Most Dishonorable: Sonic Frontiers

“I am a pervert. I am a disgusting little worm who craves pain. Let me feel your hate, Sonic Hedgehog. Destroy my hopes, my dreams.” This is the prayer of The Sonic Fan. This is the creed that we the aggrieved live by. There are fits and starts, there are highs and lows and lows and lows, but there is only one canonical ending to this life sentence. Behind us, hell. Ahead, a desert. There is no oasis. The only solace we might find is that this will all be over very, very fast.

Sonic Team’s latest Lament Configuration is Sonic Frontiers, a game that commits the gravest sin of being utterly fascinating yet torturous to play. This dime store stab at cobbling together a few disparate open worlds with the broken bones of 3-D Sonic is the most interesting Sonic the Hedgehog has been since ever and one of the worst games I've ever finished. While Sonic Mania was a great game and perhaps the first and only great Sonic game, it was more or less a sanded down compilation of 2-D Sonic’s greatest hits. Here we have a 3-D Sonic that still feels rotten to play and still cannot grasp that slowing down our Blue Blur absolutely kills his gimmick. Sonic Frontiers reaches for heights much higher than any of its three dimensional predecessors but falls six feet deep into the dirt.

This whole, hateful mess really feels like someone at Sega said “do Breath of the Wild, but Sonic. You have six days.” I’d love to know how they got to this point. When the trailers for this game hit, the marketing team really pushed the Breath of the Wild-ness of it all. When word hit Sonic Team that the folks in marketing cut a trailer that leans into the Zelda of it all, they got pretty miffed and pushed back against the suits. Now that it’s in my hands, it’s impossible not to compare the two. Lush but mostly bland worlds littered with mini-puzzles, a race of tiny little freaks scattered everywhere you can collect for enhancements, an either/or upgrade path you use to build either health or stamina, and a mess of shrines that pop you out of the world. It mashes all this stuff together with absolutely none of Zelda’s elegance, constantly pestering the player with an updated map or training tutorials or brief but frequent and unskippable cut scenes that really take the legs out from under a character whose entire appeal is speed.

The five overworld maps are littered with points of “interest” where Sonic can solve “puzzles,” like pressing the dodge button seven times in a row, parrying projectiles, or scurrying to a platform in the short to middle distance. No real brain busters to be found. Completing these “challenges” will award you one of the 45 different currencies Sonic has to collect to move this nonsense along. Spiky hearts for offense, blue fruit looking things for defense, Coko spirits for speed or ring capacity, rings, purple coins for fishing, meteorite pieces to unlock chances to get more purple coins, skill points for skills, gears to unlock levels, keys from those levels to unlock Chaos Emeralds, and either pink hearts, medallions, or wrenches to unlock forward the story via your cyber ghost pals Amy Rose, Knuckles and Tails (respectively).

In keeping with Sonic’s grand tradition of aimless, mindless level design, these worlds are a miserable time to navigate and explore. There are 2-D sequences lodged all willy-nilly into the 3-D world you can get trapped in and have to find your way to one of the exits because the game suddenly decides to ignore that whole third dimension thing. If you can rustle up enough gears to activate the shrines that send you to more traditional 3-D Sonic levels, well, congrats: now you have to play through 3-D Sonic levels. Like I said, this is a hateful video game. The levels are predictably bad and offer next to nothing other than some occasionally cool music, though the tracks aren’t especially memorable or up to snuff with the musical legacy of Sonic the Hedgehog. There’s not even any aesthetic variety level to level, as you’re just flipping between Green Hill, Marble Garden and Cyberspace themes. From there, you clear challenges to score keys that help you unlock Chaos Emeralds. Then it’s just Sonic running to and fro between Chaos Emeralds and his dipshit buddies (not you, Knuckles you rock) while a Cybergoth Hologirl learns the true meaning of love by eavesdropping on Sonic and Tails figuring out their relationship. I guess that part is kinda cute.

At first I thought the most aggravating sequences are the boss fights. Visually indecipherable and soul suckingly tedious, these boss fights bring Frontiers’ mind-numbing combat to a new low. It's like eating slapdash shit sandwich of quick time events, button mashing and confusingly timed parry sequences all while struggling to wrestle the game’s unwieldy camera and out-hustle a timer. The only saving grace is the emocore anthem that kicks in during each boss fight. Yes, this game’s saving grace is emocore. These are truly dark times.

But then came the pinball sequence. There are little minigame quests that pop up throughout the game that range from awful to inoffensive. But this fucking pinball thing, man. Near the end of the third map, this game grinds to a halt to make you score 5 million points in the floatiest, jankiest virtual representation of pinball I’ve ever had the pleasure of suffering through. Out of nowhere, a cave door opens and you have to beat this rinky dink pinball board to activate the shitty boss fight. You plink and plunk this gravity defying pinball around and pray to hell that you get lucky and don’t lose your multiplier by dropping a ball. Lose three balls and you’re fucked. Imagine sitting there playing a perfectly fine video game, something not at all like Sonic Frontiers, and suddenly someone shoves you onto a golf course and says “go play 18 holes, dickhead. And if you wind up over par, start the fuck over.” This game hates you. It hates your time. It might even hate Sonic.

The whole thing mercifully ends with a bunch of incomprehensible bullshit. Sonic’s flesh is being eaten by the cyber corruption after saving his pals, then they give him a group hug and he absorbs them. Then he does a bunch of stuff and beats the penultimate boss (“Supreme”), but that boss has a final form that Sonic has to fight in space. So Cybergoth Hologirl hacks into the final boss right before it’s revealed that she’s Dr. Eggman’s daughter. Then Sonic and Supreme go into outer space and Supreme grabs Sonic and rips a speedball that sends Sonic through the moon and then the game ends. And all his pals are back to normal now, no longer absorbed into Sonic’s corporeal form. And then there’s a song about how Cybergoth Hologirl loves her dad, Dr. Eggman.

Now this might be the little blue hedgehog talking, but I believe life is a disease inflicted upon the unwilling. Earth is a bad place, humans don’t belong here, and my greatest nemesis lives inside me. We hold these truths to be self evident. I cope with these truths by playing video games. Good ones, bad ones, funny ones, short ones, long ones, I don’t give a fuck. I love ‘em more than anything in the whole world. That’s my business. That’s what I do. But I hate this game, Sonic Frontiers, as much as I hate being alive. This game is so agonizing, so baffling and unreasonable that it might as well be reality. It truly hurts that much. I’d be better off reading a book or meeting someone new than playing this video game. Sad, sick shit. I hope Yuji Naka rots in prison for bringing Sonic Hedgehog to life. Or insider trading or whatever it is he’s clearly guilty of. Fuck Sonic and fuck it all.

So welcome to my video game year in review for 2022. Enjoy!

Pour one out for: Fuser (2022)

I wrote about how much I loved this game back in 2020, but wished for more music to tinker around with. I finally got some, including the best band in the world, The Cure! Then the DLC dried up. Now it’s all getting de-listed and so is the game. Turns out nobody was playing Fuser and the music licenses are all expiring and we’re forever losing another great game to the sands of time and evils of corporate America. Epic Games bought Harmonix and all the stuff that made them fun and weird will be washed away while they’re probably stuck coordinating a Machine Gun Kelly concert you can watch in Fortnite. Can’t we de-list him instead?

