Happy 2020 everyone and thank you for joining me yet again for my yearly exhaustive look back at my ranked experiences of videogames from the prior year! For newer readers, that is where anything gaming related I played, read, watched or interacted with in any other fashion in 2019 (regardless if the game released in 2019 or not) is dissected and broke down in a way unlike your average videogame website top 10 list. Somehow these keep growing in length each year, and if you survived until the end and desire more than take a look at my past top ranked experience lists for these years: 2018 - 2017 - 2016

Just a forewarning this will be a lengthy read so make sure to ‘Control + D’ to bookmark this page or for you mobile readers I would be obliged if you queued it up on a ‘read later’ type app such as Pocket. Click or press here for this year’s recommended background reading music courtesy of the soothing, ambient beats from the OST for NeoCab! Since I do not anticipate anyone reading this in one go, I googled up HTML code for page anchors to make it intuitive to read this in parts for us time conscience folks, so here are some in-page bookmarks…

Part 1 - Rankings 41 through 34

Part 2 - Rankings 33 through 26

Part 3 - Rankings 25 through 20

Part 4 - Rankings 19 through 15

Part 5 - Rankings 14 through 10

Part 6 - Rankings 9 through 5

Part 7 - Rankings 4 through 1

Enough dilly-dallying, let us kickoff the 2019 list with a couple not-so-desirable gaming experiences of the year…

PART 1 - RANKINGS 41 THROUGH 34

41) The Spoiled Fruit that is Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD

I loved the original Super Monkey Ball games on GameCube and Xbox! I missed out on the last original iteration that hit on the Wii launch, Banana Blitz and was ecstatic to hear that Sega was giving it the HD remaster treatment in 2019 on current systems! All I recall from when Banana Blitz originally released was that it forced in a lot of waggle/motion controls for the Wii and that they made the HD release more traditional controller friendly and took out mini-games that were exclusively centered around motion controls so I thought this would be an ideal way to play the game! I could not have been more wrong!

My favorite memories of the GCN/Xbox versions was getting four people to play the main adventure mode where everyone would take their turn with their own monkey ball and navigate them on progressively tougher stages (think classic Marble Madness). Once a player passes/fails a stage, it would be the next player’s turn and it would serve as a nice preview of the stage ahead and what to glom off of one player’s attempt to strategize for your upcoming turn. With up to four players it was a riot cheering and gasping at successful attempts and ridiculous fails and was always a great time….that is until Sega decided for Banana Blitz HD to make the primary adventure mode only playable for one player!!! I have no idea why they did this and am going to chalk it up to a ridiculous oversight!

At least the party games are still multiplayer and the excellent Pilotwings-homage, ‘Monkey Target’ returns….but with only one map!?!? Add on top of this some unexpected jittery visuals that did not sit well with my friends and I and it lead to me apologizing for busting out this sorry version of Monkey Ball for a multiplayer game night! If you still have your past consoles hooked up I recommend Super Monkey Ball Deluxe for PS2/Xbox instead since it has all the stages and party games from both GCN games, exclusive content, more maps for ‘Monkey Target’ and multiplayer support for the primary adventure mode.

GB's Video Embed is not jiving with me so here is a link - https://youtu.be/7BKhZVZhBXo

The long awaited return of the TFL/DGR/StH Game Show at MGC did not disappoint!

40) Midwest Gaming Class Weather Fail

2018 saw my return to the Milwaukee retro videogame convention, Midwest Gaming Classic, after missing the previous four. I had so much fun reconnecting with everyone and taking in the show at the incredibly spacious Wisconsin Center that I soon enough made reservations to make it down for the 2019 show. With the con transpiring in early April though there is always the chance of a late-season snow storm/blizzard hitting in the Midwest and that is exactly what happened and closed my local highways for nearly two days and I wound up missing out on the show. I did at least get to check out SupertheHardest’s panel where they livestreamed their Jeopardy-style game show that was an absolute joy to follow along with as hosts John and Dave tossed out random games to the contestants and an eager crowd! I do have reservations for MGC later this year in a few months, and I am hoping mother nature does not intervene two years in a row.

39) Metal Gear Solid-Quest Fail

Regular readers of this list may recall me trying to march through all the core Metal Gear Solid games. 2019 marked an off year in my MGS-quest as I took some time off from that feat. I keep kicking myself too, because I only have MGS5 left, and I got a few hours into it and was already getting a good grasp for it, but got distracted too much by getting wrapped up into Breath of the Wild and made the error of trying to play both of those games simultaneously, but eventually succumbing to the power of the Tri-Force and having Breath of the Wild dominate my game time! I promise to fix that for 2020 and made finishing MGS5 one of my few gaming goals for 2020! If I succeed at that I may attempt to take a stab at Revengeance and the original MSX games too. For what it is worth I did pick up the new Solid Snake amiibo that released in 2019, and the OST vinyl of the PSone original so there was a modicum of Metal Gear fandom I participated in.

38) Konami Making it a Win

Speaking of Konami, yes, you read that title right, I am ever so cautiously marking 2019 the year Konami started to right the ship! For the last few years since they released MGS5, Konami has been lauded by gaming fans and media that it has been the company that has abandoned gaming because of their lucrative gym business on the side and have remained complacent only releasing their annual Pro Evolution Soccer games since. Things quietly started to change in 2017 when Konami surprised us with a new Bomberman game in time for the Switch launch. 2018 saw Konami release a HD update for their Zone of the Enders titles on PS4 along with some exclusive VR content and also port the Switch Bomberman game for Xbox One and PS4. 2018 also saw the release of the polarizing Metal Gear Survive.

2019 saw them up their ante even more with the release of three acclaimed digital anniversary collections for their arcade space shooters, along with ensembles of hit early entries from their Contra and Castlevania brands. To top it off, Konami got on the mini-console bandwagon by announcing the TurboGrafX/PC Engine-mini that will have over 50 games pre-loaded on it! Minus the stinker that is Contra: Rogue Corps and 2019 wound up an excellent year for Konami and hopefully a taste of what is in store for the years to come!

37) Retro-bit Controllers

2019 saw me getting several controllers from the third party, Retro-bit. They have been growing in prominence in recent years with their growing supply of updated classic controllers and availability of HDMI cables for classic systems and have been dabbling with re-releasing classic NES games (more on that in a bit). Retro-bit answered my long pleading demands of having an N64 controller in with only dual grips instead of the standard three grips, and giving the button layout a tweak to make it more of a standard six-button layout like on the Genesis and Saturn controllers. I tried it with several games and far preferred it over Nintendo’s default controller. The other Retro-bit N64 controller modeled after the hard-to-find controller from Hori is a bit more of an acquired taste, but I found it to work great with certain titles.

I also found myself going to Retro-bit to acquire a six-button controller for the Genesis-mini console that also came out in 2019. For whatever head-scratching reason, the Genesis-mini only shipped with the original three button controllers and Sega gave Retro-bit the license to make compatible controllers based on Sega’s updated six-button controllers for the Genesis that hit during the fighting game craze. Retro-bit has several other enticing controllers, adaptors and cables on their website, but I am for now biting my tongue and holding off before splurging too much on their retro-gaming goodness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOv-wigNjXA - Playing through all of Sunset Riders half-out-of-it was my favorite moment of Extra Life 2019.

36) Extra Life 2019

After taking my first year off from the 24-hour videogame charity drive, Extra Life, in 2018 in nearly a decade I was stoked to get back into the 24-hour saddle again for 2019. I returned to join my friends Chris and Lyzz for another round of Extra Life. Props to them for being super accommodating to me as always and providing an excellent gaming and streaming setup for the 24 hours! Unfortunately, some last minute emergency issues beyond our control transpired and resulted in a late start, early finish, and a very on-and-off charity drive this year. For added self-imposed injury, I did not time my sleep/nap cycle ideally leading into the stream and quickly lost steam after several hours in and as you can see by the picture here, took what seemed like nearly double the naps than usual. After realizing we were all in pretty rough shape, we put the kibosh to the charity drive after a little over 12 hours invested through…..

….that does not mean it was all bad however! There was a solid four-to-five hour stretch where I got in a lot of random retro gaming and took requests from family members who donated to play any retro game of their choosing and it was gratifying knowing they got to watch along on the stream as I fulfilled their request! My sister requested the original Super Mario Bros. and my stepdad requested some Tetris and an obscure SNES soccer game I never heard of before. Chris also busted out the PSVR and I finally got a chance to tryout the VR version of Zen Pinball and the fully featured on-rails shooter, Blood & Stone. Probably the highlight of 2019’s Extra Life was finally playing through the arcade classic, Sunset Riders while donning a Sunset Riders shirt to boot in a sleep deprived state! Despite all the hiccups, we managed to make the most of it and got in a fair amount of donations from family and friends for our local children’s hospital!

35) VGmpire’s Last Hurrah!

I have been a fan of videogame soundtracks ever since getting my first one for N64’s 1080 Snowboarding, and for nearly a decade VGmpire has been my go-to podcast celebrating all things about videogame soundtracks. Each episode would have a theme around a specific game franchise or genre and several music selections were carefully curated and inserted throughout each episode between host commentary for the music and game itself. For the last couple years VGmpire has been winding down, sparingly releasing episodes on a part-time basis until a few months ago when the host, Brett Relston stated VGmpire would be taking a permanent sabbatical due to new employment commitments. He did not leave his listeners on a low-note however, and after a few years of only a couple episodes here and there he left with five straight weeks of episodes highlighting the best soundtrack selections spanning nearly the entire Street Fighter universe! Those five episodes were an awesome farewell to his listeners and they covered such a wide-breadth of some of the best jams in fighting game history.

34) Annual Videogame Vinyl Love

Speaking of videogame soundtracks, this ranking indicates how I faired with my videogame vinyl pickups throughout 2019. I added several new additions to my videogame vinyl library, and all have provided excellent background music to my yoga workouts! Standout highlights from this year include the original Metal Gear Solid, Castlevania ReBirth and complete set for Tetris Effect being my favorite pick-ups this year. However, there was one more OST that stood out among all others this year for me and that was for the legendary SNES beat-em-up, TMNT IV: Turtles in Time! I listened to that several times over, before mixing in something else in my rotation. Memories of beating that iconic brawler several times came flooding back as I jammed out to those shell shockin’ tunes! It even has an appreciated bonus track from the TMNT live concert tour smash hit, ‘Pizza Power.’ In case you are blanking on that sick track, I will permanently instill it in your mind with this clip below…

https://youtu.be/JgHnwRUnT_4 - If you are a 90s kid then you can instantly relate to this chart-topping hit!

PART 2 - RANKINGS 33 THROUGH 26

33) Now You’re Playing With Podcasting Power

Friends and family knew I use to run a videogame podcast called On Tap for several years from 2006-2013. Since then I have been scratching that podcasting itch by sporadically guest hosting with the sweet baby boys of Your Parents Basement podcast over the years. If you have read past editions of this best of list, you may recall me linking to my guest appearances on there. In 2019 I was on four episodes of the YPB show and touched on some of my all-time favorites and discovered all new gems I never played before that you will read about below. I also got to guest host with longtime friend Glenn on the PSnation Podcast for the first time in several years and had an epic time talking about all kinds of retro and current games along with the latest in TV and film.

Throughout 2019 I uploaded several episodes from the On Tap archives onto my YouTube channel (you can find them by click or pressing right here). The archives have been offline since several months after the last episode released in late 2013. I tried to make them somewhat relative to current gaming events like re-posting our TurboGrafX retrospective in time for 30th anniversary, and our Mortal Kombat special to coincide with the release of Mortal Kombat 11. It felt good getting some of these favorite episodes back online and inspired me to pick up a long overdue new microphone for future guest hosting spots and possibly a return to regular podcasting. I have been giving a serious think to debuting a weekly/bi-weekly show hopefully later this year with the goal to stay in touch better with friends and peers. Hopefully all will go according to plan, stay tuned!

32) Getting my Morning Caffeine Fix…in 2D Pixel Brawler Form!

I crave my 2D brawlers/beat-em-ups! I will touch on some others later in this list, and I always enjoy revisiting the classics, but I also am elated to see the indie game market pick up the torch with a decent smattering of modern takes on the retro-pixel brawler. There were a couple I recently picked up, and am beating myself up for not making time for the much anticipated follow-up to the NES classic, River City Ransom with the release of River City Girls. A 2D brawler I did make time for with a couple friends though was Coffee Crisis. It is where an alien invasion happens out of nowhere and two seemingly ordinary baristas take the initiative among themselves to fight back! As you can see in the video below, the gameplay looks and feels like a more fleshed out version of the brawling from the classic Simpsons arcade game! The action is appropriately over-the-top, and is jacked up with power-ups that make the characters feel they are going through a caffeine boost of sorts. I busted it out a couple times with friends Derek and Adam, and we progressed several levels through each time before running out of lives.

https://youtu.be/5PyctYij1nw - Coffee Crisis is a solid contemporary take on the classic arcade beat-em-up brawlers!

31) Ride or Die 2019

Here is my annual love for the quality of driving/racing games I played in 2019. I did not put as much time into driving games as I wanted to in 2019, and went through some serious droughts of getting my racing fix. I wanted to start either The Crew 2 and/or Forza Horizon 3 in hopes of having a big open-world racing game to pick away at throughout the year and failed in both endeavors. I did find time to continually pick away progress at the awesome OutRun/Top Gear tribute that is Horizon Chase Turbo however. Another similar take on Hang-On/OutRun I chanced on a random weekly Xbox sale was a motorcycle time-based driving title, Super Night Riders. It captured the spirit of Hang-On to a T with its evolving time of day, catchy tunes and last second emotions of barely hitting the next checkpoint! I wished it had more than just its several included courses though! I kept coming back to these new takes on the retro-time based driving games in short spurts, and were ideal ways to start off lengthier gaming sessions.

I got a chance to have a few sessions for the first time in a while with SNES-Super Mario Kart inspired Super Indie Kart which is STILL IN EARLY ACCESS after several years. The developer is shooting for a full release in 2020, and compared to what I played a couple years prior, a lot of tracks and characters were added with highlights being both ToeJam and Earl. I experienced many of positive vibes I had from SNES Mario Kart from what I tried out and hope to see it finally emerge out of Steam Early Access this year.

I discovered Grip off Xbox Game Pass, and its initially intimidating spherical driving. Eventually, I was able to adapt and get into and make a fair amount of headway into this combat racer that fans are touting as the spiritual successor to the PSone gem, Rollcage. I had a couple short sessions online in OnRush thanks to it being a PlayStaion Plus game. I dug its take by capturing the magic of crashing rivals in BurnOut and putting a new twist on it and making it a team based points competition instead of a traditional position-based racing game and wished I was able to spend more time with it in 2019. The driving game I put the most time into in 2019 was demolition derby-racer WreckFest. I touched on it on my 2018 recap with it coming out of early access for PC, but 2019 saw the console release and my brother and I had several sessions of online WreckFest on Xbox One. The action got pretty whacked several times and we did not care that we usually finished in the middle of the pack with the fun we had surviving each race and the chaos that comes with demolition derby-based racing games.

30) Family Gaming 2019

I had my dad and brother over at my place for Father’s Day and Christmas this year and of course we wound up playing some old school games. On Father’s Day, similar to last year we powered on the N64 and experienced some of the same classics with my dad we did growing up like New Tetris and Mario Kart 64. My dad was starting to hone in his masterful Tetris skills again by the time we wrapped up, and if we would have done more sessions I am confident he would have been wiping the floor with us! On Christmas I had a fixing for my initial videogame memories with my dad on the Atari 2600 so I booted up Atari Flashbacks on the Xbox One. I remember the astutely titled Bowling being a big hit with the family and sure enough we had several close games. Despite how simple it is on the VCS, it remains one of my favorite videogame renditions of the sport. We then booted up the arcade versions of Centipede and Millipede and Joe wowed me with some impressive progress in those games I had no idea about until he said went through a recent period playing those arcade classics nonstop at a nearby locale.

29) Super the Up-Down

I have fond memories of the 90s nostalgia arcade, Up Down in the Twin Cities that I wrote about here before and 2019 marked my third trek there! My brother and I met up with longtime friends Moe and John from the SupertheHardest podcast and we proceeded to drink and game the night away. Aside from some brief excursions to clash against John in Street Fighter II and teaming up with my brother in Smash TV the main highlight was Moe, Joe and I nearly beating the iconic X-Men arcade game all the way through before running out of quarters in the final Magneto fight. I am starting to get a little concerned though with the upkeep of the machines at Up Down however. Several machines had faulty buttons and/or would not support a second or third player. I did not recall having these issues the last two times I was there, but I imagine it is inevitable with big crowds getting their drinks sloshed all over that those machines would require constant maintenance.

28) You Do Know Jack!!

I have no idea how they do it, but Jellyvision/Jackbox games has been pumping out a nonstop collection of social party games under the Jackbox Party Pack branding and 2019 saw volume six hit current consoles. Even at six entries in I am continually impressed at how smooth most our sessions run using a web browser window on our phones as a controller with little-to-no lag throughout. I have reminisced before in these yearly breakdowns my recurring couch multiplayer sessions with friends Derek, Brooke and Ryan. Variations of Jackbox Party Pack dominated our sessions this year, with the sixth game taking the most time once it released. Trivia Murder Party 2 was the runaway hit game of the collection with its quirky deathmatch take on trivia and the one we came back to the most. Dictionarium would be a runner-up with us competing to see who can be the most creative with new words and definitions.

27) Flying Power Disc!

Long forgotten Neo-Geo game, Windjammers gained notoriety over the last several years from it being regularly featured on Giant Bomb videos and features. I had no idea about it prior either and would be lying if I were to say otherwise. It gained so much newfound fame from GB’s videos that it started gaining traction in the eSports scene, got a remaster on PS4/Xbox One/Switch and recently got an upcoming sequel announced. I briefly tried the PS4 release of WindJammers in 2018 to mark my first hands-on time with it, but 2019 saw me won over by it! I vanquished the computer adversaries with each character to net that trophy and played a fair amount online with my go-to PS4 online adversary, Chris (different Chris from mentioned above)! The PS4 remaster could not handle this combative disc-based version of Pong any better! Highly recommended for quick, local and online multiplayer throwdown sessions!

GiantBomb’s many intense multiplayer sessions of Windjammers turned me (and countless others) on to this Neo-Geo hidden gem.

26) No Rest for the Wicked…

I was a huge fan of the first two Borderlands games, but only played the first couple hours of the Pre-Sequel before deciding to take a break from the series. Derek and I played through the second game and was giving me some friendly nudging to get the much-hyped Borderlands 3 that released a few months ago. I finally picked it up several weeks ago, and we only got a couple sessions and several hours in as of this writing and thus this ranking, but from what we played so far I am started to get sucked back into the fun grind that is Borderlands. The first couple hours took a bit of re-familiarizing with the general gameplay and abilities and how to properly manage inventory and level-up because BL3 is a glut of menus. Combine that with the fact I have fallen out of favor with first person shooters in general for the last few years and I found myself extremely rusty initially.

After a couple hours though I started to get back in the swing of gameplay and get my Borderlands-wheels rolling again. I recalled the BL-wisdom that Derek helped instill in me from our BL2 sessions of ‘Do not dwell on the countless stats on each gun, keep swapping out until you find something that is fun to shoot with!’ I am a fan of the quirky Borderlands lore and outrageous characters and while the jokes are hit and miss, the frantic gameplay and open-world exploring more than makes up for it. I have a newfound appreciation for Bio-fuel! I look forward to getting back into Borderlands 3 as 2020 progresses and hope to report back next year with how we steamrolled through it!

PART 3 - RANKINGS 25 THROUGH 20

25) New Old NES Games and other Limited Run Releases

I eluded to earlier how Retro-bit started re-releasing older NES games. 2018 saw them release the formerly Japan exclusive, Holy Diver and 2019 saw them re-issue the increasingly rare Metal Storm. I acquired both of these in 2019. I opted for the deluxe edition of Holy Diver that saw it include a ton of extra goodies as seen in the pic below. The Metal Storm re-issue is the Japan version of the game that has narrative cutscenes included and more forgiving difficulty tweaks. I did not get a chance to play either of these yet, but Holy Diver looks to be a tough-as-nails platformer that rewards practice and I look forward to attempting Metal Storm’s consistently rotating platform-based stages. Mr. Jeremy Parish did commendable breakdowns of both games upon their reissues so for those that are interested in adding some new old NES games to their collection click or press here for his Holy Diver review or here for his take on Metal Storm.

Retro-bit partnered with Limited Run to distribute Metal Storm. It would not be a yearly gaming dissection without highlighting some key Limited Run purchases. Limited Run somehow scored a goldmine of a deal by getting the rights from Disney to re-issue physical versions of several classic Star Wars games for the NES, GameBoy, N64 and PS2 remasters on PS4. I wound up getting one of my childhood N64 favorites in Shadows of the Empire and the remaster of the PS2 racing title, Racer Revenge for PS4. I was also thrilled to lock in orders for physical releases for Atari Flashbacks on Vita, acclaimed puzzler Lumines Remastered and much anticipated narrative exploration titles like Wandersong, Alone With You and Tacoma for PS4. Limited Run has been lately releasing more obscure titles that are off my radar the past few months so I will take that as a blessing in disguise on my wallet!

24) ZOMBICIDE OF EPIC PROPORTIONS

These past few best of gaming installments I tend to breakdown some of my favorite board game moments of the year in an entry. Easily my favorite board game night of 2019 was where my brother and I met up with several other people for a six or seven player session of Zombicide. Imagine a meticulous, detailed board game portrayal of Left 4 Dead and you have Zombicide. I did four player runs of it before knowing that Zombicide usually requires a ton of intricate setup with its many tiles, pieces and tokens so I imagined with nearly eight of us we were in for a long night. Luckily, my buddy Mike hosted the game and has a boatload of experience with Zombicide, and even with his brisk pace of moderating and moving the game along we ended up playing for a solid five-ish hours before we wrapped up. It got to the point where we were playing so late and I knew a few of us were getting fairly tuckered out, but we roughed it out because we were passed that ‘point of no return’ in our quest to escape the board with our party alive!

Regrettably, my brother and I were the only ones whose characters perished, two times over each as Mike gave us replacement characters, but both of us got a little too hasty with our strategies and we paid dearly for it. Regardless, it was an epic board game night I will never forget! Derek and Brooke were playing with us too and both got into the session as much as my brother and I did. They have since told me they have been doing mini-sessions of it and mastering the pacing and setup for the game, so I look forward for more frequent Zombicide sessions in 2020!

23) A Certain Super Power-ed Guide Book

A couple years back I recounted how Pat Contri’s Ultimate Guide to the NES Library book/tome was bedside reading for me nearly every night. While maintaining a reading schedule of a page or two a night it still took me a year and a half to finish since it reviewed every game that hit the NES in America. Contri soon after got to work on the sequel, Ultimate Guide to the SNES Library and it wound up being one of only three crowd-funded projects I ever contributed to. The book finally finished publishing a few months ago and I got my copy in the mail about a month back. It follows the same format as the last book by reviewing all the American and PAL SNES games, and contains roughly a dozen featured articles and essays to book-end this SNES bible. I immediately looked to see how the SNES games I own measured up, and then continued my same routine as I did with the NES book at reading a page or two of reviews a night before bed. Naturally, I am only a couple dozen pages in and have a long ways to go, but am ecstatic to see a long coming crowd-funded project come to fruition!

22) Top Gaming Videos of 2019'

For whatever reason, gaming videos are perfect background noise for me and resulted in me watching way too many. Like last year, here is my notated favorites that hit in 2019…

The yearly ‘Winter Games’ competition video of the GiantBomb crew featuring random videogame challenges and traditional house party a holding your breath contest ….seriously is always one of my favorite GiantBomb videos of the year. Too bad for their Goldeneye challenge in this video they did not know about the one hit-kills from the ‘License to Kill’ mode or their ‘Slappers-only’ duel would not have lasted forever.

GiantBomb - Dreamcast Anniversary Stream - Jeff Gerstmanns Pro Skater Series - Winter Games 2019 - GB Family Feud - GB Advance - VinnyVania Bloodstained Series - The Final Mario Party - Mass Alex 2 Series – Get on my Level Series - Resident Evil 4 Playdate Series - Dangerous Driving Quick Look - WWE 2K20 Quick Look - Madden 20 Quick Look (VINNY WINS!!)

MetalJesus - Jaguar Love - PS2 Love – Reggie Pickups - WiiU Love - PAL PS2 Exclusives - PSP Racers

Gaming Historian - Super Mario Land Series - Story of Links Awakening - Story of Super Mario Bros 3

https://youtu.be/deB5opzbjSE - Attending a couple E3s myself as part of the gaming press I can vouch for a lot featured in this splendid breakdown of what E3 is like for the gaming press.

OntheStick/JoeDrilling - ECW Hardcore Revolution - Marvel Superheroes - Resident Evil 2 - Oxenfree

No Clip - Gaming Media at E3 - History of Telltale Games

LGR - Computer Warehouse Exploration - Doom II 25th Anniversary - Ion Fury - Windows 3 Point 1 Love - SimCity 30th Anniversary

CGQ - Genesis in 1990 - Dreamcast Launch - Lets Read EGM issue 36 - Lets Read Nintendo Power issue 2

RetroPals - GameCom Love

https://youtu.be/VYpryVA5WQQ - Behold, according to the AVGN, a terrible flagship Zelda game by Nintendo.

My Life in Gaming - History of M2

GameSack – Shenmue III Review - Worst Sounding Genesis Games - NES Special - Mega SG Review

AVGN/Cinemassacre - Videogame Magazine Special - Pepsi Man - Chex Quest - The Immortal - Majoras Mask - Defending NES OG TMNT - Genesis Mini Review - Nightmare on Elm Street - Barts Nightmare - SNES Campus Challenge - Thunder in Paradise - Combat vs Contri

https://youtu.be/eHEi5OsJKdoJeremy - Parish did comprehensive looks at all American and Japanese Virtual Boy games in 2019, and topped it off with this all-encompassing look on why this Nintendo system came and went in under a year.

Jeremy Parish ‘Works’ - All of Virtual Boy Works - Links Awakening - Tengen NES Trio - Circle of the Moon - Pilotwings 64 - Turok 2 GBC

Scott the Woz - Mario Kart for SNES - GCN - DS - and Wii - Club Nintendo - WiiWare Chronicles - Call of Duty DS - Bargain Bin Christmas

https://youtu.be/vk1g8ufIO-o - Scott the Woz states his case for Double Dash being the best Mario Kart, clearly he is mistaken and we all know the 64 version reigns supreme.

21) Out-drinking Satan

I was pleasantly surprised to see the anticipated indie game, Afterparty as part of Xbox Game Pass upon its release day. It is from the developers at Night School Studios who brought us Oxenfree, yes that same game which took the #1 honors for my inaugural top gaming experience list from 2016. Needless to say, I was excited to see what Night School Studios had in store for the sequel. Afterparty is a narrative exploration game where two freshly graduated high-schoolers find themselves suddenly very much dead and in a twisted Tim Burton-esque party version of hell and set forth on a quest to out-drink Satan in order to get a second chance in life on Earth.

The hype going into this kind of rubbed me the wrong way a little bit about its promotion of getting wasted all the time, but it all kind of makes sense in the end with one of the endings available on how that lifestyle may not be all it is initially cracked up to be. I dug the aesthics in Oxenfree, and loved how they brought them over into Afterparty, but with some tweaks to represent a 24/7 party atmosphere in hell. Gamplay is similar to Oxenfree with by picking from a few dialogue choices available and some only available when your character is drunk which warrants multiple playthroughs for this 4-5ish hour game. By the end I liked the universe Night School established and what they were going for by the time I finished it, but I did not love it. Maybe my initial choices lead to a not-so-desirable playthrough as I thought they would. Afterparty has their in-hell version of Twitter with random tweets from background characters going on non-stop and it is more distracting the way it is implemented.

I have been listening to the Afterparty OST while writing parts of this never-ending read, and I have been taking it in more this way than the way it came across more muted during gameplay. Oxenfree I loved so much that I played through it two more times within a few months to see other dialogue options and endings, but with Afterparty the last act felt kind of disjointed with my choices and it wrapped up with no real sense of closure. Again, maybe it was bad luck on my part with the options I picked. This however did not lead me to anxiously jumping right into starting another run, but I wanted to see if the other endings were worth playing for so I went and YouTube’d the other endings right away and yes, I think those would have been better ways to conclude Afterparty for me, but they still lacked the memorable high notes that comprised the final act of Oxenfree. Afterparty is on Game Pass though so that is a nice perk at the moment and so I imagine I will at least start a second playthrough sooner than later to see how the opening parts play out differently by picking polar opposite choices.

I also wanted to mention I played this on an Xbox One S on an external hard drive install and I was stunned to see this is the first game I ran into with particularly noticeable slowdown and performance issues. I had little to no hiccups with other graphically extensive games like Gears 5 and Man of Medan recently so I found the performance hiccups here surprising with the not-so-overwhelming visuals from this 2D game. Lucky for Afterparty, it is a laid back narrative exploration game so it was not that much of an issue to deal with whenever slowdown and framerate stutters happened. Despite these performance and narrative qualms, I do not regret my time with Afterparty and would recommend to at least try it if you have Game Pass and see if it is up your alley.

https://youtu.be/lBP3uyHJ0zU - EPN went above and beyond with their coverage of the Genesis Mini with several videos dedicated solely to the 16-bit ‘Blast Processing’ wonder.

20) Sega Finally Gets a Mini-Genesis Right

After several versions of mini-Genesis ‘Flashback’ consoles of poor-to-mixed quality from the manufacturers, AtGames, Sega took it upon themselves to release and produce their very own Genesis-mini on the 30th anniversary of the North American launch. Sega got it right this time around with superior emulation compared to the efforts from AtGames and a lineup of 42 games mostly from Sega, but with also some notable third party hits too. They also include handy features as seen in Nintendo’s mini-systems like save states and the ability to rewind gameplay which I can attest is a lifesaver for some of these brutally tough games from the 90s. It is worth noting the recent Genesis Classics disc Sega released on current consoles offers up over 50 games, but they are all from Sega’s catalog and have a wide range of quality. The lineup here comparably hits more than misses, and features the expected Sega studs, but welcomed third party additions like Road Rash II, Castlevania: Bloodlines and Street Fighter II: Champion Edition.

I have only briefly played my own Genesis-mini, and am awaiting the close final tweaks to software that is about to release that will allow users to upload their own personal Genesis games to the mini much like I did for my NES & SNES-minis so I can curate my own ultimate Genesis library. I like the library offered up here, but would be lying if I said I was not bummed that Sega omitted some of its hit sports games that helped defined it during the 16-bit wars. I understand there are those pesky royalty fees to deal with for former players and teams, but a lot of the early 16-bit Sega Sports titles lacked those licenses or only had one player being the cover mascot for the title. EA was also a strong supporter of the Genesis (with sports AND non-sports titles) so it was eye-opening to see only one game from EA’s 16-bit library make the Genesis-mini cut. This is why I am awaiting for that library loading software to get perfected so I can have my own handpicked Genesis line ready to go! I also want to give props to EPN for their prolific and thorough videos breaking down the Genesis-mini at launch and give another shoutout Jeremy Parish’s in-depth review of it too where he goes far more into the weeds on the Genesis-mini than I will on my blurb about it here if you want to know more.

PART 4 - RANKINGS 19 THROUGH 15

19) Punishing Arcade Action Starring Dolph & Hasselhoff Clones

The Punisher is in all likelihood my favorite 90s arcade brawler. Granted, I am biased being an unapologetic fan of the comics and the arcade game makes great use of the license by featuring several of the Punisher’s top villains from that time and having Punisher team up with his on-and-off ally Nick Fury. The Genesis port is noticeably watered down visually in order to run on the system after looking at comparison videos online. When not playing the two side-by-side the differences are negligible to me while playing. It does not have the ability to set max lives in order to breeze through it, but you can set to adjust an option to add a few more which made it plausible to beat on normal difficulty with a non-wreckless strategy of picking your spots and timing attacks instead of rushing into encounters with mindless button mashing. I can vouch for this from experience!

The bad thing about beating Genesis Punisher on Normal difficulty is it gives a bullshit ending screen of ‘Now Play like the Punisher in Hard Mode to see the True Ending.’ I mean, it is not like the ending is likely all that it is cracked up to be to motivate me to going through it again on a tougher difficulty….oh wait…guys I looked it up and turns out that ending blows away all other endings from arcade brawlers at the time as you can see by that attached video below. With that in mind, I invited my brother over one day in 2019 and I was determined this was the day we could beat Genesis Punisher in hard mode. We did have some help though from game genie cheats we had loaded up on an SDcard into the Retron5 we used to play it on though. We did not turn on full health or infinite lives because we desperately wanted to say we ‘earned’ that awesome ending, but one of the things hard difficulty mode tweaks is not the challenge of the opponents, but merely the quantity of them. This would not be a deal-breaker since a lot of the common thugs are pushovers, but with this brawler having a timer, it would lead to us losing a couple lives after running out time while taking out the ump-teenth wave of goons sent our way.

Not wanting to burn through more lives on a BS timer system, we disabled the timer on the cheats menu halfway through and we also disabled losing life from executing the leg sweep ‘super’ move. Not that the leg sweep was more powerful as ordinary attacks, but it helped free up some breathing room when the AI cluttered the screen with several enemies. With those two ‘assists’ activated we progressed up to the final stage before we finally ran out of lives in the midst of the ‘ol arcade brawler stereotype, the dreaded boss gauntlet! I am confident if we would have gained a couple lives and disabled the boss timer from the beginning we would have at least got up to the final boss and possibly defeated him!

Earlier in 2019 Arcade 1up released a Capcom Marvel edition cabinet loaded up with the classic arcade versions of Punisher, X-Men: Children of the Atom and Marvel Superheroes. I have no idea why a brawler such as Punisher seemed like a fitting inclusion with the Marvel fighting games when Capcom had several other Marvel vs. fighting games to choose from, but that Arcade 1up release is so far the only reissue of either the Arcade or Genesis Punisher title to this day. The downside is that it will set one back $400!!! As awesome as it would be to have the actual official arcade release at home, I imagine if I would pick that up I would ignore my aforementioned advice and fall victim to maxing out the credits and mindlessly button mashing my way to the end. I think I will prefer sticking with a little bit of strategy in my brawler and one day hope of finishing hard mode, just like the Punisher…..for now.

https://youtu.be/yLdlQMNS9hs - This will be worth the extra hassle of beating in hard difficulty to witness the true ending to The Punisher!

18) Handheld Gaming 2019

I had a pretty solid year for traditional portable gaming (AKA non-phone games!!). With 2019 being the 30th anniversary of the GameBoy in North America, I went to our local retro game shop with the mindset of picking up the only GameBoy variant I did not own, the GameBoy Pocket. I noticed it there on a previous trip going for not that much and when I went to request it the clerk informed me of their modded GameBoy Advances they recently started selling that have new outer shells and a premium backlit screen on par with the latter GBA SPs. That went for three times as much as the Pocket, but after the clerk let me test it out for a few minutes I instantly had a change of heart and forked over the dough for the custom deluxe GBA. I love my backlit GBA SP, but I always preferred the form factor of the original GBA more, and having it with a top class backlit screen convinced me to upgrade. I wound up playing that modded GBA quite a lot in the back half of the year.

