letshugbro's Old Game of the Year Awards For Old Games I Had Played Before 2021, 2021
(Non-2021 games I played in 2021 but did not play for the first time in 2021)
9 Games
Understands that the true Dark World is adulthood and that Time will mold us all into adults, whether we want it to or not. Collect your spiritual stones if you want some illusion of choice, but the adults in charge are pulling up the strings of your playpen. Seven years will pass and the apocalypse will arrive with droughts and flames and frozen wastes, the leaders and heroes of youth rendered useless against the unstoppable forces of evil. Masterpiece. You had to be there. Each playthrough allows you to see your past gaming selves as Young Link; you now naively see yourself as the more capable and wise Adult Link who is too embarrassed to use the boomerang. A Nintendo game that forces you to grapple with mortality and innocence and the cycle of fathers and sons in ways that grim Atlus JRPGs about demons could only dream of. Godlike!!! Majora's Mask stans will talk about their little stories that they write down in their little bomberman notebook or whatever, but it was all in here too - you just didn't have a checklist or trinkets to reward you for engaging with the material. Gameplay is still rock solid (on Nintendo's first try!!), but you come to this thing for mood, atmosphere, text, subtext. OCARINA OF TIME BABY
I ended up beating the main game again with two of the new characters and got halfway through Mania+ difficulty, which I think becomes borderline impossible against certain enemy types (jumping girls, kisama....) but it's a testament to this game's Fun Factor that I was getting my ass wiped within two minutes of starting each stage and still came back for more
Eclipsed only by its French step-son in terms of beat em up quality
4
About 75% of the ideas for THATCHER'S TECHBASE came out of a single session of this game I had with my bros at the start of 2021. kingbancho's review of this game nailed it to a tee, just an ultimate bygone hangout.
Was a total white whale and white knuckle moment to finally beat this thing (with liberal save-stating) - was it worth it? The grey, torn hairs on my temple say no
TOO FUCKING HARD
The opening hours here where Banjo and Kazooie matter-of-factly call out the fact that they're in a tired mascot platformer sequel and mock their best friend's wife for being thick are genuinely shocking and engaging and interesting and then the game dumps you into some insanely needlessly huge overworlds and asks you to find 100 reddy-brekkies or whatever and your will to continue exploring this thing as art over product dissolve into the Rare Replay homescreen and you go back to fucking up bugs in Jetpac
More offensively British than Banjo-Tooie, somehow. Wasn’t made by British people!
7 Comments
Stealing this as well, only game i've played from 2021 was Cruelty Squad. Coop games have been living rent free in my head this year
I ended up doing two lists for non-2021ers - new non-2021 plays (https://www.backloggd.com/u/letshugbro/list/letshugbros-old-game-of-the-year-awards-2021/) and old non-2021 plays (this one)
love what you said about oot here (smt slander aside!!). 15-ish years ago, at least among the insertcredit and selectbutton forum circles (also by extension actionbutton), there was a lot of unfavorable sentiment toward the game: it was considered this awkward, ugly, childish, outmoded thing, utterly eclipsed by games like shadow of the colossus. or maybe it was just me. while i had loved the game in 1998, for a period of the '00s i blinded myself to ocarina's enduring brilliance. i mean, i don't think it was just me: the evocative 'minimalist zelda' of sotc was thrilling and i felt like this represented a powerful new artistic direction for video games. it was clear that this was kinda the zeitgeist. nintendo seemed to be fumbling and groping for new ideas for zelda... and, frankly, fantastic as botw is it owes much to their observation of what has made other fantasy sword and board adventures successful (creatively and critically). anyhow, i think it makes sense that ocarina was put through a period of skeptical reavaluation only for it later—pretty recently, in my view—to find itself back in the good graces of weirdos who think about video games like we do. a period of growing pains. and i'd honestly say that the game even means more to me now than it did in '98.
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ocarina’s greatest strength is that it is a game about the passage of time and what it’s like to grow older, so naturally it will only grow more more powerful with time as the people - especially to people who experienced it many years ago - play it again and again and fill it with the power of memory
my mind often snaps into the lazy thought of it being overrated, but jesus H. did this make me want to play Ocarina again
iyellatcloud
2 years ago