since getting back into games the last few years, ive usually only really played one at a time. probably as a result of the last year and getting deeper into older games, it occurred to me recently that all of a sudden, there’s quite a few i’d like to get around to, and i don’t know if i will! as we exit end-of-year season, i thought it would be fun to talk about what we’re looking forward to.
i checked out Doom (1993) last year and honestly have been digging that a lot, and that has me wanting to give a few other “genre defining” games a shot. specifically, System Shock 2, Dragon Quest, and Rogue. i know those are like, the most boomer pulls imaginable, but i am trying to spend more time with older games i’m not already nostalgic for. though i did also just reinstall Star Wars KOTOR with a heap of mods, so. there’s that.
how about y’all? any releases you’re hoping turn out good, series you’ve always been curious about, old favorites you wanna dust off?
What if I spent all of 2021 playing nothing but remakes and reboots? Like, say, Umurangi Generation on Switch, Scott Pilgrim finally on not-Xbox 360, Disco Elysium on not-PC, and Super Mario 3D World on not-WiiU. Nier Replicant!
Everything else I’m hyped for doesn’t really have a release date. I’d love to play Silksong, but is that a 2021 game?
Playing old games has made my gaming time so much more enjoyable over the past year or two, so I know the feeling! I’m planning on playing some more PS2 games that I missed during my sheltered childhood! First up this year is Raw Danger which is one I’ve been meaning to get around to for a long time. There’s a fan patch that adds back the Japanese VO and a few other things that didn’t make it over in the US release.
As for new releases, I’m psyched for Hitman 3, which comes out in a few weeks. That game will almost certainly suck up months of my game playing time. If we’re lucky, and the RE team can pull off it’s fourth straight banger, then Resident Evil Village would be the next new game I’d sink time into after that!
I was actually thinking about my resolutions for how I’d like to engage with games for 2021 just earlier today! I did something similar at the start of 2020 and looking back on it, I only really accomplished one of my goals which was finishing a series I had bought all the games of but hadn’t really played.
I came up five resolutions for 2021 which are:
Finish more visual novels that aren’t genre hybrids.
I wanted to finish at least 6 games that are strictly visual novels and wanted to make at least half of them games from Japanese developers since I tend to view OELVNs as being “easier” to engage with on some level and I’d like to challenge that because I don’t think that’s actually true!
Finish at least 12 JRPGs.
I wanted to try to average one a month but that may just be because I’m currently juggling a few of them right now. I also wanted to try and alternate between modern games and older obscurities or classics I’m unfamiliar with.
Finish more older games, regardless of platform of origin.
I touched a lot of older games (older meaning games released more than 15 years ago) than I finished in 2020 and I want to endeavor to finish more old games instead of peeping them for 30 minutes.
Finish at least five commercial games from developers I am unfamiliar with or do not have any prior notable releases to their name.
Pretty self-explanatory, I want to monetarily support and take chances on games that aren’t especially popular or the focal points of conversations within games spaces. Also, I tend to merely look at games that seem like they might be cool from devs I’ve never heard of and rarely do I ever try them out. I’d like to change that!
Finish at least five games (commercial or non-commercial) from developers in itch.io.
Same as the last resolution, I feel like I tend to look at itch once every few months and seldom do I bother to actually try, let alone finish, anything I see on there.
Was really proud of myself for getting to a bunch this year: Mario Galaxy, Pikmin 3, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, Paper Mario 64, Super Metroid, and To The Moon. Actually felt a bit left out come GOTY season, I didn’t play much new last year.
This year I’m excited to finish FFVII (just got to disc two), and hopefully play that remake. Additionally I own and would like to play Super Mario Galaxy 2, Skyward Sword, and Metroid Prime. I’ve been in the habit of buying games much longer than beating them!
I want this to be the year I play a Xeno- game (Xenoblade, Xenogears, maybe Xenosaga? we’ll see) because my spouse loves them, but I haven’t played any of them. Xenoblade is the most likely since we own it on Switch now and I can play it handheld, but I think I’d enjoy Xenogears. Maybe I’ll dig out my old PSP and look into how to make it emulate the PS1. (We own a PS1/Xenogears, but the only TV in our house that can connect to it is shared and I hate playing long games like that on it.)