In the first half of the year though I wrapped up Dragon Quest VIII in January shortly after posting the previous year’s recap, and stuck with it for a few months consulting guides for recommended post-game quests to take a stab at. Loved my many hours with DQVIII, but that was a game I primarily endured throughout 2018. After that lengthy RPG I popped in the optimal palate cleanser, WarioWare Gold on the 3DS. Up until that point, the only WarioWare release I ever played prior was the GameCube version, which I am a fan of but I always heard excellent testimonials about the handheld versions. WWG has over 300 of the bite-sized ‘micro-games,’ most of which are collected from previous entries, but also consist of a fair amount of exclusive original micro-games for the 3DS. The frenetic gameplay kept me bug-eyed throughout, and the slightly lengthier ‘boss battles’ also cracked me up. There are a seeming infinite amount of Nintendo references and small sections of gameplay taken from countless other Nintendo games ranging from common top 8 and 16-bit hits to the obscure with nods to titles like Virtual Boy’s Mario Clash. It all added up as the perfect pick-up-and-play title coming off a mammoth RPG. Do not be like me and neglect this superb handheld version!

I am a nut for picross games, and the 3DS has a ton of them but 2019 I finally started the My Nintendo exclusive game, Legend of Zelda Picross. Like other Picross games on the 3DS it has an intuitive control scheme and a multi-layered hint system which I took advantage of numerous times to nudge me in the right direction! I downloaded the GameBoy cult hit, Mole Mania off the 3DS eShop and consumed a few hours of that action/puzzler to discuss on a clayyyysic episode of YPB I guest hosted on. I imported a few fan translation GBA and DS games that have been on my want list forever because they never had official American releases, but thankfully the fanbase stepped up and changed that so I was thrilled to finally add Ace Attorney Investigations 2, Retro Game Challenge 2 and Mother 3 to my handheld library. I played through the first case of AAI2 and it brought back memories of why I enjoyed the first one so much and the fresh changes it brought to the Ace Attorney formula. Did not get a chance to play Retro Game Challenge 2 yet, but I did put a lot of time into Mother 3.

The fan translation originally released for Mother 3 about a decade or so ago and I started it up on a ROM and got a few hours in, but eventually got sidetracked and regrettably neglected it. Having a physical copy of the game and making 2019 a big year for the Mother/Earthbound franchise for me were the catalysts to have me stick through Lucas’s adventure this time around. Mother 3 has a similar look and feel as Earthbound on SNES, but with an entire new setting and cast of affable characters that similarly immersed me into their unique world all over again. Props to the fan translators who took on that mammoth undertaking with dialogue that does not skip a beat and brings back the vintage lighthearted and crude humor that was a trademark of Earthbound. The battles play out nearly identical too with each character having unique attacks, and retaining Earthbound’s rolling HP meter that allows additional precious seconds to escape death from a gutsy battle. I have been cherishing my dragged out sessions of this gem so I have not finished Mother 3 yet, but according to a guide I am halfway through chapter seven of eight, so almost!

17) Out Contra-ing Contra

I have played a few Contra titles over the years, but usually fall victim to their hard-but-fair difficulty. I am starting to come around and appreciate them a little more recently and kind of like I described with Punisher above, play them a little more smartly and not rush in guns blazing in order to conserve lives and survive those grueling boss fights. I heard of a new Contra-inspired indie game gaining some buzz and launching day and date on Xbox Game Pass called Blazing Chrome. My buddy Adam was swinging over to hang out on the night of its release and I brought up about starting the night off with a quick session of Blazing Chrome expecting it to kick our ass and deplete our lives within ten minutes. We booted it up and……did not put it down until over two hours later!

Blazing Chrome plays like Contra III on steroids. The character and background sprites along with all the gunfire and explosions adds some extra ‘oomph’ and a little more dazzling special effects that would not seem possible on the SNES, but easily doable on the Xbox One. The boss battles also capture that ‘larger-than-life’ feeling from the bosses of Contra III. Eventually we fell victim to the fourth stage boss, which was something like going up against a Veloci-raptor that require pinpoint precision in order dodge its flurry of attacks. Thankfully, Blazing Chrome is not as merciless as Contra and allows the ability to restart at the beginning of the latest stage you progressed to after running out of lives.

We must have restarted that dastardly fourth stage damn near ten times and played until our eyes felt like they were on the verge of falling out. Despite Blazing Chrome kicking our asses, like Contra it felt like it was not the game being cheap, but instead our own fault and needing to put forth the practice to learn patterns and master the timing and layouts of levels. It was a blissful moment whenever we got another stage or boss that we were previously hung up on and successfully coordinated our attacks to take down mid-bosses or other pesky foes. Adam and I keep thinking of revisiting Blazing Chrome ever since, but knowing what we are in for this time around we keep telling ourselves we got to be in the right mindset going into this five star indie game of 2019!

16) ”Go X-Men, Stop Magneto….err Apocalypse….no actually Magneto, Really!”

I reached out to the fine folks at YPB Podcast who were looking for a classic X-Men game to cover to coincide with the release of the X-Men: Dark Phoenix film. The SNES title, Mutant Apocalypse has always been on my bucket list to beat. Despite the polarizing nature of the FOX films, I have enjoyed most of them and was anticipating Dark Phoenix and wanted to re-watch the previous film, Apocalypse for a refresher on the plot too. So for about a week I went all-in on X-Men and played through and finished Mutant Apocalypse, with literally mere minutes to spare before I met up with the YPB crew for our arranged recording time.

Mutant Apocalypse hit when Capcom was on top of their 16-bit game pumping out nonstop, top tier licensed and original games. MA is not an arcade brawler, but more of a methodical action platformer. I dug how each level focused on one of several different X-Men and how each character had their own specialized attacks I knew so well from the hit 90s cartoon from that era. There are still plenty of cannon fodder for to hack ‘n slash though, but also a fair amount of platforming to navigate through and multi-layered boss fights to survive. I hate to sacrifice my gaming cred, but some of these boss battles I had to resort to the save state and rewind features of the SNES-classic in order to proceed. It was worth it though, and resulted in one of the top X-Men games of that generation, barely nudging out Clone Wars on Genesis for my favorite 16-bit X game.

I jest with the title of this entry because it eludes to Apocalypse being the big bad behind everything, but ultimately it is a red herring and low and behold it is none other Professor X’s good buddy, Magneto behind it all again! We poked fun at that logic while dissecting the game with the YPB boys, and I surprisingly found myself legit into Apocalypse on my re-watch of it. Playing through MA and enjoying Apocalypse more than I expected the second time around had me way more amped up for Dark Phoenix than I had any right to be because it was impossible to avoid the movie and comic press at the time anticipating a box office dud. While Dark Phoenix will not make my top 10 films of 2019 list and had its fair share of holes to dig through, I still had a good time throughout its retelling of the Phoenix saga and it provided a degree of satisfying closure to this four-movie arc of characters.

15) Sports-Ball Gaming 2019

It was a solid year of sports gaming for me in 2019. It did not dominate the year for me, but the chunks I did rock the old sports-ball were immensely gratifying! Picking up from 2018 and into the first couple months of 2019 was finishing off my season of Mutant League Football. I raved about this in last year’s recap about this being a worthy spiritual successor to EA’s Mutant Football League. It captures the over-the-top nature of the Genesis game and mixed in a dose of dialed up NFL Blitz-esque gameplay for what is likely my favorite football game this generation. I won the championship in season mode, and debated starting up the new Dynasty/Franchise multi-season mode that released as DLC towards the end of 2018, but decided to take a break from this whacked out turf frenzy in favor of….

https://youtu.be/EDQfTuQy-sc - I loved Madden’s take on Friday Night Lights, and Madden 19’s second attempt at a story mode ups the stakes for the returning NFL hopefuls as seen in this complete collection of all the cutscenes above.

…a more realistic version of the sport in Madden NFL 19. I am a fan of EA’s take on a story-based single player mode it debuted in Madden NFL 18 with its ‘Longshot’ narrative. Madden 19 brought back Devin Wade and Colt Cruise in their quest for NFL stardom with part two of ‘Longshot.’ I noticed a polarizing reception to this story mode, but I thought it was a much-needed dose of fresh single player gameplay after so much emphasis on Ultimate Team in Madden this past decade. Wade unfortunately is still having trouble remembering plays, and Cruise bounces back and forth trying to ride the limited success from his song ‘Longshot.’ Cruise’s storyline is noticeably more of the focus this year with him making one last effort at making it into the NFL before being introduced to his long lost half-sister who drags him into help coaching the beloved local football team, the Bullfrogs! The narrative and football sequences are better paced out, and most football gameplay involved is never forcing a player to play through complete whole games, but instead a series of drives to accomplish a certain goal. The awesome high school flashback games return, complete with adorable local announcer commentary!

It was interesting to see which active and retired NFL talent they brought into the story, and eventually ‘Longshot’ circles back to Colt coaching the Bullfrogs from escaping being foreclosed on from a real estate bigshot in a feel-good fundraising finale! Despite how much I was into the narrative, I got swamped with a bunch of menu prompts after finishing ‘Longshot’ pressuring me to check out the microtransaction-heavy Ultimate Team mode afterwards, and the menus throughout the rest of the game modes consistently attempt to poke and prod away to Ultimate Team instead. After doing a couple online games with a friend and failing miserably, I quickly traded in Madden 19. I felt like I sold it short and probably could have still got a solid season worth of games in the Franchise mode, but the big push in marketing and development resources in realistic sports games this past several years going into virtual currency-influenced modes like Ultimate Team rubs me the wrong way and I find myself playing more arcade sports games instead.

Speaking of arcade sports games, an interesting digital game on PS4 I tried out last year is Super Blood Hockey! It looks and plays similarly to the NES classic, Ice Hockey (complete with picking the size of your players), but with a bigger focus on fights and….well, blood. I only played a few games and need to come back to it, because I am awful against the AI, but I definitely am into the vibe it is going for. Another arcade sports game that had an awesome old-school NES vibe, but I was able to get a feel for was Basketball Classics on PC/Steam. It reminds me a lot of what Double Dribble would be like if it were on Intellivision. Gameplay is very simple with only three buttons involved for gameplay, but it also mixes in handy modern play mechanics like a 2K-esque shot meter.

Basketball Classics has the 8-bit hoops charm factor oozing out of it with a catchy theme song, background chiptunes and interactive dunk cinematics that look like they were ripped right out of Double Dribble. I do not want to overlook the righteous story mode which follows a similar style to the NBA Street games by beating teams and recruiting their top player who have similar player portraits to 80s/90s NBA legends like Jordan, Barkley, Magic, Kareem and Bird. I was able to get to the ‘phantom five’ boss team, but despite several attempts failed repeatedly. There is still a lot I want to dive into and I have yet to try like a regular season mode with several dozen classic team rosters available.

PART 5 - RANKINGS 14 THROUGH 10

14) An Offer I Could Not Refuse

In last year’s list even though I did not subscribe to Xbox Game Pass, I gave it a pretty solid ranking due to it being the second coming of the Sega Channel, but now with proper resources and superior accessibility to its userbase. It also helped that Xbox Game Pass offers about triple the games at around 130-150 games a month compared to the 40 Sega Channel offered up at the time. Oh yeah, back in the mid-90s Sega charged about $15 a month, and Microsoft is currently charging $15 a month also for its ‘Ultimate Game Pass’ which combines Game Pass for Xbox One and PC as well as bundling in Xbox Live Gold. Since the last year’s recap Microsoft has went on to make all of its first party games available to Game Pass subscribers on their first day of release, and also went on to presumably offer nice payouts to highly anticipated indie games to become available on Game Pass upon their release date like Outer Worlds, Blair Witch Project, Demon’s Tilt, Afterparty, Blazing Chrome and Outer Wilds.

Despite all that temptation, I held off subscribing to it because I already have way too many games in my backlog and do not want to pay a monthly fee on top of it, but then around E3 2019 Microsoft made an offer too good to pass up where for only $1 they would convert the rest of your remaining Xbox Live Gold time to an Ultimate Game Pass membership and then add a bonus month on top of it. My Xbox Live Gold auto-renewed a month prior to that announcement, so it would be foolish to pass up converting my remaining 11 months into Ultimate Game Pass time for only $1. I am glad I did because I wound up trying out a decent amount of games from it. Not a boatload because as you can see from this list I had a lot of other games to play, but the convenience of the service caused me to try a lot more than I thought. There were challenging BMX-based games like Descenders and Lonely Mountains: Downhill, the bonkers semi-platforming game, ClusterTruck, the aforementioned spherical racer, Grip and The Blair Witch Project that I was totally consumed by for the first hour until I got lost in the woods and spent two hours circling around going nowhere before giving up. On top of all that I ended up finishing two games off of Game Pass by the end of the year. One of them was Afterparty that I already gave my rundown of, and another I will touch on shortly. So yeah, even though I may not stick with Game Pass when my $1 membership expires in half a year, it is safe to say I easily got my dollar’s worth out of it and then some!

13) Pinball Madness 2019

The weekly match-up scorechasing leaderboards in Pinball FX3 have been a constant for me for a couple years now. Every Saturday morning I have a routine of loading up the four predetermined scorechasing tables of the week and do a couple three minute runs on them each. The developers at Zen have also been capitalizing on acquiring the Williams/Bally license and have around a dozen-ish classic Williams/Bally pins in the Pinball FX3 library now including a couple personal favorites of mine like Medieval Madness, Champion Pub and No Good Gophers. I remain partial to the way the pinball physics handle to those authentic pinball games in Farsight’s take on the tables in Pinball Arcade, but having them available with the rest of the Zen lineup is convenient.

I messed around with a few other pinball titles on Xbox One. Zaccaria Pinball hit Xbox One in 2019, and it is essentially the European version of Pinball Arcade. I toyed with it several times throughout the year and it had a ton of options to tinker around with and I have been meaning to revisit it a little more frequently. Every time I boot up Steam, I continue to do a run of Hyperspace Pinball as I continue to be dazzled by its neon-lightshow aesthetics. Even though Farsight has seemingly abandoned support after losing the rights to the Williams and Bally tables, I still throw in Pinball Arcade sporadically and bust out one of its many tables from its mammoth vault of legendary pins. Finally, in December Demon’s Tilt hit Xbox Game Pass on its first day of release and it became an instant classic. Demon’s Title design is based off the acclaimed Devil’s Crush/Dragon’s Fury pinball games on TG16/Genesis that are themed heavily on three screens of verticality, fills the tables with a potpourri of ghouls to lay waste to and intimidating boss-fight bonus stages. It keeps the TG16-era visuals, but pumps them up with contemporary special effects like Blazing Chrome also did, and throws in a banger of a synth-metal soundtrack to nod along with throughout!

https://youtu.be/dX031NEmLXw - Behold the screen-filling madness of Demon’s Tilt and its jamming synth-metal soundtrack! I dare you not to headbang along with it!

In real-world pinball, I finally got around to joining a local pinball club about an hour’s drive away from me. I visited it several times already and am impressed with its lineup of nearly 25 tables available, most of which are from the 90s and up. I spent my first few trips there trying a game or two on each table, and now that I got that out of my system, I think I am going to try going forward just sticking to one or two tables a visit so I can get as much practice and get the most out of each table that way. 2019 wounding up being the biggest year for pinball for me since starting this list and thus its higher-than-usual ranking!

12) Feel the Need…for Jag

This is admittedly an odd tale of my how I crave my retro games. I already mentioned the Midwest Gaming Classic retro-con I like to attend above. In the first several MGCs I went to, they always had a small part of the floor called ‘JagFest’ where they had several Jaguars hooked up and the entire Jaguar library on hand to play at your own desire. Over my first four or five MGCs I would spend a couple hours there each year trying out a bunch of Jaguar games and would eventually settle on the five or six I preferred and would play those for an hour or two to get my yearly Jaguar fix and avoid having to dish out the money for the games and system. After returning to MGC in 2018 after a few years off I could not locate the JagFest corner and came to learn those folks stopped supporting MGC a year or two prior. All of a sudden I found myself missing out on getting that usual fix for Jaguar gaming so I started to keep my eye out online and finally found one for a fair price a few months ago.

I started eyeballing places for the several games I liked and tracked all but a couple of them down for decent prices over this past year. Adam swung by again recently and we did a Jag-Night and broke out several multiplayer games. We did a few rounds of NBA Jam TE, and minus the awful background music, it is the best looking home console version of Jam TE for what it is worth. It was nice revisiting some classic rosters too like when the Timberwolves rocked Christian Laetner and the Spurs had the lethal combo of David Robinson, Dennis Rodman & Sean Elliot! We then busted out two player Raiden and got up to the third stage after our second attempt with the two credits setting. Brutal Sports Football is an awesome mess of an arcade sports game and I loved decapitating my friend's players instead of scoring goals more. There is so much chaos going on screen I am surprised the Jaguar was able to barely keep up with it all. Finally finished off the Jaguar marathon by score-chasing on Tempest 2000. My meager Tempest skills did not gain me much headway, but Adam fared better and got a few stages in. I never thought I would eventually cave and get this ’64-bit’ oddity, but here I am….and after that session I kind of do not regret it and am legit having fun with the games for it. Who woulda thunk it!?

11) Still in Pursuit of that Elusive Tri-Force

I know….I know….I am a terrible person for not beating Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild yet. I still semi-regularly throw in BotW every two to three months and get a memorable session out of it methodically exploring every nook and cranny of the map. I cannot help but activate ‘Hero’s Path’ mode to see where I have traversed across the map so I can explore everywhere out of paranoia of missing out on those oh-so-desirable secrets in unexplored areas. I have a majority of the map explored and am on the precipice of starting the last stretch of the core game that is Hyrule Castle. Of course I still want to unlock that rad Master Cycle Zero, complete the Master Sword DLC trials and pursue so many other secrets I likely missed. Despite not finishing it, I have gotten a lot out of my sessions with BotW this year which is why it still lands in the top half of the rankings. Breath of the Wild is right up there with MGS5 as one of my first games to finally knock out of the backlog and I plan on setting everything else aside in the coming weeks to finally grind out the last dozen or so hours I anticipate I have remaining in BotW.

10) Crafting Them Videogame Anniversary Specials

For those unfamiliar with my past work, I use to be in the gaming press and penned countless reviews and specials from 1999 until around 2012. I took a break from it after suffering a series of setbacks in my pursuit of landing a major gaming press gig and after about stepping away from writing all together for a good year was when I returned at first with my limited series resolutions-themed blog, and then starting up this movie-themed blog in 2014 and have not looked back since. After a couple years I started to get that little inkling of a desire to get back to videogame writing again and aside from a handful of special circumstance reviews from the last few years the only major videogame-themed writing I have done was these gigantic end-of-the-year blowouts to get videogame writing out of my system for another year.

In 2019 however I started jonesin’ to do a little more. With several videogame platforms hitting milestone anniversaries in 2019, I took that opportunity as an outlet to write not a stereotypical historical retrospective, but instead more a journal of my lifelong memories for the console being commemorated. I went with the outline of how I first learned of these platforms, how I first discovered and played them and of course wrapped it up running through my all-time favorite games and moments for said platform.

They were a pleasure to put together, and reflecting back on my early childhood mishaps for the GameBoy brought back memories I have long stashed away. The Genesis special got me nostalgic recounting the summer spent playing the Sega Channel nearly every day. The Dreamcast tribute was an emotional journey to relive the high highs of it being the first system to purchase with my own money and the many late night multiplayer sessions and the low lows of the sudden discontinuation announcement. The TurboGrafX and 32X flashback I felt I had a unique take on because I did not own them until well after their lifecycle. In 2020 there are four more systems celebrating milestone North American launch anniversaries I am shooting to write specials on throughout the year: NES turns 35, PSone and Virtual Boy both hit the quarter century mark and the PS2 will be 20. Keep your peepers peeled for them!

PART 6 - RANKINGS 9 THROUGH 5

9) A Paperboy-rogue-like-lite…

I am a moron and forgot to include this Xbox One digital-only gem, The VideoKid in my 2018 list where it dominated a lot of my playtime. It is an 80s-nostalgia themed take on Paperboy, but instead of delivering newspapers on a bike, you are delivering videotapes on a skateboard. There are coins and other jewels to collect that carryover from each run that can be used to unlock 80s themed outfits ranging from AH-NULD to Teen Wolf and a few extra skateboarding tricks too. VideoKid is crammed with pop-culture references from that decade, and each run has…um I think this is the right way to phrase it….’procedurally generated 80s references’ to freshen up each run. The developers dig deep with the references and here are a teeny fraction of them off the top of my head in this game: the California Raisins, Care Bears, Smurfs, Night Rider, Transformers, Bill & Ted, TMNT, Nightmare on Elm Street, Masters of the Universe, Terminator, Batman, Ghostbusters and a plethora of others.

It feels slightly more appropriate debuting VideoKid on my 2019 list because even though I played a lot of it in 2018, I never finished a run until 2019. I would always get goosebumps upon realizing I made it to a farther area in the run and I would succumb to my nerves getting the best of me. As you can see by the attached pic of my tweet, all that practice paid off and I finally finished a run after well over triple digit attempts. That was easily one of the single best gaming moments for me in 2019 and why it ranked so high. I would go on to beat it several more times in order to unlock all the outfits and acquire all the achievements. I never would have imagined enjoying this as much as I did upon downloading this $5 game that seemed like a neat little 80s throwback timewaster, but instead I would invest all those attempts in my conquest for ultimate 80s glory. Having Bill & Ted near the end of the run belt out to you in recognition “you rule, Video Dude!” was the icing on this delicious cake!

I had a feeling this game would be up my brother’s alley, and so I used the Xbox One’s ability to gift games and sent a copy his way and urged him to at least give it a shot. Soon enough, he got back to me on how he became addicted to this peculiar title too. He later returned the favor by gifting another low-budget digital-only title to me, Knight Squad. It is a simple 2D overhead visual game where a bunch of knights clutter the screen and players can assign teams or go in free-for-alls with a wealthy amount of options and maps to tinker with. It had easy to pick-up-slaughter gameplay, and I found it to be a fun little mindless deathmatch game I booted up in a few multiplayer sessions with friends. It will definitely remain in my multiplayer throwdown rotation!

8) Hadoken Finish Him 2019

Normally this ranking would highlight my routine online fighting sessions with my longtime fighting game rival, Chris! While we did bust out a few of our usual favorites like versions of Tekken and Street Fighter throughout the year, the bulk of our fighting game time was dominated by Mortal Kombat. With the Mortal Kombat 11 release approaching, we had a few meet ups of its predecessor, Mortal Kombat X as a way of having a last hurrah with it before its sequel dominated our meetups.

In the midst of those sessions I realized I never got around to playing the much-touted story mode of MKX so I blitzed through that and finished it within a few days of MK11’s release. It was foolish to hold off so long on that story because I loved NeatherRealm’s past fighting game story modes, and MKX had a neat narrative by introducing the four new ‘Kombat Kids’ that are the new generation of fighters from the offspring of the mainstay regular roster members. A lot of the story involves some deep MK lore which I was somehow able to keep up with because I read a few too many MK comics over the years from Malibu and DC than I probably care to admit.

I wasted no time diving into MK11’s story a few days later right at its release date. Other than removing and not even acknowledging two of the four new ‘Kombat Kids’ introduced in MKX, I absolutely ate up the MK11 narrative. The plot manages to achieve the impossible by successfully conveying one of my personal pet peeve storytelling devices, time travel! It then doubles down on that by throwing in an all-powerful-TIME TRAVELLING GOD as the main antagonist that wastes no time messing around with the timeline and mixing in past takes on MK characters from the original 90s trilogy and spewing them out into the current timelines along with their wiser elders a couple decades later. It was a hoot watching modern day Johnny Cage grab 90s potty-mouth Johnny Cage by his ear and give him a lesson on manners. The sexual tension between both retro and contemporary Kano was bizarre to say the least, but well worth watching how their alliance played out. Aside from the time travelling hijinks, there are a lot of serious moments I could not help but get emotionally wrapped up in with my near 30-years history invested into this franchise. Watching Jax initially succumb, and then overcome his PTSD got me good!

https://youtu.be/ezsPJTplu_0 - Here are some of the more lighthearted moments from MK11’s story mode courtesy of young, obnoxious Johnny Cage which were nice moments of levity from the nonstop time travelling war that is the primary arc.

Only praising the story mode would be selling MK11 short, because a lot of the other modes have a ton to offer up too. The multi-layered towers return, and full of all types of consistently rotated gimmicks like past games. I wound up preferring a classic themed tower of several opponents as a perfect way to practice and get use to a new DLC character whenever one dropped. Chris and I would meet up and duke it out online whenever a new character released. Having an older Arnold Schwarzenegger as DLC to coincide with Terminator: Dark Fate has been my favorite DLC character. Having Arnold’s uppercut command be replaced with a crouching shotgun blast is THE BEST-EST! The creation options are a wee overwhelming with oodles of costume and move variants to deck out up to several save slots for each fighter. I stuck to only making a few for some of my go-to characters, and part of me would have preferred having a traditional few costumes to unlock for each character instead.

The tutorials are insanely in-depth and reach new levels of pro-strategies detailed in fighting game tutorials. Seeing the Krypt return is always a delight, and having it be hosted by Shang Tsung who is graphically and aurally portrayed by the man who played him in the first movie, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa is the quintessential fan service! Parts of the Krypt though went over my head as NeatherRealm went overboard with several types of currencies involved and hunting down objects to unlock various parts of the Krypt. Props to the developers in the end though for somehow doing the impossible and consistently managing to outdo themselves with each sequel. I plan on keeping MK11 in my online fighting rotation for the foreseeable future.

7) COG Attack

Having Gears 5 available day one on Xbox Game Pass was an appreciated way of saving $60. I bought into how Gears 4 advanced the narrative with the next-gen of COG a couple decades later and had the original characters serve as more of an elder advisor role. The unique twist at the end of Gears 4 dealing with Kate is a big component of the campaign for the fifth game. I did not anticipate for Coalition Studios to pay off that big cliffhanger by really diving deep into Kate’s past and seeing how the revelations that await her pan out. I imagine most have probably heard how they mixed in a couple mini-open world environments into the story kind of how Uncharted Lost Legacy did a couple years ago. I did not mind it and got into exploring the frozen tundra and desert wastes while the characters filled in the traversal time with dialogue opening up about themselves and poking fun at each other. It helped mixed things up a bit and could not help but get immersed in its (limited) open worlds.

By spacing gunfights out with the open world traversal, I forgot how heated the action can get with Gears 5’s variety of mammoth villains, especially in the final act when shit appropriately ramps up. The final act felt worthy of a big budget blockbuster of larger-than-life set-pieces, action and a heavy duty final choice presented that I had to pause and give a serious think over. I played a ton of multiplayer in the original trilogy, and regret not getting a chance to play the multiplayer for the fourth game, but have already redeemed myself by dabbling with several round of multiplayer in Gears 5. I am godawful, but it the occasional kill I pulled off brought back kind memories of how into the multiplayer I was before. Also having Linda Hamilton and Dave Bautista as unlockable characters for multiplayer are both perfect fits for the franchise! I also need to try out Horde mode and see how far it has evolved since I last played it in the prior games. So much left to do multiplayer-wise that I can see Gears 5 being one of the few online multiplayer games I regularly come back to this console generation.

6) How About a Game of Lucky Hit?

Last year I picked up Sega’s HD remasters of Shenmue I & II on Xbox One in hopes to finish them again for a refresher on its grand narrative before the long anticipated third installment. I finished the first Shenmue off that collection in 2018. I played through the second game over the course of the following summer. Ryo is now pursuing Lan Di in China in two sprawling cities, with a bonus third area in an extended epilogue and all together it is about double the length of Ryo’s first adventure. Even though there are appreciated quality of life improvements compared to the first game as far as save anywhere and quasi-fast travel features implemented I prefer the first game more. Main thing I chalk it up to is in the first game Ryo having more of a sense of familiarity with Dobuita where Ryo knows nearly all the locals, shopkeepers, etc. In the sequel he only gets to become acquainted with several people and all the minor cast and shopkeepers treat him as an unknown and there are only hints of the charming small banter in the sequel to be had that the first game is overflowing with. There are some killer supporting characters Ryo gets to know like Ren, Xiuying and Joy, but the all-encompassing cast Ryo has varying degrees of acquaintance-ship with is what help makes the first game so welcoming and makes me give the first game the nod. Also, the sequel does not have forklift races and replaces it with an awful cargo carrying QTE mini-game where your co-worker screams at you every time a QTE is missed. No thank you!

A couple things going for Shenmue II is addition of two more YS games: Outrun and Afterburner II (and ability to access the four games from the main menu once they are encountered). Both of the cities are huge with tons of mini-games and side activities to take in with a lot of new ones debuting. Not all of them are winners but there was a ton of diversity between them and at least a few I found myself revisiting frequently. The final several hours of Shenmue II are also truly special and even though it was my second time experiencing this game, it was the perfect way to get me ready for the third game when it hit a couple months later. --spoilers next paragraph--

The romp up the mammoth Yellowhead building complex in the final act of the second city was a twisting, grinding beast to get through, but lived up to the journey to get to the final boss, hot on Lan Di’s tail. The final three-to-four hour epilogue following that is something daringly unique for its time and still holds up. If you were like me and hold in high regard the first Red Dead Redemption's epilogue then you will probably dig Shenmue II's bold epilogue which I did not see anyone attempting in 2001 when it first released. It was special to relive all over again even if there is a total lack of combat. A bulk of the brazen epilogue is a walk and talk where Ryo meets pivotal Shenmue character, Shenhua and the duo mostly converses and gets to know each other on their way to Shenhua’s home which is where the pair discovers a new revelation in their journey that closes setting up Shenmue III. There is a complete lack of combat, and only a handful on QTEs sprinkled in the last few hours. I absolutely loved this gutsy final act, and I understand why it is not for everyone for the crowd that is demanding of more gameplay. ---end of spoilers—

5) Spooky Gaming 2019

I continued my tradition of playing Xbox 360 launch game, Condemned: Criminal Origins on Halloween for the third straight year. I made a couple more chapters of progress in this creepy, first person detective/combat game. I need to stop only playing it on Halloween and finally finish it sooner than later because it manages to pull off a suspenseful and thrilling ride all these years later. I hinted above at my frustrations at Blair Witch Project on Xbox One. I was hooked into its first hour setting up the background of the protagonist lagging behind a search party in the woods and looking for clues they could have missed while catching up to them. Its gloomy woods atmosphere was giving me chills and goosebumps like Condemned was, but then I could not figure out where to go in the woods and circled around and double checked my paths several times for about a solid two hours before giving up. Consulting a guide at that point would not have felt right because I was so immersed in into the world. A few weeks later I read up some other player’s logs on what happened after the fact and it turns out the designers intentionally crafted the game to give that spooky lost in the woods vibe, but I guess it worked a little too well for me. I did a little digging to see what else Blair Witch had in store, and it expectedly involves a lot of supernatural and stealth elements once the legend of the Blair Witch comes into play, so I would like to give it one more shot eventually.

A game I did not give up on however and saved spooky gaming season for me was Dark Pictures Presents: Man of Medan. I was big time into developer Supermassive Games hit teenage, slasher game Until Dawn a few years back. Their follow up hit last year in Man of Medan is the first installment of their ‘Dark Pictures’ anthology line of spooky/slasher games, complete with a Tales from the Crypt-like host. This installment has a similar style of gameplay where six college-age students in trouble at sea wind up in a cursed ship which leads to all kinds of tomfoolery! Like Until Dawn, gameplay rotates between the six kiddos, and they will be constantly barraged with QTE choices that may decide their life or death fate. New in Man of Medan is the ability to set up local or online co-op play, with the developers insisting on setting an evening aside to beat the game in one night within four to five hours.

That is exactly what I did when I brought the game over to Derek & Brooke’s place and we went through all of Man of Medan in a single sitting. In an unexpected twist, a severe thunderstorm rocked our town that night which provided a supreme ambiance as we played. We assigned two characters to each of us, and we finished with half the cast surviving. I was so entranced by that crazy night thinking of how to do things differently in order to get all the dorm-rats out alive and I plowed through the game a second time within a week and…..finished with only one surviving the slaughter, and it yielded a despondently meek ending that I only was all too deserving of in my failing of QTEs and decision-making efforts. Nevertheless, those two epic playthroughs of Man of Medan, combined with my excursions into Condemned and Blair Witch Project culminate for the highest ranking yet for the yearly spooky gaming entry.

PART 7 - RANKINGS 4 THROUGH 1

4) Dream-tember 20th Anniversary Celebration

As I mentioned earlier, the Dreamcast was the first system I bought with my own personal income and the hell of a ride I had with that system in its two and a half year lifespan is why I have extra affection for this console. Penning that huge anniversary special was not enough as I decided for the 20th anniversary I would take my Dreamcast out of the closet for the first time in over a year and regularly throw in a few old favorites a couple times a week for all of September. Some highlights was revisiting a bunch of driving games and doing a few races each in Hydro Thunder, 4 Wheel Thunder, TNN Hardcore Heat and playing several hours worth of my favorite Dreamcast racer, Demolition Racer: No Exit. I would dabble with some of my favorite fighting games on the system for a few rounds of Dead or Alive 2, Capcom vs. SNK and both versions of Marvel vs. Capcom.

I consumed quite a bit of Dreamcast-anniversary videos this year, and this stream from the GiantBomb crew was the cream that rose to the top as one Macho Man would say.

The non-driving/fighting game I played the most that month was a complete run of Typing of the Dead. Yes, I still have my Dreamcast keyboard (and mouse too!), and it was a pleasure putting my home-row skills to good use slaying zombies to gloriously awful voice acting. The typing challenges/mini-games they mixed in on the boss fights tripped me up a bit too and were a hoot to figure out. Aside from playing all those games, I contributed to a crowd-funded indie Dreamcast game, Arcade Racing Legends, that looks promising and should be shipping within a few months. I also dug out my stack of complete run of Official Dreamcast Magazine out of the closet and re-read the first five issues throughout the year. A lot of memories came flooding back from their colorful feature and review spreads. Several YouTube channels I followed did Dreamcast anniversary streams, and I devoured them all!

The guys at YPB Podcast were doing a month long Dreamcast special too focusing on a curated Dreamcast gem each week, and I volunteered to guest host on their episode dedicated to, you guessed it, Shenmue! I barely contained myself as I raved about all my favorite memories for it, and apologized to the hosts for some of my incoherent gushing about the game afterwards. Speaking of the original Shenmue, throughout the year I picked away and eventually finished watching GiantBomb’s endurance run/long play of it which was just as entertaining and riveting as their Metal Gear Solid ones! It all added up for a month where I surprised how far I went out of my way to commemorate the system’s lasting legacy 20 years later.

3) Finally Conquering Diamond Dog

In late ’97 I played a ton of the cult hit SNES RPG, Earthbound. I was mesmerized by this new twist on the Japanese RPG by taking place in a contemporary setting with young elementary aged children instead of cliché fantasy worlds. Despite putting in a lot of time, I never was able to get past the dual combo boss of Diamond Dog and Carbon Dog before I lost my save data and went decades before coming back to it on the SNES-classic in 2019. I once again have YPB Podcast to thank when they reached out for guest hosting spots and asked for a few suggestions on recommended games to play. I threw out the option of Earthbound so I can finally knock that one off my bucket list, and luckily they obliged me and that was the impetus I needed to work through that game. I only got a third of the way through it by the time we recorded the episode, but I stuck with it afterwards and finally finished it within a few weeks. After doing some research I was surprised to discover where I left off before against the dueling dogs was at roughly the 80% mark through the game. So close!

