Matt Horton on YouTube - AUDIO matthorton.LIVE

ALL of my links - https://MattHorton.live

In Papers, Please, you take the role of a citizen of the fictional nation Arstotzka, modeled after Cold War totalitarian Eastern European nations. The government of Arstotzka has just ended a war with the neighboring country of Kolechia, and the player character has been appointed as an immigration inspector as the tensions from that recent war continue.

Papers, Please is also a game that reminded me too much of my real life.

0:00 - This makes me uncomfortable
0:03 - Papers, Please
1:28 - When I finally played it
1:53 - Too close to home
2:55 - No wrong way to be an immigrant
3:46 - I'l never finish this game

While Elden Ring has generated a lot of buzz and excitement, there are other games that interested me more in terms of gameplay, storytelling, and overall enjoyment. I'll be sharing my top picks for the best games of 2022 and explaining why I think they're the ones you should play. If you're a fan of Elden Ring or just want to know what other games to catch up on from this year, you'll find something great to play here.

These are my favorite games of 2022.

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0:00 - What games meant to me this year
1:21 - It's a Pokémon game!
4:01 - A puzzle game for mystery lovers
5:12 - This game feels like being a kid again
8:08 - You love superheroes and cards?
13:22 - They made 3 MOVIES for this game
16:43 - The best, ugliest game
17:49 - You still love superheroes and cards?
19:25 - Such a cute little fox
21:08 - The game that made my year

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Credits:
Marvel SNAP OST - Chris Alan (https://thechrisalan.com/2022/06/02/who-wrote-the-soundtrack-to-marvel-snap/)
Hero - Martin Garrix and JVKE (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5spiMVI9U8)
Hero (Piano Cover) - Jarel Gomes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RWNBmTIGtY)

Links to everything @ https://MattHorton.live

0:00 - I shouldn't love this game
1:20 - What SNAP does right
1:46 - Cards RULE
2:15 - The Marvel of it all
3:01 - Why do the mechanics work?
4:12 - The Snap
4:58 - Is it pay to win?
6:45 - What Marvel SNAP gets wrong
6:56 - Cyber Holiday changed my mind
8:37 - What did it cost?
9:03 - I'd rather buy the physical copy
9:46 - You have to do better, Marvel
10:57 - We've done this before
11:59 - Players want credits
13:12 - You're supposed to enjoy video games
14:01 - Marvel SNAP is great despite everything
14:47 - A silly thing I'm doing

Marvel SNAP is a card battler mobile game featuring a wide array of Marvel Comics characters. Players collect and build decks of cards featuring their favorite heroes and villains, and then engage in simple, strategic matches against other players (and occasionally bots). Each card has its own unique abilities and powers that often map directly to the character's super powers, and players must use those abilities wisely to outmaneuver their opponents and emerge victorious. Marvel SNAP's deckbuilding is approachable. It's game play is simple to understand, and it's characters are loved.

But it's a genre known for predatory monetization practices, and I personally hate online competitive multiplayer games. But I love Marvel SNAP.

So what does Marvel SNAP get right?

Citizen Sleeper asks you to decide if escape is possible.

It took several minutes of impasse and tears and not touching my controller, for fear of making a decision before I was ready, for me to know what I thought about that question. Citizen Sleeper gives you several potential answers and in the ones that resonated with me was the kind of deep personal freedom you only find, sure enough, through community.

Citizen Sleeper is about disability and body dysmorphia and the inevitability of corruption, and it is about the things the grow among and around those things. The antidotes and the byproducts.

Citizen Sleeper is about collections of people: families, gangs, unions, neighborhoods, corporations, and communes. It is about the individuals that make them up and how their individual needs strengthen or threaten the collective. But for our purposes today, it is about place. Yes the whole of its corporate, colonized space, but also...the aging space station its story takes place on: Erlin's Eye.

The Eye is not exactly a welcoming home, but for a sleeper it is, in many ways, better than what they've come from. In the world of Citizen Sleeper, AI has been outlawed. So as a way of getting around that, the company Essen-Arp pays regular people to emulate their consciousness. It's a way to skirt the rules, but it also relies on there being people desperate enough to participate. These people are asleep in some kind of corporate facility, and their emulated consciousness is downloaded into a constructed body called a Frame. This new person is called a Sleeper, though many in this world would take issue with my calling them a "person." These Sleepers are forced to do some sort of labor for some period of time and when that time is up, the Frame is deactivated, the person whose consciousness they were made from wakes up, and that person gets paid for the work their Sleeper did.

As you might imagine, the Sleeper, an emulated human personality living inside a constructed body and being forced to work their entire life only to benefit another person, might have feelings about this arrangement. So Essen-Arp makes sure that if the Sleeper ever escapes, their Frame, their body, will begin to destabilize. It will break down at an accelerated rate. Death will always come for the Sleeper, either through violence or planned obsolescence.

And this is where the game places you at the start. You are an escaped Sleeper, nearly frozen in a cargo container, just trying to survive long enough to make it to Erlin's Eye. You're not sure where you'll go after that, but you know... well you hope there will be options when you get there.

0:00 - Content Warnings
0:45 - Is escape possible?
3:34 - Why Citizen Sleeper hit me this hard
6:55 - Who does YOUR body belong to?
9:26 - Citizen Sleeper's characters
16:12 - The body is not the self
20:42 - Content Warning: Body feelings
22:34 - Who do YOU belong to?
27:00 - Lem & Mina: An uncertain future
40:27 - Content Warning: Death and grief
42:01 - Where do you BELONG?
44:02 - Getting to know Emphis

MY LINKS

Find MY Discord, Twitter, Instagram, and Twitch at https://matthorton.live

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Andrew Shouldice, creator and lead developer of Tunic, was actually heavily inspired by The Legend of Zelda, a game known for having many secrets that, depending on your perspective, are either genius or obtuse. But Tunic is heavily inspired also by games like Fez, Dark Souls, and Elden Ring. These are all games I have never played.

Tunic got me to love a Soulslike.

My YouTube channel as a podcast feed
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0:00 - The conundrum
1:24 - What people actually mean when they compare Tunic to Elden Ring
2:05 - How Tunic gripped me
4:09 - How Tunic makes difficulty fun
6:49 - Tunic is GORGEOUS


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13 Sentinels pumps out huge reveals, twists and turns that are actually meaningful to its characters rather than being empty fan service, and just super fun story beats every few minutes. And it wears its many sci-fi inspirations on its sleeve.

13 Sentinels is ostensibly a game about teenagers with secret powers that let them call down giant mechs to protect their city from kaiju attacks. But there's also an alien invasion plot line, a time travel element, and even an 80s high school drama. This game is referential, but its characters love the source material so fervently that reference quickly becomes reverence. It is unapologetic about its love for genre fiction and aims to be the epitome of those kinds of stories in a way only a video game can be.

My YouTube channel as a podcast feed
SUBSCRIBE TO THE AUDIO PODCAST FEED - https://pod.link/1612773588
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AUDIO PODCAST RSS FEED - https://listenbox.app/f/Oqi315cAxB1J
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0:00 - You should play 13 Sentinels
2:05 - This game is the best sci-fi tv show ever
4:48 - A few gripes about 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim
6:59 - Who 13 Sentinels is for

MY LINKS

Find MY Discord, Twitter, Instagram, and Twitch at https://matthorton.live

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