Our Top Games of 2020 - Renegade Arcade #10: The Relaunch Episode!
Good evening, Night City! Welcome to the 2021 relaunch of the now-weekly podcast known as the Renegade Arcade! We have a very long, jam-packed episode with the latest industry news and a look back at our favorite games of the past year, which, frankly, needed all the awesomeness it could get! From Doom Eternal to Animal Crossing to a brand new Streets of Rage game, we rip and tear out the innards of the best games of 2020! Check a look, as the Devolver Digital folks might say!
Edit: I also want to dedicate this episode and all the show notes to Ted Mays, who owned a comic shop called Gecko Books in Kaimuki, Hawaii, near where I grew up. Ted passed away yesterday. For all those who were lucky enough to know him, Ted was a kind, knowledgeable man who loved comics and was in the comics retail business for many years. I’ll always remember him and the shop I loved to visit as a kid and as an adult. RIP, Ted. We’ll miss you.
First up comes the news that Electronic Arts’ exclusive license to develop and publish Star Wars games has now come to an end, and the internet rejoices! As do we, friends, as do we. With Disney resurrecting the legacy of LucasArts, if not the name itself (boo!), under the banner of Lucasfilm Games, we’re going to see the release of a new Indiana Jones game developed by Machine Games, the team behind the current Wolfenstein series. Also in the works is a brand spankin’ new open-world Star Wars action title developed by Ubisoft Massive, the creators of The Division franchise. Both teams do pretty solid work, so it’ll be interesting to see how these two games turn out! Of course, we’ll have to wait a while for these titles to be released, but the dev teams deserve the time to create awesome worlds for us to explore, and hopefully, blow up just a little bit. Heh. I love fire.
Alright, dudes and dudettes, here’s our main event: the reveal of our favorite titles of 2020, brought to you by Bio, Organoid Zero, and Neoplasmic (that’d be yours truly).
Tyler’s Picks:
In what may be the most controversial pick of the podcast, Bio starts us off with a discussion about Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War, the latest in Treyarch’s branch of the CoD franchise. With a new installment in the BlOps series comes the return of a single-player campaign, which features some narrative twists (nothing as confusing or gutsy as that twist from Black Ops 3, unfortunately) and a few dialogue choices along the way. Of course, there’s a ton of multiplayer options, as well, including PVP, Warzone (the franchise’s battle royale mode), and my personal favorite, Zombies! While it doesn’t have David Hasselhoff like Infinite Warfare Zombies did (or a cast of recognizable celebrity voices), this Zombie mode is a tight gameplay experience and loads of fun, especially with friends! On the downside, Activision still includes a metric ton of microtransactions and a seasonal Battle Pass (sigh), but it’s still a decent game with a cool campaign.
Next, Tyler picked Among Us, the multiplayer game currently sweeping the world, and knocking Fall Guys off its perch at the top of Twitch streams everywhere. While the game has been released for a couple of years now, Among Us really took off in 2020, and bajillions of players have experienced it since. Unfortunately, I am not one of them, but both Brock and Tyler assure me that it’s a worthwhile experience, and I’m excited to try it! Also, here’s a video of the Funhaus crew doing a "live-action” version of an Among Us playthrough, and it’s loads of fun to watch!
Third, Tyler picked Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, the latest in the long-running and probably never-ending series about a brotherhood of stealthy assassins who sneak around in the shadows, never revealing themselves to their prey—Wait, what? They’re Vikings? They jump off raiding ships? They’re screaming “FOR ODIN!!” at the top of their lungs as they set towns ablaze and ransack buildings and kill their enemies with axes in the open? Oh. Okay. Sure. Why not? I mean, it’s good fun, but… not too stealthy. Or assassin-y. But that’s just how they make these games now. Less with the stabby, more with the hacky-slashy.
Finally, Tyler (with an assist from Brock) talked about Ghost of Tsushima, the Samurai-simulator that’s been hailed as one of the greatest Playstation-exclusive games of the 8th Generation. While the game is a spectacular visual feast, contains some intriguing traversal mechanics and world-building, and includes awesome combat, it also has faced some criticism for being extremely inaccurate in its portrayal of the Samurai as honorable men of valor. In truth, according to historians, many of the Samurai were simply thugs following the command of their lords and vassals. The mythology surrounding the Samurai was more of a twentieth century invention, created to drum up feelings of national pride and militaristic fury than an adherence to an ancient code of wisdom and honor. While this is disheartening to learn, it still makes for good video game plot-writin’, so there we go! A solid game that should encourage you to pick up a history book or two. Just too bad that when it comes to the Samurai, all of were sadly myth-taken.
