Old Man Yells At Games

This one’s a lot more negative than the last ones, but there are still some good games to discuss.

2023

2023 was a year full of games I found intersting, personally, but I’ll start with everyone’s favorite section: The stuff I didn’t play!

Starting off with Forspoken. I swear this was a good year. Forspoken was a… game. Third person action/adventure, horrific dialogue, terrible soul less graphics, generic fantasy setting. Some vague magic elements. Certified triple-A slop. It got clowned on for its horrendous dialogue (rightfully so), but some said the gameplay was okay. I didn’t play it, but the gameplay looks incredibly boring. The whole game looks like a complete waste of time.

On that same wavelength we got Starfield. Another one of those open world Bethesda RPG things that are light on everything. Wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle. You travel around a mediocre world to take on mediocre missions where you do mediocre shooting in service of a mediocre story. This is bread and water soup, and the bread wasn’t even toasted.

Moving on from the games I didn’t play because they look like torture, we got the games I didn’t play because my backlog is too long.

First is Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. It’s Jet Set Radio. Grind around a city, do tricks and spray graffiti while listening to a funky soundtrack that includes music by Hideki Naganuma, the composer for the original Jet Set. It seems like fun, should get to it at some point.

Dave the Diver was a surprise hit that released this year. Run a sushi shop at night, and during the day, you forage for ingredients under water. It’s a neat concept, with some interesting gameplay loops. I got a taste of this game in the unlikeliest place of all: a mobile gacha game crossover. It had an event in Nikke: Goddess of Victory, which included a mini game which was basically a small version of Dave the Diver. It was fun. I haven’t gotten around to it because I forgot about it. This game had some controversy because it was published by Nexon, and people were arguing if it counts as an Indie game or not. I’m not sure on that end.

Baldur’s Gate 3 was another arguably indie smash hit. It’s a massive RPG from the creators of the Divinity series, which are also massive RPGs. Form a party and take on an epic quest that is a faithful adaptation of Dungeons and Dragon’s mechanics in videogame form. I haven’t played it because it’s a 100 hour behemoth, and I ain’t got time for that.

This was also the year of Lethal Company. One of the first in the revolutionary Friend Slop genre, where you and three other friends get spooked for funny YouTube clips. I didn’t play this because I don’t have any friends- I mean- it’s not my cup of tea.

What did I play this year, if not those big releases? Some indie nonsense no one’s heard of/cares about? You betcha, buddy. It wouldn’t be a Load Last Save article without irrelevant games!

The Ninja Saviors was a remake of a game for the Super Nintendo. It’s a 2D Sides-scrolling beat-’em-up where you play as a mechanized ninja android. Demolish dozens of soldiers and thugs through seven stages of arcade action. It’s pretty straightforward, but a lot of fun. It’s not exactly a remake, it’s more like a remaster. It spruces up the graphics a little, adds some new features and two new characters. Good stuff, overall. Tengo Project makes good games. Go check them out.

There’s Turbo Overkill, a first person shooter where you have a chainsaw leg. Speed through cyberpunk levels shredding countless bio-mechanical monsters. You get a nice arsenal of weapons to play around with, great mobility, a kicking soundtrack and some great level design. I recommend checking it out. I’ll review it at some point.

Hrot was another first person shooter. This one’s a lot less mobile than Turbo Overkill. More like a traditional boomer shooter, heavily inspired by Quake. Shoot irradiated monsters in Czechoslovakia in this horror-adjacent shooter. It’s a good time. I wrote a quick little recommendation for it as part of the 2025 Christmas series. Read it here.

Chants of Senaar was a puzzle game where you used language to solve problems. It has a nice, unique art style, great music and the gameplay is simple, but effective. I wrote a whole review for it, which you can read here. I recommend checking it out.

I also recommended Kill the Crows. It’s a single-screen arcade shooter where you shoot evil crow guys in the wild west. An enjoyable, short arcade game you can get for $5. I also recommended it for the Christmas thing. There are a lot of games from this year that I covered here. Even more in the extensive favorites and runners-up section.

To round-off the small indie games section we got Stonks 9800. It’s a relaxing life sim/job sim/idle game where you play as a Japanese stock broker in the 80s. Buy low, sell high, watch the little lines go up and make enough money to buy a house, a car and anything else you might want. The game is getting some notoriety now thanks to its great aesthetics. There’s also Amy, the cute secretary that talks to you during the game. It has some light dating sim elements, too. It’s still in early access, as of writing this, but it gets updated frequently with new features added every few months. Worth checking out.

This year gave us fighting games, too. Street Fighter 6 came out to mark a new chapter in the now 30+ year old franchise. It’s a bit of a mixed bag of good fighting and some dumb mechanics, but I still enjoy it. I’ve written about it several times, and keep playing it on my off-time. It worked well on launch, which was surprising, given how poorly Street Fighter V performed on release.

We also got Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising. This long titled game is another fighting game, set in the Granblue Fantasy universe (it’s a mobile game). This is an updated version of Granblue Fantasy Versus (without the rising) which added some new features, more characters and better netcode. It also messed with the game’s core systems and shifted it from a more neutral-focused old-school fighter to something more in line with a regular anime fighter. It’s still more grounded than most in its genre, but its offense was made a lot more oppressive, combos got longer and damage was turned up to ludicrous levels. It’s still fun, but it has its rough edges, like dash-in light attack (66L).

Speaking of mistaken updates to games: Overwatch 2. I wasn’t much of a fan of the first one, but I did play it, and I also gave its sequel a shot. I didn’t like it much. A lot of the same problems were carried over from the first, along with a slew of new imbalances that come from the game shifting from 6v6 to 5v5. Having your tank countered in a rock-paper-scissors way isn’t fun.

Out of all these noteworthy games, which one was my favorite from 2023?

My pick for 2023: Pizza Tower

Mamma Mia! That was an easy pick! This game is fantastic. It takes heavy inspiration from Wario Land, but it manages to do its own thing. Great controls, great levels, it’s full of wacky, creative ideas and it has a ton of soul. It’s a rare game that can be enjoyed casually, and it really shines when you learn to play it and go for speed run clears.

I could go on and on about it. In fact, I did. I reviewed it back in 2024. Read it here.

Runners up:

Roboquest. This roguelite first person shooter has you shooting your way through hundreds of robots. It’s fast paced, really tough and an an overall excellent game. There’s tons of stuff to unlock, different characters to play as, co-op, tons of weapons to discover and some great movement. Highly recommended.

Deadlink. Another fast-paced first person shooter roguelite. Shoot robots here, too, but it’s cyberpunk themed. Take on challenging arenas where you fight for your life using a clever resource system that encourages you to play aggressive. I wrote a small review for it as part of the Christmas thing. Read it here. I highly recommend it.

Hi-Fi Rush. This extremely charming rhythm-based hack and slash is a ton of fun. It’s like a simplified version of Devil May Cry where you time your attacks to a beat. It feels like a PS2 game, in the best way possible. Its core gameplay is straight forward, but satisfying and polished. It’s brimming with charm, with goofy characters and a cheesy story that is kind of dumb but also comes off as sincere and heartfelt, the graphics are wonderful, the music is top-notch and it’s a blast to play all the way through. Hi-Fi Rush gets an easy recommendation. I should review it at some point.

En Garde. Another fun, cartoony hack and slash with Saturday morning cartoon energy. Play as the swashbuckling Adalia de Volador and take on guards and noblemen with your fencing skills. Kick people into pots, swing from chandeliers and dazzle them, or take them down with regular old sword skills. I gave it a glowing review, which you can read here. Yet another easy recommendation.

This was a great year of games, at least for indie games. The bigger stuff was a bit… lacking. We need less triple-A slop, and more small games with worse graphics made by people paid more to work less. That’s where the real gold is hidden. Let’s see if 2024 brings us more, of it’s just a stinky snore.

2024

We got big releases! Big, stinky releases! The gaming industry is recovering from the effects of the pandemic, and they’re back to their regular bowel movements, giving us the best of the best gaming has to offer, all for the low low price of $60!

Starting off with Rise of the Ronin. Nioh was Team Ninja’s first souls-like. It combined the formula with more action-heavy combat and set it in a dark, yokai-infested Japanese setting. Then Sekiro came out and did the same. Now Team Ninja answers back with a Sekiro-like. Is it any good? Well, take Sekiro. Now, imagine if it sucked. That’s Rise of the Ronin. It has an open world that dilutes the gameplay and makes you travel from mission to mission to pad the runtime. Combat relies heavily on parries, like Sekiro, but you can’t move out of the way most of the time since enemy attacks track magnetically. There’s a Diablo-style loot system, like in Nioh, where you get constant junk dropped in your inventory that may or may not have more numbers. There are a ton of fighting styles and weapons to use, but you have to unlock them slowly. They’re drip-fed over hours and hours of gameplay. This game’s huge, but it’s padded to hell and back. It’s an hour of gameplay stretched out over 90. Very stinky, no good.

Stellar Blade was also a stinky action game. Before I talk about Stellar Blade, I have to go on a tangent.

This game proved to me that most Internet game critics are slop consumers that don’t know what they want. You see, there’s these game reviewers that claim to be against how modern gaming sucks nowadays. Old games were better, they claim. They look at a game and claim that it sucks because it doesn’t have titties or because the story has woke elements. They would constantly rail against these kinds of games. They don’t want Forspoken, that game’s woke. If they made games like they used to, it would be better. I always thought this sounded like a bunch of nonsense. They’re not engaging with the game as a game. They see it as a pawn in a stupid Internet culture war. They don’t dislike the game because the mechanics suck, or because it’s a mess of filler, they say it sucks because it’s “woke”. I thought that if a game as bad as Forspoken came out, but it had a chick with huge knockers in it, they’d love it, because they don’t play games. They argue about them.

Turns out I was right. Stellar Blade is a crappy game, but the Internet critics liked it because awooga bazooga, big booba and ass. I usually don’t weigh in on those kinds of culture war/political topics, but I will do so here. First off, I don’t know how having a sexy girl in a game is political. Titties are apolitical. Second, this game stinks. I wanted to like it; it’s an action game with pretty graphics, cool monsters and yeah, the girl is hot and I wanted to look at her, but the game is just so boring. The combat is stiff (boner joke), you only fight things with parries and basic attacks, there’s constant “exploration” that kills the flow of combat, constant cutscenes and all that bad stuff. It’s a very poorly made action game that misunderstands all the fundamentals of combat. But hey, she wears a skin-tight suit, therefore this game isn’t woke, therefore it’s good, apparently.

To complete my fence-sitting journey, I’ll say the other side is bad, too. This game isn’t bad because it objectifies women, or because it promotes unrealistic body standards, or because it’s gooner-bait. It’s bad because the core mechanics leave a lot to be desired.

We now return from our little break to talk about Tekken 8. It’s another triple-A disappointment. I got this game on release, because I liked Tekken 7. I was excited for it. Then I played it. This doesn’t feel like Tekken. It’s mostly about throwing out big, safe moves, you can’t sidestep most attacks, the Heat system is annoying and mobility overall was toned down. Matches devolve into what looks like a slugfest inside a phone booth as both players throw out big, gorilla attacks with no real care for spacing. Not to mention all the dumb 50/50 coin flip situations where you guess wrong once and lose 90% of your health. I don’t like it.

Multiversus came out this year. A Super Smash Bros style platform fighter featuring characters from Warner Brothers. You could have Lebron James fight Arya Stark. The game won Best Fighting Game at the Game Awards this year. Nothing bad happened with this game. It’s still going. Forever. Bugs Bunny fighting Rick and Morty, and they’re dancing, dancing. They say Multiversus will never die.

Zenless Zone Zero came out this year. It’s a huge mobile gacha game. I played it for around 30 minutes and didn’t think it was interesting. You press one button and that’s it. It’s the videogame equivalent of jingling keys in front of a toddler. Except the keys here are anime titties, and the toddlers are unemployed 20-somethings.

Speaking of free-to-play key jinglers: First Descendant. A looter shooter where the characters are all Korean models. It’s like Warframe, but with plastic surgery. I played it for a lot longer than I’m willing to admit. It’s dumb, but decently entertaining to play with friends. It’s engaging enough to keep you playing, but repetitive enough that you go on auto-pilot and can talk with your friends. It’s a podcast game.

There was Black Myth Wukong. It’s yet another souls-like. Or is it a Sekiro-like? I don’t know what this is. People claim it was an action game like Devil May Cry, with combos and style, but from what I’ve seen, it doesn’t look too interesting.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 was another big release I didn’t play. I’ve heard not so good things about it, but I liked the first one, so I might check it out at some point.

I did play Slave Zero X. I wish I hadn’t. I wrote about why I dropped and refunded that game in an article I wrote a while back.

There was also Call of Duty Black Ops 6. These games keep appearing, and people keep buying them by the million. All I know about this game is that it’s a complete aesthetic mess. You can play as Beavis and Butthead and shoot Nicki Minaj with a futuristic rifle. It’s like if Fortnite has less soul. It’s a corporate product made by automatons and consumed by people who might as well be automatons.

Marvel Rivals was another corporate shooter that released this year. It’s Overwatch again, but with Marvel characters. It was a massive game for a few months. I played it with friends for a bit, but it’s not my thing. It has the same problem Overwatch did where both teams sit and poke at each other until their ultimates are up and that’s it.

There was a re-release of Horizon Zero Dawn? Why? That game is only 7 years old. I can barely see any “improvements” in the re-release. They just yassified Aloy a little. What an absolute waste of resources. Graphics haven’t improved in a decade.

Last but certainly not least we have Concord! The greatest game ever made. An incredibly original idea: a sci-fi hero shooter, wonderful cooldown-based abilities, slow combat, beautiful characters that everyone loved, an incredible art style that looked like a low-budget cosplay contest at a UFO convention, it was a sure hit. It released to massive hype, and everyone sang and played instruments, and Concord was dancing, dancing. Concord said he’d never die. Then a week went by and the game was shut down. Years of work gone in an instant. Millions of dollars poured into a horrible idea for a boring game in a saturated genre. A great snapshot of the games industry at the time. Triple-A games have to stop. I’m serious. They’re disgusting. We don’t need to spend millions making bad Overwatch clones, you numpties.

We also got Dragon Age: The Veilguard. A big, fantasy RPG that looks like garbage, plays like garbage and has a script written by a group of illiterate chimpanzees high on paint fumes. I’ve never played a Dragon Age game, and I doubt I’ll start with this one.

Most of these games sucked. What did I pick for 2024?

My pick for 2024: Helldivers 2

Sometimes Triple-A games get it right. One out of every 20 games. Not a good percentage, but every now and then, when the stars align and everything goes right, you get a decent game. Helldivers 2 is proof of this. It’s an excellent third person shooter with meaty, satisfying gunplay, it’s challenging, it has a lot of different weapons. The games as a service thing is a detriment, since it’s getting updated constantly, and those updates aren’t always improvements, but it’s a solid time. Fun with friends, too.

I wrote a review for it, which you can read here. It’s the first thing I ever reviewed on this site!

Runners up:

Starward. It’s Gundam Versus, with anime girls. It’s a lot of fun, but incredibly hard to learn. Its player base is practically non-existent, too, which makes finding a match a pain. It’s also a gacha. Look, it has a lot of things working against it, but I like it. The core gameplay is solid.

Metal Slug Tactics. A tactics game based on the Metal Slug franchise. It does a great job of translating the run and gun aspects of the arcade game to a turn-based tactics format. I recommend it and wrote about it on the Christmas thing, read it here.

Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom. Super Mario 64, but with a taxi. Super Cario 64. I also wrote about this for the Christmas thing. I wrote about a lot of games for that. Metal Slug Tactics is great, go play it.

Balatro. A roguelite poker deckbuilder. A simple, genius idea with wonderful execution. I wrote an entire review glazing it. You can read it here.

KILLKNIGHT. An arcade-style shooter where you survive waves of horrible monsters. Its mechanics loop into each other, it’s intense, it has a simple yet effective scoring system and it’s overall a great game. Go play it. I wrote about it, go read it here. I should give it a full review at some point.

Shadow of the Ninja: Reborn. Another Tengo Project ninja game. It’s a platformer. Tough, with great levels, challenging enemies and hellish bosses. Great old-school gameplay that will test your skills. Amazing presentation, too. I wrote a full review. Go read it here.

That was 2024. Yet another year of great indie games set against a backdrop of absolute garbage triple-A slime. All the money in the world can’t buy you any taste. These games have no style, no grace, absolutely not worth touching even for free. Then we have indie games made for 10% of their budget, with smaller teams, and they’re miles above those crappy, corporate products.

Onwards to 2025.

2025

Now we’ve reached the end of this series. I could keep writing summaries for 2026, 2027 and so on, but they haven’t happened yet. It would be like that one scene in Space Balls where they watch the movie as it’s happening. The other years will be done one at a time. For now, enjoy the summary for 2025.

Starting things off with the release of the Switch 2. Nintendo’s long-awaited follow up to the insanely popular Switch is finally here. I didn’t get one, so I missed out on all the wonderful Switch 2 games like Mario Kart World, Donkey Kong Bananza and… that’s it? Mario Kart and Donkey Kong? I mean, they look like fine games, but that’s what the console launched with? There’s Kirby, too, that’s cool. You can play the Yakuza games on it, but I wouldn’t buy a Switch 2 for Yakuza. I can play those anywhere else. I can’t play Mario on PC or Xbox (legally, at least). Only time will tell if the console is any good.

Monster Hunter: Wilds was another game I didn’t play. It’s Monster Hunter World, but with even less color, more cutscenes and more of an emphasis on story. It also runs poorly. It doesn’t sound like something I’d be interested in.

Same with Avowed. Obsidian is a company that everyone keeps telling me is the greatest. They make the best RPGs. I’ve played some of them, and seen the others, and I can’t really find any of that RPG magic. Are they like Blizzard, where they made some amazing games back in the 90s and have been resting on their laurels ever since? I don’t get it. Avowed definitely won’t change my opinion on them. It looks like an unfocused mess with no real core identity. Graphically, it also looks like the most Unreal Engine 5 game ever made. A friend of mine who loves RPGs told me to steer clear of this one, and I heeded his warning.

I didn’t play Blue Prince, but not because I didn’t want to. The backlog is out of control. I’ll get to it at some point.

Civilization 7 came out this year, too. I didn’t play it. I’m not going to pay $70 for a base Civilization game. I’ll wait for a few years until the definitive expansion comes out, then I’ll give it a shot. Even then, it’s not a guaranteed thing. It looks like it builds off Civ 6, which I don’t like. Maybe I’ll save the money and use it on something else.

That something else won’t be Ninja Gaiden 2 Black. “But Roger!” you exclaim. “Ninja Gaiden 2, the greatest game ever made, is back! In remake form! How could you not love it?”. It’s Sigma again. This is the twentieth time they re-release Sigma. I don’t care if they put gore back in, it’s still Ninja Gaiden 2: Sigma. The objectively inferior version. I want the original. Until the original is back, please don’t call me.

This year also gave me another Ninja Gaiden disappointment with Ninja Gaiden 4. I know a game is bad when I have to keep playing it to see if I like it, and I have been chipping away at Ninja Gaiden 4 for a while. I still don’t like it. The weapons are limited and samey, combat is mashy, enemies are annoying, the new camera supposedly fixed the problems with the previous games but enemies still manage to hit you from off-screen, the aesthetics are awful, Yakumo is a shitty protagonist, there are too many one-button platforming sections, and even playing as Ryu feels bad. The boss fights are long and boring, your damage is too low but you take too much damage, every combat encounter feels the same and the sound design is weak and flaccid. I can’t find anything to like about it. It’s so bad that I want to write a full, proper review for it, but that would mean playing the game in-depth to get notes, and I can barely stand it for more than ten minutes at a time. After NG3 and Yaiba, I said this series should remain dormant, and I meant it back then. I REALLY mean it now.

This year gave us Supervive, a MOBA combined with a battle royale. Made by a huge team of ex employees from Riot and Blizzard, this game took the world by storm. It had a huge player base and it was the talk of the town for a few weeks. Then the advertising budget ran out and everyone forgot about it. Player count dropped off a steep cliff and the game is set to be shut down in 2026. It lasted longer than Concord, at least.

SplitGate 2 seems to be going down that same path. Sorry, it’s not SplitGate 2 anymore. It’s SPLITGATE: ARENA RELOADED. They took the money they made from the original SplitGate and said they would make a new high-quality game with it. They made SplitGate 2. It’s a first person shooter with portals, but now the maps are bad. They’re smaller, less vertical and with less surfaces to put portals on. The game was retooled into a weird semi class-based shooter. It plays fine, but it’s a downgrade from the first. Shouldn’t have messed with a good thing.

There was a remake of The Talos Principle. Why? That game’s only… eleven years old. Oh, it’s over a decade old. I remember when it first came out. The original game is good, I can’t speak on behalf of the remake. The original still runs well on modern systems, so I don’t think the remake is necessary.

This year also saw the release of Hollow Knight: Silksong, the most anticipated game of all time. No one could believe it, but it was finally here. The greatest game ever. Then a lot of people started complaining because it was too hard. Was it too hard, or is this a case of “hollow knight fans play hollow knight for the first time”? I’ll tell you when I play it. If I play it.

Out of all these wonderful, exciting and high-quality games, which one did I pick as my favorite for 2025?

My pick for 2025: Clair Obscur Expedition 33

Wait no! I haven’t even played this yet. Get out of here!

Sorry about that. That game shows up anytime a winner is announced. It’s like a virus.

My real pick for 2025: Peak

Climb a mountain, have fun. It’s ingenious in its simplicity. A great hangout game.

Runner Up: Virtua Fighter 5 REVO. It’s Virtua Fighter 5. Again. This game is almost 20 years old at this point, and it still beats every other fighting game, and it’s better than 80% of videogames released after 2006. See why I’m so negative?

Conclusion

Here’s where I end this overly long, convoluted retrospective on any notable game I could find across my 30-something years on this Earth. Up to today, when I’m typing this in 2026. I’d have to go back and read the whole series, but from what I can remember, it was quite the ride. Starting off with decent games in the 90s, then a huge mess of classics around the 2000s, then a marked decline around the early 2010s, to finish off with a completely split industry in the 2020s. We got multi-million dollar games on one side, indie greats on the other. The multi-million dollar ones are all boring, derivative trash that runs poorly and plays even worse, and the indie ones tend to be entertaining games you actually want to play.

I don’t mind that too much. Doing this series has reminded me of all the great games I haven’t played. I have a backlog that stretches back to 1991. Games could stop being made tomorrow and I’d still have enough to play until I’m 90 years old. The other day I did a quick calculation of how many hours worth of RPGs are sitting in my library, unplayed, and it’s around 1,000 hours. On unplayed RPGs alone. Not counting all the stuff that got added recently.

In my opinion, games are getting worse and better at the same time. Triple-A is getting noticeably worse. Gone are the days where you could spend $60 on a big name franchise and get something worth playing. Any big, new IP has a 90% chance of being a huge disappointment. Just a bunch of boring, soul less junk running on Unreal Engine 5.

That’s if you’re not actively looking for the good stuff that’s hidden away. The ones that don’t have millions to spend on advertising. As long as good indie games are being made, there will be something new to play.

And as long as I feel like it, this blog will be around to tell you about any game I find interesting, be it because it’s great and you should play it, or because it made my blood boil and insulted my lineage.

Go out there and play good games. They exist, you just have to look. If all else fails, know that there are over 40 years of games you haven’t played yet. Your new favorite might be lying in some dusty old basement somewhere, waiting for you to pick it up. Or emulate it, most likely. Just don’t tell Nintendo I said that. They’d kill me.

More years, more games, less enthusiasm.

2017

What was happening in the world? Despacito?

Who cares? The Nintendo Switch is here! Nintendo’s new console was a massive hit, and it brought with it some incredible new games like ARMS, which no one remembers and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which I haven’t played. We’re starting early with those. I haven’t played Breath of the Wild, but I have played versions of it, since this is one of the most influential and copied games in recent memory. It made a Ubisoft style open world with some stuff do do and explore, and it introduced the climbing stamina system every other game would go on to adopt.

For the other Switch games we got Mario Kart 8… again! That’s right, that Mario Kart game you were already sick of on the WiiU is now on the Switch. Who am I kidding, no one played it on the WiiU. No one bought a WiiU. I didn’t, but I did play Mario Kart 8. It was alright.

I didn’t play Lawbreakers. I wasn’t the only one to not play it. In fact, not playing Lawbreakers was the style at the time. You might be asking yourself “what the hell is Lawbreakers?”, and you wouldn’t be the first or the last to ask. It was Cliff Bleszinski’s answer to Overwatch. A hero shooter where you could go into zero gravity areas. The art style was boring, the characters were unappealing, the gameplay looked slow and heavy, and it flopped in a few weeks. No one remembers it. I’m sure nothing like that happened again. I never played it for the aforementioned reasons.