I had an excellent companion/travel book with me in the form of FanGamer’s Earthbound Handbook which is part strategy/tips, part lore/narrative and entirely exquisite artwork. I read the corresponding chapters of the guide as they marched along with how Earthbound played out to make it the perfect supplementary piece! FanGamer also has a tome all about the localization of Earthbound called Legends of Localization. It was my nightly bedtime reading for a few months as it dove into the weeds on the translation of the original Super Famicom version, and what references were removed and what were added/altered to the American release. Incredibly thorough read that shed a lot of light on the Herculean-effort it took to translate and bring this over state-side!

Finally, as I mentioned earlier, but to make it come full circle as the year of Mother/Earthbound, 2019 was the year I made record progress and nearly finished Mother 3 on GBA! Just to emphasize, I am very much into it like I was with the original and hope to finish it within several weeks and rave all about it on the next recap!

2) To the Sequel

A constant theme throughout this list has been my passion for narrative exploration based games. One of my favorites of the genre is 2011’s To the Moon from Freebird Games. It is about two professional 'memory explorers' Neil and Eva who use a device to traverse through a dying person's lifetime of memories and implant their patient's final wish so they can die thinking they lived their most fulfilled life. It has a 16-bit RPG graphical style and the writing is lighthearted with the two main memory explorers having plenty of cheery banter as I plugged away through the memories. The sequel, Finding Paradise hit six years later in 2017, and I have no idea why I waited two years to start it up.

I was thrilled to command Neil and Eva again as they take on fulfilling a new patient, Colin’s dying last wish. Their new patient is a tricky case who left his dying wish ambiguous, and more-or-less requested our trusty doctors to figure out his dying wish for him. It is the same type of narrative-exploration gameplay with some light puzzle elements, but with a few new wrinkles mixed in due to an early twist, which builds up to an even bigger hook in the final act I did not anticipate and leads to a whole new dynamic of gameplay I could not help but embrace. Kan Gao is the primary creator and designer behind these games and kudos to him once again creating a funny-yet-powerful-and-saddening tale as they dove through Colin’s memories in what felt like a page-turner I could not put down. Luckily, Finding Paradise is only several hours long and I was able to breeze through it within a few days due to the ‘one-more-page’ sensation of the narrative. Combine that exposition with a beautiful 16-bit throwback visuals and another knockout score and it left me depleted and wiping dust from my eyes by the time it was all over.

In a bizarre, ironic City Slickers-sort of way, I felt like Billy Crystal when catching up with my friend Matt a few days later and telling him about this game and To the Moon. He asked if Freebird plans on releasing it on consoles, and I told him how the first game has been out for nearly a decade and since it is not on systems by now I doubt how either game will ever get a console release. A little later that day I looked up online just to be certain and I completely missed it was announced last September that To the Moon would be getting a Switch release within a few days of this writing on January 16, 2020. If you do not PC game and have a Switch, I highly recommend giving this a shot! You will not regret it!

1) ”Kept You Waiting, Huh?” Yes, Ryo……You Very Much Did Exactly That!

Surprise….or not! Shenmue III was the sequel I waited 18 long years for, and in the week before it released once it seemed like the game was past the point of no last minute cancellations I had this overwhelming sensation that I cannot describe any better than ‘holy crap, this is actually happening!’ I mentioned earlier about writing those anniversary tributes that the only other videogame writing I did was for a handful of special exception reviews. Shenmue III would be one of those special exceptions! I reached out to my friends at PSnation to see if they had anyone slated to review it and if not I would throw my hat in the ring to cover it for them and to my luck the review opportunity was up for up for grabs. I did this for two reasons, one to once again ensure I did not lollygag and take many months with this dense, sandbox game and two, to get everything I need to say about my experience with Shenmue III out of my system.

Not only did I review the game for PSnation, but Glenn invited me onto their podcast to review it on there too.Click or press here to take in my text review of the game, and click or press here to go check out the podcast. For everyone else, please bear with me for some…abbreviated…thoughts on Shenmue III. With a self-imposed review deadline in mind, I put time into Shenmue III nearly every day (minus Thanksgiving) and finished it within 17 days.

Yu Suzuki for all intents and purposes created another Shenmue game, quirks and all. Due to it being on a crowd-funded budget (with later assistance from publisher, Deep Silver) it does not graphically compare with the latest and greatest AAA games, but still looks superior to the old Dreamcast games and offers the same scale of dense sandbox exploring. Some quality-of-life improvements from the 18 years since the last game are appreciated like dual-stick movement and no more quasi-tank controls! The narrative picks up right where Shenmue II leaves off in Shenhua’s village and focuses on two key areas, Shenhua’s rural village and another being a dense urban area. It would not be a Shenmue game without a wealthy range of side activities and mini-games to keep busy and earn money to buy new moves and level up Ryo’s kung-fu. I like the core fighting engine as it is improved and more fleshed out and has a better feel to it than the loose Virtua Fighter-feeling in previous games. Newcomers to the series should probably start with the first two games, or the quirkiness of the intentionally stilted and stoic voice acting and some of the characters will likely throw you for a loop.

https://youtu.be/4e6FmAi_G40 - The fine folks at MinnMax had a fine installment here of their quest to discover the game of the year by giving Shenmue III an honest try…kind of.

As much as I loved this game with it being the clear cut #1 rank, I would be lying if it was in need of a few gameplay tweaks to improve the overall experience with more than the few limited fast travel options available, and better emphasis on leveling up Ryo’s combat skills early on. QTEs could have been implemented better and even on Nnrmal difficulty I found myself missing a fair amount of them, luckily developers YS Net is forgiving with frequent QTE checkpoints, and the fail animations are laugh-inducing. The Shenmue nut in me appreciated the many fan service and narrative callbacks to earlier games (hint: absolutely inquire with the hotel clerk what you can purchase from her). Fans of original games will be bummed like me to discover there are no more classic Sega arcade games to play, but for what it is worth there are other minor Sega easter eggs in the form of posters and other smaller items tucked away in the world. Also, what gives with the lack of soda drinking animation!? I bought a shirt last year that was all about Ryo’s aplomb drinking of soda!

The last big stretch leading to the final showdown of Shenmue III had a few poignant moments that will stick with me in the grand Shenmue saga, but compared to final stretches of previous games it is the weakest of the three and was over a little too quick when I was gearing up for one last sprawling stronghold to take down. The ending left on a high note of how it concluded and what the future has in store for the brand. Now a couple months after the fact, I am relieved that through hell and high water, Shenmue III found a way to exist and despite some shortcomings it was well worth the 18-year wait. According to the trophies and Playstation Store listing, there appears to be some mini-game and fighting challenge DLCs in the pipeline, and I am keeping my fingers crossed that Shenmue III performed well enough for a fourth entry.

THANK YOU!!!!!

AFTER NEARLY 18,000 WORDS I AM SPENT! If you somehow made it this far please give me a shout out on Twitter @Gruel and I will tweet you a fist bump for indulging me this long! This took me nearly a whole week to write and edit, so thank you once again to making it all the way through or even just jumping around and skimming to what stood out for you. I appreciate it more than you know! I will leave you all with this annual yearly recap book-end tradition. See you all next year!

https://youtu.be/-NkhD3xquMU - Here is the ritual end of my yearly recap video for a much needed breather after sticking with me for all these thousands of words.....Suuuuuuuuper-Slam!!!

Previous Year’s Best of Recaps - 2018 - 2017 - 2016

After the deluge of wrestling-themed entries for WrestleMania month this past 30 days, I have been pining to do another videogame anniversary special. Looking up which platforms have major milestone anniversaries this year, I noted six that stuck out. Four of the platforms (NES, Xbox 360, PSone, PS2) I have an extensive history with and they will get their own respective flashback treatment from me when their anniversaries draw nearer later this year. The other two platforms have all had lackluster or outright abysmal degrees of retail success and both I have only had limited histories with and never played on a consistent basis. Nevertheless, the time I did have with them I considered unique and I do have some fond memories of my experiences with each platform. So let us get on with this flashback special as I celebrate the 25th anniversaries of two consoles that each hit in 1995: Sega’s Saturn and Nintendo’s Virtual Boy.

I want to begin with the platform I have played the least of these two, the Saturn. Yes, I played my Virtual Boy and its daunting 14 game library more than the Saturn. In 1995 I was still lagging a generation behind on the latest consoles. All my family had was an NES at this point and I recently got a GameBoy for Christmas of 1993 so in 1995 I was getting a lot of mileage out of my GameBoy and my parents were still hitting up garage sales for bargain price NES game for me. By the time the Saturn and PSone hit in mid-1995, I was a year away from getting a SNES which I desired more so the Saturn and PSone were not even close to making my wish list. I read about them looming in magazines like Game Players and Electronic Gaming Monthly, but truth be told I was not all that excited for the future of disc-based platforms and the advent of polygonal graphics that were about to come into fruition with 32-bit consoles.

As a naïve 12-year old, the first major 3D polygonal games that hit on SNES and Genesis in the early 90s like Star Fox and Virtua Racer looked butt-ugly to me, and from trying out demo kiosks of PSone and Saturn at stores the impatient kid I was back then was furious at this newfound ‘feature’ of the latest systems having loading times. Combine that with my family having no desire to chunk down several hundred dollars for another gaming system and I was left with no cravings for the Saturn and PSone when they both hit in 1995. I had no clue of Sega’s surprise Saturn launch announced at the first E3 in May of 1995. For the unfamiliar, it was when going into that E3 it was known that both the Saturn and PSone were slated to launch within days of each other in September of 1995, but at Sega’s press conference they said right then and there the Saturn is out right now at a handful of select retailers. In 1995 the Internet was only around for a few years and not even the slightest bit ubiquitous. Computers were still a couple years away from coming down to more reasonable family friendly prices, so at this time I got all my gaming news from my monthly subscription to Game Players.

Here is the podcast special on the Saturn I originally recorded way back in 2008. Check it out if you want to know even more about the history of the Saturn and its games.

I wound up largely ignoring both the Saturn and PSone for the first few years they were out, maybe occasionally trying out an occasional store kiosk demo and that was about it. I remember the magazines at the time putting a lot of hype into Sega’s arcade ports, and console exclusives like Panzer Dragoon getting cover stories of having mind-shattering graphics, but I was not buying it at the time and stubbornly remained loyal to my 2D sprites. For the Saturn, I finally got my first real experience with it in April of 1997. I remember shortly before this time the Saturn was being pushed aggressively on TV with a special 1996 holiday bundle packaging it with Daytona USA, Virtua Fighter 2 and Virtua Cop for $199. I had no idea at the time why this ridiculous deal happened was because Sega was getting killed in sales at this point in the PSone/Saturn/N64 era and they were desperately trying to play catch-up with a hell of a value considering several months earlier in 1996 it was clinging onto its dooming launch price of $399.

Flash forward a few months later in April of 1997 and my hometown got hit with a huge flood that forced a mandatory evacuation of the entire town for a couple weeks until the waters receded. For a couple days our family stayed at a nearby air base hangar. I believe we were planning on hunkering down there for several days until a couple days in my uncle from St. Paul surprised us and showed up and ‘volunteered’ on taking us in and refused to leave without us coming with him. My siblings and I were delighted to get out of the crowded hangar and spend time with our cousins for what ended up being a week before we were able to get back home. My cousin Royce, who was within a year of my age at the time wound up getting that Saturn three game bundle for Christmas a few months earlier and we played those three games along with the demo disc that came with the system almost every day.

We must have played through Virtua Cop at least a few times, and I remember finding it a big step up from previous light gun games I was accustomed to. Daytona USA at the time did not really click with me, and while I was impressed with the graphics at the time I did not come around to checkpoint-racing games yet and was more turned off by their enforced time limits back then. On the demo disc our family got a lot of fun competing against each other in the home run derby mode available in World Series Baseball. The standout game of the pack was easily Virtua Fighter 2. It blew me away and for me it was the first game that proved not only for fighting games, but for games all together that 3D polygonal graphics and gameplay could be viable and damn fun. I knew I was a couple years late to the party by this point, but by 1997 polygonal graphics were no longer the crude, non-textured blocks and rectangles on the SNES and Genesis, but actually had some depth and style to them. I loved Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat at this point, but Virtua Fighter 2 proved to me that 3D fighters could coexist with 2D ones.

That week with my cousin was my proper introduction to the 32/64-bit era. It would be over a decade though before I got more serious hand-on time with the Saturn. Not many friends of mine had the Saturn back home, or if they did we rarely busted it out. My friend and former podcast co-host, Matt has a mammoth collection, and I only recall us turning to the system once or twice all these years to play the charming platformer SCUD. Another friend and podcast co-host of mine, Chris also has a Saturn in his equally mammoth game collection, and until 2008 I only recall us powering it on a couple of times to play the fun co-op action platformer, Three Dirty Dwarves, which had a nonsensical, grungy vibe to its destruction.

In 2008, we were a couple years into doing our videogame podcast and we loved doing console retrospectives, so we decided it was time to do one on the Saturn. I just uploaded it to YouTube and integrated it into this article for your listening pleasure! Chris knew about my limited Saturn hands-on time at this point so we decided to spend literally a whole afternoon, about four to five hours of ‘research’ playing a good chunk of his Saturn collection. About 10-15 minutes for each game for a quick refresher for what each game brought to the table. There was one though we played for about two hours straight. That was the rare Panzer Dragoon Saga Chris had a copy of. I knew about it being a collectible at this point and heard the acclaim for it being an ahead of its time RPG and professed to Chris to hope to spend a little more time with it to see what the hype was all about. I remember digging its rail-shooter action the first two games established while simultaneously mixing in RPG style mechanics and exploration. I think we both got wrapped up in it, and stuck with it a bit longer than anticipated. Suffice it to say, those opening hours stood out to me all these years later and I can see why Panzer Dragoon Saga became a hot commodity.

Jeremy Parish did an excellent line of videos with deep dives on every individual Virtual Boy game released, including Japanese exclusives. Here is his take on the Wario's exclusive Virtual Boy game as of yet to be re-released, Wario Land.

In my TurboGrafX-16 flashback, I wrote about how I procured the system at a gaming community meet-up event. At that same event there were several gaming systems hooked up for play throughout the night, and one of them was the Saturn. One of the highlights of that night was someone bringing enough multi-taps and controllers that we were able to get plenty of rounds of eight player Saturn Bomberman in. I am a fan of classic multiplayer Bomberman, but never played more than four players before, and was surprised to see the Saturn pull off an eight player version with a micro-sized map and characters in order to fit everyone on screen. It was a Bomberman experience that nothing will likely ever stack up to. I dug up a photo from the event of all of us gathered around the TV so you call can see the tech in action!

Sadly, I never got anymore hands on time with the Saturn after this. It is one of the few major consoles that I do not own. For years I remember seeing the system for sale at our local retro games shop for around $30, but I always hesitated on it. The games I enjoyed on there Sega released better sequels on other systems, and I later got to check out some of its top ranked games like the Capcom fighting games, Guardian Heroes, Nights Into Dreams... and acclaimed shmups like Radiant Silvergun on enhanced re-releases on the Xbox 360 and PS3. There remains games exclusive to the Saturn that I always wanted to try like Die Hard Arcade, World Series Baseball ‘98, Fighters MegaMix, Burning Rangers and Shining Force III, but with retro game prices continuously going up, the time to start a Saturn collection has come and gone in my book unless I happen to stumble upon a steal of a deal. I do have one Saturn game in my collection however, and I will give props to Matt once again who gifted me his extra copy of Bug!.

While Sega pulled the plug early in America on the Saturn, it comparatively fared much better than Nintendo with the Virtual Boy. It launched in America in August of 1995, and sold so poor right out of the gate that Nintendo could not have abandoned the platform any faster. Its last game, 3D Tetris, hit North America in March of 1996, only seven months after it launched and with a total of a meager 14 games officially releasing stateside. I remember seeing the hype leading up to the Virtual Boy’s launch in the magazines, and like with the initial wave of polygonal graphics, I was not sold on the concept of virtual reality. However, a couple months after that same flood hit in 1997 our local Wal-Mart had unsold Virtual Boy inventory it was desperate to get rid of by selling the system itself for $20, and games for $5 each. This was one of the first times as a kid I recall my dad abstaining from his garage sales-only videogame rule and realized the steal the system was going for. We walked out of that Wal-Mart with the system and the copy of Mario’s Tennis it came bundled with, along with copies of Golf, Mario Clash and Nester’s Funky Bowling.

I was in the midst of spending summers on a farm at this point in my childhood for several years, and that was the summer of Virtual Boy with my siblings. I played the crap out of all four of those games. I abided by the recommended break alerts that popped up every 15-30 minutes seriously because I recall the gaming mags at the time reporting on the Virtual Boy causing eye strain after consistent use. Even with all that heavy duty play of the Virtual Boy that summer, somehow I am the only one in my family that does not have glasses. All four games we had were solid, but not mind blowing. Mario Clash I thought was a nice, fully-featured take on the classic original Mario Bros. arcade game that fleshed out that style of gameplay with about 100 stages and got so difficult early on I did not come close to finishing it. Golf was a good simulation of the sport, but it only had one course so I did not revisit it that often. I remember enjoying Mario’s Tennis a lot, but this being the debut version of that game it was more of a tennis sim with Mario characters, and had less of the wacky mini-games and power-up attacks associated with the franchise today. My siblings and I played a ton of competitive Nester’s Funky Bowling. There was not anything that funky about it other than the occasional cheerful animation from Nester and his twin sister Hester whenever you scored a strike or spare, but it was a functional enough bowling game that we had plenty of fierce rounds of over that summer.

After that summer we and I got our fill of those four games and the Virtual Boy found itself in the closet for many years. Eventually I randomly dug it out and found the tripod busted, and the pack that hooked up to the back of the controller that contained the plug-in for the AC adaptor was missing. With no means of powering on the Virtual Boy, it sat in a bag forgotten in my closet for well over a decade. I will thank one Jeremy Parish for renewing my interest in Virtual Boy with his excellent line of Virtual Boy Works videos. For those that are unfamiliar with him, Parish is one of most credible members of the retro gaming press, with him hosting the renowned retro-game podcast, Retronauts since 2006 and going on to write countless books and producing chronological video series on nearly every 20th century Nintendo platform. He averages one video a week, which usually highlights one or two games and does a deep dive into its development history and then proceeds to review the game. A few years in he has already covered almost all the games released from the first years of the SNES and the first two years of NES and GameBoy.

Throughout 2019 Parish took a detour from those three systems to focus on going through the entire VirtualBoy library, including its several Japanese exclusives. His surprise love for the platform shined through his thorough coverage for each game. It is a well-produced series and fantastic history lesson for this blink-and-miss-it platform that I highly recommend checking out by click or pressing here, especially now to learn about the first major attempt at a virtual reality platform with VR now having a modicum of success with the PlayStation VR and the Oculus Rift having made legit waves these past few years.

Virtual Boy Works inspired me to track down a few more Virtual Boy games to my collection which were surprisingly going for not that much on eBay. I wound up getting Galactic Pinball, TeleroBoxer, Virtual League Baseball, Vertical Force and Wario Land. I also tracked down a replacement AC Adaptor hub and tripod stand which resulted in my Virtual Boy powering on once again! I tested out all these games briefly. I love me some videogame pinball, and Galactic Pinball has some nifty 3D tricks up its sleeve. TeleroBoxer is like Punch-Out meets Rock ‘em Sock ‘em Robots or Real Steel for the younger readers who need a more contemporary reference. Vertical Force is a competent shmup, and I wish I put more than a few minutes into Wario Land because it is a legit top notch platformer and went down as one of the few highly rated games on the system. I swear to one day make it through Wario Land!

Thank you for joining me on this two part 25th anniversary special for the Saturn and Virtual Boy! Got a favorite Virtual Boy or Saturn memory of your own? I would like to hear how it compares to my tale so shoot me a line on Twitter over @Gruel. If you enjoyed this journal-style flashback special, than I encourage you to check out the links below to the specials I wrote for the Dreamcast, GameBoy, Genesis, TurboGrafX-16 and yes, even the 32-X. Thank you all once again for indulging me!

Who would have thunk it that the Nintendo Power mascot, Nester would get his own titled videogame. He also appeared as a newscaster in NES Play Action Football and named as 'Lark' in Pilotwings 64.

My Other Gaming Flashbacks

Dreamcast 20th Anniversary
GameBoy 30th Anniversary
Genesis 30th Anniversary
TurboGrafX-16 30th Anniversary and 32-X 25th Anniversary

Greetings dear readers and welcome to my annual top gaming experiences/moments/favorite games I played in 2018 that may or may not have released in 2018 round-up!!! Consider this my personal greatest hits compilation of my year in videogames that was 2018! Buckle up buck-a-roos because I am going to take you on a several thousand word journey as I count you down my handpicked top 33 gaming ‘experiences’ of the year! This is not going to be any other ordinary quick scroll through of listed top games of the year because almost anything I did gaming related qualifies for a ‘experience’ in 2018. That experience could be my overall time I invested into a certain game or series of games I decided to lump into one list item, or it could be a certain other piece of gaming memorabilia, news item that really struck me or a memorable gaming session with friends and family that makes it perfectly eligible for the list!

So if you have not by now then use your favorite bookmark app (I recommend Pocket) or ‘control + d’ to manually bookmark this page to revisit this feast of words because it is going to take some time to consume! For optimal experience I highly recommend a big cup of coffee and blaring one of those 10-hour YouTube videos of ambient rain because that is exactly what I did to craft this beast! Speaking of YouTube videos I linked to a whole boatload of them throughout the rankings from trailers for most games I discuss and moments that really popped for me if you so desire to click them for a reference to the corresponding footage. If you managed to finish this monster and dare to seek out my similar takes on previous years of gaming experiences then I triple-dog-dare you to check out my write-ups for my best of 2017 and best of 2016 gaming spectaculars. Enough with this intro, to the list we go!

Part 1 - Rankings 36 through 31
Part 2 - Rankings 30 through 24
Part 3 - Rankings 23 through 18
Part 4 - Rankings 17 through 14
Part 5 - Rankings 13 through 10
Part 6 - Rankings 9 through 4
Part 7 - Rankings 3 through 1

PART 1 - RANKINGS 36 THROUGH 31

36) Telltale & Prima RIP

I hate to kickoff this list with a downer, but that is why this is at the bottom of the list. The saga of Telltale announcing its closing in 2018 was quite the affair with all the misguided reactionary hoopla. It initially leaned towards fan outcry of Telltale now being unable to finish the final season of its acclaimed Walking Dead line of episodic games it was in the middle of releasing getting more attention over the developers who lost their jobs and benefit plans. Things were getting heated in the wrong ways real quick, but there was a modicum of redemption with fellow videogame developers reaching out and picking up many of the laid off and publisher Skybound Studios picking up the rights for the remaining episodes of the final season of The Walking Dead and following up that announcement with good news of Skybound being able to re-hire most of the original developers who did not already land jobs elsewhere.

I feel I wronged Telltale this year by having 2018 be the first year in several years where I did not complete a season of a Telltale game. Tales of the Borderlands and both seasons of Batman are in my massive ‘want to play’ stack, and now with The Walking Dead being on its way to being concluded I now feel obligated to pick up where I left off after finishing season two a few years ago.

Prima closing up surprisingly resonated with me. They have been the constant major publisher of videogame strategy guides for what seems like an eternity. Part of me is surprised Prima hung around this long with how easy it is to reference GameFAQs and other online guides, wikis and YouTube playthroughs for free in an instant. I prefer to go that route too, but I would occasionally pick up a Prima guide and would prefer their more detailed layouts and maps when playing Fallout 3 and Skyrim than compared to what an average text GameFAQs guide can offer. I will also give a shoutout to their supplementary NES & SNES Now You’re Playing Power/Super Power guides/nostalgia books that launched alongside the NES & SNES Classic. Both feature lots of vintage scans from Nintendo Power alongside new interviews with developers, pro speedrunners and creators of fan art, music and website communities. When I heard of their closure I went out and ordered Prima guides for other Bethesda games like Fallout 4 and New Vegas. When I went to file them away I hung my head in shame to see I already procured the Fallout 4 guide awhile back, so now I have two copies of that one. Backup copy! There will still be other specialty strategy guide publishers (major props to FanGamer’s guides!), but none with the presence or outreach of Prima established.

35) Non Virtual Boy VR

Last year in the round-up I stated how I have too many reservations about getting on board with the VR craze that has swept up a segment of the gaming world and that I will stick with my Virtual Boy for my VR needs. My Extra Life friends Chris and Lyzz have a Playstation VR headset and had me try it out at their place in 2018 and after trying out a couple games in PSVR…..I was impressed, but still not sold on it overall. I played one or two of the mini-games on the PSVR Worlds mini-game collection that came with the peripheral. I then played about a half hour of London Heist. That experience was a memorable one as I got to admit it was cool looking around the gangster hideouts while being tied up and taking in the unique 360 camera of my surroundings that is only possible in a VR experience. The gameplay was on the money too in some shooting gallery segments and eventually a car chase portion that was the highlight of my time with London Heist.

I was relieved I did not suffer from any of the motion sickness I heard wide varieties of minor and severe reports of from VR players. Then again I only played PSVR for only an hour. I have kept up with the games hitting PSVR since its launch and in its first couple years it has built a library of several games that appear to hold their own as premiere VG single player experiences with bonafide hits such as Moss, Astrobot and Farpoint. After some legit hands-on time with PSVR I will maintain my reservations on VR in general. The price entry point is way too high and I would rather spend the money needed for starting off a proper PSVR experience in upgrading my PC instead. It requires a lot of cumbersome setup, it is a safety hazard by completely blocking off your surroundings and finally after playing for a mere hour my face felt like it was sat on for many more hours after removing the headset. I may try out VR down the line at friend’s places or wherever I run into it at and will likely enjoy my time with it, but as far as owning VR goes I will continue to be happy with my Virtual Boy and reliving the complete Virtual Boy experience in 2019 with Jeremy Parish’s Vitual Boy Works line of videos.

34) Hadoken 2018

Last year’s list I ran down what was popular among the numerous fighting games my friend Chris and I played online throughout the year. We continued that trend on and off throughout 2018, almost always on Saturday mornings while taking brief breaks to cycle loads of laundry. I finally had my first serious, long overdue sessions of Mortal Kombat X and had some great practice rounds doing a few arcade ladders before throwing down online with Chris. I really need to go back and plow through the storyline I love so much out of those Midway fighters before the sequel hits later this year. Tekken 7 was another popular one among us and I loved its slow motion attacks that kicked in on the closing strikes of battles. It was the most fun I had with Tekken since the Tekken Tag 2. Props to Namco for adding my favorite Tekken mini-game, Tekken Bowling as DLC! It is as sweet as I remembered, but Chris and I were seriously bummed there is no online play for it. Street Fighter V was getting fleshed out throughout 2018 with a ton of DLC with its season passes and I grabbed the first two seasons when they were on sale to try out the new characters with Chris a couple of times.

If you do not have it already on last-gen systems, I still would recommend Ultra Street Fighter IV as it collects nearly all the DLC characters and costumes and goes on sale digitally frequently. It was a hit revisiting with Chris, but the surprise SF hit among us online was Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection. Aside from collecting 12 of the earliest SF games, it made four of them online and Capcom had a slick online lobby system to make it quick and seamless to jump from playing one version of SF to another. Chris and I got lots of fights in throughout the year and I also did about 20 fights in online ranked lobbies against random opponents in hopes of getting just one win to get a trophy. That proved to be a brutal endeavor as my assumptions of my meek hadoken skills hoping to get lucky once were foolish as I lost every time (thought a couple of times I won once out of three…yay?). The worst was when higher skilled opponents would sit there and wait for me to come at them before schooling me with counter attacks. That happened even worse in Mortal Kombat X online against randoms, but as they say, practice makes perfect.

33)Mass Effect Andromeda Novels

I have seen nobody talking about these…probably because of how lackluster Mass Effect Andromeda was received. I was a huge fan of all four novels published concurrently alongside the original Mass Effect Trilogy and they helped fleshed out the story between games and gave a ton of back story to characters I was thrilled to see finally appear in the third game. I had no idea publisher Titan Books were releasing novels set in the Andromeda universe until about a year after the first one hit. Just a few months ago they released the third of the planned four books set in the Andromeda timeline.

I finished the first two books and enjoyed both of them. I gave more thorough reviews on my GoodReads account and will link to them here. For the quick breakdown though Nexus Uprising deals with a crisis of the Nexus mothership arriving at Andromeda attacked by a mysterious ‘scourge’ and the hysteria that results with its limited crew in charge of a ship barely hanging onto survival. Nexus Uprising leads right into the start of the Andromeda game. Initiation has a new Andromeda recruit fresh off her seven years of Asari training traveling for one last mission before journeying to Andromeda where the new recruit encounters a hostile VI/AI in a facility she must now survive and rescue as many survivors along with her. The latest book, Annihilation, I am only halfway through and I regret to report that I am just not feeling this one.

Annihilation explains why about a third of the original Mass Effect races are not in the Andromeda game as it goes into detail why they all took a separate ship there that wound up having a disastrous journey. I enjoyed the peripheral races in the original games in nice little spurts, but having a book focusing entirely on the volus, elcor, drell and a couple other races so far has been a slog to get through. I will keep my fingers crossed it picks up in the second half.

32) HDMI Cables for Retro Consoles

The past couple of years have seen an emerging trend of either having deluxe HDMI conversion kits for older systems to display at their proper resolutions on newer TVs or having third parties re-release older systems like the NES and SNES with new HD capabilities. Those are great options to have if you want a pristine picture on your HDTV for retro gaming goodness, but they cost a premium and 2018 saw manufacturer Pound release their HDMI cables for SNES, Dreamcast, Xbox and PS2 all for around $30 each. I picked up the Dreamcast and PS2 cables, but have only had time to test out the DC cables so far. I dug out the Dreamcast and tested out several games with regular cables and then the Pound cables and noticed a definite improvement in the graphics! They no longer have that washed out ‘muddiness’ look when I would ordinarily run a SD system on a HDTV with composite/RCA cables. There was a minor caveat where I noticed a minor background graphical effect in menus and only when I took the time to squint and stare during gameplay, but other than that this was a much affordable alternative. I found out about these from YouTuber, MetalJesus and you can see his coverage of it by clicking here with plenty of before and after comparisons to see if they may be what you are looking for.

31) Father’s Day Gaming

I have nostalgic memories of the many long gaming sessions I had with my dad and siblings while spending weekend visitations with him. We went all the way back to the original Pong and Atari 2600 in my childhood years through the NES, SNES and finally N64 during my high school years. While I have wonderful moments of many games with the family in each era the N64 years were the ones I cherished the most because of the ease of four player multiplayer with its four controller ports which was perfect for my dad, my brother Joe and either my sister Ann or another friend that would be over to helm the fourth player spot. Almost a couple hours of every visitation during that time we played countless hours of competitive N64 multiplayer.

That was many years ago though since we regularly played, and while thinking of ideas for what to do for Father’s Day this past year instead of going out for dinner and catching a movie like we would usually do I threw out the idea of staying in and having pizza and doing an N64 gaming day. I was delighted to hear my dad and brother were both up for it and thank goodness the games still held up and were just as much fun to play as they were around 20 years ago. My dad loved New Tetris and was a total pro and would be in a trance when he used to play it all the time so I was mighty curious to see how well he remembered it all these years later. We were all a little rusty, but we all got back into the rhythm of things after a few minutes and it was like we did not miss a beat. I am always disheartened to hear New Tetris get overlooked when I was hearing multiple discussions of past great Tetris games when Tetris Effect took the gaming community by storm in 2018. New Tetris was the first 3-4 player console Tetris game and also the first home console game to debut the incredibly handy ‘hold piece’ which is why New Tetris ranked right up there with Tengen Tetris, OG GameBoy Tetris and Tetris DS for my favorite versions of the legendary puzzle game.

We also played a hefty amount of Mario Kart 64 and GoldenEye 007. I have heard the countless debates over the years, and I will forever contest the N64 Mario Kart as the pinnacle of the series. I have also heard the many people proclaim that GoldenEye is an outdated mess all these years later. Every two or three years I bust out GoldenEye and the same thing happened here as before, after a few minutes of adjusting to the graphics and controls the game had its hooks in us again and we were having intense rounds of deathmatch with muscle memories suddenly kicking in of our favorite map and weapon presets. The three of us went on to have many rounds of fun blowing the crap out of each other! I have been watching Giant Bomb’s line of recent Die Another Friday videos where they try and run through the campaign in Perfect Agent difficulty. Instead of the expected jokes about how dated the graphics were I was relieved to see that most of the GB crew eventually were legit surprised at how fun GoldenEye still is.

PART 2 - RANKINGS 30 THROUGH 24

30) Videogames in Theatrical Form

Longtime followers of my work may recall my podcasting days where my co-hosts and I would go out of our way to track down and cover almost every major and obscure videogame licensed film that hit theaters or direct-to-video. Minus a few exceptions, they were usually painful experiences. Even though my podcasting days are behind me I still like to keep up the tradition of catching any new film that hits the theater or video that is based on or around videogames. 2018 I managed to catch four new films that fit the criteria. The new Tomb Raider featuring Alicia Vikander as the one and only Lara Croft was solid, but nothing spectacular. It had a handful of memorable stunts and captured a few of the moments I recall from the acclaimed self-titled reboot game in 2013 so on the videogame film curve I would categorize that as a ‘win.’ Rampage featuring The Rock totally surprised me how they were able to get a fun movie out of a straightforward arcade smash-em-up from the 80s. Within a half hour I was feeling for the monsters and Rock’s connection for them was surprisingly powerful. Really good stuff that you should not dismiss!

Looking back on Ready Player One several months after its release I can safely recommend it. I loved the book when I read it shortly after its release several years ago and I was somewhat conflicted coming out of the film. This is because of how far it strayed from the book yet essentially maintained a similar over-arching plot on how a world full of gamers playing the same VR game are tracking down the creator’s hidden ‘easter egg’ in order to inherit his riches and become his heir. Avid game player I am I could not help but keep my eyes peeled for as many as ‘blink-and-you-will-miss-it’ cameos from the beloved mascots of videogames and pop culture from over the years. After hearing how the author wrote the screenplay and gave his seal of approval for the changes I eventually was won over by them especially since the changes were entertaining and since the film came out only four or five years after the book it could have been a slog to see the movie play out 100% the same.

To close off 2018 a few weeks ago I took two of my many nieces and nephews to see Wreck-It Ralph 2: Ralph Breaks the Internet. That was a unique experience because my middle-school aged niece and nephew were ecstatic to point out a couple of YouTubers they follow that have cameos in the film. The sequel had a similar structure to the first where the first 20-ish minutes circle around Ralph and Vanellope loving life in their arcade they reside and visiting other arcade classics of gaming lore. I love how Tapper got a lot of love in the film with Ralph and Vanellope making that game setting their late-night watering hole of choice! Eventually though their arcade gets hooked up to WiFi and it was fun seeing Ralph and Vanellope take a journey in Disney’s CG version of the Internet with lots of real-life companies like Google, Amazon, etc. having their own fun representations in the film. This sequel was a big hit with me and once I got past the welcomed videogame references in the first 20 minutes I enjoyed Wreck-It Ralph 2’s overall plot exponentially more than the first film.

29) Yippee-Kay-Yay-Mutha…..

For readers of this blog who may or may not also keep up with my film reviews here, I recently reviewed Die Hard in honor of it being a Christmas film classic (yes, I am one of those people). It should go without saying that Die Hard is one the all-time greatest action films, and after watching it again a few weeks ago I recalled how there were a few PSone and GameCube games I had vague memories of fairly decent receptions at the time and after discovering how low they were priced on eBay I decided to take a chance on them. I loved the arcade game, but do not own a Saturn so I did not hunt down that version, but got the two PSone Die Hard Trilogy games and Die Hard: Vendetta on GameCube. I have not had a chance to play them yet, but I have since watched a few entertaining Game Informer Replay videos on them revisiting these ‘gems’ to varying degrees of quality all these years later that will suffice for now until I get around to them. Here are a few links so you can check them out and do the same!

