July was a bit of a bust, I did play a couple things but… big oof overall. Maybe August will be better. Clearly it won’t have one of the worst games this year, right? Actually there are a few cool things coming, so it might be fine actually. But it does have two of the worst games of the year not named Suicide Squad.

So for August 2024, we’ve got: 19 multiplats and 1 PC early access release that’s interesting… and 1 Switch game I totally forgot about lol (had to edit this post). I have 2 “for sure” games I’m getting and a few maybes too. Depending on my thoughts on it, I might even write a review for one of them! Haven’t done that in a bit.

Let’s go!

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. This is not just games I care about myself, I highlight as much as I think makes sense. Of course, I can’t see the future, so I may be missing games and I may be listing games that may get delayed.

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!

This was revealed in one of the earliest PS5 presentations, might have been the first one. It was noted right away to not be exclusive, which is nice. It looked really good graphically, and the gameplay concept seemed pretty fun, so I was excited for this one.

It’s also an indie studio’s first game, which you can’t tell from looking at trailers. The devs previously did some 3D animations for different companies, for ads and such (some of which was pretty nice), so this jump into gaming is definitely an interesting choice.

Let’s see if Ember Lab’s first endeavor in gaming is a good one!

Well I sure didn’t post a lot since the last release list post. NEO TWEWY just took really long. And I’m playing through Great Ace Attorney right now, I’m almost done with the first game in the pack. And I didn’t get time to play that much else though there’s a bunch of games I do have on my “must-get” list. I still gotta get Blaster Master Zero 3 and Axiom Verge 2 and No More Heroes 3… And more, less “urgent” stuff… and that’s just recent ones, there’s a bunch of older stuff I eventually want to grab. And of course September has a couple games I want. I’m definitely not running out of things to review.

So this month I’m highlighting: 19 multiplats, 6 Switch games, 1 PS5 game and 2 PC games. There’s some good stuff in there too, I’m at 3-4 games I’m getting for sure, and like 5 maybes. Definitely a decent month.

*EDIT 09/10: removed a game that is not coming out this month that searching on google still has the wrong date lol*

Let’s go!

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, small interesting ones 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.