In the same realm of high-profile flops I didn’t play, we got Mass Effect: Andromeda. A terrible follow up to the besmirched Mass Effect franchise. We all thought Mass Effect 3’s ending was the worst thing to happen to the franchise, but along came Andromeda to show us true horror. Poorly made, riddled with bugs, and with a script that redefines millennial writing. Constant, unfunny quips, baffling turns of phrases like “My face is tired from all of this”, and awkward cutscenes. All from a franchise known for its writing and cinematic presentation. The gameplay was hot garbage, too, apparently. Allegedly. I didn’t play it. You couldn’t get me to touch anything Mass Effect related after 3. That wound runs too deep.

We also got a new Bubsy game for some reason. I don’t know who asked for it, but we need to find them and put them in jail. Same for whomever came up with the game. Matter of fact, find anyone who bought the game and put them away, too. The only good thing we got from this game was an episode of Oney Plays. That’s it. I didn’t play it, either. What? You think I’d play the new Bubsy game of all things? I have questionable tastes, but I still have some discernment.

I did play Nioh, which also released this year. It was Dark Souls in ancient Japan, before Sekiro. Then Sekiro did Dark Souls Japan, but at that point it was Nioh without stamina. The web of comparisons is weird, but the game was fine. It had a dumb loot system that had you collecting hundreds of junk with slightly different numbers, which was infuriating. The overall gameplay, combat and mechanics were good, at least. Tough as hell, too.

Tekken 7 came to consoles after being out in the arcade for years. It was fun. The rage system was a bit annoying, but it was still a good time. Then the game kept getting updates and DLC characters, and it stopped being such a good time. Then Tekken 8 came out and 7 started to look a lot better again, but I’m getting ahead of myself here.

Capcom didn’t want to be left behind in the fighting game arena, so they released Marvel vs Capcom: Infinite. We wish they hadn’t. It was the long-awaited follow up to Marvel vs Capcom 3. When the game was announced, the hype was immense. We couldn’t believe we were getting a new entry in such a legendary franchise. Then the trailers dropped and opinion quickly turned sour. It looked like a mobile game. It didn’t have one third of the love and care the previous games had, it had a much smaller roster and it was missing fan favorites like the X-men. The overall negative attitude towards the game and lack of support in the esports scene led the game to flop like a fish out of water. The game itself was fine. It was a degenerate tag fighter, and the infinity stone system just led to longer combos and more oppressive offense. Not much different from the previous games.

Prey came out this year, too. Not that Prey. That was a sci-fi first person shooter with horror elements where you go around a space station full of aliens. This one was a sci-fi first person shooter with horror elements where you go around a space station full of aliens. Wait a minute. This version of Prey is an interesting game. An immersive sim with a good amount of freedom, creative problem solving, spooky moments and some neat ideas. This game is what Bioshock should have been.

There was Cuphead, the indie darling that introduced millions to the concept of “difficulty not in a Dark Souls game”. It had gorgeous hand-drawn graphics and a great soundtrack, but it wasn’t all style and no substance. It was a genuinely fun run and gun shooter with some good challenge.

Speaking of highly-regarded indie darlings, we got Hollow Knight. A metroidvania with heavy dark souls influence. You can’t discuss games after 2014 without mentioning dark souls. Dark souls this, dark souls that. I didn’t like Hollow Knight. It’s incredibly slow in its progression, and it’s a lot of walking and basic platforming. Oh, but it gets really hard later. Yeah it gets hard eventually, just give it a moment. This doesn’t usually happen, I usually get my double jump upgrade sooner.

While I’m tanking my credibility by admitting I dislike beloved games: Nier Automata. I know everyone loves this game, and they think the story is so deep and they jork themselves raw over 2B, and yeah, 2B is cute, but damn is that game boring. My God. The combat is shallow and repetitive, I didn’t like the empty world and the “exploration” and backtracking. The presentation is great, but I couldn’t bear the gameplay enough to get through it and enjoy the story. Even on that front, I think The Talos Principle did a better job of questioning the nature of existence and consciousness, all while having fun gameplay.

Indie game speed-round: Fight n Rage. It’s a beat-em-up where you pound furries into submission. With your fists… not- not like that. Nex Machina: arcade style shooter with seizure-inducing graphics. It’s a lot of fun when you can actually see what’s happening. Overcooked is a multiplayer cooking game that has the uncanny ability to start arguments. Slime Rancher was a cozy game where you catch slimes and profit off them. Very relaxing.

With all this heresy out of the way, let’s get to my favorite game of 2017

My pick for 2017: Battlerite

If I could take Hollow Knight’s popularity and give it to another game, it’d be Battlerite. Battlerite was a 3v3 moba battle arena. It took the fun aspect of mobas- the part where both teams are trying to kill each other- and made an entire game around that. No towers, no farming, no items, no objectives, just pure chaos, and it was wonderful. The characters were well designed, with interesting kits and abilities, the flow of each match was fast and satisfying and it was all around a blast. Too bad no one played it and it died a few years after release. It had so much potential. To this day, I consider it the greatest moba ever, even if it wasn’t really a moba.

2018

Did 2018 happen? I don’t think so. Filler year.

Starting off with a quick foreshadowing, we got Among Us. A little indie deduction game that went under the radar on its release. I’m sure nothing will come of it in a few years.

If you wanted less fun and more stress in your game, Darkest Dungeon had you covered. A brutal dungeon crawler where one wrong move could send your entire party into a schizophrenic meltdown. You didn’t even have to be the one to make the mistake. Sometimes they’d just start killing each other because they got spooked by a roach. It crossed the line from “challenging difficulty” all the way into “oh my God why would I even bother with this shit?”.

Assault Spy was a game where you played as Dante from Devil May Cry if he were a salary man. I did a quick write up recommending this one for Christmas, and it’s probably getting a full review at some point.

This year was huge for the kind of multi million dollar triple-A game I don’t play, but everyone else seems to love.

We got God of War again, but this time, Kratos is a dad! This is a more serious, mature take on those immature God of War games you liked as a kid. Those were videogames (derogatory), this one is closer to a movie, therefore it’s art. It’s still about clobbering fantasy creatures, but you’re not supposed to enjoy the violence. It’s just the focus of 99% of the game because- uh- well- uh- we’re making a statement about how violence is childish and you should be a dad… with axes. It’s high art, dammit! The fact that you’re questioning it means you’re not ready for it.

Red Dead Redemption 2 took this concept and ran with it to the point of parody. A giant, massive, bloated game that puts everything over the gameplay. It plays like a regular cover shooter from the 360 era, with no real changes or improvements, but hey whenever you’re looting something you have to take every item out individually! Isn’t that neat? In terms of gameplay it’s Red Dead Redemption one, but with a lot more talking, but you don’t care, do you? The graphics are incredible and the horse’s testicles shrink when they’re in the cold! Gaming isn’t about the gameplay, it’s about horse balls. We need to make our employees work 70 hour weeks to get those horse balls juuuuuust right.

Monster Hunter World also attended the same school of design as the others. You won’t see any of those details on the monsters, there are other games for that, but it did introduce a lot more story elements into a franchise previously known for its gameplay. It also drained it of all its color. It’s Monster Hunter, but with less of what made the previous games fun, but it was still a worthwhile experience. Even if some of the monsters were a complete pain in the ass, especially in its Iceborne expansion. Looking at you, Blackveil Vaal Hazak. It would take another entry for the franchise to go fully triple-A, but I’m getting ahead of my self.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance came along to show you could make a high-end story-driven game, while still being fun. You just have to trust that your player is capable of figuring out what to do, and how to do it. Judging from a lot of the reviews complaining about the combat, it sounds like the developers had a little too much faith in the average consumer. This game’s great. Its systems work well together, there’s a good sense of freedom to what you can do, the quests are interesting and the combat is weird at first, but satisfying once you get the hang of it. I especially liked the archery mechanics. The section in the monastery could have been removed, in my honest opinion.

2018 was also a good year for Mega Man, and re-releases of Mega Man. We got Mega Man 11, a great new entry in the franchise after over a decade of inaction.

We also got four other Mega Man games. Wow! Four new games? Yeah, four new re-releases. We got the original franchise with the Legacy collection and X in the X Legacy collection. Wait, that’s two games. Where are the other two? They’re right there. We split both collections in two games for some unknown reason. This is even worse if you remember the Anniversary collections that released back in 2005. They had every game in their respective franchise in one disc, for $30. I still bought the legacy collections because I’m a good little consumerist piggie.

We also got a re-release of Burnout Paradise. Wait, why? That game isn’t old enough to warrant a remake, it came out… a decade ago? Oh no. I remember buying the original at Gamestop like it was yesterday, and now it’s getting a re-release? Damn. Time really do be progressing in a linear fashion.

There was also a re-release of Ressonance of Fate. Sorry, let me use its proper title: Resonance of Fate^TM/END OF ETERNITY^TM 4K/HD EDITION. That’s its actual name. That’s how it shows up on Steam. This is an HD remaster of a relatively unknown JRPG where you shoot trolls with guns. It has an interesting combat system with a steep learning curve, but once you figure out how it works, the game doesn’t ever really evolve past it. The combat is one puzzle, and when you solve it, the same solution applies to every other fight. It’s fine, but since it’s a JRPG, it means it keeps going for around 50 hours, which leaves the gameplay feeling a bit thin.

There was also a re-release of Dark Souls (there it is again), but now it’s in High Definition. Wait, why would you re-release Dark Souls? It’s only seven years old at this point.

We also got Super Smash Brother Ultimate. It was not as good as Melee.

On the subject of fighting games that aren’t very good: BlazBlue Cross Tag Battle. Like Smash Bros, it was also a crossover fighter. This time, it combined all of Arc System Work’s most famous fighting game franchises, like BlazBlue, Under Night In Birth, Persona- wait, Persona?- and RWBY. What? RWBY? That isn’t even a fighting game! Did I forget to mention Guilty Gear? No, because this Arc System Works fighter doesn’t have a single Guilty Gear character in it. It does have Yumi from Senran Kagura. Not a fighting game, either. The game was an unbalanced mess of degenerate strategies, unblockables, touch-of-death combos and unreactable crossups. If you managed to find someone to play with, you could suffer through this game’s vomit-inducing netcode. A waste of time and money for everyone involved.

Out of all these, which game gets the dubious honor of being my favorite of the year?

My pick for 2018: Celeste

A neat platformer with a great soundtrack. It’s one of those save-state games where you can retry the same jump 300 times in the span of one minute. It’s still a good time.

Runner up: Kingdom Come: Deliverance. I’m serious about that monastery section.

2019

Let’s start off by addressing the indie elephant in the room: I haven’t played The Outer Wilds. I know I should. I’ll get to it at some point.

What I did play was its similarly named compatriot, The Outer Worlds, and I sure wish I hadn’t. I only played a couple of hours of this, but by golly gee willickers, this has to be the most boring thing I’ve ever played in my entire life. I got so bored at one point that I had a near-death experience. My body detected a lack of brain activity and said “well, I guess my time’s up”. If you measured my brain waves while playing it, it’d be a flat line. The gunplay was terrible, the guns felt like garbage to shoot, enemies were spongy and dumb, the dialogue was horrendous, the characters gave me kidney stones, the moral choices were so asinine they made me curl up into a ball and weep. I can safely say that I hate this game. It’s a void of boredom that destroys joy and personality. It’s the videogame equivalent of getting stuck in an elevator with a redditor. I truly understand the Angry Video Game Nerd now, on a spiritual level. Having a buffalo take a diarrhea dump in my ear really is more appealing than playing this terrible game.

I think the same would happen if I had played Kingdom Hearts 3. The long-awaited third installment in this mess of a series. It came out, and I don’t know if anyone cares anymore. I sure didn’t.

I didn’t care about Jump Force, either. It took all your favorite Shonen Jump characters like Naruto, Luffy and Goku, and had them fight in typical 3D arena fighter fashion. It was a terrible cash-grab game that ran like garbage. It made every character look like a cheap, plastic knockoff of themselves. It was like mashing two TEMU action figures together under a strobe light.

Since I’m ripping on games, let’s transition into Metal Wolf Chaos XD. Metal Wolf was first released in 2004 by Fromsoft, the makers of Dark Souls (see what I mean? You can’t talk about games without bringing that up). It’s a game where you play as the President of the United States and you use your presidential mech to bring justice! It sounds like fun on paper, but in practice you end up shooting stationary targets that take 40 seconds to destroy. Not fun. Boring, in fact. My fellow Americans, it is with great displeasure that I announce that Metal Wolf Chaos XD is a stinky game. I did not have fun relations with that game.

I’ll be talking about Disco Elysium now. The fact that it’s here and not at the end with the runner ups and the favorite should tell you something. This is foreshadowing. It’s a literary technique. Disco Elysium uses a lot of literary techniques. It has amazing writing. Shame about the gameplay. It’s like a visual novel, with filler. I wish this game were a real novel. A book. I’d read the hell out of it. Not too enthused about playing it, though. I found it to be kind of intolerable. Inland Empire: Now you’ve done it. You went and tipped the Disco Elysium fans’ bookshelves. You practically pissed all over their library with your… “hot takes”. You’d best say something nice about another popular game, or your four subscribers will see through your cheap charade and go read something better.

I didn’t like Katana Zero. It was Hotline Miami, but side-view and a lot less free-form. Very restrictive save-state gameplay. Not fun.

I think I’m done speaking ill of videogames for 2019. The only other game I’d poke fun at is Death Stranding, the first strand-type game, but I didn’t play it.

Indie game lighting round: Baba is You is a creative puzzle game where you switch out attributes to make new situations. It’s hard to explain in one little blurb, but it’s a lot of fun.

My Friend Pedro is a side-scrolling shooter where you dual wield guns. Good stuff, even if some of the later levels do away with the dual wielding gimmick.

Ion Fury is a first person shooter made in the Build Engine. It’s good, has some really chunky sound effects, and I recommend playing it, even if they overuse the tiny skull enemies. Seriously, you can’t go more than 20 seconds in that game without seeing at least one of those.

SplitGate was a fun first person shooter with portals. Cool maps, satisfying guns and some neat game modes made for a great party game. I sure hope this game lasts for years and never does anything stupid. Foreshadowing is a literary device.

We also had Dead or Alive 6. It was fine, I liked it. No one played it. It tried to do away with its sexy image and it made an effort to present a more serious tone. You can’t try to be serious and also charge hundreds of dollars for swimsuits at the same time. One or the other, Tecmo. Preferably the former. If people didn’t like the sexy girls, this franchise wouldn’t have six installments. Now is not the time to change course like that. I have very little hope for DoA 7.

Another long-running fighting game got an installment that no one played: Samurai Shodown. The game itself was good, offering that classic Samurai Shodown experience you know and love. Well, a small number of you know it. The problem is that its launch was a mess, and it was on the Stadia. Remember the Stadia? Google’s streaming-only game console? That was a fiasco. The terrible launch soured any chances this game had at an audience. This is Samurai Shodown we’re talking about, so its chances of having an audience were near zero anyways.

Devil May Cry 5 also came out this year. Pretty good. Haven’t really played enough of it to give a definitive answer. From my first playthrough, I found that the combat encounters were pretty sparse, and the environments felt very samey. You spend too much time wandering around the sinewy tree thing. Maybe it gets more enjoyable on higher difficulties? I don’t know. I’ll find out when I get to them.

There was also Code Vein, which was Dark Souls again, but this time it’s anime. I have this game sitting in my library, but I’ve never played it.

Hey I haven’t mentioned Dark Souls enough so let’s talk about The Surge 2. It’s a souls-like, but technological. You dress up like an accident at an appliance store and go cut people’s limbs off. It’s an enjoyable game, even if the difficulty spikes its way into complete bullshit every now and then.

There’s a game called Zanki Zero that released this year. It’s a dungeon crawler with survival elements. It’s fun, but it outstays its welcome and falls apart near the end. I’ve been chipping away at it with intentions to review it, but that last segment is a bit of a slog. A long dungeon full of tough, annoying enemies and tons of environmental hazards. Not to mention that the story devolves into nonsense and goes out the window. That’s what I get for following a game’s story.

With so many games mentioned, what was my favorite for this filler year?

My pick for 2019: Slay the Spire

I wrote a weird review/extended skit thing about the game, which you can read here. It’s a great game, go play it.

Runners up: Yeah, this year had multiple games competing for the top spot. Imagine that.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. It’s the game that started the parryslop movement, and arguably the only one that did it well. It’s a great, well-crafted game with a lot of cool ideas. Its gameplay is single-minded and sharpened to a fine edge. It does one thing, and it does it well.

Oxygen Not Included. A base management sim where you have a bunch of little guys and you give them orders, which they complete at their own leisure. You also have to keep them fed, happy and comfortable, or else they’ll refuse to work or just outright die. It has a ton of complicated mechanics, and you have to familiarize yourself with thermodynamics to keep your base cool.

The game is on the same level as Civilization or Factorio for me. A game so addictive and complicated, that I banned myself from playing them. I can’t trust myself to play them for a healthy amount of time, so I just got rid of them. That’s a glowing endorsement if I’ve ever heard one.

Mordhau. A first-person medieval melee game, like Chivalry. Great, satisfying combat and simple mechanics with deep uses.

That was a fine year. Hopefully nothing happens to ruin it.

2020

The pandemic hit.

At least we had games to keep us busy. We got the release of the hotly anticipated Cyberpunk 2077. It was a disaster. A complete, unmitigated mess, full of bugs, crashes and unfulfilled promises. Then the game was supposedly fixed, and everyone says it’s good now, but I don’t believe them. That game’s problems can’t be fixed with a few patches. They’re buried deep in the core mechanics.

If you still want to scratch your cyberpunk itch, you could check out Ghostrunner. It’s a first person game where you speed through levels killing dudes. Everything dies in one shot (usually) and you combine parkour and ninja skills to complete your objectives. I had fun with it, even if I died to the tower boss over 5,737 times.

This was also the year of Genshin Impact, the game that spawned a million gachas. I don’t like it, and I don’t like its derivatives, either.

Not all live service games released this year were as long-lasting as Genshin. We got Dota Underlords, a game that tried to capitalize on the auto-chess fad that was growing at the time. It existed for under a year, then it was unceremoniously abandoned by Valve.

There was also Bleeding Edge, a kind of moba brawler hero shooter thing. No one played it and it died. A lot of that had to do with the fact that the game looked horrible. Maybe it’s a matter of personal opinion, but I hated how the characters looked. They were ugly, terribly designed, with weird silhouettes, disparate and busy designs with no real rhyme or reason. I played it for a bit on Gamepass just to see what it was, and I still don’t know what it was supposed to be.

At least there was Deeprock, which was also a live service multiplayer game. This one lasted longer. I don’t like Deeprock. It’s a chore simulator, and the chores aren’t particularly fun to do. If only there were another multiplayer shooter where you complete tasks while getting attacked by aliens. Foreshadowing is a literary device.

Hades dropped. I haven’t played it. I’m sure it’s fine. Same with Ghosts of Tsushima. Apparently it’s good. I wouldn’t know.

Wow there weren’t any games. What did I pick, then?

My pick for 2020: Streets of Rage 4

A fantastic game and a worthy installment in the legendary Streets of Rage series. It has a ton of playable characters, an interesting chaining mechanic that encourages you to keep a full combo going without distracting too much from the core gameplay. It has modern additions like combos, while keeping everything else extremely old-school. You don’t have a dodge, for example. If you want to avoid damage, you have to walk out of your enemies’ range. Actual spacing in a modern game. Wow. Imagine that.

Even in a scarce, starved year such as this, there were runner ups.

Yakuza: Like a Dragon. The Yakuza series was always a kind of JRPG, but now it fully embraces that with turn-based combat. Great characters, interesting battle mechanics, an neat job system that lets you build powerful characters, and a ton of stuff to do. The financial minigame was my favorite.

One Step From Eden. I wrote about it for my 12 days of Christmas series, which you can find here. It’s a fast-paced take on the Mega Man Battle Network formula, which turns it into a roguelike. Highly recommended.

2021

Nothing was happening still, but we got more games.

What could be worse than Cyberpunk at launch? Balan Wonderworld. A game by the legendary minds behind Sonic 2006, this revolutionary game managed to piss everyone off with its terrible gameplay and laughably awful presentation. At least you could get some entertainment by laughing at it. Yuji Naka, who created Sonic and Balan, was arrested shortly after the game’s release. It was for insider trading, but I like to think it was because of Balan Wonderworld.

Monster Hunter came back and gave us Rise. It was a lot closer to the old Monster Hunter games, with more color and monster variety. It was much better than World, in my opinion. I hope they keep going down this evolutionary path, and make the games less like World. Foreshadowing. You know the drill.

Ninja Gaiden got a re-release with the Master Collection. It gave us Ninja Gaiden 1, 2 and 3. One and two were the Sigma versions. Again. Three was the improved Razor’s Edge edition, at least. It’s good to see these games again, but stop with the Sigma. Please.

We got Guilty Gear Strive. It’s Guilty Gear, but geared towards beginners. Simplified characters, less Roman Cancel options, and more of a focus on neutral. Then the DLC came along and threw this base premise out the window. Now it’s another convoluted mess of anime nonsense and characters that can kill you in two combos from across the screen. Not to mention Happy Chaos. Fun.

Halo Infinite came out this year. It was promptly forgotten.

My pick for 2021: None.

I’m serious. I like Monster Hunter Rise, but I wouldn’t call it a favorite. I used to enjoy Strive, but then Happy Chaos happened, and now I actively hate the game. I like Ninja Gaiden, but the Master Collection is just a re-release of the inferior Sigma versions.

What a year. Hopefully 2022 is better.

2022

This year starts off strong with High on Life. Oh God… the Rick and Morty shooter?

Maybe there’s something better. Here we have Babylon’s Fall. A game made by Platinum Studios, so you know it’s good. They made Nier: Automata. Wait, I didn’t like Nier. This game was a live service MMO slop thing that only lasted a few months before getting nuked. I don’t know what it was about.

Surely it has to get better at some point. Here we have Phantasy Star Online: New Genesis. That’s good, right? Phantasy Star Online is a great game. This new update completely overhauls the game, getting rid of everything that made it good and replacing it with nothing.

That can’t be right. No way they took Phantasy Star Online 2 and turned it into a dull, content-less void with nothing to do other than grind numbers. They- they did? Oh my God. This is worse than I thought.

What’s next? A free-to-play mobile game version of Diablo? Foreshadowing is-

We got Diablo Immortal. A free-to-play mobile game version of Diablo. Full of micro-transactions and other garbage.

Quake Champions got its official release this year. I played it in Early Access years before, and it was already losing players. It came out to zero hype and completely fizzled out. No one noticed. It was Quake, but with hero shooter elements. Not a great combination.

Enough about live-service games, let’s talk about actual videogames. Starting off with Gungrave G.O.R.E.- son of a...- Can’t we get anything good?

Gungrave G.O.R.E. sucks. It sucks so much that I wrote an entire review on it. Read it here.

There’s also God of War: Ragnarok. More man and his boy.

Surprisingly, that wasn’t the biggest game of the year. That honor goes to Vampire Survivors. A five dollar indie game where you walk around a stage auto-shooting things. It’s incredibly simple to the point of boredom, with a bunch of skinner box mechanics to keep you engaged. Not my cup of tea. It forever changed the gaming landscape and ruined the Bullet Hell tag.

We also got Need for Speed Unbound. I played it, thought it was fun. Didn’t review the game, but I reviewed every song on its soundtrack for some reason. You can read that here.

There was also Stranger of Paradise. A Final Fantasy game that gained notoriety for its absurd cutscenes about killing Chaos. The funny, corny parts are few and far between.

Out of all this, what did I pick as my favorite of the year?

My pick for 2022: Sifu

Become a Kung-fu master and avenge your father’s death by beating the tar out of everyone in the neighborhood. It’s a great 3D brawler with big fights that really capture that kung-fu movie feel. It strikes a good balance between modern parry games, including a stance bar like Sekiro, combined with more traditional options like dodging. It’s short and it has a lives system, so it’s the closest a modern game is willing to get to an arcade experience. Decently challenging, too.

Runners up: There were runners up, it’s just that they were the only games from this year that I had anything positive to say about.

Postal: Brain Damaged. A first person shooter loosely based off the Postal franchise. Use a grappling hook shotgun to fly around levels at high speeds, shooting hallucinations and other monstrosities that lurk in The Dude’s mind. It has an incredibly juvenile sense of humor like the mainline games.

Prodeus. It’s DOOM, again. There’s a base being overrun by demons- I mean- creatures from another plane, and you have to rip and tear until they’re all dead. Or until you find the blue key card to open the blue door. It’s a bit on the easy side, but the well-crafted levels and excellent sound design keep it interesting.

