I played a much smaller variety of games this year than probably any other I’ve made a list for. I probably played the same number of hours but I was mostly playing fighting games. I set some goals, in order of difficulty

-hit Master in SF6 on principle: Completed this, will probably get back into that game soon but pure grinding for points is a pretty bleak way to interact with fighting games. This wasn’t especially difficult compared to the other two goals. If you have a 50% win rate or even slightly below, you will eventually hit master with enough games played. I feel ok about where my Aki ended up but I will try some other characters when I get back to 6

-hit A Rank in 3rd Strike: Still working on this. I’m not a fightcade patron so I don’t know what my point totals are. This is good because I just play 3S and don’t care about anything other than just improvements and learning how to play matchups. I can feel myself going slightly crazy so I may take a break on this soon. I do want to be in good shape for this year’s jazzy circuit though.

-Make top 8 of a Rev2sday: I set this goal in the summer of 2020 and boy it has gotten wildly harder since then. Any given week’s top 8 could be entirely people who have top 8’d a major. I stopped grinding Xrd cause I needed a break but I refuse to relinquish this goal. I will get back to this one. Thankfully spending time really grinding fighting games is useful for getting better at fighting games so I don’t think I’ll have fallen off when I do.

Best Games I Played in 2024

I wrote a different version of this post on Cohost, the best social media I’ve ever experienced. I enjoy writing posts like this, and I ambiently want to send those posts out into the world to be read by other people who enjoy reading and writing posts like this. Idk, surely at some point some other posters retirement home will come along and I can get on that site for a year until it shuts down. I don’t have new thoughts on most of these games I guess I’ll repost most of my blurbs with mild editing.

Silent Hill 2

This was a year where I tried a few PS1 and PS2 classics finally. Some of them I felt were simply not good. Silent Hill 2 was fantastic, entirely deserving of the praise it received. The visuals are incredibly evocative, timeless, not needing any kind of alteration or update for purely capitalistic reasons. The gameplay is just stiff enough to lend to the horror feel without being frustrating. The vocal performances are strange and make me feel off in the way that horror perhaps should.
I don’t like horror media in general, I suffer from enough anxiety already. I played this game on a call with friends and had a fantastic time. I chose to skip some of the puzzles because I simply wasn’t gonna be bothered, but besides that I played it pretty faithfully and liked it. Just all around strong vibes.

Tekken 8

If you aren’t a fighting game player, it might seem weird to say this, but Tekken is like learning a whole different language compared to the dialect changes between all the 2d fighters. There are just so many things to learn for every character. It is a messy game in a good way. I never got good at it, and I never quite found a character I totally fell in love with, but I put a lot of hours in, and we are one dumb character away from me spending another hundred hours in the game.

Celeste 64

For the entirety of my time playing this game, I forgot that Celeste had a wall cling. I played it exclusively using wall jumps to inch up walls. It felt jank and unintended, but I soldiered on, it was a game jam game after all. Despite playing it in this incredibly silly way, I had a great time. It feels like celeste but in 3d. That is an accomplishment.

Helldivers 2

I like playing games with my friends. Helldivers 2 was a great way to do that. I was shocked to learn how many people got into it, I never felt like Helldivers 1 had a huge cultural footprint, but maybe I just wasn’t looking in the right places. My only complaint was that it takes a lot of time to get to play with some of the toys and that made a lot of the hours feel relatively samey. I liked my time in the space quite a bit though.

Chrono Circle

I like rhythm games and I like weird controllers. I need to take another trip down to the arcade to play weird rhythm games.

Chants of Sennaar

I generally don’t click with puzzle games, they just don’t spark joy. It turns out that this is because I have an astoundingly weak visual mind, can’t really see images in my head, and almost all puzzle games want you to look at something and imagine how things could be different. Sokoban games are like if you asked me to read tax code for fun.

Chants of Sennar was a puzzle game I devoured. Loved all of my time solving language puzzles. It matched my level completely, I felt challenged but not overwhelmed. There is a series of puzzles where you act as an interpreter and it is my favorite thing I did in games all year, just a great feeling of accomplishment mixed with good story vibes.

The Big Catch Tacklebox

I played this for about 20 minutes. I will play The Big Catch for 20 hours.

