My Favorite Games of 2021

 Martin · 4 years

2021 was a weird year for video games. Lots of games saw their schedules or their quality slip because of complications from coronavirus or working-from-home complications. Some mainstays were still great though, and there were some surprise hits as well.

This is a list, in no particular order, of my favorite games that I played in 2021.

Psychonauts 2

I almost always enjoy Double Fine's games, and I had (mostly) fond memories of the original Psychonauts, so I was pretty hyped for the sequel when it finally arrived.

It turned out incredible, with just about everything that made the original a good experience made even better this time - and with all the niceties I've come to expect from modern games thrown on top.

The game has the comedic tone that you'd expect from a Double Fine/Tim Schafer game, but there's also a gentleness and kindness to it that I really appreciated this last year.

Forza Horizon 5

The Forza Horizon series is consistently amazing, and the fifth game continues that tradition. I'm still having a lot of fun with this game, and being able to visit a virtual microcosm of Mexico during a time when, for various reasons, travel like that is all but impossible for me, was a treat.

Halo Infinite

I got into Xbox with the Gears of War franchise, so Halo has never really been my thing. I've mostly kept up with them and played them just out of duty of being an Xbox owner, but only a few of them have really grabbed me for long bits of time.

Halo Infinite has been a blast though. I haven't written about it much here yet, but I played through the campaign and really liked grappling everywhere and exploring the open world. Multiplayer, especially with friends, feels solid and is a lot of fun - even if we're just chilling out chatting while playing in the background.

I'm looking forward to playing the campaign again with co-op, and digging into multiplayer more in 2022.

Life Is Strange: True Colors

I've been a fan of the Life Is Strange games since the original released back in 2015. And though I'm still slowly working my way through the second game, I was taken by the trailer for True Colors and had to play it as soon as it launched.

It's a fantastic game with an interesting story, good writing/characters, and a bump in the underlying tech that helped make the experience even more immersive. It might be my favorite game in the series now - but the remastered original will be out in 2022, so we'll see how that lasts.

Myst

I think I've probably bought at least four or five copies/versions of Myst over the years. It was one of the first games I ever experienced on PC from a CD-ROM, and I have fond memories of spending many hours clicking around trying to solve the various puzzles the game offers. Seeing the game be remastered in Unreal was enough to sell me on buying yet another copy, and this one hit Xbox on Game Pass, so I didn't even have to do that.

I still remember the solutions to a lot of the puzzles, so it was neat that this game included a mode where many of the puzzles are randomized, so you have to tease out the solution regardless of familiarity.

I had a really good time wandering around Myst Island and its library of ages once more. Now I just hope Cyan Worlds can do the same treatment for Riven someday!

The Forgotten City

The Forgotten City surprised me. I knew a little bit about its history - that it started life as a Skyrim mod - and while that told me a lot about what to expect in terms of gameplay, it also made me expect it to be janky in the way only Skyrim could be.

I probably wouldn't even have tried the game out, were it not on Game Pass - but I'm glad that I did! Firing it up for the first time, I was quite impressed with things. This is a time loop game, and after running through a few rounds, I was hooked. The story is interesting and the setting is just big enough to contain things without meandering.

Mass Effect: Legendary Edition

As I get older I have less and less time for giant games, and it takes a lot of mental effort to really get into them. But like visiting an old favorite place, I slid right into Mass Effect with little friction, and managed to play through all three games in the original trilogy in succession.

It was a great time to run through them again, and I learned that my initial thoughts on the second and third games were pretty wrong. I had such a good time playing these games that I ended up (finally) playing through Mass Effect: Andromeda later as well!

Orcs Must Die! 3

A friend of mine, who I had played the original Orcs Must Die! with, clued me into this one, and I picked it up to play with him.

OMD3 is one of those games that you don't expect to be great, but it kinda is. Everything feels very polished (aside from maybe the menus). The music slaps. I just wish there were more!

