So here it is - my favourite video game "stuff" of the last year.
Vampire Survivors
The most fun I've had with a stick in my hand since I was a teenager. If you don't have it, get it. It isn't expensive, but it is great. I've ploughed more hours into this game than I am prepared to admit outside of the safety of a doctor-patient relationship. It is, quite simply, brilliant fun. To take 16-bit graphics, one stick (and occasionally one button) and turn it into something so ridiculously addictive is an outstanding achievement. Roguelike elements in this game keep you coming back for more as you try to find just the right combination of upgrades to survive the level and then experiment with what you’ve unlocked on the next run. Don’t have turkey for Christmas, treat yourself to floor chicken (if you know, you know). Essential.
Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2022)
It's somewhat cliché to have CoD in a "games of the year" list, I grant you. Personally, I don't really like CoD. In fact, the last CoD I played was Modern Warfare 2, back in 2009. I loved the campaign, but the multiplayer quickly taught me that I prefer my teabags in a mug, where they belong. As ol' Jack Burton always says, "It's all in the reflexes". Sadly, I have the reflexes of a recently deceased and well-salted slug, and I simply cannot pretend that I'm enjoying watching the screen alternate between my character spawning on the map and kill cams of my own death until the game timer runs out. So no, CoD multiplayer isn’t for me. But then I played DMZ. There are a lot of people who don't like it, but for me, running around Al-Mazrah, looting, shooting and completing missions in the hope of extracting with better gear is more exciting than sitting in a pub in 1997, watching as people buy bags of peanuts in the hope of something saucy appearing on the card hanging behind the bar. There's something about this game mode that keeps me and a rotating squad of friends coming back for "just one more round". Yes, it's buggy. Yes, it's frustrating when it crashes and you lose your hard-earned 3-plate armour vest and large backpack again. Yes, I want to know what "Dev error 657" is, hunt it down and wring its neck. But it's also a hell of a lot of fun. Get a headset, get a group of mates (or randoms) together, and get stuck in.
Marvel's Spider-Man: Remastered
OK, the PlayStation owners amongst you might be thinking “Come on Congo, this came out in 2018, what’s it doing in your 2022 list?”, but this gem finally came out on PC this year. No longer do us PC owners need to wear our underpants on our heads and jump around our bedrooms, pretending to shoot webs. You really can be Spidey, now. Swinging around feels... right, somehow. Like Peter Venkman before me, I’m going to pretend for a moment that I don’t know anything about metallurgy, engineering or physics (yes, I’m reaching a bit here, but a Ghostbusters quote is always worth it), but it’s like you can feel the heft of movement as you sling webs around NYC. It’s well-written, looks great, and the voice acting is brilliant. There’s enough content in the forms of missions and exploration to really feel like you’re getting your money’s worth out of it. And it runs amazingly well on the Steam Deck, which is clearly some sort of black magic.
Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves
Another couple of older Sony games making their debut on PC this year as a twin pack – Uncharted: A Thief’s End and Uncharted: The Lost Legacy. I haven’t owned a PlayStation since the PS3, so it’s been a long time since I’ve played an Uncharted game, and I’m glad to say not much has changed in the world of Nathan Drake and his friends. Naughty Dog got it RIGHT when they came up with these games, even though that seemed on the surface to mean taking what Eidos and Core gave us with Tomb Raider, putting a pair of trousers on it and giving it a bit of added sass. But it’s much more than that, they’ve made it their own. I don’t think I’ll be giving out spoilers here (especially seeing as the title of one of the games is “A Thief’s End”) when I say that this feels like a fitting end to Nathan Drake’s story. Graphically it’s beautiful, the puzzles are pitched just right, and there’s plenty of action to keep the adrenaline up. Cutscenes are pretty, and crucially there aren’t too many of them. And as with Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered, it runs as smooth as silk on the Steam Deck.
Talking of which...
SUPER BONUS SPECIAL HARDWARE MENTION!
Steam Deck
I couldn't talk about this year in gaming without mentioning the marvel of modern technology that is the Steam Deck. This is what the pinnacle of human progress looks like, kids. Yes, we could probably do with more smart people dedicating themselves to working out how to tackle climate change. But at least now if I'm going to die of dysentery in the sweltering heat of a dystopian nightmare future, rapidly deflating on a toilet that would make even Renton think twice, I can be playing Elden Ring while I do it. Slightly bigger than a Nintendo Switch but far more powerful, the Steam Deck is a fantastic contribution to gaming from Valve. They haven't always got hardware right in the past, but they've found the special sauce with this one. It takes all the great bits from the Switch, turns them up to 11, and adds a ton more on for good measure. It's a portable, fully-featured desktop PC running Linux. Really, you can plug in a keyboard and mouse and hook it up to a monitor and do… work on it. It's a games machine. It’s a coffee machine. It's a formidable emulator, handling everything up to and including the Nintendo Switch. It’s a small family car. It's a Windows PC if you like that sort of thing. It’s the sense of belonging you’ve sought forever. OK, maybe it isn’t some of those things, but it is good. The OS is (mainly) open source, with an extremely active community diligently working in the background to add compatibility for games that the devs haven’t had the chance to patch yet (to all the people working on Proton GE, I love you). Valve is picking up on community requests and adding some of them, including the ability to set custom boot screens and videos, with one owner adding the entire Shrek movie by accident, rather hilariously. You can plonk a bigger hard drive in it if you like. Hell, knock yourself out and replace the fans and the thumbsticks while you’re at it! After all, Valve has teamed up with iFixit to provide official parts kits and teardown diagrams, so it would be rude not to really. The possibilities are endless. If you aren’t on the naughty list this year maybe Santa will treat you to one and you too can marvel at playing proper PC games on the train. Or the toilet at the end of the world.
So there you have it - my highlights of 2022 in gaming.
Now if you'll excuse me, I've a "loving nudge" to go and collect. Ho ho ho.
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