28) ….And Raging Justice….For All

I referenced in these round-ups before how every few years my friend Matt and I would marathon several random beat-em-up classics usually consisting of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and X-Men variety. The last time we did that was around 2015, and the current gen systems have been flooded with a quality amount of re-releases of classics and obscure releases and all-new installments in the genre that we have been neglecting for far too long. Just a couple weeks ago Matt and I finally got around to playing through one of them on the PS4 called Raging Justice.

It had a similar look and feel to Final Fight, but with a slightly pastel-esque touch to the graphics that made the late ‘80s punk ooze right out of the game! The story had all kinds of goofy street punk gang warfare that we both ate up and we were really gelling in our playthrough and we were surprisingly not eating up that many lives. As a matter of fact we only went through one continue between both of us! After plowing through it within two hours we made a list of other similar new beat-em-ups that hit PS4/XB1 over the years so hopefully we will do better at sticking with this genre in 2019.

27) Now You’re Playing With a Power……ed Up NES/SNES Classic

If you do not want to go down the route listed above by hunting down HDMI cables for a system you do not own or a pricey HD-capable 3rd party version of a NES/SNES than there are a couple of grey-area alternatives. I talked about the RetroPie in last year’s round-up, so this year I want to focus on what people are calling ‘modding’ your NES/SNES Classic. I am not going to give you a step-by-step breakdown, but a quick Google/YouTube search will point you in the right direction. Once it is done you can add up to as many games that will fit in the Classic’s internal memory. If you stick with just NES games you can fit a majority of the NES’s library on the internal memory, SNES game sizes are noticeably bigger and if only going that route with ROMs you can fit roughly 200 of them on there…..that is if you in good faith own the original copies.

There is a nice benefit to the NES/SNES Classic compared to the RetroPie and that is a friendlier user interface complete with upbeat background music and the ability to upload your own box art which ostensibly delivers the nostalgic sensation of browsing the shelves at a videogame rental store and thus is more appealing than scrolling through a large text box of games on a RetroPie. Since the NES/SNES Classic is HDMI it provides an excellent HD picture for these classic 8 and 16-bit games. This resulted in busting out both the NES & SNES Classic several times throughout 2018 for some free spirited gaming nights.

26) Tabletop/Pen and Paper Madness

I referenced last year how I started to get into semi-routinely board game nights with my friends Derek, Ryan and Brooke and we managed to keep the board game nights churning throughout 2018. Derek & Brooke have amassed a hearty collection of board games and we were able to rotate a fair amount of games from last year and new ones to try out this year. One of the board games we revisited often was Betrayal at House on Haunted Hill, and they release a spin-off called Betrayal at Baldur’s Gate we were all eager to try throughout the year. We finally busted it out on a day where my brother was able to join us and it was a great medieval themed take on the original game that did not disappoint. Another new board game we tried out was Elder Signs. Thank goodness Derek, Ryan and Brooke are awesome tutors because the game had an elaborate setup with many pieces and by about halfway through our session I was familiar enough with the play style that yielded a fantastic end to that round when all of us were able to mount an insurmountable comeback that resulted in an unlikely, thrilling win for us all!

Shifting from tabletop gaming to pen and paper gaming, I have always been a fan of the SNES/GEN versions of Shadowrun. I always knew a group of friends that have been roleplaying the pen and paper RPG it is based on for quite a few years now and they reached out before to get me to play, but with my gonzo work/sleep schedule I knew it would be impossible to routinely play with them every week. I still had that itch to want to at least give it a honest try all these years later so I reached out to them and asked if I was able to commit to playing at least once a month with them and if they would they find a way to squeeze me in? Thank goodness they found a way to create random characters and place me into their campaign for the three times I made it out there to play with them. Mike is an awesome storyteller and ran a fun campaign, and I will also give props to Justine, Ron & Robb for being very welcoming and tolerant of my noob-ness and by being quite gracious sharing their infinite Shadowrun wisdom unto me. Unfortunately I fell out of the routine of playing with them after a few times, but I am glad to finally tried it out after all these years and would be down to make random cameos in their future sessions.

25) Kicking that Early Access Bug

I am going to cheat a smidge on this one because in December of 2017 through 2018 several games I invested lots of time into and/or have been majorly anticipating finally left Steam Early Access (SEA) and got official releases. Some went onto have official releases on console of well. Gang Beasts has always been silly goofy wrestling/brawling fun with creatures made of a silly puddy-esque substance and it was fascinating watching that game evolve over the several years Gang Beasts was in SEA until its official December 2017 release. I had fun times with friends in that game, and especially witnessing countless Giant Bomb sessions of its madness. FirePro World was another wrestling game that came out of SEA in December of 2017, but it was only in SEA for several months…not years. I have loved previous FirePro games for their faithful representation of a wrestling match and endless customization options, and was thrilled to see it get a physical PS4 release which wound up being the first physical wrestling game I picked up since…..wow…WWE 2K14.

Road Redemption was another game that spent a few years in SEA and I was stoked that it finally got an official release in 2018, with later digital versions that hit PS4 and XB1 in the following months. I raved about it before in previous year-end round-ups, and it is long overdue to finally have a motorcycle combat racer that is finally worthy of being deemed a successor to the heralded Road Rash series. There is a lot more to Road Redemption than being a Road Rash clone, so stick with it as its bizarre rogue-lite nature of its career mode and bonkers weather and weaponry will unleash mayhem you likely did not anticipate coming in. Distance is another driving game that was in SEA for far too long, but after four years Distance emerged a fleshed out release. It is a driving game like nothing else, and the best way I can sum it up is a ‘trippy neon platforming Trials-esque’ driving experience. Its standout feature is a platforming ‘adventure’ mode which was rebuilt for the official release and went on to add so much other tracks and customization features since I last played Distance in SEA that I hope my meek PC can still handle it when I eventually revisit it!

Not done yet because two more driving games trapped for years in SEA also fully released in 2018. Jalopy is another adventure-esque driving game where you take your uncle on a trek across Eastern Europe in the family’s run-down lemon of a vehicle that needs constant attention and repairs and not to mention other tomfoolery the duo stumbles into amidst their travels. I have had my eye on Jalopy for awhile and was relieved to hear when its long SEA cycle also concluded. Finally, Bugbear’s project formerly known as Next Car Game released in 2018 as Wreckfest. It is the spiritual successor to Bugbear’s FlatOut line of demolition derby racing games that I have so many fond memories of. Wreckfest looks and feels like a current-gen FlatOut and I was glad to see it retain its excellent physics engine the series was known for. I was bummed to see the console release get a delay into the second half of 2019, but for those with capable PCs, Wreckfest is fully out now to consume in all its destructive glory!

I do have two quick honorable mentions for this category. Super Indie Karts is an adorable Mario Kart-clone featuring mascots from many hit indie games as drivers that has also been in SEA forever. The developer keeps regularly adding content though and it just released a fresh batch of tracks and drivers (featuring the not-so-indie ToeJam & Earl) to the build a few days ago. I have nothing but super-fun memories of my time with Super Indie Karts so I hope it gets its long-awaited official release in 2019! Finally, while Shaq-Fu 2: A Legend Reborn never was officially in SEA when Shaq accidentally leaked it out in an offhanded interview four years ago shortly before its Kickstarter campaign premiere, it feels like it never left there once the game released to worst game of the year-caliber reception. I own two copies of the 1994 original Shaq-Fu, so I felt obligated to purchase the sequel when I recently stumbled upon it in the clearance bins for $6 just a few months after its release.

24) Good ‘ol Fashioned Videogame Couch Multiplayer

I will also give a quick mention to the videogame nights I was glad to be a part of with Derek, Brooke and Ryan! While 2018 saw us hit up more board game nights we managed to sneak in a few couch videogame multiplayer nights of some old favorites like Sony’s take on the JackBox Party Pack that is called That’s You where the four of us chuckled away the night at its irreverent trivia and doodling nonsense on each other’s faces. We also mixed in a couple other games into the rotation throughout the year. I heard great things about Towerfall before, but finally playing it was a rush and a half with its fast intense bouts of bow-and-arrow deathmatches with sudden death animations that left us in stitches!

Derek introduced us to the bonkers four player game called Ultimate Chicken Horse where users play several quick rounds trying to reach a goal but insert random objects of torture between each round that makes getting to the goal near impossible by the end of the game. It was a big hit with our group. Finally it will behoove me to include the crazy night we had with the 360 game, Cloudberry Kingdom. It is an absurd runner game filled with all kinds of deathtraps just waiting to obliterate our adorable avatars. Cloudberry Kingdom has literally hundreds of levels, and as expected each one got procedurally more nuts but was still a blast to attempt to complete! After a couple hours of the madness and many attempts on one particularly troublesome stage we all had this priceless defeated look on our faces after we finally finished it and we all knew in that instant that we were DONE with it for the night! What a fantastic runner I hope we get to revisit again one day!

PART 3 - RANKINGS 23 THROUGH 18

23) Wanting More Time to Dedicate to 2018’s Top Indie Games

There are a few websites and podcasts I follow that have tons of game of the year coverage, and it is a great place to get a reminder of those indie games that slipped through the cracks and I completely forgot about or neglected throughout the year. I heard enough praise about three of them that seemed up my alley and before the end of the year I was able to put in a 20-30 minute session with each of these. I wish I had more time for each, but my initial impressions were high for all three and I know I will put more time into them throughout 2019. Yoku’s Island Express is a hybrid of a pinball game and a MetroidVania that somehow delivered on both fronts as I unlocked more paths through an island by flipping my character and ball through a variety of colorful environments. My love for both genres makes me want to return to it ASAP.

Minit is a roguelite RPG with an dastardly hook where each session has a one minute timer, but you retain all the items collected on each session that unlocks other paths on the map. I did about 20 sessions and as I got familiar with the game world I already was starting to plan my next steps ahead for my next minute run. Many jovial curses to the developers who intentionally programmed the NPC W-H-O-T-A-L-K-S-T-H-I-S-S-L-O-W to keep me in a nail-biter of a moment to hit the next checkpoint with literally a single second to spare! The last indie game I snuck in some time with was the Super Meat Boy-esque platformer, Celeste. This comes from the same developers who made Towerfall that I just got done shedding some love for above. The instant restarts and checkpoints make its fair-yet-punishing platforming worth the challenge to get through and I can already see its addicting ‘just-one-more-try’ instant respawns reminding me of the longer-than-intended sessions I had with the Trials games and I look forward to them in Celeste! I am only about a half hour in, but have heard nothing but the best of acclaim for its narrative about overcoming personal struggles to make it to the top of a mountain!

22) Fans of Gamers Who Crave Limited Runs

I imagine you have heard of them before, but if not then both Limited Run Games and FanGamer have both been great sites I have been persistently coming back to for primarily physical copies of smaller indie games and top-tier quality gaming memorabilia. I am happy to see Limited Run expanding in 2018 by finally starting to publish games on Switch and landing their more anticipated games in a limited window preorder program so everyone has a shot at getting a copy. It was also encouraging to hear that some of their games will be shipping in smaller quantities to Best Buys across the country so people who do not order their games online have a shot at getting some of their titles the traditional way. Some of the titles I ordered this year from them that I was stoked to get physical copies of include Late Shift, Read Only Memories and Golf Story. That is right, I do not own a Switch yet but ordered Golf Story because I loved the GBC/GBA RPG takes on Mario Golf that Golf Story is the spiritual successor of and I kept hearing how it hits all the right notes for fans of those handheld classics. I anticipate I will get a Switch within the next year pending the inevitable smaller redesign of the system. My only qualm with Limited Run now is with their growth their shipping times have significantly increased. I recall my first few Limited Run games I ordered taking 2-4 weeks to ship, now the last several I got all took 3-5 MONTHS each. Step it up guys!

I will also tip my hat to FanGamer for their plethora of must-have merchandise. I loved their meticulously detailed strategy/companion guides for Earthbound and Mother 3. It is awesome they are collaborating with Jeremy Perish to publish deluxe hardcover books of his transcripts for his excellent Works line of anthology retro gaming videos. FanGamer has a ton of artistic shirts, posters and other memorabilia for many top-rated indie games. I ordered my first shirt from them recently with this design that perfectly captures the spirit of WindJammers. I am also perplexed with their sudden infatuation to the classic run-and-gunner, Sunset Riders, FanGamer recently obtained the merchandising rights for. They celebrated the occasion with a unique cosplay promotional video that almost convinced me to order their Sunset Riders branded wallet….almost!

21) 25 Years of the Real-est Interactive Multiplayer in the Room!

Guys, the 3DO is a pretty neat system! Seriously! Of course I did not spend the obscene $700 when it first launched 25 years ago, but I got it for a bargain in 2007 and went on to hunt down many games that I always wanted to try for the platform. Not all of them were winners, but there were several that wound up as worthy inclusions in my library. My recommended games for the 3DO include the awesome party game Twisted, its mascot platformer Gex and the original Need for Speed. 3DO also has excellent versions of Super Street Fighter II Turbo, Family Feud, Madden and arguably the best version of the classic motorcycle racer, Road Rash!

Nearing its 25th anniversary and just in time for Halloween, the good people at Your Parents Basement Podcast invited me on to guest host and commemorate one of the 3DO’s spooooop-iest games, the Tia Carrere FMV thriller, The Daedalus Encounter! I busted out my 3DO from the closet and booted up my old save and came pretty darn close to finishing it before the puzzles got to be too much of a brainbuster for me! Riveting times were had breaking down and dissecting the game with the YPB crew which you can check out and download here.

20) Shmuppreciation 2018

One of my favorite podcasts I have been a listener to for over 13 years now is Super-the-Hardest. They use to be primarily videogame-centric, but have since evolved over the years to focus on whatever topics pique their interest such as craft brews, board games and jamming out to vinyl records! One of their longest traditions has always been dedicating March to shmup/space shooter games. I am not a pro shump player by any means, but always am down to pump in a few credits and blast away for as long as I can survive.

They have a small, but tight-knit forum community I have always been a part of and when March hit the hosts were asking there if anyone was playing any shmups yet. A couple days went by with little response, and knowing how big shmup-month was for that community in previous years I was suddenly inspired to start up weekly high score chases on the forums there with the focus this year being on three random NES shmups each week. I tried to have a consistent rotation of the three games being one common/popular shmup such as Gradius & 1943, another lesser known domestic release like Alpha Mission & Zombie Nation and finally a imported Famicom game that never saw a stateside release with picks this year including Parodius Da & Gradius II. At least a few us participated each week posting our scores and exchanging tips and breaking down how good/awful that week’s selections were. It was a heck of a month and somehow I managed to keep up posting selections each week and got in time with every game! No idea if I will do it again for 2019, but if I do I think it may be time to upgrade to 16-bits!

19) The 3DS Soul Still Burns!!

I somehow managed to sneak in an hour of time into my 3DS each week. I was ecstatic to track down an English translation for Ace Attorney Investigation 2 that never saw an American release. I loved the first game and always wanted to play the follow-up and got most of the way through the first case. I finally played my first Fire Emblem game by putting in several hours into Fire Emblem Echoes. Hearing that Echoes was a good entry point for the series having played Advance Wars many years ago the gameplay was not that difficult to pick up. It has that same addicting strategy gameplay as Advance Wars, but with a medieval theme and a far richer narrative than what I recalled from my Advance Wars days. Just the couple of sessions I had with Echoes I was already starting to get attached to the cast.

Hotel Dusk and its sequel, Last Window are my favorite DS games. They are mystery visual novels, and when I found out earlier in 2018 that some of the developers at Cing who worked on those games went on to make a bite-sized spiritual successor to it on the 3DS eShop called Chase: Cold Case Investigations - Distant Memories I knew I had to get it. I bought this around when it released in 2016 and neglected it until John from the Super the Hardest podcast recapped it earlier in 2018 and inspired me to pick it up. It is essentially a more stripped down version of Cing’s earlier games as it revolves around two detectives interviewing suspects for a hospital blast. Graphics and style remind me of Hotel Dusk and the lead detective in Distant Memories looks quite similar to one Kyle Hyde. It was a decent little visual novel that can be finished in less than three hours, and I hope it gets a follow-up, but it appears this one came and went because I have heard nothing since.

I finally started up Theatrhythm 2: Curtain Call. In case you missed out on it before it assembles the protagonists from past Final Fantasy games and makes a fun battle system/rhythm game of over 100 songs from the rich history of Final Fantasy soundtracks while somehow fitting in a intricate narrative too. Wish I had more time to get into it and I think I will have to restart it I manage to deep dive into it because I spent the bulk of my 3DS time once again this year with Dragon Quest VIII. My save file is currently approaching 110 hours in DQVIII. However, the last 15-ish hours have been spent grinding from levels 40-65 for most of my party members for the final boss. To say the boss is a pain is an understatement. I failed multiple times at vanquishing him, thus the hours at grinding away. I will never forget my time with DQVIII, but am looking forward to finishing it on one of my next sessions so I can finally put more time into other games. The 3DS still had a strong 2018 from Nintendo published games and I wound up picking up Captain Toad, Detective Pikachu and WarioWare Gold which I desperately want to dive into!

18) ‘Get Ready for a Cruise Missile!’

I use to play a ton of sports games until several years ago. I took a long hiatus from them to focus on more narrative-driven games. Madden NFL ‘18 premiering its story mode dubbed ‘Longshot’ got me curious at giving the acclaimed football series another go for the first time in five years. I surprisingly dug Madden’s take on a story mode and loved playing as the fictional Devin Wade working his way through the reality show challenges and playing in flashback high school games with lighthearted local announcers providing the unintentional best sports commentary out there. Longshot also had a well-rounded cast filled with some surprising moments I never thought I would get invested in such as getting them sports feels flowing for the Longshot acoustic sing-a-long! The story mode only took a few hours to play through and even if you are not a fan of football games I would recommend giving it a shot as the football parts are few and far between and the story mode is primarily QTE/mini-game focused.

Story mode aside, I managed to play a few rounds online against my friend Steve I use to play countless sports games with over the years and it felt good to reignite that rivalry. Madden still plays as good as I remember, and one thing I want to point out from the core game is the new NFL commentators they brought in for ’18 & ’19 with Brandon Gaudin & Charles Davis easily being the best announce team in Madden history that added a ton to the presentation unlike any Madden announce team before them! I did pick up Madden NFL ‘19 recently because it has ‘Longshot Part 2’ which promises to conclude the storyline for Devin Wade and his buddy Colt Cruise, but other than a couple rounds online with Steve again I have yet to dive into it. After catching a couple scenes online I am psyched to see how Longshot concludes and plan on blitzing through it around Super Bowl time like I did with part one in 2018.

If you are not a fan of sim-football and prefer arcade style action in the vein of NFL Blitz than I will instead point you towards Mutant Football League which I played nearly a full season of off-and-on throughout 2018. It is the spiritual successor to EA’s awesome Mutant League Football on the Genesis, and part of me is still surprised how the team did not get a cease-and-desist from EA with a slightly altered name change and bring over so much of the look and feel of the original game. It modernized all the things I loved from the first game with a game engine that plays like a amped up version of Blitz, and retains classic elements of the Genesis game like being able to kill your adversaries in all types of gruesome ways and introducing awesome powered up attacks that can be used once per half to up the brutality. And yes, you can still bribe and kill refs! I was a little bummed Mutant Football League did not get that much of a buzz when it finally released because it had a successful Kickstarter campaign and a follow-up to the Genesis game has been long demanded in the sports gaming circles I follow. A physical copy released later in the year with a new Franchise mode included so hopefully that will bring some new eyes onto the game. If you want more over-the-top arcade-like gameplay out of your football games then by all means give Mutant Football League a try!

I also got really into my first basketball-sim in many years. I dabbled with a couple arcade-hoops games over past couple years and really dug the Neo-Geo Arcade Archives re-release of Street Hoop on Xbox One, while the free-to-play Xbox One hoops game, 3-on-3 Freestyle…..not so much. I always stuck with NBA 2K games as my NBA sim of choice since their debut on Dreamcast and picked one up every couple years and played them regularly through 2K11. Early in 2018 however a super cheap digital sale on NBA Live ‘18 convinced me to give it a shot. I have solely been playing its create-a-player story/career mode ‘The One.’ I have been digging it and loved the first several games I played in ‘The One’ proving my worth in street games of 21. Every few games there would be these hilarious FMV updates from a First Take set with Stephen A Smith and Max Kellerman being over-the-top versions of their already over-the-top personalities which convinced me that my created player was going to dominate the street leagues and become the #1 draftee in the NBA….it did not turn out that way, but I am having a blast so far proudly representing the Timberwolves while dishing out far too many three-point attempts than I should be.

Love him or hate hime, Stephen A Smith has always been entertaining with his sports analysis as seen in this video above collecting his best moments. Unlocking more analysis videos from him covering your created player's career in 'The One' mode in NBA Live kept me coming back to it.

PART 4 - RANKINGS 17 THROUGH 14

17) The End Day is a Lie!

I was going to say a couple entries earlier when covering all those NES shmups that I have not played that much NES in years, but that statement would have been false because mere weeks before that I played through the entirety of the post-apocalyptic, action-RPG Crystalis on NES! It was the featured game on the first of two Your Parents Basement podcast episodes I guest hosted on for 2018. I picked up both the NES and GBC versions a couple years ago after hearing countless years of love from the staff at GameCola about it. I managed to play through most of it by the time we recorded that YPB episode and finished it off a few days after that. All these years after its original release, Crystalis is still a fun action-RPG to plow through. I loved the accessibility of the combat, and while the options to choose from to level up seem quaint now, I can imagine how they were top of their league at the time.

After beating the NES version I put an hour into the GBC port to see how it held up. I heard the GBC version get a fair amount of slack over the years, but from my initial time with the handheld port it seemed noticeably cleaner and had some useful tips at the opening town that would have benefitted my first time through. I had a great time sharing my experience with the YPB crew and if you are interested in hearing our takes on SNK’s 8-bit RPG then click here to check out that episode. It seemed only fitting that the NES original got its first retro re-release later on in 2018 on the SNK 40th Anniversary Collection on Switch.

16) Pinball Quest 2018

Welcome to my yearly blurb all about feeding my addiction to videogame pinball. In case you skipped around this year-end round-up (I do not blame you!) I will refer you to entry #23 for some quick thoughts on Yoku’s Island Express. I only got a few rounds of my favorite PC-exclusive pinball game, Hyperspace Pinball in 2018, and the last time I played it a couple weeks ago I had a great run and was briefly ecstatic until the leaderboard indicated I missed my personal high-score by a smidge! I also gave a couple runs to what appears to be a mobile pinball game ported to Xbox One in Quantic Pinball. It is a fine little pinball game, but its mobile roots are too apparent and not many upgrades are present to make the console release feel warranted.

2018 was a strange year for Pinball Arcade. I wanted to make the switch to primarily playing it on PS4 in 2017, but that proved difficult upon discovery of my dozens of tables I purchased on PS3/Vita not being import-able to the PS4 version like I was able to for the dozens of tables I acquired for Zen Pinball 2 to work on Pinball FX3. So that meant I would have to buy the tables all over again. I held off for a long time, but I wound up spending roughly $200 on all of the DLC for it upon hearing midway in 2018 all of Pinball Arcade’s collection of tables under license from Williams/Bally would no longer be supported for purchase with only a few weeks notice to be able to buy them and add them to your Pinball Arcade library. Plopping down around $200 all at once for that DLC was a punch in the gut, but ultimately I do not regret it because there are some minor, but noticeable enhancements to the visuals on the PS4 version of Pinball Arcade and it has a slightly cleaner feel to the gameplay too. Additionally the developers at Farsight now have a separate game called Stern Pinball Arcade so the newer Stern tables have a flashier place to reside. I perfectly understand the idea to make the Stern tables pop more on their own platform. The Stern tables purchased theoretically work in both Pinball Arcade and Stern Pinball Arcade, but doing so requires reactivating the purchased license in the clunky Playstation Store interface and it once lead to me to inadvertently purchasing the same table twice.

A couple months later I was stunned to find out that Zen Studios gained the license for the Williams tables and by the end of the year would have their first seven tables from the Williams/Bally collection available for download to Pinball FX3 (PFX3). I have mixed feelings about this. I do like Zen’s optional upgraded graphical enhancements to the tables, but the overall physics for the ball movement does not feel like the authentic movement that Pinball Arcade faithfully represented. There is an option in Pinball Arcade for ‘classic mode’ which kind of slows down the speed of play and leans the gameplay to marginally feel like an authentic pinball experience, but it simply does not cut it overall. Hopefully Zen can take the feedback and continue to improve in future DLC tables.

Gripes on the Williams tables aside, I enjoyed the rest of my time in 2018 with PFX3. I have heard the criticism for Zen Studios’ unrealistic style of pinball, but I have always been a fan of theirs and feel there is room for both authentic digital pinball from Pinball Arcade and faster physics with the more fantastical tables from Zen. I finally started to grasp PFX3’s initially intimidating ‘mastery’ system of each table. The mastery system is topping off essentially an experience meter for each table by achieving score goals in each gameplay option available and maxing out several stat meters. I did this for The Infinity Gauntlet, Back to the Future and almost all the way for Medieval Madness. I also got into the weekly online scoring ‘matchup’ league play where PFX3 randomly picks four tables and scores posted by three random players in three skill levels for three minutes of play each week. By toying around with trying to master tables and online score chasing in matchup play it lead to a lot more time invested in Pinball FX3 compared to 2017.

15) Sega Channel 2018

In the summer of 1996 I spent about five or six afternoons a week at my friend’s place playing Sega Channel. No memories of it? Here is some vintage archival footage of its menus of the Sega Channel experience. It was Sega’s sweet-at-the-time service where in coordination with cable companies from 1994-98 you would pay $15/month to have a rotating monthly selection of 40 games playable from a special cartridge that hooked up to the household cable line. Games would download to a temporary internal memory on the cartridge from the cable line over a minute or two and save states were also available. It was the current Netflix streaming of gaming and was way ahead of its time. It was also how I discovered countless Genesis favorites I hunted down at local shops and online after I got my first job a few years later.

It took 20 years after Sega Channel shutdown to get a faithful reincarnation of it, but only far better in every way. GameTap sort of brought it back to the PC for the few years it was around in the 2000s. However, Xbox brought it back in full force with its excellent Game Pass service for Xbox One it introduced in 2018. Instead of 40 games available to play each month there are 100+ rotating games for Xbox. Add on Microsoft’s bold move of making all their first party games available on Game Pass on day one of their release and it would be insane not to recommend it, especially for new Xbox One owners. I actually am that insane though and do not have it because of my massive backlog and lack of time to commit. However for new Xbox One owners and/or game players on a budget like students or parents looking to save lots of money getting games for their kids they would be in an ideal position going with Game Pass and a Games for Gold subscription which additionally nets ownership of four games each month to their Xbox games library.

14) Ride or Die

Like pinball games, I also have a yearly blurb on my experiences with racing/driving games for the year. I felt my year in driving titles slightly nudged out my pinball times, thus it being a couple notches higher ranked. If you dear reader are randomly bouncing around this list then I will refer you to entry #25 where I touch on driving games coming out of Steam Early Access such as Road Redemption, Wreckfest, Distance, Jalopy & Super Indie Kart. There were a few driving titles I dabbled this year in that I wish I had more time to plug away at. As you will see later in this round-up, I am a nut for the Sega 80s arcade driving titles like Hang-On & OutRun, and the PS4/Switch release of Horizon Chase Turbo is the best spiritual successor to that type of racer I have seen over the years. They brought on the same composer from those games and the visuals have a nice modern HD look to them that capture the spirit of those 80s greats. It has been a great while since I played a snowmobile racing game and Ski-Doo Snowmobile Challenge was a limited, but fun budget title racer on PS3 that reminded me of a fond time when all I wanted was a no-thrills career mode with a few dozen races and simple stat upgrades to deal with in a career mode. Drive!Drive!Drive! was the final racer I put some minor time into, and that was an extraordinary title where I would have to bounce around multiple cameras to control simultaneous races.

At the beginning of the year I was wrapping up the last dozen or so races/events in the 360 version of Forza Horizon 2. I had another good time with it like its open-world predecessor and took advantage of that rewind button to avoid retrying the same track over and over, but looking back I preferred the experience of the first FH more as the sequel seemed more of the same, but in a less spectacular backdrop. Friends are telling me to skip three and jump to the new fourth game in the series getting a lot of buzz online now, but the third game has that tempting Australian outback setting I froth to explore and on top of that the unique Hot Wheels DLC pack I heard nothing but superb things about. So I will continue to be extremely behind on that series and plan to jump into FH3 later this year.

I went on an odd Monster Truck binge in 2018. The Xbox One digital store had Monster Jam: Crush-It available for dirt cheap one week, and having a modicum of nostalgic memories of past entries in the long running budget title series I wound up taking a chance on it. After spending far more time than I should have with it, ‘budget’ is a generous description for Crush-It, because this racer is full of absurd physics, bizarre collision detection and endless other bugs. After a ton of bugs causing too many rage-inducing moments I beat enough tracks and finished all the challenges to make Crush-It of all games to have the dubious honor of being the first Xbox One game I unlocked the full 1000 gamerscore in. After wrapping up my time with Crush-It I stumbled into picking up a copy of Monster Truck Madness 64. Microsoft was developing the series at that point on PC for awhile, but ported it to N64 and had a pre-GTA Rockstar Games publish it for them. Unfortunately the Rockstar branding could not have saved MM64 as it too was also rough around the edges with terribly loose steering that had me dreading every corner. It did feature the nWo muscle trucks at the time though that brought back memories of the old WCW Motorsports advertising.

The racing game I put the most time into in 2018 was The Crew. Not the sequel that came out later in the year, but the original game. I got around halfway in it via staggered play over the previous year or two, but with the release of the sequel approaching I grinded away in the couple of months leading up to its release to finish the avenge your brother’s death storyline which I actually kind of dug. There was a surprisingly gripping cinema building up to campaign’s final race where I was legit getting behind protagonist Alex Taylor. I had fun just messing around and cruising around UbiSoft’s condensed open-world of the continental United States and tracking down their take on iconic landmarks. I messed around a little here and there with their instantaneous online coop/versus multiplayer reminiscent of Test Drive Unlimited, and had a few fun online moments but I enjoyed most of my time in the single player. Gameplay wise it is not five stars by any means, and I would prefer Forza Horizon any day, but there was something about the gritty underground nature of The Crew and its car-culture-gang-warfare story that kept me sticking with it. I eventually picked up the sequel recently on a bargain bin digital sale for the ultimate season pass edition being 60% off so who knows, I likely see myself in 2019 playing The Crew 2 and Forza Horizon 3 concurrently at my regular on-and-off pace.

PART 5 - RANKINGS 13 THROUGH 10

13) Spoooooky Gaming

For Halloween I brought up to my board game/videogame night friends Derek, Brooke & Ryan about doing a spooky gaming marathon. They did me one better and recommend I bring over my copy of Hidden Agenda on PS4 to binge through that I have been occasionally throwing out for an option over the previous months. Hidden Agenda kind of snuck under-the-radar towards the end of 2017 as it came from the same team that made the critically acclaimed teenage spooky thriller, Until Dawn. This is another spooky-thriller, but designed to be played with your friends and finished in one session within three hours. It is a game that requires a smartphone app to play, and luckily it came close, but did not deplete our entire charge by the time the credits rolled. The app had some clever functionality that kept tabs on case notes and presented us with options to vote on which way to take the story next like having to choose which part of the case to investigate, or which path to split off into. While the story was a little all over the place it managed to get us riled up and jumpy a few times, and was still a blast to play through in its entirety in a single night on Halloween weekend. Now I need to replay it on my own to have complete control over the story so on my calendar this October I am going to write a big reminder to replay Hidden Agenda and finally bust open and plow through Until Dawn.

12) Back-to-Back!!!

I have been avoiding most co-op gaming that cannot be finished in a single session like Hidden Agenda for a few years now due to lack of time to finish lengthier co-op games. I made one exception this year where my same friend Matt and I met up twice to persevere through A Way Out. It is a coop game clocking in at around a whopping six hours. That is a lot for me nowadays. Matt and I absolutely loved our time with A Way Out. Spending the first couple of hours getting to know the prison system and plan our escape was a rush and it reminded me of the equally awesome first few hours of Xbox’s Chronicles of Riddick. Crawling up the air shaft with that back-to-back mini-game will go down as one of my favorite moments in co-op gameplay.

The plot I found myself getting into where two would-be fugitives found themselves teaming up to escape prison and get back to their loved ones. It kind of disappointingly unravels in the final moments with some bold narrative choices the developers made that I am still processing in my mind on how I feel about the final hour of play. The ‘must talk to everyone’ extremist in me was addicted to talking to nearly all NPCs and have brief choice-based conversations with all of them. The developers at Hazelight Studios cram in diverse gameplay throughout with plenty of exploring, interrogating, QTE segments, platforming, gunfights, intense car chase sequences and a big highlight being a hospital chase sequence where A Way Out seamlessly bounces back and forth between the two characters as they get split up and must evade the police. If you are looking for something fresh and different than the infinite amount of co-op shooters available, then give A Way Out a chance.

11) ‘This is a No-Smoking Flight!’

If you do not recognize that quote it is from the adorable master of cooking eggs, Sunny, at the close of one of the numerous lengthy cutscenes that Metal Gear Solid 4 was known for. The ending cutscene is literally the length of a movie, and the cinemas between each of MGS4’s acts are right around an hour each and I would not want it any other way! MGS4 was the first MGS game I finished nearly 10 years ago and I decided it was only appropriate to revisit it after finishing the first three MGS games in the past couple of years. I got so much more out of MGS4 this way by actually getting the countless past references to the core trilogy of games this time around. I loved that MG4 also had memorable debuting characters like the aforementioned Sunny and the soda-chugging gun-runner, Drebin! Since I last played MGS4 Konami has also patched in trophies so it was worthwhile to hunt down those and look into some that swayed me to approach gameplay in a different fashion which yielded a refreshing second go-around.

After finishing MGS4, I continued my ritual of view that installment’s complete gameplay commentary from Dan and Drew at GiantBomb to get essentially a third playthrough experience out of MGS4. I did not make major progress in the rest of my Metal Gear quest otherwise throughout the year. I did get a little ways into MGS5 at the beginning of the year, but then felt compelled to drop it and play through MGS4 before it instead. That was probably a wrong decision in hindsight, but at least it gives me an excuse to restart it and experience one of gaming’s grandest opening missions yet again. I did pick up the GBC version of Metal Gear Solid last year for a decent price at a local retro shop, so if I ever do finish MGS5 I would like to play the GBC title along with the MSX versions of the original two games.

10) Better Late than Never

I have no idea why I held off seven years on getting around to the highly-touted Saints Row the Third, especially after loving the first two games and finishing them in quick fashion right around their release. The third game in the open-world crime action series upped the zany factor the series debuted in the second game with some of its activities by introducing all kinds of over-the-top elements in the story missions and into the weapons, upgrades, you name it. Here are a few examples so you can see for yourself. Saints Row the Third gave the franchise its own satirical identity when before it was only a pretty solid GTA-clone.