Disco Elysium: The Final Cut

There are a couple games in my list that are technically not from 2021, but they launched on Xbox in 2021, so that's when I played them. Disco Elysium is one of them, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I had picked it up on PC when it launched, but didn't have time to play it then - and I'm glad that I didn't. The Xbox version came with the "Final Cut" improvements that rolled out some time after the initial release, and it includes one massive change to the original: spoken dialogue for the entire game. Disco Elysium is very text-heavy, and so this made it almost into an interactive audiobook of sorts.

That sells the game a little short on its production, since the visuals and music are incredible as well. It was one of my favorite game experiences of 2021, and I can't wait to see what ZA/UM, the studio behind the game, does next.

Octopath Traveler

This is the second technically-not-from-2021 game on my list, but it also launched on Xbox in 2021, so here it stays.

Octopath Traveler is also another game that I knew would take many, many hours to finish, and so I was very reluctant to even buy it. I had it on my wishlist at the Nintendo Switch eShop since it was announced, but never pulled the trigger on it.

Then it suddenly appeared on Xbox, and on Game Pass, and I had to try it. It turned out to be a good game to take small bites out of, and I ended up completing a leg or two of each of the eight travelers' journeys every time I played.

I believe I stopped playing it at over 100 hours, but I still have a lot of grinding to do before I can even think about completing the really tough after-end-game stuff. I'll probably end up buying it if it leaves Game Pass in the meantime, just so I can keep it in my back pocket for a rainy day.

Mafia: Definitive Edition

Alright, now we're really out of bounds for 2021, I know. But this is a list of games I enjoyed in 2021, and I can't not mention a few.

I loved the original Mafia, even though it was a deeply flawed game. It came out twenty years ago, and I can still hum the music from it. One of my college roommates has nightmares about it.

It was a cool game, though, and I bought the remastered trilogy in 2020, but never got started on it until the following year. I'm glad I did though, because the Definitive Edition of Mafia is incredible.

It's honestly more of a re-imagining than a definitive edition. It loosely follows the story of the original game, and crosses many of the same paths, but all of the art, music, and voicework was entirely re-done. I did miss the old actors a bit, and the new music wasn't nearly as memorable. But better controls, a better save system, and all the other modern touches make the tradeoff worth it.

Monster Train

I really enjoyed Slay The Spire a few years ago, but I only managed to get to the Heart at the end a few times, and I always felt like the game was a bit too difficult for me. A friend of mine recommended Monster Train, and I ended up really liking it. It's a very similar game to Slay The Spire, but each run takes way less time and the game just generally moves quicker. Plus, I feel like I actually recognize a lot of the synergy between cards in this game, and so it's one of my go-to casual games whenever I need a little palette cleanser.

Mass Effect: Andromeda

I wrote a lot about this game during the year, but I had to mention it here again because I am so impressed by it.

Mass Effect: Andromeda was a game that I started right when it launched, got bored with it and distracted by some of the flaws, and ended up abandoning. The thought of trying it again someday lingered, but I knew I had to after finishing the Mass Effect: Legendary Edition trilogy.

I gave it another earnest try, and I'm glad I did - even though it feels much different from the other games, it's actually a really interesting experience and - especially now that many of the rough edges have been patched over the years - it's definitely worth playing for anyone looking for a good science fiction action RPG.

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Streaking

 Martin · 4 years

Well, I'm a little disappointed in myself - I had a 109 day streak going posting on my blog here, and I accidentally broke it yesterday because I forgot to post something!. It had been going since August, when I started doing my Drawgust posts!

Oh well - so it goes. Now the pressure's off, I guess!

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Starting To Feel Creative

 Martin · 4 years

I've got that tingly feeling again... my fingers want to do something creative! But they're currently in the middle of cranking out some comps for a prospective client in Blender.

That's sort of creative. But it's also a lot of technical problem-solving that isn't as fun.

Soon, hopefully!

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Halo Infinite’s Big Team Battles

 Martin · 4 years

I've put in a handful of rounds in the Halo Infinite's Big Team Battle mode now, and all I can say is that it's chaotic fun.

The maps are just the right size that you don't need to run very far to get back into the battle, and there's just enough anonymity in the amount of players that you can't really blame any one person for a bad match.

I had a blast riding machine-gunner on a Warthog as my teammate tried to run down enemy players.

