by slax
I think I looked for a different way to capture the games I played this year, and it didn't work. While I'm not on GB much anymore, this list function is just super clean so here I am in November trying to do a remember of everything I've played.
Well let's see what we can recollect then, as always here is our rating scale:
The nice thing is, I can look back and see the main lesson of this year was getting deep into stuff.
Games that I want to make a note on that I haven't finished:
Persona 3: Reload, I made it a good way through this game. Love a Persona. And at some point in the past I might've considered it to be my favorite in the series. But this release wasn't quite the juice I needed to just marathon my way through it. They quickly announced the highly divisive FES expansion, The Answer, was coming out, something I hadn't yet played, and it didn't come with the FeMC route, which, we all know, was a huge misstep. All of this sapped the urgency to get through this game. So, while I don't love the way Atlus just release there games repeatedly for the subsequent 5+ years after they come out in slightly altered forms, I hold out hope the FeMC gets fully developed and released. That would be cool. I will certainly beat this game sometime, probably after finishing Metaphor, because it still has some juice left. And compared to other series, it's still a lot of juice.
PARANORMASIGHT: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo -I started this and it's spooky and pretty cool. I was trying to find out what I wanted to follow-up Ace Attorney with, and think I ultimately "switched" to Danganronpa, but I want to come back to this.
Danganronpa - lol. Leave me alone. I'll get back to it. It's cool.
Marvel's Midnight Suns -I liked the gameplay, didn't care about the story initially, and the game really wanted me to care about the story. Another game that I think probably is good, but hit a bit of the wrong place wrong time problem.
I also need to figure out what do with games that I've talked about before but come back to, maybe up here is the way:
I played a bunch of Path of Exile, still overall really fun, but has its problems.
Vampire Hunters - Doesn't seem like it has a page, otherwise I might've added it to the list. A fun first-person Vampire Survivors-like. It needs additional balance passes, as the game really rewards same gun builds, and the joy of a game like this would be how much different nonsense can I be shooting at the same time.
Vampire Survivors - Can't decide if this should be up here, or below. I haven't even played much of the Castlevania expansion, which is ostensibly why it would be listed in this years rankings, having already ranked it in years past, but who am I, but the lowly curator of a list, basically only for me, who comes back here in subsequent years for a little chuckle. I had it below, but now I'll just post what I had below here. An excellent compromise if I do say so myself:
They keep adding things to this game, and it keeps being very fun! I will say, the adventures are mostly not as good, but that's because it slows everything way down and limits what you have access to. I don't play these games for "difficulty", which those still aren't, I play them to fill the screen with nonsense destroying all my enemies.
*Update - I'm actually gonna bump this down, not because the Castlevania stuff isn't completely worth it, I think it is, but rather, the evolution of this game from simple maps to complex labyrinthine castles, while really cool, isn't supported by the visual aspect of late game Vampire Survivors. Unfortunately, since evidently (this isn't sarcastic, but rather, from reports in the community section, they've said this, but I don't have a screenshot or anything, this just looks snarkier than it is) the dev is not interested in added a opacity slider for weapons, you have a new difficulty unlocked, one not explicit in the game. A difficulty based on how overpowered can you get, but still be able to see where you are going. Once you get all of the meta power ups it isn't difficult to have screen spanning effects that make traversing the maps more and more difficult. I don't love this difficulty layer, and it unfortunately has sapped some of the joy I had from exploring the new content. I'll probably hop back in, but I also hope poncle decides a little additional accessibility isn't a bad thing.
