!.06-GameSpot - All Content

!.06-GameSpot - All Content

WWE's Worst Toy Ever Features A Magnetic Sable Head | Wrestle Buddies Episode 35

Posted: 24 Dec 2020 09:30 AM PST

Happy holidays from the Wrestle Buddies, the hosts of GameSpot's professional wrestling podcast. Gearing up for The Buddiesies--our annual award show--Mat and Chris are taking a week to dive into a very dumb WWE toy from the late '90s. Also, it's the return of WrestlePiece Theater.

Kicking things off, a few weeks back, Chris picked up a WWE toy from eBay, and it brought him a lot of joy, so Mat tried the same thing. However, Mat's journey to joy was rough as he purchased something called WWF Bangerz--he wanted Pogs but those were too expensive. Mat opens up these Bangerz and tries to learn how to play them. At first, it seems like a pretty dumb game; however, Mat can't stop playing.

Following that, there's one last fun trick up our sleeves, as we have the final WrestlePiece Theater for 2020. Reenacting one of the most famous promos pre-Attitude Era are some of GameSpot After Dark's and We Enjoy Wrestling's hosts. Kallie Plagge, Tamoor Hussain, Chastity Vicencio, Matt Fowler, and Eric Goldman all lend their talents to voice "Stone Cold" Steve Austin. Why did Fowler choose a British accent? The world may never know.

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Mass Effect 4: Everything We Know

Posted: 24 Dec 2020 09:00 AM PST

At The Game Awards 2020, viewers were surprised with an announcement trailer for a brand-new Mass Effect game. Currently unnamed, the new Mass Effect looks like a direct sequel to Mass Effect 3, though if you break down the trailer further, there are hints it could be a follow-up to Mass Effect: Andromeda as well.

Developer BioWare had already confirmed that it was working on a new Mass Effect alongside Dragon Age 4 and Anthem 2.0, but the Game Awards trailer is our first official view of what the game could be about. Admittedly, it's not much--the trailer showcases two galaxies, zooms in on the Milky Way, plays radio transmissions that showcase humanity's evolution when it comes to space travel, and then finally focuses on an icy planet.

On this planet, we see a hooded figure ascend a destroyed Reaper, where they find a piece of N7 armor among the snow and ice. The figure then pulls back their hood to reveal that it's Liara T'Soni, a returning character from the original trilogy, and the camera refocuses to show that she's joined on this expedition by three other figures, though their identities can't be made out. Because Liara is an asari--a race of aliens that appear youthful for centuries and live for close to 1000 years--and she's only 109 in Mass Effect 3, we can't actually use her appearance to estimate how much time has passed. It kind of feels like BioWare specifically chose to feature only her in the new game's first trailer for that very purpose.

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Fable 4: Everything We Know

Posted: 24 Dec 2020 09:00 AM PST

The Fable series is about to be reborn on Xbox Series X|S. We know that, because Microsoft told us so during its Xbox Series X showcase, throwing in a reveal trailer for a new Fable game along with a number of other titles. Sadly, though, info about the return of the beloved action-RPG series is extremely thin otherwise.

We've run down all the details currently out there about Fable (which is often referred to as Fable 4 as the follow-up to the original game series, although we don't know if that number is reflective of where the game will fit in the franchise). It's not much, but you can be sure that we'll keep you apprised of any new details as Microsoft makes them available.

Fable Release Date And Platforms

Sadly, we know next to nothing about when Fable will actually be available to play (or much of anything else, for that matter). Microsoft's website for the game lists no date, but does run down what machines you can expect to play Fable on when it does eventually arrive. Fable will be available on the Xbox Series X and Series S, as well as on PC. Given that all first-party Microsoft titles also appear on Game Pass at launch, we can expect Fable to be part of that subscription service as well.

