Ed Zitron is the CEO of public relations firm EZPR and loves to gamble to forget about work.
Hello everyone! This is my first list of the top 10 for Giant Bomb, and this has been an especially peculiar year for games for me, as it was the first I can think of and not necessarily love ten games, and hated several major releases (Doom Eternal and Spider-Man: Miles Morales). But, most of the time, the games I loved I absolutely fell on my head.
10. Animal Crossing: New Horizons
I listed this game not because I think it’s great – in fact, I think it has the worst user interface in a game that exists – but because of the experience I had when playing it with other people. I can’t think of a game I’ve played with my nephew, half of my friends, my wife, his friends, my family, his family – everyone! Everyone wanted to play this, everyone wanted to exchange fruit and make the turnip exchange and try to make more bells to improve the house. He absorbed my life for a whole month and then disappeared as if it never existed. Amen.
9. Fuser
I love Harmonix, even though they never gave me Rock Band: Queens of the Stone Age. Fuser is probably one of the strangest games anyone has ever played, let alone Harmonix, and it’s incredibly endearing as a result. It is basically a mashup simulator, with you releasing parts of the songs (vocals, drums, guitars, etc.) constantly, trying to match the beats and playing with the tempo of the songs. You can actually do some monstrosities – it includes “All Star” by Smash Mouth, “Killing in the Name Of” by Rage Against the Machine, “Party Rock Anthem” by LMFAO, “Jolene” by Dolly Parton, just to name a few. It’s a nightmare machine, but there’s so much going on under the hood that it always makes the songs fit together. There were several moments in the game when I laughed with real and real joy at how something got mixed up – the guitars from “Killing in the Name Of” work in various places – and then in the real comedy of any Smash Mouth song. Please play this game. Is so good. I want more songs.
8. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2
Proceeding and apologizing preventively for the large number of remakes on this list, starting with this one. THPS is a game that rocks because it knows you want to play a video game, and doesn’t try to make you pretend otherwise. This is a very straightforward update, adding manuals to the game (have they always been there? Where are my pills?), Graphical updates (obviously) and some new goals. But it’s alright. This game has always been good. All I needed to do was update. And here it is. Except that they removed “Out with the Old” from Alley Life, which is a crime, and everyone involved was arrested and imprisoned.
7. Maneater
This was my surprise game in the top 10 of the year. It takes a little time to get started, but the Maneater’s mechanics are so good – it’s so fun to say “” and eat stuff and level your shark. It doesn’t claim to be profound, it doesn’t claim to be a great story, it’s just fun. You are a great shark that eats people and people scream, and Chris Parnell does reality TV-style talkings all the time. It is very funny, very pleasant, a very funny game and a parody of all kinds of open world.
6. Marvel Spider-Man remastered
I didn’t like Spider-Man: Miles Morales – it looked empty and out somehow, on a mechanical level, to the point where I immediately started remastering the original PS4 Spider-Man for PS5. The reason Morales didn’t work for me was that you didn’t look like Spider-Man – you were throwing electronic punches and constantly kicking guys with guns in different buildings. However, the original Spider-Man rocked, and the graphic brilliance that the remastering adds is significant enough to look like a totally different game. They apparently also remastered everyone’s faces, which is cool, but mostly the ray tracing and the high resolution and it all just added a huge layer of wow factor that makes me want to just constantly swing.
5. Tsushima’s ghost
I was shocked at how much I liked Ghost, but I got a strong recommendation from a friend. Although the story is a little extravagant, it is really one of the best open world games I have ever played. The best open world games reward you for investing in systems and exploring the world, and Ghost continues to do that even if you completely and totally avoid the main storyline (which I still like). At some point, halfway through the process, I became a little too powerful, to the point that it was almost impossible to die (I think it might have increased the difficulty), but there is something about the fantasy of being able to become the Supreme Samurai.
4. MLB The Show 20
I never thought I would write how much I liked a baseball RPG, but The Show 2020 really improved the Road To The Show single player mode, which makes you build relationships with other players (and rivals) while playing. It’s still what you buy for The Show – a good-looking and technically wonderful baseball simulator – but it adds the ability to fuck with other players to increase certain attributes, adds boss challenges (batting or challenging pitchers) and rewards to keep up with this. I never touch the rest of the game and it can be awful, but I will always put more than 30 hours in baseball RPG to raise the level of my stats.
3. Demon’s Souls
Demon’s Souls looks like more than just a graphical update. It’s smoother, you can move in more directions, the menus are significantly improved and the loading times change the way you feel about the deaths – they suck, there were two times that I played my controller (5-1 and 5-2), but you don’t hate yourself as much as you would when the loading screen lasted 30 seconds. The speed and fluidity of the remake really adds to the fact that, deep down, a lot of Demon’s Souls is a puzzle – finding the right combination of moves to go through a certain stretch and move on to the next. It looks great, it’s great, but it keeps everything I loved about it the first time.
2. Final Fantasy VII Remake
I wondered if my nostalgia could get the best of me with the remake of Final Fantasy VII. I loved the original and thought I would be willing to forgive a lot in this game if they did it well enough to hit the right buttons in my brain. Sure, he did that, but he also said a cohesive and New history, and has the best combat I’ve ever done in an RPG, to the point of sometimes resenting the game for not giving me more chances to fight things. It is so rewarding and fun.
It also features some of the best narrative moves in games, especially in music. They have what appears to be a total or partially orchestrated remake of the original’s soundtrack, but what FF7: R does with the music goes beyond that – it constantly flows around what you’re doing, going in and out of combat like a pit made for TV. It’s beautiful, moving and engaging, and it’s not up to you to remember the original material. I also really like how they are taking the story. The whole game looks invigorating after the movies and TV focus entirely on subverting expectations – he knows what you want and gives it to you.
1. Hades
I was surprised by Hades. It’s beautifully done, visually and aurally, clearly done with an immense amount of love and care in a way that you just can’t Watch with games. And that may have made me a little nicer with the mechanics, if it weren’t for the fact that Supergiant became the first and only company to create a game that makes Diablo better than Diablo. The rich roguelike system is so well adjusted, so rewarding, so perfectly I ended up doing about 50 complete game cleanups on the switch and on the PC. I cannot express in words how good Hades is. I can’t think of another game with such a beautiful presentation and rigid mechanics.