Well, it’s that time of year again. The earth has travelled another 584 million miles or so, people are making all kinds of resolutions about how they’ll be different now that a number has changed, and we’re all looking back at the year just ended. Somehow COVID is still kicking around, although at least here in the UK things are a bit more open than they were, people still can’t get hold of the Playstation 5 or high-end graphics cards, and it seems like the world has gone daft for NFTs (including some game developers looking to get in on the action - please don’t).

Here’s my annual rundown of the games I’ve enjoyed playing in 2021 and the ones I’m looking forward to trying soon.

UPDATE 2022-01-12: So it seems AWS backtracked on this slightly, having changed to simply preventing the creation of new or changing of existing ds2 clusters post 2021-12-31. Users on ds2 already can continue to use them, but are advised to switch the dc2 or ra3.

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Back at the start of 2019 the world was a simpler place. COVID-19 wasn’t a thing, Bungie and Activision got a divorce, and every major game publisher was looking for their own Destiny-killer. EA’s take on the online persistent world live service looter shooter genre was the eagerly anticipated Anthem, the new game from Mass Effect developers Bioware. Despite plans for multiple years of story and content, Anthem famously bombed and within a few short months there were talks of gutting the game and starting again with a massive update. Bioware recently announced the overhaul was cancelled, so I thought I would jump back in for the first time since those early days so full of promise, before EA pull the plug on the servers.

I joined my first Twitter Spaces uh….hangout…chat…thing…space(?) the other night, hosted by Stefan Natter, talking about Roam Research and how powerful a tool it is for unlocking all sorts of potential, and helping focus and creativity. One comment made by George Silverman of MindSkills echoed some thoughts of my own lately, about the sheer volume of information to which we’re exposed on a daily basis, and the mental capacity of our brains to process this.

Just a quick note to say that I’ve recently rebuilt the site, moving away from Wordpress to the static site generator Hugo. There are various reasons for this (cost, maintenance, security), and I’ll follow up with another post detailing the migration as there were a few challenges along the way that caught me out. Others might benefit from my experience.

There’s a long-running belief in both the video game and movie industries, which is that films based on games (and usually vice versa) just don’t work. Yet many video games are extremely deep, story-driven experiences with a wealth of material from which to draw inspiration. So where does it keep going wrong?

So, 2020 is over. What a weird year. The COVID-19 pandemic has ravaged the globe, impacting everyone in different ways. While some claim it’s a hoax, others have cut off all human contact. Personally, I’ve been in a fortunate position and it’s not been too bad, and I’ve managed to keep playing games, including taking in some good new titles and the launch of the new console generation. It seems like lately the only posts I actually get round to are these “best of” ones! As with previous years, these are only titles I’ve personally played, and only covers Xbox, with a couple of non-demanding PC games thrown in for good measure. Also, personal opinion only of course, happy to hear what others have enjoyed via the comments below.

A couple of weeks ago TrueAchievements published #MyDecadeOnXbox, a nice infographic for each user detailing the highlights of their achievements over the last ten years. This prompted a massive surge in registrations for the site as people scrambled to get their own infographic from TA. And honestly, who doesn’t love an infographic? In this post I (once again) take a quick walk down memory lane and pull out some personal highlights from my own summary.