Industries of Titan and Phantom Brigade are two games that came out in Early Access last year, and while I’ve been watching a fair few streams, I’ve still not played them myself. Hope I get to it, especially if either ends up releasing 1.0 before the year’s done.
In terms of new releases, I am very excited for She Dreams Elsewhere, Paralives, Super Lesbian Animal RPG, Sable, Keylocker, Wolfstride, and perhaps Metal: Hellslinger. I don’t plan to own a PS5 this year, so unless a rich uncle I never met dies suddenly and leaves me his fortune, I probably won’t get to play Resident Evil: VIllage, but it looks cool. Hitman 3 I might pick up for my spouse’s birthday if it runs alright on a base PS4.
I have a giant pile of Android: Netrunner cards that I purchased with every intent of playing the game and have yet to do anything with them. I should fix that.
jrpgs that aren’t persona maybe the big one for me categorically since i missed experiencing a lot of the jrpgs as a child. in terms of stuff that i know but would still like to be made available ace combat 6 and on the mobile titles on pc even more than a port of 5 or zero since those last two i know like the back of my hand
I talked about this in a avoiding FOMO thread, but I made a list of games that I’m ok with buying in 2021, and not buying anything else (unless it’s like, BotW2/new Pokémon). So I’m focusing on games I own that I haven’t played, and older titles.
Right now I’m working my way through FFXII: The Zodiac Age and am enjoying a lot of it.
I know I’m going to play SMT V because I love those games, and I missed Scott Pilgrim when it came out, despite being a defining movie for my teenage years (I know, I know), so that as well. That’s probably it for 2021 releases.
This is a fairly big undertaking, but I think I want to play both Persona 2 games, but between the JRPG I’m playing now and SMT V, we’ll see. It’s hard to tell if I’ll burn myself out, but I’m just really enjoying the genre, and there’s a lot of older stuff I want to experience.
I have a bunch of smaller games on my Switch that I haven’t gotten to, like Momodora, Dogurai, Squidlit, and Yoku’s Island Express, so those might be good palate cleansers between bigger games.
I thought I was going to be done with Animal Crossing in 2021, but my mom just got it for Christmas so I’ve been playing that with her (we’re in different countries and I’m bad at calling, it’s a good reason for me to talk to her).
Last year, I mostly kept up with the new hotness, but I didn’t really enjoy that and it’s kind of expensive, so I am also planning to limit myself to only a few new games this year. Sounds like a lot of other people are in the same boat.
The main big game I am looking forward to is Monster Hunter Rise because I loved Monster Hunter World so much.
I don’t get hyped for new releases much anymore, but I am amped for Subnautica: Below Zero. I adored the first game which I picked up in a bundle years ago. So it was an easy sell to me to buy BZ in early access and support its development. But I have been waiting for that sweet sweet 1.0 release, which is supposedly coming early this year.
I think the only new release I’m looking forward to this year is the NieR rerelease/remaster. Aside from that, I’m mostly continuing what I did last year and focusing on clearing out my backlog. Between stuff I bought during Steam Sales years ago, free EGS games, and free Twitch Prime games, I’ve got literally hundreds of things I haven’t touched.
Also, this thread has reminded me of the ~200 things I downloaded after picking up the Itchio Racial Justice Bundle and then played exactly 2 of. I should probably work on that, too, huh?
There are a couple specific things I want to get to in the near future: Shadowrun: Hong Kong (I played Dragonfall last year and mostly loved it), Mutazione and Whispers of a Machine (two games I started last year and never got super deep into but want to get back to now) and Disco Elysium (bought it on sale and am waiting for the big update that’s coming in March).
But also after playing all the Yakuza games last year, there’s still a part of me that wants to go back and replay them all and get all the platinum trophies… so I may just end up doing that instead.
