Video Game Round-Up! - November/December 2020

Welcome to this month's Video Game Round-Up!

I'm a few days late again, but this time it's due to work and not my own forgetful brain (though I will admit I didn't start writing this until two days ago :P ).

Another 19 games this month, though that is a bit of a cheat since seven of them were in one bundle. Still, they count :D I finished three games this month, two on stream, one of which I did in one sitting :D I also started 13 other games without finishing them, or any other games I have previously started, so I think have like 85 million unfinished games now... But at least I started them!

In the saddest news, I still don't have a PS5 :(

But enough about that, let's get to the games!

Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Switch) - The girl is so close to completing both her fish and bug Critterpedia pages, as well as those sections in our museum. She just needs the Dung Beetle and the Stringfish. I need both of those too, as well as a bunch of other fish and bugs that come out in the first half of year. I also need the lobster (which Felicia has already caught), and the last two undersea creatures that will come out in March 2021.

Turkey Day was pretty fun, and consisted of us running around the island looking for various ingredients for Franklin the Turkey to use in his dishes. There were four dishes, and two variations of each, for a total of eight dishes and eight gifts from Franklin. We did all eight dishes on stream, and we both did every dish by the end of the night. I wore a sushi chef outfit because I would be cooking, but Felicia decided to dress as actual sushi for reasons :P

Bully (PS4) - In the 18th episode of Adan Plays Through His Backlog, I played Rockstar's open-world school hooligan simulator game. It's an interesting departure from their other output in the Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption series as there are no guns, grenades, knives, etc. There are non-lethal versions of all these things (you can shoot greasers with a slingshot, for example), but the game is more concerned with the main character Jimmy Hopkins becoming the coolest dude in school by doing various tasks for other students (and occasionally going to class). It was pretty fun, and seems a lot smaller in scope than GTA or RDR, which means I may finish it by the end of 2021 (and maybe even platinum it, as none of the trophies are missable).

Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales (PS4) - I finished it, not once, but twice! Whoo! Marvel's Spider-Man (PS4) from 2018 was a much longer game, but I think Miles Morales is the better game. As I said last month, I love the character of Miles, but I also love Miles' supporting cast (Ganke, Rio, and Hailey) more than Peter's (Mary Jane and Aunt May). Beyond the main story missions, there were also a good set of side missions dealing with an attempted criminal takeover of Harlem that Miles and Ganke have to stop, plus all the side missions on the Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man App.

Miles' bio-electric powers also provide an extra layer of depth to the combat. Beyond the Arkham-style moves and gadgets, Miles gets a couple of extra super powers that let him jump, slam, punch, and dash with extra power and pizzaz.

I streamed my entire playthrough, and it only took me about 12-13 hours to do pretty much everything in the game. I played through it a second time, sticking to the critical path (and that set of side missions because I liked them so much), so I could get the platinum trophy.

If you like action adventure games, or games where you can be Spider-Man and swing through the air, I cannot recommend this game enough.

Watch Dogs: Legion (PS4) - I beat this game early in the month, but still need to some busy work to get the platinum trophy. I enjoyed the game a lot, especially being able to hack all the things. It was my favorite bit in the first two games in the series too. I mentioned last month that I wasn't sure how not having a main character would impact my enjoyment, and it turns out not at all. I mostly used the same three characters throughout my run, and it was fine. Bagley, the AI constantly chattering in your ear was quite funny.

The main missions were pretty good, but I think my favorite set were the 404 missions, which were quite reminiscent of Ghost in the Shell, and more than a little creepy (especially when you break into that one house to look for more evidence). Good, good stuff.

I unlocked most of the trophies in that single playthrough, but not all of them. I booted the game back up after beating it only once because I was waiting for a Cyberpunk 2077 update to download. I was able to unlock a couple of class-based trophies that were giving me trouble: "Meta-Gaming", in which I had to find and recruit a Video Game Designer (it took forever to find one) and "You Don't See Me", in which I had to escape a level 5 police pursuit using a Living Statue emote (the hard part here was a) finding a Living Statue that didn't have the automatically die "perk" and b) getting the cops up to a level 5 police pursuit without getting hospitalized or arrested). I have five trophies left, and they're the most obnoxious ones because I have to traverse the map to find pubs for drinking and playing darts, put up a lot of graffiti, make deliveries, and complete a football mini-game. I may put them off until the first DLC drops :P

Hollow Knight (PS4) - I'm still playing and streaming this game, but I've only played it another 7 or so hours, as many other things have taken up my time, but it's the game I think about the most when I'm not playing it. I've discovered lots of new paths and places, and defeated a handful of bosses since last time (three, I believe). I even got one new power, which is neat. I will continue streaming this game (and occasionally making videos when I can't beat bosses on stream), and will do so until I beat it because it's a really, really good Metroidvania.

