Happy belated new year! I got a second job near the end of the summer, so I have been way less a part of this forum than I intended to last year. Oops!
But before things pick up again in a big ol’ way next week, I wanted to share a little write-up that I sent to friends of mine on our Discord server, especially because there is a lot of IC Forums Influence at play in what follows. Come expecting enthusiasm, not insight; I don’t mean this to be especially good or critically reflective writing.
Same as most of y’all, this is more about the very many games I gave a fair shake last year. I had a JRPG-heavy winter and spring, while over the summer I picked up a handheld emulator and set up a PC for the purpose of emulating games up through the ~PS2 era in my living room, got kinda wrapped up in Resident Evil, Touhou Project and and Ace Combat along the way; lately, with less free time, I’ve been playing games socially and on Switch. Without further ado, I present my…
TOP TWELVE of TWENTY TWENTY FOUR and seven more
Here are some of my gaming highlights in retrospect. Some have been fogged by memory’s decay, others beloved evermore for the dry brine of time. Links go to reviews I wrote on the games I journal’d about over on Backloggd.
The spoiler tags are few but genuine, so be warned! And this is not a ranking, but games are presented roughly in order of how strongly I’d recommend them to a general audience.
1000xRESIST (2024)
There is the you that remains, that remains and remains.
This dozenish-hour debut is one of the best stories I have ever been told. It is very rare that you get to drop the “…for a video game” portion of narrative accolades. This is not a good production for a video game; this is a genuine work of art akin to great literature or theatre. It is about school and about clones, about the pandemic and about immigration, about aliens and about sisters, about whining and knowing when not to sulk. There are so many layers to the story presented here, and the more I think about it, the more I am impressed with how much there is to sit with in this game. It moved me to tears multiple times and has left a lasting impression. I cannot recommend it enough to all feeling humans.
Void Stranger (2023)
Honestly, I can’t even remember how I ended up in this place.
You go into Void Stranger under the impression that it’s a box-pushing, tile-swapping puzzle game, and it is for a long time, but then it is so much more. You dive into a labyrinth and discover more twists than you could have imagined. This two-man project features some beautiful Game Boy-ish pixel art and fantastic lo-fi, bitcrushed music compositions. Surprising and twisty narrative. The puzzles get devilish and the game runs deep . The end is the beginning. This game is its own sequel and then some. As a favor to your sense of wonder, please: Work through the puzzles, dive deep into the void and learn the many secrets to living in its world.
Sin and Punishment (2000)
The old Earth will die soon. Killed by the very people it fed.
This one’s a cult hit for the N64 that was only released in Japan despite its all-English, only-English voice acting. Smash Bros trophies helped popularize it in the West and now you can play it with Switch Online and emulators! An on-rails shooter (think Star Fox) by the legendary Studio Treasure, Sin and Punishment has your character always running forward as you move them side-to-side and aiming across the screen while alien enemies flood your vision. A lavish and melodramatic Evangelion-esque plot about identity and apocalypse plays out in cutscenes between the stages. Very cool tbh. I played this like 5 times, went for the 1 Credit Clear (i.e. win it without using continues) and failed, but this is the game that helped me discover why shootemups are so cool. You can beat it in about 2 or 3 hours, check it out!
Mouthwashing (2024)
How come it always seems like you’re standing on the edge of a bridge with your feet in cement?
This is a shorter horror title about a Space Amazon delivery that goes terribly wrong. Mouthwashing is a story told out of time, jumping forward and back and hopping characters’ perspectives, perfectly pacing the reveals and setting a suspenseful tone like no other. It pulls no punches; check TWs online if you need. Makes for a gutwrenching evening, I highly recommend it for fans of psychological thrillers.
Mr. Driller (1999)
Dig, Dig and Dig!
This is a precious Namco puzzle game, originally released for Dreamcast, featuring a super cute mascot protagonist and a bumpin’ soundtrack. You move left, right or down to drill deep into the ground, collecting oxygen tanks to replenish your air supply as you try to get to the goal at the bottom, or to see how far you can make it before losing. It’s very chill, and there are plenty of ways to emulate it or to download its sequels and handheld ports. Excellent use case for having a handheld emulator machine!
Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown (2019)
Does the color of the sky mean anything special to you? It does to me.
This July, I played all of the Ace Combat games available to me in a month: Air Combat, Ace Combat 2, a translation of the Japanese release of Ace Combat 3 (the U.S. release was gutted to fit on a single disc), Ace Combat 4, Ace Combat 5, Ace Combat Zero, and I only skipped AC6 because it is exclusive to the difficult-to-emulate Xbox 360. There was a time when AC7 was my favorite game I had played this whole year. Instead of going into them at great length here, I recommend checking out my extensive Backloggd review above to feel out my vibes on the experience. My summer in the skies was a really fun time and I recommend any fan of action games to try out this superb series, starting with AC04 and AC7. (Another Namco W on this list!)
Resident Evil 3: Nemesis (1999)
All the foxy ladies love my accent. It drives them crazy.
I played through the original RE trilogy in July and early August. This was my favorite! It’s got a fun map that propels you forward, it is a tight and concise experience, and changes things up on you in fun ways, particularly in having the main bad guy, Nemesis, be a pursuer who will occasionally pop out and screw up all your careful planning and resource management as you gleefully squeal away from him. As you can tell from the quote, it’s got goofy, dated, action B-movie dialogue to accompany the survival horror. It’s tight!
Gran Turismo 2 (1999)
Move aside and let the man go through. Let the man go through.