Pac-Man Museum+, ranked

14) Pac-Moto (2007)

This video game is an affront to God, or as I call him, Pac-Man. Originally from Namco Museum Remix for Nintendo Wii, this game is a remix of Namco’s not at all popular Motos series. It plays like a herky-jerky version of “Bumper Balls” from Mario Party. Fuck this game.

13) Pac-In-Time (1994)

This platformer is a bad idea from the jump. I don’t think Pac-Man should step foot outside of his mazes. Frankly, I don’t think Pac-Man should have feet. Too sexy, too distracting.

So an evil witch drags Pac-Man back in time almost 20 years to 1974, which is a paltry five years before he was born. Doesn’t seem all that exciting or consequential to me. Watergate and ‘Nam were already wrapping up, and I don’t think the invention Betamax would’ve exactly blown his mind. If this video game was just Pac-Man drinking Tequila Sunrises (which was modernized and popularized in 1973!) and watching the first five years of Saturday Night Live, I’d be interested. That’s exactly how I would’ve rode out the Carter administration. But yanking Pac-Man out of his natural habitat and dropping him into various landscapes where he clumsily hops around and tries to find all the pellets replaces all the thrill and urgency of classic Pac-Man with the meandering dullness of Cool Spot. Cool Spot isn’t fit to change Baby Pac-Man’s dirty goddamn diaper. Get out of here with this nonsense. What are we doing here?

12) Pac-Land (1984)

Goddamnit, what did I just say? At least Pac-Land has the decency to simply move from left to right and just end. The charmingly gaudy MS Paint backgrounds are at least worth a laugh. But I’m done laughing. Pac-Man is serious business and business thus far is a damn joke.

11) Pac-Attack (1993)

This half-assed sketch of a Pac-Man puzzle game just shows how much shit they threw at the wall with this cool video game dude we all know and love and how little of it stuck. There’s no depth, personality or imagination to be found anywhere in this bland, brown puddle of mud. They don’t even use all the colors for the ghosts. This game is all the worst parts of a bootleg and none of the fun stuff, like copyright infringement or the main character doing bong hits with Goku. More like Wack-Attack.

10) Pac ‘n Roll Remix (2007)

This is the furthest a Pac-Man Museum+ entry strays from the Pac-Man original recipe while still being playable. It’s not very good, but it’s undoubtedly more playable than any other bastardized experiment mentioned earlier on this list. As our great hero, you roll around 3-D landscapes and engage in kinda, sorta platforming and ramp jumping while collecting enough pellets to unlock the gate to the next area. The levels are over fast enough and rolling Pac-Man around super fast is at least somewhat fun. It’s not what anyone cool and smart wants out of a Pac-Man video game, but it doesn’t send me into a blind rage. That’s a damn rare thing these days.

9) Pac & Pal (1983)

We’ve reached the top nine, where some of these games are still pretty bad but at least Pac-Man is back where he belongs: in a maze surrounded by ghosts. Pac & Pal was another failed attempt at recreating Pac-Man Fever following the general disinterest in Super Pac-Man. Ms. Pac-Man was a monstrous hit from Chicago legends Midway, but it had a bit of step-child status as it wasn’t a Namco original. Unfortunately for Namco, Ms. Pac-Man was more fun and popular than anything else the Japanese developer could sell to arcades at the time. Wanna know why? No pellets! The lack of pellets in Pac & Pal (allegedly) made arcade goers sick to their stomachs, causing widespread yakking (the clinical term for “blowing chunks”) and giving arcades their signature stench that would never quite leave. It also wasn’t very fun.

Our hero frolics around his little maze as he is wont to do, but instead of gobbling up pellets, he flips playing cards that unlock different items across the map. Then a little green thing named Pal runs around and occasionally grabs the items for you. And it just goes on like that. It’s perfectly fine and quite cute, but it’s not Pac-Man. Very few things can be Pac-Man. It’s a burden we all must live with.

8) Super Pac-Man (1982)

Super Pac-Man is a little more fun and a little less cute than Pac & Pal. The little green thing is gone, as are the pellets… but they’re all replaced with fruit! But those are supposed to be the bonus items! What in the world were they smoking they were making this one? The sheer audacity.

The fruits are locked in tunnels that you need to eat keys to unlock unless you get the Make Pac-Man Big power-up, in which case you can chomp through the gates. It’s not all that interesting of an idea for a sequel. They should’ve kept the game almost exactly the same but instead make Pac-Man a lady. Put a bow on her head. Maybe give her a little mole. Some fishnets wouldn’t hurt. Just a thought.

7) Pac-Mania (1987)

We’re half way through this 14 game collection and the games are finally, actually getting mostly good. Pac-Mania ditches the useless gimmicks of Super and Pal and sticks to the original recipe of clearing a maze full of dots while ghosts chase you around. Oh thank fucking god almighty.

Pac-Mania turns the perspective to an isometric view and zooms in tightly, leaving only one sixth or so of the map visible at any one time. It moves much slower than other Pac-Man games, but it does have something those games don’t: a damn jump button. Armed with the power of hops, our hero can now gracefully leap over those treacherous ghosts that have haunted him so, like the grim specter of gravity that has cursed him for so long. The faux 3-D and the small tweaks show that using a light touch on the classic formula was all Namco needed to make an interesting if still inferior followup to the game that made them famous.

6) Pac-Man Arrangement (arcade) (1996)

The arcade version of Pac-Man Arrangement takes a bit of artistic inspiration from Namco’s own Galaga ‘88. Bright, chunky pixels and a diverse color palate make the game look like ice cream scoops chasing each other around. The look is a bit garish and uneven, but there’s a bit of carnival-like charm here; everything all at once til you puke.

We get some new bells and whistles here – speed boosts and new power-ups – as well as a new ghost named Kinky. Kinky uses a whip to make Pac-Man submit, then ties him down and smothers him while the player watches helplessly and becomes aroused. I’ve lost several hundred credits playing this game and never made it past the first level. I always need a nap whenever I get a game over.

5) Pac-Man Arrangement (console) (2005)

The home version of Pac-Man Arrangement was released nine years later on one of the many Namco Museum collections. We trade the sprites in for hot polygonal action and get a much brighter and bouncier look for this go-round. We get a few more minor tricks and treats here, like lifts and teleporters, but the core game remains; gobble gobble, wakka wakka.

We do get some fun boss fights for the sake of variety. They aren’t too complex, but they offer a fun diversion from your standard maze chase action. This is a good one.

4) Pac-Man Battle Royale (2010)

Ah, the jewel of the arcade. Pac-Man Battle Royale is a stand-up cocktail style four-player cabinet that cops some of the mechanics from Pac-Man Championship Edition but adapts them into a multiplayer format. Like CE, eating the food near the center of the map morphs and resets half the map, starting the cycle all over again. Here, eating power pellets allows Pac-Man to devour not only ghosts, but the other players’ Pac-Men. Seven rounds of hot and fast action for a quarter a pop. You’d have to hit Times Square in the 80s to get that sort of bang for your buck.

3) Pac-Man Championship Edition (2007)

The third best Pac-Man game on a 14-game collection should be a cause for celebration. Instead, this game’s standing and very inclusion only highlights the disappointment with this collection. CE is a fine game by itself. In 2007, it breathed new life into the Pac-Man franchise and lit the Xbox Live Arcade on fire. The game changed the Pac-Man formula by making the whole game a single, evolving map that changes every time you eat the bonus food that appears when you clear the pellets. Five to 10 minutes at the time, pack as many points into one run as you can. It captures the simplicity of the original Pac-Man but doubles down on the speed and precision. It is a thrill. Or was a thrill until 2010.