Waiting seven years to get to this classic made certain parts of the graphics seem a little long in the tooth, but for the most part the visuals and core gameplay held up nicely. Experimenting with the huge variety of weapons and vehicles available made cruising through the open world a lot of fun. Same goes for the series trademark offering of mini-game ‘activities.’ The developers at Volition pushed every button to get the most out of that M rating to make its missions standout like no other as they go in places you will not believe. I went on to play both pieces of the story-based DLC content which take the Saints in filming their own Gangstas in Space movie and chasing down an evil mutant clone of series mascot, Johnny Gat. If you missed out on this landmark achievement in open-world gameplay then consider this synopsis somewhat timely since THQ Nordic will be releasing Saints Row the Third later this year on switch.

PART 6 - RANKINGS 9 THROUGH 4

9)Discovering my Favorite Gaming Blog

Early in 2018 I was scouring the webs digging up info on the must-have import games for the Super Famicom/SNES. I came across this top 50 list ranking the most obscure SNES imports from a blog called RVGFanatic. It is a blog primarily dedicated to covering SNES/Super Famicom games, but also has the occasional feature covering a game on another system or a random personal life story. The site has been around for over a decade and RVGFanatic continues to publish a few new entries a month. His writing and coverage reminds me of the writing style dominant in gaming magazines from the 90s and RVGFanatic stated in various articles that was his intention with the design in the blog.

I spent a good chunk of the year revisiting his site and perusing the archives there because there is an earnest quality to his writing that captures the sheer joy of growing up with those games. He manages to be both reflective and current with his writing recognizing pros and cons the games have been known for, while also recapturing the experience of playing that game for the first time. A prime example of this is his recent review of Clay Fighter. It perfectly encapsulated my memories of the much hyped fighter looking wicked cool with its revolutionary graphics which helped hide its haphazard gameplay. His occasional personal blogs were metaphorical page-turners too as I related with him perfectly to his excellent write-up of rental store memories as well with his piece on wrestling nostalgia of the Hulk-a-Mania years of the then-WWF. I can recommend so many more of his articles and reviews, but instead I recommend you dive in and get lost in RVGFanatic’s archives like I did!

8) My Handpicked Top Gaming Videos of 2018

I have been scouring the YouTubes and GiantBombs throughout the year and have some of my highest recommendations of my favorite videos to add to your watch later q! Without further ado, here are my top picks of 2018…

GiantBomb's Die Another Friday series where they play through Goldeneye 007 on its toughest difficulty was priceless all the way through!

GiantBomb - Die Another Friday| Winter Games 2018 | Gaiden the Ring & Get in the Ring| Mario Party Party 11 | Quiet Man Quick Look | Wreckfest Quick Look | Detective Pikachu Quick Look

Jeremy Parish ‘Works’ Videos - Too hard to pick just one all of them are so informative and comprehensive. Pick a system of Works videos from the playlists indexed here

MetalJesus - Game Pickups with Reggie | Vinyl Record Pickups | Wii and PSP Hidden Gems |PS2 Hidden Gems

Gaming Historian – Story of Punchout | Story of Tetris

Norm Caruso did an unbelievably excellent job with his production values and in-depth research breaking down how Tetris came to be and is a must-watch for anyone who has the slightest craving for gaming history.

Game Sack – Star Trek Games

Up Up Down Down - E3 Live – Elite vs New Day Street Fighter V Challenge | Edge and Christian NHL 95 Faceoff

No Clip – History of Bethesda

AVGN - Earthbound | Home Alone games with MaCauly Caulkin

Same Name, Different Game – FirePro Wrestling | Punisher | Street Fighter Alpha

Classic Gaming Quarterly - Let’s Read TurboPlay | Nintendo Power | Game Pro | Official DreamCast Magazine

Scott the Woz - Wii Ware Chronicles | Devils Third | Madden NFL 08

Same Name, Different Game has some fine breakdowns of various versions of the Punisher back from the 8 and 16-bit era.

That list there is days full of quality videos to last you throughout 2019, I hope you dig them as much as I did!

7) Videogame Vinyl

How the hell did I go down this whole!? I recall first getting clued into the world of emerging videogame soundtracks on vinyl from this music primer episode of Retronauts. Later in 2017 a friend gifted me his old record player since he recently upgrade along with a couple records. Since I had the record player in my possession I figured I had to had to track down a just a few records for it and I heard good things about soundtrack vinyls from Mondo and I went and ordered several records from them. That was the first domino tumbling right there, and from that point it was inevitable to prevent the rest tumbling after them.

Throughout 2018 other websites I follow like Limited Run, Data Disc and FanGamer started to offer videogame OSTs on vinyl and I made several more purchases throughout the year. I do not have hundreds of vinyls mind you, but I finished the year with around 15. I made sure to track down some iconic videogame soundtracks like a few from the Castlevania series, Earthbound and Snatcher. There were also a few oddballs that still boggle my mind why they got a vinyl release like Windjammers and Mortal Kombat I & II that I convinced myself I had to have. I am not buying these to sit on the shelf though as I have been getting some quality use out of my record player jamming out to soundtracks while cleaning the house and doing DDP Yoga three times a week.

6) Hey-a Fellers

It was practically impossible to avoid getting sucked up by the whirlwind of hype in the months leading up to Red Dead Redemption 2’s release. I also loved its predecessor so much that I knew I had to be there day one to be in on the conversation going around the gaming press zeitgeist about RDR2’s opening acts. South Park got in on the RDR2 hype train too with a couple episodes where the whole town is addicted to it. Rockstar does not disappoint with their narrative and audio/visual presentation. I will not bore you with the details you have likely read elsewhere by now, but rest assured the open-world, cast, narrative, visuals and especially the score and voice acting is aces all around!

Not all is aces though as RDR2’s multi-faceted control scheme has been divisive among many in the gaming media. Bottom line, there are too many functions for every button on the controller, and at points I completely forgot certain controls and had to do a quick online search for a refresher on how to do specific abilities like dual wielding and changing coats. Those gripes quickly washed away after extended sessions with RDR2 where I cannot help but get immersed and lose myself in the world. I spent so much time looking forward to getting distracted by whatever quick instant side mission or event that popped up traversing to my next checkpoint. According to my progress I am 36% the way through RDR2 after what seems roughly that many hours in the game, however I am only in chapter two because I keep having so much fun clearing out whatever side missions get accumulated in my checklist. I easily see many more hours to come in RDR2 throughout 2019.

5) The Hidden Beauty of Shield Snow-Surfing!

2017’s #1 pick, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild took up so much of my playtime in 2018 that it managed to eeek its way into my top five of 2018! There is simply so much to explore, see and do and I am insane at refusing to take advantage of fast travel due to fear of missing out on seeing cool stuff. The photo I attached here showing my 133 hours of total play time was taken shortly before Halloween and I have put at least several more hours in since then. I will give a shoutout to my co-worker Mike who has been awesome to trade tips and stories with since Breath of the Wild’s launch. He gave me a ton of great pointers and his advice has made my experience with BotW a better one! Mike filled me in all about the wondrous technique that is shield surfing! I later discovered more about it when my random traversing lead me to a corner of the wintry mountainous region of the map where I was taught shield surfing and how that lead to the thrills surfing through the snow blanketed mountains of Hyrule.

I have made so much progress this year! I am down to needing to unlock only two more parts of the map where my one last divine beast to conquer lies before finally taking on Hyrule Castle and Ganon! I loved my time in the Lost Woods and Lomei Labyrinth Island that was a hoot to find my way out of. I finally got the Master Sword. I took some stabs at the DLC trials for the Master Sword which is reminiscent of the extremely tough-but-fair challenge that is Eventide Island. I failed after several attempts, but would like to conquer them to increase the Master Sword’s power! Speaking of DLC I waded around with a handful of the DLC quests available and unlocked the Korok mask from the DLC quests which looks funky as hell, but it has helped me amass at least triple the amount of Korok Seeds I would have found on my own. I want to jump into the DLC quest that unlocks the ‘Master Cycle Zero’ (aka Hyrule Motorcycle) as footage I have seen so far looks straight-up rad cruising through Hyrule in their trippy looking hot-rod. Mark my words, Breath of the Wild, in 2019 I will finally finish the core quest and vanquish Ganon and unlock the Master Cycle Zero!

4) Eeeeeeelsss

Oxenfree was my game of the year in 2016. I loved its art style, mysterious narrative and especially its script where the teenagers would one second be trying to solve this multi-layered mystery on an island and the next have a heart-to-heart chat about stereotypical teenage drama. Night in the Woods was receiving a lot of the same buzz over it also being a Narrative Exploration game with a relatable 2D art style and similar plot hooks to the point that among the gaming press it was generating buzz of being 2017’s top Narrative Exploration title. After looking into Night in the Woods I could not help but be reeled in by its plot where a failed college student drops out of college two years in and returns to her small podunk town of Possum Springs to try and recapture her days of chilling with her high school friends but only for them all to be later caught up in local town superstitions proving not to be so superstitious.

As attractive as the plot was I could not help but, I would not say be turned off, but rather mystified about the decision to go with humanoid-structured animals representing all the characters. First impressions watching initial gameplay of Night in the Woods made that choice in character style difficult to suspend my disbelief and maintain my focus on checking out the game. I am not saying that is a bad thing, I am simply stating that is what was perplexing my mind. There must have been others who felt similar to me because there was also a harsher vocal contingent who was upset with people avoiding the game due to the art style who wrote a few articles stating that if you were avoiding playing this because of animals as characters than to F off. That led to me not wanting to get caught up in all that hoopla so I decided it was best to avoid that controversy.

It was only around game of the year time at the end of 2017 where I heard friendlier supporters of the game rally behind it with high praise that convinced me to give it a chance and start it up at the beginning of 2018. I am relieved I did because Night in the Woods is a kickass Narrative Exploration game! The writing is right up there with Oxenfree as all the characters captured that local post-high school angst and rebellion of trying to make it in the real world and things not quite working out. I settled into a convenient routine of daily life gameplay where the player character Mae would check in with her parents and of course with me being me, make sure to talk to every local I would come across because they had something different to say every day! The dialogue for every major and minor character was so spot on that it made going out of my way to talk to everyone worthwhile and random spots in town had special one-time moments going in with periphery characters that if I did not check out I would have completely missed out on such as a poetry reading contest, breaking light bulbs behind a corner store and checking out the stars with your old teacher.

There are a lot of singular moments that really stuck with me in Night in the Woods. Every day in the game you are presented with the option of going out on a side-adventure with one of Mae’s two best friends Gregg or Bae. I chose to do all mine with Bae so if I do get around to playing through this again I will do Gregg’s side stories on my replay to have at least a little bit of new content playable in each day of gameplay. Bae has some priceless moments with Mae where the two have serious chats about their most personal feelings that few other games I have seen dared, and they also have some priceless lighthearted moments where the two get mischievous in a dilapidated mall, complete with a mini-game on trying to steal from a Hot Topic-esque store. The most hard-hitting moment that I vividly recall was when Mae’s mom has a bad day and does a 180 heel turn on her daughter! It hurt so much! Mommmmm!!!!

I was thinking once Night in the Woods was going to focus more on the supernatural mystery it would take away from Mae’s personal drama that was so irresistible to get caught up in. Thankfully, that was not the case as it was doubly entertaining to watch Mae’s crew come together and discover the truth behind the superstitions plaguing Possum Springs. As you can tell I got so into Night in the Woods’ page-turning narrative that within about a half hour of starting the thought of the characters being animals did not cross my mind, and looking back on it the designs of the animals corresponded appropriately to the personalities they were representing. Minus the handful of over-ambitious dream sequences that were a little bit of a chore to get through and I might have given this a nod over Oxenfree. That split hair aside, Night in the Woods is a spectacular Narrative Exploration game and hangs in the upper elite tier of them with Oxenfree, Firewatch and Gone Home so if these games are up your alley make sure you do not make the same mistake I did and hold off on Night in the Woods for this long.

---YouTube Break #6---

PART 7 - RANKINGS 3 THROUGH 1

3) Returning to the Midwest Gaming Classic

From 2007-2013 one of my favorite times of the year was attending a local retro game expo, The Midwest Gaming Classic. Many great times were had there hunting down retro games, hanging out with an awesome forum community I once frequented, classic sessions of late-night karaoke and checking out tons of arcade machines and game consoles set up on free play. Unfortunately the timing of it always fell in a rough time of the year for me and it grew increasingly difficult to make time for it each year until it came down to where I had to stop going for four years. I was not going to make it this year again until a couple of my online gaming friends who I hung out with at MGC before and still keep in touch with asked if I was making it and that convinced me to pull some strings at work and manage to split up some vacation days I had coming so I was able to make the 12-hour drive out to Milwaukee and back home with a couple hours to spare before my first shift back at work.

Bear with me as I give yet another shoutout to Glenn and Jeff for reaching out and asking me about MGC because it resulted in an awesome weekend with some wicked weather to dance around to make it there and back. Wound up hanging out and touching base again with tons of great people I had not seen in four or five years. We had a blast hanging out late night after the show playing SNES games on a projector until we were zombies and watching the spiritual successor to King of Kong in Man vs. Snake. It also helped that MGC has moved to a bigger and nicer venue from the last time I went with room to grow. It was like MGC got revitalized by having adequate room for the mammoth vendor halls, game museum, free play arcade and conference rooms for speakers and panels. I caught a few panels on retro gaming and hung out with On the Stick’s Joe Drilling talking wrasslin’ and retro gaming after his panel. I succeeded in my game hunting quest in the vendor hall to hunt down the last couple of NES PowerPad games I did not own, and accidentally came across a homebrew bag toss game I never heard of before called Tailgate Party that I picked up to complete the collection. It proved to be a epic time that I was barely able to pull off at the last minute, but I do not regret it because it was yet another classic MGC weekend for the ages!

2) Forklift Races

It is kind of hard to place how much I love both Shenmue I & II. I got a theory from 1997-2000 for people who played either Final Fantasy VII, Metal Gear Solid or Shenmue fresh off their release. For those three games, people would be so blown away by their then-groundbreaking new standards set for their cinematic cutscenes and ambitious narratives that they would remain forever loyal to that particular game and swear by it forever no matter how credible the negative criticism is out there for those games. That is exactly what happened to me with Shenmue as it was the first of those three games I played, and I have seen people react in near-identical fashion to the other two games. I am aware of the criticism for Shenmue and I will not deny it, but there is so much else going for it that won me over that it made me overlook it and enabled me to have one of the best single player experiences in a game ever.

These last few years I was getting the itch to replay the original Shenmue when the Kickstarter was announced and funded in record time for Shenmue III. I was pleasantly surprised Sega quietly announced they were releasing a HD remaster of the first two games for current platforms to cash in on the upcoming sequel. As soon as the remaster collection hit in the summer of 2018 I dropped all other gaming and cruised through the first Shenmue within a month. I was initially trepid that the unique controls would be so outdated that Shenmue would be near unplayable. It was indeed a clumsy control scheme to get reacquainted with for my first 10-15 minutes, but after that I was whisked away back to 2000 again when I first experienced Shenmue and I was reminded how much I loved the setting of Dobuita. There are plenty of cheesy characters filled with so-awful-its-great voice acting that it was a treat reliving it all over again.

Like Night in the Woods I developed a regular daily routine while in the process of hunting down clues to find out more on who killed Ryo’s father so he could avenge his death. I would start off the day going to the local corner vending machines and grabbing an iced coffee and capsule toy. Ryo has got to have his morning coffee with the absurdly drawn-out drinking animation every morning like any other ordinary person! I would talk to as many regular shopkeepers I would about finding the latest clue and occasionally would have to battle off some street thugs for information or chase them down in a QTE sequence that Shenmue helped institutionalize among games. A guilty pleasure was visiting You Arcade nearly every in-game day for a round of a perfectly emulated version of Hang-On that I kind of was starting to ‘get gud’ at the checkpoint-based racer by the end of Shenmue. Eventually I got Ryo his infamous job driving forklifts as the plot came to a boil with Ryo hot on the tail of his father’s killer! Every day at work started off with a forklift race that had a catchy theme song I made up lyrics to nod along with for momentum. There was an achievement for winning a race…..it was the only achievement I failed to achieve! The penultimate 70-man mega-battle leading up to the final boss fight was a rush and a half to experience all over.

Again, there was some outdated controls and other quirkiness that was noticeable, but it did not get in the way from my unabashed love for the series resulting in my replay of the orginal Shenmue being my second best gaming experience of 2018! I cannot recommend it for everyone as I have seen the nature of that game rub some people the wrong way and my only answer for that is Shenmue is not for everybody. My spirits were riding high after finishing it that I started watching GiantBomb’s endurance run of it recently, and I went out and tracked down the vinyl OST for Shenmue and additionally the vinyl OST for Hang-On as well. Yup, I am kind of into Shenmue just a hair or two. I did not start up Shenmue II yet off the remaster set and plan to plow through it before Shenmue III’s currently planned August 2019 release.

1) Oh my God, You Killed Connor!

After 16,000 words we are finally here at #1! I know Detroit: Become Human has some hot-button controversies around it and if you decided to avoid the game I get and respect that. With that out of the way let me start by saying I have been a huge fan of Quantic Dreams going back to Indigo Prophecy and Heavy Rain. I even dug Beyond: Two Souls regardless of that title getting messy at a few points. I know each game has their fair share of nitpicks, but the thing Quantic Dreams nails is how they branch out their stories with its multitude of choice-based gameplay having actual impactful results in the narrative. This is not like most Telltale games where the greater arc stays the same, but the journey is slightly altered. No, characters can abruptly die when presented with a sudden major decision or major paths can be altered to skip entire levels. That is what I loved about Quantic Dreams’ games is these major chances they take on their games and Detroit absolutely kills it in these departments. Quantic also lives up to their past precedents set by moving the bar for Detroit being a true technical marvel and one of the best looking games this generation of consoles. This is coming from a person playing on a slim PS4 and not a 4K Pro system so I can only imagine the improvements if I were to play on a 4K setup.

Like Heavy Rain and Indigo Prophecy, Detroit follows the story arcs of several characters. All four are androids at different states of becoming ‘deviant’ and thinking for themselves. Each character path has major moments where I had to pause the game and think over the imperative decision I was presented with. Quantic Dreams is clever at masking some choices as right or wrong that created some moments that I will never forget. Android Detective Connor and his human partner Detective Anderson were my favorite characters to follow throughout the game. Connor can get killed off like other characters in the game, but unlike other characters he is always instantly replaceable from the agency. I did not know that when my Connor perished in a jaw-dropping way I did not see coming. I instantly debated on rewinding my last save to play it differently, but I sternly stuck to my decisions the whole game no matter how they played out. I was relieved to see Connor come back and continue his love/hate relationship with Anderson, and eventually became amused by the inadvertent ways my decision making kept getting my Connor killed.

The other characters all had nearly equal major moments to get behind with a few examples such as saving a daughter from her abusive father in one of the most intense escape sequences in Detroit, rescuing a bunch of experimented androids from a psychopath, leading a android-rights revolution to trying to stealthily escape from the madness to the Canadian border. Quantic Dreams always has had Quick Time Events (QTE) button prompts handle the majority of their gameplay, and they have evolved it with each of their games to have the best implementation of QTE in gaming. Minus a few key moments they almost never result in a instant game over if one QTE prompt is missed and there usually is a few chances to correct a mistake in order to recover and win the scene…or you can intentionally fail and flub through a fight or chase scene like a dummy to hilariously disastrous results.

Depending on how you succeed through the prompts and the narrative based decisions made results in an ostensibly infinite amount of endings for each character. Quantic Dreams introduced a remarkable new feature at the end of each scene where a branching tree of decision options is displayed showing the choices made and blank boxes representing other options available and the percentage of the connected PS4 users that picked each option. From this same dialogue tree box checkpoints can be selected to pick up right from there in the gameplay scene to change a decision you were unsatisfied with. After finishing Detroit within two days I took advantage of this and hopped into one key part of the plot where Connor is presented with a choice that essentially gets the ball rolling for the final two-to-three hours of gameplay. I replayed that final chunk of scenes three more times within a week to see big differences in the endings for each character. Some did not survive, others endings all my characters made it to the end while others wound up skipping out on some of the most pivotal scenes in the entire game based on earlier decisions. I knew two other coworkers who were on the fence on picking up Detroit who were fans of Quantic’s previous games and I insisted on borrowing out my copy and we later went on to thoroughly breakdown how we handled key decisions and our various endings. It is insanely rare for a game to cause me to replay it multiple times that soon and that is saying something special about Detroit: Become Human and why it is my #1 gaming experience of 2018.

---The End?---

My word tally count is now tipping over 17,000 words so I think I better end this. It took me nearly 10 days to write this, and I do not blame you if it took that long to read it. That said I hope this proved to be a best of the year list/round-up like no other you experienced! Once again, if you liked what you read and want more of my end of the year ramblings then I will refer you to my best of 2017 and best of 2016 top gaming experiences features.

So until next year…..oh wait I almost forgot it would be inappropriate of me to suddenly end this without rewarding you with a few YouTube recommendations! I failed in unearthing my all-time favorite SNL sketch of Sports Center with Ray Ramono and Tim Meadows, so this sketch on the origins of the iconic NBA on NBC Theme will have to suffice. Need a refreshing beverage after getting through this list; Dusty Rhodes has the answer for you! These sparring kickboxers needed some beverages after getting bombarded in their training session by a acapella group. Mr. Worf wants to drain his sorrows in other beverages after witnessing this montage of his fails. Finally, here is a nice compilation of background music for your home with the top 100 ranked N64 songs of all time.

Ok that is seriously it for 2018, thank you again everyone for riding this out with me!

Greetings and thank you once again for joining me in another anniversary retrospective! I know we are in the second month of 2020, but please indulge me and pretend it is still 2019 so I can say this is officially a piece commemorating the 30th anniversary of the North American launch of the NEC TurboGrafX-16 and the 25th anniversary of North American launch of the Sega 32X! Yes, this is the two-for-one anniversary special! I have been neglecting this for too long and wanted to have this up before the end of 2019, but I think I was a wee burnt out with my tomes I crafted for my other three flashbacks I posted throughout this past summer. I have good faith this will be a shorter piece because even though I have a history with both the TG16 and 32X, my experiences with them are both greatly after their original launches so I do not have those twee childhood memories of the 32X and TG16 as I did with the GameBoy and Genesis. Regardless, I do cherish my time with both ill-fated systems I will be covering today, so let us kickoff with the system that came out first, NEC’s TurboGrafX-16 in 1989.

Even though TG16 launched in America in 1989, I do not recall seeing it in stores or hearing about it until 1994 when I got my first videogame magazine subscription to Game Players. Yes, I still have those 1994 issues of Game Players in my closet and if I can find the right issues I will attempt to paste in a semi-decent cell phone shot of the pages that referenced the TG16. If memory serves right, I believe there was a spread video pinball games that highlighted both Crush pinball titles for TG16, and another column highlighted TG16’s Ys Books I and II for being a revolutionary RPG title with its then-unprecedented cutscenes and voiceovers. I also discovered about TG16’s mascot, Bonk when reading a review in GP for the NES port of Bonk’s Adventure.

By consuming other gaming press media over the following years I eventually learned what happened with the TG16 and its CD add-on in America and how they did not fare as well as they did in Japan and quickly faded out within a year or two after the SNES launched in America. I never had a friend that owned the TG16 growing up, nor do I recall a store kiosk having any set up for play in my middle-of-nowhere hometown. I cannot remember even dabbling with hunting down TG16 emulators since I never saw the games out in the wild for sale at my local shops to peak my curiosity. So I believe the first time I played a TG16 game was when the Wii launch in 2006 and also debuted at its launch the Wii’s downloadable classic games for its ‘Virtual Console’ channel. The TG16 was one of the supported platforms and I recall downloading the hit multiplayer game, Bomberman ‘93 around or shortly after the Wii launch making it likely the first official TG16 game I played.

Here is footage of Keith Courage in Alpha Zones, the pack-in launch TG16 platformer that could not compare to the likes of Mario and Sonic......

Aside from playing my first TG16 game in 2006 on the Wii, 2006 was a big year for learning a lot more about the system thanks in part to one particular podcast. Apple debuted podcasts in 2005 and other MP3 players quickly supported them too. I sampled countless gaming podcasts, but one I quickly got turned onto towards the end of 2005 was one Team Fremont Live. That podcast is still around to this day, but underwent a couple name changes and is now known as Super-the-Hardest. I quickly became a fan of the three hosts, John, Moe and Hilden and loved their take on videogames. They had frequent retro gaming segments on the show and the trio frequently waxed nostalgic for their TG16 memories. Over the years consuming their podcast and participating in their forums my knowledge for the system exponentially expanded! If you currently dig through the Super-the-Hardest archives or check out these links, you will find a wealthy amount of TG16 articles there to learn a ton about the platforms and their recommended games.

The then-Team Fremont Live hosts lived about a five hour drive away from me, and they had on open invite community event in the summer of 2006 where I first met them in person and gamed and drank the night away with them and their fellow community members. It was an awesome time, and in January 2007 they hosted another community event for their first ever year-end awards, ‘The Darryls!’ I remember meeting up with the three hosts the night before the event for a ‘packing party’ where we drank all night again and quickly got stone cold sober, literally, as we packed up the van with recording equipment in the middle of a January Midwest night of biting subzero temps! The Darryls transpired the next day and I got reacquainted with many community members again and there were several TVs set up with various games to play for everyone in what ended up being another memorable night with the TFL community.

John, Moe and Hilden did a special presentation later on in the night for their 2006 best of game awards and did a contest drawing towards the end of the night that I was the lucky winner drawn. My prize was a TG16 system, complete in box and with a copy of the original pack-in game, Keith Courage in Alpha Zones! I was blown away and stunned the prize was going to be a system! That pic at the top of this article is indeed me being the proud new owner of a TG16! Keith Courage was a decent little platformer, but I would never become that skilled at it and would peter out of lives by levels two or three and regret never taking the time to master that game.

....instead Bonk wound up as TG16's hit platformer series that spawned a trilogy on the TG16

Thanks to listening to many hours of TFL at that point however and through other online research over the years I knew which games to hunt down. Luckily in 2007 and for the next few years TG16 releases remained affordable to hunt down as most games save for a select few went for under $20. I tracked down a far superior platformer in Bonk’s Revenge. Its vibrant visuals, challenging-but-fair platforming and adorably gruff mascot Bonk blew Keith Courage away and looked graphically on par with the other 16-bit platforms. World Court Tennis initially appeared as another run-of-the-mill tennis game, but diving into ‘Quest Mode’ provided an in-depth medieval narrative complete with an RPG-esque overworld and random tennis battles!

I looked into getting the CD add-on, but from what I gathered it sounded like the add-on attachments had a high faulty rate by 2007 and were not worth the risk. Even with those drawbacks I regret missing out on the TG-CD games and only had the chance to dabble with a handful off of other collections and Virtual Console over the years. Fighting Street (aka the original Street Fighter) had its only American console physical release on the TG-CD, and I did not get a chance to play it until a Capcom released a arcade hits collection on the original Xbox. Ys Books I & II was a revolutionary RPG for what its cinemas and voiceovers debuted to the market, and it was not until the Wii Virtual Console that I finally had a chance to experience the original version. Turbo Technologies brokered a bonkers deal with EA to bring a little known version of Madden to TG-CD that I would have played the heck out of compared to the other gridiron game on the platform I will touch on shortly.

The TFL crew were big fans of shmups (aka the original ‘shooters’) and I recall them being high on Blazing Lazers and I wound up spending many hours trying (and failing) to vanquish that space shooter. Already being a diehard fan of videogame pinball in 2007, both Alien Crush and Devils Crush were among my first TG16 purchases. They were both fantastic multi-layered pinball titles, with several screens of verticality to flip the pinball through and vanquish enemies and mini-bosses away on the playfield. I loved both games, and if you want a current rendition of that then I highly suggest tracking down the recent release of Demon’s Tilt that is available on most current platforms. Demon’s Tilt is essentially a modern take on the Crush games, but on crack with amped up visual effects since it is capitalizing on the horsepower of modern systems.

After accumulating these several titles I would make it a habit to add one or two more a year at an annual retro videogame expo I regularly attended in Milwaukee called the Midwest Gaming Classic. John, Moe and Hilden would also attend MGC most years around this time and I would make it a point to track them down at some point during the convention and get them to recommend me a TG16 for under $20. There recommendations never failed, and this was how I discovered NEC’s answer to Ikari Warriors (Hey, I was a huge fan of the NES game!) in the superior Bloody Wolf, and the quirky platformer, JJ and Jeff. The yearly MGC pick-up was how I finally procured a copy of the gore-slasher-fest that is Splatterhouse. I would also chance random games that caught my eye for the TG16 and did not go for that much. I loved my 8 and 16-bit sports games and took a shot on TV Sports Football, and it was a decent adaptation of the gridiron, but did not measure up to the many other football titles on the other 16-bit platforms.

Acclaimed wrestling game franchise FirePro first started on the PCengine in Japan, here is footage from the second game in the series.

The same can be said for the TG16’s sole American wrestling game, Battle Royal, it was an OK videogame grappler, but nothing that held my lasting attention. However, the excellent FirePro Wrestling series got its start on the platform as Japan-only exclusives, and I will give props to my former podcast co-hosts Chris & Lyzz for grabbing a copy of FirePro: Second Bout for me at MGC one year I could not make it. The FirePro games have evolved into the pinnacle of 2D wrestling games over the years, and it is fascinating to see how it started on the PC-Engine in Japan and even in FirePro’s earliest installments it was already a class above the competition.

While both of these wrestling games went for under $20 by 2012, the next year when I returned to MGC in 2013 TG16 game prices inflated exponentially. For proof I was looking up some old MGC photos from my pictures library, and found some photos of Chris & Lyzz’s 2010 MGC loot-haul laid out on their bed. As you can see they picked up a TG16 and several games, if you zoom in on the photo you can see most of their games went for under $20. I have no idea what brought on the sudden demand, but a vast majority of TG16 games started going for around $50-100 within a couple years and that was without jewel cases and instructions!

For this piece, I contacted Chris and Lyzz for their memories of picking up the TG16 and their favorite games they have played since, and Chris responded back with the following: ”I can't remember much. I just remembered that I liked Bonk’s Adventure and Fantasy Zone. Bonk’s Adventure because of how much I used to like side scrolling games and that is the only game that I wanted to play at the time that didn't come out for the NES/SNES/GEN. Fantasy Zone because of the sheer weirdness factor of it.”

2009 marked the 20th anniversary of the TG16 launching in North America and I wanted to do something special to commemorate it. I was in the midst hosting my own videogame podcast, On Tap, at the time and invited John, Moe and Hilden to come on for a special TurboGrafX anniversary episode! It was a delight to have them on the show and have them take us all to school with their master’s degree knowledge of all things Turbo and reminisce about the TG16 for an hour. I recently dug that episode out of the archives and uploaded it onto my YouTube channel and will embed it below for your listening pleasure!

This is a special TG16 20th anniversary podcast I recorded 10 years ago! Add it to your queue to listen to for more TG16 wisdom!

I would bust out the TG16 once every year or two until several years ago when the WiiU became my virtual replacement. The WiiU started supporting the TG16 by uploading a ton of the TG16 library to the WiiU version of the Virtual Console in 2016 and uploaded nearly a game a week from mid-2016 until early 2018, well after the launch of the Switch. I sold my Wii after owning it for only a year and only owned a few TG16 games for it, so this late infusion of TG16 titles on the WiiU caught my eye (and other Retro enthusiasts too). This culminated in about 50 TG16 games hitting the WiiU by the end with even a few former Japan exclusives among them….and I bought all of them! The original Wii Virtual Console that is backwards compatible on the WiiU remained open until early 2018 to purchase their TG16 games too which I used to acquire other acclaimed TG16-CD games not available on the WiiU like Castlevania: Rondo of Blood and Ys Books I and II.

A few times a year I fire up my WiiU and pick a few random games to play from my many Virtual Console purchases. It was this way I finally got around to trying out the Legend of Zelda-inspired Neutopia and having a fun night with a couple buddies hack and slashing away in Dungeon Explorer. I also got to take in the ridiculously huge sprites of the brawler China Warrior and finally experienced TG16’s take on Outrun in Victory Run. The WiiU surprisingly wound up a gratifying legit alternative to the now-absurd asking prices for used TG16 games, and a convenient way to make TG16 games appear on a HDTV without the fuzziness that happens when I plug an SD system into a HDTV.

In a few short weeks a new way to experience the TG16 will be launching in America with the arrival of the TurboGrafX-Mini! It is launching as an Amazon exclusive so do not be on the lookout for it in retail stores right away. It has over 50 games, about half of which are Japanese PC Engine versions. If you want something more physical than pick and choosing which games to download on the WiiU, the TurboGrafX-mini is an ideal way to start discovering most of the top titles for the system!

While I never knew of the TG16 during its active North American lifespan or got a chance to play it until this century, I still have priceless memories of discovering hit titles exclusive to that system that stood out in a way unlike anything else on its 16-bit competition. The 32X is a whole other beast though. I remember being a furious 11 year-old upon its release in 1994. I vividly recall the hype in Game Players for it and even 11 year-old Dale thought Sega was out of its mind for releasing a $150 add-on for the Genesis merely several months before the Saturn when Sega already had plenty on the market to tide them by with the Genesis, Game Gear and SegaCD. A wee shy of 50 games only came out for it in the little over a year games were published for the 32X, and nearly half of them were marginally enhanced Genesis titles. From reading mags during its lifespan and hearing other gaming media reflect back on it throughout the years I gathered the add-on had a handful of standout exclusives, but was largely forgettable and not worth tracking down, and I hand no plans to do so, until….

…In 2009 a co-worker was about to get married and was parting with his gaming collection to raise funds for the wedding/honeymoon. He knew me as an ardent game player and gave me a print out of what he was selling and his asking prices. This was still a couple years before the big retro used game boom I described above, because around same time a couple years later 32X game prices jumped just like TG16 games. Still, I noticed most of his prices were at the higher end of most eBay auctions when I researched them online. I did not have a SegaCD or 32X in my collection at the time and there were at least a few exclusives on both systems I always wanted to try, and with the funds going to a good cause I made an offer for those systems with about a dozen games in the middle range of what he was asking for and what other asking prices I saw online at the time. I want to say I paid roughly $200 for the lot.

I loved the port of Virtua Fighter on 32X and this video shows how the 32X version holds its own against the flawed launch Saturn version

I got about six or seven games for 32X from my co-worker and later tracked down three or four more over the next year or two to get the other 32X games I wanted. I had a couple up-ports/’Remasters’ from the Genesis for 32X like Toughman Contest and WWF RAW. Toughman Contest was EA’s gritty take on Punch-Out that I was a big fan of, and it got a big endorsement from toughman hot-shot at the time Butterbean. The 32X version did not add too much other than lightly touched up graphics and framerates. The 32X version of RAW though had a couple extra weapons at ringside to bash adversaries away with and its own exclusive wrestler, the masked Kwang, who later on went to be better known as Savio Vega in the WWF throughout the 90s. Unfortunately the gameplay for those old Acclaim 16-bit games had those tired button mashing grappling meters that killed your thumbs and was a few entries old at that point so it did not get too much playtime from me.