Madcap Mosaic. A weird little deckbuilder where your cards are tiles. Walk around the board to activate them and win fights against monsters. It’s an interesting concept, and it provides a fresh twist on the card game formula. I expect this to be copied by every other deckbuilder in around four years.

Thanks to over at “I Play Games So You Don’t Have To” for recommending it. Go read his article on obscure games. There’s sure to be another hidden gem there for you to discover.

Conclusion

That was 2017 to 2022. An overall poor stretch. There are definitely a lot of indie games I didn’t cover, but I did my best to mention any that I’ve played. Had to do some digging and check my Steam Library. If there’s one you think I missed, comment it down below and I’ll give you my uninformed opinion on it.

Next time, it’s the final stretch; 2023 to 2025. There’s a lot to cover at the end. Tune in next time!

Unlucky Number 13

Read the previous part here

The games keep getting worse and the list of things I didn’t play gets even bigger. What a wonderful time to be alive. We start this set of years with...

2013

It’s 2013, Let it Go is constantly playing everywhere as background noise and the Boston Bombing happened. The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One released as well, marking another console generation. This one would feature one or two notable exclusives, which would be one or two more than the next console generation.

As for games, we got a slew of terrible sequels and some new stuff, as always, but a lot of it is pretty bad.

Like Shadow Warrior 2013. It’s a reboot of the franchise, taking it from a great boomer shooter to a mediocre 2013-style shooter. It doesn’t have cover-based shooting, and it’s not brown and gray, but it falls into many of the pitfalls of the time, with its hallway/arena level design that completely ignores the well made levels of the original. It swaps your fun guns for the usual pitsol/uzi/shotgun trio and gives you a katana, which is what you’ll be using most of the time since the guns are terrible. It runs poorly, even on good hardware, and it has that annoying Reddit humor where everyone is constantly making quips and pointing things out. They never shut up, either. It’s a painful experience.

Speaking of painful shooters, we got Call of Juarez: Gunslinger. A game everyone insists is an arcadey fun time, but it’s yet another early 2010s brown slop shooter. I spent an entire review complaining about it. You can check it out here.

If you want the most 2013 of all 2013 shooters, look no further than Bioshock: Infinite. An incredibly over-hyped sequel to the equally over-hyped Bioshock games. After Bioshock 2, fans were left a bit disappointed that the story didn’t progress, so Ken Levine came back to pen another chapter in the saga. One that is so mind-numbingly stupid that it could only impress game critics, and impress them it did, being hailed as a work of art. I didn’t like it at all. I wrote a lengthy review explaining why. Read it here.

Call of Duty: Ghosts released this year, to hammer home the fact that shooters were well and truly dead. I didn’t play this. The only thing I know about this game is that it features advanced fish AI.

I can’t believe so many legendary franchises got crappy entries. What’s next? You’re gonna tell me Devil May Cry got a shitty reboot?

DmC: Devil May Cry was a reboot of the Devil May Cry franchise for western audiences. I guess that means one: the DMC franchise wasn’t for western audiences, despite its massive popularity in the west and two: the best way to appeal to American tastes is to make things worse. Judging by the reviews on IGN, I’d say that yeah, they’re right about that. DMC took the already excellent gameplay of Devil May Cry and convoluted it with color-matching elements. You had to use specific weapons to damage specific enemies, because the part we hated the most about Devil May Cry was the freedom it gave us to play with whatever weapons we wanted. It was overwhelming. I want to match colors and mash buttons. It had a revamped story that changed Dante into a foul-mouthed millennial douchebag and made references to Fox News. This is a message to Japanese developers: NEVER let western studios touch your franchises. I sure hope that never happens again, especially not with something like Ninja Gaiden.

Western gamers don’t want fun, they want misery, and The Last of Us delivered it in buckets. Set in the post-apocalypse, this ultra-violent dad simulator made you demolish zombies, curb stomp humans and shoot other living things, then it made you feel bad for doing so. Same thing with the rebooted Tomb Raider games mentioned before. There’s something weird with these western guilt games. They spend years developing an engine that can render the individual bits of brain matter falling out of an enemy’s skull after a headshot, but then they tell you that violence is bad. I know violence is bad. You don’t have to make a 20 hour game where you spend most of the time killing to tell me violence is bad. It’s like telling me Gurren Lagann is about how we should never build giant robots because they’re not awesome.

Saints Row 4 didn’t make you feel bad for being violent, but it made me feel bad for playing it regardless. The fourth installment in the Saints Row franchise (you can tell by the 4 after the name), this entry brought you back to the city of Steelport to take part in more haha funny chaos. The gloves were off and the series went from over-the-top to complete and utter self-parody. I’ve always said this game is having more fun with itself than you are. It’s like going to a party where nothing’s happening, but one guy keeps going “WOOOOO! HELL YEAH!! WOOOOO!” every now and then. The game wants to come off as being a raucous good time, but it’s just busy work. I don’t care if I get turned into a toilet, I’m still shooting bullet sponge enemies, traversing an empty city and doing tedious mini-games.

There has to be something good here. How about Ride to Hell: Retribution- oh Lord. This was a broken, sloppy mess of a game that became infamous for how bad it was. A lazy, try-hard edgy attitude that completely falls flat thanks to its terrible animations, horrible dialogue, atrocious voice acting and low overall quality. The gameplay was also a mess of the worst cliches of the era. Save yourself the trouble and watch someone else play it. That’s the only way anyone can get any enjoyment from this.

How about Injustice? Oh no. This was a fighting game from the developers of Mortal Kombat. It had a roster full of DC heroes: Batman, Superman, The Flash, Wonder Woman, etc. and it featured their signature clunky fighting and janky animations. It was a clownfest game, featuring a wildly unbalanced cast, unblockable stage interactables, infinite combos and a ton of flow-breaking in-game cutscenes. This game stinks.

Maybe those previous games were too action-packed for you. You might want to relax by playing something slower, like Sim City, which also got an entry this year. Just fire up your PC and boot up the game and get ready to build massive skyscrapers for your little townsfolk. Wait, what’s this? You have to be online to play a singleplayer game? And the servers don’t work? Amazing! This game was only notable thanks to its absolutely disastrous launch that had everyone staring at a login screen. The game was fixed eventually, but the stain of being a broken mess at launch never washed away.

If you wanted an always online game that actually worked (mostly), you were in luck, as this year gave us quite a few online grind-fests you could waste dozens of hours on. Firs off is Payday 2, a bank heist simulator where you rob banks and shoot cops. You can technically do a stealth run, but good luck getting that to work without a well-coordinated team. Most of the time, things devolved into minutes-long shootouts.

If you preferred your co-op shooting in space, you could try Warframe. The premiere space ninja grinding simulator. It had a unique art style and a fun action combat system with a focus on movement. Spend hours and hours grinding to make your gun do 30% more damage. I spent a couple hundred hours on this, and sometimes get the urge to go back.

Final Fantasy 14 re-launched this year. It originally released in 2010, and keeping with the times, its launch was a complete and utter disaster. No one liked the original, and it was so bad, they had to take it down and re-make it. This iteration was a huge success and it’s still being played and actively developed over a decade later. If only other developers had the presence of mind to completely teardown their game and try again, instead of throwing it in the garbage like so many of these short-lived live-service games. Or maybe not. Crunch is already terrible as is, imagine having to slave away six months of your life in unpaid overtime only to be told “nah, this is shit, mate, do it again”.

The last of our grind-fest mini section is Path of Exile, a Diablo-clone where you fight hordes of monsters to get epic loot. The game features a sprawling skill tree promising dozens of different builds, if you can grind for weeks to unlock them. It was a lot of fun, until a random server desync made you lag into a mob of demons and die. Then it wasn’t so much fun.

Killer is Dead was another weird, wacky Suda 51 game. It was a hack and slash game where you play as Mondo, a hitman for hire, who has a giant cybernetic arm that shoots blood bullets. Slay hundreds of monsters to foil the King of the Moon’s secret plot to use moon energy to turn people into monsters. The game makes zero sense, and looking into the story makes it make even less sense. There’s something about boiled eggs, too.

We also got DayZ. Based on an ARMA mod, this game popularized the survival genre and was a huge hit.

The biggest game this year was Grand Theft Auto 5. After this game released, Rockstar realized they didn’t have to make anything else, and could just keep re-releasing it and charging people for in-game money. This was a massive hit, it’s the best-selling game of all time and it has made over four quintillion dollars in revenue. That’s not even a real number, but it’s probably close to what GTA5 has earned in revenue. Over a decade after its release, we’re getting Grand Theft Auto 6, a massive bloated game that will surely live up to the hype.

For a much smaller game, we got Dragon’s Crown. Smaller in scope. If you look at the Sorceress, you’d know there’s nothing small about it. It’s a 2D beat-em-up by Vanillaware. It looks like a ton of fun, but it’s locked in PlayStation jail, so I haven’t been able to play it. Jason Schreier of Kotaku made some comments complaining about the game’s sexy female characters, and the game’s artist saw the critique and, since Jason didn’t seem to like any of the female characters, he replied with an image of shirtless dwarves. It’s still funny to this day.

A much, much smaller but somehow bigger game was Flappy Bird. It released in 2013, but it didn’t get popular until 2014. This was a simple phone game where you tapped the screen to keep a little bird flying without hitting any of the green Mario pipes. It was incredibly simple, but for some reason it became a massive success. It generated tens of thousands of dollars PER DAY in revenue, and everyone was playing it. The game’s creator eventually took it down because he felt it was “too addictive”. The game was taken off app stores, and phones with the game installed then shot up in price, being sold for thousands just because they had the bird game pre-installed.

Gunpoint also came out this year. It’s a cool stealth puzzle game where you hack into complicated security systems and then sneak into the building.

Let’s check in on Nintendo, to see what they were up to. They were still struggling with the Wii U’s disappointing numbers, and they were celebrating the year of Luigi. This just meant they were releasing their games as normal, but slapping Luigi on them. New Super Mario Bros for the tenth time, but this time with Luigi! Amazing.

They also got a Platinum exclusive with The Wonderful 101. A neat little game that was like Pikmin mashed with Viewtiful Joe, but with way more touchscreen gimmicks. It’s a really unique game that has way too many quick time events. Seriously, they’re excessive. Platinum really needs to dial it back.

We also got Marlow Briggs and the Mask of Death. It’s a God of War inspired budget game where you play as Marlow Briggs, and fight soldiers. It’s fun, campy and often goes on sale for under $5. You can’t go wrong with it.

Out of all this underwhelming slop, which did I pick as my favorite of the year?

My pick for 2013: Dota 2

That’s right! The best thing to come out this year was the misery simulator DOTA2, AKA: The Stanford Prison Experiment disguised as a MOBA. This game, along with sleep and government bureocracy, have taken hundreds of hours of my life. It’s one of the best games ever. It’s ridiculously complicated, but every part of it makes sense in the greater context of the game. Every stupid mechanic has a point, every play has a counter-play, and every counter-play has a counter-counter play. Chess is easy to learn, impossible to master. Dota 2 is impossible to learn, impossible to master. I could go on for thousands of words explaining why I like its obtuse design, but I won’t do that here. Maybe at some point, I’ll write a review on it. For now, I’ll just say that it’s my favorite game of 2013.

I hate everyone that plays it, though. Myself included.

Runners up

You’d think that a stinker year like this one wouldn’t have any runners up, but hey here we are.

La Mulana (2013 remake). It’s a bunch of nonsense; a metroidvania with a ton of cryptic, moon-logic puzzles, tough as nails platforming and evil bosses. It’s a magical experience that will make you feel the same magic you felt playing videogames for the first time, but I don’t recommend it for everyone since it’s a massive game that actively hates you. It’s Silksong’s criminal cousin who doesn’t get invited to Thanksgiving.

Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. AND IT WILL COME, LIKE A FLOOD OF PAIN. POURING DOWN ON ME. AND IT WILL NOT LET UP UNTIL THE END IS HERE

AND IT WILL COME THROUGH THE DARKEST DAY

IN MY FINAL HOUR

AND IT WILL NEVER REST UNTIL THE CLOUDS ARE CLEAR

UNTIL IT FINDS MY DREAMS HAVE

DIS-

A-

PEEEEE-EE-EE-EE-EE-EE-EARED

MY DREAMS DISAPPEAAAAAR

*GUITAR SOLO

2014

Ebola was ravaging Africa, and Ubisoft released Assassin’s Creed Unity. Much like other games of this era and beyond, it was plagued by tons of bugs and issues on launch. My favorite was the one where peoples’ face would disappear, leaving behind a spooky set of floating eyes and teeth.

Watch Dogs also disappointed many. After years of marketing itself as an ultra-advanced next-generation game with incredible graphics and complex, hacking gameplay, it released as just another Ubislop third person game with none of the bells and whistles. The graphics looked worse, the gameplay was nonexistent and it kinda stunk. This led to the game flopping, and Ubisoft realized they had to improve their games’ quality if they wanted to sell more. Just kidding. It got eights and nines on review sites and it sold millions of copies. Ubisoft made bank and proceeded to make two more underwhelming, buggy sequels and no lessons were learned.

Speaking of underwhelming but high-grossing: Destiny. This sleeping pill of a game combined the thrill-a-minute gameplay of Halo with the slow dopamine drip of an MMO, to create something that was a videogame, and could be played on a screen.

If you preferred your boring shooter MMOs free-to-play, you could try Firefall. It was a third person sci-fi MMO shooter, where you would do boring MMO quests… but in space! I played it for a few hours and had a crushing realization that I was completely and utterly bored. I deleted the game and went back to Warframe.

If you missed that old Bungie, that making Halo Bungie, made Master Chief Bungie, you could get Halo: Master Chief collection. A compilation of the classic Halo games, all in one package for your enjoyment. This definitive edition of the games was feature-complete and extremely polished. Juuuust kidding. Again. This was a buggy mess with no working multiplayer and constant, disastrous problems. The game would reach a “playable” status years later, with the multiplayer actually working almost a decade later. This game didn’t sell, and it was a sobering reminder to Microsoft that they couldn’t sell a half-assed product and- who am I kidding. It sold like crack and no lessons were learned.

Xbox also released Titanfall. From the former Call of Duty development team, it was a first-person shooter where you’d run around and shoot people to call down a giant mech.

Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze was also a good time. I didn’t review that one. Not yet, at least. Donkey Kong is back, on the Wii U, but no one played it until it was re-released on Switch (myself included). This was another fine platformer where you would jump around in creative stages and monkey around. Get it? Because Donkey Kong is a monkey. Wait, he’s an ape. Ape around.

Donkey Kong was also in Super Smash Brother 4. More like, Super Smash Brothers Snore. I didn’t like this one at all. It was better than Brawl, in its core gameplay, but that’s not saying much. It’s like saying two is a lot more than zero.

On the subject of Nintendo, we got Mario Kart 8. This game, much like Grand Theft Auto 5, would be played for an entire decade before we got something new. At least it was fun, looked great and had an amazing soundtrack.

Some other decade-spanning games were released this year. Hearthstone popped up and showed everyone you could make millions by selling digital cards. Smite released this year, a free-to-play third person MOBA about mythical gods fighting. It was a good time, and it had a decent business model: free to play, or you could pay $30 and unlock every character forever. It was a fun time. Granblue Fantasy released this year, too, and much like Hearthstone, it found out you could make millions by selling digital pictures. It was one of the first big gacha games, and you could pay big bucks to get PNGs of anime girls. I have to admit, they had some good PNGs. I played it for some time, but didn’t spend any money. I stopped playing because progress was exceedingly slow. At the pace I was getting material drops, I could have forged a legendary sword in real life before I got one in-game.

If instead of a gacha full of anime girls, you wanted your mobile game to desecrate a beloved series, you could check out Dungeon Keeper mobile. Another horrid decision by EA, this game was Dungeon Keeper, but on mobile. So Dungeon Keeper, but bad.

If you liked hanging around in dungeons, but wanted a better experience, you were in luck. You could try Stranger of Sword City. This was a dungeon crawler RPG where you form a party and explore dangerous dungeons. Dangerous isn’t an exaggeration. This game is brutally difficult, making any mistakes cost you dearly, by wiping out characters. Death comes quickly, and if you’re unprepared, you can get hit by a one-shot spell that kills your entire party. It’s tough, but it’s still a lot of fun.

Thief had a new entry. It was a reboot or something. I’m not sure. All I know is that it wasn’t well received, and it was teased as Thi4f, which is incredibly dumb.

Another 4 from this year was The Sims 4. Much like other games mentioned, this one also went on for over a decade. There is no sign of Sims 5 in 2025, and it isn’t even being considered at the time of writing.

Now for a quick edition of “games I played but no one else cares about”: LoadOut was a cartoony third person shooter, where the gimmick was making your own guns. You could pick a firing type, such as sniper, shotgun or rocket, add elemental effects and other things, including healing. The guns were horribly unbalanced, but the game was fun in a party game sense. It was free to play and multiplayer only, so it was shut down and can’t be played anymore.

Town of Salem was a social deduction game. Think something like Among Us. You had to figure out who’s who using deduction tactics, and you would vote during the day to see who would be executed. A friend of mine and I would play this and try to get the other players to execute us under false pretenses.

Fistful of Frags was a first person cowboy shooter where you’d yee-haw and shoot each other with coach guns and six-shooters. Pass the whiskey.

The year prior we had Flappy Bird, a mobile game that was delisted and any device with it installed went up in price. Same thing happened to consoles with PT installed. PT (Playable Teaser) was a demo/proof of concept for a possible upcoming Silent Hill game. You would run around a house, looping through it, seeing different creepy things each time. There was a talking baby fetus thing that looked like the thing from Eraserhead. Despite it being a demo, it captivated millions before being delisted and highly sought-after.

Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z is another parallel to previous years. Remember back when DmC: Devil May Cry came out, and I said Japanese studios should never outsource to western devs? Well, they didn’t listen, and we got Yaiba. A truly horrendous game, Yaiba took the beloved Ninja Gaiden series, gave it a comic book coat of paint, added some cringe-inducing comedy and put zombies in it. The result was a mess of a game. It played nothing like Ninja Gaiden, it was more like a cheap knock-off of God of War, with tons of spongy enemies that took forever to kill. You had multiple attacks, but none of them did anything, so you would end up mashing like an idiot hoping something would die. It was full of flow-breaking puzzles and platforming sections, in-game cutscenes and a ton of nonsense. It’s a lot like Ninja Gaiden 4. Both games are awful, but I think Yaiba is way worse. This game sucks.

We also had Five Nights at Freddy’s, the game that introduced millions of kids to horror, the Internet and launched Matt Pat’s entire career. To think that the Pope would have never gotten a copy of Undertale if it hadn’t been for this game.

The biggest releases this year were Dark Souls 2 and Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor.

Dark Souls 2 is the second game in the Dark Souls franchise (you can tell by the 2 next to the name). It takes the high difficulty of the first game, and elevates it to kaizo levels, filling each stage with a ton of annoying enemies. This game is often seen as “not a great Dark Souls game, but a good game in general”, and I disagree wholeheartedly. I think this game is terrible. I got through it with gritted teeth after having enjoyed the first one. The locations are bland, boring and uninteresting. Each section is a glorified hallway with one or two things to do and see. There are sections like The Gutter and Shrine of Amana which made me want to rip out my hair, then my clothes, then my skin. They were designed by a mad man with hatred in his heart. Most bosses were complete pushovers, going down in one attempt. There were some bosses that were just a room full of regular enemies, but a health bar appeared underneath. The movement was a lot faster and floatier, everything felt like it had less weight, nothing interesting happened, and then there was the section at the end where you had to go into giants’ dreams or something to find the next thing to do. It was a terrible time, and I dropped the game at one point, only to find out I had dropped it at the final boss, so I went back and finished it. It was a disappointing time, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, fan of the series or not.

Shadow of Mordor, or what I like to call it, Shadow of Boredom, was an Assassin’s Creed style game set in the Lord of the Rings universe. You play as the Gravewalker, an undead who-

PRETENDER! My name is known at grave sites throughout Mordor. The dead rise when they hear my incantations. I EARNED the title of Gravewalker, and now you sully the name by using it for yourself. This ends now!

What was that all about? Anyways, you play as the guy, and he’s dead, but an elf spirit brings him back to undeath and you have to kill orcs. It uses the Batman Arkham Assylum style of combat where you fly from one enemy to the next with the push of a button. It’s very repetitive, with missions that have you walking from one-

GRAVEWALKER! I’m gonna stick a spear so far up your arse you’ll cut your tongue every time you speak!

-That’s rude. Like I said, the missions had you going from one spot to the next, following a highlighted path to interact with highlighted objects with no real interactivity. Follow the preplanned path, and press the button when the game tells you to. It’s incredibly boring-

GRAVEWALKER! Cut me all you like! You’re the one who’ll be dead at the end!

-SHUT UP! This was another reason why I hated this game. While you’re trying to engage with the boring, shallow combat, you keep getting interrupted by orcs coming at you and shouting. Anytime a named orc appears, it triggers an unskippable in-game cutscene that shifts the camera to the orc for a few seconds while they spout their taunts. It breaks what little flow the gameplay has going all to show you some green guy screaming nonsense at you. If there are multiple orcs showing up one after another, things get ridiculous-

GRAVEWALKER! I HAD A BOWL OF NAILS FOR BREAKFAST… WITHOUT ANY MILK!

Oh for God’s sake, let’s wrap this up.

What piece of junk did I pick as my favorite from this mess of a year?

My pick for 2014: Sunset Overdrive

Originally a launch title for the Xbox One, this underrated shooter flopped hard, but it’s a blast to play. I ignored it for years because it was an X-Bone exclusive, and I didn’t want that console, and the marketing made it look incredibly cringey. Don’t get me wrong, the game is a cringe-fest, but it plays well, at least. I always recommend it to anyone who would listen.

I wrote a review for it, which you can read here.

With 2014 being one of the worst years in gaming, that means things can only get better in 2015. Right?

2015

Things did not get better in 2015.

Starting off with Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5. I love the Pro Skater series, but this one is a complete travesty. It’s a bland, buggy mess. A lot of others have covered it in more detail, and I don’t care much for it. It’s a soul-less cash grab, and I like to pretend it doesn’t exist.

Rise of the Tomb Raider. It was a third person action adventure game with crafting. It was like Uncharted, it had elements of Assassin’s Creed, it was every game at the same time, and nothing all at once. I wrote an excessively long review on it. Click here to read it.

Black Desert Online is a Korean MMO grindfest. It takes place in a massive open world with no fast travel. Fight monsters, farm, cook, fish and do all sorts of activities to make number go up. It was a very complex game, with an overwhelming amount of things to do and a massive world to explore. I had fun with it while I played it, but then a few years back they changed owners and I lost my account in the process.

Another long-running multiplayer game that released this year was Rainbow Six Siege. The premiere four-dimensional tactical shooter. Get shot through an angle you didn’t check, through a wall or through a small bullet hole. It’s fun and stressful in equal measure. Like other games mentioned in these years, it was also overhyped and sold as a different product before release.

On the Wii U we have what is now Tomonobu Itagaki’s final game, sadly, Devil’s Third. This was like a prototype of Wanted Dead, blending melee combat and third person shooter. Neither half worked particularly well, and it was a bit of a mess. The game had some interesting ideas, but the execution was wonky. The constant in-game cutscenes didn’t help. No one would have known about this game if Itagaki’s name wasn’t attached to it.

Time for a quick round of “games I played no one cares about”. First off is Rise of Incarnates. It was a very short-lived free to play Gundam Versus style game. You picked a hero that was linked to some mythological deity and you’d fight in 2v2 battles. It was interesting, but it didn’t secure an audience in the five months it was online. Yes, it only lasted five months. It launched in July, got pulled from Steam in October, then it was completely shut down in December. Apparently the game couldn’t become a hit in three months. The other game was Dirty Bomb. It was another free to play multiplayer game, but this one was a first person shooter. It was fun, but it was removed. You can still technically play it, from what I’ve read online, but I haven’t confirmed it.

Another online multiplayer game that was shut down was Evolve. It launched as a paid game, and it had some critical success, but there weren’t enough players to sustain it. It went free to play, but that wasn’t enough, and it was shut down in 2018. It was an interesting asymmetrical shooter where one team played as the hunters and another player was a giant monster, and they had to fight each other. The idea hasn’t been picked up by another game.

For shooters this year, we had Fallout 4 and Halo 5. Fallout 4 took the already anemic RPG elements from the first-person Fallout games, and stripped them down even further, leaving only the terrible shooting. It was a success, somehow, proving people will really lap up anything if it has a recognizable IP attached to it. Halo 5 was another game. I didn’t play it, because it looked extremely boring, and if Halo 4 was anything to go by, it was.

We also got the first Helldivers, a fun isometric shooter best known today as “that one game that came before Helldivers 2”. It’s a great game once you understand a few of its quirks.