See, in 2010, Pac-Man Championship Edition DX happened. That game is one of the best games ever made. More music, more strategy, more modes and more skins. More and better everything. It is an arcade-style masterpiece. It even got a vastly inferior sequel in 2016, which like this collection is also available on Switch. CE DX+ however is nowhere to be found in this collection or anywhere on the eShop for that matter. The disrespect Namco Bandai has shown by not including DX in this collection is tantamount to popping Pac-Man execution style while Ms. Pac-Man and Junior gaze on in horror. Disgusting. Reprehensible. Ridiculous.

2) Pac-Man 256 (2015)

Originally released as a micro-transaction monstrosity on mobile, Pac-Man 256 is an endless, isometric, upward scrolling Pac-Man inspired by the original Pac-Man’s glitched-out killscreen and developed by Crossy Road makers Hipster Whale. Eat dots and swallow power-ups to escape an ever-encroaching glitchy corruption crawling upwards from the bottom of the screen. The power-ups are bigger than just power pellets, too. Tornadoes swarm, lasers shoot and fires blaze to straight up merc the parade of ghosts headed your way.

While the mobile version was hamstrung by ads that dissuaded players from giving the game more than one play per day, the console version is hard to put down. This vastly improved port is the probably the number one draw of this collection, as most of these other games are either a) not worth playing or b) available elsewhere. This one rules.

1) Pac-Man (1980)

The best Pac-Man in this Pac-Man collection is Pac-Man. If things were different and Pac-Man Championship Edition DX+ was here, it would win in a bloodbath. It might even kill every game ever except for DOOM. Or Breath of the Wild. Or Burnout Paradise. That’d be one hell of a Fatal Four-Way. I’m picturing a 60 minute broadway draw where Pac-Man, Doomguy, Link, and a really fast car are all bleeding profusely from their head in their respective corners while the closing bell rings. But Pac-Man is still a good video game. You may know Pac-Man as God or Ms. Pac-Man’s husband. He’s good people.

Best 2021 games of 2022

Unsighted

A roving gang of lesbian cyborgs are here to stop the world’s hourglass from running out of sand by slicing and dicing their way through an army of robuts. No, this isn’t a lost episode of The Morton Downey Jr Show. It’s Unsighted and it owns. The core gameplay is pretty by the numbers action/adventure stuff; upgrade attacks and learn new abilities to access new areas whoop more ass. As the game progresses, it pulls off enough little tricks along the way to stay interesting. The key here though is the quick and hard hitting combat that it rides all the way home. Gorgeous background art and blood soaked pixels kept this game at the forefront of my mind all year long. While roguelikes and Metroidvanias are a dime a dozen these days, I haven’t played a straightforward 2-D action adventure game this good in some time. Hell, I played this one twice.

Unpacking

Moving is a royal pain in the ass. Whether it’s changing domiciles or getting your lazy ass off the couch, we can all agree that being active is abhorrent and something we as a society should avoid at all costs. Stay inside! It’s too bright out and there’s a whole lot of people out there who will try to talk to you! Your TV gets lonely when you’re not watching it, and that’s no way to treat an electronic device. Instead of moving, try Unpacking, an organizational box-emptying simulator with chill beats to unpack to.

Using zero text and strictly environmental storytelling, Unpacking unfolds over the course of several years in a young lady’s life. Through changes in school, financial hardship and romantic relationships, the player learns about our unseen and unheard from main character via the things they carry and the things they’ve left behind. From essential items like game consoles and DVDs to useless crap like toothbrushes and shoes, every item in every box has a place. Certain items don’t fit where they used to, perhaps due to embarrassment or shitty boyfriends. Other items get tucked away in corners or even replaced over time. Some photos are destined for junk drawers never to be seen again, while others get primo positioning on the fridge.

The game part here isn’t so challenging. Some items have specific spots they must be dropped in, while others have a generalized area where the player is allowed to place them. Does your Gameboy go on the nightstand or the desk? Nightstand in case of a nocturnal emergency, obviously, but the game allows the player to make their own mistakes. As soon as everything is in its right place, it’s time to move again. This is a game about either what clicks or doesn’t click anymore. And boy howdy does clicking items into place here feel fantastic. Great clickin’, great clackin’, no doubt. But nothing quite fits until our unknown lead finds a place to click into themselves. After moving away from home to tin can apartment to shitty boyfriend after shitty boyfriend and back home again, this game tells a wonderful, simple story about finding a place for your life and yourself without using a single word.

Picross S Genesis + Master System Edition

This is a game that knows when to show its cards. Picross (aka The Devil’s Math, aka Button Crank, aka Poor Man’s Sudoku) is a game of patience. Find the big numbers, work the edges, and wait for the pixels to come together in glorious fashion. Not just household names like Squime from Alien Syndrome or Duke Oda from ESWAT: City Under Siege, but inanimate objects like Stop Watch from Puzzle & Action: Tant-R and Spring from Sonic the Hedgehog. Use your noodle and spacial awareness while rocking the fuck out to Outrun tracks and other Sega tunes chopper-lifted in for the soundtrack, then be rewarded with a pixelated portrait of all of Sega’s greatest heroes. Heroes like Gwyn from Beyond Oasis or Sieg from Record of the Bahamut War. Wow, are those the Yellow Frogs from Puzzle & Action: Ichidant-R? You bet, pal! It’s like the Hollywood Walk of Fame, but in puzzle form!

All the stars are out and more...except Knuckles the Echidna. Where the fuck is Knuckles? You know, The Echidna? Listen, my love for Tyris Flare from Gauntlet II knows no bounds. And my adoration for Kaiser Greedy from Ristar goes without saying. No offense to RinRin & MinMin from Kung Fu Kid, but where the fuck is Knuckles? He was the shining star of the hit Hollywood blockbuster Sonic the Hedgehog 2. He beat Ernest Borgnine for People’s Sexiest Man Alive in ‘97. He co-hosted MTV’s Spring Break with Daisy Fuentes. WHERE the FUCK is Knuckles? Larcen Tyler from Eternal Champions isn’t exactly as boffo at the box office as he used to be, but they gave him a payday here. What gives?

I’m 149 puzzles into this disre-goddamn-spectful embarrassment. This scar on the face of the legendary Sega/Sammy/Atlus brand. And their own god king of everything, heartthrob dreamboat to some, badass motherfucker to all, Knuckles the Motherfucking Echidna is nowhere to be found. I mean they’re treating him worse than Tonga from Gain Ground! False profit Sonic the Hedgehog is here! That little punkass Miles “Tails” Prower is here! Hell, even the goddamn Spring showed up!

Then in the golden hour, right at the buzzer when all hope was lost, when this pathetic world was ready to finally collapse in on itself, there he was. Standing in the doorway with a holy sun shining on his back. Puzzle 150. The final boss. The grand finale. Knuckles the Echidna. He came back to save us. I can’t think of a better ending in video games and neither can you.

Itty Bitty Vidi Game Committee

Dead Cells – Queen and the Sea DLC

Four years later and Dead Cells is still getting better. Still the hottest action in 2-D roguelikes and poised to get even better by adding Castlevania content next year, including music. Adding Castlevania music to anything makes it exponentially better. Group sex, funerals, you name it.

