Okay I did my GotY post, now let’s stop looking at the past and look at the future… Hopefully 2024 brings just a bit more quality than 2023 did.

I’m just gonna do the usual, just talk about my top 6 most-hyped-for-now games, and then big lists of games I have some level of hype for, and a slightly smaller list of games that might be popular but that I don’t have hype for (some because they’re bad, some because they’re not really my thing).

So let’s go!

It’s time for the only Games of the Year awards that matter!
… Just kidding, no GotY awards matter. But I like doing them (which does, in fact, make this more relevant than the VGAs), so here we go.

I am choosing 5 winners, and then one TOP GAME OF THE YEAR winner, just to attempt at variety, and then posting all my honorable mentions which are games I liked but that weren’t GotY material. This is obviously going to be based on games I played myself (which is still over 50 games, even though I reviewed very few of those). So if there’s a game you liked and it doesn’t appear as one of my winners or honorable mentions… it’s because I didn’t play it. And I probably didn’t play it because it was obviously bad.

As far as notable games I skipped one that aren’t bad (or probably aren’t bad), there’s still a few of those. I skipped on both Like a Dragon games, Baldur’s Gate 3 (I will get it at some point), Persona 5 Tactica, Remnant 2, Hogwarts Legacy, Lies of P, Dave the Diver and probably a bunch of other games that were pretty popular and probably-good. Also didn’t play FF16 which… I’ve not been convinced it’s good, but I’m waiting for the PC version so I will review it when I do play it.

And there’s a few obviously bad games I didn’t touch, like Alan Wake 2, Starfield, Redfall and Diablo 4 (I played the beta, it was not good, so I skipped on the full game). And of course there’s some bad games I did play, like Forspoken and Sonic Superstars… or that were fairly subpar like Spongebob Cosmic Shake.

As a general rule, remakes and remasters will not make the list unless they’re substantially different from the original, but some might make it into the honorable mentions.

Anyways, time to rant quickly, then go through the winners and stuff. LET’S GO!

Every year, the VGAs remind us that they’re awful, boring and stupid. Why do people keep watching? I make sure to watch someone that is “reacting” to it just to be sure they don’t get my view. Fuck Geoff the Lizardman’s shitty show. It’s been a shitshow since when it started in 2003 on Spike TV, and it’s still shit despite the (barely) rebrand.

The nominees are decided by people who legitimately do not play games (Evidence: Alan Wake 2 was nominated in many categories… And Dave the Diver was nominated in the indie category even though it’s literally not indie), the winners are decided by people who legitimately do not play games (Evidence: Pizza Tower wasn’t in the indie category, and lost the one category it was nominated in… Also Alan Wake 2 won in multiple categories), and gamers have very little say on what goes on there. Not a single award given in any of these categories is worth taking seriously, because it’s all decided by people who have no idea what’s going on. Even if there’s audience voting, it actually doesn’t matter because the weight of the audience in the decision is minimal… and, as the Player’s Voice category showed, the people who vote in this stupid show are clearly not qualified to do so when a game from 2 years ago almost fucking wins.

Some people say they watch it for the World Premieres… Okay, watch the World Premieres when they’re uploaded on youtube a few minutes later. Not like they’re ever any good, of course. Or worth suffering through the VGAs to watch them. This year had the Visions of Mana trailer, and Monster Hunter Wilds being announced a year too early which is a waste of time, and that REALLY fucking weird Sega trailer where new games for Jet Set Radio, Golden Axe, Streets of Rage, Shinobi and Crazy Taxi (cool announcements, but why announce 5 games in the span of 40 seconds? Stupid trailer). You could’ve just seen these on youtube or twitter. No need for the VGAs to exist.

Fuck the VGAs.

…There’s automatically a Read More button but there’s nothing more to read.

Well the GotY stuff is done, so not much is left to do this year other than… get hyped for next year! I also have 2 reviews that I’m writing, and the january release list. So I’m doing stuff!

2022 was a pretty fun year with a lot of pretty solid games. 2023… I’m not quite sure if it’s lining up to be quite as good, but it very easily could. There’s a good number of really interesting games coming up, but I’m actually not sure about big badass games yet, as a whole.

So I’ll do my yearly usual post, giving my top 6-ish hyped games, make a big list of big-to-small games I’m interested in, and make a list of big games I’m not interested in. Just trying to get excited about the future and stuff.

So let’s go!

IT IS TIME FOR THE GAMES OF THE YEAR 2022! I’m actually surprised at how good 2022 ended up being as far as games. There were a lot of good ones, so much so that I couldn’t play all the interesting ones. There was just no time. Not that all games were good, Sonic Frontiers and Return to Monkey Island exist, after all. But overall, there was plenty of good stuff.

So it is this time of the year where I can talk about all the great games I loved that came out that year. I usually do 6-7 GotY winners, one of which would be my grand TOP GotY choice, but I don’t know if I can do that this year.

I will also rant about the year as a whole, as usual, with a focus on the big 3.

There’s some games I was interested in during 2022 that I have yet to play, in case you’re wondering. Who knows if I’ll get to them, but if you think they’re really good and are sad they’re not named here, know that I probably hold no ill will against them, I probably just didn’t play it.

Amongst big games I haven’t played that could’ve had a chance: Digimon Survive (actually bought it but haven’t played it yet), A Plague Tale: Requiem, God of War Ragnarök, Horizon 2, Marvel’s Midnight Suns, Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher, Choo Choo Charles, Signalis, Soulstice, Sports Story… and many others. A lot of interesting games came out this year, was a bit hard to get to all of them.

So let’s go!