Pseudoregalia

This is such a complete game that it feels weird talking about it. It does the things it set out to do. I can’t imagine “Pseudoregalia, but better.” It isn’t a perfect game but the places where it feels off just feel correct to the thing. I like 3d platformers and this was a good one.

Peaks of Yore

Someone is going to tell me that the accents in this thing are accurate and I’m gonna feel my mind melt. I have wrist issues and playing this definitely was not good for my mouse hand but it felt good to do. I like climbing things and this was a fun way to experience that. Peaks of Yore feels fair but difficult which is what I want in a climbing game.

Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree

(I wrote this bit in october 2024)

I haven’t beaten it yet. They can’t keep making more elden ring, they’re tapped out. There are no more souls games to make, the tank is empty. Please take a break Fromsoft, make something else. You are so good at making games and spaces and experiences. You don’t need to come back to the well anymore, I’m gonna play the next thing they make, I have since 2010 and haven’t been disappointed yet.

December Update: My god they announced more Ring. Please stop fromsoft, you’ve done enough. There is no more blood in this stone. I have at least one friend who likes the Ring so I guess I’m gonna do the thing, what else am I gonna do with my life, learn a hobby?

Picross 8e

Picross is a good ass time, I breezed through 7 hours of flying last week just putting the lil squares down.

Signalis

This game was on my radar, but finding out that I liked Silent Hill 2 really caused me to really get around to this one. My first thoughts about this game are negative, because it never quite hits all of the marks for me. This isn’t exactly a bad thing, it is a feeling I get with things that I really like but also really want to love. I want to love Signalis, I love sad robots, that is truly the peak of media for me, it is what I want. Signalis has a lot of those. I don’t know where it falls short, perhaps it needed one more piece of warmth. The one time we see characters happy is a really affecting moment and it really flavors the experiences that follow after.

I really bounced off of Resident Evil 1 this year. I had a curve of not liking it, then really vibing with it, then just deciding the effort was not worth it. Signalis smoothed over enough of the edges that I really clicked with it. I always felt like I was about to run out of resources, that I wasn’t going to be able to beat the game. This is good, that is right where the balance should be. The puzzles were there to make you move around the space but didn’t really challenge you. This genre space is really about hanging out in a good atmosphere than scaring you it seems, and I’m all for it.

Crusader Kings 3

I bounced off this game hard the first time I tried it a few years ago. My friends like it so I decided to give it another shot. I almost bounced off this game super hard again, even with my friend giving me a hands on teaching session. I just see so many mechanics and numbers and start to freak out. My brain needs to know all the things I need to be worrying about and considering. This is just impossible in CK3. Thankfully I broke past the wall and was able to relax. This is a pleasant ant farm to watch and poke at.

Wacca

Thanks to being on a discord server for a Seattle 3rd Strike meetup, I saw that there was also a pop-up arcade that sometimes hosted events. I didn’t know what to expect but I would like to be the type of person who travels an hour by bus to go to a random warehouse park to do something cool. Plus the machines were all free, recommended 10$ donation at the door, not a bad way to spend your time.

This warehouse was full of modern rhythm games which I didn’t even consider to be an option. I forget that I like rhythm games, I played a ton of DDR and Guitar Hero as a kid. I love weird controllers and input devices, they feel like new and fresh ways to interact with games. So I chose Wacca because it was an open machine. I don’t know that I had a great time, but I spent a quick two hours playing the thing so I think I like it.

A random person saw that I didn’t have a card and brought me one, so I just have a card to interact with all the machines. I didn’t wade into the middle of the pack to play some of the more popular devices but I should. The local meetups have shut down for now while they find a new warehouse but I’ll be back.

Alan Wake

I liked Control, and everyone had huge amounts of praise for Alan Wake 2. The people praising AW2 are alan wake fans so you can’t really trust them, but I saw the talk nonetheless. My friend really liked Alan Wake 2, and 1 is a different friend’s favorite game, so I finally got around to this.

This is the most Xbox 360 ass game of all time. It could not be more for the 360 if they tried. I have a hard time describing why, but just the awkward melding of interactive filmic elements and an ok 3rd person shooter is what that era is in my brain. That being said, the story was fun, the voice acting was good to great, and I had a good time. The ending was bad because the combat was just incessant after a point, but that is a minor complaint, I am excited to play AW2 after going through the Control DLC.