Burly Men at Sea (PS4) - The 19th episode of Adan Plays Through His Backlog featured this charming and adorable narrative game about three sailor brothers who go on a bunch of adventures, sometimes on a boat, sometimes on a raft, sometimes in some barrels, and sometimes just swimming around, but always at sea. They meet a bunch of people and creatures from myth and legend, but always end up back on their island home. The main mechanic is choosing different paths through the various events (there are twelve endings in total, so not a lot of paths), with some light puzzling thrown in. And the minimalist art style is fantastic. This is a short game, and I ended up playing the whole thing (and platinuming it) in one sitting on stream. If you've not played this (and didn't watch my stream), I suggest giving it a shot. It's a good investment of time and money.

Call of Duty: WWII (PS4) - The 20th episode of Adan Plays Through His Backlog feature three quite different Call of Duty first-person shooters. The first I played was 2017's WWII, a return to the war that made FPS games so popular in the first place. The Call of Duty series specifically hadn't had a game set in this war since way back in 2008's World at War, which was set in the eastern front (and was the first game in the Black Ops sub-series). I only played the initial Normandy invasion level, and died many times. I like the characters in that first level, and will eventually complete this.

Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare (PS4) - Next up was 2016's Infinite Warfare (which I was trying to play first, but wouldn't load for some reason; it loaded just fine after WWII). This game was widely panned because of its futuristic setting, but I liked it! I'm a pretty big sucker for sci-fi concepts in general, and this one has Kit "You know nothing, Jon Snow" Harrington as the main villain. Again, I only played the opening mission, but I found it quite fun. It feels a bit like Titanfall 2, but without all the giant mechs (I assume; I only played the first mission, after all). I will finish this eventually as well.

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War (PS4) - This is the latest Call of Duty game, and I was honestly going to wait to pick it up until much later, but then I saw a Let's Play and it looked really cool. You get to make choices in this game that affect the ending, which is wild for an FPS. But also, running around Cold War era locations like East Berlin and flashbacks to Vietnam make for pretty great levels. I decided to keep playing the game on stream, so this'll probably be the next Call of Duty game I complete. Also, I like that the one guy looks like Robert Redford :D

Immortals Fenyx Rising (PS4) - Look! Another open-world game from Ubisoft! The third they've released in like two months! :P This one is set in a Greek mythological world in which most humans have been turned to stone by the Titan Typhon, and only the warrior Fenyx can save the world. It was built by the same dev team that did Assassin's Creed Odyssey, and very obviously took a lot of--shall we be kind and say "influence"?--from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Switch) (GameSpot did a video with side-by-side comparisons, they're so similar), but don't hold that against it! If anything, it's a good enough copy--I mean, homage--that it's nearly just as fun to play.

I played about two hours on stream, and then played it a couple more hours after that. My favorite bits by far are the Vaults of Tartaros, which behave like the shrines in BotW, and are these wonderful puzzle-platform sections. I've only met Hermes and Aphrodite so far, and still have Athena, Ares, and Hephaestus to meet (at least).

The story is told by Prometheus to Zeus, and you guys, they're pretty funny. I like their banter a lot.

Also, because Star Trek: Discovery's Lt. Detmer's haircut is now my favorite haircut of all time, I am giving it to all my characters, and my Fenyx sports that haircut :D

Hades (Switch) - The other (probably better) game featuring Greek mythology on this list. I played it for another two or so hours and got as far as Megaera one time, and she promptly whooped my ass. The girl, on the other hand, has made it quite a bit farther. She pretty regularly gets to Theseus and Asterius, but hasn't beaten them yet. She has beat all three Fury sisters and the Hydra multiple times, though. I think she's gonna beat it very soon.

Capcom Beat 'Em Bundle (Switch) - The 21st episode of Adan Plays Through His Backlog featured this collection of some of Capcom's early brawlers. There are seven in total, and I will write about them individually below, but they have many similarities. Chief among them: they are dang hard. You will die a lot, and the reason for that is because they were all designed to guzzle as many quarters as possible when they were all located in arcades. But these versions have unlimited continues, so have become incredibly easy. It doesn't matter where I lose my last life, I can simply continue in the exact same place, losing not a whit of progress. I will finish all of these games because they're challenging enough to make them not boring, but easy enough to never frustrate me, and sometimes that's exactly what I want.

Final Fight (Switch) - This is arguably the most famous game in the collection, and features a bunch of characters that would go on to appear in the Street Fighter series. I only played as Mayor Haggard on stream because it's his daughter that's been kidnapped by the Mad Gear gang. I got as far as beating Sodom and Edi. E, the hirsute police officer who works for Mad Gear.