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50 Games You Should Have On Your Radar In 2021

Posted: 24 Dec 2020 09:00 AM PST

2020 saw the release of a lot of awesome indie games--If Found..., Evan's Remains, Signs of the Sojourner, Umurangi Generation, Murder By Numbers, Vigil: The Longest Night, What Comes After, Monster Train, and so many others. But with the year coming to a close, it's time we start looking forward to the ton of cool-looking indie games scheduled to launch in 2021.

Of the many indies currently scheduled to come out in 2021 and beyond, these 50 have really caught our eye. They're listed alphabetically.

12 Minutes

No Caption Provided

A time loop-focused thriller, 12 Minutes sees you learn that your wife is pregnant before a police officer breaks into the apartment, accuses your wife of murder, and kills her. You're then sent back 12 minutes into the past and are given free reign to try and influence the outcome of events before they reset again. You aren't given an explicit goal; it's up to you to figure out what the best outcome to the time loop is. The game's voice cast is composed of James McAvoy (Split), Daisy Ridley (Star Wars: The Force Awakens), and Willem Dafoe (Spider-Man). 12 Minutes is scheduled to launch for Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC in 2021.

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Spider-Man: Miles Morales' Dinner Scene Hits Hard This Holiday

Posted: 24 Dec 2020 08:00 AM PST

Miles Morales and his mom Rio just moved into a new apartment in Harlem. There's still a lot to unpack in their rooms, and you can learn so much about them by looking around and examining their possessions. But the living room and kitchen are all put together, and Rio is going all-out to prepare a big Christmas dinner for herself, Miles, and a few family friends. It's a heartwarming scene where you have to do a few chores like put on some music, light the Christmas tree, and make sure Ganke cleans up the damn mess he made spilling soup on the rug. What's most important here is that it's a rich display of culture, language, and food that celebrates the Morales' Puerto Rican heritage.

Anyone who has played Spider-Man: Miles Morales will remember this part of the game--not necessarily for the fact that Miles has to get the power back on by using his Spidey skills while no one's looking, but because it draws you into a cozy winter vibe of a snow-covered New York City. It's a powerful moment of character building--you hear Miles and Rio speak Spanish to each other and you can see the Puerto Rican cuisine prepared and being cooked. It's an invitation to see Miles' Boricua roots first hand, and a striking piece of representation for those who share Boricua roots or relate through other Latin-American cultures, all over a nice dinner for the holidays. And for me, after I spoke to my mom to let her know I couldn't come home for Christmas this year, these moments in the game became much more bittersweet.

No Caption Provided

As I walked through that scene, it reminded me of home and my mom, a reflection of the 20-plus years in the past I spent with her during Christmastime. Rio is on the phone speaking Spanish while she's cooking, just like how my mom would talk chismis in Tagalog over the phone with my aunties, acting like I wouldn't understand what she was saying. Some of the food you see on the counter and being cooked closely resembles Filipino dishes I always had growing up, too.

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Our 6 Favorite Anime Of 2020

Posted: 24 Dec 2020 08:00 AM PST

From volleyball boys to sentient video game villains, these are the anime we loved in 2020.


2020 was a bit of an oddball year for anime, with COVID-19 causing several shows and movies to be delayed while a few others were split into parts, with the first half releasing early in the year and the second half debuting months later. But we still managed to get quite a few gems.

In the following article, we detail the six anime that really stood out to us in 2020. We loved them for different reasons--some, like Great Pretender, left us on the edge of our seats with its fast pacing and dramatic cliffhangers while others, like My Next Life As A Villainess: All Routes Lead To Doom, provided a welcome amount of hilarity in an occasionally bleak year.

Next, check out some of our other best-of-2020 lists:


Great Pretender


Great Pretender is a colorful and wacky anime about a group of con artists working together to swindle the wealthy corrupt. The show features a loveable protagonist in Makoto Edamura, a Japanese swindler who’s just trying to find happiness in a normal life, and a great deal of Great Pretender is spent hoping he’ll manage to break free of the charismatic but manipulative Laurent Thierry while silently admitting that Edamura fits in well with Laurent’s crew of outlaws.

