Christmas gaming and what's to come in 2020

Posted by Lana Meeren on January 10, 2020 in Concrete Genie, D&D, God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, Lost Mines of Phandelver, Luigis Mansion 3, Planet Zoo, PlayStation 4, Pokémon Sword and Shield, The Last Guardian, Witcher 3, Witcher Show, Xbox,

A late happy new year to all of you! I sincerely hope you all had a better start to this than I did. 2019 ended with me being sick almost all December long and I started 2020 in the same way.
Some of the time around Christmas I got to use for gaming, but it was less than I had hoped, naps took prevalence in getting healthy. 

I got to start playing Planet Zoo, which is a game I’ve been near religiously watching Let’s Plays and streams of ever since it launched into open Beta. The game is lovely although still flawed and while I definitely will sink some more hours into it before I review it, it was definitely the video game I enjoyed most over the holidays.
Additionally, to that, I played some Luigi’s Mansion 3, which I got as a present for Christmas. I like the game so far but I’m only about an hour or so in, so I don’t feel like I can really say anything about the quality and enjoyment the game brings me.

Never before packed so many nerdy things for a family holiday

Travelling to my family, I brought along some games and lots of dice and a few games. I gifted my mum “God of War” and helped her get into it and lend her “Concrete Genie” because I knew she’d love the art style as well. We wanted to try “The Last Guardian” as well but it seems that might have to wait until next Christmas.
The reason for less video game time was that we also played some Dungeons and Dragons with my family, which was great fun. It was the first TTRPG for my mum and the first time my partner got to experience D&D in a group not being the DM. I ran the group through the “Lost Mines of Phandelver” adventure and it was absolutely great and fun. There’s already plans to continue the adventure on the next family holiday.
Dungeons and Dragons is a relatively new passion in my life, and I plan to blog more about that as well after all the dice is part of the name of the blog. I have a rough draft of how I came to play and love the franchise, and I hope to finish that in the coming days.

As another family activity over the holidays we watched the Witcher show (which is awesome) and it was a lot of fun, I haven’t played 3 yet, but it’s snug on my PlayStation and its time will come. My dad played the first two games and I used to be glued to screen next to him, while I didn’t technically play them myself, I definitely “experienced” them. From what I gather my mum is excited to play at least Witcher3 as well.

One of the good things about being sick in December is that it’s the month of endless “Best XY of the year” videos and, since it was the end of the decade the amount seemingly doubled. So, while I was indeed in bed most of the time I at least wasn’t missing out on entertainment even when I didn’t feel like reading or gaming.

For a while I ruminated if I should do a similarly themed blog post as well, but it proved hard for multiple reasons. The most relevant reason is that I spent most of the 2010s too poor to do lots of gaming. I’m still catching up on the entire life cycle of the PS4 and the only PS3 game I ever got to play was Assassins Creed 3 literally years ago. The only consistent gaming I had access to was DS and later 3DS games for most of the decade. I played some stuff on PC, but my laptop used to be slow as hell. It ran Skyrim though, which was nice. So, my gaming life really took up in the middle of 2018 again when I got a Switch. That kind of proved to be a catalyst for me missing my old hobby a lot and saving up for a PS4 which I bought around Easter last year. It was an awesome purchase which I’m still super happy about, especially since it led to my mum finally finding her way into gaming as well. My parents were kind enough to also provide me with a new Laptop for Christmas (well I paid half but I still couldn’t have made that leap without them) so now the Sims4 starts in 2 minutes, instead of the 26 minutes it used to take. Meaning I have 3 up to date systems to run games on and nothing but real life can stop me.

However, I have lots of great stuff from the last decade still to explore. Making a “games of the decade” list would have felt wrong since I missed so many titles and my selection is so limited. A game of the year would also be difficult because I played a lot of great games last year that released in other years and I loved many of them very much. Horizon Zero Dawn, God of War and Assassins Creed Odyssey would all have competed in the same year and to be very honest I cannot decide which of those I loved more, they were all incredible experiences.

Instead I hope I can give them all the time and effort they deserve in coming blog posts. I will blog about games that are older than a year and a half in a category I plan to dub “late to the party” (or something similar I’m not sold on the title yet).
There are already 3 pages of notes and rambles that I wrote down for Horizon Zero Dawn so I hope I can turn this into a coherent post soon.

One kind of a resolution I made to myself was to clean up my backlog of games, so I can feel less guilty about it. It’s probably as common a resolution with gamers as doing more sports and eating healthier is with all people, nevertheless, I want to try at least. I downloaded some of the games on Steam and I’ll try and only get a new game for every two I finish. Let’s see if I can keep to that.

Meanwhile new stuff will come out, there are several games I’m super excited about this year and I can’t wait for more to be announced. There’s “The Last of us 2” and the new Animal Crossing. My partner is positively bursting with excitement for the first part of the Final Fantasy remake and I can’t wait to play it with them.

Pokémon is also releasing a DLC for the first time in the franchise’s history and I’m very excited how it will turn out. Currently, opinions in forums and other online places are clashing again, but I don’t feel like judging this new thing without seeing it first.
The important part to me is that the DLC is not necessary to get all the newly added Pokémon, although it might be a bit harder to do it by trade.
I have a lot of hopes and feelings about the whole topic, but I think I’ll wait until the Pokémon Home direct is done until I gather them all in a full post, since that service will very much determine my opinion on some things, like Pokémon accessibility and fair pricing.

I probably won’t be able to play all these games on time and right to release, which would be the relevant time to blog about them traffic-wise, but that’s not my goal anyway. This blog is supposed to be a fun side project for me to write about my favourite hobby. I’m also trying to finish university right and now and am working on the side to keep eating, so my gaming time is naturally limited. My goal is to blog weekly, I’ll do my best to uphold that.
I know I’ll probably get Animal Crossing on release and might play the Pokémon DLC pretty soon after release. My partner probably also wants Final Fantasy early so those games will hopefully get their blog posts in a not too long after.

With all that said, I think 2020 will turn out to be an awesome year for gaming. There are a few very big releases coming our way and the year will end with a bang when the new PlayStation 5 and Xbox release for the holidays. One thing is for sure, I won’t run out of things to blog about.