Sidebar: I find it intensely frustrating when a piece of media constantly references another work. Like I have seen Twin Peaks, for the love of god alan wake, please stop asking me if I have seen Twin Peaks. I can’t believe the ending of AW1 references the Twin Peaks Season 2 ending. Like, Remedy, you made a good thing, you don’t have to point to another good thing and say “please associate us with this other thing.” Be confident, I liked your work, you can have your own aesthetic choices.

Anime and Manga

Michiko and Hatchin

If this show was as good as its trailer, this would be an all timer. Instead it is merely pretty good. In the legacy of the other Watanabe involved shows, this takes after Cowboy Bebop or Samuari Champloo in that it is about some dipshits with a vague goal. This mostly consists of various episodic adventures. When the show is good it is great. It doesn’t nail the ending the way you’d like but it does it well enough. This is an enjoyable time.

Escaflowne

I feel like not a lot actually happens in Escaflowne. Like with Michiko and Hatchin, the english trailer for the movie is an all timer, hard to live up to. This is better than the movie due to being coherent, but perhaps worse due to maybe a lack of budget or ambition. The show doesn’t try to go super big, but it also never oversteps its ability. This is an incredibly consistent show that spins a fantasy story with some romance subplots. If you would like that, you won’t be let down.

Turn A Gundam

I’ve talked about my gundam feelings in other years, so I’ll just discuss Turn A. This is the Tomino Gundam to watch. If you are only ever going to watch one Gundam, do this one. If you’re only gonna watch two, also watch Gundam Wing because that is a fun time.

Holy shit this show has Gundam money and goes nuts on one of the last shows to ever do big budget cell animation. Tomino finally cracked the code on how to actually have enjoyable characters in addition to the mechs and politics. While the show is still created to sell robot toys, the show isn’t entirely about how cool it is to send Mechs out into battle. Instead it is mostly about how if you leave a bunch of weapons lying around, militaries will come into existence and insist that the weapons should be used. There is no way to have a mech without it inciting violence. It is necessarily a thing that causes power imbalances and people will try to use that power.

All of this on top of having weirdo character drama. There is a freaky friday plot that I assumed I would hate because I just hate that style of plot. It actually is maybe the beating heart of the show and doesn’t hit any of the normal elements of that sort of story. 50 Episodes is a lot, but if you need to watch some Gundam for your own education, this is the one I like the most. It does have references to past Gundams and the historical structures of gundam plots are fun to know ahead of time, but like, there are 200 Episodes you could watch to prepare, or you can simply miss a couple thematic elements on the first go around.

Uchoten Kazoku 1 & 2

This show is just endlessly charming. I could watch these dipshits have adventures forever. The writing is funny, the characters are realized, the plot is fun but not so involved that it is stressful.

Land of the Lustrous (Manga)

Land of the Lustrous always looked pretty cool but I never bothered reading it. I especially wrote it off when I saw implications that it involved a lot of suffering of some sort. I just assumed it was an edgy piece of media and didn’t want to engage with it.

I could not have been more wrong. I struggle to come up with words that can convey how much it means to me. It is an impossibly touching and earnest story. I am intensely lucky I decided to read it when I did, because the series ended maybe a week or two before I started. Experiencing the object as one whole thing was very rewarding.

I’m tearing up just thinking about it. I love these rocks so much. I love the ending, it fills me with profound sadness but also hope and joy alongside it.

Vinland Saga (Manga)

After remembering that I enjoy reading Manga this year, I decided to check out Vinland Saga finally. After reading a volume or two I realized I could and probably should just purchase the volumes and read it that way. I consume media through a computer, I have never had a need for physical objects. Comics is a form of media that just is meaningfully different when seen on paper.

Vinland Saga has been a good time. I decided to purchase the big bound volumes because if I’m gonna get the object, might as well have the paper be large. The big volumes are coming out slowly so I get to wait and slowly experience the story at a healthy pace.

This book has the shit drawn out of it. Dude and presumably his assistants do not stop drawing at any point. It has vikings, adventure, and farming. Adventure is by far the least important part of those three.