They Always Run (2021)

This game owes a lot to Flashback, and to me that’s a bad thing. The marionette-like animations make the combat far too stilted and so encounters feel overly scripted. These painterly landscapes sure look pretty though.

Nightmare Reaper

While I love the look and concept of this one, it just couldn’t get its hooks in me. Love a game with a cold open, though. And the Gameboy Advance SP pause screen is neat.

Welcome to Elk (2020)

I think the worm has turned on these dreamlike allegories for purgatory stories. Enough is enough. You can see it coming from a mile away at this point. Welcome to Elk is another one of those, but it’s got a cute coloring book look and a funny script. It even blends in some FMV sequences, so I’ve gotta give it up.

Inertial Drift (2020)

There’s not much to this one beyond the sick drifting and dope breakbeat soundtrack, but I’m a pretty simple fella. Just ask my wife, a couch.

Donut Dodo

Old-school arcade action for all ages at the price of a Fugazi ticket in the late 80s. This is what comes out of a blender when you throw Donkey Kong, Petter Pepper and Bounty Bob into one. Mmm, viscera smoothie.

Bummers 2022

The Ascent

This one lands right on the line between the good and naughty list. I want to love The Ascent so much more than I do. This is such a vibrant world with such engrossing art direction. It feels like no two characters are of the same species. The twin stick combat is simple and adapts well to the open world. The writing is foulmouthed and funny without being showy. This is a deep dark cyberpunk future where the your only allies are in middle management. Shit is bleak, but The Ascent manages to squeeze some humor out of it.

But goddamn is this game a slog. The scenic route through these lovingly detailed grimy, neon backgrounds is visually engaging, but the boredom is only broken up by annoying enemy ambushes. Moment to moment combat feels good, but encounters are frequent and often unavoidable. Enemy swarms feel relentless and even adding a second player via co-op can’t seem to stop the flood. Victory feels more like a relief than a reward, like beating your brains against a wall and being more thrilled that it’s over rather than the fact that you bashed your whole head through brick. The difficulty curve and technical snafus (of which there are many) keep this game from reaching greatness, but they got close here.

Splatoon 3

See, Splatoon 2 had an excuse for being a glorified WiiU port. The sorta-port/sorta-sequel rescued a super cool franchise that too few people played from being trapped forever in the pitiful WiiU ecosystem and brought it to a console that you can fit in your pocket if you wear JNCOs. I have played a lot of Splatoon 3. I’d like to play a lot more. But there is no excuse for Nintendo anymore. Their Two Cups One String concept of online gaming must end. It’s 20 goddamn 22. They still put only two maps per hour in the hopper. There’s still constant disconnects. The squid ladies still need to yap at you every time it’s time to change out the TWO LOUSY MAPS (though you can at least relegate their yapping to the background now). Every time you put your console to sleep, it still has to remind you that a) you disconnected from the internet and b) kick you out to the Square to reconnect. Just reconnect! Or stay online, like the console already does to download updates! Why is Nintendo still so bad at this?

Beyond their never ending shortcomings when it comes to online play, there is next to nothing new here. There’s a pretty boring back-alley card game now. Great. You can play the Salmon Run mode whenever you want now. Cool, but that was a self-created problem in the first place, so they don’t really deserve credit for solving it. The maps and music are both worse this go round, too.

The concept and world of Splatoon is awesome. It is such a uniquely Nintendo property, and that’s the biggest bummer of it all: only Nintendo could Nintendo something this bad.

Nobody Saves the World

On it’s face, Nobody Saves the World is a perfectly fine game. It’s got a gnarly, mid 90s Nicktoons sort of look to it, a huge world to explore and an everloving assload of boxes to tick and meters to fill. What bums me out about this one is that the Guacamelee folks made it. Drinkbox made two extremely underrated luchador themed Metroidvanias prior to this here open world dungeon crawler.

This could’ve been their chance to explode, but something about this game feels flattened out. It’s like they had all the ingredients for a perfect game but no recipe to tie it all together. There’s a nakedness to its systems that just give up the game to a degree where nothing feels organic. It feels like the goal is more to level up characters and check boxes rather than defeat bosses or clear dungeons. Combat is monotonous and the only motivation to move onto the next dungeon is leveling up enough to unlock more dungeons. This would feel so crass if it was $60 and published by some giant like EA or whoever else is left, but as a $20ish indie game it’s just disappointing.

Pokemon Legends: Arceus

I thought Arceus might finally be the jump forward this franchise needed. No more plodding, linear adventures through the same stories we’ve been seeing since the debut of Red and Blue. Arceus starts out promising but still doesn’t go far enough. The echoes of Breath of the Wild in the early marketing were almost entirely superficial. We are once again grinding through battles and mashing the A-button through every bit of dialogue. It is still repetitive as all get out. Maybe someday when the Pokemon games stop selling venerable assloads of copies, GameFreak will have its back against the ropes and can finally take a chance with something completely different. This feels like a half step towards something exciting.

Redout II

In the not too distant future of Redout II, this dreadful rock we call Earth has been given a major upgrade; we moved humanity to Mars and scarred the planet’s natural beauty by erecting anti-gravity racetracks everywhere. From the Grand Canyon to the cherry blossom orchards of Japan, no site is too sacred to have some luminescent loop-de-loops plopped right on top so that hover cars can go real fast through ‘em.

These vast improvements to the planet make for a great lore backdrop in what is essentially a game where all you do is floor it. A nice AI lady is more than happy to calmly explain to you the historical significance of the landmark you’re about to disgrace with your relentless need for speed. While the game controls great and the sense of speed is excellent, I wish there would’ve been more improvements to the core game. Six years after the release of the first game, there’s really no new mechanics to speak of. It’s still the same shallow campaign with the same types of races. Going fast rules or course, but these four driver races are never feel dynamic. This game coasts on the same Budget Wipeout vibes as the first one. I’m a big fan of those vibes, as this game has the right look and sound to make it work. I don’t think we’ve got the next great racer here, just some cheap thrills. Nothing wrong with that, but I would’ve loved a little more.

Forza Horizon 5 Hot Wheels DLC

The Hot Wheels gimmick made a lot of sense for the Horizon franchise and was pretty damn fun the first time around when it hit Forza Horizon 3 in 2017. While Horizon is more arcade-y than Forza Motorsports, it’s not exactly an arcade racer. But its open world and cross-country friendly map lends itself to the wild and wicked world of twisty/turny blaze orange Hot Wheels track. It was fun and novel, but ultimately took away from what made the Horizon half of the Forza series so distinct from every other racing game around. There’s a rampant goofiness when you can go so far off road on so many different types of terrain that the confines of a Hot Wheels style track just don’t allow for. I greatly preferred the Lego expansion in Forza Horizon 4. The Lego-stylized cars looked way better and the map maintained the openness of the Horizon series that these Hot Wheels tracks lack.

We’re back to Hot Wheels for Horizon 5 and all my complaints persist. Maybe I just have more nostalgia for Legos (which rule) than Hot Wheels (which suck). In any case, this DLC followup to what was one of the greatest racing games since Burnout Paradise just doesn’t cut muster. Or pass the mustard, for that matter. Might be time for a major shakeup on the Horizon side. Motorsports can go screw as far as I’m concerned. Car dorks are the worst. They’re lamer than I am with only a fraction of the self-awareness.

