Video Games – Page 7

TE’s Top 10 Video Games of 2022

Well, another year is behind us, and as usual, I frittered away a huge chunk of it playing video games. To help justify spending all that time on viddygames, here’s a big, long list of the ones that I liked most.

If this is your first time reading one of my Top X Games lists, I don’t make them based on games released in the previous year, but rather, games I played in the previous year. There is one constant rule: I must have played the game for the first time in the last year. And I added a new criteria for 2022, which is: no two games from the same franchise. Helps to keep the list a little more diversified. Oh, and the games are listed in the order that I played them. No playing favourites among the favourites.

Okay, that’s the preamble. Let’s go!

In 2021, I played most of the games in the Ys series, and most of them were really good. Ys: Memories of Celceta even managed to secure a spot on my Top 10 list for 2021. So the only video game “goal” I had going into 2022 was to finish off the Ys series by playing through the two games I had outstanding: Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana, and Ys IX: Monstrum Nox. Needless to say, they were also really good.

Lacrimosa of Dana in particular gets to adorn this list because it is definitely my favourite game in the series. It takes everything that was great about Memories of Celceta and makes them even better. So really, you could probably just read what I wrote last year and it would mostly still apply, and I could skip writing another paragraph here. But I suppose that I should at least go over some of the highlights. Specifically, I enjoy how the combat is exciting and very speedy, exploring is more fun than ever with map and treasure box completion percentages for every area, the metroidvania-style way that the world slowly opens up as you gain new traversal abilities is always appreciated, and I think that this game has the best cast of party members in the series.

One thing that I cannot praise enough about Ys VIII is that it has one of my absolute favourite video game soundtracks of all time. All Ys games have phenomenal music, but Ys VIII’s in particular really stands out to me. Not only did I get an imported physical copy of the soundtrack, but I also bought the Ys VIII: Super Ultimate arrange album, and I listen to both of them quite often. Sunshine Coastline specifically is straight up one of the best video game songs I’ve ever heard, and multiple official and cover versions of it live on my phone so I can listen to them all the time.

Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up: February 2023

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Star Ocean: Till the End of Time (PS2) – You know how in FNAF, there’s “the one you shouldn’t have killed”? Well this is “the one I shouldn’t have played.” To be fair, it wasn’t that bad, and while I did enjoy some of my time with it, it was an absolute struggle to play much more often than I would have liked. Also the ending was poop. The biggest shame of it all is that I likely would have been totally ga-ga for this game if I’d played it back in 2004, but it just feels rough in 2023.

Picross S6 (Switch) – What more can I say than “it’s more Picross”? No, like, literally, it’s exactly the same format as the last two but with different puzzles. Which is all I ask for, but it doesn’t make for a very interesting review.

Kirby’s Dream Land (GB) – With the release of the Game Boy Online app on Switch… I took the opportunity to revisit some old favourites.

Nintendo Direct 2.8.2023

Uh, so this happened over a week ago. I watched it on my work laptop, to take advantage of the second screen, but I also can’t access WordPress from said laptop. So I wrote down all these notes while watching and only now have gotten around to publishing them.

Pikmin 4 – I like the music. New onion design? Ice pikmin… cool. Ooh! A pupper pal! Dungeons are back? Overall, it looks like another Pikmin, which is good since we haven’t had one in 10 years.

Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up: January 2023

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Mega Man X (SNES) – The annual tradition continues.

The Night of the Scissors (PC) – A very short -and surprisingly easy- hide-and-seek style indie horror. There are like three items to find, one puzzle, and a killer who just doesn’t seem to be around all that often. Needs some more meat on its bones.

Nightmare of Decay (PC) – Indie survival horror FPS that wears its inspirations on its sleeve. I really liked it, though it could be a bit frustrating at times. See here!

A List of Viddy Games from the Old Year

Happy 2023!

Here is a big ol’ list of all the video games that I spent a significant amount of time playing in 2022. It’s not a comprehensive list, as I left off a few little indie games that were more “experiences”, games that I gave up on after a single session, and games that aren’t really games (like Rocksmith and Fitness Boxing). If you’d like to know how I felt about any of them, I included the month in which I started playing each one, so you can conveniently look up the appropriate Month End Round-Up post.