To the anime’s benefit, the whole season is split into small arcs, each of which only lasts for a few episodes and focuses on a different heist. So instead of one long drawn-out story, Great Pretender is several different stories, each of which focus on developing a new villain and providing additional insight into one of the members of the crew of antiheroes that the show follows.

This is all paid off in the show’s final arc, which reveals that there’s actually been a narrative throughline for the anime this entire time--looks like you, the viewer, were even being conned. It’s not as mind-boggling a reveal as that seen in the most esteemed of anime dramas, but it is a rather clever bit of meta storytelling to trick the viewer into further emphasizing with Edamura as we see that Laurent has been manipulating and conning us this whole time as well.


Haikyu: To The Top


Haikyu returned in 2020 for a fourth season, introducing a brand-new subhead and animation style with it. The fourth season played to both strengths of the shonen volleyball series, as it’s split into two distinct halves that are each satisfying in their own way.

The first half of To The Top felt like Haikyu Season 2, in that it slowed down and focused on the internal development of its characters--namely protagonists Hinata and Kagayama. The second half (which focused entirely on a single volleyball game like Season 3) payed off that development in a rewarding way, in that we got to see how Hinata, Kagayama, and the rest of their team had improved to the point that they could take on Inarizaki High School and the powerful duo of the Miya brothers.

Few sports anime are as popular as Haikyu and To The Top is a good reminder of why. The show doesn’t rely on superheroic levels of play to make it exciting, it establishes what each character is capable of and then delivers on a story where the stakes feel very real. And thanks to the new animation style, Haikyo: To The Top implements incredibly detailed facial expressions, which allows viewers to better understand a character’s train of thought or emotional state during the fleeting seconds of a rally.


Kaguya-sama: Love Is War Season 2


Misunderstandings are usually one of the most annoying tropes in romantic comedies; it seems like many shows and movies in this genre rely on them for the crux of their plot to manufacture drama. Kaguya-sama: Love Is War works so well because it instead relies on misunderstandings for the basis of its comedy. In this anime, student council president Miyuki Shirogane and vice-president Kaguya Shinomiya are both crushing hard on each other, but both believe that if they admitted their feelings, the other would tease them for it.

It’s such a straightforward premise, but Kaguya-sama: Love is War stretches this one misunderstanding out into a collection of some of the funniest comedy sketches in its first season, and manages to do so again in Season 2. The introduction of new characters initially seems counter-intuitive given the charisma of the existing cast, but the newcomers seamlessly worm into the established back-and-forth, creating new avenues of comedy.

The show’s strength--especially in Season 2--is definitely its willingness to slowly build up to a punchline. Though each skit is self-contained, there are occasional throughlines for a few of them, resulting in jokes that have been building all season long. You don’t really notice it until the punchline lands, but when it does it almost always hits.


Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken


Few anime explore the concept of creating anime, and even less manage to do so with the same level of charm and attention to detail as Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken. This comedy sees anime-lover Midori Asakusa, money-hungry Sayaka Kanamori, and socialite Tsubame Mizusaki joining forces to create a club at their high school for creating anime.

Though its plotlines are usually played for laughs, Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken excels for leaning into and exploring the creative process behind anime--both the fun aspects that attract creatives like group brainstorming, as well as the less glamorous parts of the business like work crunch and funding. Both Midori and Tsubame dream of becoming professionals in the anime sphere while Sayaka is the realist, typically reigning in the expectations of the other two.

Because at the end of the day, Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken is an anime about making anime, not an anime about making your dreams come true. Reality is often much harsher than what you’ve imagined. It’s not all doom and gloom of course--this probably wouldn’t have been one of our favorite anime of the year if that had been the case--but Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken is special because it’s willing to tackle and discuss the often glossed over hardships of working in the anime business while still delivering a wonderful narrative of why people still want to pursue such a career path anyway.