Hitman 3 Ambrose Island DLC

In the end, we all get it. Most of the time, we don’t even see it coming. While it feels a bit unfair to call this totally free Hitman 3 update a Bummer of the Year, this might be the worst level IO Interactive has put together in the entirety of the modern Hitman trilogy. Aesthetically, it’s a little too close to the Santa Fortuna map. Layout-wise, it’s far too sprawling and disconnected to ever feel tense or even remotely exciting. Zero story missions to be found and a complete absence of voice work from our hero Agent 47 turns what could’ve been a fun, surprise encore into a cold, humorless corpse.

House of the Dead Remake

Amateur hour at the Curien Mansion. Cheap, cash-in remake trash. Even Sega didn’t want to put their name on this. That should’ve been a tipoff and frankly, I blame myself. I will forever be a sucker for House of the Dead, but nabbing this ground-up remake to play at home on my Switch was a rookie mistake. Looks, sounds, and feels like pure crap. I’d be better off watching the 2003 Uwe Boll film, because it rules. Sega put their name on that one!

Old Games, 2022

Mother 3 (2006)

For years I’ve dreamed of Nintendo bringing Mother 3 to the states. I’ve crushed and snorted the rumors, I snagged the Mother merch, I bought Nintendo’s ports of Mother 1 and 2, and still I sit here putzing with my fuzzy pickle while Mother 3 stays stuck in Japan.

I sat on the English language fan patch for years hoping Nintendo would finally just do the damn thing to no avail. Until this year! I finally tapped out and played Mother 3. And you know what? That was a bad idea. I ruined it. It should’ve just stayed on that pedestal I kept it on for years and kept thinking it was some lost classic I’d never get my hands on. But now I know it’s really just a 16 year old Gameboy Advance RPG that couldn’t keep my attention for more than an hour or two. I could’ve had hope. I could’ve kept dreaming. But all I got was this totally fine GBA game.

Hell is Other Demons (2019)

A single-screen, level-based action-shooter/platformer. If your game has chunky pixels, pounding synths and The Devil in it, I want to play your game. I’m an easy mark.

Each level is a bite-sized bullet hell where you (a demon) kill stuff (other demons). Upgrades get stronger and the four-color scheme changes shades, but you still gotta hold that rapid fire trigger til the bloody end. Killin’ stuff’s fun!

GoNNER 2 (2020)

GoNNER was an off-kilter, ramshackle rougelike in 2016 when the world was flooded with every flavor of the rougelike rainbow. It had a unique look, but nothing else to set it apart from the pack. It controlled in a wobbly kind of way that gave it a fun sort of looseness but in turn sacrificed precision. While it gave the game a unique feel, that’s a hard sell for a game that is pretty strictly combat based, especially when competition within the genre is so stiff. It skated by mostly on charm and sale price.

GoNNER 2 doesn’t do anything new for rougelikes, or even for the GoNNER Franchise, but it does everything GoNNER did well even better. This is especially true with regards to sound design. More bleeps, bloops and pops! An avalanche of clicks, clacks and gunfire thunders down the mountain. More everything! Psychedelic splashes of color and an ever explosive array of firepower keep this game humming through its hellish difficulty. Though tough, this game does a great job of scaling its challenge via pre-run loadouts. The various ability and weapon unlocks allows the player to adapt their own playstyle, providing so many different ways to attack the game.

The action is acrobatic and incredibly tense. That wobble dee wobble dee from the first game is still here, but I feels like it adds to the game more this go-round. Everything is very bouncy and extremely combustible. The screen is constantly exploding in GoNNER 2. It’s a great feeling. And when all that stuff is popping off and you end up getting actually good enough at the game to beat it, it all swirls together to make magic. And just like Hell is Other Demons, this one also takes place in Hell. I bet that place rules.

Valfaris (2019)

There ain’t much fancy about Valfaris. It’s solo Contra but with a Heavy Metal magazine twist. Chunky, grimy pixels laid over driving metal arrangements provide the setting for our intergalactic adventure. Our hero looks like John Romero by way of Metalocolypse, religiously banging his head in celebration after every addition to his arsenal. Guns, melee weapons, and special attacks saw through enemies leaving wayward torsos and stumbling stems spilling blood all over alien landscapes.

Valfaris isn’t trying anything new, but its confidence in its style and simplicity goes a long way. It’s challenging because it has to be. Without that grind, it would be a pretty lifeless affair. Fortunately it’s forgiving enough to curb the occasional frustration found in tricky platforming sections or difficult boss fights. There’s enough give and take between power-ups, checkpoints and secrets to keep the challenge fair from start to finish. That mix of old-school challenge and modern sensibility is a shaky tightrope to walk but Valfaris stays fluid and adaptable throughout. It certainly lands on the tougher side of modern action games but it manages to find the right balance.

Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle - Donkey Kong DLC (2018)

It was nice to see Nintendo’s one true hero reunite with his evil nemesis Mario after so long, even if it was DLC to Rabbids crossover game that came almost a year after the initial release. Donkey Kong deserves better.

Maybe that’s not fair. Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle was a great game that overshot expectations by a mile and this DK DLC adds enough new mechanics and characters to liven up the original game. But we’re talking about Donkey Kong here. The name that put Nintendo on the map. Their original arcade hit sure as shit wasn’t called Jumpman.

I think it’s time our primate pal got back into starring roles. A gritty reboot called The Donkey Kong where DK works as a union busting muscle, beating up plumbers and other tradesmen until he learns the power of organized labor and turns on his masters by murdering them with barrels. Maybe a family drama about a single gorilla dad who has to raise two chimps all by himself in the midst of a war against crocodiles. How about a two-hander starring him and Bowser where they get shithoused and commit crimes together? Realistically, I think Nintendo could and most likely will do all of these things.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Cowabunga Collection (1989-1994 via 2022)

May The Devil themself bless/curse the retro wizards at Digital Eclipse with eternal life. No developer past or present does as comprehensive a job on old school collections as they do. Frank Cifaldi (Video Game History Foundation), Chris Kohler (formerly of Kotaku) and Drew Scanlon (formerly of Giant Bomb) along with many others are the premier team in archival re-releases. Their work in the field of digital museums is unparalleled, and the Cowabunga Collection is no exception. From flattened cardboard box art to arcade maintenance manuals all the way to illustration style guides for our teenage mutant heroes, this had to have been the most extensive archival work they’ve done until Atari 50 came out a few months afterwards. This collection is filled with era-contemporary ads, animation cells from the TV show, and even from scratch strategy guides outlining tips and tricks for the various games.

It’s not hard to play these games on any PC or tablet you have lying around. A quick Google search will have you emulating Turtles in Time faster than you can say “Big Apple 3AM.” Digital Eclipse knows this and makes their experience better than any emulator would allow. If you want to play it as close to the original experience as possible, you can do that. If you want to make these old, cold and covered in mold games easier to play by modern standards, you can make them so much more enjoyable with a few minor difficulty tweaks.

Make no mistake: most of these games are not fun to play in 2022. Just watching a playthrough of The Manhattan Project is agonizing. But the thought and care Digital Eclipse put into this release is admirable. They are doing god’s work here. Long live these Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and long live Digital Eclipse. Cowafuckinbunga.