A 32X version I did enjoy was of Doom, and for a few years it was the only version of the iconic first person shooter I owned until a version hit download on 360 a couple years later. I was a big fan of Sega’s early polygonal titles, Virtua Racing Deluxe and Virtua Fighter on the 32X. The launch Saturn version of Virtua Fighter was notorious for being a buggy mess, and the 32X version that released a few months later surprisingly had a smooth framerate and played as crisp as I recalled in the arcades. Sega somehow against all odds managed a port of Virtua Fighter on the Genesis, but had a somewhat cleaner version with exclusive tracks on the 32X later that year. I loved me some Virtua Racer and if I ever get a Switch one of the first eShop downloads I plan on getting is the recent touched up remake of Sega’s first polygonal racer M2 developed last year. Finally the last upper-tier quality game I have in my 32X library is Sega’s arcade port of Star Wars Arcade. It only had the three missions of the arcade that boasted dog-fighting missions on the Death Star and a Super Destroyer, but they were quick mindless, pick-up-and-play blasting fun.

I do own all five ‘Sega CD 32X’ games that come on discs for the Sega CD, but require the 32X in order to load. All five of these games are FMV-based games from Sega and Digital Pictures and all have releases on the SegaCD already, but the 32X CD versions have slightly better resolutions and framerates thanks to the added power from the 32X. None of the five games are all that fun regrettably. I have awful memories of the clunky controls in one-on-one basketball in Slam City with Scottie Pippen and never getting a good memory for the order of camera patterns in order to succeed in Night Trap. I guess Corpse Killer was a semi-decent on-rails light gun shooter with digital characters similar to Area 51 of that same era, but with far cheesier acting and implementation. Both Night Trap and Corpse Killer recently got touched up remasters on the PS4 for those brave enough to see how they hold up today.

There were a few other 32X games I wanted to track down, but I neither saw them in the wild, had negative buzz or at that time were already going for a bit more than I preferred, and are selling for outrageously more today. I always heard good things about Knuckles Chaotix being a decent substitute for a Sonic-style platformer on the system, but that one always escaped me. I loved the World Series Baseball games on Genesis, and the 32X got a slightly up-res’d version of the ’95 release, but it had such a low print run that it is one of the higher selling games of the 32X library. I liked the original 80s version of the arcade shmup, Zaxxon and was bummed to see the polygonal 32X follow-up get panned with negative buzz which kept me away from that version. Finally, the comic book game nerd in me always wanted to own Spider-Man: Web of Fire, but with it having a low print run being the final the 32X game, and combined for being an awful game to boot were a lethal combo to keep me away from it for good.

That wraps up this two-for-one flashback anniversary special on the 32X and TurboGrafX-16. What were some of your favorite games or memories of those systems? Feel free to comment about them below or reach out to me on Twitter @Gruel. I guess combining my memories of both systems went on for a bit longer than I anticipated, but I managed a modicum of brevity by being about a 1000 words shorter than my gigantic Dreamcast special.

Over the past couple weeks social media has been buzzing with tributes and testimonials for the legacy of the GameBoy on its 30th anniversary of its Japan launch and fast approaching North American launch in 1989. There was also that pic a couple weeks ago of Chris Evans and Scarlett Johansson playing linked two player Tetris that went viral that sent waves of nostalgia down my spine! Like countless other 90s kids I had a devout affection for the GameBoy’s (and its 1998 Color update) enduring legacy into 2001 when its true successor, the GameBoy Advance launched. So it is time to lay out my history with the little gray brick that could, but before I do I would be remiss if I were not to point you towards someone who has been doing phenomenal work chronicling the GameBoy’s history first. Retronauts host, Jeremy Parish has been painstakingly crafting videos detailing every GameBoy release for America and Japan in chronological order and currently is nearing the end of covering games released through 1990. So if you want to catch up and find out about the early hits and likely a plethora of titles you have never heard of before, then click here to dive in.

Unlike a lot of the excellent retrospectives I have been reading these past couple of weeks, minus a couple exceptions, I did not play that many of the AAA GameBoy titles from Nintendo. I was a sucker for licenses from my favorite sports leagues and watered down ports of the latest console games as you will later read about. It was not until I much later got the Official GameBoy Player’s Guide with my first Nintendo Power subscription a few years after I got a GameBoy that I realized what were the key titles for the system. However even after re-reading that bible of GameBoy knowledge multiple times I was adamant on avoiding the powerhouse first party titles like Super Mario Land, Metroid II, Link’s Awakening and Donkey Kong in favor for eye-blinking double take titles you will discover in a bit. My childhood preference of games went against the grain to say the least. With that out of the way, let us flashback to 1993….

I remember begging my parents for a GameBoy for Christmas in 1993 when I was 10. I cannot specifically remember why, but after ruminating about it I pinpointed it down to the fact in 1993 I still had a NES and my parents understandably did not want to budge on dropping $200 for the 16-bit upgrade. The GameBoy was at its height of its popularity at this time and advertisements for the green and black handheld dominated my Saturday morning cartoon lineup. The GameBoy launched at $90 in 1989 so by 1993 I think it was going for around $70 which seemed like a much more realistic sell to my folks at being my one-and-only ‘Santa’ gift for Christmas.

Also around this time I was going through serious pro-wrestling withdrawal. From about 1988 until early 1993 I was an avid WWF kiddo. Big Bossman and The Rockers were my favorites, and I have fond memories of braving the classrooms of Catholic school with my Big Bossman tennis shoes. However, growing up with three other siblings who detested the squared circle made it a battle for control of the household’s sole television. Eventually, the numbers game caught up and I got so use to being bullied out of getting my weekly then-WWF fix that I went nearly three years from early ’93 until late ’95 not watching my favorites on the airwaves. The only other way at that time for me to get my dose of wrestling at home was in the mostly mediocre-to-horrible wrestling games on NES. I played far too many hours of duds like Wrestlemania and Steel Cage Challenge than any kid should have, and double that for the decent at best grapplers on the system like Pro Wrestling and Tecmo World Wrestling.

Enter 1993 and Royal Rumble for the Super Nintendo and Genesis. I lost track at the number of times I would play that game setup on free play at store kiosks. I was dazzled by Royal Rumble’s superior 16-bit graphics and standout feature, the Royal Rumble match that saw up to six wrestlers in the ring at once trying to throw everyone out and subsequently replaced with a fresh combatant until the game went through its entire 12-man roster. It seemed as close as it was going to get at the time to the insanely awesome Rumble match in one of my all-time favorite arcade games, WWF WrestleFest. Being able to participate in the chaos of the Royal Rumble match with a controller after endless hours of only one-on-one and tag team matches on various NES games was mind-blowing to 10-year old Dale. All the gaming magazines at the time were echoed my sentiments and gushed with glowing reviews which only served to exacerbate my demand.

Again I pleaded for a SNES and a copy of Royal Rumble for Christmas and again I was denied courtesy of its tall asking price. It was then I went with the aforementioned plan b for the GameBoy. Also hitting NES and GameBoy in 1993 was WWF King of the Ring. King of the Ring sported inferior 8-bit graphics and had a smaller roster of wrestlers and no awesome Royal Rumble match to play, but it did have the not-so-great King of the Ring tournament to play which was only a series of one-on-one matches, but most importantly it would be portable and I could play it anywhere and not have to worry about battling for control of the TV with my siblings to play it. Looking back now those were the catalysts to relentlessly ask my parents for the GameBoy.

Growing up with divorced parents meant celebrating most holidays and birthdays twice. I got to celebrate Christmas first with my dad a few days before the actual date of Christmas and was elated to unwrap and discover my very own GameBoy with a copy of its killer-app, Tetris! Over the next couple of days I played an un-healthy amount of Tetris. ‘Gee, if this block-puzzle game I barely heard of before is this awesome, imagine how good the wrestling game would be’ naïve me daydreamed of at the time. However, before I could get to that moment, something unexpected and terrible transpired!

On Christmas Eve I was with my family that night going to church for its annual Christmas Eve dinner gathering. To get through the night of being with my family I brought my new electronic best friend with me and snuck in as much Tetris as I could between bites. After we wrapped up and my family got back into the car to go back home my GameBoy was not as snugly tucked into my pocket as I thought and as I shut the car door my GameBoy slid out of my pocket and collided with the blunt force of me shutting the door onto it. As you can see in the screenshot here, the incident caused about 95% of the screen to get cracked and impossible to see and I balled my eyes out that entire night. Kids, do not bring your GameBoy to church or God will strike down upon you when least expected!

To make matters worse on Christmas morning the next day I opened up a copy of WWF King of the Ring for GameBoy from Santa. I plugged it into my cracked GameBoy and was stunned to see it still worked and played the music and it would display the miniscule amount of graphics that were possible in the tiny corners of the GameBoy screen that were not damaged. I must have begged my parents for days to see if they could get the GameBoy replaced or returned or something. I feel horrible now for how irritating I must have been at that time. To my surprise, my mom came through a week or two later and got me a new GameBoy. Once again I was thrilled and beyond belief of how those past couple weeks played out, but from then on I was extra careful with my GameBoy and to this day I still own both my busted and replacement brick GameBoys.

For a few months all I had was Tetris and King of the Ring. I loved Tetris and even found a classmate to link up and play two player with a few times and it remains in my GameBoy library to this day! However, even with my childhood adoration for wrestling I could tell King of the Ring would be nothing more than a middling wrestling game and nothing compared to its 16-bit brethren (though it did have some rocking wrestler chiptune entrance themes). At this point a few months into 1994 our local videogame shop was a place called Tiger Play, which was essentially a modern day GameStop that bought, sold and traded new and used games. It was the same store where I persistently requested to put Royal Rumble for play in its kiosk to the chagrin of the employees. I have no idea how they tolerated me back then. I decided it was time to part ways with King of the Ring and trade it in for something else.

In early 1994 Mortal Kombat fever was running wild with the sequel dominating arcades and the home release being super popular with all my classmates. Mortal Kombat did not come out for NES, but it did for GameBoy and the now much wiser 11-year old Dale thought the GameBoy version would be just as good as the SNES, but only not in color and was thrilled to hear Tiger Play would happily do a straight-up trade of King of the Ring for Mortal Kombat. Right away I could tell something was not right to discover it was missing Johnny Cage from its roster and it ran a significantly slower framerate. I still remember having to ever--so—slowly--like--this input the button sequences for the special moves in order to get them to work. Even worse, facing Shang Tsung on there was super cheap because he would automatically cast a projectile when one input away from pulling off a special move so I had to learn to beat him without special moves which took forever, but I eventually pulled it off. The GameBoy version of MK did have one thing going for it over the rest and that would be it was the only version of MK that let you play as Goro! Goro was unstoppable, but even with that trump card, the handheld MK was pretty lousy, but I forced myself to get some enjoyment out of it before marching back to Tiger Play a few months later and trading MK in for Bo Jackson: Baseball and Football. Turns out ‘Bo Knows…’ how to endorse subpar sports game, but the sports nut in me played that to death for a couple years because Tiger Play closed its doors around this time and it would be a few years until our town got another videogame store.

After that brief flirtation with trading games in I would only receive two games a year for GameBoy from 1994 through 1998 shortly before I got my first job and could afford my own games then. At that period in my life those two games a year meant everything to me. As hinted above, I was still drawn towards games based on my favorite licenses at that point and Bart vs. the Juggernauts was one of my early games I received as a present. The mini-game collection featured a lot of hair-pulling cheap controls, but I forced myself to stick with it and lit up when it became one of the first games I ever finished. A much better game I got as a present that I also finished was Donkey Kong Land. I have no idea how Rare was able to get graphics that seemed somewhat comparable to the SNES Donkey Kong Country, but I remember loving playing it, but being bummed at its lackluster ending of only ‘congratulations’ with no accompanying DK crew victory graphic. At least Bart vs. the Juggernauts had a wicked ending with Bart getting rewarded with his very own ‘Truck-a-Saurus.’

I learned my lesson from Bo Jackson and MK to do my research for better games on the GameBoy….actually no because I kept asking for more fighting and sports games for Christmas and birthdays, but at least getting varying degrees of better ones this time. The original NFL Quarterback Club on GameBoy I had a ton of fun with. It only featured the ‘Quarterback Club’ mini-games, but no actual game of football that was playable in its console versions. That was not a problem though as me and my siblings had a surprising amount of fun alternating back-and-forth with the various QB drill mini-games available and I could not help but crack up that my sister only played as Jim Kelley because of how close it sounded to ‘Jim Carrey’ who was wildly popular in the mid-90s. NFL Quarterback Club ‘96 was only actual football and no mini-games, but that was fine because it featured a far better handheld rendition of football compared to Bo Jackson and even a season mode with password save option! Yes, I still have my passwords saved inside the instruction manual

Ken Griffey Jr. Presents: MLB is an awesome port of the SNES original and blew away the baseball from Bo Jackson. It had a battery-save season mode along with the ability to trade players with no restrictions so I created my team of all-stars and rocked through an entire season throughout many family car rides. Mortal Kombat II is a huge upgrade from the first portable version, and while it also had a scaled back roster it did feature more precise gameplay, more friendly controls to pull off special moves and fatalities and a stable framerate resulting in me not trading this one away and playing it way too much.

That wraps up all the games I got as gifts and by the time I got my first job the GameBoy Color hit the market so I eagerly picked that up. There were a couple classmates over the years I met where we borrowed games to each other. I did not discover many new gems that way as most kids were also picking up the dreck of LJN licensed games and I could one can only tolerate so much out of WWF RAW, Fist of the North Star and Home Alone on GameBoy before getting out of the game borrowing market. I managed not to get swept up in PokeFever as I was just a couple years older than that targeted demographic. I did pick up Pokemon Blue shortly after its release after reading about the hype for it and got a little ways into it before my younger brother noticed me playing it and asked to borrow it around the time it was blowing up with younger kids so I did not mind letting him hold onto it until it for his GameBoy until he remembered to give it back to me about ten years later.

Since the GameBoy Color was only on the market for a few years I will not meander on as long about it. With that said, the GameBoy Color far surpassed the meek GameBoy in every way with the exception of not having a backlit screen. Other than that, it was smaller, fit more comfortably in my pocket, took two less batteries and well….the addition of color! Yes, I picked up a few too many sports and wrestling games on it again that were mediocre at best, but I did have a lot of fun with some enhanced NES re-releases on there with Super Mario Bros. Deluxe, the first three Dragon Warrior games and Micro Machines 1 & 2: Twin Turbo. For original titles my favorites were Mario Golf and Mario Tennis. For people familiar with the recent Golf Story on Switch Mario Golf is a lot like that where it is a sports-RPG hybrid where it has a fairly in-depth narrative at attending a golf/tennis academy to become the best player and being able to take lessons and play mini-games to level-up and prepare for the tournaments. Super Mario Bros. Deluxe had a lot of fun extras and even a two player competitive mode to see who can finish a stage first that I absolutely ate up.

A couple years ago some unearthly thing got me craving the basic, watered down platformers that dominated GameBoy and I hunted down the five Turok games released for GameBoy platforms and I played through the entirety of the first one on the original GameBoy and had a somewhat decent time with it. I did not play it on the actual GameBoy, mind you but instead on my TV courtesy of the Retron 5. I should mention I am a proud owner of the Super GameBoy, GameBoy Player and Retron 5 which made it convenient to bust out these portable games at a much friendlier resolution and not have to worry about the GameBoy’s non-backlit screen. In honor of the 30th anniversary last week I popped in the GameBoy Color version of Turok 2 and played a couple levels into it. For as weak and watered down most handheld versions of console games were, there was something about it that kept me coming back to them.

The GameBoy helped me through my childhood, too many family trip car rides to count and several summers on a farm. I probably had an unorthodox library of games for my GameBoy compared to the average owner who probably owned a majority of vastly superior games released by Nintendo, Capcom and Konami. What can I say, I was too young to realize what to ask my folks for. No matter how strong or weak each game wound up, I made sure to get the absolute most out of each game. Thank you Nintendo for releasing and supporting the GameBoy well after you should have throughout the 90s and enabling me to enjoy games anywhere! Thank you to everyone who got through this indulging my childhood memories of portable gaming with me! I hope you all have just as many great childhood handheld system gaming memories as I did whether it was on GameBoy, GameGear or later generations like GBA, PSP, DS, mobile, etc.

Where were you for quadruple nine, AKA September 9, 1999? That was the marketing friendly launch date of the Sega Dreamcast in North America, which will make it 20 years old. Such a landmark anniversary inspired me to craft another gaming reflection piece here looking back on my memories with the Dreamcast over the years. If you missed my similar anniversary articles earlier this year for the Genesis and GameBoy please click here to get caught up.

The first thing that comes to mind all these years later of the Dreamcast is that it ended up the first system that released when I had a job and could afford it entirely on my own. I got my first part-time high school job mere days after turning 16 about a half year earlier in 1999 and was fine picking up the occasional new game for our family’s N64 during that timeframe. However, around August of 1999 the first issue of Official Dreamcast Magazine (ODM) hit newsstands and it really popped compared to other gaming magazines. It was the first oversized gaming magazine that I can recall and they crammed in tons of news, special editorial features, previews and reviews in every issue and not a millimeter of page-space seemed wasted. It also had a bright colorful art scheme consistent throughout most issues compared to its competitors and in hindsight it was the ideal color scheme due to the unorthodox lineup of eye-popping bright games like Jet Grind Radio, Space Channel 5, Sonic Adventure and Samba de Amigo to name a few. I will give props to YouTube channel Classic Gaming Quarterly for doing a excellent page-by-page revisiting of that awesome first issue several months ago which was the catalyst for me re-reading the first four issues earlier this year. Those issues hold up splendidly and if you run across scans of any I highly recommend giving them a look-see as they perfectly encapsulate everything that made the Dreamcast as fondly remembered as it is today.

That special preview issue of the Dreamcast sold me on the system with its hype of being the first 128-bit system on the market and how Sega would change gaming with its new GD-ROM disc format, interactive VMU memory card and by introducing online play with its built-in 56k modem the following year. It also had thorough previews for nearly the whole launch lineup. If you recall my Genesis write-up, I was not much of a Sonic fan and that issue only had reviews for Sonic Adventure and House of the Dead 2. I had good memories of the first HotD light gun arcade game and that review got me amped up for the sequel. By the time I was done perusing that issue of ODM a few times over I was hell-bent on getting a Dreamcast and a copy of HotD2 at launch.

9-9-99

As the Dreamcast launch approached I was legitimately unaware of being able to pre-order games or it was officially a available service yet at our local Software Etc. in the mall. I inquired there frequently when they were opening on launch day it turned they were opening early that day an hour or two before I was supposed to be at school. I convinced my dad to give me a lift there and arrived there an hour early to secure getting a system. There was only one person ahead of us and I presumed getting a system at Software Etc. in 1999 would be comparable to lining up at any other department store and getting a new product on a first people at the front of the line basis. That turned out to be the case for Dreamcast (though I do remember them instituting pre-orders the next year for the heavily anticipated PS2 launch) and I was thrilled walking out of there as planned with a Dreamcast and HotD2!

Software Etc. did not get any VMUs however and thankfully my dad checked out other stores on his lunch breaks and was able to procure me one from KB Toys. Only other problem was there were no light gun peripherals available for the Dreamcast at launch. Sega did not release their own model in America due to the controversial Columbine shootings earlier in the year, and third party models were still two-to-three months out from being available. I could play HotD2 with a controller, but I refused to accept that as an option and for the first few weeks after the Dreamcast launch I was content on playing the included demo disc and checking out games like Sonic Adventure, Hydro Thunder, Soul Calibur and Power Stone over at a friend’s place.

Finally after a few weeks of that I was fed up of waiting for the light gun to hit and I took a chance and picked up Sega’s NFL 2K since I was always into football games and still sticking with older pigskin games on the N64 and playing a ton of Madden NFL ’99 in near weekly sessions on another friend’s PSone. I was instantly blown away by NFL 2K’s revolutionary leap in graphics and gameplay at that point. It had bar-raising production quality with TV-caliber replays, camera angles and insanely impressive announcer commentary which made it feel like the first football game to come off as an actual telecast. I can still pinpoint my mom walking in on me playing and doing a double take and asking if NFL 2K was real or not. NFL 2K got a ton of play in single player and in local multiplayer against friends over the next year.

For the rest of 1999 I checked out every demo included with each issue of ODM and it lead to me checking out Sega’s other sports offerings and playing a ton of NBA 2K and even a fair amount of NHL 2K. Worms Armageddon ended up being a surprise hit with friends and I loved going nuts with its Banana Bombs and Holy Hand Grenades. For Christmas of 1999 I got NBA 2K and Toy Commander. I eventually came across a light gun too and played through HotD2 several times through with a friend. Toy Commander was another lost gem on the Dreamcast I spent hours with devouring its single player missions and the local vs. multiplayer deathmatch was also fun for its time. I loved using the pressure-sensitive triggers on the Dreamcast controller to shoot free throws in NBA 2K, and speaking of the controller I am surprised there seems to be a lot of widespread disdain for peripheral. Sure, it was a little bulky, but nothing compared to the original Xbox ‘Duke’ controller or the unique ergonomics of the N64 controller. I loved the thumb-stick and directional pad, and the rest of the button layout was nearly identical to a SNES controller.

If I should be nitpicking about some of the Dreamcast’s features it would be about the side effects of the painfully low battery life of the VMU. For those unfamiliar, it was Sega’s innovative memory card that also had a mini black and white LCD screen that would display gameplay tips, stats and other options and also could be unplugged from the controller to play bonus mini-games included with supported games. Unfortunately the VMU had an infamously low battery life and within a few weeks the included watch batteries would drain and would result in a notoriously loud beep from the VMU when powering on the system to indicate it was time to replace them. Additionally, the Dreamcast also had a painfully loud hard drive whenever loading game data. After awhile however I got use to the grinding hard drives and perpetual beeps and passed it off as Dreamcast’s catchy marketing slogan ‘It’s Thinking.’ As the years passed and new owners complained about those noises it sort of became a hazing-esque right of passage to them first experiencing the platform.

2000

While I was putting together an outline for this piece I was surprised to find out how much of a bummer a first half of 2000 I had with the Dreamcast. Aside from still getting lots of long-term fun with the aforementioned sports titles, almost every new game I picked up was a letdown. I never played a Resident Evil game before, but friends and classmates loved it and I saw a ton of buzz for the upcoming exclusive Dreamcast title in the series, Code Veronica, in ODM so I got it for my birthday shortly after its release. I popped it in and was completely unprepared for its tank controls the early Resident Evil games were known for and I completely stumbled around like a buffoon and could not get past the first zombie. After several attempts I pleaded with my mom to take it back to the store and exchange it for something else. After that I tried renting games more often and was disappointed with World Series Baseball 2K1 and Sonic Shuffle. The former had excellent past entries on the Genesis and Saturn, but the first Dreamcast baseball game released without the ability to control the fielders and it felt like half the game was missing. I knew Sonic Suffle was developed by Hudson Soft who also made the first couple Mario Party games I played a ton of and was excited for the Dreamcast rendition of the party game, but was stunned it was plagued with countless loading times for every turn and mini-game that soured the experience.

The last big disappointment of 2000 for the Dreamcast was WWF Royal Rumble. At the time it was going to be the first exclusive Dreamcast wrestling game and I was nonetheless psyched for it. I disregarded EGM’s low review scores for them not ‘getting’ the game and presumed I would have a fabulous time with it. I came to find out later on it was a port of an arcade game I did not see available anywhere which is why it surprised me with its low amount of wrestlers on the roster and modes of play available when stacked next to other titles. After plowing through all the single player content in an afternoon I was overwrought about how the game turned out. I did wind up getting some decent value out of Royal Rumble down the line with friends in multiplayer Rumble matches, but out of the gates as the sole Dreamcast exclusive wrestling game it felt like a Kirkpatrick-esque punch in the stomach.

After those four disappointments 2000 wound up getting redeemed for the Dreamcast with a flurry of much better titles. I enjoyed playing Soul Calibur over at my friend’s, but was not head over heels for it like many others. A fighting game I did feel that way for however I took a random chance on in the summer of 2000 with Marvel vs. Capcom 2. I instantly loved its unforgettable music, chaotic three-on-three tag battles and the accessible hyper combos that did not require master precision to pull off. The game was a regular in my rotation with friends and for a couple months we held routine tournaments in my first apartment with my roommate and neighbors. It lead me to playing a ton of another Capcom fighter that same summer in Power Stone 2, which was vastly improved over the original and felt like a 3D version of Smash Bros. with simultaneous four player battles and constantly evolving stages.

Demolition Racer: No Exit was a surprise hit I put way more time than I should have into it. I love demolition-derby racer games, and No Exit had a ton of tracks, demolition derby events, thrashin’ metal soundtrack and many unlocks that kept me coming back to work my way through its extensive career mode for a good three-to-four years after release. It ended up as my surprise favorite driving game on the system which is absurd compared to other first-party driving hits that did not land on my radar until many years later like Daytona USA 2001, Sega Rally 2 and Metropolis Street Racer. The awesome port of the arcade hits Crazy Taxi and 18 Wheeler had faithful home Dreamcast ports, but I played a ton of both in the arcades and got my fill of them at home with a rental. I think it is safe to say I am not alone in Crazy Taxi turning me onto Offspring and being one of the few games to make product-placement seem cool with driving like a lunatic to escort passengers to get their KFC and Pizza Hut fix. I was so bummed out to see the later 360/PS3 re-release take out the product placement and replace the Offspring’s tall licensing price soundtrack with licensing fee-friendly indie bands.

The other surprise hit of 2000 was Virtua Tennis. I tried it on ODM’s demo disc and it wound up being surprisingly fun and easy to pick up and play. Jim Courier I now associate as being the man who dethroned Jimmy Connors in his last gasp at coming close to winning a major in the early 90s and being the only American character to play as in Sega’s game. The demo wound up being hit and created buzz online about it and a quick fervor spread about it being the cannot miss Dreamcast game of the summer. Virtua Tennis was impossible to find in stores so that caused me to create an account at ebgames.com and how Virtua Tennis was the first game I ordered online.

After those two games saved the year for Dreamcast, the next installments of NFL 2K and NBA 2K released which I instantly purchased and played endless hours of with friends. The 2K1 versions of both games added franchise modes and online play finally debuting for the system. I played about several rounds of both sports games online and tried to master typing out ‘good play’ on the keyboard peripheral. The games played decently, but I could not help but notice semi-constant lag over the 56k modem so after several games I stuck with my routine local multiplayer with friends.

What was being advertised as the do not miss hit for the 2000 holiday season was Sega’s much anticipated open world adventure, Shenmue. ODM and websites put a ton of hype for Shenmue leading up to its release and how Sega was putting a huge budget into it and how it was the first part of a mammoth saga, but I was not initially feeling it and that style of game seemed a bit outside my wheelhouse at the time. Shortly after its release however, I saw a used copy marked down surprisingly low at a local rental store and decided to chance it. I was shocked by its quality of graphics and cinema cutscenes for the time and before I knew it I found myself getting immersed in the open-world and having the freedom to talk and interact with nearly any major or minor NPC and their own so-bad-its-good English voiceovers. I understand Shenmue is not for everybody and its unique controls resulted in a polarizing reception for the game, but I burned through that game within a couple of weeks and loved every minute of it. I revisited it last year when Sega released HD ports on the Xbox One and PS4 last year, and after getting used to the controls I instantly got wrapped up in it again.

1-31-2001

2001 kicked off strong for the Dreamcast with ports of PC FPS hits of Unreal Tournament and Quake III both launching around the same time with online play. ODM and websites hyped up 2001 for being a big year for Dreamcast games supporting online play. I tried out those pair of FPS games at a friend’s and had a blast with them and was looking forward to the rest of 2001 for the Dreamcast even though at the time the PS2 was out for a few months and had a lot of people’s attention. Unexpectedly, towards the end of January crazy rumors started popping up about the PS2 slaughtering Dreamcast in 2000 holiday sales so bad that Sega would be discontinuing support for the system early. I immediately dismissed the rumors as ludicrous as it seemed whacked for a publisher to stop supporting a system under a year and a half after release. Sure enough however on January 31, 2001 news broke with Sega stating they would only support the Dreamcast with games for the rest of 2001 and would transition into a third party publisher role in 2002 going forward.

I was devastated with the news as a huge Dreamcast fan and continued to be bummed throughout 2001 as many anticipated Dreamcast games like Half-Life, Rez, Castlevania Resurrection, Headhunter and Tribes got cancelled and/or switched over to becoming a PS2, Xbox and GCN release. Sega and a few loyal third parties like Capcom released a steady stream of games throughout 2001 and I did get a lot of enjoyment from some of them like the addicting arcade-driving sequel Crazy Taxi 2, a decent but forgettable arcade FPS title Outrigger and a few more light gun games like the excellent HotD2 follow-up from the same developers but in a secret agent setting called Confidential Mission, the peculiar Japanese horror themed light gun shooter Death Crimson OX and the delightful surprise remaster of the original Virtua Cop tucked inside Sega Smash Pack to tide me through 2001 for Dreamcast. Sega said they would be porting their next wave of sports games to other systems a few months after their initial Dreamcast release in 2001 so I held off on them that year.

I was saving my last surge of Dreamcast fandom for what the gaming press was heralding as the swan song for the Dreamcast in Shenmue II. About a couple month before its American release however Sega stunned its fans by announcing they were cancelling the American version and making it an exclusive to the Xbox a year later with touched up graphics and adding in English voiceovers that were not originally going to make their return. The Shenmue fanboy in me was furious, but I found relief in ebgames.com capitalizing on the situation by offering the European version of Shenmue II that did not get cancelled for sale along with a boot-disc to get it to play on American systems. I spent the first several weeks of 2002 gleefully playing nothing but Shenmue II. I convinced myself it blew the original away due to jumping through extra hoops to acquire the sequel. The follow-up is a noticeably larger and longer experience and contains some noticeable gameplay improvements; upon currently replaying it on the previously mentioned HD bundle on Xbox One/PS4 I am going to have to go back to siding with the original being superior due to its more immersive setting and my love for driving forklifts. I hope to finish replaying the sequel in time for what is one of my most anticipated games ever in the long awaited third Shenmue game currently slated to be released this November a whopping 17 years after the original release of the second Dreamcast game.

Speaking of imports, Shenmue II was the first game I ever imported, and the second game was another Dreamcast game in FirePro Wrestling D. I heard so much acclaim for the FirePro games in Japan about them being the ultimate 2D wrestling games. After tracking down a guide online I relentlessly jotted down detailed English translations of all the menus and discovered a game save that translated all the wrestler’s names and attires into their English counterparts. I wound up playing a ton of that classic entry in the series on the Dreamcast. I am constantly nagging myself to open up my copy of the latest entry, FirePro Wrestling World that recently hit PS4 last year. I regret not importing more Dreamcast titles in the later years because games kept regularly coming out for Sega’s last system in Japan for several more years. Eventually most of them made their way to America on other systems in the following years, but for those that took advantage they got a one-to-three year head start on gems like Ikaruga, Rez, Rent-a-Hero and Capcom vs. SNK 2.

Post-2002

I also regret not making time to sink my teeth into the then-exclusive RPGs on Dreamcast. My former podcast co-host Chris picked most of them up so I was able to check them out at his place and play some of them on demo discs. Skies of Arcadia intrigued me with its sky pirates setting and I eventually picked up the GCN re-release. Ditto with the pair of Evolution RPGs that later were bundled together on the GCN. Grandia II I recall having a kind of more involved battle system that popped out to me and if I owned a Switch I would likely be acquiring the HD up-ports of the first two games that just released on there. I did enjoy demos of action RPGs Silver and Record of Lodoss War and finally tracked down both games last year and played about an hour of both way after the fact. The one I did put a lot of time into later on was Phantasy Star Online on the original Xbox. I loved being able to play that game in four player split-screen and I had a few friends over for several marathon sessions of its addicting action-RPG combat into the wee hours of the night.

The Dreamcast unofficially lived on for the next couple years well into the PS2/Xbox/GCN era with some of its key games that got cancelled and sequels getting re-released on those systems. Sega released their 2K sports line for a few years on all three systems before selling sports developer Visual Concepts and the 2K branding to Take-Two in 2005. The heavy duty competition from 2K Sports titles only helped fuel EA Sports to step up their efforts for better sports titles from both companies for the past 20 years. The Xbox got some heavy hitters in the form of Panzer Dragoon Orta, Shenmue II, Crazy Taxi 3, Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and Gun Valkyrie. The PS2 landed Rez, Headhunter, Half-Life, Tribes, Grandia II and Resident Evil: Code Veronica. The GameCube received the four player port of Phantasy Star Online well before the Xbox version and later an exclusive third chapter in addition to Evolution Worlds, Skies of Arcadia Legends, Ikaruga, Chaos Field and enhanced deluxe versions of both Sonic Adventure titles.

Aside from Dreamcast living on with those games on the next wave of systems I still busted out my Dreamcast regularly for the next several years. It was my favorite way to play Marvel vs. Capcom 2 for many years and as mentioned above I kept revisiting titles like FirePro Wrestling D and Demolition Racer for quite a few years too. The homebrew/indie scene was alive and well for the Dreamcast and is still going to this day. Goat Store had a couple high-profile indie releases with Feet of Fury and Irides that I both acquired. The former is the only dance-pad game I know of for the system and while I do not own a dance-pad I did put some time into it with its support for the Dreamcast keyboard. Irides: Master of Blocks is a fun Lumines-inspired puzzler on the system. Since it is the 20th anniversary of the platform, I took a chance a few months ago and Kickstarted an upcoming driving game set to hit at the end of this year that peaked my interest in the form of Arcade Racing Legends. Here is hoping to its success!

The End?

When I think back to my own personal favorite moments and experiences with the Dreamcast there are a few things I will chalk up to its legacy. I consider it to be the first system to prove that online gaming was viable on consoles and paved the way for it to really take off a couple years later on the PS2 and Xbox. I will also remember it for its local multiplayer games being a big hit with my friends and I for its wide array of fighting and sports games for two players as well as many games taking advantage of the four controllers with quite a few party games and driving games especially supporting four players locally. I consider it the last hurrah for the arcade ports, as the late 90s were the final successfully years of arcades in America and Sega, Capcom, Midway and Konami took advantage of Dreamcast’s Naomi-based hardware making it developer-friendly to convert their arcade titles to the system. A majority of the games I listed above are arcade conversions.

These last two are big ones for me personally. First is how Sega stepped up big time with their blockbuster first party sports games on the Dreamcast and gave the impression of how they scared away competition from EA Sports releasing their games on the Dreamcast. Finally, I will remember the Dreamcast where Sega took chances with a plethora of new, unorthodox IP. It seemed every few months a new original Sega IP hit the system from successes and cult-hits like Jet Grind Radio, Samba de Amigo, Space Channel 5, Crazy Taxi, Skies of Arcadia and of course Shenmue to fascinating curiosities such as Floigan Bros., Alien Front Online and the bizzaro-Leonard Nimoy-narrated journey that is Seaman. Combine everything from these last two paragraphs and that is why I feel it is safe to say why I and likely many others revere the Dreamcast as much as we did for the years it was active in its all too short lifespan.

I have rambled, ranted and raved for over 4,000 words now and want to thank you dear readers for sticking with me to the very end of this trip down memory lane. I apologize for the length of this piece, but I had to get it all out of my system. If somehow you want more Dreamcast love and want to keep this Dreamcast nostalgia train rolling I will link you to two prior pieces I did on the system. The first is a special 10th anniversary flashback on the Dreamcast where I breakdown 15 forgotten facts about the Dreamcast. I touched on a few of them here, but there are several more obscure factoids you can discover by clicking here. The other is my former co-hosts and I doing a special Dreamcast retrospective podcast on my old podcast you can listen to by clicking here.

My Other Gaming Flashbacks

GameBoy 30th Anniversary

Genesis 30th Anniversary

BONUS OVERTIME: Random Dreamcast quick bits I neglected to include above!