Of note is that of the 75 games listed below, 53 were eligible for my “Top X of 2022” list. I’ve narrowed it down to the ones I liked best, and I was left with fifteen finalists. Now I have the unenviable task of deciding if I want my GOTY list to just be 15 games, or if I want to try to figure out which five to cut to make it a nice, round Top Ten. Or, should I add seven more games to make it the Top 22 of ’22? Find out in… I don’t know, like a week or two, maybe? I’m going to try to get it done before February, anyway.

Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up: December 2022

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Pokémon Scarlet (Switch) – Paldean Pokédex complete!

Mars Moose: Cosmic Quest: City Sights (PS1) – More of a curio than anything. It’s a 10-minute game for wee bairns, but still, I played it.

Trombone Champ (PC) – A wacky game that I don’t think really lived up to its potential. It’s not exactly the rhythm game it first appears to be, but nor does it go nearly as off the deep end as similar games like Frog Fractions or Inscryption.

Nintendo Stats – 2022 Edition

I’ve grown to really enjoy how Nintendo compiles your play history and presents it in statistical data for the year. And apparently Steam did it this year, too!

Alas, Nintendo’s offering for 2022 was weak, with much less data than the last couple of years. What I got was a list of the 21 Switch games I played the most this year, and how many hours of each. No graphs, no in-depth breakdowns, nothing else. So, here are the top three…

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 takes the cake for sure, and I still have a ton of game left to play there. I don’t want to give too much away, but it’s definitely going to rank high on my 2022 GOTY list. Monster Hunter Rise got second billing because the Sunbreak expansion came out this year and I spent a lot of time grinding away at that with my brother. Lastly, and just squeaking in there at the end of the year, is Pokémon Scarlet, which is even a few hours richer than what it says above, because I’ve played it a bunch since these stats were delivered. Also, the assertion that I only played Pokémon on 10 separate days cannot be right. It just can’t!

Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up: November 2022

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Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow (GBA) – What? Halloween season is over? Sure, but Castlevania is appropriate at any time of the year. Plus, this is my favourite ‘Vania, so there’s that. Is it still good almost 20 years later? Yeah! A little creaky in some ways, but still solid. Got the good ending and 100% map completion, but I had no interest in grinding for 100% soul completion.

ElecHead (Switch) – A very fun retro-style puzzle-platformer. Charge up platforms with your body and see what happens! Throw your head to charge up far away platforms! Fall and die on spikes many times! You know the type.

The Turing Test (PC) – Sweet first-person-puzzler that is highly reminiscent of Portal and The Talos Principle. Sadly, it’s rather short, and maybe even a wee bit too easy. I suppose it’s a good thing, though, when a game leaves you wanting more.

ActRaiser Renaissance and Why I Shouldn’t Have Played It (So Much)

The Wii’s Virtual Console was a pretty incredible thing, and one of the reasons why: it introduced me to a fair number of classic games that I never would have experienced otherwise. ActRaiser for SNES being one of them, if you hadn’t already sussed that out from the post title. I can vaguely remember reading about ActRaiser (or perhaps its sequel?) in Nintendo Power, very specifically while with my family at the drive-in theatre, waiting for a movie to start. But I never actually played it until many, many years later when it was released on the VC. And you know what? It’s a pretty cool game! Part action-platformer, part SimCity Lite, it’s got surprisingly few imitators to this day despite how well-received it was and how fondly remembered it seems to be.

Square-Enix surprised the world last year by releasing a remake of the game, called ActRaiser Renaissance. I feel a little bad about waiting over a year to play it, but there are simply too many games, you know? But I have played it now, and I thought that it was very good! It’s a very faithful remake, as it brings back literally everything I remember about the original and polishes up the presentation with fancy new graphics and a rearranged soundtrack by the composer of the original, Yuzo Koshiro. And that’s all great! There are also a ton of new features, like being able to level up your character and get power-ups in the action stages, and a new tower-defense mode for the simulation stages. There’s also an absolute buttload of extra dialogue, which, having read it all, is pretty safe to skip entirely.

Where things go wrong, however, are in the trophies (or achievements, if you prefer). While most of the trophies are awarded for beating bosses, at least half of them are awarded for what amounts to grinding levels and farming monsters.

Hype (Paldean Form)

The new Pokémon games release this Friday! They’re finally here! And to celebrate, I did a thing:

Normally this is the kind of thing that I would write about here on this blog, but… I’ve been wanting to branch out into different kinds of video content, so here we are!