Best Music 2022

Honorable Mention: Arcade Paradise

Lemme talk to you for a minute here as a working man. A blue collar fella. The kinda guy Springsteen would write a song about (and probably has but I’m far too humble to know or acknowledge it): Work bites the big one. You gotta go do a bunch of stuff you don’t really wanna do but you’re earning money but you hate money but you need money but you forgot to jack off this morning and you miss your dog and your television is lonely and there’s no hot dogs on the rollers at Kwik Trip and it’s all a giant ball of bullshit. Arcade Paradise often feels like work. It’s tedious and monotonous but if you do it fast enough and calculate the perfect way to play the game, you get to finish workday and play video games. So in this endless, dastardly, fateful loop that is life, I spent dozens of hours playing a video game where you work your ass off just to be able to play video games after spending dozens of hours a week working my ass off just to be able to play some damn video games. Nothing matters and this is all a sick joke. No respect. Ba-ba Booey.

Arcade Paradise lives in a weird world. It exists in some sort of 80s hangover that lasts through 1999 or so. It blends all its era-specific reference points like style and technology together with its pop culture stand-ins/knockoffs to give off a very charming bootleg vibe. Nothing fits here, so everything kinda fits. You spend the game building a coin-op empire by first running a bizarre laundry mat where you wash and dry people’s clothes for them. You use the money you earn from this to order arcade games off the internet and hide them in the back room so your dad doesn’t see how big of a slacker loser you are.

Most of the arcade games offered are bad. Some of them are fun enough to play in order to farm more cash for upgrades, while others aren’t worth the quarter. The concepts are fun; there’s a Pac-Man clone with a Grand Theft Auto paint job. There’s a Space Invaders switcheroo where you get to be the titular characters. There’s a damn Vector graphics tribute to Super Hexagon in this game. Some of the games seem to be straight up making fun of how you’re wasting your time, a la No More Heroes; games where you stack boxes on other boxes, mine for gold, or two separate games with different skins where you chop down an infinite tree. The highlight of the arcade’s roster must be the Outrun clone because it must be. A space-age hover speeder races down an endless series of forked roads at top speed with while new wave synths blare. That’s where I belong.

While the games are hit or miss, the jukebox is the crown jewel of this arcade. Unlockable songs are often the highlight of any game they’re in. We get some breakbeat, some Soul Asylum-ish corndog alternative, and some sludgy metal, all ranging from awesome to hilarious. I don’t think the Arcade Paradise soundtrack is something I can listen to outside of the game. I don’t enjoy this music on a song-by-song basis, but I cannot deny the charm of a jukebox filled with 90s pastiches of Nine Inch Nails, wretched rap/rock and drum and bass tracks. Affectionate but assy. Laughable junk food. They found the voice of the 90s here and really nailed the corniness. The music fits perfectly into the game’s hodgepodge alternate universe where 80s arcade games and 90s tech intermingle to bring forth this off-kilter Pee-Wee’s Playhouse sort of world full of hard edges and bright colors.

Runner-up: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge

The golden age of the beat ‘em up is long gone, and that’s probably for the best. These types of games were made when games were still fairly young and only cost a quarter a play. Beat ‘em ups rarely made sense on home consoles where they were extremely repetitive and very short, hardly worth whatever the price tag said. But the Turtles are back now, so fuck everything I just said.

Shredder’s Revenge is a blast. It’s breezy, goofy and damn good looking, relying on the vibe of the original animated show more than anything. The six player drop in/out online co-op is key here, as playing this game alone is a sad affair. That’s what Raphael would do. Don’t be a Raphael.

This is a pretty no frills beat ‘em up, but it does everything it sets out to do very well. The few alterations it makes to the formula all work very well, but developer Tribute Games ain’t breaking any ground here. They made a brilliant move hiring Lee Topes for the soundtrack, though. The Sonic Mania vet bangs out some grade A buttrock to raise shell to. These songs are built from brawling. Two to three minutes and they’re gone baby gone. In and out, nobody moves and nobody gets hurt. Big, bright 80s sounds bang and crash to match the game’s flashy fervor.

While I throw my W up for the Wu-Tang Clan and adore Ghostface and Raekwon most of all, their track here (“We Ain’t Came to Lose”) is just pure crap. First of all, Ghostface drops Little Caesar’s references when we all know goddamn well that a) the Turtles eat Pizza Hut in the NES game and b) the deluxe edition came with Pizza Hut coupons. There is no greater sin than disrespecting the advertising partners. Secondly, he rhymes “pizza pizza” with “Easter Easter” and uses the phrase “facial features” twice. After Ghostface sleepwalks through the first verse, Raekwon picks up the refrain, then half-asses his way through his own piss poor verse. Topes is no RZA, but he does his best here for Ghost and Rae to lay down a hard hitting kung-fu canvas for them to fuck with. Always happy Starks and The Chef got a payday, but what seemed like a fitting partnership goes tits up. I don’t think that Microsoft made Wu-Tang Clan RPG will ever come out, but I’d love to see Shaolin square up with our heroes in a half-shell. Man, Mikey and ODB woulda got along gangbusters I bet. GZA and Don sharing secrets of the universe while Meth and Splinter get ripped and scarf sushi. Picture that. Live in that world. Thank me later.

Soundtrack of the Year: Tunic

Lifeformed and Janice Kwan have music for all of Tunic’s moods. The expansive three hour set they put together blends atmospheric synths with traditional piano to give the world of Tunic so much texture. Sharp, quick strikes wrench up the tension during battles while playful, tinkering chimes breathe curiosity into the world’s dark underbelly. There have been many synthrock/electronica soundtracks this year (The Ascent and Rollerdrome are other standouts), but few feel as married to the game’s voice as this Tunic soundtrack. More on Tunic in a bit.

Honorable Mentions, 2022

Rollerdrome

Rollerdrome flows. Grind, grab and kill without the fear of bailing. Each level is an arena of death where it’s shred or be killed. It’s a little Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater with a Sable-like look and the developer’s own OlliOlli World’s self-contained laser-precise challenge. Cheers to Roll7 who did some damage this year. Rollerdrome feels like a lot when the late game hits and it’s firing on all cylinders, but if you can pull it all off it feels amazing. I wish the levels had a bit more visual variety because this game is one of the best lookers of the year.

Demon Throttle

This is not the first or last time I fell for a marketing gimmick. I’m in the key demo, dude. I’m the belle of the ball for a few more years and I’m gonna bask in it, goddamnit. Demon Throttle is a cartridge only, never digital 8-bit vertical shoot ‘em up with all the bells and whistles of the era its paying homage to. It is Waffle House steak tough. Its moody, Ninja Gaiden-esque cutscenes are simple but hilarious. We follow the story of a cowboy who’s chasing down a large-hogged demon that fucked his damn wife. He teams up with a sexy vampire lady to avenge his cuckolding and regain some chalices the sexy vampire lady needs.

Demon Throttle is a bit more involved than vertical shooters of the era it’s imitating, but it’s pretty strictly an unforgiving bullet hell. The light RPG elements and upgrades take some of the edge off, but this game is a motherfucker for its four level length. And of course you’re not gonna get the canonical ending without navigating the extremely thin rouge elements and finding all the secret doors.

Demon Throttle feels pretty dated and much slighter than it should be, but it’s engaging, funny and makes good on its marketing gimmick/homage.

Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope

After blowing expectations away with the first game, I can’t give this followup the same grace I might have otherwise. This is a fun game and a smart streamlining of the first unholy crossover but never amounts to much more than that. But that first game was pretty great, so that’s still a pretty fun and cool thing to be.

Super Mario Strikers Battle League

Mario’s long neglected soccer franchise returns from a 15 year hiatus with an extremely thin but rather fun outing that’s the best Mario Sports game in quite some time (probably since 2014’s Mario Golf: World Tour). There’s very little to do here other than play some soccer. You can unlock some equipment that will boost various stats or make your character look like a cyber-doofus or soccer samurai, but the way the characters are balanced makes all that feel pretty inconsequential.

The core game is a hoot, though. Or it was until the online pool dried up a month or so after launch. Nintendo once again hamstrung the online play by making menus more cumbersome and the downtime between matches take longer than it should. Shortly after release it was hard to reliably matchmake with anyone willing to stick around for a full four minute match. The matches themselves move fast enough that you can cram a bunch together in a relatively short amount of time, but there’s no penalty for quitting and no real reward for winning or any sort of stat keeping, so there’s no point to any of this if you can’t find any decent competition. And as a 34 year old loser with nothing better to do, I whooped a lot of ass at this Mario Soccer game. I’m not afraid to embarrass your little shitbag kid, so jump if you’re feeling froggy ya little brats.

It’s a bummer that this undeserved franchise finally got another shot only to fall flat, especially considering it’s last iteration (Mario Strikers Charged for Wii) was so much fun. Nintendo seems pretty content to pump out pretty bare bones sequels to all of their sports games for each new console, with each one either the same as or worse than the last. But if you put Mario in the title, it usually sells anyways. Disappointing but not surprising.

Hyper Demon

I think the lack of simplicity in this Devil Daggers followup hurts its replay-ability, but I really admire the nightmare Sorath constructed here. While Devil Daggers was run and gun in a Quake-ish void full of hell’s forces, Hyper Demon has you air dashing, butt stomping, timing out dodges and managing power-ups. You’re still trapped in a void but this time it’s a shiny and flashy ocular assault that whiplashes between beautiful and inscrutable. Most of the time I’m playing this game I don’t know what the fuck is going on. The tutorials are well done and helpfully remove some of the mystery that obscures the high-level play, but putting those learned skills into practice during an actual run never seems to happen for me. In a game where one hit ends your run and you have to move top speed at all times just to stay alive, that tension pushes all those lessons you learned in training right out of mind while you simply try to survive.

This deepening of the Devil Daggers experience is an extremely cool and interesting idea, but in the process it loses what made that game so special. The glistening coat of chrome this game is bathed in adds to it’s breakneck insanity, but that same maximalist philosophy is what makes Hyper Demon a fun and flighty curiosity rather than a stone cold classic like Devil Daggers.

Best Games, 2022

Atari 50

If there were a Developer of the Year award it would go to Digital Eclipse (with a silver medal for Roll7). Their work on Cowabunga Collection set a new standard for archival work, then they raised it a scant few months later with Atari 50. They even started releasing original games on Itch.io and co-developed that Garbage Pail Kids game. I cannot gush enough about these folks as stewards of gaming history. Imagine Digital Eclipse having access to Nintendo, Namco Bandai, or even the late great Midway. There are so many worthy candidates for the Atari 50 treatment and I hope this is just their first stop on a long journey through gaming’s past.

I knew next to nothing about Atari’s influence on video games. All I knew was the wood paneling and shitty graphics. The most important thing this collection provides is context. Rather than just a cluttered library of old games and a partitioned off museum of concept art and promo material, Atari 50 is laid out in five different chapters across a timeline. Each era of Atari is represented in detail with video interviews, artwork, manuals and the opportunity to play the games by order of release. I can’t honestly recommend playing most of these games in 2022, but there’s certainly a few worth digging around in for awhile. Some feel suprisingly predictive of current gaming trends, with a few seemingly establishing long lasting genre tropes. Digital Eclipse went the extra mile to modernize some standouts by doing whole cloth remakes of games like Breakout and Yar’s Revenge. There’s a wholly new mashup of Atari’s vector graphics arcade games called VCTR SPCTR that brings together Asteroids, Lunar Lander, and Tempest. Digital Eclipse dug even deeper to unearth unreleased prototypes and modern day homebrew 2600 games made by enterprising dorks. This is an astonishing package.

The highlights of this collection are the parts you don’t even play. Video interviews with former Atari staffers are often informative and frequently hilarious. They might forget how a game came together and who worked on it, even as they were working on it because of how many drugs they were passing around the office at the time. But if these interviews are any indication, they never forgot all the times management tried to ruin their day and fuck them blind. There’s a reason why the main bad guys in video games are called bosses.

Atari gets a lot of well deserved shit for what they’ve become in recent years. There’s the (still pending) hotel brand launch, their dalliance with crypto currency, the there and gone VCS console reboot and many other embarrassments. I’m glad Digital Eclipse took the time to showcase what this company used to be so the good stuff isn’t lost to memory.

The Quarry

I hope this game was a hit. Developer Supermassive’s games feel like the natural evolution of FMV games. They’re over the top silly, prioritize story and involve little to no skill. Supermassive has been pumping out games under the Dark Pictures banner every October for the last four years, but The Quarry is very much a followup to 2015’s Until Dawn. I’m so happy to have a new batch of moron teens to kill off in the woods.

The actual gameplay here is slim to nil, as all you’re really doing is clumsily guiding counselors around a haunted summer camp and occasionally engaging in quick time events while doing the whole choose your own adventure thing. Do you want the horny teens to kiss? Do you want to run away like a coward while your friend gets eaten? Do you want to load a pocket full of shells into Ethan Suplee? You can do all of the above!

It seems like you can save or kill everyone here. Some characters seem too stupid to live, while others feel destined to be the Final Girl/Guy, but the choice is yours if you play your cards right. The cast of characters is pretty archetypal in that Breakfast Club sort of way, but all the actors are pitch perfect in their roles. The script is often hilarious, as the writers are never afraid of making these characters look like total dipshits in social situations.

The horror stuff is appropriately over the top, and the stable of genre vets they’ve assembled here are all more than game. Semi-famous sibling Ted Raimi is here! Laura Palmer’s mom plays a fortune teller! Former WCW World Heavyweight Champion/divorcee David Arquette shows up for a little while! The only one getting short shrift here is the fella I was most excited for, god-king Lance Henriksen. He doesn’t come on strong til the end and even then he’s barely there. It definitely feels like the more an actor cost, the less they were in it.

The motion capture work and facial tech is at the forefront here and it all looks great, which is good because the rest of the game looks pretty shitty. It doesn’t hamper the experience and actually lends well to the budget horror spectacle of it all. This game is great for a laugh. I’m really tired of people saying video games are bad at being funny. You’re either playing the wrong games or are too humorless to have your own fun.

OlliOlli World + Void Riders DLC

Shred til yer dead, baby. I don’t know how they made a whole game out of the worst Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater level (“Downhill Jam”) and made it rule, but here we are. Gotta be the style. OlliOlli World looks sharp, fresh and fly as fuck. The cel-shaded pastels and wild ass outfits certainly don’t hurt. Everything here from the fashion to the art style to the lo-fi hip-hop instrumentals hones in the game’s upbeat vibe.