Oh man, I wish I would have remembered to touch on a few more gems I dug on the Dreamcast. I forgot about the oddball arena-based fighters that were fun rentals back then like Spawn: In the Demon’s Hand and Heavy Metal: Geomatrix. There was also the crazy keyboard version of HotD2 that hit in 2001 called Typing of the Dead! It was a super fun way to master your home row skills while massacring zombies! Sega released a remaster of it on Steam a couple years ago so give it a look-see! I remember trying to hunt down the low-quantity released broadband adaptor for the Dreamcast in 2002 on eBay but sellers were marking them up in ‘Dreamcast Online Ready’ bundles for absurd amounts. 56k web browsing with the Dreamcast was admittedly a slog, but it worked and was a slick way to upload and download game saves and made me feel I was swindling William Shatner by not falling for his WebTV commercials from that timeframe. Hydro Thunder I played a bit at a friend’s and to this day even though it was a fun on its own merits arcade boat racer the thing I recall most fondly about it was the over-the-top announcer saying the game’s name on the title screen and exclaiming ‘Dam the Torpedoes!’ at specific moments.

I wanted to get Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 so much for Dreamcast after hearing all the GOTY-caliber buzz and wanting to experience it with better graphics, but after spending weeks not finding it in stores around town I wound up settling on purchasing the PSone version even though I did not have that platform at the time and brought it over to my neighbor’s place for many throwdown sessions of Trick Attack multiplayer and HORSE. No regrets! There was something about Next Tetris: Online Edition that was off that did not get it to live up to the fun I was having in multiplayer over on the N64’s New Tetris and Tetrisphere. I wanted to like it, much like I did with launch title Trickstyle because of its futuristic extreme sports nature with a bunch of unique tricks and competitions to take in, but its un-intuitive controls left me getting my fix with solely the demo. Brighter days were ahead for Trickstyle’s developer, Criterion Games.

Apparently sim F1/Indy/Cart games were a hit on the Dreamcast for its brief lifespan with multiple entries from Sega and Ubisoft. Even the notorious LJN publishing label got resurrected after being dormant for several years with its retro F1 game, Spirit of Speed 1937. It is a good thing I never came around to them with the many other stellar driving games available. I remember loving the Ready 2 Rumble Boxing demo and thought that franchise would be around for years, but one quick sequel later and an out of nowhere Wii version years later and it has been AWOL ever since. EA’s Facebreaker seemed like a worthy spiritual successor, but that one came and went even faster.

Even though EA did not release anything on the Dreamcast I still checked out a few other third party sports games from Acclaim, Midway and Konami and had great times with NFL Blitz 2000 and digging NBA Showtime and its brilliant use of the NBA on NBC theme song. Crap, I forgot to touch on the last pair of Sega’s polygonal arcade brawler ports that were good weekend rentals for their day in Dynamite Cop and Zombie’s Revenge, but I will forever be a Die Hard: Arcade man for life! I tried to give Sonic Adventure an honest shot, but lost interest quickly after being wowed by its opening stage and that damn whale flipping all over the place after Sonic in its 128-bit glory. I will not get into the details here, but if you are up for an ill-fated timing story, then look up the details on the cancellation on what was supposed to be one of the last Dreamcast games originally scheduled to release towards the end of 2001, Propeller Arena.

Ok ok, now I am finally done and think I covered every nook and cranny of my Dreamcast experie….awwww shoot I forgot to tell you guys all about Sega Swirl! Wait, where are you going? Come back, come baaaaaack!

I remember first encountering the Genesis while spending either Thanksgiving or Christmas 1991 over at my older sister and brother-in-law’s house. I was only eight at the time, and remember being perplexed at the black gaming box and the thought that there could somehow be other systems than the good ‘ol NES. I did not subscribe to any gaming magazines at this point and I think I was still about a year away from experiencing Sega’s deluge of combative commercials against the SNES. During that holiday season of ’91 I recalled playing the first Streets of Rage on the Genesis with my little brother nonstop the couple days we were there. I remember being blown away by how superior it was graphically to what I experienced with other NES brawlers before like Double Dragon. We only got up to the stage where we faced off against the dueling karate sisters who kept whooping us and neither my brother nor I had the skills at the time to get past.

The next year or two the only times I recall playing the Genesis were at my sister’s for the holidays or the occasional store kiosk. I remember my brother-in-law picked up other games we played regularly like ToeJam & Earl, Buster Douglas Boxing, Toxic Crusaders and PGA Tour Golf. I dug all of them, especially ToeJam & Earl where I had no idea what was happening half the time with its unorthodox level structure and item pick-ups, but loving the co-op gameplay, stylish graphics and its funky beats at the time. Brief memories of store kiosk play from the early 90s consisted of being horrible at the original Sonic the Hedgehog because it was too fast for my childhood noggin’ to comprehend. I also recall being confused at early editions of Madden Football at store kiosks because when I would press buttons to hike the ball ‘Audible’ would appear on screen and then eight or nine-year old Dale had no idea what that meant compared to easier pick up and play NES pigskin games I was conditioned to.

Until Christmas of 1995 I probably played no more than about 10 Genesis games all together. I was more aware of the system by that time thanks to reading magazines more regularly at that point and hearing from classmates who had the system, but until that point I was pretty loyal to my NES still (I did not get a SNES until late ’96). For the Christmas season of ’95 my best friend at the time who coincidentally lived three blocks away from me, Rich, received a Genesis and that was when I got a lot more hands-on time with its extensive library of titles. Rich and I shared a lot of similar game interests which at that time was a ton of sports games, fighters and action/brawlers.

For the next several months I was over at Rich’s for countless sleepovers and going nuts with fighters like Mortal Kombat II and Evander Holyfield’s Real Deal Boxing. Real Deal Boxing blew away Buster Douglas Boxing with more authentic boxing gameplay and an insanely thorough career mode where we would take a created boxer and move him up the ranks as champion until his skills gradually weakened with age to force his retirement. We absolutely ate up the sports games at that time. We played what seemed like an infinite amount of Madden NFL ‘97. A much wiser 13-year old Dale was no longer befuddled by the intricacies of Madden and we had so much fun with it. We would create many players to deck out our teams and keep running blitzes to try and injure the players because there was an intense bone-breaking injury sound effect that we ate up. It was like the equivalent of Favreau and Vaughn going nuts in Swingers when they made Gretzky bleed in NHLPA ‘93.

Mutant League Football was another favorite of ours that made that injury sound effect in Madden child’s play. EA also made MLF and it was the equivalent of NFL Blitz at the time with larger-than-life mutants and animals literally killing each other on the field with over-the-top hits. It was possible to force a team to retire due to killing off too many of its players which was always our desired objective! If you have not played its spiritual successor follow-up, Mutant Football League on PS4/XB1 I give it the highest of recommendations because it perfectly capture the sensation of the Genesis game while bringing it up to contemporary standards.

We also played a lot of EA’s violent driving game, Road Rash II. Being able to race motorcycles and knock out your competition with chains and nightclubs while trying to evade the cops seemed revolutionary when playing it for the first time! We later discovered EA’s take of Road Rash on rollerblades in the awesome rollerblade stunt/racing game Skitchin’! Fun fact about Skitchin’ is that the competitors you race against have gnarly nicknames like ‘Thrasher’ and ‘Jackal’ and thus in ’96 was the origin of how I came up with what wound up as my online handle but at the time was my radical Skitchin’ username, ‘Gruel’ to blend in with the rest of the pack and have stuck with it all these years later!

After spending several months devouring a good dozen or so Genesis games with Rich, it did not compare to the summer of ’96 when Rich signed up for the Sega Channel! I remember it launched in 1994 and seeing commercials for it at the time where it seemed too good to be true where for about $15/month would net the user a Genesis cartridge that would connect to a cable line and get the Genesis online streaming access to a rotating 40-50 Genesis games a month. That is right, decades before services like OnLive and Playstation Now, the Genesis did streaming gaming back in ’94 and it worked like a charm! Check out this pristine archival footage of the menus to see how it all worked. Sega Channel essentially was what Xbox Game Pass is today, and I am surprised to hear how little it is discussed when people reminisce about the Genesis.

We discovered so many new games this way and for that entire summer I was over at Rich’s about three to four days a week binging on Sega Channel games until Rich’s dad got on my case because I was over so often. I remember discovering new sports games on there like the innocuously titled Super Volleyball that we became somehow addicted to and the surprisingly awesome Tiny Toons ACME All-Stars that had its own killer spin on arcade basketball and soccer that it played like NBA Jam but filled with crazy Tiny Toons power-up attacks. Sega Channel is what additionally exposed me to co-op games like General Chaos, the Streets of Rage sequels and Gain Ground and classic single player games like Shadowrun, Comix Zone and Vectorman that Rich and I took turns trying to keep progressing through. Sega Channel also was my first exposure to the classic Bomberman franchise with many nail-biting rounds played of Mega Bomberman!

It came as no surprise to me when I finally bought a Genesis a few years later in 1999 that the first games I hunted down for it were those same games I first discovered on the Sega Channel! In April of 1999 shortly after I turned 16 I got my first after-school job and after a few paychecks I went to Wal-Mart to determine what should be one of the first games to buy on my own! This was around the time when Majesco re-released the third, mini-sized Genesis model at a discount price of around $30. I was legit stunned at that price for a brand new system, even if it was for a ten-year old platform at that time I could not help but instantly snatched it up!

If you read my GameBoy special from several weeks back you will recall my lamenting over its lackluster wrestling games compared to the superior ones on the 16-bit platforms. On Genesis, Rich and I played way too much Royal Rumble on the system. Other wrestling games I picked up for the Genesis over the years was the inferior predecessor to Royal Rumble in Super Wrestlemania. While I had a blast with Rumble way back when, it regrettably does not hold up well all these years later with its over-reliance on a button mashing grapple meter that obliterated thumbs that I have no idea how I tolerated at the time. Saturday Night Slam Masters was a unique wrestling game from Capcom. It is essentially Street Fighter II in a wrestling ring, complete with victory taunts, Mike Haggar from Final Fight in its roster and even has a few wrestling moves sprinkled in! I loved how they had over-the-top laser light entrances and larger-than-life character sprites at the time, and I recall enjoying the Genesis version more than the SNES. There was nothing else like it since, and on occasion I will still throw it in every couple of years. I continue to hope one day Capcom will release its sequel, Ring of Destruction in a random collection of arcade games because it never got a home port all these years later.

I mentioned some of my favorite sports games for the system above, but it really needs to be emphasized how big sports games were on the Genesis. Both Sega and EA pumped out a seemingly endless line of sports titles for the system. I remember getting into silly speculation with Rich over how much extra memory that yellow tab on the EA carts allowed EA games to play better. For hoops titles I got my NBA Jam and Live fix on SNES, but on the ‘ol Genny my go-to basketball games were the oft-forgotten NCAA skinned version of Jam in College Hoops. I occasionally also threw in the hand-me-down street ball version of NBA Jam in Barkley Shut up Jam. I loved Madden, but Sega’s Joe Montana line of gridiron games were just a notch or two below too. For baseball, Sega’s World Series Baseball titles were in a league of its own when it came to gameplay and presentation with its larger-than-life hitter/batter perspective. For hockey EA’s NHL line was/is legendary! About four or five years ago my friend Derek gave me a ring to come over for some impromptu random gaming and he never played much Genesis before so when he got over I had the Genesis hooked up and laid out all my games for it and of that night we had the most fun playing a few rounds of NHL ‘94. At that point it was a 20-21 year old game and it still held up as one of the best hockey games of all time.

For brawlers I loved the Streets of Rage games, but I think it is my secret shame that I have yet to complete a single one. That must one day change! I did love the exclusive Genesis TMNT game, Hyperstone Heist! It was right up there with Turtles in Time and every couple of years my friend Matt and I make it a ritual to plow through that game. After many attempts we also conquered the Genesis port of the awesome arcade brawler, The Punisher! It does not have as friendly of a continue system as Hyperstone Heist so Matt and I had to learn to play a little more conservatively and not rely on mindless button mashing. It felt gratifying to have all that hard work pay off and beat The Punisher….until we got a copout ending screen of text saying ‘Now play like the Punisher and try hard difficulty.’ We did not, but I wound up looking up the ending several years later and at least Capcom made it worth your while because it had a far more intricate ending than many other brawlers at the time. The one Genesis brawler that always had our number was Captain America and the Avengers. It is a lot of fun to play, but it does not allow that many credits and by setting ourselves up with the max lives and continues that game was still a beast, and even playing conservatively and having so many attempts we only managed to make it to the final boss, The Red Skull, only once.

Let us fast track to about a little under 10 years ago when a co-worker approached me about being interested in buying his Genesis/Sega CD/32X along with a couple dozen games. He was saving up to pay off his upcoming wedding and he gave me a list of everything he had along with prices for everything he wanted going by what he saw off eBay auctions. I did some price researching of my own and made him an offer of around $250-ish for the ‘tower of power’ and about 20 games combined for all three systems. Looking back I accidentally lucked out with that offer because it was only a couple years later when 8/16-bit prices on the used market took a huge jump. I never had a must-have desire for a Sega CD or 32X, but there were always a couple of games I wanted to play on them that I eventually hunted down. I liked the versions of WWF RAW, Doom, Virtua Racer and especially Virtual Fighter the most out of my dozen 32X games. I recall as a then 10 and 11 year old being disgusted by early polygonal console games like Star Fox and Virtua Racer and was more on board with FMV games being the future, but remember being a little taken aback by Virtua Fighter indicating that there may be something to these 3D polygons. The 32X version is a surprisingly faithful version to its arcade counterpart.

I need to dive into my SegaCD games more one of these months. I hunted down all the must own titles for it like the Working Design RPGs, Shining Force CD, enhanced versions of Amazing Spider-Man and Batman Returns and Snatcher which I hope to one day knock off my gaming bucket list. Regrettably now my only SegaCD games I invested a decent amount of time into are WWF Rage in the Cage (essentially Super Wrestlemania but with some FMVs and a bigger roster), Slam City with Scottie Pippen (a abysmal FMV-based street hoops title) and the underrated SegaCD exclusive brawler, Prime. I am a huge Ultraverse comic nut and I ate up Prime on SegaCD since it was the only game released featuring characters from that comic book line before Marvel acquired them and cancelled all their books within a couple years (yes, I am still bitter over it). It is only one player, but Matt and I spent a few attempts taking turns at beating levels until we finally vanquished it. We even had an attempt thwarted when Prime was loading the final boss battle when a flipping blackout halted our progress! As memorable as that moment is I will instead forever associate Prime with its unrivaled and unforgettable opening theme music (seriously….give it a listen!).

I need to give a shoutout to the official handheld Genesis, aka the Nomad! My brother surprised the hell out of me one year with it for a birthday present. My favorite Nomad memory is my brother getting hyped for getting his own version of Genesis Shadowrun and I told him I would come over and bring my Nomad and my version while he played on his television and we could both start off our own new game and exchange tips and hints in a friendly rivalry type of way. I think my brother must have gotten the Genesis version of Shadowrun mixed up with the completely differently designed SNES version because he tried to run around aimlessly and gun down everything which is not how you want to play the Genesis version. We were planning that day out for weeks and I remember being stunned after about 15 minutes when I was starting to sink my teeth back into Shadowrun’s cyberpunk action-RPG brand of awesome when my brother out of nowhere went ‘screw this, let’s play something else!’

As I wind down I want to give many thanks to Sega for keeping the Genesis relevant throughout this century with its gratuitous re-releases of physical and digital collections. I have no idea why, but I keep on buying them for the convenience of having them for the latest system. It started with the Sega Smash Pack on DreamCast seeming like a killer value in 2001 for 12 games for $40. Then a few years later on PS2 I snatched up Sega Genesis Collection which seemed like an even better value with just over 30 games for $30! Then in the 360/PS3 era along came Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection which offered 40 games for $30!! Sega also sold a lot of the games ala carte via each console’s digital storefronts. Then last year we got Sega Genesis Classics on Xbox One/PS4 with 50 games for $30!!! The last several years Sega also has been licensing out to At Games to release their own pre-programmed Genesis mini console with dozens of pre-installed games. I held off on getting those after hearing how awful its emulation and shoddy production quality is, but after hearing how Sega finally decided to manufacture their own Genesis Mini themselves this fall and handed off the emulation duties to the acclaimed emulation studio M2, I could not pre-order fast enough! I have no idea why I keep deep diving down this well, but hats off to Sega for keeping me coming back again and again!

Similarly with my GameBoy flashback piece, I had an unorthodox experience with the Genesis. I was not a hardcore Sonic or Phantasy Star player like the average Genesis owner. If you ask me any day of the week my answer to what my favorite Genesis game is, it could be either The Punisher, Madden NFL ‘97, Shadowrun, Hyperstone Heist, NHL ‘94 or Skitchin’. That is another thing that made the Genesis great was its mammoth library of diverse titles so there was no doubt something for everyone! With that I will put the kibosh on this look back of my favorite moments with the Genesis as I anxiously await for my pre-order of the Genesis Mini to arrive in a few months!

Want more Genesis Love from me in Audio and quasi-video form?

I was looking through my hard drive archives and a decade ago while I was still doing my videogame podcast, On Tap, we did a special 20th anniversary special on the Genesis where my co-hosts and I reminisce about the Genesis. I went ahead and uploaded it on YouTube so if you want even more Genesis takes then click here to give it a listen!

Also recorded throughout 2009 from the On Tap archives was installments from our history of comic book videogames series. In this next episode I uploaded to YouTube is the second part of series where we breakdown every single comic book licensed game on the SNES and Genesis! My co-host Matt and I did thorough research for this episode and played almost nearly every single comic book game from this era in preparation for the episode to give the most up to date research and to see if these games (of which a vast majority are beat-em-ups) still hold up. Click here to give it a listen!

Howdy, everyone! Welcome to my first blog of 2018, and what better way to kick it off than reflecting back on my top gaming experiences of 2017! I had a blast with my top 11 gaming experiences blog from last year, which was really more like 30-40 moments condensed down to 11 entries. I did a similar thing for this year, but for a whopping 21 entries instead. That is nearly double the fun! Just be forewarned, this is a doozy of a read, so without further ado, let us get onto the list!

21) End-Label-Fever

My buddy Matt introduced me to unofficial N64 end labels that were available online. I became immediately envious and ordered the complete set off Etsy and promptly applied them to all my games. I am still befuddled to why Nintendo never had them to begin with.

20) Quantities are Limited!

I ordered several games from Limited Run throughout 2017. If you are unfamiliar with Limited Run, they publish physical versions of former digital-only PS4/Vita games, but true to their name in small print runs that you have usually only several minutes to order online as soon as they are available or you are out of luck. Thankfully I had no problem getting my orders in on them and I was stoked to get the physical versions of games I was super into such as Oxenfree, Firewatch, Windjammers and Read Only Memories.

19) A Certain NES Guide Book

Past few years I have gotten into YouTuber Pat Contri’s work a bit. I first found out about him on an AVGN guest spot, and have been keeping up with his podcasts and videos since. A couple years ago he released a mammoth tome dubbed The Ultimate Guide to the NES Library and as the title eludes it tries to be the ultimate guide by reviewing every American, Europe and Australlian release for the NES and have a bunch of bonus columns and features to round it off. I try to read two-to-four reviews before bed at least a few days a week and I have been doing that for just over a year now. I have found out about a ton of NES games I have never heard of before or knew very little of, plus it was interesting to find out their takes on the games I grew up on. This has lead to me tracking down a few NES games throughout the year such as Roundball, Crystalis and Indy Heat to name a few. I still have a ways to go and am only up through Rolling Thunder on the reviews as of this writing.

18) Mmmmm….Pie

The last couple years I have been hearing a lot of buzz about all-in-one emulator machines known as RetroPies. Questionable legalities of the device aside, they have risen in popularity this past year and I inevitably stumbled into playing a couple variations of it at various places throughout the year. One person had a custom arcade cabinet with it installed and we tore it up playing countless arcade fighters and brawlers on it. Another time another friend and I went out of our way to search for obscure versions of Street Fighter ports and had a decent time experiencing the original Street Fighter and surprisingly decent versions of Street Fighter Alpha on the GameBoy Color and Street Fighter Alpha 2 on the SNES.

I told one friend my joy last year experiencing the import-only arcade release of Ring of Destruction, and sure enough we found it and slaughtered each other for quite a bit on it. The best RetroPie moment was finding an English-patched version of Super FirePro Wrestling Premium on SNES and the worst was when playing a RetroPie for the first time for whatever reason the first game of the several thousand available on it I decided to play was Shaq-Fu, a game I already own…two copies of…don’t ask.

18) The Return of Bimmy & Jimmy!

I was surprised with the out of nowhere announcement and quick release of Double Dragon IV at the beginning of the year. I am presuming the 16-bit Super Double Dragon is no longer cannon. Got a chance to play it with Matt shortly after its release and I loved how it captured the NES feel of the classic 8-bit brawlers and we had a good time with it until we hit one of the final levels. That level was filled with mazes of mind-boggling auto-scrolling ramps and pillars that pop down from out of nowhere and instantly kill you much in the same vein as that godawful N64 Sub-Zero game, but worse! It was an instant turn-off to an otherwise fine co-op brawler. Limited Run had a nice collector’s edition of it up for sale recently but those memories of those nasty pillars and ramp sequences convinced me to stay away.

17) Now You’re Playing With Super Power!

I loved the NES Classic in 2016 and in 2017 I had to make sure to line up in stores a couple hours ahead of opening to procure the inevitable SNES Classic. While it has nine less games compared to the NES Classic, the quality and scope of those 21 SNES games is far greater than the ones featured on NES Classic. Finally experiencing the previously unreleased StarFox 2 was a treat and I made sure to first play the first game I owned for my SNES 20 years earlier in Street Fighter 2: Turbo. Me and my friends Derek and Ryan had a ball taking turns to see how far we could last in the unbelievably-hard Super Ghouls ‘n Ghosts (it was not all that far). A couple months later I got my brother one for his birthday and we spent many hours failing to make significant progress in the brutally-tough-yet-super-fun Contra 3. I believe we only got to the third level. One day we shall conquer it, and one day I will sit down and take the time to get through EarthBound!

16) Them Damn YouTubers!

I mentioned YouTuber Pat Contri earlier and I think 2017 has become the year where I routinely started to follow several YouTube videogame personalities. Before I primarily stuck with the crew at GiantBomb for most of my online gaming-related videos and still do for most of them, but I like mixing in a little variety from several other YouTubers. I will give a shout out to Pat Contri again for his many podcast excerpts that entertain me, as well as James Rolfe and his Cinemassacre crew for the always-excellent AVGN videos and let’s play streams he posts with his co-host Mike Matei. Gaming Pick-ups and hidden gem list rundowns sound kind of blah on paper, but the man known as ‘Metal Jesus’ and his wide array of mostly likeable guest hosts find a way to make them entertaining and I cannot help but watch nearly every video he posts on his channel.

I have been following Jeremy Parish’s writing and Retronauts podcasts for well over a decade and have been a huge fan of his Works line of YouTube videos chronicling countless GameBoy, NES and SNES games. They are exhaustively researched and well-produced and filled with tons of facts and behind-the-scenes info that your average online review likely would not have. Finally I will give a shoutout to two more retro-themed gaming channels, The Gaming Historian and Classic Gaming Quarterly. Both YouTubers do deep dives into gaming’s past and put a lot of work into their videos and as a result they do not have as frequent videos as other channels, but their quality makes up for the quantity. I am beyond belief, but my hat is off to the host of CGQ for making his ‘Let’s Read’ videos where he highlights and notates tidbits from his favorite articles of old-school gaming magazines and somehow makes them must-see material!

15) I AM TUROK!

Last year I mentioned how I got a Retron 5, a handy device that allows you to play several retro game system’s cartridges on an HDTV with clean visuals like how I remember them instead of the dreadful fuzziness you get when hooking up old-school systems on HDTVs with the older composite cables that came with the system. I finally finished my first game using the system in 2017, and the game that got that honor was the long forgotten GameBoy….gem….Turok: Battle of the Bionasaurs. It came out alongside the more popular N64 game and was a simple 2D side-scrolling action/platformer game. If you are wondering why that random GameBoy game it is because I spent several summers on a farm with nothing but a GameBoy growing up so these no-frills basic platformers resonate with me in a unique way.

The Retron has the ability to download an exhaustive vault of Game Genie/Action Replay codes onto an SD card from their website and that came in handy here or else I stood no chance of beating this game. Even though the infinite health made dealing with enemies a breeze, the limitations of the GameBoy’s screen made platforming a bit of a hurdle than I intended so I still died plenty of times, and if it was not for taking advantage of Retron 5’s save-state feature I definitely would not have finished it. I have all the other Turok games on GB (there are five of them!) and eventually would like to get through most of them as these simple watered-down GB conversions are nice little pallet-cleansers to start off a gaming session.

Speaking of the Retron 5, Hyperkin released an adaptor for it this year allowing it to play Master System and Game Gear games. I picked it up, but kind of regretted it afterwards as it took a few hoops of downloading and applying updates/patches from Hyperkin’s website in a particular way until a couple hours of trial-and-error got it to finally work. I do not believe the effort was worth it though because I have no Master System games and only six or seven Game Gear games. I did make sure to play quite a bit of Game Gear Road Rash immediately afterwards for my troubles. Hey….if I were to track down just five Master System games what would you recommend? Tweet me your picks!

14) The Year of VR….No, Not That VR

I keep hearing about how Playstation VR, Oculus and HTC’s virtual reality sets that came out over the last couple of years have legitimized VR and brought it up to par with core console based gaming. However, I am just not seeing it. The price point is the primary deal breaker for me, and then factoring in the space factor for all the cables and some games that require you to move around is another major deal-breaker too. This past year saw some AAA console games get their full single player mode available in VR like Resident Evil 7 and Skyrim that I would not mind checking out one day, but most of what I see that is playable out there seem like decent little mini-games and shooting gallery variants, but not worth the barriers to invest into a proper VR setup. If you have it and enjoy it, that’s awesome, but I simply cannot justify crossing that line.

That said, I still have the original VR monstrosity that is the Virtual Boy and 2017 was THE year it became active again! I was missing the AC power adaptor hub for my Virtual Boy that I misplaced long ago, and I searched for them on eBay and they were surprisingly affordable there, as was a replacement tripod for the Virtual Boy. I also picked up a few more VB ‘gems’ such as Virtual League Baseball, TeleroBoxer, Galactic Pinball, Vertical Force and Wario Land to increase my mammoth VB library to nine games (that is more than half of its complete library, seriously!). I tried a few of them out and was surprised at my lack of TeleroBoxer skills that I need some severe practice at. VB does have a fine pinball game though and I would like to set aside time to finish Wario Land one day because it is one of the few legit quality games on the platform. Suffice it to say, the good ‘ol Virtual Boy will likely be my sole VR system for the forseeable future.

13) Pinball Gaming Love

Like last year, I played a healthy chunk of pinball games. This year it was primarily Zen Pinball 2 and I kept up with its final round of new tables and tried my best to attain each table’s trophy/achievement. I probably put way too much time trying to get that pesky Rogue One trophy. I put in some time into Pinball Arcade and Hyperspace Pinball, but not nearly as much as last year. I really need to put more time into the former because I just got caught up acquiring its latest season of tables and have yet to try any of them out. It is a shame that unlike the Zen tables, purchasing Pinball Arcade tables on PS3 does not carry over to the PS4 version so I am stuck playing them on PS3.

I did do the upgrade a few months ago from Pinball FX2/Zen Pinball 2 to Pinball FX3 and am still coming around to it. Zen thankfully allows my PS3 purchased tables to carry over into the PS4 version! I think I am finally getting use to PFX3’s new unlockable upgrades system, but there seems to be a bit too much optional mini-modes available in order to ‘master’ each table. I will give Zen props for making their latest two tables free in honor of the 10 year anniversary of the first Pinball FX. I imagine I will conform to its various new extras and features soon enough, but not as quickly as I thought.

12) Twin Cities Gaming – Part Two

Last year I mentioned how I went to the Twin Cities to visit a couple friends where we engaged in all sorts of gaming awesomeness, and I continued the trend again this year. I first visited my friend Tyler and while checking out the Mall of America we caught a glimpse of this VR Arcade/theme park there that had all kinds of ambitious sets rigged up. We did not test any out, but just surveyed the area to get a good idea of how to plan out a day there next time we return. We did stop in one of the other traditional arcades in the Mall of America however where I finally discovered in the wild one of the Mario Kart GP games that Namco develops. There have been a few iterations of these over the past decade and I believe the version we played was Mario Kart Arcade GP DX. The version we played had a sweet two-player setup that held its own with the latest home versions, and I was delighted to see it bring back some of the two-player co-op features not seen in the series since Double Dash.

I made another trip to the awesome Up/Down Arcade with my friend Dick while I was in the Cities and I was thrilled to see they had just as many awesome 80s and 90s arcade units there as it had last year. We also checked out a pinball bar called Tilt Pinball Bar. It was much smaller compared to Up/Down, but still contained everything I wanted out of such an establishment with a good variety of around 25-30 tables from all eras. We spent a good couple hours there competing for high scores while enjoying a brew and I finally got a chance to play the authentic versions of tables I put countless hours into their digital versions in Pinball Arcade with tables like Champion Pub being a thrill to finally play in reality!

11) First Rule of Fight Club…

I have neglected online multiplayer on Playstation since Sony started charging for it on PS4. A couple months ago I relented and picked up a three month card because of my friend Chris who I use to semi-regularly play online PS3 fighting games with. Since I activated the subscription we played on three out of four Saturday mornings and had some great sessions in a variety of fighting games. Neither of us are EVO-quality vets by any means, but we kind of have a vague idea of what we are doing out there and are both along the same skill level. We played a ton of Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite, Street Fighter V and Injustice 2. I dug all three games, and Chris and I talked a lot of friendly smack while we mashed away on buttons relentlessly.

10) Reviewing my first game since 2011…kind of

I adored the first two Syberia games that hit PC/Xbox in 2003/04. I loved their story, atmosphere, cast and writing. While its adventure-genre standard puzzles it featured had me referencing guides online, I did not mind because I had to see what was next for the affable heroine, Kate Walker. I somehow missed the announcements leading up to the third game and was surprised to see it on shelves one day early in the year and I immediately grabbed it without question. That turned out to be a mistake because Syberia 3 is a near-unplayable mess filled with countless glitches and bugs that were previously not part of the franchise’s pedigree. I have no idea how this got the stamp of approval for release. I saw Syberia 3 went on to have more patches and updates after I finished it so hopefully it is not as much of a hot mess as it was when I played it during its first week of release.

I wrote a lengthy post chronicling my troubles with the game on a forum I frequent online. Once I realized I rambled on for a quite a bit about the game that it nearly resembled a review, I tweaked a few spots in the original post and made a couple other minor addendums to cover most of the bases of the game. I then submitted it with the lowest score possible to my GameFAQs profile (I am not a fan of how they converted to its five hearts rating system). I have not done a video game review in several years since I switched to focus on reviewing movies on this blog. That said, if you want to see a more detailed account of my disappointment with Syberia 3, then click here to see my first video game review since 2011.

9) Beating my first Mega Man game at Extra Life!!!

On my top gaming moments blog last year I recounted how Mega Man 2 became the first game in the series I put serious play time into by beating three stages in it during the annual 24-hour Extra Life charity drive I participate in every year. I beat a few more stages since then, but still had a few more to go and it felt fitting to finish the game off at the next year’s Extra Life! That is exactly what I did, and boy did I feel like an idiot doing so with my lackluster Mega Man expertise. While I still enjoyed my time with the game, I had to exploit save-states for every few screens of progress. I had no idea there was a huge labyrinth of levels leading up to the final encounter with Dr. Wily, which included finishing off all the previous bosses again one more time. I was only anticipating spending another couple hours with the game when instead it took me about five to six hours to finish it off. I still loved every moment of it and want to at least finish off a couple more games in the series someday. I hear that Mega Man 3 is even better than Mega Man 2 so I should at least play that one….right?

8) Off to the Races

Just like last year I played a ton of racing games off and on throughout the year. Like pinball games, starting off a gaming session with 30-60 minutes knocking off a few races of progress before I move onto something else is ideal for me. I played way too much Konami Krazy Racers on the GBA Virtual Console on WiiU. It is a fun little kart racer featuring a unique cast of side characters from various Konami franchises. I also played a ton of Fast Racing Neo on WiiU and loved its take on F-Zero/Wipeout. Before the Switch version of Mario Kart 8 launched earlier this year I got in a few more online sessions on the WiiU version since I imagined most of the player-base flocked to that version upon its release. I am still surprised at how well that version runs online with my wi-fi setup.

Other racing games that dominated my time this year were The Crew. I am not really engaging in much of its online content and trying to romp through its story mode, but I do like its take on using the USA as an open world hub. The spiritual successor to Road Rash that is Road Redemption finally came out of Steam Early Access a few months ago and I enjoyed a couple loops through its career mode with my brother. TrackMania Turbo is a fun time-trial based racer oozing with style that has me itching for those perfect runs. JoyRide Turbo is an inferior racing game also with ‘Turbo’ in its title. It is a port of the Kinect-racer on 360 that hit XBLA a year or two later with standard controller gameplay added, and it is ok, but eventually it wore out its welcome. It is not as terrible as Beach Buggy Racing on Xbox One, a budget kart racer for the platform with very loose controls and gets my nod as least enjoyable racing game I played in 2017. Finally, I have been playing a lot of the 360 version of Forza Horizon 2. I loved the first game and its festival/party atmosphere it introduced to the spinoff series and the same applies to the sequel. I am almost done with most of the races in the career mode and after that I can finally move on to the third Horizon which I hear nothing but amazing things.

7) One Game in One Day!

I have referenced here before how I am down with the genre of games known as ‘Walking Simulators’ with much love from me to prior hits in the genre like Oxenfree and Firewatch. Games in this genre cater towards me because they usually have powerful narratives that can be finished in a couple sittings. I wanted to finish one more game before the end of the year so on December 30th I started and finished another popular game in the genre that hit earlier in 2017, What Remains of Edith Finch in about four hours. The game did not disappoint as it focused on the last surviving member of a cursed family revisiting her childhood home and each through an interesting series of flashbacks she experiences each family member’s demise. I enjoyed most of it and absolutely loved its atmosphere exploring the mysterious house filled with literally thousands of books. The big focus of the journey though is reliving those 10-12 flashbacks and they scale all over the place from enthralling, to vague, to underwhelming and head-scratchingly dull. I still very much enjoyed my experience with it, especially since it was one of those rare times where I can plow through a game in a single sitting, but I would rank it a notch or two under Oxenfree and Firewatch.

6) Pound-Town!!

On last year’s best of blog I dedicated an entry to my awesome couch co-op gaming nights with friends Derek, Brooke and Ryan, so I will continue that trend this year. We started off the year rotating in and out a lot of our usual favorites but sticking more and more to the social party games featured in Jackbox Party Pack. About halfway into the year another Jackbox-style game hit the PS4 that was a hit with our group called That’s You and it incorporated more unique ways of getting the smartphone in the mix in its games compared to the Jackbox use of the smartphone.

About halfway into the year however we started to play more and more board games. We got a few in the mix in 2016 but 2017 was the year board gaming took off for us. A couple board game/hobby shops opened up in town over the last year or two and it resulted in our group trying out tons of new board games. I must have tried out nearly a dozen tabletop games and some of my favorites were Five Minute Dungeon (a super quick card based version of DnD), YamSlam (think Yahtzee meets poker) and another game I forget the name of where you where a headband and put a card on it while your teammate gives clues to the answer like in the classic game show, $25,000 Pyramid.

