Video Games and Me in 2021
The ones I loved… Guardians of the Galaxy This one surprised me. It reads like one of those cheaply done movie-to-game tie ins that we saw a lot of in the early aughts. The three note combat loop certainly gives that first impression. I appreciate that the developers did their best to mix those three combat notes into a melody, but it’s not the shooting that makes this game hit my list. It’s the outstanding characters. This isn’t just a regurgitation of the movie, or the comic books. The built a game rooted in the trauma the team has been through (mixed from bits mined from decades of comic books and, yes even the movies) AND then the developers went to work on actually processing that trauma. In all of pop culture I can probably name a handful of things that have actually done the work of processing trauma. None of this would have mattered if the voice and motion capture work hadn’t been spot on for what the game was trying to say. If you didn’t give a damn about Star Lord’s lost fami