You don’t need a yearly retrospective, do you? I’m not here to write one. 2020 has been a malignant, joy-sucking farce for pretty much everyone. It’s been a slog that undermined every good moment; hence the dearth of any content here. It’s hard to write as if gaming is of stupendous importance when we’ve all been perpetually 30 seconds away from doom-scrolling at the latest headlines.

However, as the year closes, I’ve found myself at least somewhat pleased by one gaming development – or rather, the lack of a prior development perpetuating itself. 2020 has had a real lack of dumb hot takes about Metroid, and that’s awesome.

You see, apart from 2020 being an all-around nuclear dumpster fire, it was also the 10th anniversary of Metroid: Other M. With this particular game, hot takes don’t get much hotter or dumber. (Remember that time Nintendo “killed Samus”, so devastating and unforgivable a crime that the writer of that piece…went to work for Nintendo soon after?)

That’s the caliber of writing that accompanies Other M – “idolizing” a videogame character that one hasn’t apparently taken the time to google. Of course, I’ve spent enough time in these choppy waters over the years. I’ve said what I needed to say about the disproportionate response to either not understanding the game series’ timeline, not seeing the same character in Fusion, or not reading reading a summation of the manga that fleshes out the Metroid mythos.

No, what’s most heartening is that the year past with…a whimper. A scant article or two marked the “occasion” of this anniversary. Which is the most positive development possible for this game. If you had told me, even two or three years ago, we’d hit this anniversary without a slew of dumb hot takes, I’d have thought you mad. It’s not like gaming writers had anything better to do in 2020; idle think pieces have come at a steady drip during this dreary year.

Yet Other M was pretty much ignored.

The incandescent outrage was always artificial, the message-board wars mostly a proxy for good old-fashioned trolling. Metroid: Other M was only ever a videogame, flawed in its execution the way ambitious projects often are, but offering something different in exchange.

It’s a lesson to remember as we move forward from this annus horribilis, back to normal functioning, when we can all breathe the free air again, and experience videogames once more as the needed escapist fantasies they are (instead of a checklist thing to do during days when we can’t go do anything else). Pick a game, pick an outrage. Cyberpunk? Its current maelstrom will pass and no one will care. Does anyone even remember the shoot-’em-in-a-barrel takedowns on EA for Star Wars: Battlefront II? Hell, remember the dawn of the past gaming generation, when you could “win” E3 with a 20-second video that smacked Microsoft? Even hot takes that hold up well are little more than footnotes to better memories.

By all means, keep the snark, but perhaps save your 5,000-word cri de coeur that protests a videogame or system for not being exactly the thing you hoped for. Maybe even shelve the tweet. None of it will matter in 10 years. As Metroid: Other M shows, the only thing left a decade on will be the game itself. The hot takes? They’ve grown cold. Meanwhile, the producers, directors, art creators, musicians, writers, and the entire production team still have something to show for a project they thought worthwhile.

And hey, maybe if we’re really lucky, we’ll have a new Metroid in 2021.

OK, 2022.