops and Mario freaking out on ledges and crevices. I do feel though that as annoying as a lot of the mini-game-ish missions are in Galaxy, none of them are particularly improved by being on Switch. The cursor awkwardness might be fixed for some by pointing the Joy-Con like a Wiimote but I tried it for a few seconds and fucking hated it. The best way to experience this game is absolutely in its original version or perhaps the Wii U version, I never tried that. On its own, perhaps fine but I still don't think either one of these three games is worth the $60 Nintendo squeezed out of so many kids/kids' parents. If you really want a legal backup to pirate the better versions of these games, then I guess this here is a license to do so but the original versions are simply better ways to experience these games. I would even argue Super Mario 64 DS is a better way to experience Super Mario 64 but the rest of the internet would mostly say "no".
All-in-all, fuck 3D All-Stars and fuck Nintendo. But also I'm keeping them in case I want to stream Sunshine again. What a racket though.
