Year In Review - 2018 - Video Games

Despite this being a site centered around the discussion of film, I wanted to take a post to talk about the last year in games as next to film I probably spend even more time playing video games.

2018 was a huge year in gaming for me, between September and just last week four of my most anticipated games in recent memory came out in quick succession of on another and I finally purchased my first VR headset with PSVR. Before I talk about that Ill quickly discuss some games from earlier on in the year that stuck with me.

The start of the year most of my time would have been spent on my Nintendo Switch which I had recently got at the time, me and my girlfriend made our way through L.A Noire which she had never played before but I had played years ago. I found that it doesn't really work on a second play-through as all the mystery is obviously gone, and the game play loop isn't enjoyable enough to keep me invested for the massive 30 hour + run-time. My most played game on the switch ended up being the amazing

Stardew Valley , which I had already played for a decent chunk of time on my PS4, but the switch made sure that it took over my life for a good couple of months.

Just quickly I will list some other note worthy games I got the chance to play this year before focusing on the main ones; Shadow Of The Colossus, A Way Out, Far Cry 5, God Of War, Life Is Strange, Persona 5.

Now onto VR. I was always looking for the right moment to jump into VR, and around the time I started looking into deals for the PSVR my cousin sold me his unit that he had no use of anymore. I tried it out before I bought it off him and after about 2 minutes of using it I was instantly sold. The first time you experience VR is, and I know it sounds cliche, mind-blowing. I don't want to spend to much time on every single VR game I played as I bought way to many games for the system that are just not worth talking about. My issue I found was that I kept buying games for the VR simply cause I was so hooked on the experience of it that I was willing to just try everything. Many of the games available for the PSVR are games you will play for maybe an hour or two but then you will just resort back to playing Kingdom Hearts 2 HD for the 5th time. So I was looking for a game that I would really get invested in. So of course I bought Skyrim for the 6th time.

Now, Skyrim for VR is great. What is not great is the fact that I am beyond terrified of the spiders in Skyrim. So I am not joking when I say that I had to stop playing the game as facing a frost spider in vr is the worst thing I have ever done in my life. Firewall: Zero Hour is a fantastic exclusive for PSVR but I was simply too bad at it to keep going. Thankfully, November runs round and Beat Saber is released for PSVR. Without a doubt, Beat Saber is the best game I have played on PSVR, well, almost is. The game-play of Beat Saber is so much fun that it is (at least on the PSVR) to the fault of the game. The game has as of writing this 17 songs, which is a decent amount to choose from, however the PC version has almost an unlimited amount of songs thanks to modding. So sadly I found myself getting sick of the music in the base game very quickly. The fantastic developers at beat games are working on the first of many DLC packs for the game, but this was due out the start of January and it looks like it is still a far way off. But honestly, the best game I found for PSVR was the completely free Rec Room.

Rec Room at first looks like a game that was riding off of the success of VR Chat (Ugandan Knuckles game) but the game is really a social hub that hosts a collection of smaller mini games. Even calling them mini games feels like an insult but in reality some of the games that you can play in Rec Room are better than some of the full price versions on the store. The social aspect of Rec Room is the true highlight, I found myself making friends with a few people from all over the world and standing in my room for hours playing virtual charades with these people in hysterics. It really made me hope for my close friends in the real world to jump on the VR train just so we could play this game together.

I will probably write about VR again in the future as I covered probably less than half of the games that I played for the unit this last year so watch this space.

I mentioned at the start of this post about four games that came out in the last few months than were some of my most anticipated games in years, so I will try not ramble about them and focus on them in more detail in another post one day. Spider-man, Red Dead Redemption 2, Spyro Reignited Trilogy and Kingdom Hearts 3 (was 2019 I know), are all fantastic games and could not be anymore different. I don't even know how many times In my life I would say to someone how "I wish they made a game as good as Spider-man 2." or, "They better remake Spyro one day.", and here we are. I think I hyped these two games in particular to a point that no game could ever match but thankfully I ended up loving both of these titles. I managed to avoid most of the hype for the other two games, even despite in the case of Kingdom Hearts 3 I had literally waited 12 years for it to be a reality.

I might start writing more reviews for video-games as proven by this blog I can sure ramble for a while about them, right now I am about halfway into Kingdom Hearts 3 so I may start with that. Looking towards 2019, I just cannot imagine it being even nearly as big for games as this year was, but here is hoping I am proven very wrong.

Just realized, I also played Undertale this year which is now one of my all time favorite games.