Heroes of the Storm released this year, to a confused chorus of “what?”. Blizzard was throwing its hat into the MOBA ring long after the fad had passed. They missed out on acquiring DotA2, so now they went and made their own dota. It had some interesting ideas, and it was decently entertaining, but it didn’t make the usual trillions of dollars Blizzard is used to seeing, so it was put to rest.

There’s Rocket League, which I haven’t played, and it segues into the “games I haven’t played” corner. Witcher 3 is the most popular game ever, and I haven’t played it, because I wanted to play the fist two before it, and I played part of the first one and stopped for some reason. Splatoon also released, but I never had a Wii U nor any intention of playing this. Undertale also released this year, much to my not-playing it. If Matt Pat gave me a copy of this game, much like he did to the Pope, I wouldn’t play it either. Bloodborne, I haven’t played it. It’s stuck in PlayStation jail, and I don’t own one, nor do I plan on owning one at any point. If it ever comes to PC (loud, mocking laughter), I’ll play it.

Hatred released this year, and it vanished. It caused a ton of controversy before release, being banned of Steam at one point, and causing everyone to clutch their pearls. It was an isometric shooter where you play a guy in a trench coat who shoots guns. He basically goes postal. That sounds very familiar. The game was mediocre, and it was forgotten a week after launch, showing that sometimes, the best thing you can do is ignore something if you don’t want it to get publicity.

This year also saw the release of Mordheim: City of the Damned, which was one of my first reviews.

What sort of nonsense did I pick as my favorite from this underwhelming year?

My pick for 2015: Yakuza 0

A dramatic soap opera JRPG disguised as a manly brawler. This and Like A Dragon have been the only Yakuza games I’ve played, and they’ve both been fantastic. There’s a lot of stuff to do, to the point where it’s a bit overwhelming. The combat is fun, the soundtrack is bopping and it has a financial mini-game which really speaks to me for some reason. It gets bonus points for featuring Ai Uehara as a character (don’t google her in public).

No runners up because, come on. Do you see what I’m working with here?

Maybe 2016 will be better. Or it won’t. It won’t.

2016

Battleborn came out and it was smashed to the ground. No one cared about it. I saw preview footage of it and it looked atrocious. There’s a fan effort to make a private server for the game and that seems like a huge waste of time. This game looks like crap. If you want a shooter MOBA, go play Deadlock.

Battleborn was destroyed because it released alongside Overwatch, Blizzard’s shiny new franchise. This was like Team Fortress 2, but with pretty girls and less content. The game was alright at first, then patch culture and competitive gaming shaped it into a sterile mess of shields and stalemates. It helped popularize the concept of hero shooters. God have mercy on us all.

Call of Duty Infinite released, and I don’t care for the game. All I remember is that the reveal trailer for this game was disliked into oblivion on YouTube. Millions of people still bought this game and ate it up like good little consumer piggies.

Battlefield 1 also released this year. It was infamous for being a mess at launch, which was the style at the time. Crowbcat’s glitch compilation has over 7 million views. People learned their lesson and stopped buying crappy games. Juuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuust kidding. It sold like crazy. Then when Battlefield 2042 came out years later, it was a broken mess, too, but people went back to Battlefield 1 because they saw it as the more polished product. To me, this is irrefutable proof that games are declining in quality, and people never learn their lessons.

Mighty Number 9 released this year, and it was crappy, but no one bought it, so there’s an upside to that, at least.

Persona 5 released, spawning a huge wave of Persona fans who have never played the games. I am not a fan of the series, and I haven’t played the games.

In indie games this year, we got Stardew Valley. A worthy successor to Harvest Moon with its own flavor. It’s nice, cozy and it has a lot to do and some interesting characters to socialize with. I liked it a lot.

There’s also Mother Russia Bleeds, a horror beat-em-up that takes cues from Hotline Miami. Punch your way through Russia’s criminal underground and overcome an addiction to drugs. It’s pretty okay.

There’s Rabi-Ribi, a game that’s not about being a Jewish Rabbi. You play as a bunny girl, which is the exact opposite of a Rabbi, and you explore an interconnected metroidvania world, fighting bullet hell bosses. It’s a lot of fun.

There was also Let it Die, another Suda 51 mind trip. This time, it’s a free to play Souls-like with pay to win elements and an eternal grind. Wait, that sounds terrible. It was pretty frustrating, but speaking of sounding terrible, its soundtrack does not. It’s an eclectic mix of weird styles and unique artists. It even has Wakusei Abnormal on it. The soundtrack alone is worth checking out.

Devil Daggers was another indie game that released this year. It’s an experimental first person shooter that looks like a nightmare. Play its sequel HYPER DEMON if you want to transcend and experience Hell.

Furi was another indie game. It’s a boss rush where you go up against different colorful enemies. The bosses are very hit-or-miss in terms of quality, with some being fun, some being complete pushovers and others being The Burst.

Enter The Gungeon is yet another indie game. This top-down shooter has you going around the titular dungeon to defeat a dragon, go back in time and kill your own past. It’s a blast, full of a ton of secrets and some great arcadey action.

This year saw the release of the premiere stress simulator Darkest Dungeon. A game where you make a party and descend into horrid dungeons. I played it for a few hours, but it’s too much. Getting your entire party wiped by a random crit that starts a chain reaction where your tank kills your healer makes Stranger of Sword City look fair by comparison.

Speaking of dungeon crawlers, we got Labyrinth of Refrain. This weeb dungeon RPG from the makers of Disgaea has you exploring the titular Labyrinth of Refrain. It’s one of those niche weeb games on the Vita. I have been playing it on and off for a few months for a review, and I had a lot of fun with it at first, but it just keeps going and going and going. It’s nowhere near as long as I’m making it out to be, Stranger of Sword City is longer, but it really starts to drag after a point. The Three Towers of Umbra are no fun.

There’s also Titanfall 2, the sequel to Titanfall (you can tell by the two in the name). It’s a fast-paced good time.

Another shooter we got this year was DOOM 2016. It’s not the two-thousandth and sixteenth entry in the series, it’s just a reboot. It tries to keep the same energy of the original games, but with a lot more in-game cutscenes, a much lower enemy density and an emphasis on glory kills. It’s competent.

Combining shooters and indies we got Superhot, the most innovative shooter. It’s a first person shooter where time only moves when you move. At least that’s what it says on the box. In reality, time never really stops, it just moves very very slowly. You can tell because if there’s a bullet coming at you, you can stand still all you want, it’s still going to inch its way towards your soft little skull. It’s a ton of fun, taking an almost turn-based approach to gunfights. The game then shows you your run in real-time, making you look like an action star.

Another indie shooter we got this year was Toxikk. This was a throwback to arena shooters, heavily inspired by Unreal Tournament. It looked great, felt great and played great, with good netcode. Sadly, it never caught on, and only had a few dozen players. Arena shooters are a lot like Classical music. Everyone wants to say they like it, but no one actually wants to play them/listen to it. I bought it on release to tell the developers that yes, we want arena shooters, but it wasn’t enough.

Girl’s Frontline released, too. It’s a mobile gacha where you collect anthropomorphized gun waifus. It’s surprisingly difficult. It was released on Steam recently, even though the sequel (in name only) is already out.

Street Fighter V came out. Like most games of the era, its launch was a complete and unmitigated disaster. Its netcode was never up to par, and it was an overall disappointment, but it was Street Fighter, so everyone in the FGC had to put up with it. I got it much later after release for $5, and thought it was worth it at that price point. Lucia was great, even if she was just Ken but worse.

Can’t talk about gaming in 2016 without mentioning Pokemon Go. This mobile game swept the world and had droves of people going outside for the first time. It was a fad that faded quickly, but it was massive as it was happening. It was crazy to see. The game was even referenced by name in Hilary Clinton’s best campaign speech.

Which slop did I tolerate the most out of all this-

GRAVEWALKER! YOU HEAR ME YOU BASTARD? I’ll cut off your nutsack and nail it to my door!

-Sheesh I thought we left this bit back in 2014.

My pick for 2016: Enter The Gungeon

A neat little roguelite shooter with a ton of secrets to explore. I don’t have much of an emotional attachment to it, like with a lot of games of this era, which is why I mentioned it previously in the article, unlike the others where I hold it off until the end. I still recommend it.

Conclusion

That’s the list up to 2016. A dark, dark time indeed. I hope it gets better, but I know it won’t.

Join us next time for more doomer-posting about videogames. Up next we’ve got indie darlings like Hollow Knight and Cuphead. Bet you can’t wait to read what kooky opinions I got on those two. I see… wow… 2018 is looking grim. 2019 at least has Sekiro, which I like… OR DO I? Find out in the next installment of “Roger rants for way too long about games”.

I Hate Videogames

Read the previous installment (2005 to 2008)

2009

I didn’t mention it in the summary for 2008, but the housing crisis officially started. This isn’t a financial analysis blog. We talk about videogames and make unfunny jokes, but even I know that giving out mortgages to people who can’t repay them would be a disaster. Same with college loans. You can’t give out fifty thousand dollar loans to an eighteen year old expecting them to pay it back. The bubble’s gonna pop eventually, especially when no one can get a job with their degree, thanks to degrees being devalued, because everyone is going to college, because everyone can afford a fifty thousand dollar degree thanks to the loans.

Is what I would be saying if the world made sense, but it doesn’t. The money’s fake, you can print more if you need it, and if you’re a huge bank, you’re deemed “too big to fail” and get a government bailout. I sure wish the government had bailed me out when I spent my entire paycheck one month on gacha pulls. I made a power point explaining my situation to the bank, but the guy handling the case said that spending all my money on PNGs of anime girls was unwise, even if the summer outfits were, admittedly, really cute.

This air of financial instability underscores 2008 up to around 2013, when it mysteriously vanishes and everyone wonders why everything is so expensive all of a sudden.

Swine flu hit in 2009. Swine flu comes from pigs, and the best way to combat it was to combat the pigs directly, by hurling birds at their flimsy fortresses. That’s right it’s Angry Birds! The hit mobile game that took the world by storm and created the phenomenon of kids coming up to you and asking if you have games on your phone. This simple little physics game was easy to learn and it had enough randomness to entice casual players and keep them in a “one more level” loop. If you were alive during that time, you know how massive it was.

Plants vs Zombies also released this year to make sure your new iPhone’s battery would be spent on flash games instead of calls. Much like Angry Birds was based off Crush the Castle (a flash game), Plants vs Zombies was a take on the popular tower defense genre that dominated “addicting flash games” sites. You’d place down little plants and defend your house against waves of zombies, each with their own little quirks. The game was surprisingly good, offering a simplified but clever take on the tower defense genre. It had a lot of levels and it explored each of its gameplay ideas thoroughly. This was from the time that even a flash mobile game was made with some level of competence.

If you wanted even less gameplay in your game, and more social interaction, you had Farmville. A Facebook game that had everyone and their mother watering digital crops and pestering each other for more supplies.

This was when free to play was really hitting it big. We had the short-lived mess that was Battlefield Heroes, a more kid-friendly take on the Battlefield franchise. It had some of the things you know from the series; tanks, planes, objectives, with a cartoony presentation and cooldown-based hero powers. It was incredibly unbalanced and pay to win.

Speaking of free-to-play games with cooldown based hero powers, we got League of Legends. Yes, this game is ancient. What started off as a continuation of the Defense of the Ancients mod by ex-developers, quickly became its own mega-hit in the coming years. It popularized free-to-play with terrible micro-transactions, showing you could get millions of players by offering a small percentage of your game, and charging out the ass for the rest. Seriously, look up how much it costs to get every single hero in the game. Oh, but you can get them for free by playing. You just need to play non-stop for the next eight years, but it’s doable if you’re violently unemployed. I used to play League religiously back around 2010, but then DotA2 came out and I stopped. I’ve tried playing it again, but it’s completely different. It’s like a Ship of Theseus thing. Over the decade plus that this thing has been online, it has been receiving balance patches every few days. Once everything about it changes, is it even the same game? It sure is. I can still get forced into a 40 minute game with the most toxic people imaginable and get reported if I so much as call one of those shit-heads a shit-head.

Enough of these free-to-play baby games, it’s time for REAL GAMES… that I didn’t play! First we got Little Big Planet. I never had a PS3 (or any PS after 2), so I never played this, but it looked fun. You could make your own levels and play them with friends. This translated to “remake Mario 1-1 endlessly, but with dicks”. Every level had dicks. MadWorld didn’t have dicks, but it had you shaking your Wii remote like one. Perform gory kills in this Frank Miller inspired brawler from Platinum. It looked like fun, but at the time I was, and still am, deathly allergic to motion control gimmicks. I sure hope they don’t become a fad at some point. That’d be miserable. Speaking of misery, Demon’s Souls! I’ve heard it’s good, but I’m not getting a Playstation just to play it. We also got Dragon Age: Origins, which is like Mass Effect, but fantasy. I didn’t understand this one. Mass Effect was already a worse version of the classic Dungeons and Dragons rpgs like Planescape and Baldur’s Gate, so then they go and release a direct comparison to those, but with less depth?

Speaking of games with “origin” in their name, X-men Origins: Wolverine. It was a third person hack and slash where you played as Wolverine. Its main gimmick was that it was the first time you’d see Wolverine using his claws to actually slice and maim people. The firs time if you’d never read any of the X-men comics, that is, which is who the game was aimed at. People who were huge fans of the Marvel movies, but didn’t read comics. The game itself was a lot of fun. It had a leap mechanic and you could fly around like a deranged cat and claw at your enemies. It was diet God of War, but like Coke Zero, it doesn’t taste as good as the real thing, but it’s still pretty dang good.

Red Faction Guerrilla was a game all about breaking stuff. It featured a detailed physics engine that would let you destroy ANYTHING. Well, any man-made structure, at least. It was fun, but the destructible environments made the game more of a novelty than anything. Since every building was made of crackers, you couldn’t have indoor levels, and since simulating an entire building crumbling took so much processing power, everything had to be completely bland. You’d have entire apartment buildings that you could take down by ramming a car into them, but once you were inside, you’d see they were empty with no chairs or tables, and the walls were flat gray. It was still a fun time, up until a random grenade blew up the building next to you and flattened you with it.

If you wanted to break everything, including the ground, you could play Minecraft. The game was still in its early phases of development, but it still showed its potential. The simple gameplay loop of gathering and building was incredibly addictive, and you could make a lot of cool stuff even with the basic blocks at the time. No one could predict that it would become the biggest game ever, but we were having fun building brown bricks in Minecraft.

The Batman Arkham series premiered this year, making you really feel like batman. This was a big shake-up at the time, since every other Batman game had sucked. This wasn’t just good for a Batman game, it was good all around. It put you in the Arkham prison, setting you loose on a bunch of henchmen. This game was good, but it also popularized “Detective vision”, where you’d press a button and the objectives would be highlighted. This then lead to the death of intuitive level design and organic sign-posting. Instead of making a level that could be navigated by humans, just stick a billion props in there and have the player press the “where do I go?” button to highlight the one thing you need to look at to progress the game.

If you wanted more puzzle detective work, you could check out 999, or Nine Hours Nine Persons Nine Doors, or Zero Escape. I’ll be calling it 999 from here on. It was a puzzle visual novel where you had to escape rooms and solve a mystery involving a Saw-style game with a cast of colorful characters. The puzzles were a little easy, but entertaining, and the overall story was nice. The characters were memorable, and the soundtrack was incredible. The only thing about this game is that I don’t know of anyone who played it, and I want to discuss the True Ending with someone because it makes no sense whatsoever.

Borderlands doesn’t make any sense, either. Premiering in 2009, this birthed the Looter-Shooter genre, where you shoot and get loot. The part about this game that doesn’t make sense is how it managed to become such a massive franchise. Its core gameplay is abysmal. It’s a slow, weightless shooter with hallway levels and enemies that are so dumb they would be more at home in congress. It’s boring, the characters are insufferable, there’s constant chattering, the world is depressing, the RPG elements are about as deep as a dog’s water dish and the game boasts about its millions of guns but they all feel the same. Genuinely baffles me how anyone could find this entertaining.

Prototype also came out this year. It was a sort of spiritual successor to the game Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction (which I don’t know if I mentioned in 2005). You’d leap from buildings, take down tanks and turn into a horrific tentacle monster. I’d say more about it, but the PC version is a pain in the ass to get working on modern systems.

Halo ODST released, too. It was alright. I spent most of my time with it playing Firefight. The Firefight mode in Halo Infinite is a disappointment.

Out of all these wonderful sloppers, which one did I give my government bail out to?

My pick for 2009: Bayonetta

Along with MadWorld, this was Platinum’s first official game, and they knocked it out of the park… and peaked early but that’s just my opinion. The game itself is a wonderful spectacle fighter where you play as Bayonetta, a pissed-off librarian who takes down monstrous angels with style. It’s fun, it has some great set pieces, the combat is great, it’s fluent and accessible while still having some technical bits. The enemy design is good, with a nice mix of more passive combo fodder and aggressive enemies that make you play defensive, combat encounters are nice and varied. The soundtrack is great, too. The only downsides are the over reliance on quick time events and the parry accessory is a bit overpowered. Other than that, no notes. Excellent stuff.

I can’t wait to see what gaming wonders await in the exciting year of…

2010

This was the year My Little Pony premiered, giving birth to bronies. Well, that’s certainly an omen of things to come. I want to go back to 2009 now, please.

Why go back to 2009, when there are videogames to discuss? We got Scott Pilgrim vs The World: The Game. A truly horrific beat-em-up made by people who don’t know the genre. Don’t believe me? I reviewed it in detail here.

I still want to go back. Maybe the next game will change my mind: Fallout New Vegas. Oh God. Everyone loves this game, but I can’t stand it. It’s so boring. The shooting is terrible, the world is massive but empty, and I don’t care about the shallow RPG elements.

That last one didn’t work, but how about Metro 2033- AUGH. I hated this one, too. Limp shooting and every encounter is interrupted by a cutscene. This is less like a game and more like a rushed tour through a theme park. I don’t see the appeal of it at all.

Halo: Reach? I guess? It wasn’t awful, but I didn’t care about it at all. Funny story about this game, I bought it and played it for a few hours when it released. Then, years later, I was cleaning out a closet and this game fell out of a pile of junk. I looked at it and had a genuine moment of “when did I buy this? I have this game?”. That’s how much of an impact it had on me. The thing I remember most is Egoraptor’s old cartoon on it. Turns out that no, I was in fact not ready for Halo: Reach.

Wow this year’s looking to be a real stinker. Maybe a list of games I didn’t play will cheer me up. We got Epic Mickey. I have literally no opinion on this whatsoever. Head empty, zero thoughts. I just know it was advertised a lot on release. Danganronpa premiered this year. I have it in my Steam library but haven’t played it yet. Seems alright, I’ve enjoyed other games by these developers. Its fanbase is annoying as hell. We also got Heavy Rain. JASON! JASON? JAAAASON. Shaun? SHAAAAAAAAAAAUN. SHAUN.

StarCraft 2. It was a game.

Vanquish came out. I’ve played this. It’s a cover-based third person shooter. I don’t like those. Oh, but you’re not supposed to use cover, you’re supposed to slide around! Slide around from cover to cover. I’ve never clicked with this game. Everyone describes it as this high-octane, stylish shooter but it’s a cover shooter with sliding.

Super Meat Boy is like Vanquish. They’re both games. I liked Super Meat Boy. It was fun, and it was one of the first big indie breakout hits.

We also got Mass Effect 2. I played this on release. I loved Mass Effect at the time, and was excited for the new one. Then I played it and accidentally 100% completed it and got the good ending. I went to do a second playthrough with my other character and realized I had already seen all the game had to offer. Fantastic. Amazing. Miranda’s ass saves this game from being completely forgotten.

Man there has to be something to talk about this year. Let’s see here… uh… there’s Powder Toy. A free physics simulator that simulates little particles with detailed fluids, realistic temperature changes, and electricity. You can make little logic gates. It’s fun. It’s the most interesting thing here.

There’s also Shank, a 2D beat-em-up I reviewed. It’s good. Skip the sequel.

Donkey Kong Country Returns was a good time. It brought back Donkey Kong for some platforming fun after years of absence. It had varied, creative levels and some legitimately challenging bonus levels.

Red Dead Redemption came out this year. Grand Theft Auto in the old west. Saying it like that sounds like I’m being reductive, but it’s a compliment. It nails the atmosphere and it really makes you feel like a rootin’ tootin’ shootin’ cowboy. This is also one of the few games where I care about the story. It’s a tale of redemption (as the name implies) told through some stellar character writing. It also uses actual themes, reinforcing the central point of the narrative with parallel stories. Imagine that. A game where the story has effort put into it! The ending is kind of jarring, since John dies at the end (the game guy, not the book) and you’ve seen him survive worse. This moment introduced the term “ludo-narrative dissonance” into popular use and launched thousands of pompous essays on videogames.

Out of all these incredible games, which did I pick as my favorite?

My pick for 2010: Just Cause 2

Yeah, I picked this over Red Dead Redemption. I know, I know. It’s a lot more fun. Both games are open world third person shooters, but only one of them has a grappling hook. I know about the lasso, but it doesn’t count. This one’s a win for Rico. This action-packed game had you blasting government property to liberate a small island nation. There was a lot of freedom, with a detailed physics engine that let you tether things together and use them to cause mayhem. You could also shoot a speeding car’s tires and watch as it spun out of control and exploded. It was like playing Grand Theft Auto with cheats on, but more fun.

I’m sure things will get better from here on.

2011

The year of Party Rockin’. Bacon was the most epic thing ever, moustaches were ironic, everyone was mocking a 13 year old girl for making “Friday”, and they would have kept going but they took an arrow to the knee.

I REALLY want to go back to 2009 now.

Why was everyone getting injured by arrows? Because of Skyrim. It’s fallout with swords. The biggest game ever, ported to every system multiple times. It spawned a legion of unfunny memes and saturated gaming discussion for years. It birthed thousands of modders who are still keeping this frail skeleton of a game alive well past its expiration date. I have not played this, and have zero interest in it. I don’t care how many times Todd Howard ports it, I’m not playing it.

I guess this means we’re in the “games I didn’t play” section. We got LA Noire. It’s like a movie. I can look back on it now and appreciate the fact that it’s a Rockstar game that isn’t Grand Theft Auto. The Stanley Parable was also a non-game. It was about walking around and listening to a narrator be oh so clever about videogames. Post-modernism and hipster irony are to culture what hydrochloric acid is to soft tissue. There’s Shadows of the Damned, whose development is a huge mess that’s worth looking into. The game itself looks interesting.

We got Bulletstorm. A game I reviewed and thoroughly hated.

There’s Portal 2, which was really good. The multiplayer mode is a ton of fun, and it has some great puzzles.

Deus Ex returns with Deus Ex: Human Revolution. A game that’s really good, until you get to the much less detailed and much less interactive second half.

Red Faction Armageddon was a follow-up to Guerilla, but it wasn’t received well. People, myself included, expected another open world physics sandbox, instead we got a corridor-based third person shooter set inside caves. No one wanted that, and the game was completely ignored. Years later, I got the game on sale for two dollars and gave it a shot. It’s a surprisingly good third person shooter with great physics. The environments are repetitive, and the later levels throw an insane amount of enemies at you, to the point where it gets tedious, but it’s a decent game. Undeserving of the hate it got. Then I remembered one of its advertised features was a unicorn gun that shot rainbows out of its ass. That’s horrifically 2010s coded. Epic bacon unicorn rainbow moustache lasers.

There were also three games with the number three in them. Serious Sam 3 was the third installment in the Serious Sam franchise. It was horrifically ugly, sporting the signature brown and bloom that was the style at the time, and it brought Sam back to ancient Egypt to retread old ground. It’s long, tedious and it has some terrible indoor sections. Saints Row 3 was also a piece of software you could buy. It ramped up the kookiness of the second game into self-parody levels. It’s very of its time, with some changes to the formula that I didn’t really enjoy. The third three in this trinity is Marvel vs Capcom 3. Chaotic, wildly imbalanced, but tons of fun. It was superseded by the Ultimate edition, which came out a few months after the original.

TERA online launched this year. It was an MMO with real time action combat. I played it for a bit and it was fun, even if it ran like garbage. It also had big bazoogas.

SpaceChem also released. I don’t know when I’ll get to talk about this game, so I’ll do it here. It’s a very complicated puzzle game where you combine atoms to make chemical compounds. You program the process into a machine and watch it go. You have to be mindful of each atom’s placement, where they spawn and where you output them. The puzzles get even more meticulous when you have to chain multiple reactors together and manage multiple inputs and outputs. It’s a tough, replayable puzzle game that will test your brain more than any other puzzle game. It made me realize that I’m a big dumb dumb, but it’s still very entertaining and beautifully made.

Let’s get on with the favorite.

