The Best Games I Played In 2021 By Tiffany Treadmore & Dov Grey | Winter Spectacular 2021
2021 was the $29.99 paid expansion pack of 2020. Not as in-depth as the original experience, but bubbling over with new moves, new scenarios, and new unlockables. It was very close to that original 2020 gameplay, but a lot more open world.
For a bit. And then it was back to sweet, sweet isolation.
Similarly to 2020, I spent the year mostly indoors, replaying a lot of games I missed, both in an emotional way, but also in the I-never-had-time-to-play-this way. I also made use of my wise decision to begin paying for Game Pass Ultimate.
Below are some of the games I enjoyed over the last year, despite some of them coming out a decade or more in the past.
Nook is back up on mic telling us about his “poetry”.
10. ANIMAL CROSSING: NEW HORIZONS
Of course, I played more Animal Crossing in 2021, I am not an idiot. I do not like weeds. I do not like weeding. Having been previewed that there would be an absolutely enormous amount of content coming to New Horizons before the end of the year I began revisiting my old island in the Spring of 2021 with a focus on Building For The Future. Over 2020 I had built up a quite kinky little island and then had my WiFi connectivity in Animal Crossing magically unusable despite it working in every other game. This continued into 2021 and then, miraculously one day, it worked again. I built out a small Talk Show and Podcasting set-up within my island to hopefully use to make content in the future. I still love Animal Crossing New Horizons. I think it is wonderful, and if you somehow haven’t touched it yet - you should.
I still don’t know how to pronounce passpartout.
9. ART SQOOL
In my real life, when I am not being a Nintendo Leaker, I am an artist. I make films, I make games - I even paint. I have been obsessed with every type of ‘Educational Game’ that allows you to create, draw, paint, or edit images or movies. Art Sqool, the brilliant hipster vaporwave-meets-meme game from Julian Glander forces you to use your creativity to excel through an art university, following the lessons of a weirdo AI instructor named Professor Qwertz. The tools limit you due to their weird nature - neon colours, chalky brushes, etc - forcing you to think a bit outside the box as you create art.
I love it. My only wish is they incorporate some sort of .Gif maker into it, in the future.
8. BAIT!
As a young person who grew up in the forest, on a stream, in the middle of nowhere, I began fishing at a very early age. I was always afraid of the fish, I always hated stabbing the worms with the hook, and I hated hurting the fish when it would ultimately bite my line. I was, however, very good at it. I found that the sitting, the waiting, the thinking of fishing was my favourite part and I wished I could get that same experience without having to hurt anything in the process.
I was not yet aware of the concept of meditation, which could easily have satisfied these desires as well as changed my life for the better - but I was aware of shareware.
My father brought home from work a stack of 3.5-inch floppies fairly regularly from work, and one time within those diskettes was a rudimentary text-based fishing game for MS-DOS compatible computers. To this day I have never been able to find out the name of the game, losing the copy I had years ago, but I fell head over heels in love with it and played it for hours upon hours, weekly. When I was older, and in college the Sega Dreamcast was released, and within the first week of owning one I was gifted a copy of Sega Bass Fishing.
Insert an “I was hooked!” pun. I loved it. I loved how life-like it seemed at the time while also being a bit arcadey. I loved the relaxing sounds and music. It was wonderful to me and I have never had that type of Fishing Game experience again until this year, during the second pseudo-quarantine when I purchased an Oculus Quest 2 and a copy of Bait! by Resolution Games.
My god, man. It is relaxing.
Tangerine Tang is pretty good but you will have to go back to Animal Crossing to find a Pale Chub.
In Bait!, within VR, you sit in a comfy dock chair and fish. You throw out your line while wistful soft music and nature sounds plink and dink and swirl around and then you reel in a fish. Just like any other fishing game you have to make sure not to break your line, which can make it sometimes feel like ages to reel in a fish properly. But, that is kind of the point. It makes you sit and be quiet and slowly, slowly, slowly pull that fish in. Additionally, they have made the fish fake species - so you never feel like, “Aw shucks, I just killed an endangered species.” It's whimsical, it's comfy, it is well written if not a bit light. It is just great and you should play it.
7-1. PEGGLE
Peggle. Have you even lived as a gamer if you haven’t played Peggle? Well, sadly, that is the current world many of our youths are growing up in. Peggle on mobile is a near Gacha Game at this point and nothing like the Peggle we knew ten years or so back. I purposefully asked my child and their group of friends, ‘Do you guys like Peggle?’ and all of them - all of them - said they had never even heard of the game. Nonsense. How can this be? How can a generation of children grow up like this? For me, Peggle has been an important part of my gaming life for almost 15 years.
Great now I just miss how beautifully stupid E3 in person was.
Hell, I have even had sex WHILE playing the 2009 Nintendo DS port, Peggle Dual Shot.
Anyways, this year I got Game Pass Ultimate. Among decisions I have made in my life, it is one of the purest, best, and most rewarding. Game Pass Ultimate comes with not just one Peggle game but two, delicious, flakey, and satisfying Peggle games that you should play right now. Go. Go play Peggle. Now.
