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!

So this is the Game of the Year. Spoilers!

Yeah, when this was announced, I knew it would rank highly as one of my favorite games this year, but I didn’t know exactly how much.

This is a series that us non-japanese people haven’t gotten any of in a long while. The last game in the series we got in the west is Dragon Quest Monsters Joker 2, in 2010. We missed on the Pro version of Joker 2 (which is particularly stupid because the Pro version came out in Japan 6 months before the vanilla version came out in the west… where’s the logic?). We missed on Joker 3 and its “Pro” version. We missed on the 3D remakes of DQM1 and DQM2. We missed on all the mobile games (Wanted, Super Light, and the mobile port of the 3D remake of DQM1) except for Tact which barely counts. And we even somehow missed on Terry’s Wonderland Retro which is just a port of the Game Boy version of DQM1 with some extra UI added around the game screen (with stuff like monster stats and labyrinth info)… which is a really fucking stupid game not to port to the west considering an english translation literally already exists from 25 years ago… It IS a fantastic series, but Squeenix hates us.

But when this was announced for a worldwide release, the hype was off the charts. FINALLY we get a new one!

So let’s see exactly how good it is… or whatever it is I’ll write after this, I have no idea.

Really didn’t have much to talk about this month. Didn’t really have a good reason to do reviews other than Mario RPG. Like, I finished Ghostrunner 2, that was okay. Almost finished Hardhat Wombat (newest game by some people who worked on Plants vs Zombies), that’s pretty fun. Played a whole lot of Mahjong Soul because I decided to be good at Mahjong and rank up (and I did). But there’s not much I really felt like posting about… Oh and I picked up Cyberpunk, maybe that’ll be okay, I’m not super sure about it yet.

So here I’m highlighting: 3 multiplats, 2 Switch releases and 1 PC release. There’s very little. One of the most hype games of the year… and that’s about it. There’s a few things I decided on purpose not to highlight, and a lot of stuff that didn’t manage to catch even a little bit of my attention…  Like, am I really supposed to highlight a shitty VR FNAF game? Fuck that, just watch the 50 videos MatPat will make out of it. Several other games I say that I don’t feel warrant the highlighting. Also Apple Arcade is not a real platform… Just a reminder.

Oh and Xbox is getting BG3, but I didn’t find a precise date so it’s not in here.

Let’s go and wonder why I bothered posting this!

Disclaimer: I only list games that I think are worth mentioning. This includes games I’m personally interested in, games that will likely be popular, highly advertised games, some more niche stuff I may notice, and such. Not just games I care about myself, I highlight as much as I think makes sense. And of course, I can’t see the future, so I may be missing games and I may be listing games that may get delayed.

I think I need to be the singular voice of dissent towards this game. Not because it’s bad, far from it, but it’s a major symptom of a malady that has been turning the entire gaming industry to shit for many years.

While there was excitement for this game when it was announced, and it’s seemingly doing amazing (consistently staying above Super Mario Wonder on the eshop), it’s also something of a “why would you do this” kind of game.

So let’s talk about it!

I put out reviews this month! And didn’t put out other stuff I wanted to! Yay! Currently playing Ghostrunner 2 and Hardhat Wombat, not sure if I’ll fully review either yet, but they’re good.

So here I’m highlighting: 20 multiplats, 3 Switch games and 1 PC game. As far as anything I’m actually buying… There’s 2 I’m getting for sure, and, like, 1 or 2 maybes. No much there. Lots of interesting stuff that I just happen to not care about.

Let’s go I guess!

Disclaimer: I only list games that I think are worth mentioning. This includes games I’m personally interested in, games that will likely be popular, highly advertised games, some more niche stuff I may notice, and such. Not just games I care about myself, I highlight as much as I think makes sense. And of course, I can’t see the future, so I may be missing games and I may be listing games that may get delayed.

Okay so Sonic wasn’t good (see previous review), but Mario, unlike Sonic, has an extremely solid track record of quality up to now (as far as mainline 2D and 3D games go), and the trailers for this were pretty darn solid (I only watched the reveal trailer, but people were hyped for all the following ones too). These are 2 franchises on basically opposite ends of the quality spectrum, and it’s pretty interesting that these bitter rivals saw a release of similar styles of games in the same week.

So really this is just pure hype and, after release, very good critical reception as well, moreso than Sonic. I’ll try not to make too many comparisons in the review itself, but this whole point of reviewing both of these (especially when my review output has been low recently) is to compare them.

So let’s just go with it right now, not much else to say in the intro!

Last week both a new Sonic and a new Mario came out. While Mario Wonder was a pretty hyped game and looked good based on its trailers, Sonic Superstars had awful trailers and wasn’t getting too much hype. When it came out though, reviews were pretty positive. But I think you should always reduce your hype when it comes to Sonic, because his post-Genesis output has not been very good with only a few examples of games that were any good at all.

So today I’m releasing 2 reviews, one for Mario Wonder, one for Sonic Superstars. And I’m starting with the worse of the two.

Also kind of a mini-review, I don’t feel like going super in-depth with this one.

So yeah, let’s go with Sonic first!

Awawa?

Awawawawawawawawa!

Anyways, yeah, October games. September had a few posts because… stuff happened. But still haven’t gotten really any reviews out. I’ve been playing stuff, but I don’t feel like I have much to say about them. Maybe I’ll make a post of micro-reviews or something, I dunno.

So here I’m highlighting: 18 multiplats, 4 Switch games and 1 PS5 game that will come out to PC later. There’s just 1 “for sure” game for me this time, a few maybes though. I actually skipped on including a bunch of stuff because it was so obviously shitty (like that awful VR Ghostbusters game).

Let’s go I guess!

Disclaimer: I only list games that I think are worth mentioning. This includes games I’m personally interested in, games that will likely be popular, highly advertised games, some more niche stuff I may notice, and such. Not just games I care about myself, I highlight as much as I think makes sense. And of course, I can’t see the future, so I may be missing games and I may be listing games that may get delayed.

So this was something I saw a bunch of trailers for and I thought it looked pretty cool. There was a demo that I didn’t play. It was getting pretty good comments. So I figured I’d check it out.

So anyway I just finished it yesterday evening, and here’s a quick mini-review!

Let’s go! There will be very minor spoilers.

Hey on the same day as the Nintendo Direct how about that!

Well I didn’t notice any “leaks” for this one that aren’t entirely stupid… So my expectation is simply that this will be shit. Like every State of Play. These things are always awful. My expectations? Shitty games that won’t be exclusive to PS5, making this whole presentation pointless and stupid.

My general expectation for every State of Play is the same: even the best ones don’t have anything interesting, so no, matter how good this may end up being, it will still have been a shitty waste of time.

So yeah, let’s go I guess. Again, like the Nintendo Direct, this is a live reaction.