My pick for 2011: Dark Souls

This year sucked. I didn’t want to pick Dark Souls. It’s not that I don’t like it. It’s the opposite. I didn’t want to pick it because I like it.

Wait, that doesn’t make sense, does it? If it’s my favorite game, it means I like it, right? Yeah, but I only like Dark Souls. I don’t have any specific affinity towards it. It’s the best out of this year, but I wouldn’t take a bullet for it.

Another reason why I didn’t want this game to be my pick for 2011 is because I have nothing to add to the games’ discussion. Everyone thinks the game is great, but loses a lot of steam after in the second half. I agree with that assessment, and have nothing else to add. No controversial opinion, no unique insight, no funny jokes. Just Dark Souls good. It hard. Funny praise the sun. Jolly co-operation. I am an NPC when it comes to Dark Souls.

I’ll pick Bulletstorm as my anti-favorite. It’s terrible, but at least I feel something for it. Enough to write 8,000 words on it. I enjoyed Dark Souls, but I couldn’t write a high-school essay on what I think of it. I’d have to use a lot of filler words and cheat the spacing to 2.5 while upping the font size to 16.9 to get it to one page.

Why not Portal 2? I liked it, but I played it once on release and never again. I replayed the first game a few times, but I haven’t thought about Portal 2 until I wrote this article.

2012

The world was supposed to end in 2012, according to the Mayan calendar. Looking at the games for this year, I’m glad it didn’t.

The Wii U released.

So did Borderlands 2- dammit. The sequel to one of the most boring games of all time. Now, with even more yapping. I’ve heard people say this game is fun with friends, but I’ve tried it with friends, and it sucks. It’s not that we’re boring. We can do crosswords together and have a blast, it’s the game that’s boring. Once I was playing with another one of my friends, and he was telling me something he did, but the characters in-game kept talking, so he’d stop what he was saying to let the game talk. Then after around three or four interruptions, he yelled “SHUT THE FUCK UP FOR ONE SECOND” and had to mute the game. It’s a boring, infuriating game that only offers the most baseline entertainment to barely qualify as a game. It’s a skinner box. Hell, getting locked in a room with a button that dispenses food in reaction to stimuli sounds like it’d be more interesting than Borderlands 2.

On the subject of beloved first-person games that put me to sleep: Dishonored. It’s a stealth game, but you’re incredibly overpowered and nothing is a challenge. I tried to do a ghost run of the game and, not only is it a walk in the park, it’s also incredibly unfun. The vast majority of the gadgets you get are for killing, which is discouraged in a stealth run.

While I’m tanking my reputation, I might as well talk about FTL: Faster Than Light. An indie game where you’re a ship captain, and you have to navigate hostile sectors of space. It’s interesting in theory, incredibly dull in execution. Most of the time you’re getting hammered by foes that outmatch you, scrounging for parts and money and sort of stumbling along making guesses, hoping you don’t land in a sector with a sun and a pirate. There’s no real rhyme or reason to encounters, and there are two limiting factors in exploration for some reason: fuel and time. It’s all fine and dandy until a stray missile takes out your oxygen bay and everyone dies.

Halo 4 was certainly a videogame. It was the first Halo game not done by Bungie, and it shows. It’s an awkward game that tries to mix Halo and Call of Duty. I played it for a bit on release and didn’t like any of it. Ended up returning it.

PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale was Sony’s answer to Super Smash Bros, but that answer was completely wrong. This was a platform fighter featuring Sony’s most iconic characters such as Fat Princess and a Big Daddy from Bioshock? Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon were curiously absent, but at least we got Kratos. This game was TERRIBLE. The fighting was janky and awkward, the movement was stiff, the combo system was bizarre, the fact that you had to kill an opponent with a super move turned matches into endless stale-mates, the stages were visual vomit where you couldn’t tell what was going on. The presentation was cheap and flimsy, the music sucked, the animations were lazy, the sound effects were flaccid. Bonafide honest-to-goodness dumpster juice pressed onto a disc. If I popped this into a console and got a video of Crash Bandicoot being executed by ISIS I’d be less offended.

After that, I don’t think it could possibly get any worse. What’s next? Oh it’s none other than Mass Effect 3! I bought this game on release day. I drove to Gamestop and got a physical copy of it, the same day it came out, paid $60 for it, brought it home with the intention of enjoying it and seeing the conclusion to the epic Mass Effect saga and Commander Shepherd’s incredible adventure. What I got was a choice between three different colored explosions, and the ship’s comic relief character boning a clanker. If I had popped this into a console and got a video of Garrus being executed by ISIS I’d be less offended. This game is the main reason why I skip cutscenes. Imagine being invested in a mid story over three entire games only to be let down at the end. Not just the end, the entire game was a series of disappointments. Not even Miranda’s prodigious posterior could save this mess.

Now it’s time for everyone’s favorite: the end of the article! No, it’s the section where I list what I didn’t play from the year and disappoint my readers, just like Mass Effect 3 disappointed me. Starting with Diablo 3. I have never played Diablo. No hate or anything, I just never wanted to play it. Fez came out this year, and because Phil Fish is a little crybaby, we won’t get a sequel. I know his name and last name and he’s only made one game. There are a lot of people who don’t even know who Shinji Mikami is, but they know Phil “I made one game and got bullied off the Internet” Fish. To be fair, that’s one more game than I’ve made. Speaking of Shinji Mikami, he worked on Resident Evil 4, which I like. He didn’t work on Resident Evil 6, which I don’t know if I like, because I haven’t played it, because Shinji Mikami wasn’t involved in it. See how it works itself out? Keeping with the Mikami theme, Lollipop Chainsaw. I haven’t played it, it looks interesting, but I heard the PC port was bad. Will have to get my hands on it some other way. The connection is that Chainsaw was made by Suda 51, and he worked with Mikami on Shadows of the Damned. Bravely Default is another game from this year I didn’t play. It looks like a fun JRPG, and I like the art style, but I never owned a 3DS. SSX had a sequel this year. It looks like a soul-less reboot that misunderstands everything the original stood for, and I never played it, even if I loved the SSX series.

Adding to the list of mobile games we got Clash of Clans and Subway Surfers. These should be in the previous section, but I wanted to categorize them thematically with the mobiles.

Ninja Gaiden 3 released, disappointing everyone with its weird combat and lack of weapons. It was received so poorly, that they released the Razor’s Edge edition a few months later, which added a lot of missing content and re-organized some levels to be more playable. Thanks to its tanky enemies, drawn-out fights, bad enemy design, terrible boss fights and constant quick time events, Ninja Gaiden 3 was considered the worst in the franchise. Then Ninja Gaiden 4 came out, did the same things, and people praised it. For the record, I think NG4 is worse than 3. At least 3 kind of feels like Ninja Gaiden.

This year also gave us Street Fighter X Tekken. This fighting game was a crossover between Street Fighter and Tekken, if you couldn’t tell by the subtle name. Its most innovative feature was the timeout system, where fights wouldn’t end by knockout, but by running down the clock. The game was rightfully disliked for being slow, encouraging time scamming and for its scummy DLC practices. It had on-disc DLC, which would become normal in the years after. On a related note, we’re getting Tekken X Street Fighter any day now. Yup. Just wait.

If you wanted a better fighting game, we got Skullgirls, a tag fighter using the ratio system from Capcom vs SNK 2. It had a small roster on release, but each fighter was different from the rest, with distinct playstyles and movesets. It had a great, hand-drawn art style and a kickin’ soundtrack. Lots of fun, and it had way better netcode than anything at the time.

There was also XCOM: Enemy Unknown. A reboot of the Xcom franchise of tactical alien warfare games. It’s a great game, but I never managed to get past the first UFO raid mission. It’s one of my gamer badges of shame. I will get back to it at some point.

We also got a sequel to Counter Strike? Yeah Counter Strike: Global Offensive. An overhaul of CS1.6. Fun fact, the gap between the original Counter Strike and Global Offensive is now shorter than the gap between Global Offensive and whatever comes next.

With all this dreck on deck, who did I pickle to tickle my pickle?

My pick for 2012: Gotham City Impostors

Yeah baby, we’re back with the bizarre niche picks. What the hell even is this? It’s a Call of Duty style first person shooter set in the Batman universe. You play as either the bats or the clowns and you shoot the enemy team with guns. There were different classes based on body type: Heavy, medium and small, each with different health values and speeds. There were loadouts and fun gadgets. There was a glider that let you dive bomb enemies, and if you were using the heavy class, it was a one-shot kill. To counter that, there was an electric lawn gnome you could place that would zap them out of the air. The glider was the preferred cheese tactic, so I’d run the gnome on every load out, zap the flyers down, tea bag them for a bit while they were stunned, then kill them. It got me called a looooooooot of slurs on Xbox Live, so you know it worked. You can’t play it anymore since it was an online-only game and the servers were shut down. This happened to a lot of games from this era.

Runners up: Oh wow! We finally have enough decent games to merit their own runner up section again!

Dragon’s Dogma. It’s a great RPG with interesting combat and some neat little details. It’s a goblin, arisen! It fears fire! Strength in numbers, arisen.

Hotline Miami. Fast paced, brutal, mostly unfair. Make split-second decisions on the best way to clear out rooms full of mafiosos. The soundtrack is one of the all-time greats.

Sleeping Dogs. A man who never eats pork bun is never a whole man.

Mark of the Ninja. Forget Dishonored. That’s old and busted. Mark of the Ninja is a much better stealth game.

Binary Domain. A cover-based third person shooter, and I don’t like those, but this one’s fun. It has good, responsive shooting and some fun moments, even if the boss fights are almost as bad as some in Ninja Gaiden 2.

Conclusion

That was the early 2010s. An uneven set of years that had some surprisingly good stuff hidden away. 2012 turned out to be a strong year, with a lot of good stuff. Around this time up until maybe 2018, my picks will become very safe and boring, seeing as how there were a ton of games releasing each year, but a lot of them were stinkers, if you couldn’t tell by my overwhelmingly negative reaction to a lot of them. Stuff really started to stink from here on out, so expect things to get even more boring. Right now I’m looking at the 2013 list and I see Bioshock Infinite. Hooray.

Tune in next time to see what other shockingly wrong opinion I have on games! Maybe I’ll say something wild about Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor, who knows what I’ll think of Bloodborne, and my opinion on Overwatch could shock and amaze! Probably not.

All this and more on the next installment of this nonsense series!

The Late 2000s

2005

The year was 2005, and the world was once again embroiled in conflict. Over seven-hundred people were injured in London on July 7 in the largest terrorist attack to hit the UK. Multiple suicide bombers attacked four different underground trains in London. I remember hearing about it when it happened, but I don’t see much mention of it after the fact. I’ve heard more people reference the sarin gas attacks that happened in Japan a decade before, but not these. This happened a few years after 9/11, and as a kid, I was convinced I was going to be on the receiving end of a terrorist attack. It didn’t help that the school I was in received bomb threats at around the same time (it was some disgruntled seniors, nothing to do with Al-Qaeda), but the mood was that we could get blown up at any time.

On the other side of the pond, we got hurricane Katrina. It devastated the city of New Orleans and most of the southeast. This lead to hundreds of losses, billions in damages, and that one time Kanye said George Bush doesn’t care about black people, which went viral.

Speaking of viral videos, 2005 was when YouTube was first launched. Before this, you had to make your own site to upload videos, but now anyone could upload embarrassing clips of themselves in 240p for all to see. No more pesky individuality and control over your own uploads, now you could hand them off to YouTube to get compressed and regulated. One step closer to a centralized, sanitized Internet.

One of those videos that became a meme before YouTube was Leeroy Jenkins. A staged comedy skit where a World of Warcraft raid party is discussing a plan, only to have the plan thrown out the window by a guy running in shouting his name, Leeroy Jenkins. It was kind of funny at the time, but in my opinion, overstayed its welcome and introduced the world to the concept of memes which would be beat to the grave and back.

With these articles I always have this nagging thought that it’s a bit tasteless to juxtapose tragedies with videogame things, but it’s a way to establish the overall time frame. It’s still kind of jarring. “hundreds died, millions of homes lost, and the Xbox 360 released.”

The Xbox 360 released. It was the next big thing, the sequel to Microsoft’s black and green Halo machine. It promised high-definition gaming, and it did deliver, with some great games… years after the console’s release. Its original launch was marred by the infamous Red Ring of Death, an error that displayed three red lights on the console’s front that meant “your xbox’s screwed, mate. No Halo for you”. The failure rate on these machines was astronomical, with thousands being sent back in their little coffins to get repaired. I got a 360 for Christmas in 2006. I plugged it in, set up my profile, popped in a game, played for 30 minutes, then got the red ring. Luckily, it came with a warranty and I was able to replace it. Then that second console red ringed within a week.

The console launched with several games, none of which I really care about. A few notable titles include Kameo: Elements of Power, a game developed by Rare after Microsoft acquired it. I have never heard anyone mention this game. Perfect Dark Zero was another Rare developed title. It sucked. Last but not least we had Riiiiiiiidge Racer 6. Remember that one?

The PSP also released this year.

On the previous generation of consoles, things were still in high gear, with the release of multiple high-profile titles.

For the Gamecube we had two huge Capcom titles: Killer 7 and Resident Evil 4. Along with Viewtiful Joe, and the forgotten PNO3, these were a collaboration between Nintendo and Capcom to make exclusives for the Gamecube. This deal worked great, giving us some truly unique, visionary titles that would then get ported to every single console, leaving the Gamecube behind. I still think the original Gamecube versions of these games are the best.

Killer 7 was a psychedelic puzzle game/first person shooter with a slick, cel-shaded art style and a confusing mess of a story. You’d go around levels in third person, moving along a rail like a train on a track, exploring environments and solving simple puzzles. Every now and then you’d come across monsters, where you’d switch to first person mode and shoot them, unleashing torrents of blood. It was a sharp departure from anything else on the Gamecube, which was seen as a console for kids.

Resident Evil 4 followed along a similar path, being a more gritty, M-rated game. The game was more action-oriented than the previous Resident Evil titles, with an emphasis on arcade-style shooting. It’s one of the most critically acclaimed games ever, considered by many to be one of the best games ever.

This is the part of the article where I say something like “and I didn’t play it” or worse, “I played it and didn’t like it”, but in this case, we’re going with a crazy third option. Most of the people, specifically critics, who praised the game, didn’t really like it. Why? Because of the remake. The remake “fixed” the game’s “bad tank controls”. It “modernized” RE4, which was “dated” in its design.

In their review for the game, IGN, the beacons of knowledge blazing out across a black sea of ignorance, said this vomit-inducing gem.

In preparation for this review I returned to the original game for the first time in years and was shocked at how badly this remake was needed. The movement of main star Leon Kennedy felt ridiculously restricted; he struggles to get around as though he’s wearing an old pair of skinny jeans that haven’t fit him since his police academy days, and is immobilised anytime he gets his gun out as though he’s incapable of independent control over his hands and feet at the same time. By modern standards it’s absurd, and would absolutely put off a lot of newcomers before they could begin to understand why this game is so highly regarded.

Source: Resident Evil 4 review, IGN.

Thank goodness the game was fixed! I couldn’t possibly imagine digging through the ancient pharaoh’s sarcophagus to unearth the original game. What an outdated piece of junk!

Good design doesn’t “age”. The original RE4 is still a fantastic game. Its controls were made that way with a purpose. If you think it needed an update, did you really like it? If it was a 10/10 back in 2005, it should still be a ten out of ten now. The remake made it more accessible? You’re telling me that one of the best selling games of all time, ported to every console, wasn’t accessible? The game that sold millions of copies wasn’t “accessible”?

Game critics are hacks and frauds. Feel free to count me in there, too, but at least I can still play the original RE4 and enjoy it. It doesn’t need to be updated.

Guitar Hero came out! Now instead of playing air-guitar along with your favorite songs, you could jam to them with an expensive plastic guitar! Enjoy all your favorite classic rock songs, now with the added percussion of a cheap plastic strum bar clacking along.

Dungeon Fighter Online came out this year. You probably hadn’t heard of it before the Arc System Works game Dungeon Fighter Duel, but this is a Korean MMO beat-em-up. It’s one of the highest grossing games ever, consistently beating out World of Warcraft, even during its heyday. I played it back in 2010 using AOL as a makeshift VPN back before it came to the west. It was fun.

Time for everyone’s favorite section: Games I played that no one cares about or remembers. Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects was an absolutely jank arena fighter where you could play as different Marvel heroes/villains and throw cars at each other. It sucks but it kept me entertained as a kid. NeoGeo Battle Coliseum brought together classic SNK characters for a crossover fighting game that was significantly better than Capcom’s attempt with Fighting Evolution. You could play as the Mars People from Metal Slug. One Piece: Grand Battle was another jank arena fighter I played a lot as a kid. As the name suggests, it was based off One Piece. You’d pick from the straw hat crew or any villain before the Alabasta arc and duke it out. It was surprisingly decent and it had a lot of personality. It used the 4kids dub, and hearing Sanji yell “YOU JOIK!” in his weird, nasally New York accent has stuck with me for ages. Here’s the entire cinematic attack, and I remember every cringey phrase from it. I highly recommend you watch it. I need to spread the virus to more people.

Submachine was another game I played. Submachine was a series of flash games where you’d solve puzzles in eerie, empty locations. I used to play a ton of flash games at this time, as did many others, and this series was one of my favorites. They were re-released on Steam! Check them out.

Rogue Galaxy was a JRPG I played for some reason. I was never into JRPGs as a kid, but I ended up playing this one. It was fun, even if I don’t remember anything about it. Neither does anyone else, since I’ve never seen anyone mention this game. It reminds me a lot of Skies of Arcadia, which is a good thing.

Ratchet: Deadlocked was another videogame. A darker, edgier take on Ratchet and Clank with more emphasis on shooting and less platforming. It was fun, but I still think Up Your Arsenal was better.

On the subject of big games that I didn’t play: Psychonauts and Shadow of the Colossus. Psychonauts just never looked like something I’d enjoy. I’ll probably give it a shot at some point, but its status as that one game everyone loves but no one plays and my general distaste for Tim Schafer keep me away from it. Shadow of the Colossus is certainly a game. Everyone praises it for its story, atmosphere, music and production. Notice the gameplay isn’t listed there. The first Yakuza game came out this year. I’ve only ever played Yakuza 0 and Like a Dragon. They were great, but the games look like they’re the same thing over and over. If I played one I’ve played them all.

Urban Reign also came out in 2005. I reviewed it. I didn’t like it. I’ve been seeing a lot of Urban Reign apologists rise up recently, and I don’t like that one bit. I might have to revisit this one and write an article detailing why they’re all wrong.

Out of all these, which non-Resident Evil 4 game did I pick as my favorite?

My pick for 2005: Devil May Cry 3

If you were reading this whole section wondering “why didn’t he mention DMC3 in the Capcom section?” it’s because it’s down here. This game has some high highs, and really low lows, but it all evens out to a great time. The combat is a ton of fun, with dozens ways of interacting with enemies, letting you set up great combos. The atmosphere is fantastic, the visuals still hold up, the music is incredible. It set the ground work for the modern action game, and then modern action games completely disregarded it and did some other bullshit.

Controversial note: Style switching does not belong in DMC3. The intended way to play it is with the locked styles and fixed weapon loadouts like in the original. Style switch mods are reddit.

Runners up: Burnout Revenge for the PS2. The perfect game to play while hanging out, smoking weed and filling your belly with DIET soda.

Serious Sam 2. Finally, Sam is out of ancient Egypt. This game’s a fun time, even if the levels are the longest things ever (like this article).

2006

You heard about Pluto? It’s messed up, right? They demoted it to dwarf planet status this year. Eight planets bullied number nine until he left.

On the Internet front we were being subjected to the nuclear radiation of Caramelldansen, an infectiously catchy audio virus in the form of a Swedish techno song. Everyone thought it was Japanese, myself included, thanks to its ties to weeb culture at the time. It wasn’t the only song and dance making the rounds at the time, as this year also gave us The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, whose ending Hare hare Yukai dance choreography made anime fans move their bodies for the first time in years. One YouTube comment said “the girls who did this dance in middle school during the craze are now in their mid 30s”. Man.

Videogames were also happening, with the release of the Wii and PlayStation 3. The Wii launched with a bunch of shovelware, marking the console’s status as the box where movie tie-ins would go to die. The PlayStation launched with a bunch of games I never played, including Resistance: Fall of Man and Riiiidge Racer. Remember that one?

This is when I finally get to explain the whole Riiiidge Racer thing. It was during this year’s E3 where Sony gave an awkward press conference that gave us some timeless sound bites. We got “Giant Enemy Crab”, “Attack its weakpoint for massive damage”, “$599”, referring to the PS3’s steep price, and of course, RIIIIIDGE Racer. I do remember that one.

Mario came back with New Super Mario Bros. The game that started Nintendo’s new era, where they put out the same game with the same uninspired art style and sort of vegetated for a while.

Gears of War came out, forcing every other game to become a brown cover-based shooter. Truly the darkest timeline. I never liked these games.

Rockstar gave us two new games: Bully and Table Tennis. This was back when Rockstar put out more than one game a decade, and they weren’t all Red Dead Redemption or Grand Theft Auto, even if Bully is Grand Theft Auto but in school. You played as Jimmy Hopkins, a troubled kid who dealt with the bullies and incompetent adults at Bullworth boarding school. It was a fun game that took a lot of cues from 50s americana steeped in 70s grime. It had the trademark Rockstar humor, great writing and a lot of fun stuff to do, even if the core gameplay was a bit shallow. Table Tennis is just what it sounds like. Ping Pong. It was a serious, realistic sports game that took everyone by surprise. Nowadays it’s remembered as “the one time the GTA guys made a ping pong game”.

We didn’t get a GTA this year, but we did get a GTA clone with Saints Row. The series would quickly lose its gangster roots and go off into quirky millennial cringe, but the first games were a good alternative to GTA.

Dwarf Fortress came out this year, too. An incredibly complex sandbox simulation where you manage dwarves. It’s still going to this day.

Capcom brought us a few notable games this year. Okami was a beautifully stylized adventure game with an innovative brush mechanic. I haven’t played it, but I should. I did play Megaman: Powered Up, a remake of the first Mega Man game for the PSP. It had a faithful remaster of the original game, a remixed version with new stages and bosses, and my favorite part: the level editor. It had a detailed level creator where you could make anything you could imagine using props and mechanics from different Mega Man games. Kind of like Mega-Maker, but more comprehensive (at least it was the last time I tried Mega-Maker a few years back). You could also share levels with others online. It was a ton of fun. This year also saw the release of Lost Planet, the first game in the now forgotten trilogy. You explored a frozen planet and fought giant aliens. It was kind of like Monster Hunter with guns. Fun time.

Last but not least on the Capcom gravy train: Dead Rising. A neat zombie survival game set inside a mall. Race against the persistent clock to complete a series of tasks, find weapons and do missions to uncover a dark conspiracy. The game sounds horrible on paper. It’s full of escort missions, respawning enemies, it has a timer, weapons that break, but when you put it all together the game really works. It’s a ton of fun, and it encourages repeat playthroughs to optimize your runs and find all the secrets.

Bomberman: Act Zero also came out, and it was a game. It took the cute and loveable Bomberman and turned him into a robot man in a dark, gritty world. The game was terrible, and it didn’t have any save points, meaning you had to play through all 99 levels in one sitting. It was a form of torture.

Speaking of horrible things, child-predator heaven, AKA Roblox, also released this year, unleashing an ancient curse upon the land.

Out of all this dreck, which heavy hitter did I pick as my favorite for this year?

My pick for 2006: Sonic 06

Naaah I’m just kidding. I couldn’t resist the fake-out. Here’s something infuriating: I actually did play Sonic 06 back when it launched. I was a fan of Sonic as a kid, played it, and hated it. It plays like garbage, it looks like garbage and it runs like garbage. It made me realize that, hey, maybe Sonic games really do suck, and they kept sucking for years after. There are people trying to fix this game, and I think that’s a massive waste of time. This game needs divine intervention to be good. Flush this turd, let it go down the drain and move on.

My actual pick for 2006: God Hand

According to IGN, Sonic 06 is one point better than God Hand. This beat-em-up masterpiece didn’t release in the best state, with some obviously rushed aspects, but it’s still one of the best 3D beat-em-ups. The large variety of moves, the different enemies, the unforgiving difficulty that only gets worse the better you do. It’s a great time all around. I don’t have much to say about it here because I wrote an entire review praising God Hand. Go read it! It’s good.

Runners up: King of Fighters Maximum Impact 2. It sucks, but I played it for hours and hours. It lives rent free in my head.

Virtua Fighter 5. Objectively, it’s thousands of times better than Maximum Impact 2. One of the best fighting games of all time. Constant back-and-forth interaction between players, with very little in the way of flashy mechanics, just a really solid base system where every choice has multiple counters, which then branch off into even more situations. Easy to get into, impossible to master.

