I don’t need to tell you that 2020 has been an obnoxious year. With the pandemic came lockdowns, which brought more idle time than one can manage. Luckily some of the greatest minds on planet earth are working hard to create the most popular diversion of my generation: video games. Here’s a list of the ones I enjoyed the most this year and think you should give a try.

Nioh 2

The Nioh games are Team Ninja’s version of the “Dark Souls” game. Think punishing difficulty, weird monsters, and a convoluted plot. Nioh stands out on it’s own since it’s a very difficult game, but it throws so many weapons and abilities at you that you’re actively encouraged to break the game. You can spend a lot of time memorizing enemy movement patterns, or you could also combine weapons and abilities to create a yokai killing machine who throws poisoned shuriken and hits stuff with a gigantic sword. I was also reading James Clavell’s “Shogun” at the time, a book that also takes place in 16th century Japan. Some of the same historical characters even overlap, of course in Nioh 2 they can throw giant fireballs at each other which is an added bonus.

Paper Mario: The Origami King

Nintendo knows what they’re doing. They want you to play their games, on their hardware, with your family. They specifically make family games, and they do a very good job at it. Paper Mario: The Origami King is no exception. The RPG elements are extremely light, but the main draw of the game is the fun puzzles that are intertwined with a whimsical story. This was a blast to play with my daughter before bedtime.

Chess

Chess didn’t come out in 2020, it was created in India some time in the 6th century, but I have been playing a lot of it. I was always a casual chess player, but I got more into it in 2020. I couldn’t SEE my friends very much this year, but I could play chess with them on chess.com. After a few dozen games you start to realize how little you know about the game. I started studying chess tactics, openings, puzzles, and reading chess books. I even taught my 5 year old daughter how to play (and she shows an interest in it which really surprised me!). If you enjoyed “The Queen’s Gambit” on Netflix I’d recommend signing up for a free account on chess.com or lichess.org, playing a few games, then getting a little obsessed like I did.

Street Fighter V: Championship Edition

The first version of Street Fighter V came out in 2016 to a few complaints. The online netcode wasn’t very good, and there wasn’t a whole lot to do in single player. But I don’t have any firsthand experience with this since I only started playing it this year when the Championship Edition came out this year for around 40 bucks. It’s a good value, you get all of the DLC characters released to date, the netcode has been fixed so it’s now easily playable online, there are plenty of single player training missions, and there is a huge playerbase (with cross console/PC play) so you never have to worry about finding someone to play. The initial release of this game might have sucked, but the Championship Edition made a lot of very nice improvements worth checking out.

Shiren the Wanderer: The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate

I built a new gaming PC this year. RTX 2060, a bunch of RAM, new CPU and case. I spared no expense! But the new PC game I ended up enjoying the most was this simple looking dungeon crawler that I can play on my laptop. Another roguelike in the “Mystery Dungeon” series, you play as a wondering swordsman named Shiren who’s best friend is a talking ferret. Shiren is a very well made roguelike, it’s easy to learn the basics but you start to understand the more complex systems as you progress through the game. It’s challenging to make it to the end of a dungeon, but building a new character with new equipment after you get knocked out is fun too. All very zen.

The Raspberry Pi is a small single-board computer that was originally developed to teach the basics of computer science, luckily these wonderful computers were discovered by nerds on the internet, so there are now tons of goofy Raspberry Pi projects you can try on you’re own. Here are a few projects I’ve set up at home.

Team Venom Bot

My first Raspberry Pi was a Model 2 B that I originally used as a low power NAS device and media server. Over time the SD card burnt out and I had to retire the NAS and think of another project. “Hey Twitter is an annoying website,” I thought, “Maybe I could do something with that”. So I set out to make a Twitter bot.

Using Python I was able to program the Raspberry Pi to send out one of many extremely inside jokes from a text file to a twitter account named “Team Venom Bot”. The account would then post the tweet. I used a cron job to run this every 12 hours. By the time I ran out of lines in the text file I had accumulated TEN whole followers (mostly my friends and other bots). Unfortunately Team Venom Bot didn’t grow big enough to influence any US elections, but it was interesting to discover just how east it was to make a basic twitter bot.

The bot isn’t running anymore since I wiped the SD card for another project, but it was a fun way to learn a little bit about Python.

PiHole – https://pi-hole.net/

I hate buying things, so why would I want to look at ads? Yet there they are, all over the internet. With a PiHole server, you can re-route your home network’s DNS queries to go through a custom domain name white-list on your Pi server. This way when you go to a web page and an ad for Alex Jones brain pills or a Christian MILF dating site wants to load, you just see a nice little frowny face logo instead.

Setting up a PiHole server is fairly easy and extremely practical. A great first project if you want to get into using a Raspberry Pi.

Retropie – https://retropie.org.uk/

Are your kids asking you for a new Nintendo but you don’t want to drop another $300 to those goon Mario Bros? Do you want to see if the games of your misspent adolescence hold up? Then you should try building a Retropie.

Retropie is built on the Raspbian OS, and will turn your Pi into a retro-gaming system. For my setup, I added a touch screen, speaker, stand, and both blue tooth and USB controllers. I also added an attachment to the HDMI port so it can easily be plugged into the HDMI port on a TV.

Retropie offers a huge variety of emulators, even obscure consoles like the TurboGrapx and Virtual Boy. There is a lot to customize and play around with, a very fun project if you’re into old video games.

Minecraft Server – https://lemire.me/blog/2016/04/02/setting-up-a-robust-minecraft-server-on-a-raspberry-pi/

Several years ago I build a Minecraft server for my friends. A co-worker of mine gave his 4th Grader son the server address, and before long his entire class had built a little civilization. One day my co-worker calls me, and tells me I need to ban one of his son’s friends. Apparently they had a little “Lord of the Flies” moment and some kid was destroying the 4th grader town with TNT. Pretty funny moment, I can see why Minecraft exploded so much in popularity.

For this project I wanted to see how well a Minecraft server could run on a Raspberry Pi 3. And it turns out it runs very well for the most part, even from a remote connection. The only problem is that none of my friends play Minecraft anymore, and nether do I, so it sits very idle now. I’m currently looking for another project to try on this Pi, so if you know any good ones, feel free to let me know!

Overall the Raspberry Pi is a great way to learn more about computers. Even just making a little device that plays old video games will teach you quite a bit about open source operating systems, the internet, computer storage, and even some basic programming.