I'm looking forward to more maps in the future, and (hopefully) just plain getting better at this!

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Halo Infinite Seems Promising

 Martin · 4 years

Xbox held a short online event today for its 20th anniversary. During the show, they released the first part of Halo Infinite, the multiplayer bit. The campaign for the game launches in December.

After work, I spent some time playing around with it - and it's a lot of fun. It reminds me of playing Unreal Tournament 2003 with my roommates, back in college. I think it has a lot of potential to be fun.

I'm more of a campaign guy myself, but I like having a casual game to have fun with my friends with in the evenings. We'll see if this turns into that, but in my opinion, so far, so good.

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Forza Horizon 5 Is A Beautiful Escape

 Martin · 4 years

And I am here for it.

It's funny how each iteration of Forza Horizon is only an incremental change over the last, but it's always so fun to just drive around and explore the new map and complete challenges as you go.

These games are great. And coupled with Flight Simulator, which released last year for PC and this year for Xbox, provides some amazing escapism and pseudo-travel for those of us who don't yet feel comfortable resuming our old ways of being.

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Duplicate Files

 Martin · 4 years

A week ago, my phone's data storage maxed out, and I needed to unload my photos and videos to clear up space.

Actually, scratch that - my photos and videos were already backed up via OneDrive, but somewhere along the line, the app lost the ability to automatically delete media that's already been uploaded. I wanted to make sure I had everything backed up before deleting it all from my phone, so I had to find a solution to compare the phone's storage to my OneDrive copy. I have a Samsung Galaxy S10e, and it lets you plug a USB cable in and browse the files just like an external hard drive.

After some research, I settled on software called Beyond Compare. The interface was easy enough to figure out, and it quickly churned through all of my media. It also let me use all the features in the demo, without buying. After an hour or two of working through my pictures I was done! Beyond Compare aligns duplicate (or similar) files by name, so it was simple to find the discrepancies. I was able to clear up over 30GB of data!

I purchased a copy of Beyond Compare after I finished, since I felt like the tool may be handy in the future and I appreciated what it'd done for me.

Yesterday, my wife had a similar issue, but with slightly different circumstances. She needed to upgrade her phone, which was also about out of space, and wanted to make sure everything was backed up before swapping over to the new device. I've got her on OneDrive as well, so the backup has been happening, but she has an iPhone and weirdly, the files on the phone were not named the same as the files backed up in the cloud.

I loaded up Beyond Compare, thinking I might solve the problem as easily as my own, but I forgot that without the file names being the same there was no practical way for the software to show duplicates side-by-side.

I spent the next hour creating a PowerShell script that would go through all the images from the phone and rename them to match the files on OneDrive, which appeared to be just the date the photo was taken in this format: "YearMonthDay_HourMinuteSecond_iOS.jpg". Once I got the script working however, I realized two things: first, the hours were off by 8 - an easy fix - and second, that the "date taken" property in Windows Explorer did not include seconds, so I couldn't recreate the file names exactly as they were on OneDrive. So Beyond Compare would, sadly, be useless here.

After spending a bit more time looking at other duplicate file checkers, I tried out dupeGuru. It took a long time to analyze all the photos from the phone and the OneDrive backup - about an hour to get through 18,000 photos. Once that was done, however, it was pretty easy to sort out which files we wanted to keep and which were duplicates.

In addition to the 3,000 duplicates it found between the phone and the OneDrive storage, it also found 2,000 duplicates within OneDrive - a happy surprise! It took me a few hours to go through everything, but it wasn't too difficult - just a little tedious (and with a few random hiccups, probably because OneDrive didn't like the software trying to delete hundreds of items at once).

We still have to get all the media she has in her iMessages out somehow, but that shouldn't be too hard.

In the meantime, I'm wondering why Windows (or OneDrive) doesn't have built-in tools for this sort of thing. We're almost all digital hoarders in some capacity, with the inevitable duplicate file here and there, and Windows has tools for comparing and hashing files included in the Command Prompt/PowerShell. It seems like an easy, obvious thing to have.