Viva Piñata. Filled with fun! A unique gardening/creature catching game from Rare. You tended to a little garden that you set up to attract different piñatas. Each one had their own requirements, and once you met those requirements, they’d move in. Then you had to deal with their rivalries, keep them happy, and get them to breed and evolve. This game doesn’t get the recognition it deserves.

Marble Blast Ultra. A cool platforming game where you play as a marble and roll around abstract levels. A lot like Monkey Ball. It has a spiritual successor named Marble it Up! Ultra, which you can play on modern consoles and PC.

2007

I’m sure some news-worthy stuff happened this year, but I’ll leave that for later, we have Internet stuff to discuss.

2007 was the start of the modern Internet. For better or worse. Mostly worse. With the release of the iPhone, everyone had a computer in their pocket and could access the Internet at any point. Twitter was created the year prior, YouTube was already established and Google had bought it, Facebook was on the rise and Reddit had been taken over by Conde Nast. The Internet started its corporate path to complete centralization. Independent sites were starting to dry up, customization was getting replaced by default settings. It was the start of Eternal September.

Everyone was singing Chocolate Rain, screaming “THIS IS SPARTAAA” and getting Rick rolled.

On the side of videogames, this is considered the greatest year in gaming.

We got Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Much like 2007 was the start of the dumbing down of the Internet, Call of Duty 4 was the dumbing down of the shooter genre. I know the genre isn’t considered brainy, but this was the game that introduced the setpiece-heavy, two weapon limit, corridor levels, hitscan enemies that kill you in two hits, brown and bloom. The worst.

Bioshock also gave us mediocre shooting action. I don’t like it, and I explain why in excruciating detail in my review for Bioshock.

Crysis came along to fry everyone’s PC. It’s remembered as that one game with the graphics that no one could run. Nowadays, you can run it, and it’s okay. Not worth a $1,500 rig in 2007.

Halo 3 exploded onto the scene. It was another casual shooter, but this one was at least fun with friends. It offered a ton of different game modes, extensive tools to create your own content, all wrapped up in some solid gameplay. I played very little of the campaign in this game. 99% of my time was spent in the multiplayer. It’s still the peak Halo experience. Infinite doesn’t even begin to compare.

Keeping with the theme of sci-fi shooters, we have Mass Effect. A game I loved back when it came out, but don’t really gel with now. It’s the perfect RPG for people who don’t play RPGs. When I first played it, I had never really played a game like that, and was blown away by the story and choices. Nowadays, I’ve seen games with more in-depth stories, better choices and overall better gameplay. The janky cover-based shooting isn’t much fun, and it only gets fun once you reach the end of the game and have all your powers and crew members.

Mario also went to space with Super Mario Galaxy. An incredibly creative platformer that showed Nintendo had some life left in them, before they went into a cocoon and released the same New Super Mario Bros game for the next few years. I still think it’s the best 3D Mario game to date, along with Galaxy 2.

Valve showed everyone they could in fact count to three, with the release of The Orange Box, which featured three great games in one package. It came with Team Fortress 2, Half Life 2 and Portal. They casually dropped the most anticipated sequel ever, a fantastic genre-defining multiplayer shooter and an experimental puzzle game at the same time like it was nothing. These three titles alone are enough to cement them as some of the greatest developers of all times.

On this year’s edition of notable games I haven’t played: I Wanna Be The Guy, an ultra-hard game that rage-baited players back when it was still called trolling. The Uncharted franchise started, bringing us the adventures of John Uncharted, who was like Lara Croft, but man. Then Lara would become like Uncharted, but woman, completing the snake eating its own tail that is modern pop culture. No More Heroes introduced us to Travis Touchdown and the bizarre, colorful world of ranked assassinations. Looks fun, but I’ve never played it. I heard the PC ports of this series were bad. Assassin’s Creed closes out this gap in my gaming knowledge. I’ve never been interested in this series. Not much else to say, but it keeps going to this day, even though it’s nothing like the first few games.

The Witcher series started, too. 90% of people who know the series have only played the third game. The first one is a very janky but interesting and immersive game with some cool details and great world-building. Notice the gameplay isn’t listed here.

Out of all these incredible, industry-defining games, what contrarian gobbledygook did I pick?

My pick for 2007: Command and Conquer 3

I was never an RTS guy, but Command and Conquer 3 caught my attention with a demo. I had never tried anything like it, and ended up enjoying it immensely. Sure, this was on the 360. A console is not the right place for an RTS, but even with that, I played a ton of it. Then I got it on PC and saw what the game was really like. It was like a fish who had been walking on land all his life finally swimming. The game is great, each faction is unique with their own little quirks, there are a lot of fun, degenerate strategies to pull off and it’s a good time overall. I used to pick Nod and rush Shadow Teams. It got me called a loooooot of slurs on Xbox live.

Runner Up: John Woo Presents: Stranglehold. Yes that’s the game’s real title. It’s a neat third person shooter where you play as a guy in a trench coat who shoots guns. I wrote a review for it, which you should read.

2008

Ninja Gaiden 2

Sure, we got the start of the Blazblue franchise, GTA4 came out, we got Burnout Paradise, which isn’t as good as the others in the series, Dead Space premiered, which I haven’t played. Devil May Cry 4 was cool, but it’s half a game. Fallout 3 was overrated to hell and back, that game was the most boring game in existence before The Outer Worlds took its crown, Left 4 Dead is good, yeah mmhmm, Saints Row 2 rocks, Braid was a leap for indie games, Mount and Blade ate up a solid week of my life, We had Mario Kart Wii which was way worse than the previous games, Smash Bros Brawl, which was also worse, I know you like the subspace mode, but the game is kinda stinky. Mortal Kombat vs DC was VERY stinky, and Street Fighter IV came to end the fighting game dark ages and started the modern FGC, for better or worse…

but none of those games are Ninja Gaiden 2. This isn’t a review of the game. I don’t know if I’ll review within the next year, because if I’m going to review it, I have to make damn sure to get it right, but this game is on a whole different level. No other game matches the sheer excess of Ninja Gaiden 2. The enemies are excessively aggressive, there’s an excessive number of them on screen at once, the levels are excessively long, there is an excessive amount of incendiary shuriken flying around, there’s an excessive amount of terrible bosses. The game has some low lows, mainly the subway fish, and the green worm. Anytime you find yourself in a tunnel in NG2, you’re gonna have a bad time, but the highs are so high. The combat is polished to a mirror shine even if nothing else is. The game is excessively cruel and unfair, but it gives you the tools to match these challenges. It’s simultaneously the dumbest and most intelligent game ever made. There hasn’t been, and there will never be a game like it.

Ninja Gaiden 4 sucks, by the way. It’s trash.

Conclusion

That was the tail-end of the 2000s. A time with some a lot of cool, memorable games and the start of an era. Looking back, there were a ton of good games. Looking forward, there aren’t many. Join us next time as I go through the early 2010s, a time where there some real stinkers. From here I can see… oh God! It’s Borderlands in 2009! How horrifying. Scott Pilgrim vs The World in 2010? Sheesh.

Tune in next time to see what beloved games I haven’t played, or what beloved game I don’t like. I see Dark Souls came out during that time. I bet you can’t wait to see what I think of it.

The Takes Don’t Get Any Better

During the 2000s, videogames became a massive industry. This means more games, which means more things to talk about, which means I will start covering less years per article. If I did five I’d have to either skim the years and be brief with my words, which will never happen, or type out a 16,000 word manifesto. No one would read that. Who am I kidding, no one will read this regardless.

Enjoy my terrible takes as we venture into the era of MTV edginess and frosted tips: The early 2000s.

2002

There was stuff happening in the world in 2002, but I don’t remember any of it. Looking through the news of the time, we were still feeling the effects of 9/11. Not much else happened. On a personal note, that year saw the release of the movie Treasure Planet, which I was obsessed with as a kid. I don’t know why.

Who cares about world events or my bizarre hyper-fixation on an underrated Disney box-office failure when there are video games to discuss? Apparently this year was stuffed with games. A lot of interesting, high-profile releases, and as always, a bunch of niche nonsense no one but me cares about.

Starting this list with Stuntman on the PS2. It’s a driving game where you are a Stuntman (as it says on the box) and your job is to perform stunts for a movie. These stunts require precise driving, and they get considerably harder as the game progresses. It puts you in a bunch of different cars with radically different handling, speed and weight, making each vehicle feel unique. The game’s detailed driving physics was a great middle-ground between easy to play arcade action and realism, making for an addictive and skill-intensive experience.

This game sounds great, doesn’t it? I bet you’re going to go to your emulation website of choice to snag a ROM to try it out. Only one problem: this game doesn’t run on emulators. There’s some inaccuracies with how the PS2 emulator works that makes this game crash halfway through the first mission. It never got a digital release, and it will never get a port or remake, so the only way to play it is to get a physical copy and put it into an actual PS2. A real shame, since it’s a driving game that doesn’t use driving just for racing. A hint of another game to come… soon. Ominous!

Speaking of niche games where you drive, ever heard of Robot Alchemic Drive? It’s a game where you pilot a giant robot, but you don’t control the robot from the cockpit. You play as an anime teen, and you control the robot with a little remote, and all the action is seen from the perspective of the little character, so you have to find good vantage points to see everything. It’s a really unique game that captures the feeling of piloting a giant robot in a way other mech games don’t. You don’t feel like you’re just playing as a big human, like in most Gundam games or the new Armored Core games. You feel the weight, the momentum, the scale of it. It’s kind of jank, and the graphics look like vomit, but the game itself is a lot of fun. Today, it’s mostly known for its horrific voice acting and awkward cutscenes.

Robotech: Battlecry was also a robot game. It was my first exposure to the Macross franchise, and I was hooked. Fighter jets that transform into robots? Sign me up! It’s like an army of Starscreams but they’re not sniveling fools. The game itself was pretty fun. As was Kirby: Knightmare in Dreamland, which doesn’t feature mechs. That’s probably why it’s getting mentioned here and not as my favorite. This was a fun little GBA game that I mostly remember for its annoying earworm commercial that used to play all the time on 4Kids.

DodonPachi: Dai Ou Jou brought us another fun game about fighter jets shooting stuff. It’s a fantastic arcade shmup with well-crafted levels, excellent graphics, a fantastic soundtrack and it’s bone-crushingly difficult. A great time all around. Along with that, fans of guns were rejoicing with the release of Ratchet and Clank, a shooter/platformer with fun, creative guns and a cynical sense of humor.

If you liked your shooters with Samus in them, you were spoiled for choice with TWO whole Metroid games. The series was absent for an entire console generation, so seeing it come back was a big deal. Both games were pretty dang great, too.

If instead of shooting the aliens, you wanted to be the alien, you had Alien Hominid. This was a massive deal for me. The original Alien Hominid was a flash game on Newgrounds, which I played a ton of. To see that become an official console release was mind-blowing. It was one of the first times the Internet crossed over with the real world, and it was one of the first indie games to make it to the big leagues.

Enough about original games, let’s talk about some sequels. Burnout 2 improved on the original Burnout in every way imaginable making a high-octane arcade racing game that had an incredible sense of speed and technically impressive crashes. The cars crashed, that is. Not the game. This was back when games had actual Quality Assurance.

Super Monkeyball 2 brought us a second monkey ball, to complete the swinging pair, and it was great. More Monkeyball. How could you go wrong?

Soul Calibur 2 brought fighting games into everyone’s living rooms with its easy to learn hard to master fighting system and great single-player content. It also helps that it had Link from Zelda as a playable character (on the Gamecube only).

Speaking of Gamecube Only, we got Super Mario Sunshine. An incredibly anticipated new entry into the 3D Mario series. It was so anticipated that the game was seen as overhyped and not as good as Mario 64. Then the anti-hype calmed down and everyone saw that yea, this game does in fact rule. This is the part where I’d say something like “at least from what I’ve heard, it was good”, and that’s what you’re expecting, but no, I’ve played this one. Hold your applause, please. It’s a great game, and anyone who says it’s bad is objectively wrong. My reasoning? Because I said so.

Another game I have a strong, controversial opinion on is Kingdom Hearts. It married the worlds of Final Fantasy and Disney and it did to teenagers what crack did to the black community. When a kid stops being a kid, they start hating anything they think is for babies, which is everything they used to like until last week. The exception to this is when the thing is presented as edgy, which is why Kingdom Hearts was so successful. It took Disney, which is for babies now that you’re a mature 13 year old, and paired it with Final Fantasy, which is edgy, and it make Mickey angry and talk about darkness. That’s some real mature shit right there. This is the kind of grown-up media I need as an angsty teen. I’m not the same guy I was when I was 12. I have a single hair on my chin, and I think girls aren’t gross anymore.

I actually played Kingdom Hearts, and hated it. Adults used to tell me that videogames were a waste of time, and I didn’t believe them, but Kindgom Hearts felt like a real waste of time. It’s an insipid game with boring combat and levels that were designed as an afterthought. The cutscenes, which are the game’s main draw, look fantastic and are animated beautifully, but the things that happen in them are embarrassing. The story is terrible, on every level. It’s a poorly cobbled together mess of cliches and hack writing techniques. Amnesia, false memories, evil twins, time travel. It stinks and the only explanation I can find as to why this series became a hit was because it one-shot 13 year olds.

Speedrun of other games: Controversy was brewing thanks to Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. It’s GTA, we all know what it is, it was fun and the music was amazing. If you still needed more controversy, we got BMX XXX. An edgy BMX game for radical teens that features sex jokes, swearing and actual naked boobs. Another game that one-shot thirteen year olds. I never played this, but it looks like a grimy version of the Dave Mirra games, which are just okay. Worse than the Tony Hawk series, which also got a release this year with Pro Skater 4. I love this game, and in my opinion, it’s the peak of the Pro Skater franchise. It has a lot of cool mechanics that all work perfectly with each other and great levels to play around in. Then came the other games and added more mechanics for the sake of it.

We got the first Splinter Cell game, the first Battlefield game, the first Sly Cooper and the first Blinx game. Along with that, the first and only Eternal Darkess. Sad. Many such cases.

There’s also Zelda Wind Waker. I’ve heard it’s good.

Out of all these, what weird, rinky-dink bullshit am I going to pick for my favorite?

My pick for 2002: Road Trip Adventure

No, I did not just make this game up. This is an open-world RPG racer. A Car-PG if you will. You drive around different towns, talk to other cars, run errands for them and participate in races, where you earn money to get better parts.

It’s a fun, cozy game full of soul. The world is big, but not big enough to get boring. Each area has its own theme. You start in a small town with a peach orchard, there’s one themed around Edo period Japan, a snow town, Las Vegas and more. I loved it as a kid, and still love it now. The only downside is that the driving itself is really janky. The physics are off, and jumping doesn’t feel right at all. Gravity is all sorts of messed up in this game. Even with that, the charm and overall experience makes it worth checking out.

There are tons of mini games to play, cool places to explore. There’s a city in the sky you can reach if you have wings (which you can buy and put on your car). It’s a rare example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. It’s a pretty bad racer with nice exploration and fun customization, and it all combines to make a really memorable game.

Runners up: La Pucelle: Tactics. A great tactical RPG where you collect monsters. It’s from the makers of Disgaea. It’s a lot of fun with some cool combo mechanics.

Mega Man Zero. An edgy reboot of the Mega Man franchise that makes it even more difficult. A great time. It was responsible for draining entire packs of batteries back in the day.

Shinobi (PS2). A tough-as-nails action platformer with a unique combat system centered around killing enemies at the same time. It took me a few tries to get into it, but once it clicked, I was hooked.

Sonic Advance 2 and Super Monkeyball Jr justified my purchase of a GBA, along with Mega Man Zero.

2003

The Iraq war was in full swing, with the atrocities at Abu Ghraib. What a way to start a paragraph in the article about videogames. Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected Governor of California, Evanescence releases their debut album urging everyone to wake her up and Linkin Park released Meteora. On the subject of influential albums, we also got Metallica’s St. Anger. The record that pioneered playing a trash can as a drum and making music solely for the purpose of torturing the listener.

I don’t have any relevant memories from this time, so let’s go into the videogames.

If you were still reeling over the controversies brought on by GTA: Vice City and BMX XXX, then avert your eyes because 2003 brought us two more controversial games. We got Postal 2, an open-world shooter where you play as a guy in a black trench coat shooting guns. You go around town completing mundane errands while trying to stay alive. You can shoot people, cut them apart with axes, piss on them, set them on fire and worst of all, make them sign petitions. It was the sequel to Postal, which was already in hot water, and it upped the crudeness, profanity and violence. It was hated by everyone over the age of 30. There was also Manhunt, a game about making snuff films, that got significant free advertisement from news stations making breathless condemnations of it on prime time. Don’t play this edgy game about killing people! It’s violent! Here’s a full 15-minute segment outlining all the game’s features. Look at those grayfix! Just don’t buy it, especially not at your local EB Games.

If you prefer your controversies with more boobs, you could check out Dead Or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball. This game with a mouthful of a title brought you an eyeful of titties. Play as the iconic female characters from the Dead or Alive franchise as they frolic on the beach in skimpy swimsuits. It didn’t do much to change the perception of games as dumb entertainment for horny teens. The game itself was alright. Yes, I actually played this.

I also played Downhill Domination. It’s a cool arcade bike racing game for the PS2. It’s so cool that I could talk about it for an entire review… which I did! You can go read it here.

On the subject of games from 2003 that I reviewed: Hot Shots Golf Fore! The fourth entry in the long-running Hot Shots Golf franchise. Check out the review here.

Two more arcade racing games came out this year: F-Zero GX and SSX3. F-Zero GX is the pinnacle of the F-Zero series and one of the best games ever. It’s brutally difficult, with excellent, precise controls and great tracks. The series has been dormant since that game, and I’m okay with that. I don’t think anything can match it, much less surpass it. A sequel is unnecessary. SSX3 was also great. It made it so you could go through every course seamlessly, and it was a ton of fun. It had these challenges at the end of each peak, with the final peak being a 30 minute race from the top of the mountain to the bottom. The controls are tight, the tracks are creative and chaotic, the soundtrack is excellent and it features a bunch of customization options that are a lot of fun to unlock and try out. The game has an excellent 2000s futuristic feel to it, too, which is great.

Shooter fans were eating good this year. GunZ: The Duel released, giving thousands of players carpal tunnel syndrome with its high-APM shooting action. Metal Arms: Glitch in the system is an underrated third person shooter where you play as a little robot. It’s pretty tough for what it is, and it had a style of humor that was like Ratchet and Clank’s, but edgier. It’s a ton of fun. For some reason Blizzard owns the rights to this franchise now. Don’t expect to see it pop up anytime soon. Jak and Daxter return with Jak II, which is now a shooter for some reason. It also has an open world with GTA elements like stealing cars and a wanted level. It’s a much better kid-friendly GTA than The Simpsons Hit and Run (which also released this year). If you want more shooters, you can play Call of Duty, which debuted this year.

Devil May Cry 2 was a game.

So was Drake of the 99 dragons. A terrible Xbox game that I only know of for how infamous it is. It doesn’t even look “so bad it’s good”, it just looks miserable.

Out of all these winners, which one was the winningest?

My pick for 2003: Advance Wars 2

This game was a bonding experience for me and several of my friends. I played it a few years after it released, but I played the hell out of it. Me and a few friends would pass around a GBA SP and play this all throughout the day during different classes and recess. Epic 2v2 campaigns, with tenuous alliances, cheesy tactics and many, many soldiers snuck unto the enemy base to get captured by Sami’s CO Super power. That was my preferred tactic. There was one friend of mine I could never beat. He seemed to be able to see into the future. Then I found out he was an excellent chess player, and realized I was just completely outclassed in the brain department. The game itself is fantastic, too. I’ve played a lot of it on my own, so it’s not just that it’s “Fun with Friends tm”.

It has a deceptively simple rock/paper/scissors loop to it, with certain units beating other units, but it gets complex once you start mixing units and ranges and special powers. It’s a ton of fun, even if the CPU opponents are a little dumb.

Did you know there’s a website that’s been running for almost two decades where you can play Advance Wars by email? It’s called Advance Wars By Web. I think I tried it once way back in the day, but my friend and I decided it was too much hassle, and we could just get our Advance Wars fix by playing in person. That’s no longer an option.

Runners up: Viewtiful Joe. HENSHIN A GO GO, BABY! A fantastic beat em up from Capcom. It needs a PC port.

Astro Boy Omega Factor. Developed by Treasure, this is a 2D beat-em-up/shmup for the GBA. It’s a ton of fun, really tough, but it’s held back a little by the constant slow down. Having more than a few enemies on screen makes the game chug.

War of the Monsters. A 3D kaiju fighting game for the PS2. I remember it being a ton of fun, and I played it for hours, but I have to admit, I haven’t played it in years, so I don’t know if it holds up.

Espgaluda. An arcade shmup where you can change gender to get more points. Makes sense in-game. It’s an excellent game with an addictive scoring system and an absolutely brutal difficulty spike. The graphics are gorgeous, too.

Mario Kart: Double Dash!! This is where the Mario Kart franchise peaked. Played a ton of it with my friends and siblings.

2004

The most important event of the year was the Numa Numa dance. One guy dancing in front of his webcam became a massive, viral hit. It was a simpler time. You could get famous for one unedited 240p video. You didn’t even have to get naked or say a slur. A simpler time.

On the subject of music, this year saw the release of The College Dropout, Kanye West’s debut album. This marked the start of a generational 4 album run. He fell off in recent years, but to understand how hard the fall was, you have to understand the dizzying heights he reached before plummeting.

Along with that we got two monumental albums from MF DOOM: MM.. FOOD and Madvillainy. These three albums pretty much overshadow anything else that might have happened this year, so on to the videogames.

The biggest release of the year was Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Now, with these big games, I usually mention how I haven’t played them, which is pretty bad. Now I ask you, is it worse if I haven’t played them, or worse if I have played them, but don’t like them? The first is like when you are about to ask a girl out. You don’t know if she will say yes, but she hasn’t said no. Once you ask, you might get rejected, and once it happens, that’s it. Before asking, there’s the possibility of a yes. Same with games I haven’t played that you like. I might enjoy them if I give them a shot. I don’t enjoy San Andreas.

This might be heretical, but I just think it’s kind of boring. Most of the fun people have with the game is with the open world aspect and using cheats. That’s fun for a bit, but everything else about it stinks. The world is huge and empty, so traversing it is a chore. The missions are dumb and incredibly restrictive. Maybe if I had played it as a kid I would have had fun with it, but as a crusty old man back when I first played it a decade ago, it wasn’t much fun. GTA3 had a lot more freedom, and Vice City’s map was smaller and easier/more fun to navigate.

The world of shooters had two massive releases starting with the letter H year with Halo 2 and Half-Life 2. Halo 2 added online multiplayer to the already mega-popular shooter, introducing millions of Xbros to features that have been basic on PC since the 90s. Or you could play Unreal Tournament 2004, which also released this year.

Half Life 2 was the sequel to the cinematic Half Life game, and it was more cinematic than ever. It featured a cool physics engine that the game made sure you used, constantly throwing barrel puzzles at the player. It was a fun game, and its implementation of cinematics was done a lot better than games that came after it. The Bioshock series pales in comparison.

For big firsts we got the first Katamari game, which I reviewed here. The first Far Cry game, which pioneered Ubislop. The first Monster Hunter, which was the definition of a weird niche game. It filtered most people, while delighting a small minority who would become die-hard fans.

We also got the first Fable game, which was the beloved game from 2004 I haven’t played that I mentioned in the previous article. Unlike other beloved games on this list, I don’t feel the need to play this one. All I know about this game comes from the video Sseth made and it still doesn’t look interesting.

On the other side of the coin, Metal Gear Solid 3. Landmark title, incredibly important, haven’t played it, looks great, it’s on my list. I’ll get to it. It got a remake recently, which doesn’t look very interesting. I’d rather try the original.

This year was deep into what a lot of fighting game fans call “the fighting game dark ages”. Source? King of Fighters got its first 3D title with Maximum Impact. A game that played nothing like King of Fighters, and it was a clowny, janky mess where everything comboed into everything. The game was also about as balanced as a one-legged drunk on a ship during a storm. It didn’t stop me from playing it for hours upon hours, though. It’s a fun kusoge.

Capcom Fighting Evolution came along to put another nail in the coffin for fighting games. It was a Capcom crossover title, featuring iconic franchises like Street Fighter, Street Fighter and Street Fighter. Yes, this clash of titans title had a roster that was 3/5 Street Fighter characters, counting Street Fighter II and III as separate franchises. The game was also a mess of clashing art styles, low resolution backgrounds and, much like Maximum Impact, it had the balance of a guy with vertigo on a unicycle. Unlike Maximum Impact, I only played a few hours of this before slamming it into the garbage.

