Let’s be real; in a lot of ways, this is my real Video Game of the year list for 2021. Between my feeling that 2021 has been something of a dry year for major Video Game releases, combined with the fact that I’ve had limited time, money and access to the new platforms with which to play these new video games.
Thus, I’ve had a lot more enjoyment in playing older games in 2021. Both old favourites and games I never ground around to till this year.
For the past few years, I feel like I’ve been bending my personal rules for what qualifies for my Top Ten lists at the end of the year. Over the course of the past few months, I felt like this was going to be the year where I just went ahead and broke the rule entirely, simply listing the ten games I had the most fun with of the course of the preceding 12 months. Regardless of when they came out.
In the end though, I didn’t want to lose sight of the original purpose of my top ten “Best of Year” list and decided to split the lists into two and talk about both of them. It’s only fair considering there are 4 games on this list that would defiantly make their way onto the main list given the opportunity.
Rather than write about these games once per day, I’m going to break them into chunks and then dedicate more time to the games I feel I need to. So let’s continue:
Old Game #2: Spider-Man: Miles Morales
Played on PlayStation 5 | Released November 2020 | Developed by Insomniac Games
This is yet another reason I felt the need to break this list away into it’s own separate bracket. Because there’s no way I could have made a Top Ten list for 2021 and not included this on it; one of the games I had the most fun with in the past 12 months.
Which is wild really considering how much shorter this one is than the previous Spider-Man game from Insomniac. But it builds on what that game did amazingly and gives us fantastic midquel starring the fan favourite Miles Morales.
So yeah, when I was talking about getting a PS5 and playing Astro’s Playroom a few days ago, you could have probably guessed that this was the other game I was talking about. I’ve always been a giant Spider-Man nerd since I was a kid, and despite all the weird faction arguing that’s going around at the moment comparing the Tobey Maguire movies to the new MCU ones, I am just sitting here enjoying all the Spider-Man we are getting.
Set shortly after the original game, Miles Morales takes place at Christmas time, which makes the fact that I played this in the middle of Summer even funnier. But what really got me going about this game is that it told a very different type of Spider-Man story.
Now, I love Peter Parker, don’t get me wrong. But I feel like I’ve seen pretty much every iteration of that character told already. It’s pretty difficult to tell a story in the longer form format that video game require without at least treading on some toes told from other games or movies or cartoons I’ve seen before.
The cool thing about Miles is that he’s a whole new character, with a new family and a totally different situation that affords for a new kind of story to be told about Spider-Man. And I was all there for it. It’s pretty cool that he’s got a few extra powers to play with compared to peter as well. Seriously, going back to that first game and not having Stealth to bail myself out when I messed up was killing me.
If I did have a criticism of the game, it would be that I felt that the ending and resolution to the story with Miles’s friend and the Tinkerer felt a little clumsy and rushed to me. One of those, brush it under the rug solutions that kind of absolves Miles of ever having to worry about them again in the future. Maybe it comes from the fact that this isn’t a full length game, even if everyone was charging a price for it like it was.
After I finished it was nowhere near satisfied and ended up going straight back to play the original again, although that didn’t end up lasting for as long as I thought it might.
One thing I do know is that I cannot wait for the follow-up from Insomniac. Even if it’s not going to come out for another year yet. Maybe we shouldn’t rush it though, there has been a hell of a lot of Spider-Man on everyone’s minds this past few months already. Regardless, I can’t wait to see a continuation of the story and how they’re going to handle having two protagonists to play as at the same time
A Richard Wood Text Adventure 