My Hero Academia: Heroes Rising


Before theaters shut down, a few anime movies managed to have their theatrical release. Among them was My Hero Academia: Heroes Rising. And what a movie! Though its ending falls a little flat by finding a way to conveniently erase what would have been an incredibly cool and fulfilling plot development, the movie up to that point contains some of the best action sequences that My Hero Academia has ever had. In Heroes Rising, Class 1-A is sent to an island to temporarily run its hero agency and get some experience in preparation for their futures as professional superheroes. Things are running smoothly until the island is attacked by a mysterious masked man and his followers, who cut off communications. This forces Class 1-A to protect the island and its citizens without the assistance of any adult heroes.

Heroes Rising succeeds where Two Heroes largely doesn't in that it leans into My Hero Academia's biggest selling point: it's an anime about a class of students, not just one person. Two Heroes largely focuses on main protagonist Izuku Midoriya, and incorporates scenes that focus on a select group of his fellow Class 1-A students. Heroes Rising, on the other hand, gives pretty much every member of Class 1-A a chance to shine. Midoriya and his rival Katsuki Bakugo are definitely the stars, but the others participate in some impressive stand-out battles as well.

More than anything, Heroes Rising drives at the underlying message of My Hero Academia that's been slowly explored in the show since Season 3: That All Might's ideal of one prominent hero standing as the symbol of peace is fundamentally flawed, and that it would be much better if a group of heroes stood side-by-side as symbols of peace. In Heroes Rising, you begin to see the start of such an idea bear fruit, as Class 1-A bands together to defeat a group of powerful supervillains. None of them could have succeeded on their own, but together they're a formidable force.


My Next Life As A Villainess: All Routes Lead To Doom


My Next Life As A Villainess: All Routes Lead To Doom is a very lengthy title for a short and sweet anime. The anime follows a young woman reborn as Katarina Claes, the villainess of a video game where the good ending results in Katarina’s exile and the bad ending leads her to be killed. Wanting to avoid both possibilities, Katarina works to befriend the game’s heroine and the other characters, scheming for an ending where she gets to live.

The result is an incredibly wholesome show about a girl who is so laughably dense that she doesn’t realize that she’s managed to make practically all her friends--both the men and women--fall madly in love with her. In Katarina’s own mind, she’s convinced that everyone still sees her as a villain who’s doomed to be exiled or killed one day, while those around her fruitlessly continue to pine for her affections. It’s all hilarious.

This is one of those anime where you can just sit down, start an episode, and know that no matter how bleak things might seem for Katarina, the truth is that she’s overthinking practically everything and nothing but good things are going to come her way. Admittedly, that does mean that the show has extremely low stakes, but in a year like 2020, getting an anime like My Next Life As A Villainess: All Routes Lead To Doom was a refreshingly funny watch.

Elden Ring, Metal Gear Remake, And Final Fantasy 16: Our Hopes For 2021

Posted: 24 Dec 2020 07:00 AM PST

With 2021 upon us, the Generation Next gang discuss the games they're looking forward to playing on Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 next year.

Netflix's New Early Cobra Kai Release Date Is Your Gift From The Streaming Service

Posted: 24 Dec 2020 07:00 AM PST

If you've been waiting for the sweet embrace of a new season of Cobra Kai, and you're counting down the days until January 8, 2021, then stop counting because that's no longer the release date for the new season. Netflix has announced Season 3 of Cobra Kai will land on January 1, 2021. To celebrate the release, Netflix has a new video featuring Johnny Lawrence using a computer.

That's right, you'll be able to strike hard, strike fast with no mercy as you click "play" as hard as possible on your controller--possibly breaking it. Earlier this month, the first trailer arrived for the new season--which had its first two season premieres on YouTube Premium before moving to Netflix earlier this year. The end of Season 2 left one person in the hospital and a local high school torn apart--literally--as a karate riot saw students from Daniel LaRusso and Johnny Lawrence's dojos at each other's throats.