This is such a cool, challenging game. You can tell how much the developers respect car and racing culture from the thoughtful write-ups included on each one of the ~650(!) vehicles you can buy, plus each of the various modifications and tune-ups you can perform to supe your ride up. I never had a sense of what it meant for a vehicle to be front-wheel, rear-wheel or all-wheel drive until this late-90s “simcade” racer taught me; these cars handle so crazy until you learn how to tame them or tune your inputs toward the demands of their drivetrain. Of all games I played this year, this one wins the Legs Award. I came back to this one almost daily for a month straight before I rolled the credits — at 42% completion, about, which is so insane to think of how much more I could wring out of this. Polyphony Digital was pumpin’ out the value back in the day!
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (1997)
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.
Essential playing for the metroidvania fans out there. Alucard is one of the genre’s best-controlling main characters, I swear it, and the RPG elements are fun as hell. Progression feels so good, the map is immaculately crafted, there are so many cool bosses and music tracks — lie down and knock this out in a dozen or so hours, it is so worth your time.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (2024)
When the rest of them ran, you were there for me.
Complex like no other. This is a handcrafted love letter to its source material, and it is underbaked in some ways both hilarious and maddening. At least the team is punching above its weight, but big swings come with some big misses. The moment-to-moment is great, though; this and FF7 Remake still have the best action-RPG mechanics in the market IMO, even if the transition to an open-world design falls flat in some regards. But seriously, there will not be games like this for much longer. There may never be another game quite like this one ever again, not even the third & final part of the trilogy. I really think so. Sephiroth calls Cloud a puppy dog early on, so that’s pretty good.
BLUE REVOLVER (2016)
You’re not the only one who can break the rules.
Perfect arcade shmup for fans and newcomers to the genre. Choice of character affects your shot pattern of course but also puts fun twists on the narrative, and each has her own unique secondary weapons to select from. The game is very much in the vein of shmups by Cave (Donpachi, Mushihemasama), i.e. the bullets fly fast and take some twitchy reflexes to get by; there’s more aim-manipulation than pattern-memorization (like in Touhou and in Studio Treasure shmups). The scoring system is really unique and fun too, and the difficulty adapts to how much you are scoring and resets every so often when you lose a life or use a bomb. It’s great!
EA Sports WRC (2023)
Starts slights right, one hundred. Good luck.
This rally racing game is a little under-featured for a full-price title, but the minute-to-minute gameplay is exhilarating like no other. When you give this your full attention, tune in entirely to your co-driver’s callouts and get a feel of the handling of your car, it’s a unique feeling, a sixth sense for weight, sliding, the shape and forces of a vessel so much larger than your own body shooting down the roads. I couldn’t recommend this to anyone who plays without a wheel, it just wouldn’t have the same effect. But it deserves a mention on this list for sure, an enduring highlight I discovered last year.
and then there were seven… HONORABLE MENTIONS!
(Links here go to YouTube vids of gameplay or trailers.)
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Mr. Sun’s Hatbox (2023) — Very funny mission-based game that is kind of like if Metal Gear Solid 5 were a roguelike with the gameplay of Duck Game. Silly good couch co-op!
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It Takes Two (2021) — This one is actually a 9.5/10 incredible all-timer, but I still haven’t completed playing it with my girlfriend just yet. It is unbelievable how many different mechanics they included in there, how well animated and voiced everything is, how joyous the whole experience is, and also it’s rare to have a game be actually, genuinely funny! I am loving this a lot.
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R4: Ridge Racer Type 4 (1998) — Just take a look at that minute of gameplay. Listen to that and tell me this game isn’t swag to the max. Do you get it? Don’t you see?
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Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon (2023) — Maybe my favorite FromSoft game! Very fun action game with a ton of replayability, which I still need to get to the bottom of. I like how different it is to control a light mech vs. a heavy tank, how the different weapons demand different movements from you, the whole thing is awesome. Such a cool story going on, with sick tentpole setpiece battles, and you get a great sense of characterization even though you never see a human face and rarely talk to other pilots “in person,” so to speak.(edited)
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Zero Ranger (2018) — Another fantastic modern shmup, also the first game the dev team behind Void Stranger made. It’s relatively light on the gimmicks and convoluted score systems, compared to other entries on this list. If the vibes of BLUE REVOLVER don’t suit your fancy, peep Zero Ranger’s two-toned palette and see if that’s more your style.
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Final Fantasy VI (1994) ROM hack called Vanilla New World (2013) — They say FF6 is the prime of the pre-PS1 FFs, but I say it’s a little too easy to hold my interest! So I searched around for a ROM hack to up the difficulty or change up the battle systems, and found one: Brave New World. But it also came with a ton of changes to the script to make it edgy and humorous, but I don’t want that. Neither did some other guy, so he cut out like 95% of the changes (leaving more than I would have, though) and that’s what I played. I’d recommend it! Fun, challenging JRPG experience!
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Touhou Eiyashou: Imperishable Night (2004) — Two words: Wriggle Nightbug. I had such a crazy Touhou kick this year, it’d be wild to leave one off this list, right? This one is the best of the “old” Windows Touhou games to play IMO because the way this game handles difficulty through its continue system is very smart; your maiden shrine and her youkai companion begin the “imperishable night” at 11 p.m. and you have until 5 a.m. to finish the game. Beating any stage costs half an hour, and every continue costs half an hour, so you can spend a ton of continues on the early stages to master them, and as you get better, you naturally progress further and further as you spend fewer of those continues to get to the final stage. It’s clever!
AND FIN! Great year. I could add so many more, from light gun highlights to the nights I spent playin’ golden oldies like Crusader of Centy and Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete into the night. Or I could say how cool Bulk Slash is again. But I’m tired! GOOD NIGHT!
That’s the post! Lookin’ forward to what 2025 brings us! Gotta add that I owe a great debt to the pod crew and Credit Inserters on this forum for helping guide me to some really fantastic game experiences. Thanks for keeping up the great conversations and turning up excellent finds from the world of gaming. Cheers!