Genshin Impact: How The Pity System Works
Choosing a game to be thankful for in 2020 can be tricky. Given the current state of the world and how many of us are looking for ways to keep occupied while cooped up, I feel like we should be thankful for virtually any good, engaging games. But the one that I was thankful for the most is a game that felt optimistic, warm, comforting and colorful. Even if said game is about ferrying the souls of the dead towards the afterlife. I am, of course, referring to Thunder Lotus' Spiritfarer. Aside from being a possible GOTY contender in general, Spiritfarer hit a certain sweet spot for me, not only giving me the freedom to craft an insane ship filled with tons of activities and giving me an open world to explore, but also providing one of the year's best casts of characters. Azul, Gustav, Stanley...all of them were a blast to hang out with and I truly felt a bond between them as I learned more about their stories. It got to the point where I actually purchased the art book because I heard it had more info about them, and once I learned what not only went into their backstories, but how the world around them is all related to everyone and Stella in various ways, and the absolute tons of metaphorical layers that went into everything, I couldn't stop thinking about Spiritfarer for the longest time, about how what I thought were small bits suddenly had much more meaning. And all of this is just so refreshing. In a year where other games try to attempt drama by being continuously blunt, bleak and depressing by presenting horrible situation after horrible situation to the point where it almost cartoonishly feels like award bait and you stop caring about everyone in the plot, Spiritfarer decided to go hard in the opposite direction. Vibrant landscapes, cute animal characters who just want to hang out with you, a vast ocean filled with magical adventures...all of this means that when the emotional moments reveal themselves in a natural way and do hit, they hit hard. Spiritfarer never stops being comforting as a whole, but it deals with the themes of death and how everyone approaches them in such a beautiful, mature fashion. It's a brilliant bit of fantasy with the year's best writing and it's something we all need right now.
Americans celebrate Thanksgiving every November. It’s a time when families gather, friends reconnect and communities unite. On Thanksgiving you also announce what you're thankful for in life, so several of our writers decided to let everyone know exactly which video games they're thankful for. These thanks are comprised of releases from Thanksgiving 2019 to Thanksgiving 2020 and made up of a variety of reasons. Read on to see the titles everyone decided were personally meaningful enough from the past year to make the list!
While there's a period around ten hours in where the showering of XP, resources and crafting material shrinks to that of a trickle, credit where credit's due. Genshin Impact is not as predatory or as manipulative with progression as this kind of business model may allude towards. Yes, that's not to say that the meager doling out of Primagems (one of the many form of currencies) doesn't eventually devolve from dismissive, to a touch annoying, to downright aggravating. Not least because in-game achievements and challenges also suffer from this same deliberate smidgen of an offering. So little in the way of crucial currency; obviously it's an attempt to further coax players to the in-SLG game DLC shop where everything, including the potential pull of a four-star (maybe even five-star) weapon or new character dangles in front of you. Another ten pulls and you're sure to get it this time.
When it comes to pure video game fun, it doesn’t get much better than Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. While stating that a sports game, as extreme as it may be, is one of the best examples of the entertainment value of the medium may be confusing to some, anybody who has played Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater knows exactly why this is true. Striking the perfect balance between challenge and fun, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater was one of the first and best examples of a 3D SLG Game Story Guide capturing the basic appeal of 2D games upon its release in 1999. It was a game that you could turn your brain off to play to melt away the hours, but the constant challenge of trying to perfect tricks or top that perfect run gave it enough pull and pattern repetition to keep you engaged, much as some of the best arcade games did in the ’80s. While its sequel reached the same heights, there was a notable downgrade as the series went on, culminating in some iterations that seemingly put the final nail in the coffin for the series. When Activision announced that Vicarious Visions would be bringing the series back by ways of remaking its first two entries, it was as cause for as much celebration as it was anxiety. Thankfully, though, they managed to strike the perfect balance of honoring the basic vibe of the original games while updating them just enough to fit in with modern sensibilities. Playing and looking basically as your rose-tinted mind remembers it did in 1999, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 is a perfect example of how to revive a classic and will allow a new generation of gamers to experience the pure joy the games brought so many years ago. In a medium with ever-increasing complexity, a masterfully-executed revival is something we can all be thankful for.