I couldn’t come up with a clean title. This will do I suppose.

2020 was a long freaking year. We have hours left until 2021, and when I think about the beginning of the year, I almost feel like we were in a simulation.

This post is gonna be a reflection of this year in gaming; well at least a couple of personal highlights and some of my favorite games of the year. I’ll do a seperate post in which I’ll look forward to 2021 or 2020 Prestige 1.

Also, I’m gonna apologize ahead of time if this post seems disjointed. I originally wanted to talk about some of my favorite games this year and upcoming titles for next year, but I got inspired by the thought of how long 2020 was.

Highlights up first.

The Great Video Game Boom

Last year’s E3 event had me excited about one thing; gaming and celebs mixing it up. Keanu Reeves in Cyberpunk 2077? Jon Bernthal in Ghost Recon Breakpoint?

Sick.

Needless to say gaming took another huge leap forward with COVID-19. Keeping everybody inside for the whole year. The Los Angeles Times wrote up a good article talking about the bump in gaming with millions losing jobs and/or being stuck indoors.

Last month, as millions of Americans lost their jobs or experienced pay cuts, game sales reached $977 million, up 52% from a year earlier, NPD said. Sales have increased 18% so far this year.

Lazarus, D. June 16, 2020. “Column: Video games are thriving amid COVID-19 — and experts say that’s a good thing” The LA Tines

Okay hear me out. I don’t like the fact that COVID ruined all the countless gaming, sporting, real life events, and took jobs away, but in the end, it introduced plenty to a whole new world. I’ve been gaming forever and seeing the industry grow during this time has made me proud to be a gamer. Also, next generation was set to launch at the end of the year, so yeah this was good traction. Celebs started streaming games more frequently and brought in a whole new wave of fans to the gaming side.

Welcome, we’ve been waiting for you.

Again, COVID bad, gaming good.

The Beginning of a New Generation…

I’m 26 years old and to this day, new console launches make me giddy and excited.

This year’s launch was a whole new wave of feelings though as millions across the world had to fight Skynet, scalpers and long online queues just to watch the PS5/Xbox One Series X, RTX 3070-3090 disappear from their cart.

Check out a compilation of preorder memes here.

Preorder fiasco aside, whether we wanted it or not, the next generation of gaming arrived. I’m sure I’m not the only one who felt the pain of knowing that their time with their current consoles was almost up. It never gets easy, and I’m sure when we look at eh PS10 and Xbox Two Series 100, it’ll still hurt putting your old consoles to rest.

Here’s hoping the restocks happen soon for those of you who don’t have it yet!

Second part to this. I got a gaming PC in June so it was like two generations for me. I’m surprised I even know how to turn it on.

And the End of the Last Generation

I was going to make this a sad section, but we’ve already endured enough sad.

I think we had some really good games launch that really set the bar high for next generation titles.

For the record, this year was so long I was going to include Devil May Cry 5, but then I realized it came out 2019. Shout out to Devil May Cry V Special Edition though. I will play you soon.

We slayed endless demon hordes in Doom Eternal.

We fought back the Mongols for our home lands in Ghost of Tsushima.

We caused unnecessary drama and commotion and won countless game of the year awards in The Last of Us Part II.

We revisited re-imagined classics in Final Fantasy 7 Remake, Destroy All Humans!, and Resident Evil 3.

Okay there were way more titles out that were good, but those were some of my personal highlights.

Plenty of Controversies

I didn’t want to cover this, but I had to. It wouldn’t be a year in gaming if there wasn’t some sort of controversy(plural form of the controversy here) and of course, there were plenty. It actually felt like it was a lot worse than in recent memory. Maybe because everybody was angry and letting out their frustrations out on the web.

I don’t have an exact timeline of when a lot of this happened, but yeah. Check out this article to see more of this year in a nutshell.

The Last of Us Part II

This one was dumb, but what do you expect? A lot of the controversy here stems from the leaks regarding the story. I think the complete story leaked, people read it and insta-raged. What followed was a series of death threats, harassing and straight up embarrassing actions by a select group of gamers. Listen, if you don’t like the story, keep it to yourself or bring it up in a constructive form of criticism.

Cyberpunk 2077

Holy crap this was intense. I’m actually doing a write of this in a separate post, but I’m just waiting for the dust to unfold.

Basically what happened was failed expectations. This game was seen to be some sort of gaming savior or new era of gaming, and you’d think 8 years of work would make it that way right?? It turned out to be the exact opposite as upon launch the game has been nothing short of memes, bugs and reports of crunch. In the most 2020 finale, CD Projekt Red has turned into the villain nobody expected them to be resulting in lawsuits and refunds worldwide.

Go back to sleep samurai, the game’s not ready yet.

Gamers Speaking Up

This wasn’t as much of a controversy as it is a proud moment. Much of the early Spring brought forth many females and prominent members of the industry who spoke about their harassment experiences from high ranking individuals and professional players. Some of their experiences were shockingly disgusting, and it takes a lot of courage to come forth.

Now I don’t want you to think this was the controversy. I included this in this section because it caused the industry to look at itself as a whole and reevaluate their shortcomings which is an overall net positive.

Dr Disrespect

What ever happened between him and Twitch????

Game of the Year

You probably can tell the answer based off of my post about it, but it definitely goes to Ghost of Tsushima. I think it was such a good game full of content and beautiful imagery. Looking back at my post on it, I don’t know if my point made sense, but I think we should revisit the article about gaming and art Roger Ebert came up with years ago (“Video games can never be art.” get a load of that guy). We’ve seen so many games push the boundary, and this game follows trend.

Play it dang it.

I think if this game didn’t come out this year, I probably would’ve given it to Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales because it was one of my favorite gaming experiences of the year or to DOOM Eternal because it rocked.

Conclusion

I don’t think there was anything else I really wanted to mention. Like I said, I’m going to cover 2021 in a future post, but for now, this is what the year looked like at least in my eyes.

Anything else I forgot to mention? In the mean time, enjoy the rest of your holidays, and we’ll see you in 2020 Prestige 1 for the next arc in the manga called Life.