In addition to the earlier release date, Netflix has announced that the cast of Cobra Kai will join The Netflix Afterparty on January 2, to discuss the third season with hosts David Spade, Fortune Feimster, and London Hughes.

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10 Biggest Game Installs Of All Time

Posted: 23 Dec 2020 07:36 PM PST

It's pretty amazing how fast you can fill up a PC, PS5, or Xbox Series X/S hard drive. Here are games with massive file sizes clogging up our machines.

Witcher's Season 2 Script Preview Promises A Bloody Beginning

Posted: 23 Dec 2020 04:46 PM PST

Many of the stories featuring Geralt of Rivia are, at their core, mystery stories with a medieval fantasy twist. The first season of the show operated primarily on a mixed-timelines premise that was confusing at times and definitely didn't work for everyone, but season 2 seems to be digging into that mystery premise based on a page of the first episode's script posted by Netflix to Twitter this week.

The story starts with a merchant and his family traveling alone by carriage, finding themselves looking for lodgings in an empty town. The merchant turns his back for a second and then back around to find his wife missing, his daughter covered in blood.

Geralt narrates over it. "You dogged my every footstep. But struck down others I passed on my way. Why?" he begins. "I was meant to end up alone, wasn't I? So I would finally begin to be afraid?"

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New Cyberpunk 2077 Patch Fixes Save Data Corruption Glitch

Posted: 23 Dec 2020 04:17 PM PST

CD Projekt Red has released another hotfix patch for Cyberpunk 2077--it closely follows on the heels of Patch 1.05, which addressed numerous glitches that occur in the opening hours of the main campaign. This new hotfix, Patch 1.06, doesn't fix as much, but it addresses the noteworthy save file corruption glitch.

Patch 1.06 fixes the glitch that caused your save file to become corrupted if it exceeded a certain limit--something that could be done if you were holding onto too many items in your inventory. The patch is live across Xbox One, PS4, and PC.

Unfortunately, the patch cannot recover what has been lost. If you've already fallen victim to the save file glitch, your save will still be corrupted. Patch 1.06 simply prevents the bug from ever occurring again. You can see the full breakdown of what Patch 1.06 does in the full patch notes, which are listed below.

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Calico Review

Posted: 23 Dec 2020 03:18 PM PST

I was quite a young girl when I first got interested in video games. It was something of an awkward transition. At the time, games were largely considered "boy toys," so moving from typical "girly" things like princess dolls and My Little Ponies into gaming was jarring at times, especially since not a lot of games catered to the cute, colorful things I'd been enjoying at playtime to that point. Sure, I loved the fantasy worlds of Mario and Sonic, but I also wished there was a fun gaming playspace for me that echoed the fluffy-cats-and-rainbow-unicorns aesthetic of my Lisa Frank Trapper Keepers.

Had my third-grade self seen Calico, an open-world animal cafe and social interaction game, she would have lost her mind. Calico embraces an aesthetic and theme that is shamelessly, unabashedly girly in the best ways--a world of happy magical girls living in pastel-colored lands with fluffy, cotton-candy trees where all kinds of lovable animals roam freely. But while Calico's concept and visuals are a delight, the simplistic, bug-ridden gameplay dragged me kicking and screaming out of the childhood fantasy world I so wanted to exist in.

Calico is very cute (screenshots captured on PC).
Calico is very cute (screenshots captured on PC).

Calico starts off with your created player character inheriting a cat cafe in a faraway world where magic is very real and a part of everyday living. Your job is to fill your little cafe with animals, decorations, and cute kitty-themed pastries while exploring the world and helping your new friends with various errands. It's a very laid-back, play-as-you-please experience in the vein of other life-sim games, but with an air of play and fairy magic baked in: You can buy potions with funny effects to use on yourself and your animal friends, like shrinking down to mini-size to cook, zooming around while riding on giant red pandas and bunnies, decorating your house with clouds, flowers, and cat paws, and collecting basically any animal in the game (that isn't already someone else's pet) to be a part of your cafe or your traveling posse.