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Digital Art & NFT’s

 Martin · 4 years

A few months ago I heard about NFT's, and for a week or so, I thought the idea was quite exciting. As an artist, being able to sell my work digitally, to a worldwide audience, and also get a residual cut of subsequent sales sounded great. It still does. But since then, I've learned a lot more about NFT's, and now I just have concerns.

I've seen way too many other artists have their art stolen, minted as NFT's, and sold without their knowledge or consent. There's no authority to watch over who mints what, and minting outfits don't seem interested in policing users eager to help them make a quick buck. Naturally, there's no authority over the underlying cryptocurrency used to buy these illicit NFT's as well, so fraud runs rampant and there doesn't seem to be much anyone can (or will) do about it.

There's also the matter of the ever increasing amounts of energy being wasted to crunch cryptocurrency mining and transactions. Aside from the blatant theft of other people's work, it's one of the worst aspects of all this.

It's a shame because NFT's could be a big deal for digital art in the future. But the problems currently outweighs the benefits, in my opinion - so much so that I'm starting to worry a tiny bit about posting my art online, as I'm afraid it will end up being ripped off and sold without my knowledge.

I've already seen images that I've created and posted appear in random places online, and I can't imagine that situation will improve when there's a buck to be made.

It seems like every other week there's a hot new set of NFT avatars generated by some programmer artist's algorithm, made to have common configurations and rare ones, selling for thousands or millions of dollars.

My question is, if you want to have a rare, unique avatar created by an actual artist, why not just do the old-fashioned thing and commission it?Y

You'll probably pay a lot less - and you won't be participating in the dumpster fire that is the current NFT market.

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Here We Go Again

 Martin · 4 years

The remastered Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was added to Game Pass today, so I downloaded it to see how things have held up.

I originally played this game on PC (I still have the discs, somewhere) and had a pretty good time with it - until I hit a few missions where the terrible controls were too much to overcome, and I quit. I also gave the Xbox 360 version a try, but that was a port of the mobile version, so it was even worse.

I thought the new remastered versions were built from the ground up, or at least ported to a new game engine - Unreal? - but so much of the original jankiness remains, I have doubts. Mercifully, the controls do feel better though.

I'm not a huge fan of the remastering that Rockstar has done here, however. I feel like this could've been done better with less high-resolution texturing and more work on the underlying 3D assets.

The interior of CJ's house looks like something a modder would've created in the earlier days of game mods, where a high resolution texture pack was about the most anyone could do.

The models of the characters are also weird looking. The original models had to be styled a certain way to make up for their lack of fidelity, and so had a reason for looking more like caricatures. This remastered version adds a level or two of smooth subdivisions on top of stupidly high-resolution textures, and the result is extremely off-putting. It felt almost offensive to me on first viewing.

The lighting is also kind of bad. It feels like nobody tested these games.

I know there's more to it than that, and I don't mean to shit on the work of the people who created these games, but I'm glad I didn't impulse buy the trilogy right when they announced it. I'm hoping some work might be done to iron out the worse parts so that by the time I get around to playing these games again, they might actually be worth it.

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Healthcare Survey

 Martin · 4 years

I was cleaning out my email tonight and I saw that I had a survey from my healthcare provider. I'm one for filling out surveys, so I jumped in and started answering questions. And they were interesting.

All of them asked you to rate whether you:

  • Agree completely
  • Agree somewhat
  • Neither agree nor disagree
  • Disagree somewhat
  • Disagree completely

Pretty standard. But here are some of the questions they asked:

  • Prescription medications are the only remedies that I trust.
  • I always follow the advice of healthcare professionals; they are the experts.
  • I prefer home or natural remedies (acupuncture, eastern medicine, etc.) over pharmaceuticals.
  • I avoid vaccines for me and my family.
  • I would rather seek medical advice from my own personal research than from the doctor.

There were others that were a little more general, such as one asking whether you use CBD or THC to medicate, if going to the doctor gives you anxiety, etc. But I definitely feel like my provider is trying to feel out whether or not the respondents among its subscribers are turning away from modern medicine and embracing woo.

Man, am I sick of the anti-intellectual crowd. I answered a lot of questions with "Disagree completely".

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