This Crappy Year: 2020 in Review

With a contagious disease costing people both their lives and their livelihoods, and people refusing to believe that said disease even exists, the best part of 2020 is that very little of it currently remains. Fortunately, gaming brought some good news to a year which could desperately use it. Here now are the highlights from the past twelve months.

JANUARY

The toughest game you'll ever love/loathe.

I learned both the pleasure and the pain of Dead Cells, a side-scrolling action title that's equal parts Castlevania, Dark Souls, and that time you foolishly accepted a dare to put your tongue on a frozen metal pole. Preservationists uncovered the rumored Super NES version of Coolly Skunk, which was eventually released for the Playstation with improved graphics and a slightly different title. Sadly, this thoroughly unremarkable mascot, unfit to shine Sonic's sneakers, remains unimpressive even by the humble standards of a 16-bit console, proving that a skunk by a different name still stinks.

FEBRUARY

We've known for years that the Game Boy Advance can play Doom, but some hackers proved that it could play the game better, touching up the graphics while adding features missing from Activision's official release. Speaking of things that are both portable and pointless, Hasbro's Tiger division brought back several of its dedicated handhelds from the early 1990s. They're exactly the same as you remember them despite twenty-five years of technological progress, but that hasn't stopped tinkerers armed with a Raspberry Pi from bridging the gap to the 21st century...

MARCH

Ken Shimura, one half of the comedy duo Kato-Chan and Ken-Chan which inspired our own America's Funniest Videos, was one of the early victims of COVID-19. This had impact on me as a gamer, as JJ and Jeff, the Americanized version of their video game, was one of the first titles I played on the Turbografx-16, and influenced my overall opinion of the console. Seriously, the bulk of the system's library were simple, colorful action titles originally based on some Japanese property. Remember the pack-in Keith Courage? That was really some kid's cartoon called Mashin Eiyuden Wataru, with the characters and storyline given a macho, US-friendly makeover.

Is that Doogie Howser?

I also went to bat for killer apps getting ported to other formats- it used to happen all the time, guys, don't blow a gasket over it- and complained at length about the Commodore Amiga using single button controllers for most of its games. Yes, that was thirty years ago. I'm still frustrated by it, because the Amiga was released in the same year as the NES and had advanced 16-bit features that lent themselves especially well to video games. Considering the direction the video game industry was moving- away from simple arcade challenges and toward complex adventures with a need for more input- Commodore should have known better. Nobody was going to want to play Mortal Kombat with an Atari joystick eight years later.

APRIL

I finally broke down and bought a Switch, a decision I'm still questioning months later. It's not that the system itself is bad; it's just that the Lite variant isn't well suited to many of its games, with a small screen that makes text difficult to read. I'll be complaining about this issue repeatedly in future posts.

My first game for the system was Hyper Sentinel, an offshoot of the Uridium series where you skim over the tops of massive battleships, steadily weakening their defenses with laser blasts. It was definitely not the reason I bought a Switch, but that fifteen cent price tag was impossible to resist.

Speaking of irresistible purchases, the price of the Neo-Geo Mini dropped to thirty dollars on Amazon, so you know I had to buy one of those. I'm sure it was a disappointment for one hundred and thirty dollars, but for a small fraction of the original price, its flaws become a lot easier to ignore.

MAY

Johnny Turbo's Arcade was a focal point for this month, with reviews of a half-dozen Data East games featured in one post. (I got a lot of flack of panning Bad Dudes, by the way, but I'm standing by that review... it wasn't great in 1988, and this paper-thin beat 'em up sucks even more thirty years later.) I also took a second look at the Neo-Geo Mini and picked five of my favorite games from the venerable Pac-Man series. (Venerable: it's more fun to use in a sentence than "old.")

JUNE

Chuck E. Cheese, the famous amusement center and unwitting inspiration for the Five Night's At Freddy's franchise, went bankrupt this month. I used to love this place when I was a kid, but the rat and I went our separate ways a long time ago, so I'm not too broken up over it. They could have had the decency not to buy out the more adult-focused Peter Piper Pizza and drag them down to Chapter 11 hell with them, though...

Take four, they're small.