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GameSpot's Top 10 Movies of 2020

Posted: 23 Dec 2020 01:55 PM PST

Despite movie theaters being closed for most of the year, 2020 still delivered some fantastic movies. Here's our list of the 10 best movies of 2020.

The Best TV Episodes Of 2020

Posted: 23 Dec 2020 01:24 PM PST

TV was our desert oasis in 2020, and these were our favorite coconuts.


There were a lot of shows we loved this year, and you can read all about them here. But when we really looked at 2020's TV landscape, we found there were so many individual standout episodes that really stuck with us, that we just had to give them their own list.

Some of these shows didn't quite make it onto one of our other lists, like the best sci-fi and horror of the year or the best comedies, but all of these episodes made our 2020 brighter, scarier, or simply more bearable in one way or another.

We have no doubt you've seen some of these. Does the name "Jackie Daytona" ring a bell? We'll never forget what he did for our volleyball team. Do you have a favorite "quarantine episode" of a show produced from home this year? We do.

Keep reading to find out all about those and more individual episodes of television that we loved this year, then check out some of our other best-of-2020 galleries:


"The View From Halfway Down"


Bojack Horseman Season 6

Bojack has touched on plenty of some tough topics throughout its six season run as Bojack deals with addiction, codependency, being on both ends of abuse, and more. For a show as filled with bright colors and animal puns as Bojack is, it's one of the darkest, too. No show has quite so genuinely captured the depths of depression the way "The View From Halfway Down" does. The episode ventures into Bojack's subconscious as he drowns in the pool of his former home. He confronts his victims and victimizers alike as water and ooze drip down from above. It's a hard watch, but it helps the show's final season cash in on the many lessons Bojack has endured throughout the show, demonstrating that he is the way he is in part because of his mistakes, but without ever absolving him of that responsibility. - Eric Frederiksen


"Chapter 15: The Believer"


The Mandalorian Season 2

Disney's first major foray into streaming content was bursting at the seams by the time the credits rolled on the finale. The once-grounded show has now featured multiple Jedi and name-dropped some major Star Wars personalities. Our favorite episode, though, is the one that re-grounds the show, even if for just an hour. The season's penultimate episode, "The Believer," has Mando borrowing one of his old enemies, Migs Mayfield (Bill Burr) from his prison sentence. Together, the two capture a truck hauling explosives. Not only does the episode feature one of the few wheeled vehicles ever seen in Star Wars, it's almost certainly a tribute to a movie that Star Wars Episode IV crushed at the box office in 1977, Sorcerer. Director Rick Famuyiwa (DOPE) gives us a tense ride into an Imperial base where Mando realizes he'll have to bend and twist at his boundaries to save Grogu, and gives us a rare look at the way the Empire's war crimes scar their survivors. It's here that Bill Burr proves he's a great actor as well as a comedian. - Eric Frederiksen


"The One Where We're Trapped on TV"


Legends of Tomorrow Season 5

Those of us who watch the CW's Arrowverse shows have a love-hate relationship with most of them. Perhaps the most consistently shiny jewel in the network's crown is DC's Legends of Tomorrow, a show that has long since forgotten that it has anything to lose and does its own thing. The latest season had the Legends stuck in the hands of the literal Greek Fates. At their whim, the characters end up trapped inside television shows after the Fates rewrite reality, and the characters have to work through parodies of Friends (Buds), Downton Abbey (Highcastle Abbey), and Star Trek (Star Trip). The show switches between visual styles and tones of each parody, but always makes sure those moments resonate with those particular characters. Sara and Ava end up trapped on Star Trip, in the role of co-leaders. It works both as a parody of the Kirk/Spock relationship that literally spawned the concept of slash fiction, while also forcing these characters to consider what it means to be a leader and to make sacrifices. - Eric Frederiksen


"Sex Patrol"