While we are on the theme of board games this entry I will give a shoutout to Matt and the few rounds of Othello we got in over recent years (new version out on Switch!). Another night Derek and I joined my brother and friends Mike and Justine for an epic night of the board game Zombicide. I have played that game before and do enjoy it, but that game makes rounds of Risk seem like a sprint and you need to dedicate at least several hours to finish a game. Luckily, Mike is a seasoned pro at the game and breezed through its elaborate setup. Somehow, someway we managed to finish a whole game in about five hours, and it was a blast. I feel bad for my brother because he was the only one in our group that did not survive the zombie horde that night.

5) More Love for the 3DS

This is another themed entry I am carrying over from 2016. I continue to try and get in a couple hours of handheld device gaming a week on my 3DS. 2017 saw me finally finish Phoenix Wright: Spirits of Justice after a whopping 68 hours!! It easily surpasses Dual Destines as the superior 3DS installment of the franchise as it finally opens up Apollo’s background and it gets all the ace attorneys involved from the Wright Anything Agency and brings back fan favorite Maya back into the fray after a lengthy absence from the series. I am now all caught up on the latest games in the series…in America anyways as I hear Japan is getting spin-off exclusives I am envious of.

The other 3DS game I put a ton of time into this year was the remaster of Dragon Quest VIII. It originally hit PS2 around 15 years ago, but this version makes some added benefits for on-the-go gaming like quicksaves and auto-combat which I greatly appreciate. I always liked the Dragon Quest series of RPGs for being simpler, easier to pick up RPGs compared to the average Final Fantasy, and I am digging its art style, score and whimsical narrative thus far after around 30 hours in.

One last game I finished on 3DS is Find Mii and that is a Street Pass Plaza game contained with the 3DS UI. It took forever to finish because to advance in it you need to earn coins via carrying the 3DS around with you in sleep mode to beat simple monsters in a straightforward dungeon layout. There are quite a few monsters to conquer though and it took me banking up many coins to hire countless temporary heroes to defeat in its many dungeon rooms and after nearly three years of off-and-on gradual progress I finally finished it. Huzzah! 2017 saw a far more advanced version of Find Mii released on the 3DS called Mii-Topia which I understand is more of a full-on RPG compared to the intentionally basic design of Find Mii. I think Mii-Topia released shortly after I finished Find Mii and I kind of impulse-bought while on my rush of finishing Find Mii so who knows when I will get to it.

Speaking of the 3DS, my brother Joe and I went in together and got my nephew Carter a 2DS for Christmas. Joe got Carter into Pokemon at the beginning of the year by exposing him to the cartoon and the world of Pokemon cards. He is now a devout PokeKid! He never played any of the games though, so I we got him a 2DS and I loaded it up with Virtual Console rereleases of Pokemon Yellow, Pokemon Trading Card Game and Pokemon Puzzle League and I made sure to download and install a super-sweet Pikachu theme on the system for him too. When he opened it up on Christmas Eve he gave both us the biggest hugs!!! So worth it!

4) Kept You Waiting?

Just like in 2016, I played a good amount of Metal Gear Solid. The first few months of the year I dedicated to trying to finish off Peace Walker. I say trying because I got the first ending to the game, but it seemed premature due to the gameplay style and sure enough after looking up online there was a true ending to unlock that involved beating many more boss fights in a specific fashion that is too particular to explain here in order to truly finish it. I spent way too much time going down this route before ultimately giving up and moving on. I still had a blast with the game and since it did not have a difficulty level setting I guess you can say I did ‘beat’ it on its default difficulty level instead of setting it to ‘very easy’ like I did in prior entries.

I needed a break from the franchise after that fiasco for a few months so it was not until the end of summer that I picked up and played through all of the prologue to Metal Gear Solid V that is called Ground Zeroes. It is like the introductory mission to MGS2 and MGS3 that is a couple hours long and sets up the rest of the game, but it was released nearly two years ahead of the main game. It picks up right after Peace Walker which is why I invested so much time in attempting to see that through. I loved how the new game looked on the current gen with stunning graphical effects that make the series stand out above all other AAA games, and its cutscene production is in a league of its own with a gorgeous set piece that sets up the proper full MGSV experience that came out in 2015, The Phantom Pain.

A couple months later I finally started The Phantom Pain. The introductory stage is an experience I will never forget and is more like an hour and a half movie that introduces you to the core controls while Konami takes you on a visual effects smorgasbord with easily one of the best produced opening cinematics I have ever seen, and that is saying a lot not just for the franchise but for games in general. Even if you are not that familiar with MGS universe and lore, please click here and take the time to watch The Phantom Pain’s opening hour play out to see a new level of production caliber that games have rarely achieved. That hour and a half or so of gameplay is what I finished off the Extra Life marathon with, and I was glad to rock a pair of surround sound gaming headphones to it because just as much care was put into the audio as in the visuals and it all combined for my eyes being glued to the screen the entire time.

I have only had time to play about four or five hours more of it since, and I am glad I played Peace Walker because it looks like it is carrying over that game’s ‘Mother Base’ central command hub that took a bit of adapting to and I will not be going in to that interface blind this time around. This is a huge departure from previous MGS games as the gameplay is changed up big time and now takes place primarily in an open world. I am still getting use to that part, but I am loving the little I have played so far as The Phantom Pain continues to open up with so many options available at Snake’s disposal. I do miss the traditional codec calls, but I understand why Konami switched it up for this game. Speaking of Snake, I thought I would never accept Keifer Sutherland replacing David Hayter as Snake’s voice but after that opening played out I did not second guess it again.

One last thing about Metal Gear! I referenced earlier how the crew at giantbomb.com are my go to crew for gaming based videos. They occasionally do full play-throughs of games with a second person on hand for commentary, and over a couple years from 2004-06 they went through almost all of the core Metal Gear games. Giant Bomb called the series ‘Metal Gear Scanlon’ because their video-guy Drew Scanlon was playing through the Metal Gear games for his first time while resident Metal Gear expert and published author, Dan Ryckert on hand to lend his Metal Gear expertise. During the course of 2017 I watched their playthroughs for the first three Metal Gear Solid entries. They were a riot to have on in the background and watch in chunks here and there. Here is a link to a few highlight packages from their sessions for those who are interested.

3) Mmmmm….Fresh Meat

I have an odd history with the Diablo series. I love hack ‘n slash RPG games, but I have never finished one in the premiere franchises of the genre from acclaimed developer Blizzard. I played a bit of the first chunk of the debut game right around its release on PC, but then my brother Joe started it up and he had more time to dedicate to it than I did so I wound up occasionally watching him play it from time to time instead. The exact same thing happened with the sequel and I saw Joe play that game nonstop for at least a few years. I played the opening couple of missions to the long awaited Diablo III shortly after its release in 2012 at a friend’s but held off picking it up hoping for a console release instead. I was thrilled when it hit console’s the next year and I picked it up on PS3 and Joe and another friend joined us for a few awesome couch co-op sessions of it and we got nearly halfway through the game until it became difficult to arrange nights for all three of us to meet up and continue and eventually the game fell into my gaming backlog abyss.

Fast forward four years and Joe and I picked up our routine, bi-weekly Sunday morning gaming sessions that we use to do all the time until a few years ago. You want to know how long it takes to finish Diablo III and its expansion act when you only have time to commit about three-to-four a month to it? Turns out it takes roughly five months to finish it that way, but it was gratifying to finally cross finishing a Diablo game off my gamer bucket list. I am also mighty thankful that Blizzard made the normal difficulty a relative cakewalk for people like me who do not have ample time to set aside to master the game. We did not lose a single life until we got to the final boss, and even then we finished him off on our third try, and it felt so good! Joe-berg I apologize again for making you sit through all the story and dialogue sequences, I know you want to just keep on hack ‘n slashin’, but you know I gots to absorb that Diablo-lore!

2) Is This Really A Thieve’s End?

When I hosted my videogame podcast that ran from 2005-2013, Sony’s top-of-the-line action/adventure Uncharted games would always rank high on my year-end game of the year lists. Hell, I even dug the Vita entry, Golden Abyss too! I got my PS4 towards the end of 2016 and it came bundled with the fourth game of the series. I wanted to play it right away, but did not want to nickel-and-dime my way through the game like I do for most games nowadays.

I held off on playing the latest version I heard so much praise for until I requested a week off from work in April this last year when I had a few other things going on in that timeframe I needed time off for. During that time I made sure to set aside nearly two hours a day to make decent headway in that game, and I am glad I did because Uncharted 4: A Thieve’s End is the longest game of the entire series and it took me nearly 20 hours to finish. It took me that long because I did what I always do every time I play through Uncharted and took my time to soak in its lush and beautiful environments while I explored off the beaten path for the game’s trademark hidden treasures.

Uncharted 4 ranks right up there with the second game as my two favorite games in the series. The core gunplay and stealth mechanics I had some issues with before got tweaked and are far more enjoyable this time around. This is the first time in the series I did not mind playing stealthy for a change in certain areas. The platforming is just as masterful as ever as I took in every climbing, rope-swinging, and rock-sliding path that was bestowed upon protagonist Nathan Drake. The vintage set piece chase/interactive cinematics are just as impressive as the past few entries as well. I loved the introduction of Nate’s brother Sam to the cast and he perfectly blended into the series. There was one twist with him later on in the narrative that did not get fully explained that kind of rubbed me the wrong way, but other than that the story lives up to the brand’s high standards. Definitely do no skip out on this entry in the series!

Later on in the year a spinoff Uncharted came out subtitled Lost Legacy. It made the bold move of not having Drake as the protagonist and instead casted Drake’s partner-in-crime Chloe from Uncharted 2 & 3 and antagonist Nadine from Uncharted 4 as the two stars. Playing with these two and an open-ended stage that took up a major part of the second act of Lost Legacy combined to significantly change up the core Uncharted gameplay. I approached parts of this game differently than previous installments while still experiencing the aforementioned top-of-class production values from the series. While I hope it is not the final Uncharted game in the series, I hope the series goes on a mini-hiatus for the time being after six awesome entries within 11 years.

1) Zelda + Elder Scrolls = GOTY

The hype leading up to the latest Legend of Zelda game in the series that hit in 2017, Breath of the Wild was impossible to avoid. Nintendo finally changing up the core formula of a console based Zelda for the first time since Ocarina of Time and going to an open-world format was something I had to be there day one for. I still recall playing the first five hours of Breath of the Wild and being fully immersed with its its new levels of open-ended gameplay previously unseen in the series. I instantly fell in love with its world, and for its first several hours of gameplay I felt I was playing something truly special. The only times I felt this way before about a game were for Grand Theft Auto III, the first Halo and the first Uncharted. That is elite company to reside with.

Minus a couple short breaks to focus on other games, I have been consistently playing Breath of the Wild since its release and have invested nearly 100 hours into it. Despite that I have yet to finish it and have only vanquished two divine beasts so far because I love losing myself exploring its world. I rarely make use of fast travel points and I never use horses for fear or running past and missing out on hidden areas/secrets in the game. It took me several hours over many attempts to finish the mystical Eventide Island and I did not mind its grueling challenge to figure out how to overcome the unique predicament that island starts Link off in.

I remember the thrill of finishing off my first ancient machine and defeating the formidable foes that are the Lynels. I did not mind the weapons breaking frequently since it inspired me to mix up my weaponry and try out weapons I would not have otherwise and there are always a constant flux of weapons available. Somehow, someway, Breath of the Wild is the first game to get me into crafting, something I detested in games prior. That jingle it plays when you make a super zesty dish with bonus attributes is an awesome feeling. I am playing this on the WiiU and my only gripe is that it did not have the option to use the gamepad for inventory management. I guess the rain was a minor hindrance too since it prevents climbing, but those minor two gripes aside did not bother me to invest all this time into it throughout the year, and probably just as much time going into 2018 too. This is easily the best time I have had with any Zelda game ever.

Until Next Year….

Phew, thank you for sticking with me throughout this novel of an entry. This was quite the adventure to write, and I give big ups to you if you got through this in its entirety! See you next year for my top 2018 gaming experiences! As a little bonus, if you are not tired yet of clicking through all the supplemental YouTube videos linked above, here is one more that always manages to crack me up when I need to get myself out of a funk, so please click away and enjoy!

Greetings! It has been awhile since I did one of these top 10 of the year lists. It felt right to place my list on my long dormant Giant Bomb blog where a few of my past lists reside and because I always enjoy the wealthy amount of game of the year content from the Giant Bomb crew each year. This is not a ‘Top 10 games of 2016,’ but more of a ‘Top 10 Experiences’ of 2016.

As you will see, a lot of my games listed will be from prior years. Also you will definitely notice I cheated on most of my entries and included multiple games on most entries. I tried to make each number on my list a theme for each experience, so I hope that suffices for you. If you take a liking my ramblings, please check out my movie blog where I recently ran down my favorite and worst movies from the past few years. I may post this on my movie blog as well since I have a ‘Top 10’ label there too, so if you are reading this blog there, greetings again!

*Edit* I saw after I finished editing this I screwed up my numbering and actually had 11 items, not 10, but it is too late now to remove an item after working on this for so long, so onward with my top 11 experiences of 2016!

11) Finally acquiring current gen consoles

Yes, that is right, three years they debuted I finally picked up both PS4 and Xbox One. My gaming backlog grew out of control because I do not have nearly enough time to game as I use to so I wanted a few years to get caught before I got the current systems. I first jumped on the Xbox One shortly after they released the S model in September and caught a good sale on the 2 TB version that knocked off $100. It took me six weeks though to get around to hooking it up and playing it however, but I have gamed a fair amount on it since.

The PS4 I got a couple months later on Black Friday weekend when retailers were having big sales on the Uncharted 4 500gb bundle, and I was able to stack a couple other discounts to get it for $190. An awesome friend gifted me a 2 TB hard drive for Christmas shortly thereafter. I have since hooked it up and got all my cross buy games from PS3 and Vita transferred over, but have yet to find any time to play a single game on it because of all the other games I am trying to catch up on. I think one of these weekends I should do nothing but binge on Uncharted 4 because it is one of my favorite franchises and it is a crime that I have yet to play the latest installment.

I also want to squeeze in here two other platforms that kind of meet the criteria of this subject: the Retron 5 and the NES Classic. The games I have tested out on the Retron 5 have worked great on my HDTV, and results in my classic games running flawlessly in HD, with none of the fuzziness that would result from hooking up my classic systems with RCA/composite cables into an HDTV. Like everyone else, I hate the Retron 5 controller, but am thankful the Retron 5 is compatible and works well with my classic controllers.

The NES Classic I lucked into getting one morning right when a retailer opened and I was not even looking for it, but happened to hear the store had them. I brought it over to play with the family after Thanksgiving dinner and it was a big hit that night. My brother-in-law kicked my ass in Tecmo Bowl that evening. Later on I let my six year-old niece, and eight year-old nephew play the system for a bit and took in their reactions to experiencing classics like Bubble Bobble and Super Mario Bros. 3 for the first time. I have since busted out the NES Classic a couple more times with my nephew and we made a lot of progress in Bubble Bobble since, and have also had good times playing the original Super Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong with him. My nephew loves Minecraft and other tablet games, and I feared him playing these older games I grew up with would not jive with him, and I was delighted he took a liking to many of them.

10) Arcade Racers!

I love me some arcade racing games! Racing and pinball games are the perfect way to start off a gaming session. I like to invest about 30-45 minutes and knock off a few races from a career mode before moving on to whatever game I am working on in my backlog. Going through my gaming journal I realized I have invested significant time into five racing games in 2016, and have completed the career modes in three of them. I first finished off Blaze Rush, an excellent downloadable racing game that is essentially the old school Micro Machines games, but with crazy weapons. The career mode is filled with a ton of variety, and while I had a few hair pulling moments trying to win certain races, I very much enjoyed my time with it.

Toybox Turbo is from Codemasters, the same people who made the aforementioned Micro Machines games and this is a contemporary follow up to them from a couple years ago. You still race in crazy environments like kitchen tables and workbenches, and the racing is still as quick and fun as the 8-bit classics. The third career mode I finished in 2016 went to Dirt Showdown, also from Codemasters. This is an arcade spinoff from the sim-heavy Dirt rally racing games, and Showdown is more of demo-derby racer in similar fashion to Destruction Derby and Flatout. I love that style of racers, and they do not make enough of them! Dirt Showdown is a welcomed addition to the genre, and I had a blast doing both races and last man standing demolition derbies! It is pretty fun, but not quite perfect, but establishes a good foundation I hope Codemasters builds on with future sequels.

Road Redemption is the contemporary take on Road Rash I have wanted EA to make for many years. These guys are getting it right, but it is still in Early Access on Steam so the developers are constantly building upon it. It controls how I would imagine a Road Rash game would evolve into today, and they thankfully took out having to run out back to your cycle so you can get back into the race quicker. I had some friends over for four player couch play, and we had a blast and it convinced them to get it too. If you have played old school Road Rash give it a look! Mantis Burn Racing is another Steam game I put a decent amount of time into that offers up a similar isometric perspective and has a good arcade/sim hybrid feel to it complete with drifts and turbos. It recently hit consoles so give it a look there too. Finally, I have lately been making a lot of progress into Sonic All-Stars Racing Transformed. Sega really stepped up their game with their second kart-style racer a few years back. I really dig how the karts morph into planes and hovercrafts during the race and how some tracks transform during the race to keep me on my feet. The roster features a ton of Sega favorites and the racing feels great and is right up there with Mario Kart!

9) Pinball!

Anyone who knows my gaming habits knows I am a pinball nut. Ever since Pinball FX on 360 I have spend countless hours on various pinball games. As I stated in the previous entry this is another one of my go to games to start off gaming sessions with. In 2016 I played a lot of Pinball Arcade, Zen Pinball 2 and a little known indie game on Steam called Hyperspace Pinball. I love nearly the entire Zen 2 roster of tables and spent a good chunk of the year trying to replay each table on my PS3 at least a couple of times. I am all caught up now with the exception of the recently released Bethesda pack that offers up tables based on their Doom, Skyrim and Fallout properties.

Alternatively, the real life translations in Pinball Arcade are also up my alley, and I always find myself coming back to tables in attempts to best previous high scores and knock off all the preset goals for each table. I recently busted out the spinoff Stern Pinball Arcade disc on Xbox One, which offers up a couple exclusive tables that are not yet in the standalone Pinball Arcade hub and have been eating that up a lot too.

Hyperspace Pinball is an under-the-radar game that got buried in the plethora of indie games on Steam and it is unfortunate that it has gone ignored for this long. It features simple-yet-groovy futuristic graphics and a very fitting soundtrack. The primary mode is like a addicting version of pinball-meets-Asteroids and every several levels there are unique boss battles to vanquish. It took several runs before I got use to the physics of this pinball game, but once I did I was glad I mixed Hyperspace Pinball into my rotation.

8) Road Trip gaming!

This past October I went on a week long road trip to hit up some attractions I have always wanted to see and hang out with some friends who have moved out of town over the years. I visited my friend, Dick in the Twin Cities. We have a history of playing many hours of our favorite wrestling game, WWF No Mercy together and we could not resist busting it out again. We had some intense matches where we teamed up against the computer on expert difficulty, and then a few more grueling one-on-one encounters. Later that day, we checked out an game shop that had an arcade machine with a ton of games built in and one of them was for a Japan-exclusive sequel to Saturday Night Slam Masters I had no idea existed until that point. Slam Masters was Capcom’s take on wrestling meets Street Fighter II, but the sequel, Ring of Destruction, is a straight up fighting game that plays as good as any Capcom fighter back in the day.

After that, we traversed to a recently opened arcade in the Cities called Up/Down, which is an arcade bar loaded with arcade and pinball games and has a full service bar. All the hits from 80s and 90s I grew up with were there such as classic brawlers like TMNT, X-Men and Simpsons to the hits Midway dominated the 90s with like NBA Jam, Mortal Kombat I-4 and NFL Blitz. There was even old school Nintendo games like Excitebike, Donkey Kong and a version of Fix-It Felix straight out of Wreck-It Ralph I had no idea was a thing until I saw it with my own eyes. There was also around a dozen pinball tables there, with a good mix of classics like Funhouse, Terminator 2 and Adams Family to more recent Stern releases like Ghostbusters and Metallica. I guess this is a slowly expanding chain, so if you happen to run across one, make sure to check it out as you will be guaranteed hours of fun.

The next destination on my road trip was to visit my brother in a smaller town a couple hours outside of the Twin Cities. I had a great time hanging out with him, and like my friend in the Cities, we also have a history of beating the tar out of each other in WWF No Mercy. After telling my brother about experiencing the awesomeness of taking on expert level AI opponents in tag mode and proceeding to have another close match with the AI where we emerged victorious, we proceeded to take on each other in about 15 one-on-one matches. I consider myself a pretty darn good No Mercy player and can hold my own with any other seasoned player, but for whatever reason my brother has always had my number and is the only one I know that can outplay me (that link is a clip of us squaring off in a tournament final from several years ago for proof!). Of the roughly 15 matches we played, I only had one victory out of them all, and I made sure to savor every moment of it!

7) Awesome Local Coop!

This is where I will give a shoutout to my local friends in town, Ryan, Derek and Brooke! Last few years we have had recurring couch multiplayer game nights every several weeks! I always look forward to them, and we are constantly rotating in old favorites like Mario Kart: Double Dash, Mario Party and TimeSplitters: Future Perfect with newer games for a constant fresh variety of multiplayer goodness. I will give props to some of my favorite moments I had with them this year. One awesome early multiplayer night in 2016 involved a NES theme night, and me busting out my four player adaptor which led to many hours of Gauntlet II and Super Off-Road fun.

For a couple weeks we were into slaughtering zombies and we played through a couple levels of Left 4 Dead 2. I forgot how awesome and frustrating that game is as I experienced both soaring highs when our teamwork was flawless and devastating lows when we ran into trouble a couple of times. Either way, it was still a blast re-experiencing Left 4 Dead 2 for the first time in years. That led us to a couple days of long sessions of Dying Light. I loved the first Dead Island and this game is from the same developers and plays just like it, but mixes in an awesome parkour system. That resulted in all kinds of crazy running dropkicks and being on the lookout for next great weapon that would turn up in our endless piles of loot.

Just a few weeks ago we had another great session where we played Drawful and Fibbage out of the Jackbox Party Pack. Both are awesome social party/trivia games from the same people who made the also-excellent You Don’t Know Jack. These games make great use of cell phones as controllers so anyone could play, and we had way too much fun guessing at what the heck we were drawing in Drawful. It brought back classic memories of staying up all night in another similar multiplayer game on the DS, LOL!

We followed that game up with a random game I got for Xbox One since I heard so much good buzz about it online called Overcooked. This simple four player Root Beer Tapper-meets-cooking game featured some of the most fun I have ever had in a multiplayer game. When your teamwork is firing on all cylinders it is a blast, when it is not it led to us playfully shouting at each other until one point a few of us had to drop the controllers because we were uncontrollably laughing so hard. It was a moment I will never forget. There was one other multiplayer night between us that usurped these moments, but I will save it for later.

6) Extra Life 2016

Extra Life is the annual 24 hour gaming event where we game for a day straight in order to raise funds for our local children’s hospital! These last two years I traveled down to my friends, Chris and Lyzz’s house to game for 24 hours straight. I always attempt to beat WWF No Mercy’s 100-man Survival mode, and just like all previous attempts, I failed about halfway through. There were two main takeaways from Extra Life 2016. One of them was binging through Gears of War 4’s campaign from start to finish during the 24 hours. I love me some Gears, and Extra Life happened not to long after I picked up my Xbox One, so Gears 4 ended up being one of the first games I played on it. I had to take a break halfway through Gears 4 because I signed up to run a local 10k in the area, which was actually a nice breather to get out of the house and get some exercise and fresh air! I came back revitalized and had a great time playing nonstop until I finished.

Chris and Lyzz were playing their own Gears 4 campaign in split-screen coop and we both did our best to look away from each other to avoid spoilers. Turns out you cannot have a split screen system team up online with another player on their own, but we found a way to get through it on our own without spoilers! Gears 4 turned out awesome as expected, and was a return to form after the experimental game in the series that was Gears Judgment.

The other game I played later on in Extra Life I want to make sure to recognize is Mega Man 2 off the Xbox One Mega Man Legacy Collection. I never gave a Mega Man game a serious chance before. I recall trying to play the first one a couple times long ago and getting frustrated many times and not beating a single stage. In the Legacy Collection however, it has save states which I made sure to exploit to the fullest. I was saving every screen or two in Mega Man 2. I decided to start on that one since I usually hear that is the best, and it had a firm, but fair challenge level to it. I died many times, but wanted to try out different techniques in order to progress and beat each boss. I did not finish the game, but did complete three stages, which will go down as the first three levels I ever finished in a Mega Man game! One day I will return to at least finish Mega Man 2, mark my words!

5) Firewatch

After finishing Dear Esther and Gone Home a couple years ago, I have become a huge fan of the genre that has become known as the walking simulator! Firewatch hit out of nowhere early in 2016 and became a much talked about indie game throughout the year. I finally played it towards the end of the summer, and relished every hour of the six or seven hours it took me to finish. The graphics are superb and perfectly capture the solitude and beauty of being a fire ranger in the vast wilderness. I could get lost out there forever, and spent many moments just pausing in the game and taking in the sublime surroundings. The score is not always present, but knows when to kick in to amplify the moments that need it.

I could not help but get immersed in the narrative between the two fire rangers, and the mystery that the two found themselves in as the summer unraveled. Reading other game of the year reactions in recent weeks I found myself in the minority that liked the twist towards the end and was not thrown for a loop by it. I really loved the final days in the game, and it all culminated in an impactful moment for me when I could tell my summer with Firewatch was coming to an end. I got lucky and managed to get in on the Limited Run release of the physical copy of the game on PS4, and look forward to replaying it sooner than later with the newly added developer commentary.

4) Objection, dedicated handheld gaming is here to stay!

I try to dedicate a couple hours a week to traditional handheld gaming. I am not talking smartphone games, but good old fashioned DS/Vita/3DS gaming! I grew up playing a ton of my various versions of the GameBoy and still try to cram in a little bit of the current stuff too. I am a huge Ace Attorney fan and spent a good chunk of my 2016 handheld gaming getting caught up in the series. I finished off Ace Attorney Investigation: Miles Edgeworth early on in the year, and spent a good chunk of 2016 gradually chipping away at the first 3DS entry in the series, Dual Destinies. The last couple weeks I finally put my first few hours in the most recent release in the series, Spirits of Justice.

If you have played one Ace Attorney game before you know what to expect, and that is a ton of crazy over-the-top characters you meet investigating crime scenes and cross examine on the witness stand as you try and clear innocent names from murder cases. There is a ton of reading involved in these games which is why they take forever to get through at my rate, but they are worth it in the long run to me since I find myself craving what kind of adventures the Wright Anything Agency are getting themselves into next.

There was one other non-Ace Attorney game I snuck into for a few hours at a time in-between my travels in and out of the court room. That game was the PSone version of Final Fantasy VII on the Vita. I have started FFVII a couple times before, but never made serious progress in it, and I guess I did not make a ton of progress in it this year either, but barely set a new record for time and progress! I originally was trying to keep up with Game Informer when FFVII was a part of their Game Club feature, but quickly fell behind. I came back around to FFVII in December for a few more hours, and am glad to say that I finally got out of Midgar and into the overworld for the first time in FFVII! I went on to get through the portion of the game in the village of Kalm, and then failed a few times at trying to kill off that big serpent by the Chocobo farm outside of Kalm. I think I need to grind by there for a bit in order to proceed. While I know I am nowhere close to finishing the game, I plan to periodically pick it up and eventually beat it in 10-15 years!

3) Nintendo Sixty-Fourrrrrrr!!!!

If you have somehow stuck with me through this dreadfully long top 10 blog, you might recall that I stated I had one other awesome local coop gaming night I wanted to elucidate on later. That brings us here to where my brother was visiting from out of town and he joined me, Derek and Ryan for an N64 themed night of gaming. I knew Derek and Ryan had a bunch of N64 games, and I brought a bunch of my favorites to play also. I was a little taken aback when Derek asked me to bring the N64 wrestling game I loved so much because I did not associate Derek and Ryan to be much of wrestling game fans before. Turned out that WWE 2K16 was a recent Xbox Live Games for Gold free game of the month and both of them spent a bit of time suplexing and powerbombing the heck out of each other in recent weeks and wanted to give the N64 game I raved about the most a whirl as a result.

Derek and Ryan picked up the controls for WWF No Mercy in no time and we spent at least a good hour tearing each other up in intense tag team and Royal Rumble matches. I am still befuddled that Derek and Ryan had a legit good time playing wrestling games that night, and it will probably be the only night that will ever happen with them, but I will forever remember it! The night did not end there because we went on to spend hours in other four-player hits like NBA Hangtime and New Tetris. I was surprised New Tetris went over as well as it did, but the timeless puzzle game was the right breather we all needed after some heated rounds of basketball and wrestling. It would not be an N64 night if we did not bust out the Giant Bomb favorite, Mario Party 2, and we proceed to complete a 20 turn game where everybody won!

The highlight of the night however was breaking out the original console FPS multiplayer hit, Goldeneye 007. I have read many times online how this game does not hold up in modern times, but I beg to differ! Play it on a big TV and play for at least 10 minutes, and trust me, you will be conditioned to like it was 1997 all over again! That is what happened to us that night. Sure the graphics are obviously last-century, and there is a bit of slowdown in four-player split screen when the explosions start rolling, but if you are on a big screen TV after about 10 minutes, you get use to it because the core gameplay is still that damn good. We played all kinds of variants including old favorites such as Grenade Launchers in the Temple, Rocket Launchers in the Complex, Proximity Mines in the Archives and a random map incarnation of Slappers Only with Golden Gun rules so that each slap meant instant sweet death! These five games for about five-to-six hours that magical night combined for nonstop greatness and hands down my favorite multiplayer game night 2016!

2) MGS 2/3/Peace Walker

Since the fall of 2015 when Metal Gear Solid V released. I swore to myself I will get around to playing through all the Metal Gear Solid games in order. Up until that point I only finished MGS4 and gave up on MGS2 after just a couple hours. I somehow have found myself still determined to meet this goal as I plugged away and finished The Twin Snakes GameCube remake of the original MGS by the end of 2015. Throughout 2016 I managed to finish MGS2 and MGS3 and got through around the first 15 story missions of Peace Walker off the HD Collection on PS3. I even dabbled a bit with the first hour of Portable Ops through backwards compatibility on the Vita, but decided to stick to playing on consoles and moved on to Peace Walker instead.

So what do I make of the series thusfar? I have absolutely enjoyed the core three games immensely so far. I am probably playing these games completely wrong, but I played through all three MGS games on very easy difficulty. I have no shame, but for what it is worth I try to play stealthy, and if I blow my cover and fail to retreat that is when I bust out the AK-47 and go guns blazing. That works OK most of the time for me in very easy. In Peace Walker there is no difficulty setting so that involves a bit more trial and error, but thankfully that game’s missions are shorter since it was originally designed for the PSP so failure does not mean a ton of backtracking there.

I really enjoyed my time with the first MGS, and the updated graphics on the GCN made it much more pleasant on the eyes. By the time I finished it, even all these years after its release I could tell I finished something special. Playing as Raiden did not bother me in the sequel….unless it came to saving which sometimes resulted in a few raised eyebrows. It still had the same unique, great gameplay as the original, and managed to tell another memorable chapter in the MGS universe. That said, I still rank it at the bottom of the core trilogy I liked the least, but not by as much one may think.

I am probably going to give the slight edge to MGS3 to being my favorite so far. The gameplay seemed to have hit its stride there by finally giving the ability to move and shoot simultaneously, and I actually did not mind the healing/wound treatment system in MGS3 either. The Cold War-era story is probably what I will give the nudge to me liking MGS3 the most. Each MGS game got to gradually become more bonkers in nature, and wrapping the Cold War narrative around it seemed like a perfect fit. I also loved the boss battles the most in MGS3, especially the final battle with ‘The Boss’ and the beauty with how it is presented in MGS3 will easily rank as one of my favorite moments in videogames.

1) Oxenfree

When it came down to it, I only finished three games in 2016 that were released that calendar year, and Oxenfree was one of them. It is a walking simulator like Firewatch, and also like that game the small development team at Night School Studios has members that worked on the critically acclaimed first season of The Walking Dead from Telltale Games. Unlike Firewatch though, Oxenfree has far simpler 2D graphics that are watercolor-esque in nature. Do not let these simple looks deceive you, because the narrative that surrounds these four coming-of-age teens out for a night of fun on an island quickly transforms into a night of sci-fi spookiness that I will never forget and left me wanting a sequel ASAP.

I am heads over heels for the script and dialogue that unloads throughout Oxenfree. One moment the cast is trying to come together to figure out the grand mystery of this island, then the next they are taking quick asides to find out more about their personal lives that encapsulates the everyday life of teenage drama. Night School Studios make tremendous use of certain camera tricks and jump cuts that do not necessarily equal out to jump scares, but sure as hell something close that had my skin crawling with goosebumps as the adventure played out.

There are several pivotal decisions that will affect gameplay, so naturally I had to play the game a second time telling myself no matter what I am going to play the game differently. A lot of the dialogue choices in the game have positive, neutral and snarky response options so I spent a good chunk of my second playthrough being a snarky jerk and it was fascinating seeing the responses I would get in return. When it came down to bite the bullet in the end and make one of the big game-changing decisions, I had to pause the game and step away from it for a few minutes to think it over. Even after doing that, I could not go back on my natural instincts and I went with my original decision in one of the most frantic moments I had in playing videogames.

Shortly after I finished Oxenfree a second time I was caught off guard by the developers patching in a remixed mode for people who have finished the game that offers up a slightly new gameplay experience. These changes were minor, but they did add a few new wrinkles throughout gameplay and the dialogue would unexpectedly change at random intervals to keep me constantly alert to see what tricks Oxenfree had up its sleeve next. I think it goes without saying if a game can manage to convince me to finish it three times within a year, especially at a time when I have just a fraction of the time to game than what I use to, then Oxenfree easily walks away from 2016 as my favorite videogame experience of the year! Limited Run has a physical release for PS4 set for later this month, and you can bet your booty that I will be attempting to pick up a copy and experience this game a fourth time!

July was also a busy month for games. I plowed through Homefront, which I made the unfortunate mistake of playing through after beating the far superior Call of Duty: Black Ops. Finally TreyArch can say they made a Call of Duty campaign that can hold their own against Infinity Ward's best efforts. Homefront was ok, but did not live up to the blitzkrieg of media hype that THQ subjected us all too.

I got back into adventure games this month and finally beat the first episode of Penny Arcade after chipping away at it the past few months for a total of around 13 hours. I also finished the very first episode of Sam & Max, which was a much more manageable two to three experience and started the first Puzzle Agent on PC recently also. I started and finished the retro-RPG, Breath of Death VII that came out a couple weeks ago in about six hours. It is an ode to 8 and 16-bit RPGs, with many references to the great RPGs of those generations, and is well worth checking because it only goes for a buck off the 360 Indie Games Marketplace.

Finally, that Fallout 3 itch came crawling back and I finished The Pitt and Mothership Zeta DLC packs. Both took around three hours, with a little more time spent in the Pitt because I got addicted to Ingot hunting. Both experiences were pretty short, but the Pitt was still good 'ol Fallout fun, and while Zeta I give props for being something different, it just tried to play too much like a regular FPS, and Fallout 3 is anything but.