In the wide weeb world of RPGs we saw the creation of the Trails series. Not the Tales of series, the Trails in the Sky series, the one by Nihon Falcom. It’s a good SRPG, but the one I’m going to focus on is Mega Man X: Command mission. Yes, they made a full JRPG for Mega Man. It doesn’t take full advantage of either side of the equation. It doesn’t have the grand scope, exploration or story of a JRPG, and it doesn’t have the open-ended level selection, power copying and collection aspect of the Mega Man X series. A missed opportunity, but it’s still a decently solid JRPG, even if it is a lot shorter than average. Hey yo!

We also saw the launch of World of Warcraft, the life-ruiner. This game has absorbed more man-hours than every project in history combined. It was the biggest game ever at one point and it’s still going to this day. I have played very little of it. The idea of paying a subscription to play one game doesn’t sit right with me. I already pay rent and utilities. I don’t want to add a game onto that, too. My inability to part with my money probably saved me from developing a crippling addiction to WoW. Thank goodness for being a broke boy.

For games I actually did play we have Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, which was garbage and I hated it. Jak III, which was a great finale to the Jak series even if it had too much emphasis on the cars. Mushihimesama, which is a bug-themed arcade shoot-em-up. Phantom Dust, an Xbox deckbuilder game that’s really bizarre and will get a review in the future. Rumble Roses, which is a wrestling game with girls with big awooga bazoogas. Transformers on the PS2, a third person shooter that’s actually pretty dang good, and Under the Skin, a game where you’re an alien. Viewtiful Joe 2 was also a game. It was fine, but not as good as the first.

“I can’t believe this Roger guy” you say in disgust. “He hasn’t played Metal Gear Solid 3 or Fable, but he’s played Rumble Roses and… Under the Skin? How does this clown pick what games to play?”

How do I pick what to play? Poorly. Oh, and I didn’t just play Under the Skin. I also reviewed it, because of course I did. Read all about it here.

There was also another Riiiiidge Racer! Remember that one?

Since a year can’t go without controversy, we got JFK: Reloaded. It was a first person shooter where your job was to assassinate John F. Kennedy. You got points for making the shot as accurately as possible to the real thing. The game go a lot of backlash for seemingly making light of the tragedy. The game’s creator defended himself by saying it was supposed to be a historical research tool to teach people what happened on that day. No one bought the story. The fact that you could win a cash prize of $100,000 for perfectly replicating the shot didn’t help matters much.

From all these on offer, what absolute clown shoes game did I pick as my favorite?

My pick for 2004: Tony Hawk’s Underground 2

This was the last good Tony Hawk game. The mechanical bloat was starting to show, but it was still an excellent game. The controls were perfect, the speed was good, the levels were huge and offered a ton of routes and lines to combo off. The singleplayer story was also a lot of fun. It tapped into the early 2000s edginess perfectly, and it had Bam Margera, who was massive during the time. Everyone between the ages of 13 and 20 loved the guy, and the game was a perfect vehicle for him to show off.

I played this a ton with my brother. We used to go head-to-head, trying to outdo each other with multi-million point combos. He would win often, then he started practicing and could land 60 million+ combos like it was nothing, and I could never win again. It was still a lot of fun, and the game holds up perfectly to this day. There’s a mod for it on PC that lets you play online and on custom levels, providing hours of fun. Just make sure you use your totally legit copy of the game. Piracy is wrong, kids. If you don’t buy it, Bam Margera won’t be able to afford another HIM-themed Lamborgini.

Runners up: Burnout 3: Takedown. One of the best arcade racers. Excellent soundtrack, too.

Custom Robo: Battle Revolution. Nintendo completely forgot this franchise, but I haven’t. Build little robots and fight them out in isometric combat that reminds me a lot of the Gundam VS series.

Ninja Gaiden. My experience is with the Black re-release of the game, but it’s still one of the best action games of all time.

Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal. I completed this game 4 times in a row one summer. It had an online component, too, which was insanely fun, and one of my first experiences with online shooters.

Conclusion

Join us next time for more bizarre picks, more weird games, more controversy and more popular games I’ve never played. Next up we have Devil May Cry 3, Shadow of the Colossus, Sonic and even Ridge Racer. Which one of these haven’t I played? Find out and be disappointed next time on Load Last Save!

Let me know which games were your favorite from these years, and tell me how wrong I am for picking Road Trip.

Running From the 90s

Read Part One (1991 to 1996) here.

1997

I know you’re excited to learn what I was up to at the age of six, but I don’t remember, so you’ll have to read about world events for a bit.

1997 was all about two things: Titanic, and the death of Princess Diana. Even with my bad, geriatric memory, I can still remember those two things being a massive deal. My parents and older family members would discuss Diana’s death in shock, and my older cousins would rant about how great Titanic was. The entire world was struck with DiCaprio mania and people would scream “I’m the king of the world!” and spread their arms at random intervals. It was like a meme before the Internet.

Rapper Biggie Smalls was shot, something everyone, including Biggie, saw coming. His first album was called “Ready to Die”, and sixteen days before being shot, he released “Life After Death”. It sounds like he knew all along. If Biggie wasn’t your cup of tea, you could turn on the radio and have your ears groped by not one, not two, but three different songs by P. Diddy. Some people claim that, if you listened to all three songs in a row, your radio would start leaking baby oil. Continuing this trend of musical tragedies, Limp Bizkit released their debut album, unleashing Fred Durst on an unsuspecting populace.

Oh and an entire cult called Heaven’s Gate commited mass suicide. Believing they were going to be whisked away on a comet to the great beyond, the group poisoned themselves. That’s not very funny, but get used to it, there are more like this coming up.

Videogames were doing much, much better than the rest of the world. This year saw the release of several absolute classics, and the start of several mega-franchises. Starting with a little known indie title “Highly Responsive to Prayers”, the first game in the now ultra-popular Touhou bullet hell series. The first Dodonpachi released this year, as well as the first Armored Core on the PlayStation. Joining this team of firsts is none other than Fallout, the post-apocalyptic RPG. Sensing a severe lack of satanism in gaming, Blizzard releases the first Diablo game.

Wait, I almost forgot about another first: Grand Theft Auto. It’s a very niche franchise, I don’t know if you’ve heard of it. The first title, the top-down arcade destruction game, was released for PC this year. It was released on the PlayStation years later. No one would have known this little game would spawn a multi-billion dollar franchise that would span decades.

Kids were being introduced to first person shooters thanks to the release of Goldeneye 007 and Chex Quest. Goldeneye brought the fun of a LAN party into the homes of millions with its innovative splitscreen versus mode, leading to hours of fun and accusations of screen-peeking.

Other lucky kids opened their box of Chex cereal to find a game disk along with their dry wheat squares. Chex Quest was a non-violent/kid friendly re-skin of DOOM that was packed in specially marked boxes of Chex. It replaced the scary demons with aliens, the shotguns with laser blasters and removed all the blood and guts. Now, that might sound lame, but the game was still DOOM at its core. It was a great gateway drug to get kids hooked on PC games.

Speaking of shooters, one of my favorite shooters of all time was released this year: Shadow Warrior. Not to be confused with the mediocre re-boot from 2013, Shadow Warrior was a Build-Engine classic. You played as Lo-Wang, a guy who was named like a racist Chinese caricature, but was a ninja, which is Japanese, but he spoke like a racist Chinese caricature, which ended up confusing more people than it offended. The game featured cool guns, a katana, ugly demon enemies and some of the most tightly-designed levels in a shooter. It was tough as hell, too. Definitely recommended if you’re looking to play a real boomer shooter. This year also gave us Blood, another excellent/tough as nails Build Engine shooter.

Postal was released this year, heaping even more controversy onto the gaming world. Based on the term “going postal”, which refers to a series of workplace shootings done by postal workers throughout the 80s and 90s. In the game you play as a dude in a trench coat who shoots guns and goes on several killing sprees to rid the world of the hate plague.

If all this action wasn’t your cup of tea, you could play Final Fantasy 7, arguably the most popular JRPG in existence. Or so I’ve heard. I’ve never played it, and unlike Chrono Trigger, I don’t plan on playing it.

Picking just one out of all these magnificent titles must have been a nightmare, right? Who could look at a list like that and pick ONE game? I could.

My pick for 1997: Starfox 64

I didn’t even have to think about it. I knew Starfox released in 1997, and I was 100% sure there wasn’t any other release that would top it. This is my favorite game of 1997, and one of my favorite games of all time. I love Shadow Warrior with all my heart, but I don’t have its entire script memorized.

Starfox 64 is primitive, short and very simple, but it does what it does perfectly. It’s a fun, tightly made arcade rail shooter that excels in every category. Each level is unique, with its own little gimmick and theme. It’s short, but the alternate paths encourage replay and exploration. The characters are memorable, the music is fantastic. Sure, it’s nowhere near as difficult or technical as something like Dodonpachi, but it’s still a blast. I replay it constantly, and it still holds up.

I sang its praises extensively in a review.

Runners up: Blast Corps. One of the most fun games on the N64. You break buildings to clear a path for a runaway nuclear missile. It’s the most videogame-ass videogame ever, and it’s a blast… corps.

Harmful Park. It’s a PlayStation sidescrolling shmup where you go through an out of control amusement park. It’s in the subgenre of “cute-em-up”, shooters with a really cute aesthetic. It’s a lot of fun and the graphics are gorgeous. Good luck getting a copy of it. It regularly sells for $2,000 on eBay.

1998

I was seven at the time. All I did was go to school, do homework and play videogames. Not very interesting.

Was anything interesting happening in the world? Glad you asked, hypothetical reader. Bill Clinton was involved in his infamous scandal with Monica Lewinsky, giving a whole new meaning to the term “head of state”. This event dominated the airwaves for the entire year, letting Google’s founding go unnoticed. I’m sure that won’t have any horrifying consequences 20 years later.

While all that was going on in the world, videogames were happening at an alarming rate. 1998 saw the release of Half-Life, one of the most influential games of all time, which sadly introduced the world to the walk and talk in-game cutscene. Guilty Gear came along to show everyone that you could turn the concept of anime into a videogame. Not to be outdone in the fighting game front, Capcom releases Marvel vs Capcom and blows everyone’s minds in the process. Now you could finally have Megaman beat up Wolverine.

Another massive release this year would change arcades forever: Dance Dance Revolution. It introduced millions of gamers to the concept of exercise. It helped spread the electronic music of the time outside of raves by blasting it in the middle of the mall food court, making it everyone’s problem. This game, along with Hot Topic and Invader Zim would shape an entire generation of annoying millennial teens.

Over on the N64, things were getting crazy. Rareware, not content with simply giving us Blast Corps the previous year, releases Banjo Kazooie, a 3D platformer that’s arguably as influential as Super Mario 64. We also got Mario Party, the first Party-type game. Its most innovative mechanic was giving people horrible palm injuries by making them rotate the analog stick repeatedly.

Ocarina of Time, the best-reviewed game of all time, burst onto the scene in 98. One of my greatest gaming sins is that I’ve never played Ocarina of Time. I see you picking up that rock, so I’m going to move on to the next topic.

While not as influential as anything mentioned previously, Bomberman Hero and Buck Bumble were two more N64 games. The reason I mention them is because of their bopping drum and bass soundtracks. Bomberman Hero’s is one of my favorite soundtracks of all time. Give it a listen. Buck Bumble gets on here for its earworm main theme. This song was specifically engineered to get stuck in your head, making you unable to think about anything other than the bicketty buck bumble.

The PlayStation wasn’t falling behind. This year introduced us to Metal Gear Solid, which is still beloved, quoted and admired to this day. A landmark title that expanded the scope of what games could be. We also go the first Spyro game, so kids who weren’t allowed to play M-rated games had something to enjoy, too. Oddworld released this year, too, confusing and disturbing many kids, and thrilling older gamers with its bizarre world, tricky gameplay and cinematic presentation.

On the PC side, we were being treated to massive, complex masterpieces. Thief gave us an incredible stealth game with deep mechanics and huge levels to explore. Baldur’s Gate gave our dads something to stare at for hours and hours on end, and Starcraft came along, creating an entire industry of NetCafes and e-sports.

This is where I reveal myself to be a fake gamer. There’s an absurd amount of classics on display here, and I haven’t played a lot of them. No Metal Gear Solid, no Ocarina, only a few hours of Banjo Kazooie, and I’m terrible at StarCraft. Sorry to disappoint, but I can’t name those as my favorite if I haven’t played them.

What did I play for 1998?

My pick for 1998: King of Fighters ‘98

Even over Marvel vs Capcom? Yeah. KoF 98 is much better in terms of balance. Marvel vs Capcom is fun, but it’s broken as hell. So is KoF, I’ve seen the glitch videos, but it’s a more solid experience.

The King of Fighters formula was perfected by this point. The roster is great, you have all the heavy hitters, Terry, Joe, Daimon, Mai, the Orochi team. The music is fantastic, the graphics are great. The gameplay is rock solid. You have that nice, old-school feel with an emphasis on neutral and short combos. Lots of poking and reading your opponent. After KoF 2001 the series would go into this weird combo-crazy insanity that culminated in KoF 15, where everything is a touch of death.

I like Marvel vs Capcom, but if you offered me a first to 10 on MvC or King of Fighters, I’d pick King of Fighters every time.

I’m going to have to try Ocarina of Time and get back to you on that one.

Runners up: There’s this game called Space Station Silicon Valley, which also released this year. I used to love it as a kid. It’s a cool game developed by the team that would later become Rockstar Games. It was like a GTA game where you were a little micro-chip, and you’d hack into robot animals and control them to solve puzzles and do platforming. It’s really charming, but it has a deadly glitch that makes the game impossible to complete.

Circuit Breakers is a PS1 racing game I used to love. It’s like Micro Machines; it’s top-down. I still think it’s fun, and the soundtrack is another Drum and Bass banger.

Can’t forget Gex: Enter the Gecko. The game that’s more influential than brunch at Danny DeVito’s house.

Xenogears released this year, too. I talked about it in an article. I don’t like this game at all.

1999

I actually remember something from this year, and it all has to do with Y2K. You see, back then people thought that when the year changed from 1999 to 2000, the date format would cause a computer glitch that would basically crash every system on Earth. There were concerns, and a lot of them had been addressed before the 90s, but the public didn’t know, and some thought it would be the end of times. An older relative of mine explained it to me, but I was 8 years old at the time, and understood none of it. The fact that we’re all here means that the world didn’t end in 2000.

The other notable event of 1999 was the Columbine High School massacre. Two students killed 13 people while injuring 20 more. This tragedy was blamed on dozens of things, including videogames, as the two perpetrators were fans of DOOM and Duke Nukem 3D, referencing them multiple times in their writings. They also wore black trench coats while doing the massacre, like in the game Postal.

The Matrix premiered that year, revolutionizing pop-psychology for the foreseeable future. It featured guys in black trench coats shooting guns. Along with that we had Fight Club. These two movies would become the personality of an entire generation of men. If nihilistic post-modernism wasn’t your thing, you could get a ticket to go see The Phantom Menace.

In the land of games, we were getting some more certified classics. Nintendo released Super Smash Bros for the N64. It brought the most popular characters of the time together for 4-player party fighting action. It was a massive hit that would go on to launch a franchise and directly inspire the crossover-filled pop culture grey goo we have now. If it weren’t for this game, we wouldn’t be able to play as Darth Vader in Fortnite and shoot Kamehamehas at Billie Eillish. The original game was so good that I’m willing to accept this brainrotted cultural landscape. Up to a point.

The arcades were eating good this year with the release of Crazy Taxi, Hydro Thunder, Jambo Safari, Garou: Mark of the Wolves and Street Fighter 3: Third Strike. An absolutely stacked showing.

The arcade I used to go to had most of these, and it was impossible to decide what to play on just a dollar. One of my favorites was Jambo Safari, a game I don’t see talked about too often. It was one of those that you played with a steering wheel and special controls. You drove a little jeep through the African Savannah, and you had to capture animals using a lasso. You’d push a lever forward to throw the lasso, then pull it back to capture them, all while trying to follow them around. It was a crazy combination of driving and fishing, with the finely tuned controls you’d come to expect from a SEGA arcade release.

Speaking of SEGA, the Dreamcast makes its US debut. Hyped up by a massive advertising campaign centered around its September 9 release date, plastering game magazines with 9/9/99. It wouldn’t sell as much as the PS2 or Gamecube during its lifespan, but it would go on to be remembered by gamers as the platform with the best/most accurate arcade ports, and by a bunch of youngsters for having “impeccable vibes”. Looking at its promotional material, UI design and general style, I can’t say I disagree. The vibes are immaculate.

The PC market, not wanting to be left out, releases two absolute classics of multiplayer shooting: Unreal Tournament and Quake III: Arena. Two games which, in my humble opinion, are the glittering peak of multiplayer first person shooters. It had hundreds of gamers hauling their heavy-ass PCs to LAN parties, to huddle up in a dark room shooting each other and chugging Bawls for hours and hours on end.

As a direct counter to all this goodwill on the PC, David Cage curses the world with Omikron: The Nomad Soul. An overly ambitious confused mess of seven different gameplay genres, none of which work. It’s a fantasy sci-fi epic set in the future where you play as a wandering soul who has to solve his own murder, fight demons and David Bowie is involved for some reason. Yes, the real David Bowie, not a look-alike. This sounds like the raddest thing ever, but it falls on its face in its execution. This was the game that killed The Super Best Friends let’s play channel.

My pick for favorite of 1999: Donkey Kong 64

I don’t care about the constant character switching, backtracking and 4,000,000 collectibles, I love this game. This was the first game I ever got 100% completion on. 101%, actually, since I even went for the secrets. I spent so many hours playing this, and loved every single minute of it. I have a very vivid memory of staying home from school one day and playing this all day. It’s the kind of feeling you can never recapture.

The game itself is fantastic. Its platforming is kind of basic, but it gets the job done. There’s tons to do, explore and collect. You turn a corner and find a dozen different things you can get. There is a ton of backtracking, sure, but I didn’t mind it as a kid. I think I was a lot more patient back then. I played this game again a few years ago, and still didn’t mind the backtracking, but I can see how it can upset a lot of people.

It’s full of charm and personality, the graphics are colorful and fun, each section of the island is uniquely themed and each level is a blast to explore. Except for Gloomy Galleon. That stage can go hang out somewhere else. The soundtrack is great, too.

Oh, and anytime this game gets brought up, it has to be mentioned: This game holds a Guiness world record for most collectibles in a videogame. Wow.

For all my love for the other games this year, I can’t really justify putting anything other than Donkey Kong 64 as my favorite.

Runners up: Ape Escape. It’s another ape-themed platforming collect-a-thon. What? I like apes. It’s a ton of fun, bursting with personality, and the soundtrack is sublime.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. The first entry in the Pro Skater series isn’t the most impressive, but it’s still a ton of fun. It convinced me I could do an ollie in real life, but gravity sent me a painful reminder that no, I in fact cannot ollie.

I love Smash Bros, but I prefer Melee over the original. Possible spoilers for 2001.

2000

It’s the new millennium, and the world didn’t end. It was a relatively uneventful year, a welcome change from the previous turmoil and what we all now know would come to pass later on. For now, we were dreaming of the chrome-coated future that awaited us in the year 2000.

The future we got was less flying cars and robot servants, and more Britney Spears and nu-metal. The airwaves were being smacked around by “Oops I did it again”, two NSYNC tracks and Blue dabadeedadabai. It was a horrible time to have ears. If that wasn’t your thing, you could join the alternative side of things and dive head-first into the nu-metal movement that was gaining steam thanks to the release of Hybrid Theory by Linkin Park and The Chocolate Starfish by Limp Bizkit. I used to think Linkin Park and Limp Bizkit were the coolest things ever back then. I was also nine years old at the time. I’m sure those two are unrelated.

I bet you’re all thrilled to hear about my pre-pubescent music tastes, but it’s time to get to the videogames.

The PlayStation 2 arrived this year, bringing with it some cool launch titles. None cooler than Madden 2001, of course. Now you could see football, with more graphics! The future is here, and it wears a jersey. Along with it was Riiiiiidge Racer 5, remember that one?

The PS2’s launch, at least in North America, wasn’t all that great. Sure, it had Madden, but the real heavy hitters wouldn’t be showing up yet.

The PC was the one vacuuming up all the good releases. We got the classic devil-themed ARPG Diablo II, which would eventually give us Diablo Immortal, the greatest game ever made, for those who have phones. If playing with demons wasn’t your thing, you could play with digital dolls in The Sims, the premier life simulator and the first game where you could lock a family in a room and set it on fire. You’d think Postal would have come up with that one. Like Diablo, it would then morph into an unholy, micro-transaction filled abomination decades later. For now, enjoy the good games.

If you thought those previous two games were too casual, you could boot up Counter Strike 1.6, and get sweaty and angry. This tactical shooter competed with Quake III and Unreal Tournament for the title of King of the LAN party.

If singleplayer PC action was more your speed, you could grab a copy of Deus Ex. This immersive sim follows JC Denton, a man in a black trench coat who shoots guns. That sounds oddly familiar. You go through different missions that take place in huge levels. Approach each problem in one of many different ways, use stealth, use guns, use vents or sneak through the sewers. It also features a story where a terrorist attack on New York city leads to a conspiracy of government overreach. That also sounds familiar. There’s also a technocratic surveillance state ruled by a small cabal of elites. Huh...

The Sega Dreamcast got Jet Set Radio, a music CD with a free game included. This game would be remembered for its amazing soundtrack, stylish graphics and its hip, urban vibes. Notice the lack of praise for the actual gameplay. This game, in my opinion, is cool and all, but it’s leagues below the Pro Skater series, and most of the levels feel like they were made for a different game.

Skies of Arcadia arrived this year, too. A somewhat underrated JRPG, it has a simple yet charming story with loveable characters and a basic but enjoyable combat system. It has a lot of fun stuff to explore, airship battles, and a special attack where your entire crew, including the cooks, start flying around nuking every enemy on screen. I have played this but not Chrono Trigger.

On the arcade front we got four cool games. First off, Metal Slug 3. As you can tell by the 3 in the name, it’s the third installment in the Metal Slug franchise, and in my opinion, the best one. It takes the player from a crab-infested beach, to the jungle, to a zombie-infested camp and into outer space. It’s a ton of fun, like every other Metal Slug, and incredibly brutal in its difficulty. Mashing the fire button for fifteen minutes straight during the final level gave me severe carpal tunnel syndrome, but it was worth it.

Next is the forgotten/overlooked Cannon Spike. A top-down shooter where you can play as different Capcom characters including Cammy, Nash/Kevin and Arthur from Ghosts n’ Goblins. Shoot your way through a few square arenas and fight cool bosses. It even has a stage set in Raccoon city. It’s fun, and I wish Capcom would port it.

The third arcade classic we got was Capcom vs SNK. For the first time ever, you could pit Terry Bogard vs Ryu and see who’s the best. I know there was a Capcom/SNK crossover title before this one, but this was the first fighting game with both of them in it. It was a real treat for fans of either side, and a solid fighting game to boot.

That wasn’t the only fighting game with Capcom and VS released in that year. That other title was none other than my favorite game of 2000…

My pick for 2000: Marvel vs Capcom 2

It’s MAHVEL BAYBEE. I didn’t pick the first one for my favorite previously, but the second one has to be included. It’s an unbalanced mess of degenerate strategies and infinite combos, but it’s too much fun to ignore. This was the first fighting game I ever played, and it sent me down the dark path of number notation and thinking about frame data. This game was the reason why I went to the arcade. All of my quarters went into this one. I could skip playing Time Crisis or Tekken or any of the others, but not MvsC2. After the local arcade closed, I spent years tracking down a copy of it on PS2, which was (and still is) incredibly rare. I finally got one and used up an entire years’ worth of birthday/Christmas money on it. Then it got stolen a decade later. I still feel that one.

This game has an absurd roster of 52 characters, back in an era where crossovers weren’t something you saw every single day. The gameplay is fast, frantic and not very balanced. There are only around seven good characters, with the rest being mediocre and a few that are borderline unplayable. If you play this game at a sweaty level, you might get sick of Magneto, Storm, Sentinel and its variations, but I’ve never been good at this game.

It was my first fighting game, I have tons of fond memories of playing this with my friends at the arcade, and then for hours and hours at home on the PS2. Got into a lot of arguments with my friends over whether or not Cable was cheap, or if air combos were unfair. It was the first game I actively seeked out in different stores, and its soundtrack lives rent free in my head to this day. Putting anything other than Marvel vs Capcom 2 on this spot would feel horribly wrong.

Runner Up: Metal Slug 3.

2001

Nine eleven. You knew this was coming. So did George Bush. Allegedly. Other things happened this year, but they don’t really matter.