The OlliOlli games have always been my jam, but this third entry is the best yet. World plays basically the same as the first two games, it’s just more filled out and streamlined; hit sick tricks, clear the challenges and don’t bail even once before you hit the end. It feels like a Simon-like memory puzzle playing out by way of fighting game combos. There’s challenges to slay, leader boards to climb and rivals to own, and the only way to do that is to run never ending trick combos from the starting line to the finish. Quick restarts are essential in games like this and it is so easy to just keep replaying each level countless times until you nail the perfect run. When you’re in the shit, it’s hard to put down.

Everything comes together here for OlliOlli World. Then the Void Riders DLC threw a bunch of weird alien shit on top of everything and made it even goofier. Happy to see this pretty simple game from a small team grow into something so wild and vibrant.

Rogue Legacy 2

Maybe time has passed Rogue Legacy 2 by a bit. The original felt so exciting when it hit in 2013. The music and graphics were a little under cooked, but the Rogue of it all felt so novel yet so simple and accessible. It was not only instantly accessible and playable but infinitely replayable. At the time of its release, it was at or near the top of its class in the genre. A decade later after a few failed games and nearly two years in early access, Cellar Door returns with a sequel to their defining work and it’s… totally fine. Well it’s better than fine. It’s one of my favorite games of the year. But in my dreams, the sequel to Rogue Legacy is a world beater. After Dead Cells and Hades, Rogue Legacy 2 just feels like a game to me. Every aspect of Rogue Legacy 2 is better than the first, from the Adobe Flash looking graphics and boring, repetitive music on up. More traits, more classes, more weapons, more biomes, more mechanics, more everything.

It just doesn’t grab me like it used to, hold me like it used to, love me like it used to. And yet I still poured dozens of hours into it. That’s how highly I regard Rogue Legacy. It so simple and it all just works perfectly. It’s a steady hand. It’s old hat. There are lots of cooler, newer hats, but this one still fits really well.

Vampire Survivors

This is a one button game if you consider the joystick a button. Vampire Survivors allows you to become a roving pillar of exploding death, shooting out violence like fireworks. With a Castlevania visual flare, your Gothic flavored sprite spits out every subweapon of the rainbow on auto-pilot. Gone are the olden days of such foolish nonsense like jumping or pressing the attack button. In Vampire Survivors, game play you.

I struggle to call this game fun or interesting or anything like that. Vampire Survivors simply is. I don’t know if it’s good or bad or anything like that. It’s fascinating. It’s ridiculous. I don’t know what it takes to make a video game, but it feels like this game could exist in some form or another in any era past or present. It’s dirt cheap and anything with thumbs can make sense of it. That’s such a wonderful thing. I feel like a dumbass describing this game and often feel like a dumbass playing it for however many minutes I lose when I sit down to play it. It’s so purely a video game and could be nothing else and often feels like nothing, but it’s everything. Playing this game is like being unconscious; I barely notice it happening but I am so grateful for it.

Runner-up: Spider-Man: Miles Morales

This is very much a modern day, triple-A open world action game. There’s a big map, lots of icons, junk to collect, and tons of side missions to pop in and out of. The story is well told, but standard superhero fare. The combat isn’t anything new if you’ve played the Batman Arkham games, the Lord of the Rings Shadow games, or anything like that. Boy, that Arkham Asylum shadow looms forever over big budget licensed games when it comes to combat. Thirteen years later and developers are still aping that combat system wholesale.

What makes all this work so well is our number one webslinger, webhead in chief, he who is having me for dinner tonight: Spider-Man. For the first time in video games, we get a new Spider-Man. Peter Parker is on workcation with MJ so we get Harlem’s own Miles Morales in his first (video game) starring role. Miles is still as big of a nerd as Peter and has a lot of that same awkwardness, but he’s a lot less corny and much more endearing. I love Peter Parker as all spiderfriends should, but every iteration of him is beyond played out at this point. Miles and his cobbled together though slightly fractured family are at the center of this story and the game is all the better for it.

I think Spider-Man endures for many reasons. He’s always the underdog. He’s always barely holding it together, he fucks up a lot, but he makes it work while still showing scars. Even most of the people he saves in this game are asking where the “real” Spider-Man is. Shit stings, man. His personal relationships with his rogues gallery always adds a layer of stakes as well. Miles knows the people he’s fighting against and still sees the good in them when others can’t. It’s the heart that makes this game special, and it’s the unimpeachable work by the voice cast keeps it beating. There’s Miles’ mom Rio, who’s still dealing with the death of her husband while trying to run for mayor. There’s his drifting friendship with BFF Phin (who’s got a heel turn up her sleeve). There’s a shaky mentorship with his Uncle Aaron (who is also itching for a turn). All these characters and actors both major and minor have tremendous chemistry together. You can feel all the weight of these relationships crashing down on Miles. Like I said, this is pretty standard superhero stuff, but it’s all executed so well with the most enduring character in comic books this side of Gotham.

All the video game stuff like upgrading skills and completing missions and crap like that feels more like a backdrop than anything, which is fine with me. I play so few of these big open world games that when I’m looking for one I’m pretty much just looking for a skin or flavor I’m into. Aside from the amazing array of bitchin’ Spider Suits you can unlock, there isn’t anything super interesting to be found in the gameplay. I love Spider-Man but have hated most of the movies and so this is my ideal way to enjoy my favorite radioactive dork.

Game of the Year: Tunic

The People’s Elden Ring. My people, anyway. This is the mysterious, obtuse open world adventure that I need in my life. It looks cuter than Elden Ring, the music is better, it’s closer to Zelda and it only lasts like 20 hours. I don’t need the sword lore or the boss with the eternal backstory and the impenetrable combat for someone with as little skill and patience as I have. I want the cute little fox with the titular tunic to waddle around and slash stuff. And if the slashing gets too tough? I can go into the menus and turn consequences off. Save your brain for the puzzles and give your thumbs a rest. It’s been a long year, you’ve played a lot of video games and those puppies are tired. I don’t want to be punished anymore. My Sonic days are over.

Tunic is a wonder. It gives you next to nothing at the outset and trickles out enough little breadcrumbs along the way to make every discovery feel like mind blowing. The NES style instruction manual pages you find and reconstruct is such a neat way to dole out critical info, but it’s never so explicit that it ruins the game’s mystique. Piecing together clues via friends and forums at launch was such a thrill and brought back that playground feeling of deciphering meaning behind certain sequences or unknown objects. This was the game this year I was thinking about whenever I wasn’t able to play it.

It’s so damn cute, too. It uses a pretty restrained color palate and fairly low detail modeling to achieve this shiny plastic playset sort of look. If you find a secret area, you can change your fox’s fur and tunic. Though the cute factor is strong, this game certainly gets spooky when it needs to. Shadowy caverns and ghostly figures from another world give this game the push it needs to go from whimsical to hardened. That second step into the Other Side is the part where all the secrets and breadcrumbs and tension crash together and turn this game into something truly special I could not put down. There’s a whole separate layer to this game I couldn’t even engage with because I (surprise!) didn’t have the brains or patience for it. It sure looked fun for the weirdos that completed it, though!

Tunic was put together by a tiny team that used minimalist storytelling and a widdle bitty fox to achieve it’s big ideas. That Tunic was able to do so much more with so much less than so many gigantic games are able to do is so inspiring and encouraging. The world needs more games like Tunic.