I also found a cache of rare GameCube games at a bookstore in Sierra Vista, and first learned about the Game Gear Micro, a revival of Sega's handheld from the 1990s with a form factor best described as "Lilliputian." Seriously, this thing be tiny. It's also expensive, costing fifty dollars and containing just four games. It's a slightly better deal than the recently released Game and Watch with only three games, but at least that has a screen you can actually see with the naked eye.

JULY

Not much happened on Kiblitzing this month, with just four posts. One of them was a detailed comparison of all the Sega Genesis ports of Street Fighter II: Championship Edition, including the lackluster prototype by Opera House. ("Opera HOOOOOUSE!") Even if you weren't happy with the version Capcom ultimately released, you'd have to agree it's a good sight better than what Opera House had created for them.

Also, I started building an entertainment system out of a beater PC I bought for five dollars at a garage sale, and warned readers to check the batteries in their handheld systems. Turns out they don't last forever, and neither will your PSP if you leave a bad battery inside it.

AUGUST

The entertainment system I built in the previous month wasn't all that impressive at first, but it got better, thanks to the addition of a video card, an SSD drive, and a high performance CPU. Now it's my favorite way to play old arcade and console games, putting my Raspberry Pi into retirement. I'm sure I'll find some use for it eventually, if I can find it under all that dust...

In less pleasant news, it turns out that SNK has been making stealthy edits to its old Neo-Geo games, removing references to Taiwan to appease the Chinese government. This got me pretty hot under the collar, but it may not be a problem for long now that SNK is under new management...

SEPTEMBER

Okay, we're finally in the "ber" months! September marked the end of the 3DS line of handhelds. I have fond memories of this system, although a lot of that comes down to social features like Streetpass and Miiverse. It was way too much fun busting that stupid pink rabbit's chops in front of a live audience. (And oh yeah, some of the games were fun, too.)

Not having too much trouble keeping THESE
in stock, I see.

Nintendo pulled its usual artificial scarcity BS by limiting the production of Super Mario All-Stars 3D to just six months. Once March 2021 arrives, you won't be able to buy this collection in stores or on the eShop. The Game and Watch referenced earlier in this post was announced this month, but judging from personal experience, it doesn't look like anyone who wants it will have trouble finding one. That's if they want one... even hackers have had trouble finding uses for this machine beyond what Nintendo intended, thanks to limited onboard storage.

OCTOBER

Night in the Woods was everything I expected and just a little bit more, exploring the decay of middle America that the rest of the media seems content to ignore. Sony ended support for its legacy consoles, including the Playstation Vita, which is just one year older than the PS4, and Michael Pachter opened his big dumb yap again, suggesting that Nintendo put an end to the Switch's docking feature. You know, the defining trait of the system that makes the text in Switch games large enough to actually read. Alex Hutchinson also said something stupid, but it's very hard to say something more stupid than Michael Pachter... he's had years of practice.

NOVEMBER

A prototype of the deeply flawed Sega Nomad was revealed by Sega, looking a bit like a high-class Game Gear. By the way, we deserve a portable Sega Genesis that actually works, with games that sound like Genesis games and not funeral dirges. Somebody get on that.

The big news for this month, aside from the bewildering acquisition of SNK by the Saudi government, is that someone found a way to port Atomiswave arcade games to the Sega Dreamcast. Not all of these games are great (Demolish Fist is very not great), but it's nevertheless gratifying to know that the Dreamcast had a little more gas left in the tank, and could have lasted a couple more years if Sega hadn't been so eager to abandon it.

Also, Capcom announced a mini console, as if we didn't have enough of those already. It looks idiotic, like Mega Man's love child with an old IBM PC, but at least it's full of nifty games. At a retail price of $210, it had better be.

DECEMBER

Oh hey, that's right now! The prototype version of Superman for the Playstation was recently released. It's entirely different from the Nintendo 64 version, and consequently less bad. Would I call it good? No, let's not go that far. It sure does exist, though.

Apparently Seph's aim has gotten rusty
after twenty-three years.

Also of note: Sephiroth nearly put a hole in Mario with his impractically long katana, Capcom Arcade Stadium was announced for the Switch, I hacked Super Mario Bros. so Bowser's fireballs weren't ass-backwards, and the NX hoax from a few years ago wasn't nearly as hoaxy as we all thought. Yeah, that was an official Nintendo design according to documents leaked from the company, although it never went any farther than brainstorming sessions. 

Also, 2020 ends in just three days, which is the best news I've heard all year.