The King of Dragons (Switch) - This is a fantasy brawler with the extra mechanic of leveling up. You get better swords and shields as you progress, and you can choose your class at the beginning (and after every death): Fighter, Wizard, Cleric, Elf, and Dwarf (yes, I know Elf and Dwarf are races, not classes, but you go tell Capcom that). I only played as the Fighter and made it pretty far into the game. Or I assume, at any rate, since I got to the seventh stage pretty quickly.

Captain Commando (Switch) - Arguably the second most famous game in the collection, Captain Commando was almost Capcom's mascot, but he didn't really catch on. The best part of this game is the fact that the other three playable characters are friggin' nuts: Mack the Mummy Commando, Ginzu the Ninja Commando, and Baby the Baby Commando. They all play slightly differently (but mostly still punch and kick), but are just bizarre characters to include.

Knights of the Round (Switch) - This is a medieval brawler based on Arthurian legends. Arthur, Lancelot, and Perceval are all playable characters, and while I did play as all three, Lancelot and Perceval were both accidents. I don't like Lancelot because he's a cheater, and I don't like Perceval because he's the main character in the worse book of all time Parzival. This game also featured a leveling up mechanic which gave Arthur better armor.

Warriors of Fate (Switch) - This was the Chinese-themed brawler, which made it different . Everything else on the collection is 100% western, so this was a pretty neat addition. There are five playable characters with different weapons/fighting styles, but I only played with Abaka, the swordsman. This game had a problem, however. The text that told me the story whizzed by way too fast. I barely halfway through a paragraph before it disappeared. Boo.

Armored Warriors (Switch) - This and the next game, Battle Circuit, had never come to consoles before. They were arcade only, while the other five had been ported to third- and fourth-gen consoles. Armored Warriors is a futuristic sci-fi brawler in which the four playable characters pilot mechs on Earth and Raia, the homeworld of the aliens you have to fight. The cool mechanic in this game is that you get pick up various weapons from alien mechs and attack it to your mech and use it, including guns, big fists, and grabby hands. There were also a couple of cool levels that weren't just brawling. For example, there is a level where you have to rush through as quickly as possible and pick up various bonuses.

Battle Circuit (Switch) - The final game in the collection is the wackiest by far. The five playable characters are very different from each other, ranging from a girl on an ostrich to an alien plant monster to a geriatric superhero. The villains are also ridiculous, and everyone is a bounty hunter of some kind for some reason. It was pretty fun and maybe my favorite of the whole collection.

Cyberpunk 2077 (PS4) - Well, what can I say about this game that hasn't already been said everywhere else? Cyberpunk 2077 is the buggiest game I have ever played, even buggier than Mass Effect: Andromeda (PS4). It is so buggy, it has been indefinitely delisted on the PlayStation digital storefront until its myriad issues are fixed. Not even Life of Black Tiger (PS4), arguably the worst game ever made, has ever been delisted. That should give you an idea of not just what a bad state the game is in, but also the complete and utter disaster of a launch CD Projekt Red had. I'll quickly list the Ls CDPR have taken in the past two or so weeks:

1. After promising there would be no crunch, insisted the dev teams crunch to meet the new 10 December release date (even though they obviously should have delayed yet again).
2. Getting called out for having overly-sexualized trans images and ethnic and racial stereotypes in their PR material leading up to the game's release, defending that by saying the game will not be so sexualized/stereotypical or will have more context surrounding said sexualization/stereotyping, then shipping the game with no context at all beyond "this is the world".
3. Reviewers were only given PC builds of the game (aka the best version of the game at the moment), and weren't allowed to use their own capture in their reviews (only pre-approved images and videos direct from CDPR), in effect hiding the fact that console version of the game was in such a bad state.
4. Their most interesting (and extremely unskippable) mechanic was based on a medical device used to test for epilepsy, and so gives players (and at least one reviewer) seizures when playing those sections.
5. Rabid fans sent death threats (and videos designed to induce seizures) to reviewers who dared to not give the game a perfect 10 (not really CDPR's fault, but they didn't really do anything to decry this, so I'm going to hold it against them).
6. Those same rabid fans, upon actually playing the game, turned on CDPR and sent the dev teams death threats (again, not CDPR's fault, but man, do something to protect your employees).
7. Offering refunds for console players unhappy with their pre-order/purchase without actually talking to reps from Sony, Microsoft, or any physical game store.
8. Almost immediately walking back those refund offers and making it clear they would still be subject to whatever rules their store of choice has for refunds (for example, the PSN store only gives refunds if you haven't played or downloaded the game yet).
9. Offering digital refunds again after actually talking to Sony and Microsoft, and then getting delisted from the PlayStation store (XBox store still offers it).
10. GOG (a PC-game storefront wholly owned and operated by CDPR's parent company, CD Projekt) announcing that it would begin selling Devotion, the horror game by Taiwanese developer Red Candle Games that was banned on Steam shortly after its release early in 2019 thanks to CCP troll farms complaining about negative depictions of Xi Jinping a dev had snuck in, and then announcing the reversal of that decision literally hours later due to "gamer feedback" (aka more CCP troll farm complaints).

