2020 Game of the Year Award

 I know, I know....I still have not caught up on all the games of the years for the 2010s. I hope to revisit those years at some point by creating a page to immortalize all my games of the years, which this year will reach a milestone of continuous games of the years for forty friggin' years. Surely, my own game of the year award is the only continuous running such award in the entire industry, which sort of makes it the most prestigious in my mind.

My game of the year is simply awarded to the best game I played that year. In some cases, the game that has won was released years earlier but just that year had come to my attention. I'll leave it up to the gaming media to show us the real breakthrough games each year, with the shiniest graphics and most brilliant gameplay innovations, as I am not the one who can play the latest and greatest titles that are released each year, for the most part.

This year I finally picked up my wife's Nintendo Switch to see what games, other than Mario Kart, were worth playing. I found a few very original titles, as well as my only release day purchase of the year, Deadly Premonition 2. Other than that, I jumped around the decades of gaming and caught up with a few great titles from the past.

Here are this year's winner, and runners-up:

Game of the Year: Golf Story (Switch)

I've never picked a sports game to be a game of the year, unless one counts racing games of course, but Golf Story, an amazing hybrid of sports and RPG, was a masterpiece that easily wins it. Golf video games, with their own unique game mechanics,  have always been fun for me, but not a fun that hooks me for extended play sessions, until now.

It's a top-down role playing game, where the battles are not just golf matches, but small challenges along the way. Instead of upgrading armor and weapons, one upgrades golf clubs and related equipment and skills. The usual game mechanism for golf videogames is present in the form of a shot bar that the player uses with an eye on the wind to make a shot. 

They definitely got the golf right, as matches are perfectly balanced and quite challenging at times. Themes and courses vary as the story progresses, too. They also got the story right, as the player works their way up through the ranks in hopes of making it into the final championship tournament. Golf Story is fun, innovative, and perfectly balanced to provide an engaging and enjoyable gaming experience for the ages.

Runner-Up: Untitled Goose Game (Switch)

After enjoying Goat Simulator a few years ago, I felt the rampaging animals screwing with people genre was going to be a thing, but it took a few years to get Untitled Goose Game, an action-puzzle game where, duh, the player takes on the role of an annoying ass goose and terrorizes an unsuspecting small community with honking and stealing and other goose antics.

Doing exactly what I would do were I reincarnated as a goose, goose travels around and steals items, scares people, and gets shooed away. The goals are presented in a small checklist for each area, and finishing each section opens up the next one.  The one drawback is that the game is just too short, but for what one gets, it's worth it. The graphic style and sound are perfectly crisp and bright but not cartoonish. 

Why is it that every modern triple A game experience wears out its welcome with endless side quests and dots on a map that overwhelm any player hoping to get back to their lives at some point, but a gem like this is over in a few hours? I don't want another Assassin's Creed 200 hour campaign, I just want a sequel to Untitled Goose Game that lets the goose loose on Las Vegas or something. 

Beaten in 2020

 As the world and all of civilization continued their downward plunge toward their inevitable collapse, I had a great year playing videogames in between heartbreaking news reports and my own truckload of personal tragedy. Videogames are an escape and few years have been as escape-worthy as 2020.

In addition, the epiphany I had in March to pull away a little from shiny new releases and finally get around to playing classics that had passed me by in the last four decades really paid off, as a slew of mini retro consoles and resources like the Internet Archive and Myabandonware came to my full attention and appreciation.

Time is ticking, and this middle aged gamer could use up his last life any day in the next 40 years, so it was definitely time to approach the hobby this way. Case in point, here are all the games I beat in 2020: 

Full Games:

Assassin's Creed Origins (XBox One)

Untitled Goose Game (Switch)

The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening (Switch)

Golf Story (Switch)

Beyond Oasis (Genesis)

Gears of War: Judgment (XBox 360)

A Boy and His Blob: The Rescue of Princess Blobette (Game Boy)

Ys Book 1: Ancient Ys Vanished (Turbografx 16 CD via Turbografx 16 Mini)

Ys Book 2: Ancient Ys Vanished The Final Chapter (Turbografx 16 CD via Turbografx 16 Mini)

Job Simulator (PSVR)

Assassin's Creed Odyssey (Xbox One)

Marathon: Durandal (Xbox 360)

Tass Times in Tonetown (Apple IIGS via Windows 10 via Internet Archive)

DLC

Dying Light: The Following (PS4)

As 2021 begins I am reminded that, even though I first played Pong in 1975 or so, it was 40 years ago this year that it all clicked and I was hooked for life on this silly ass passtime. In the fall of 1981, when our local bowling alley added Galaxian, Asteroids, and Space War, that's when it really began for me. 

So, here's to a better year for the world, and meanwhile, there will always be great games to escape into when it is not.

Beaten: Tass Times in Tonetown (Apple IIGS via Windows 10 / Internet Archive)

 I first heard of TassTimes in Tonetown when I received my first issue of Questbusters, an absolutely essential 1980s newsletter with reviews and walkthroughs of adventure games. That's how we rolled before the internet. I did not pick up the game for my Commodore 64 until the early 1990s, during my sweeps of bargain bins, and while I played a few sessions, I did not get very far.

Nonetheless, it has been on my radar ever since, and a Google search revealed that the game was free to play on the Internet Archive, a vast, free repository of all things, ever. The sheer amount of software that is there not to just play directly but to download is staggering. Having its existence revealed to me was a watershed moment in my thinking in that, to play games across all platforms throughout the history of gaming, I no longer needed to necessarily acquire ancient hardware to do so.

This time, I played Tass Times in Tonetown using the Apple IIGS version, which featured one of the earliest mouse-based interfaces in my memory. As a standard text adventure with graphics, players can as usual just type commands like GO WEST or USE KEY, but the screen to the right of the area display contains a few common commands that one can use a mouse to click on and select. The icons for those are garishly large but forgivable as that was an emerging interface style at the time.

This being a classic text adventure, it required an extensive map to be made as the game was explored, and I went to town. The very act of exploring a map like this is enough to reveal all the aspects of the map and items in play, which brought me to approximately 80% completion by my own reckoning. From there, it was a matter of learning more about how the items I found work toward a solution.

Immediately upon entering the world of Tonetown, the player is at risk of death by not being "tass" enough. After doing what is needed to avoid that death, I thought there would be more aspects of the game that would task me with proving my tass-ness, but they never emerged. Part of the problem with playing old games is that sometimes, the modern expectations of gameplay creep in and one anticipates gameplay elements that had not been really developed yet.

Nonetheless, the world is fun to explore and the characters and situations are quirky and unique. The puzzles are not that hard, and as I mentioned, simply exploring the map will put most of the pieces in place. A lot of trial and error is required, but luckily for an older game, the player can save anywhere and there are plenty of save slots to encourage exploration.

In the 1980s, as the text only adventure evolved into first the same thing with a picture, then to more user friendly interfaces later in the decade, the themes of these games became more eclectic and varied, cumulating in such masterpieces as Lucasgames' Maniac Mansion. Tass Times in Tonetown is a fun little trip into just how wacky and offbeat these games could get. I'm glad I took the time in 2020 to finally swing back and finish the game, as well as map it out as I explored.

As for my map, I hope to take the time at some point to add it to this blog as a part of a map section, that will contain not just the new maps I make as I go, but scans of classic ones I drew back in the day. So, watch out for that. And be sure to visit and contribute if you can to the glorious effort that is the Internet Archive.