i started off this year streaming most of my video game consumption on the internet and am currently ending it almost entirely in privacy. part of that is due to being back in a physical workplace full-time, but honestly i think a lot of it has been because i needed a hard break from the energy i was putting into hosting those streams and that style of social interaction. me playing videogames and being a goofball had turned into what felt like an obligation, instead of something i joyfully shared with the people who showed up. i think i also just played more garbage and outright frustrating games than i ever have before this, which didn't help.
like you ever played Sonic 06? that was literally the first game i played all the way through this year and it easily lived up to its awful reputation. admittedly, much like an old man getting hit by a football, there was something endearingly funny about the way that game kicked me in the balls. but good god, was it still a Sisyphean nightmare that felt like it was actively trying to kill me in a way that most bad games don't. such as Popeye. that game was just deeply boring and i played it for like an hour and a half.
y'know what's a game that also felt like it was trying to kill me at times? Jet Set Radio Future. what a fucking bummer of an experience. like part of that was to blame on XBox emulation still being kinda spotty, but that's a game that whips ass when everything is clicking and is absolute torture when they don't click. the most frustrating thing about that experience was that there were clear ways the game was an improvement over the original, but the level design was so dense in its layout and clunky in it's communication that i often found my brain tying knots around itself trying to decipher what to do next.
i'm sorry, this is all uhh fairly negative, but you kinda get my point on why i needed to step away from streaming when so many of my experiences this year were having schadenfreude inflicted on me. there were a least a couple of funnier instances i dealt with this year, like Fox Hunt, The Ring for the Dreamcast, Virtual Hydlide, and Cargo! - The Quest for Gravity. oh god, wait one of the last streams i did i also played Inversion, Frogger: The Great Quest, Nights: Journey into Dream, and Dino Crisis 3. no wonder i fucking stopped streaming.
anyways, i also played some really cool games this year too. Elden Ring is excellent, but you don't need me to tell you that. the only thing i really wanna highlight about it is that it's the only game in the whole Soulsborne landscape of FromSoft's catalogue, aside from Bloodborne, that made me actively say, "what the fuck is happening?" considering Bloodborne is my favorite game, that's high praise. speaking of, i replayed most of Bloodborne this year. it still slaps!
Chicory was a cute little puzzle game with unexpectedly complex boss fights. it was a quaint meditation on imposter syndrome that didn't necessarily hit me as hard as i think it did a lot of folks, but i also haven't done anything artistic in a couple years and most of my art is vent art anyways, so i try not to let myself dwell on whether what i make is valuable or of a quality that other folks in my field put out.
after 20 years of thinking it always got an unfair rap, i finally revisited Star Fox Adventures. although there were a couple rough patches caused by controller issues that nearly made me stop, i came out the other end still feeling like that game is totally fine. it's incredibly goofy and an absolute Zelda clone, but it's nowhere near the level of bad that a lot of folks put on it. oh yeah, while on the topic of GameCube revisits, i replayed a decent chunk of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. i'd complain about how i miss the amount of personality given to the side characters in Mario RPGs from that era, but like it's fine the newer games don't erase the existence of the older ones and plenty of other indie games have picked up the slack in those regards.
i'm glad i finally got to play Katamari Damacy and Incredible Crisis, two pieces of bite-sized quirkiness. the soundtrack of the former is as delightful as everyone had led me to believe. Spyro The Dragon Reignited was pleasantly fun, but you could definitely feel the collect-a-thon stink of the era it was originally made in. i don't know that i'd call myself good at it, but the new Hitman trilogy succeeded at feeling like the darkest slapstick sketch that i've ever seen since the Going Home Alone skit in The Whitest Kids U Know. Rifftrax The Game has a shockingly great half-life to its entertainment value despite both how basic the concept is and how easy it is for something like "say quippy things over a movie" to be extremely unfunny. other honorable mentions for stuff that i played some of and enjoyed but never finished include DUSK, Streets of Rage 4, Detention, and Teardown.
returning to things i actually finished and enjoyed, after barely starting it at the beginning of the year, i finally barrelled through all of the Nier Replicant remake and damn that game is a banger! certainly flawed and a bit of a slog compared to the massive refinement Nier Automata was to the formula, but an affecting story none the less.
it's kind of unreal and funny that Konami has been trying to recapture the magic of Silent Hill 2 for the last nearly 25 years and then Signalis just casually rolled up and delivered a BLATANT reimagining of that story, which manages to surpass the quality of that original story and stylistically stand apart from that influence. like turns out you can just repackage the thing that everyone loved, the important part is realizing that the thing everyone loved wasn't simply "shit gets rusty, all doors are locked" and Pyramid Head. it was the story, thematic work, and how those elements intertwined with the gameplay.
i'm still playing through it at this point, but Tunic is the first time since Fez that i've been that entranced by the experience of decoding a game and it's thankfully nowhere near as cryptic as the latter was, since the AHA! moments are given to the player a bit more generously. also, it's presentation is just an artistic actualization of that story about how Hidetaka Miyazaki would read English fantasy stories and love the mystery of only being able to understand bits and pieces of it and that's absolutely adorable.
circling back to the beginning of whatever this is, i spent all of my free time in December playing those last three games and what little time i have spent streaming since summer has been in fun, casual bursts, which i think has done a lot for rehabilitating the idea of doing that somewhat regularly again. i'd like to get back to it next year with significantly less schadenfreude getting inflicted on me and a more laid-back energy.