Hello, Giant Bomb. How are you? I am fine. What is your name? My name is Drew. I am pleased to be in contact with your entities. I work at Twitch and do some podcasts: one about movies with my wife Sara, and one about Formula 1 with my friends Danny O’Dwyer and Rob Zacny. I am enjoying the following video games!
10. Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater
Here’s how I think about the five core Metal Gear Solid games: One is an incredible achievement on early 3D hardware, Two cranks the Kojima meter up and feels like the full realization of his intent, Four is delightful and cathartic fan service, and Five is a sublimely playing action game. Three, however, is the one that sticks with me, owing to the Cold War setting and emotional story. When I think about Metal Gear Solid, I usually think about MGS3, so I was delighted when I learned we were getting a remake, and even more so when it turned out to be good.
The reason the game isn’t higher on this list is because I haven’t played that much of it yet. I plan to take my time with it, something that is tricky to do when playing a game for Content. It’s just different when you’re being recorded! I’m looking forward to calmly assessing situations, carefully reviewing my available equipment, calling my support team… and then still completely fumbling the execution.
9. Earthion
They made a Sega Genesis game in the year 2025! Considering “2025” is a year I would expect a space shooter like Earthion to take place, that’s pretty impressive. It’s also super solid!
8. Star Citizen
Against all odds, I think Star Citizen is a video game? As is tradition, Nexlander’s Vinny Caravella and I booted up the long-in-development space sim for the annual Bike MS fundraising stream. And guess what: we partied up, took on a mission, went to a planet, killed some dudes, and got a reward! (If you’ve seen any of our previous attempts, you’ll know how unusual this is.) We celebrated by doing cool space stunts.
Full disclosure: it did take us about half an hour to figure out a problem we were having with our warp drive. The solution? Turn off the ship and then turn it back on. Pre-release software, folks!
https://youtu.be/V3AVZCpArQI?si=Tn1JpZHGZTM413Dc&t=12867
7. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection
I am absolute trash at fighting games, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying Digital Eclipse’s latest interactive documentary. DE’s editorial team, along with video production powerhouse Area 5, nailed it once again, delivering a fascinating look at one of the game industry’s most impactful and longest-running franchises. You don’t have to know how to do a Fatality to appreciate that.
6. Out of the Park Baseball 25
Despite always liking baseball, I haven’t watched the sport regularly in decades. But a few weeks ago, I figured, “What the heck, the World Series is on, I’ll watch a game.” Six hours and 39 minutes later, I had accidentally witnessed the second-longest World Series game in history.
You may think this would put me off ever wanting to watch baseball again. After all, the fact that the game went 18 innings means, by definition, there was an entire baseball game within that baseball game where nothing happened. But that, my friends, is not how I operate. Instead, I binged all 20+ hours of Ken Burns’s excellent documentary, Baseball, put Opening Day on my Google Calendar, and installed what can only be described as a baseball video game for maniacs.
Out of the Park Baseball is mostly spreadsheet. As Baseball God, you can control not only every facet of every game as it’s happening, but the staff of your entire organization (down through the minor leagues) and even the rules of the sport. It’s a little overwhelming, so I watched some YouTube videos to understand which settings I should set to automatic. I eventually found a sweet spot and spent many morning hours, coffee cup in hand, deciding whether to bunt and when to shift my outfielders. The in-game graphics may be rudimentary, but you can still practically smell the grass.
5. PEAK
Games that do one thing and do it well tend to stick around for a long time. PEAK asks you to do one thing: climb. And as we all know from childhood, climbing stuff rules. The game harnesses that hardwired instinct and wraps fun gameplay around it so effortlessly that it seems like a game that should have existed forever. And given how popular it instantly became, it just might.
4. The Forever Winter
The Forever Winter is the first of two extraction shooters on this list, and definitely the most punishing. Everything about the game is brutal, starting with its presentation. Remember the “future war” scenes from the Terminator movies? Imagine a video game in that setting, but instead of being a member of John Conner’s resistance fighters or a hulking metal endoskeleton, you’re just some guy who’s trying to find food as the bullets fly around you.
The factions fighting furiously on the battlefield–to invoke Don Draper–don’t think about you at all, unless you make the mistake of crossing their line of sight. If that happens, you'd better be close to an extraction point, or things are going to go very poorly for you. The game isn’t as “get in and go” as ARC Raiders, but it sure does go a long way on ~vibes.~
3. ARC Raiders
In one of my first solo matches of ARC Raiders, I was looting a locker and suddenly heard the sound of footsteps approaching rapidly. A player was running directly at me. I disengaged from the locker and spun my camera around, waiting for the animation to catch up as I readied my weapon. I took too long–the player was already mere feet away. I braced for the hailstorm of bullets and disappointment of losing all my hard-won loot, but the player instead continued past me down the hall. “Sup, bro?” he said over proximity voice chat, and was gone.
Minutes later, I had gotten myself into a one-on-many fight with the game’s robot enemies outside an extraction elevator. I was losing. When the elevator finally arrived, I made a dash for it but was gunned down as time ticked away. Then, from over a hill, who should come running but Sup Bro, drawing enemy fire and allowing me to crawl into the elevator. I hit the extraction button right as he entered with me. “NICE man, you did it!” he exclaimed. Video games.
2. Blue Prince
Myst is one of the first video games I remember playing, so any time a game can evoke Myst-adjacent feelings, it’s something special. Blue Prince doles out its secrets at a measured but compelling pace that kept my puzzle-solving buddy Sara and I coming back for “just one more run.”
Eventually, we could see the more complicated solutions and what was required of us to solve them, but that the execution would be tedious and largely up to luck. We opted to put the game down at that point, and as a result, I remember my time with Blue Prince fondly.
1. BALL x PIT
These days, I appreciate a game that is easy to just pick up and play. I don’t have to remember where I “left off” or how the controls work, I just hit “go” and watch those balls bounce around. Not since Holedown have I been so eager to sink hours into a game about balls.
The roguelite elements layered upon the Breakout-style gameplay are applied with just the right touch to give variety to the game and give me goals I want to reach without bogging everything down. I feel like I’m still uncovering nuances about how the game works, but I’m enjoying that just as much as I am the ballz.
Honorable Mention
If you are a Gamer of a Certain Age and are looking for things to play, I have a solution for you. Wes Fenlon writes a fantastic (and free!) newsletter called Read Only Memo about the video game emulation scene. Inevitably, each issue sends me down a rabbit hole of some retro game series I never knew existed, a weird GitHub project that glosses up a previously unknown N64 game, or a fan translation of something I definitely would have played if it had come out in the US. Every two weeks, Wes gives me an excuse to completely nerd out, and it has greatly expanded my video game horizons. Give it a follow!