The year in video games was good, bad and everything in between. It remained difficult to purchase new consoles like the Xbox Series X, the Nintendo Switch OLED and the PlayStation 5. (One fine day, we’ll play Deathloop.) Cloud gaming continued to grow in importance and Roblox continued to dominate. And, as a result of lawsuits or employee unrest, game industry giants like Activision and Riot Games were forced to confront their terrible records on sexual harassment and gender discrimination.
While the real world continued to oscillate between open and closed, video games remained a constant for some of us here at The Times. Below, a sampling of the titles that meant the most to us in 2021.
New Pokemon Snap
Kellen Browning, technology reporter
New Pokemon Snap is probably not what you think it is. There’s no catching vibrant monsters or sending them into battle. Instead, you’re on a mission to take the highest-quality photos possible of rare Pokemon as you travel along a set course through forests and seafloors. It’s a serene, meticulous game that rewards perfectionism and involves coaxing the wild creatures into picture-perfect poses by offering fruit, playing music and illuminating their silhouettes as night falls.
This was the title I anticipated the most in 2021. I played the original version of the game, released in 1999, for countless hours on the Nintendo 64, snapping hundreds of photos of Charmanders crowding around apples and discovering how to convince Jigglypuff to sing or Pikachu to surf.
Mario Golf: Super Rush
Maya Salam, senior staff editor, Culture desk
I affectionately refer to the summer of 2001 as the summer of 64, as in Nintendo 64. For those three months, my college friends and I largely avoided the steamy Kentucky days in favor of a dimly lit off-campus apartment where we spent most of our waking hours playing Mario Golf. We had our own language for every play: “Nestle!” being our favorite, for a ball that’s rolling a little too fast on the green. And when I closed my eyes at night, I’d see those rippling grids guiding me to the pin.
When Mario Golf: Super Rush was released on the Switch this summer (exactly 20 years later), …….
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/02/arts/great-video-games-2021.html