And I'm pretty sure the hits won't stop coming for CDPR in the near future.

But I find the game itself fairly fun and entertaining (when it's not crashing out on me). I'm a pretty big fan of cyberpunk as a genre, and have been really excited about this game since it was announced eight years ago. I didn't even know who CDPR were back then (I certainly hadn't played any of their games, including The Witcher III: The Wild Hunt), I just really wanted to play the official Cyberpunk video game (based on the TTRPG Cyberpunk 2020).

The character creation section has received a lot of press mostly because you get to choose your genitalia: there are four penis options (cut or uncut, big or small), and one vagina option (because I guess all vaginas are the same or something), and then something like eight pubic hair options (mostly color, but also an option for no pubic hair). It's an odd inclusion because, while potentially empowering, it's not used at all in the actual game. The sex scenes don't even feature full frontal nudity, so what is the point in choosing genitalia? Don't misread me here: I'm not asking for full frontal sex scenes in which one digital construct gives head to another digital construct. What I'm saying is what is the point? CDPR isn't actually making any statements about gender or sexuality beyond it exists (and can be overly sexualized), so it seems all it was really going for was sensationalism, which kind of fits the pattern, actually.

Also, why wouldn't a cyberpunk game let you change your appearance after the initial character creation section? Like, this genre is all about body modification, but I can't change my hair color, paint my nails a different pattern, or put in different contact lenses? My dude, I got brand new eyeballs in the first hour of the game, but I can't adjust the length of my facial hair?

Gameplay wise it's a fairly standard open-world RPG, only instead of swords and magic, you have guns and technology (and occasionally swords). The most interesting mechanic (alluded to above as causing seizures in some people) is the braindance: you get a "video" of an event recorded through the eyes of another person, and you get to live that event, including all the feelings and sensations that person had. The neat thing though, is that it isn't just the recording itself; there is also another level where you get to sort of hover outside of the person recording to see/hear things they may not have been consciously aware of. It's a mini detective game in someone else's memories, and it's pretty great.

The gunplay does what it's supposed to, and I like specing my V with specific perks and hacks. There's a crafting mechanic as well, but I haven't used it once because I usually just pick up better weapons and clothing from the various people I kill, so what's the point? About the clothes though: there needs to be some kind of cosmetic option these clothes. They all have stats, right, and some will give better defensive stats than others, but I had to run around in Daisy Duke shorts for a not insignificant amount of time because those were the best bottoms I had. I was so embarrassed for my V that he had to wear that simply because it somehow stopped more bullets than a full-on pair of pants. Let me change the appearance of my clothing, please.

Most of the missions I've been on have been pretty interesting, but my favorite so far is probably the Delamain sequence, in which an AI in charge of a taxi company has a couple of errant cabs do hit and runs, something they should not be doing as they are all under the direct control of the AI. It's a great set of missions, and I love the possible endings to it.

But, as excited as I was for this game, as much as I've been enjoying it, I've had to set it aside because it just keeps crashing out on me (it crashed twice on a three-hour stream, so that should give you a ballpark on how often this happens). I hope the next patch, which is supposed to come out sometime this week (EDIT: it came out on Saturday, when I published this), fixes that so I can keep playing without fear of getting thrown out of the game halfway through a long mission.

And that's everything for the month! I played a bunch of nice, new games that I mostly enjoyed a great deal. Next month will most likely have more Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Hollow Knight, Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, and Cyberpunk 2077 (in hopefully a better state), but will also definitely include some Marvel's Avengers (PS4) (the best Hawkeye is playable!), A Case of Distrust (Switch), Catherine: Full Body (PS4), Chronicles of Teddy: Harmony of Exidus (PS4), Cities: Skylines (PS4), and Coffee Talk (Switch), and maybe a surprise or two (on perhaps an entirely new console maybe???).

However, the next two Video Game Round-Ups you'll see will be my two end-of-year specials: Best Video Games of 2020 and Video Games I’m Most Excited About in 2021. Look for both of these in very late December/early January, and then the next regular Video Game Round-Up in the middle of January (hopefully, I can get back to the 15th).

Until next month, play more video games!