Doom Patrol Season 2

Doom Patrol uses silly nightmares to poke fun at the worst excesses of X-Men and superhero soap operas, but never forgets to put its characters first. It's not afraid to use the most absurd and horrifying concepts to tell its stories.The season's fourth episode kicks off when the Dannyzens--outcasts who lived on the sentient, genderqueer street named Danny--return to try to bring Danny back from the brink of non-existence. One character's ecstasy attracts the attention of a periscope-headed sex demon named The Shadowy Mr. Evans, while a Ghostbusters-themed crew called the SeX-Men show up to defeat him. This is all incredibly silly, and the show uses these stories to deal with things like Rita's sexual trauma, Cliff's physical inability to feel things, and a thousand reasons why an 11-year-old girl shouldn't be living with any of these broken people. - Eric Frederiksen


"Rewind 1921"


Lovecraft Country

The worst thing that one can accuse Lovecraft Country of is being too ambitious. The show has the feel of a creator who's worried she might not get another shot at this; she has to tell everything she can in a limited amount of space. But in its penultimate episode, "Rewind 1921," Lovecraft Country gels together. It uses the burning of Black Wall Street as its frame; that was the night that the Freeman family perished during the riots and the Book of Names, which they needed to save Diana's life, was destroyed. Our heroes travel back in time and meet their ancestors--not early enough to prevent their fiery fate, but early enough to ensure that the next generation will survive. Elsewhere, Tic makes peace with Montrose. Thanks to time loop paradoxes, it was he who saved his uncle's life, all those decades ago. And it ends with a slow motion walk through fire, as Leti (played by Jurnee Smollett, in an Emmy-worthy performance) walks, invulnerable, down the main street as the planes drop bombs. The loss is palpable. - Kevin Wong


"The Spite Store"


Curb Your Enthusiasm Season 10

We're ten seasons deep into Curb Your Enthusiasm, and it's incredible how consistently funny and clever the show remains. Maybe the secret is in its triviality. This show has never pretended to be about more than the most granular, rich people problems that Larry David can conjure up; the insularity is the joke. In its season finale "The Spite Store," it all blows up beautifully and karmically in Larry's face. All the stupid, little decisions over course of ten episodes--nailing the tables to the floor, not installing a bathroom, hoarding a massive cache of Purell bottles, adds up to a massive fire that burns Latte Larry's to the ground. “If I was trying to tell someone how to burn a place down, I would suggest every step you took in your business," says the fire chief to Larry. "You did so many stupid things, it looks like arson.” Ouch. Spited by his own spite store. - Kevin Wong


"Butcher, Baker, Candlestick Maker"


The Boys Season 2

This was a tough one to narrow down, because I loved every single episode of The Boys Season 2. But when you look back at the season as a whole, there's one clear standout: Episode 7, "Butcher, Baker, Candlestick Maker." The whole hour is strong, with Stormfront and Homelander's abduction of Ryan, Hughie and Lamplighter's infiltration of Vought Tower to rescue Starlight, and Butcher's confrontation with his dad. All these threads carried the theme of families in various states of chaos. But then it all ended with one of the most gruesome and unexpected bloodbaths we've ever seen on TV, cementing The Boys as one of our favorite shows ever, and this episode as one of the show's best. - Mike Rougeau


"Quarantine"


Mythic Quest

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, production shut down on many TV shows and movies. And morale across the country was down, so there were plenty of "Quarantine specials" from various shows. Because Mythic Quest is a workplace show, the special revolves around the Mythic Quest team working from home, trying to adjust to this new world. They deal with all the problems we've dealt with over the course of 2020: adjusting to working alone--or working from home when you have children--personal hygiene when you don't have to go into an office, the never ending brigade of video meetings, and most importantly, dealing with being depressed and isolated. It has an incredibly touching moment between Poppy and Ian that every single person could relate to during this year. Mythic Quest's quarantine episode completely encapsulates the gamut of emotions we all had during this very rough year. Also, it's the only show with the gusto to end its episode with the best statement of 2020, "F*** you, coronavirus." - Mat Elfring


"On the Run"