Check out Josh’s review of Ghost of Tsushima here!
Brock’s Picks:
First up for the Organoid Zero himself is the Resident Evil 3 remake, which featured the amazing Jill Valentine as the lead protagonist and a shorter, action-oriented campaign as its main focus. Certain aspects of the Resident Evil 2 remake, such as crippling zombies by targeting their limbs and a smaller map overall, keep this one from reaching the Game of the Year-nominee heights the RE2 Remake achieved, but RE3make is still a very fun experience to play through. I did not get to play the multiplayer component of the game, which is sort of its own separate entity, anyway, but I’ve heard it’s okay. If you can grab the game on sale, it’s definitely worth a playthrough. And Nicole Lee Thompkins, the voice of Jill, sang happy birthday to me on Cameo last year, so I have a special place in my heart for her and the lovely Ms. Valentine! Go play it!
Second, Brock chose Spider-Man: Miles Morales for the PS5, which is a continuation/extended side-story featuring Marvel Comics’ up and coming spider-bitten, radioactive hero. I haven’t had the chance to play it just yet, but if the original Spidey game is anything to go by, we’re in good hands. As Brock says, it’s interesting to see the subtle differences in the way Peter and Miles webswing around the city, with Peter being more experienced and thus, not as wild or enthusiastic in his movements, while Miles is young and energetic and enjoying the experience every time he jumps around New York. That attention to detail really sets a game apart from the others out there. Can’t wait to swing by and try this one out!
Next, another off-the-beaten-path choice: Godfall, a game that has not received very positive reviews among many critics, but Brock enjoyed it, primarily due to its visual style and the parry mechanic, which is one of the easiest to utilize in gaming. Godfall did have some pre-release hype going for it, as it was one of the first true next-generation Playstation 5 games shown off prior to the console’s launch. It did seem to suffer from the same thing most early “next-gen” console games are afflicted with, though: too many expectations based on pretty pictures and subpar gameplay. Personally, I’d substitute Doom Eternal for this one, but it ain’t my choice. So Organoid Zero has the final say here, and I’m glad he enjoyed it.
Finally, Brock chose another controversial choice among many gamers, Cyberpunk 2077. Yes, the head of CD Projekt Red did just acknowledge and go on camera to accept full responsibility for what amounted, quite frankly, a botched launch for the game, at least on console. PC players have been having a much better time with the game, and next-gen console owners can run the game fairly well. I played on PS4 Pro, Xbox One X, and a little bit on PC, and I can say that the Xbox consoles got the shaft here. Poor performance, constant crashes, hilariously bad bugs and glitches were the norm for my fellow Xbox fans, and I ended up refunding my purchase on that system. PS4 Pro fared slightly better, but still piss-poor compared to my PC, which runs it at a decent frame rate with ray tracing on. If you can run it on PC, it’s a sumptuous visual feast, which, while not completely bug-free, is far more palatable than the console versions.
And to be fair, there is a great narrative here, with some really cool missions that contain loads of easter eggs to find. And some of the bugs are pretty awesome! The item duplication glitch is godly, as is the fact that you can peace out of some missions and bring Panam and Judy (two major supporting characters) on other optional sidequests with you, thereby forming an actual RPG party! Doing so locks you out of the main storyline, but it’s still awesome! So yeah, Cyberpunk is worth a playthrough, but let’s give CDPR a chance to fix the broken stuff first.
Also, I added two of the most deceptive trailers for this game above, just to show how it was presented to us at first. We all know how it turned out. For shame.
Keona’s Picks:
First up for me is Hades, my second favorite game of 2020. As someone who wasn’t all that familiar with indie roguelike titles, I was extremely skeptical as to how much I’d enjoy Supergiant Games’ latest. I shouldn’t have doubted them. Hades is a special game, with a beautiful isometric 2.5D aesthetic, a stunning art style featuring awe-inspiring level and map layouts and jaw-droppingly gorgeous character designs. Fast-paced combat, which puts the focus on precision and speed, lends itself well to the old-school dungeon-crawler feel of the game, while the voice acting is top-notch and features new dialogue even as you play past the 50-hour mark! Darren Korb’s soundtrack is also amazing and features the immaculate vocals of Ashley Barrett, who could sing the damn phonebook and I’d love the hell out of it. Hades is so good, y’all. Go buy it.