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****** I will never be done. So, I finally learned how to play Riichi Mahjong this year. And by finally I mean, it had been on my periphery for a few years. Probably first as a side-story in Yakuza and then Mahjong Mornings here on the site. And while I thought it looked cool, for whatever reason, it wasn't the right time. Then in March of this year, Youtube, both the worst thing to happen to society and also something that has helped me find tutorials of all kinds of nonsense, suggested a Riichi Mahjong tutorial, or more precisely a Mahjong Soul tutorial. This tutorial to be exact: https://youtu.be/gKjpYd1Ogwg?si=N-UV4XGcfY2SNJ8e What followed was a rabbit hole that I don't know I ever want to extricate myself from. After finishing that tutorial video, I immediately got on Mahjong Soul and started playing. I found myself looking at videos of automatic mahjong tables (soooo cool), and higher level strategy. My sister, who was out of town, started receiving all of these cryptic texts about the "perfect game" and the "tiles look so cool" and "uh-oh I've gotten deep into something else". Needless to say, when she got home I showed her that tutorial and she started playing. I then, within I want to say a month, ordered a Junk Mat and Tiles and taught two other friends how to play and now we have a little Mahjong Club. My friends from Germany came over that summer and also learned how to play. Anyone and everyone who wanted to learn, I was happy to show them. But I was also very careful to not force it on to people. As, while I think this game is near perfect, it does have, what I refer to as the Inverse-Chess learning curve. That is, while in Chess you can spend maybe 10 minutes and understand nearly all the rules to chess (if not all of them, enough to get you through most games), you then probably need to start studying openings and do all of this book learning to improve your game. Mahjong, Riichi Mahjong specifically (because why not just get into the most complicated version) starts with a lot of learning. The bare basics are easy enough to understand, draw and discard a tile and try to get 4-melds and a pair. Perfect, but that doesn't even encapsulate all of the rules you need to play the game. It takes...much longer than 10 minutes to get a handle on how the game works, and so much strategy is inherit to just learning the game. Eventually once you get over this hump, you are introduced to a game that just works so seamlessly. It is my favorite competitive game and arguably one of the best competitive games out there. There is a reason that the FGC to Mahjong pipeline exists. Once you get over this initial hump you can both develop as a player on your own terms, but there is also decades of learning out there to gain additional skills from (something that I was looking for in a game, but didn't love playing chess). It's like fun poker. Or a card game you get to play with fun little tiles that are way more satisfying to interact with. I play this game basically everyday. I imported an automatic mahjong table. I'm so deep in, it'll be hard to ever get me out. I've got a group of around 8 or so people that I've taught or began to teach, and that's super fun in it's own way. Now, if you are a person reading this (unlikely but happy to have you, sorry this is a mess of thoughts) here is my suggestion for getting into this game: Watch the above Tutorial Start Playing on Mahjong Soul Playing in person is a whole different beast, that is a lot of fun, but you have to do way more stuff that Mahjong Soul just kind of takes care of. Once you and some local friends get the basics down, buy a set of tiles and start learning how to set it all up. Now you have one of the most fun games to keep coming back to. I didn't touch on why Mahjong Soul or even Riichi Mahjong is singularly great, because I don't really know how. It just feels like the perfect combination of luck and skill. It has the best parts of poker (starting with a bunch of chips and when you do well, they go up and when other people do well, they go down and when you do really bad, they go down real quick), chess and a bunch of card games people have played, but in a package that feels so well designed, which is a funny thing to say about a variation of a game that has been around since the 19th century (I just googled it, not as old as I thought honestly, still very old). Everything just works so well together. Each rule exists for a reason, carefully crafting a very tactical game, even one with the randomness of drawing. I love this game, and you should too. lol
***** Okay, we've chatted about Riichi Mahjong for a while. I guess I'll compare the clients here. They are both a bit too horny. Mahjong Soul honestly is probably a little less egregious with this. They are both F2P. But where Mahjong Soul is pretty stingy with free pulls, Riichi City has more, Riichi City also has more events and collabs (they both have collabs, but it is non-stop with RC). But the most important difference to me is number of players and scoring. RC has far fewer players and is slightly less geared towards 4th place avoidance. MajSoul has way more players all times of day and really incentivizes 4th place avoidance, which I like. You don't have to 1st, just don't be 4th and sometimes that feels like enough of a win in a game that has a big dose of randomness.
***** Listen, I just can't not. From the people that made PowerPros comes the first "realistic" baseball game since 2020 I want to say? It's on the PS5, it looks beautiful, it plays slightly different from the cartoon counterpart, but it's still damn fine baseball. Hilariously, this has a language select and you can pick English, which translates around 1% of the text. It is helpful in that it is most of the gameplay text (there is even an in game 9 page manual that gets translated on how to play), but you still need Google Translate, or a passing understanding of Japanese to get more out of the rest of the game. Someday I'll be able to play all of the single-player career modes, someday.
Now known as Hitman World of Assassination, this was my first foray into making it past the first two or three maps of Hitman 1. Finished 12/16 ***** Okay, technically inside of Hitman III, or now Hitman World of Ass or whatever, but I finally beat all the levels from Hitman I on 12/1 and all levels of Hitman 2 on 12/9, we going for gold bb. Hey everyone, not sure if you've heard of this, but Hitman 2016 (by way of Hitman III) rips. A joy to play and explore. I have thoughts, but my migraine is out of control, and my thoughts are not important. So I'll leave it here for now. Hitman II was longer, more levels, added a lot of good tech and was also really fun! I guess my only criticism so far was that they didn't update the few still-frame cutscenes from this game when they incorporated everything together. But I get it, I'm not mad. I set up some dominoes to fall in a way I was really proud of on one of these levels, making a man, who really just wanted to run to the bathroom to vomit, run through a puddle of water from the overflowing sink with a car battery in it, electrocuting him instantly. I love that it is an accidental kill, as if a car battery often makes its way to the second story main bathroom, but either way, getting all of those pieces to fall together perfectly on my own, was fantastic. Okay, and that's a wrap on Hitman 3. There is still a lot I can do, I may dabble in some Freelancer, because that seems fun. I do think Silent Assassin takes a way a lot of fun stuff you could potentially do and just asks that you pursue more story like finishes. But with that said, the replayability means, once you've done that, go ham and do other stuff. This game is fantastic. I am excited for their 007 game, but also whatever Hitman stuff comes next. Surprising myself once again, I played the Freelancer mode for a while and (with a couple of small caveats) find myself delighted with the freedom this game hands you. It's fun scrambling your way out of missions when things start going bad, something that saves in the main game realistically get you out of rather harmlessly. Is this a better game than Balatro? I don't know, but it is damn good.
