Title: 12-in-12, 2021 Edition Created: 2021-01-08 Edited: 2022-01-24 Author: zlg Welcome to ZLG's quest to beat twelve games in 2021! My backlog has exploded to over 100 games, so it's time to burn through it! This page will be "live" in the sense that it will be updated throughout the year, and later archived in the "Video Games" article category when the next year approaches. --history lesson-- 12 in 12 was started as a Reddit community [1] dedicated to helping people get through the list of games they want to beat: a backlog. It was started in 2018, and I discovered it shortly after it was created, participating on my own ever since. It's a good initiative for people to motivate and encourage each other to play through and enjoy their games more. --/history lesson-- Some people choose 12 games to beat and try to stick to it, while people like me just try to focus on beating games *at all* and, if you hit 12, awesome! If not, that's fine, too. It's about putting in time to play and enjoying what you paid for. With that out of the way in my maiden post on the subject... Here's the successful hit list for this year: * Painkiller: Hell & Damnation [Steam] * Super Hexagon [Steam] * Koi-Koi Japan [Steam] * The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD [WiiU] * Unravel TWO [Switch] * Minecraft [Switch] * Mighty Gunvolt Burst [Switch] * Final Fantasy 4: The After Years [Wii] * Strikey Sisters [Switch] * Golf Peaks [Switch] * Hatsune Miku: Project Diva MegaMix [Switch] * Metroid Dread [Switch] * Risk of Rain 2 [Switch] * Street Fighter [ARC] * Street Fighter II [ARC] * Hammerwatch [Switch] For a whopping SIXTEEN games beaten in 2021! - - - JANUARY ======= My chosen game was *The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD* [WiiU]. Unfortunately, I did not beat it. Maybe I'll catch it in a month where I beat a game easily. FEBRUARY ======== No game was chosen, but I ended up beating *Painkiller: Hell & Damnation*! It's a game that a friend and I had gotten in a Humble Bundle once upon a time. It has pretty wicked art and music direction, and pretty good shooting mechanics. You tend to get caught on the geometry really easily, though, so it's not mechanically refined enough to get me to come back. It was a decent romp, but not something that'll be staying on the hard drive. Still good for the price I paid. MARCH ===== I realized I had beaten *Super Hexagon* already, and had the hyper levels unlocked. Nice. I defeated every contestant in *Koi-Koi Japan*'s Postcard mode, marking it as beaten! I'm beginning to get a more intuitive feel for hanafuda now, though it's still easy for me to mix up the flower species. Koi-Koi is fun! -- I forget this file exists -- AUGUST ====== *The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD* [WiiU] is finally beaten! I went through the whole damn game without the red sail, though, because after I got the piece of heart from the night-time auction, I thought that was it for the rewards. Whoops. SEPTEMBER ========= This month, I left a job that was killing me slowly with stress and switched to part time for a while. It was much needed rest. My girlfriend and I played through *Unravel TWO*, a cute co-op game about two yarn people and their search to relight a lighthouse. It follows the story of two children and their escape from various dangerous situations, but it's told visually. It was a decent game, but I ended up carrying us (players can merge) in the last level. OCTOBER ======= I had first played this on PC, back in 2011, but I picked up *Minecraft* [Switch] back in February and played it off and on. By June, I wanted to actually *beat the game*, so I set out to learn how to get to The End. The game is so much different today compared to what it used to be. I really wish they'd finish up development, but it doesn't look to be stopping yet. Only a few days later, I finished up *Mighty Gunvolt Burst* [Switch]! I was literally two levels away from the end of the game when I left off back in 2017 or whenever it was... The mother lode happened this month too: *Final Fantasy 4: The After Years* [Wii] could be considered the "dark horse" of my backlog; it sat unbeaten for 12 years! It was such a pain to finish that I wrote about it. [2] Next up is *Strikey Sisters* [Switch], a cheesy Breakout clone with magic, enemies, and bosses. It even has co-op! My girlfriend tried it but didn't care for it. It was surprisingly shorter than I anticipated, but it seems about the right length for a Breakout clone. If they make a sequel, I'd like to see the voice acting toned down and some more control options, like dashes, shield/parry buttons, or being able to move forward and backwards. Still, a fun distraction! At the end of the month, I pulled *Golf Peaks* [Switch] out of my butt. It's a cute puzzle game about getting a golf ball into a hole. The catch? You have a limited number of moves that tell you how the ball will move, and you need to use the correct combination to complete the level. It feels pretty Zen. -- I remember this file exists and fill in the details. -- NOVEMBER ======== I've spent a little less time on games this month so far, but I managed to finish playing through all the songs in *Hatsune Miku: Project Diva MegaMix* [Switch]! It's hard to pin down when you've really "beaten" a rhythm game, so I set the goal of unlocking and completing every song. Seems legit. I cleaned out the CPU heatsink on my desktop machine, and now temps are safe enough to game with, so I can catch up on some games while I wait on hardware prices to lower. :) I beat *Metroid Dread* [Switch] in the middle of the month. It was a fantastic experience, and I look forward to clearing Hard Mode and learning how to speedrun it. Next up is *Risk of Rain 2* [Switch], which I cleared with a friend, but ended up carrying at the end. Hopoo Games really outdid themselves in the jump to 3-D, but part of me feels like the resources provided by Gearbox were a big part of its success. Regardless, RoR2 has gotten a spot among my favorite third person shooters ever, and I'm nowhere near done with it! Toward the end of the month, I was able to play some *Diablo II: Resurrected* [Bnet] and finished it, but I beat the original as well, so it doesn't really count. :P At the end of the month, I gnashed my teeth through *Street Fighter* [ARC]. I must say that the mechanic of not performing a special move until the button is released is one of the clunkiest and least fun control schemes I've ever had to deal with. The utterly unfair AI that can kill you in 3 hits is also problematic. The fact that it was popular enough to get sequels is surprising, because plenty of other games from that time were playable *AND* fun. *Street Fighter II* [ARC] was much closer to what we know as traditional fighters. However, some characters like Vega have way too many abilities compared to the rest of the cast, and M. Bison himself has crazy hitboxes. I played as Ryu, and he feels like playing Mario or Pichu in Smash Bros. Just... incredibly small hitboxes. I ended up playing footsies to get in, but there wasn't much to punish with. In beating these games, I'm realizing that I don't like fighting games as a genre. Even with rather simple inputs, the game's difficulty comes from consistency in executing your moves and imbalanced fighters or movesets; NOT from genuinely good AI or strong mechanics. Movement and defensive options suck. Throws are inconsistent to execute, and the SF 30th Anniversary version doesn't show OR tell you how to do a throw. This leads the player to getting bodied repeatedly, until they take advantage of spacing and use their longest move to get in, and MAYBE pull off a nice combo. I plan to beat 3rd Strike and the Alphas, too, but so far this series makes me glad I got into fighting games with Smash Bros and Soul Calibur. In both of those games, you have actual movement options, actual defensive options, and a clear system of what beats what. It's a shame the cool characters of Street Fighter are limited to such a clunky genre... DECEMBER ======== It turns out I was most of the way done with *Hammerwatch* [Switch], though I got the bad ending because I didn't have all of the bridge planks! Oops. A bad ending is still an ending! It was fun and I look forward to trying the other characters and modes. Hammerwatch was the last game beaten for 2021! See you in 2022! [1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/12in12/ [2]: gopher://zlg.space/0/articles/Video Games/twelve-years-of-after-years.txt