What We Do in the Shadows

What We Do in the Shadows is consistently one of the funniest shows on TV and nothing quite exemplifies its strengths quite as well as "On the Run," the debut of the now iconic "Jackie Daytona," a regular human bartender. Of course, Jackie is actually Laszlo (Matt Berry), who is--you guessed it--on the run from a debt in the form of a vampire played by Mark Hamill. Rather than pay off what he owes, Laszlo opts to high tail it to Pennsylvania ("because it sounds like Transylvania, and we all know that sounds cool") where he takes over Lucky's Bar and Grill and blends in to human society with a pair of blue jeans and a toothpick. In a show as consistently hilarious as What We Do in the Shadows, believe us when we say this one was something special. When you're Jackie Daytona, you can do whatever you want--because you change lives. - Mason Downey


"The Way It Came"


The Haunting of Bly Manor

The fourth episode of The Haunting of Bly Manor encompasses a very specific fear, and it's probably not the sort you'd expect--sure, there are ghosts and tragedy to go around, but the crux of the episode, the real spine-chilling moment, comes from the open and honest exploration of Dani Clayton's closeted sexuality and the root of her trauma. In "The Way It Came," we learn that Dani broke off an engagement to a childhood best friend on the eve of their wedding, not because she'd fallen in love with someone else, but because she realized that she couldn't keep pretending to be happy. "It just became something we were doing," she explains, tearfully, as her fiance tries to put the pieces together. It's the sort of queer coming out story that gets glossed over in favor of the melodrama and theatricality of more easily packaged angles--ones where people come into understanding their sexualities through some sort of forbidden crush or torrid love affair--but it's one we desperately need to see more of. - Mason Downey


"Episode 7"


Devs

Devs is a tricky show to break down episode-by-episode, with its dense and high-concept ideas flowing into one another in a way that really lends itself more to a binge than a weekly watch. However, if pressed to pick a favorite that could stand alone, the penultimate "Episode 7" does the trick in really exploring everything the show does best. The creeping existential dread of the Devs system actually working builds and builds to one of the most haunting moments of the show: Stewart's recitation of Philip Larkin's poem, Aubade. "Most things will never happen," he reads over a montage of the show's characters experiencing tragedies of their own, "this one will." - Mason Downey


"How to Cook the Perfect Risotto"


How to with John Wilson

Executive produced by Nathan Fielder (Nathan for You, Canada business school graduate), How to with John Wilson is HBO's docuseries following Wilson as he explains how, well, do things, and while the show is hilarious, there is a ton of heart to it. The season finale takes viewers on a journey as Wilson tries to learn how to make the perfect risotto for his loving elderly landlord. However, throughout Wilson's journey, he tries to quit vaping and meets someone with a truck that pollutes the air. He keeps trying to make this perfect rice dish as he goes through nicotine withdrawal. Then, reality hits as during Wilson's attempt to make risotto, the coronavirus hits New York City. It's a grim and shocking reminder of when the world came crashing to a halt. Wilson explores stores that are empty and checkout lines that wrap around the entire building. People don't know what's going on, and it is an important documentation of how everything changed in America. - Mat Elfring


"The Vat of Acid Episode"


Rick and Morty

Rick and Morty had an uneven fourth season, and not just because half of it released in 2019 and half in 2020. But it had some of the show's best episodes ever as well, and "The Vat of Acid Episode" belongs firmly in that category. What starts as a typical tiff between the titular characters grows into something totally unexpected. Morty goes on a life-changing journey, and the way it ends is both tragic and predictable. To top it off, the pay-off is maybe the hardest-earned in the show's whole history. Naturally, it all goes back to one small slight against Rick, who will do anything to make a point--and so he does. - Mike Rougeau

GameSpot's Top 10 TV Shows Of 2020

Posted: 23 Dec 2020 01:16 PM PST

There were plenty of excellent TV shows to watch while we were stuck at home this year. Here are our picks for the 10 best shows of 2020.
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