Second, we have The Last of Us 2, a game that has garnered many GOTY awards as we crossed over into 2021. We’ve said our piece about this title in our official review, as well as our TLOU2 spoiler podcast, and while the game is far from perfect and a difficult experience to play through, it also deserves a lot of kudos for being as ballsy as it was, and for providing us with a thought-provoking story and some excellent gameplay on top of it all. Gustavo Santaolalla’s score once again transcends the genre and medium in which it’s used, and if any game ever proved to be a masterclass in voice acting before this one came out, I think it’s time to crown a new champion. Ashley Johnson, Troy Baker, and Laura Bailey all deserve so much kudos for their work in this game. Absolutely gut-wrenching performances from everyone involved, especially those three. No Game of the Year list from 2020 would be complete without The Last of Us 2. It’s that simple.
Third, we have a little title called Streets of Rage 4, which finally saw release in 2020 after being in various incarnations of development for a long time. SoR4 doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it shines everything up to a polish previously unseen in old-school 2D brawlers. Character design and animation is great, enemies are tenacious without being overly annoying, and boss fights are tough as nails, which is as it should be. Voices are great, too, as is the soundtrack, which features modern house and techno along with some classic-sounding tunes from the man himself, Yuzo Koshiro, who returns to lend his musical talents to the series he helped produce back in Sega’s 16-bit glory days. I love this game, and I hope it was successful enough that we get Streets of Rage 5 sometime in the not-too-distant future. GRAND UPPER!!!
Finally, my official Game of the Year 2020 award goes to a game that made me smile, cry, shake with emotion, and pump my fist in victory more often than any other in 2020. Yes, friends, I’m talking about Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Nah, nah, I’m kidding. I don’t even own a Switch.
Seriously, my 2020 Game of the Year is none other than the excellent Final Fantasy VII Remake! Square Enix and its developers did a masterful job with this reinvention, expanding the awesome opening of the original game into a massive 30+ hour long nostalgic smorgasbord of fun, joy, melancholy, sadness, and ultimately, hope for a brighter future. I reviewed the game here and we talked about spoilers on this episode of Arcade way back when, but I still feel like the game is as good as I remember it being, despite some padding in the middle and some surprisingly linear level design. All of the negative stuff in this game pales in comparison to the sheer insanity that is the Wall Market section of the game. Featuring some of the most bizarre and hilarious quests I’ve ever seen (the massage parlor, “The Sauce,” the Honey Bee Inn sequence), this chapter of the game is awash in color and atmosphere and the kind of indulgent JRPG mechanics you can’t really find in modern games. And that soundtrack!!! Who could forget remixes like “Due Recompense” and the “Airbuster” battle theme, which rocks so hard that it may have led to me headbanging my headphones right off my skull in a fit of utter joy.
And of course, the acting is great. The entire cast nails it, and we’d love to have them join us on this podcast someday. Personally, Briana White is the standout as Aerith, a character I never really took a special shine to in the original game, but here she stands out. I love everyone, but Aerith is so full of life, compassion, inner strength, and beauty that I can’t help but fall for her. What a character, and what a game.
Before we close, I just want to say thank you to my co-hosts, Brock and Tyler, for joining me for an extra-long episode. Please enjoy it when you can, and remember, it’s available on every podcast service you can see, from Apple to Pandora. Let us know how we’re doing in the comments below, and pour one out for the Doomslayer and Doom Eternal, which totally deserves to be on this list but we ran out of time to chat about it. We’ll bring it up next week on Renegade Arcade #11, the soundtrack special! Be safe, Renegades!
-Neoplasmic
Capcom delivers a new look at Resident Evil Village, Microprose lives(!), a new Hitman is released, and Tyler is joined by Keona and new guest host Kristin as they chat about the most memorable game soundtracks of 2020 and beyond! It’s another visit to the Renegade Arcade! Join us, won’t you?