***** You never beat Balatro, you simply just buy it on a new platform. If it wasn't for a 100-year old game, this would have serious considerations for my favorite game that came out this year (and that I finished, who knows where Metaphor will land). Just one of the best run based games I've played.
***** Another banger. My sister and I played through this whole thing and had a delightful time. These games do a real cool thing where they have a reveal about something that you didn't know needed one. And it feels great!
***** Honestly, I put less time into this version than I've put into previous years, or ProSpi above. With that said, I think the PawaFes changes are really welcome, they make that mode more fun. And it remains one of the best baseball video games on the market. I, with everyone else in the English speaking world who plays these games (there are dozens of us) are hopeful for an English release but until then, I'll just happily keep fumbling my way around.
**** IDK, I think I stopped playing in April Tekken 8 is my first real go at a Tekken game, besides playing a version on some old demo disc like 20 years ago, and like, it's great! Here's the thing; my relationship with fighting games is a continuous and often fruitless search for THE ONE. THE ONE that would click and I would just get so deep into. I like learning competitive games, especially ones where there is no team to let down, and fighting games are some of the purist forms of that competition (you've almost certainly read about a better example above when I get around to writing it), but I was scared of "3d" fighting games as I primarily am comfortable playing with leverless controllers and I just figured it would feel so different to the tiny but still extant comfort I'd built up with more traditional 2d fighting games. But of course, as you almost certainly know, or will find out now, Tekken isn't really a 3d fighter. It's a 2d fighter with a few more movement options. Instead of a super jump from an anime fighter, it's a slight sidestep to the background. AND it is a really grounded game. Things I like in Fighting Games. WOW! Anyway, jumping on a game just as it came out with a bunch of people excited to teach you (via YouTube videos, again, my friends don't really like fighting games), is a great time to get into something. The move lists, while intimidating to navigate yourself, can me really easily synthesized into usable information by people who've played Tekken exclusively and want to tell you about it. All in all, probably my favorite competitive fighting game experience as this felt so much more approachable than I was expecting, And adapting and learning as you are grinding against opponents who are better than you felt really doable and satisfying. But just like all things, my love affair with this game was torrid and fleeting. Not having people I know be into a game, made it hard to stick with it for more than a month or so. The Sajam Slam was really fun to watch though, so you should all check that out.
**** Let me start by saying, I play MOBAs wrong, but I love the design space. When talking about my favorite competitive games above, there is a trend of non-team games. This makes it easier to strive for personally improvement and not cost a team anything when experimenting with new strategies etc. I get so jittery when I queue up for a game of Deadlock, in a way that, while I'm sure it would get better with more exposure, makes it hard to want to queue up. And that's a problem, because I love this game. It's a near perfect MOBA experience, combining the excellent gameplay and patching of a Dota 2 with the better controlling nature of a 3rd person movement heavy game. So instead, I'm relegated to, by myself or with a bunch of randos, beating up on bots. Would this be alleviated by having more friends that played? Absolutely. But alas, my friends only build factories and go back to pharmacy school.
**** It took me like 4 years, when I exactly finished the last case this year is of minimal importance. Work was really hard at the end of 2023. A bunch of nonsense out of my control happened and I was seemingly punished for it without any discussion with me. That all was resolved and stuff is going weirdly fine now, which is all the more frustrating that it went so poorly for a bit there for no good reason. Why do I mention this, well I was having, maybe for the first time in my life, a prolonged panic attack and it made it hard to wind down and go to sleep since I was so worked up. This game really helped. Before bed I'd settle down with this game for a bit and have a delightful time, which honestly gave me the motivation to finally finish it, which I did early this year. My only complaint is that on a few occasions you have, what I would consider, multiple pieces of evidence that would all fulfill the request in the same way, but you can only pick the correct one on the correct dialogue (I know there is a little wiggle room as there are times when a couple of pieces of evidence give you the same result), but this meant that as the cases got larger and more complex, there were more opportunities for the game to not be quite on your level. That and the fact that each game of the trilogy started from scratch vis-a-vis a tutorial case, wasn't my favorite, but I get why! And the story and characters was so fun. Hopefully they do a fully voice acted remake of these because I think that would make them nearly perfect.