Click here to skip to the winners if you’re not interested in my inane rantings.

So I reviewed a decent amount of games this year. But I played more than what I reviewed. I did have a few “I don’t want to review X game” posts, where I’d give a quick synopsis of why a review felt a bit pointless, or I didn’t finish the game and had little to say about it. Like Dawn of the Monsters which I found kinda meh, or Fire Emblem Warriors Three Hopes which I really liked but didn’t review because it’s just another Warriors game.

So I figured, let’s take all these games I played and didn’t review, and put them all in one big stupid post. Why not!

Here are the games I’m having a look at in this post: Windjammers 2, Gunvolt Chronicles: Luminous Avenger iX 2, Azure Striker Gunvolt 3, Hot Wheels Unleashed, Blossom Tales 2, River City Saga: Three Kingdoms, Shovel Knight Dig, Metal Hellsinger, Omega Labyrinth Life, River City Girls 2, Freedom Planet 2, Demon Throttle, Gungrave G.O.R.E., Ground Divers. A bit of a random post, but hey I like talking about most of the games I play, so there it is.

Well, let’s go!

Really the only reason to watch it this year is that Steam are giving away a bunch of steam decks.

Edit after the fact: When the first ever interesting moment of your awards show since 2003 is a kid trolling you with a weird Bill Clinton joke, you know your show is shit

Sometimes a game comes up that you have basically no expectations for, but they end up being very impressive. Stranger of Paradise is one of these. The first trailer was wacky as fuck, made kinda no sense, wasn’t a good explanation of what the game would be like, and all that people really seemed to get out of it was “CHAOS” and the slew of memes that came from that. Unfortunately for this game, this ended up not being a good thing because that’s all people think of it, and they think it’s bad because of that meme or something. It’s really weird, you mention this is a good game and people think you’re trolling. But it is good.

I actually avoided all gameplay videos and trailers for this game after the announcement because that announcement completely convinced me to buy it, because it was so weird and stupid.

So let’s go and talk about what is one of the best games this year so far! Yeah.

This is gonna be a pretty simple post. I’m just looking at the next year of games and trying to figure out what the games I’m most excited for. I’m keeping it straightforward. I’ll list my 6 most hyped games and talk about them quickly, then just have a big list of other games I’m interested in (with some comments next to some of them), and finally a smaller list of games that might end up being a big deal but that I don’t care about for whatever reason (either because they’ll be shit, or because they’re not my kinda game). Of course, I’ll have a bit of ranting at the end there because why not. Just to be clear about my choices.

So let’s go and discuss the hype for another year of games!

Then I can get back to normal, I still have the January games list to post 😀

EDIT 01/03 I ADDED A GAME (in the “Other games I am excited about” list)! I won’t do this much but the post is still new so why not.

2021. It was 2020 again, but weirder. On my side, I’ve been stuck in my house, working from home, since March 2020, I’m fine with that. Just working, working out, watching an unhealthy amount of vtubers and playing an unhealthy amount of video games. I had cataracts all of 2020 and early 2021 so I could barely see for a while, I got those fixed this year so that’s nice. I don’t really have much else to say on the non-gaming side of things, no big health emergencies in the family this year so that’s good. Not much activity overall. That said there was SOMETHING new… this website. I talked about this in the first post I made here, but I had a different site before this (called The Save Points, which originally was a group project but became a solo project fairly quickly), but ran into some DNS issues and decided to abandon the site I had built for the last 13 years. Switched how I did a few things, but yeah, having fun with this new site now. Definitely want to improve things a bit, I want to post more than I do.

As far as gaming, 2021 was actually pretty solid. I don’t know how it happened, but I constantly had something to play. Every month had at least 2 great games (plus a bunch of smaller decent games) which is not something that happens in most years. I didn’t even play all the games I was interested in this year, it was too busy. I didn’t even play too many stinkers, pretty much just Outriders, Axiom Verge 2 and NEO TWEWY.

So I have my own way of doing things for the GotY. Instead of being lame and choosing one winner, or being even lamer and doing a bunch of weird meaningless categories that have a ton of shitty nominations (made by people who hate video games), I just choose, like, 7 winners. I do put one winner on top of everyone else for maximum subjectivity, but yeah, 7 winners, the 7 best games of the year, let’s fucking go.

Since this IS an end-of-year post about the top games of the year, I do want to take the time to look back on some things, so I’ll rant about the console manufacturers a bit and whatever else catches my fancy, then select the 7 GotY winners. I also list a bunch of honorable mentions because I’m just a nice guy like that.

Oh hey I conveniently linked to the relevant sections if you want to skip my inane rantings. You’re welcome.

• Rant (seriously skip this part if you just want to see the winners)
• Games of the Year Winners
• Games of the Year Super Winner
• Honorable mentions

I will note before this that there are in fact games I haven’t played. So if a game you liked isn’t on the list, know that it’s either that I didn’t play it, or it sucked balls. It’s okay, you’re allowed to like bad games. Also I didn’t get a PS5 this year (for reasons I might rant about), so the one good exclusive on it is also a game I didn’t play. I’m sure Ratchet is great (impressions are basically all positive), I just didn’t want to buy a PS5 just to play that one game. I didn’t play Village (though I did analyze the gameplay from watching Gura playing it, it needs some help). I hear great things about Inscryption, I didn’t buy it. And there’s other games I’m interested in I didn’t play like Cruisn’ Blast, Super Robot Wars 30, Eastward and probably some others. I also literally just got a few other 2021 games that I will review later, maybe they’re good too.

Without further ado, let’s do this thing. 2021 Games of the Year let’s fucking go!