140 - Best of SEGA in 2020

Hello everyone! Welcome back to The SEGA Lounge. I hope you've had a good week and are ready for another episode of the show. Before we dive into things, I'd like to remind you that you can and should suggest guests for future episodes of the show. Have a specific SEGA-related dev or musician you'd like to get to know better? Or maybe you know someone in the fan community who deserves more recognition because of their amazing work? Feel free to use our social media accounts to send me some suggestions or e-mail podcast@thesegalounge.com. Even if you don't have any guest suggestions, I'm also open to topics you'd like to see discussed in a future round table style episode.

Last week we looked at what I would like to think of as my way to bring some smiles and comfort into your life by way of this podcast. On this episode, I'm joined by some friends, 17 to be exact, from the SEGA community as we look back at some of the most memorable SEGA moments of 2020. May this serve as a historical record of a year where the light of SEGA shone through the dark clouds of lockdowns and social distancing.

First up, I asked my dear guests about SEGA games in 2020. The company had quite a prolific year in terms of games released and many of them were absolute gems. A couple of them were not even developed or published by SEGA themselves but licensed to third-parties who took the matter of breathing new life into old IPs into their own hands. To name but a few, Persona 5 Royal, Streets of Rage 4, Panzer Dragoon Remake, the new Sakura Wars, Yakuza: Like a Dragon, 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, and even the Yakuza Remastered Collection, were all great titles that SEGA presented us with last year. So I asked our friends to pick their SEGA game of 2020 and to throw in an elevator pitch to convince you to play the game.

The second question I asked my wonderful panel of guests was a bit more retro in nature. Not everyone has to keep up with the latest SEGA releases and those who do may also find joy in revisiting or discovering older games. So what SEGA games not released in 2020 brought smiles and that warm, fuzzy feeling to us all?

Being a SEGA fan means you can only play SEGA games or you're not a true SEGA fan, right? Right! No, no, I'm joking. You can and you should enjoy other games and broaden your scope by experiencing what other companies and indie devs are putting out for us all to play. Just have fun, people! So I asked my guests to pick, out of ALL the games they played in 2020, SEGA or otherwise, which was their Game of the Year and tell us why. As you'll hear, after gushing about SEGA, they were more than happy to praise other non-SEGA games that resonated with them this past year.

Finally, I wanted to talk about what 2020 meant to us, SEGA fans, as a whole. Loving SEGA doesn't have to mean enjoying only the games. At The SEGA Lounge, we're all about celebrating different facets of the company, including its community of fans. So I asked our guests to share specific things that happened in 2020 which made them appreciate SEGA or the community even more than before.

This episode is our look back into the year of 2020 from the point of view of not just one but several SEGA fans. I tried to not only get a good number involved with this episode but to invite friends who I knew would offer a variety of opinions and spice up the conversation. I'm sure many of you have different takes on the best games and best moments of the 2020, so do feel free to reach out on Twitter or Facebook if you feel like sharing your thoughts.

Let me thank my amazing guests for their time and their testimonies. And I'd also like to thank the few of them who weren't able to take part in this but also contributed in one way or another to this show.

The SEGA Lounge is going back to its roots next week as I start welcoming new guests to the show. I'm very excited for our next episode as I'll be chatting with Becky Frost and Mark Saville from Special Effect, a charity dedicated to helping people with disabilities to play video games. They do an amazing job and I'm really happy to have had the chance to talk to them about it. We'll also discuss GameBlast 2021, an annual event I will be taking part in during the weekend of February 26th-28th, as part of Team RadioSEGA. I'll share more details next week, but feel free to follow me on social media for more details when I have them.

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