For 2021 I’m giving myself permission to let gaming be my place of respite. It’s ok if I don’t challenge myself or explore “new” experiences (or support indie devs as a form of altruism rather than genuine excitement for their games). I’m ok just playing comforting, familiar experiences. And I’m going to try my best to resist the lure of gaming discourse hyping up games I know deep down I won’t like. I’ve trudged through enough Outer Wilds, Nier Automatas, and Hadeses to just feel burnt out by what Waypoint likes. Going forward I’m hoping to keep that front of mind.
I started streaming (ahem yahoo anime rules) the 2010 Three Kingdoms TV series last year but fell off not because I wasn’t enjoying it but just because there’s so much to watch. But I want to finish watching that and finally dig into Total War Three Kingdoms. I also have one of the Nobunaga’s Ambition games sitting on my pile of shame and I’d like to use that as a stepping stone into the old Koei Three Kingdoms games, or just the latest one. I also never really gave Chaos Galaxy a fair shot
Also since this is kind of a games resolutions thread, I played exactly 99 games of Go last year (counting online games with humans on the 19x19 board) and my resolution is this year is to average just over a game a day and get that total to 500+. I have pretty bad competition anxiety sometimes playing online and I want to try to that via habits and exposure.
Although now that folks are talking about Netrunner on the Discord I’m like… maybe I should get into Netrunner
well, i didn’t know there was a new mh coming out (on switch, even), but now that i know, i want to play it.
i also kind of want to play some of those games i looked up in search of a sub-$60 alternate to pokémon mystery dungeon on switch, namely dragonfangz and crown trick. roguelikes!!
My GPU died in the middle of last year so I’ve been saving up for a new rtx whenever they become somewhat available (ha…)
Mostly I’ve just been digging through indies on the Switch by and stuff that comes out on game pass for my launch xbone. Looking forward to Umurangi coming to the Switch. I just started playing Hades and Fuser this year which has been a lot of fun in very different ways. Assuming I actually have a functional PC again, I’m also looking forward to RE Village because I’m a huge RE fan and 7 in particular, and also Hitman 3. Other than that, mostly just digging through older stuff and whatever I can chip off of the massive racial justice itch bundle on my laptop or that can run off my mobo alone.
This is one of those nuanced questions which is really two questions for most people: what games do you think you should want to play this year; and what games do you deeply want to play this year [even if they’re not the games you think you should want to].
As with many people who’ve already commented, I certainly have a bunch of games from the itch Racial Justice bundle that I haven’t played (although I did play at least 10 of them at the time - and some of my highlights of the year, like A Mortician’s Tale, Secret Little Haven and Us Lovely Corpses, even if it also had a lot of my low-lights as well (to remain nameless in shame) - and already owned probably another 10 or so), and I actually do really want to at least try some of them too (I keep forgetting that A Short Hike, 2064: Read Only Memories etc are all in the bundle, and I really need to give Quench more than the 40 minutes or so I gave it back when the bundle came out.)
At the moment, I’m also feeling a bit burned by Waypoint community recommends - I’ll try Umurangi Generation if and when it gets the mode that turns off that blasted timer; and I’ve been on about my journey of feelings about Hades in enough places - and so my current plan for “games in the future” involves no new games at all.
Instead, I really want to try out more detectiving/“Ace Attorney” style games after Paradise Killer (I see that, once again, the Racial Justice bundle has at least one - Nina Aquila: Legal Eagle);
I have to make a note to try Crusader Kings 3 again now we’ve had enough patches to probably fix all my issues with it on launch,
I’m also sort of fascinated by what’s going to happen with the “first ever R-Type game in a decade” - the multiple-rounds-of-crowdfunding supported R-Type Final 2 (awards for oxymoronic titles to…).
However, I’m probably not going to actually play it - I enjoy the aesthetics and weirdness of the RType games to their actual gameplay. [And I’m still sad that the world’s first realtime-with-pause side-scrolling shoot’em up - Mighty Tactical Shooter - seems to have died in development some years ago now. ]
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