Anyone who was alive at the time remembers where they were when it happened. I was at school, and the power suddenly cuts off. It was weird because that never happened there before. It was coincidental, since I was hundreds of miles away from New York. Then one of the teachers comes in and tells our teacher “they blew up the towers”. I was 10, so I didn’t know what that meant, but I could tell it was bad since my teacher was visibly upset as the other teacher explained the situation. When you’re a kid and you don’t understand a situation, you don’t really react, but if you see an adult or an authority figure be affected by something, that’s when you know it’s serious. The power came back on and the teacher turned the TV on and saw the footage, then turned it off saying something about how “the kids don’t need to see this”.

This was the start of the modern era. More forever wars in the middle east under false pretenses, the introduction of a surveillance state, trillions in debt and military spending. We didn’t know how good we had it before then.

There’s no real way to transition from that into videogames, but here we go.

2001 was, ironically, a fantastic year for games. The sixth console generation was in full swing with the introduction of the Gamecube, Gameboy Advance and the Xbox.

The Gamecube had a weird launch, with no Mario games, just Luigi’s Mansion. This unexpected game puts Luigi in a haunted house where he hunts down ghosts. No one could have guessed that Nintendo’s new console would launch with a horror-lite game featuring not-Mario.

Mario fans might have been disappointed with the launch line-up, but ape fans were pleased because Super Monkey Ball was finally here. An incredible arcade game where you roll a little monkey in a ball through surrealist levels. You don’t control the monkey, you turn the world and the monkey rolls on it. Its finely tuned controls and impeccable physics made this intuitive to play. The developers took advantage of this physics engine to make some sadistic stages that demand a lot from the player, and the game is so well designed that it can meet all those insane challenges. It’s easy to pick up and play, but it takes real skill to master.

Pikmin was another unexpected, experimental game. A type of RTS where you solve puzzles using an army of little plant creatures. Not content with just being odd, the game goes into weird territory by adding a timer, meaning you have to do things quickly or else. The addition of this timer makes the game a lot of fun. It adds a sense of urgency and it forces the player to learn the game and be efficient. The other games in the series kept the day/night timer, but removed the global one. A shame, really.

Keeping with the theme of timers we got Animal Crossing, a life sim where things change in real-time. Stores open and close at specific hours, villagers have their little routines and go to bed at night, special NPCs show up in specific days, the seasons change when they do in real life. It’s the coziest game ever. The simplicity of this first game gives it a lot of charm. There isn’t much to do, but what you can do is a lot of fun. I used to love trading items with my friends using the password feature, and swapping memory cards to visit other towns. Sure, the newer Animal Crossing games let you visit other towns via the Internet, but there was something special about visiting another town after going through the trouble of getting someone else’s actual, physical memory card. I didn’t like the fact that a town would take up an entire memory card, though. That was some bull.

Devil May Cry came out on the PS2 and changed action games forever. It had a smooth combat system, a creepy atmosphere and some hit or miss boss fights. The game overall is excellent, and it spawned one of the best game franchises ever. Everyone pays more attention to DMC3, and don’t get me wrong, that’s a great game, but the first one still holds up, even with the fact that you fight Nightmare 200 times. This one little game filled a lot of dark souls with light.

The PC went and introduced a few shooter classics like it was nothing. Max Payne introduced us to Bullet Time, which would then go on to be used in every single shooter ever. In that game you play as a guy in a black trench coat shooting guns. Wait, that’s technically a jacket, not a trench coat. Close enough. It was heavily inspired by The Matrix, and it shows, with lots of diving around and blasting dudes.

Serious Sam burst onto the scene, bringing its unique brand of arcade action. It was less like the boomer shooters of yore. No key hunting or cleverly placed enemies. Instead, you were thrown into a series of arenas where you shot hundreds of enemies. This almost Dynasty Warriors style of shooter was impressive back then, with how many 3D models it could cram on screen. It still is a ton of fun to this day, even if some of the fights drag on past ten minutes.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein re-imagines Wolfenstein before it would then get re-imagined in 2009 and then re-re-imagined in 2014. This was the good reboot. You stormed nazi castles, mowing them down using all sorts of guns, until things get weird and you go up against bio-mechanical horrors and the undead. It was an interesting sort of transitional shooter that still kept the sensibilities of older shooters, like health packs, multiple weapons and big levels, combined with more modern elements like cinematic setpieces and hitscan enemies. Still holds up.

The true modern shooter was also released this year: Halo. It introduced a lot of the things I really hate about shooters. It slowed the player down to a crawl, added regenerating health, limited your weapons to two down from ten, no melee weapon and an emphasis on story. Despite all this, the game was well designed and still fun, offering big levels to play around in and smart enemies that still had oldschool tendencies, like projectile weapons and good placements. It’s a shame that every other shooter copied it poorly. It’s still diet Unreal Tournament.

GTA III and Conker’s Bad Fur Day released this year to convince people that games were a bad influence. They were both lightning rods for controversy for being crude and overly violent. Endless hours of news coverage were dedicated to making GTA 3 the most sought-after game by teens. Nothing sells a game like telling kids they can’t play it because it’s for adults.

On the GBA we got the first Phoenix Wright game and Advance Wars. Phoenix Wright captured the heart of many with its witty writing and loveable characters. Advance wars was an addictive turn-based strategy game that could be played in multiplayer by passing the gameboy around. It was a ton of fun, and it’s still great. The bulk of my playtime was spent with the second game, which got me in trouble a few times for passing the GBA during class.

With all these classics, which one is my favorite from 2001?

My pick for 2001: SSX Tricky… and Super Smash Bros Melee

This is a perfect arcade sports game. The controls are excellent. The weight is good, the way you ride the turns as you go, how the steering reacts with the terrain, the sense of speed, the tricks, the massive air. The way you have to balance doing tricks to get boost and racing. Each track is full of alternate paths, shortcuts and secrets, the characters are full of soul and personality, the soundtrack is packed with drum and bass goodness. It’s one of the games I’ve played the most throughout my life.

I met one of my best friends in middle school because he liked SSX Tricky, too. I played it on a daily basis before and after school. It’s not just nostalgia talking, either. I replayed it consistently throughout the years, and replayed it a few years back, and it’s just as good as I remember it. I definitely have to review it in full some day.

It was hard picking between the two. The hardest decision in this whole series up to now. They’re both 10/10 games that I played for thousands of hours, played with friends, and have good memories with. I kept playing even when I was in college, so it has some more sentimental value spread out, but I can’t really pick. They both win favorite of this year. I won’t do that again, because that’s cheating, but asking me to pick between two of my favorite games of all time is impossible.

Capcom vs SNK 2 gets runner up. It’s a great game, even with all its jank.

Civilization 3 deserves a mention. I played it a decade after release, but it’s the first game where I pulled a 12 hour binge. I had to uninstall it for my own good, but I’ve gone back to it in moderation. A fantastic, deep, interesting game that can suck up hours of your time.

Ikaruga should be highlighted, too, even if it hurts my gamer cred to admit I’ve never beaten it. I sure have tried.

Conclusion

That was the late 90s. A time of turmoil, uncertainty and conflict in the world. There were a lot of good games, at least. Games that were formative for me and gave me good memories and stuff to share with my friends. At this point I was old enough to have hobbies and such, and I knew that games were going to be my thing.

What kind of nonsense awaits us in the next entry? What classic games from 2002 to 2006 will I admit to not having played? I can already see a beloved title from 2004 that I’ve never even touched once. Which one could that be?

Find out next time!

I’ve Outed Myself as an Aging Millennial

There’s a trend on social media where people list their favorite thing from each year they were alive. Mostly movies, but I thought it’d be fun to do it with videogames. Do it I did, and in the only way I know how: by writing too much text.

I’ll be going over each year giving a brief summary of what was going on at the time, to give you a quick snapshot of the era, and then go into the videogames.

Enjoy my terrible picks and feel free to leave a comment saying how much of a hack I am for not picking Chrono Trigger as my favorite game of 1995.

1991

I just got here, and I don’t know what I’m doing. What’s the rest of the world up to? Well, Operation Desert Storm started, which was another leg of the middle-east forever wars. The Internet starts, as in, the World Wide Web is launched, allowing millions to access information and communicate across the world. Little did they know all the porn that would be unleashed a few short years later. Freddy Mercury dies, Nirvana releases Nevermind, and a little-known rapper by the name of Tupac Shakur releases his debut album.

What about the games? Well, it was something, alright. Battletoads releases, introducing thousands of children to the concepts of frustration, failure and how not to break your controller. Streets of Rage premieres with its first entry, along with the first Puyo Puyo game and none other than Sonic the Hedgehog drops his first game on that same year.

With all that going on, Capcom decides to release Street Fighter II and invent a new genre.

Out of all these landmark titles, which one could I possibly pick as my favorite?

My pick for 1991- Streets of Rage

Out of all these, I think Streets of Rage is my favorite. Not by much. If I’m being honest, I’ve played these previously mentioned games, but not to the point where I’d say they’re favorites. I don’t like Sonic the Hedgehog much (heretical, I know), and the other games were important, but I prefer their sequels. Street Fighter II is great, but that’s the base version, and the one I like, like most people, is Super Turbo, which didn’t come out until 1994.

Streets of Rage is a very flawed game. It’s janky, weird and it’s incredibly easy to jab-lock enemies. It’s still fun, and it laid the foundation for a great series of beat-em-ups. The sequels were better.

1992

While I was still trying to achieve sentience, the world was awash in conflict. The biggest one being that anytime you turned on the radio, you had a 50/50 chance of being assaulted by either “I’m Too Sexy” by Right Said Fred or “Jump” by Kris Kross. This constant psychological torture was the direct inspiration for the Saw franchise.

In the realm of videogames, things weren’t much better. Street Fighter II kept stealing everyone’s lunch money, we got another Sonic game, Mario jumped into a kart and invented Kart racing, and the first Shin Megami Tensei game releases, unknowingly setting off a chain of events that would result in Persona, and some of the most annoying fans on the planet.

Wolfenstein 3D was released, providing the groundwork for the FPS genre. Along with that, another influential game was raising the bar on videogame violence. A little known fighter by the name of Mortal Kombat, the game that would be responsible for the creation of the ESRB and the lightning rod for the moral panic of the time.

My pick for 1992: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time

If you have niche encyclopedic knowledge of Ninja Turtles games, you’d know that Turtles in Time released in 1991. That was the arcade version. The one I picked is specifically the SNES port that came out in 1992. It has more levels, better music, and more consistent gameplay, even if the graphics are noticeably worse.

The reason why I picked this version specifically is because it was one of my earliest gaming memories. I started playing games on a hand-me-down NES, but I was very young and didn’t think of games as a concept. I thought the NES was a fun toy that had Mario. I didn’t know there were different games or other consoles. Then I played Turtles in Time at my cousin’s house, and learned about all sorts of games.

I used to play this for hours with my cousins and my brother. We could never get too far, because we were dumb kids, but we still had a ton of fun with it. Years later, I revisited it with my brother, and we managed to beat the game. It was the first time I actually beat a game that once seemed impossible, and I’ve been trying to chase that same high ever since.

The game still holds up, too. It’s a lot of fun to pick up and play. For the deep impact it had on my soft, baby brain, TMNT IV Turtles in Time for the SNES gets the top spot.

Runner up: Streets of Rage 2. SoR2 improved on every aspect of the first, and it’s a great game, but I didn’t play it until decades later, and it doesn’t have the same sentimental value as TMNT does.

1993

At this point I had finally attained sentience, but I still didn’t know what a videogame was. I saw a Gameboy, I think. I don’t know what I was up to back then. Probably eating dirt and looking for dangerous chemicals to drink.

The rest of the world was embroiled in conflict, as is always the case. Czechoslovakia split off into Czech and Slovakia. Two imaginary internet points to anyone who can find both on a map without googling it. The World Trade Center was bombed, which is why Biggie Smalls says “Blow up like the world trade” in his 1994 hit single “Juicy”, leading many zoomers to think he somehow predicted 9/11. Speaking of blowing up, the Waco siege, where the ATF torched David Koresh and a couple dozen kids. Don’t talk about that, focus on the religious wackos. The ATF is a totally trustworthy organization.

Along with that, the most important children’s media franchise started in 1993. That’s right, it’s Veggie Tales, which introduced the world to Christian vegetables. I know many who came to Jesus after hearing the cucumber preach. Along with that something called the Power Rangers also premiered in the US. It doesn’t have proselytizing produce, so I don’t really care.

Enough about world events and religious veggies, we’re here for the videogames. It was a pretty big year for those, too. We got more sonic, more Mario, more Street Fighter 2. Wait, that doesn’t sound particularly impressive.

What is impressive is the release of one of the most important games ever: Bubsy. The first Bubsy game released in 1993 to collective shrugs and a very small chorus of “I guess?”. This crappy little platformer somehow spawned a franchise, and it featured the worst games in existence. Bubsy 3D is still remembered to this day thanks to its technological achievement. Instead of making a game the traditional way, the developers of Bubsy 3D used cutting-edge tech to put the concept of a middle finger into a disc and have it play on a Playstation. Revolutionary stuff. It was what inspired the modern Triple-A game landscape we have today, where every release is packed to the gills with middle fingers to the consumer.

There were some less impressive titles here, too. The incredibly overrated Myst released this year. The puzzle game that’s suspiciously absent of puzzles. It indirectly inspired The Talos Principle, so I guess it gets some points for that. Not many. There was Awesome Possum Kicks Dr. Machino’s Butt, which I talked about in a previous article.

Then there’s this little known title named DOOM. The game that practically invented the first person shooter genre, revolutionized PC gaming and thrilled billions for years to come. DOOM still holds up today, showing that fundamentally solid gameplay is timeless. You don’t need a lot of bells and whistles, just make things with purpose. A lesson modern game developers missed, since most shooters released after DOOM can’t compete with it.

My Pick for 1993: Megaman X

Even though I love DOOM, it’s still not my favorite game of 1993. That title goes to: Megaman X. Sure, DOOM changed gaming for ever, and it’s still a great game, but I haven’t beaten DOOM 20 times. Ever since I was a tiny baby (but after 1993), Megaman X has been one of my favorite games ever. It takes the already rock-solid Megaman formula and gives it a few tweaks and updates. It lets you take on any of the 8 robot masters, now renamed to Mavericks, in any order as always, but it adds special effects to each stage cleared. If you beat Storm Eagle, Spark Mandrill’s stage changes, with Storm Eagle’s ship crashed into it. Small touches like that bring a new layer of exploration to the game.

The controls feel smooth and responsive, the music is fantastic, the graphics are gorgeous. It’s not too challenging, but it’s a ton of fun nonetheless. It has enough content to be satisfying, but not enough to drag on or overstay its welcome. In my opinion, it’s a perfect game. Not THE perfect game, mind you, but it does what it sets out to do perfectly. 10/10, no notes.

I replayed it after some years back when the Megaman X collection released. The one on PS2, not the new one that splits the games into two separate packages. That one sucks. It splits the series in half, so you get Megaman X1 to X4 in one purchase, then X5 to X8 in another. What a ripoff. Pay $20 for the best games in the series, then pay $20 more for X5? Six? For SEVEN!? Capcom should be paying me to play that crap.

Anyways, I was playing the collection on PS2, years after playing X1 as a kid, and I still remembered the location of every heart tank, weapon capsule and secret. I was shocked. I used to think I had a bad memory, and I still do, but that made me realize that my memory only sucks when trying to remember important things. If it’s dumb videogame trivia, that stuff will stick to my brain like frying an egg on an old pan.

For its impact on my young self, and the fact that it still holds up and I play it regularly, Megaman X is my favorite game of 1993.

Honorable mention: Violent Storm. A great, fast-paced arcade beat-em-up with music that’s so 90s it will give you a flat top haircut if you listen to it for too long.

1994

I don’t remember what I was up to back in ‘94, but I do know that some stuff was going down, as per tradition. OJ Simpson stabbed Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman (he did it) and lead the world on a televised chase in his iconic Ford Bronco. It was just like one of them movie films you see on the tee-vee. The Rwandan Genocide starts, and I don’t have any jokes for that. Amazon is founded, and no one knows the horrors in waiting there. Who in 1994 could have conceived of the wage cage? No one other than Bezos, of course. The idea that you could order a cheap, plastic trinket from China and have some underpaid worker in a 90,000,000 square foot warehouse ship it to you in one day was still in the realm of science fiction. If you ask me, it should have stayed there, but you didn’t ask. Bill Clinton bans assault weapons. What is an assault weapon? Who knows. The guys making the laws sure don’t.

In the world of videogames, the PlayStation releases in Japan right at the tail-end of the year. We see more Sonic, the release of Super Metroid, and Bubsy 2. Earthbound was also released this year, making it the most influential game no one would play for the next 20 years.

We also saw the release of classics such as Darkstalkers, which revolutionized the fighting game genre with its innovative combo system, colorful graphics and half-naked catgirl. Daytona USA and Cruis’n USA, two great USA-themed racing games released this year, showing the world that America is THE place for driving. If you ignore the horrible traffic in any city with more than 2,000 people. And the crumbling infrastructure. And the gas prices. We also saw the first Madden NFL game. Like Amazon this same year, no one would suspect that this tiny seed would spawn a massive, eldritch tree that would swallow entire countries.

Even with this massive smorgasbord of games to pick from, narrowing down my favorite for this year was incredibly easy. Hotel Mario, baby! That’s right, the CDI classic that launched a million YouTube poops and forever altered my vocabulary, introducing inane phrases like “toasters toast toast” “lotsa spaghetti” and “the enclosed instruction booklet” that made everyone around me realize I was a weirdo.

My real pick for 1994: Donkey Kong Country

Another perfect game. Donkey Kong Country is a triumph of 2D platforming. I know there are some that say DKC is just about the graphics, and the gameplay isn’t that great. Those people are objectively wrong, and they probably smell bad.

Donkey Kong Country manages to pack each level with finely-crafted platforming challenges. It gets tough at some points, with the ultra-precise barrel launching sections, but those are a ton of fun. Each world has its own distinct theming, the visual storytelling is excellent with how each world gets progressively more industrial until you finally reach King K. Rool. The controls are great, the character’s weight and jumps feel excellent and each level is built around their abilities perfectly. There are tons of cool gimmicks, keeping things fresh, and a mind-boggling amount of secrets and side content to explore.

All that without even mentioning the soundtrack, which is phenomenal. David Wise should get a medal for his compositions and how much he managed to squeeze out of the SNES’ sound chip.

Donkey Kong Country gets my pick for favorite game of 1994. I have fond memories of wasting hours playing this on an old, decroded wood-paneled TV from the 80s that kept flickering.

Runners up: Alien vs Predator (arcade), Shaq Fu.

1995

I still don’t know what I was doing in ‘95, probably shoving crayons up my nose, but the world was once again wrapped in conflict. OJ Simpson is found Not Guilty in his trial, which was wrong, but who am I to question the all-consuming wisdom of our judicial system? Oklahoma City was the site of a deadly terrorist attack, no jokes there. Tokyo was also hit with a terrorist attack; 14 dead and thousands injured after a sarin gas attack. Again, no jokes. Flight 965 crashes, killing 160. Jesus Christ. Let’s move on.

In the videogame world, we have more sequels. Bomberman 3, Final Fight 3, more Madden. We also have the release of a little known game called Chrono Trigger. As of writing this, I still have not played Chrono Trigger, so let’s move on from that before I get hit with rocks.

The PlayStation releases in North America, bringing with it Jumping Flash, Rayman, and Riiiiiiidge Racer. Remember that one?

This year doesn’t have many games that I consider great, other than the aforementioned Chrono Trigger, which I still haven’t played (much hasn’t changed since that last paragraph), but there are three games which I would consider for my favorite of this year.

First off is Yoshi’s Island. This is an incredible platformer. It explores its mechanics thoroughly with different variations and gimmicks. Each level is full of cool stuff, the transformations are a really fun touch and they vary the gameplay just enough to keep you interested. The controls, again, are impeccable. The music is fantastic, each track is full of life and personality and a lot of them are still stuck in my head to this day. The only bad thing about this game is baby Mario’s ear-piercing shrieks when he goes into the bubble. The developers thought this wasn’t stressful enough, so they added a timer and a ticking alarm sound. I remember the first time I ran out of time and baby Mario got captured by the minions. The change in art to sudden pre-rendered 3D and the sense of failure made me shit my little pants as a tyke.

The second is Megaman 7. Much like Megaman X, I played through this multiple times to the point where my parents forbid me from playing it. Forbade? They banned it. All megaman was banned after I binged X and 7. Megaman 7 isn’t the best Megaman game. It’s a lot shorter, and a lot easier, but it was my introduction to the series. I had an NES, but the only thing I played on it was Super Mario Bros, Duck Hunt and Excite Bike. I didn’t know any other games existed. Megaman 7 was my favorite Megaman game for a time. The stages are great, the robot masters are memorable, the graphics still look gorgeous and the soundtrack is one for the ages.

Now, if I put Yoshi’s Island and Megaman 7 as runners up, what ground-breaking game could I have picked for my favorite this year?

My pick for 1995: Looney Tunes B-ball. This is not a joke.

In the year that gave us Yoshi’s Island and Chrono Trigger, out of all the SNES games I could have picked, I went for Looney Tunes B-ball. Why? Because it’s my personal favorite out of the lot. It’s the one I played the most. My brother and I used to do tournaments in this game. It’s fun, but it’s admittedly kinda crap. There’s only one court, even though the game tells you you’re playing in different cities, the same three tracks play on loop endlessly and there is very little content.

It has all those flaws, but it’s fun. It’s a solid arcade basketball game with some wacky hijinks thrown in. Each character has a special move, and you can pull them off by purchasing them with gems you pick up on the court. It’s a bizarre system that works in a strange way. This game is the foundation for a lot of core memories for me as a kid, so it’s only fair that I put it as the top.

While scrolling through the list of games released in 1995, I saw some familiar names. Sure, I had to include Megaman 7 and Yoshi’s Island, because they’re great, but only one game made me sit up and go “whaaat” when I saw it, and it was Looney Tunes B-ball.

Runners up: Rayman on the PS1. I loved that game, but it was too hard for me.

1996

The first sheep is cloned, USB is introduced, and the world keeps burning. Rapper Kool Keith, under the name “Dr. Octagon” releases “Dr. Octagonecologyst”, a surrealist experimental hip-hop album that people will insist is good, even when it sounds like the schizophrenic ramblings of a homeless man set to out of tune instrumentals. I’m convinced this album is a test of some sort to see if you can form your own opinion. Other stuff happened, but it was mostly tragic, so I’ll make fun of this instead. Maybe this was considered good back then, because your only other musical option at the time was the Macarena, which was destroying the air waves causing everyone to do the cringey dance. I was at pre-school at the time, and some of the teachers did the macarena. It was the first time I felt second-hand embarrassment.

We don’t care about any of that because 1996 was an incredible year for gaming. The N64 released, bringing along with it certified gaming classics. Super Mario 64 came in to redefine 3D platformers as if it were nothing. Then he revolutionized kart racers with Mario Kart 64. Not content with his wins in platforming and kart racing, he goes on to give us Super Mario RPG, which I hear is good. Yes, it was Mario himself that gave us these games, not Nintendo.

On the Playstation side we got PaRappa the Rapper, Tomb Raider, The first Resident Evil, the forgotten and kind of crappy but still fun Jet Moto, Megaman 8. Not to mention Bubsy 3D.

Now you might be asking yourself, these are all heavy-hitters, and they’re not the favorite? What could I possibly have in my back pocket for this occasion?

My pick for 1996: QUAKE

I say this without a hint of exaggeration: Quake is the best first person shooter ever made. Period. The genre peaked in 1996, and it’s been downhill ever since.

Every enemy has a purpose, every level is carefully crafted, each weapon has its reason to exist. DOOM was the fundamental first person shooter, but Quake perfected the formula. The movement, the bunny hopping, rocket jumping, the insane but completely unintended skill ceiling. It’s a game you can enjoy as a casual player and as a coked-out speedrunner.

The graphics and the minimalist ambient soundtrack come together to form a dark, oppressive atmosphere that puts most horror games to shame. The presentation still holds up to this day.

It laid the foundation for first person shooters. Then every other game decided to ignore what Quake did. Fun movement? How about we cap your speed to a walk in the park? Ten weapons? That’s too many. Have two. Creative guns with unique purposes? What? Just point and shoot at dudes. It’s not that deep, bro. Crafted levels with considered encounters? Just chuck some dudes in a hallway and let the player figure it out. If they’re not having fun, it’s because they’re bad at it.

Runners up: Everything I just mentioned. Except for Bubsy 3D. Metal Slug.

Conclusion

The first few years of the 90s were hit and miss. I didn’t experience any of it, due to the fact that I was a drooling baby. I don’t remember much from this time, and what I have experienced from it has been looking back on it as an adult. I have no real strong opinions on it, but that will change as we go further into the future.

Next time: 97 to 2001. This is when things really get going.