This week introduced most of the blogging schedule for 2018, but something I've yet to broach is how I'll be tackling the Giant Bomb wiki this year. In 2017, I reached the end of an important long-term project regarding the SNES and then... kind of stopped. "Podcast games" - those with long periods of non-story grinding/exploring that are ideal for some background talking to split my attention - replaced "working on the wiki" as the thing I did while listening to new episodes of the Beastcast, MBMBaM, The Adventure Zone and WeHateMovies. I only stepped back in for the occasional mini-project, the most recent of which was checking all the pages for games featured in this year's Awesome Games Done Quick livestream event. (You may have noticed that I didn't make a "project report" blog for it this time - that's because the majority of the games featured in any given GDQ event have been covered several times before, and there's few left to comment on. That doesn't mean the speedruns themselves haven't been entertaining! I particularly liked the Super Mario Sunshine run, and how much it casts a highly competent shadow over the site's own Steal My Sunshine feature.)

I can't offer any concrete wiki plans as of yet, but I do have my mind set on three consoles in particular: the original Nintendo Entertainment System, which I usually work on in tandem with new episodes of Chrontendo except I've been meaning to go back to 1988/89 and start adding header images and checking them for errors and missing info, since I was fairly inexperienced when working on those pages the first time around; the Sega Mega Drive, which is a major blindspot for me even though I had the fortune of growing up with a Mega Drive-owning friend; and the Nintendo 64, which seems like the next natural port of call after the SNES. There's still the small matter of the PC Engine CD library, which is a wilderness of anime cutscenes and kooky redbook audio. I've also been giving the 3DO and Neo Geo the side-eye, but then we're getting into stuff that's trickier to emulate properly.

All the same, I'd love to tuck into a new long-term project, but the biggest roadblock right now - besides laziness and backlogs - is not knowing how much the upcoming "huge" wiki update will disrupt everything. It could be that I'll need to go back to my earlier projects - NES '83-'88, SNES, TurboGrafx - and update them for this "Wiki 2.0", depending on what new features it adds and the changes it makes to existing pages. For instance, I'd love to know what happens to header images: will we still have a small horizontal bar to work with, or will the images expand to include the entire background of the page? I think until I get the skinny on what the new wiki will look like, I'm going to hold off on any big projects. Still, there's always insufficient release info or a poorly tagged image gallery or two somewhere, so I'll find ways to keep busy until then.

Talking of keeping busy, we had the first full week of blogging features of 2018, so let's take a look:

• The Indie Game of the Week, which I suppose has now become my headliner after retiring The Top Shelf last month, covered the excellent 2017 GOTY contender SteamWorld Dig 2. Better late than never, right? In addition to being bigger and prettier than its predecessor, the game introduces a lot of advancements and new gear that can make a considerable difference to how the game plays. The hookshot and jetpack in particular add a huge amount of versatility to your movement, and the game goes out of its way to create dozens of these side-area caves that tend to involve a puzzle or a platforming challenge to overcome. While they're definitely the highlight, just the regular cycle of mining resources and selling them off for upgrade money is gratifying enough. It's even a game I would recommend to people who don't usually care for spacewhippers: the backtracking is minimal and effortless, given the game's generous fast travel system.
• The SNES Classic Mk. II is my retro-gaming feature for this year: an attempt to sift through the remnants of the SNES library for a second compilation of 25 games that could follow the original SNES Classic and its line-up. Every other week, I'm taking two games - the first is a well-regarded game that I never found the time to complete prior to this feature, and the second is an old favorite that I feel deserves more recognition - and judging them by a set of criteria that rates their suitability for a retro console, including how well they've aged and how original they still are even with the huge market of Indie throwbacks to compete with. More details can be found in this introduction/contents blog. The first episode, Demons & Angels, took a long hard look at Capcom's Demon's Crest, the third in a series of Ghouls N' Ghosts spin-offs, and Quintet's ActRaiser, the idiosyncratic god-sim/platformer hybrid which was an early hit for the SNES.

Addenda

Movie: Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle

Let's not get into why I decided to watch the new Jumanji movie. Best to just focus on the movie itself. What may have been a future entry in the WU-TANG video feature in a perfect world, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle takes the board game conceit of the original and shifts it into a retro video game context: the idea being that no-one still plays board games in 1996, the year in which the film begins, and thus its dark magics transform it overnight from board game to Atari 2600-style game cartridge to entice a new victim. After trapping one kid, we flash forward another twenty years to a different pack of teenagers in detention - a scaredy-cat nerd, an inconsiderate jock, a self-obsessed popular girl, and a socially-awkward Daria type - who find the game in their school's basement and get trapped too. If you've seen the trailer, you sort of know the rest of it: each teen embodies a different character, all played by actors with some background in action and comedy - Dwayne Johnson (The Rundown, which coincidentally was called "Welcome to the Jungle" in Europe), Kevin Hart (Central Intelligence, another movie with Johnson), Karen Gillan (Guardians of the Galaxy Vols I and II, though she had a lot more make-up in those), and Jack Black (does his role in The Jackal count as action-comedy? If not, maybe the Kung Fu Panda movies?) - and the movie bounces between jokes about bodily functions, teenage angst, how everything in a jungle can kill you, and video game tropes.

The latter is what makes this movie kinda interesting, as it expects a certain level of video game literacy from its audience. It'll explain what it means that the "NPC" tour guide Nigel (played by the Flight of the Conchords guy who isn't one of the two main guys, Rhys Darby) can only cycle through a set of stock responses, or how characters can die and come back due to their stock of extra lives, or that they can access a list of strengths and weaknesses for their characters to figure out how they work as part of a team. It doesn't go overboard with video game in-jokes either - while Karen Gillan's "Ruby Roundhouse" is clearly a Lara Croft ersatz, complete with comments about how a bare midriff and short-shorts is wholly inappropriate for the jungle, that's pretty much the only time the movie acknowledges that other video games exist.

For the most part, it's a predictable family comedy film with a few PG-13 jokes about wieners (Bethany, the aforementioned popular girl, has to deal with peeing in the form of a male avatar for one awkward scene) and themes about personal responsibility, teamwork, and overcoming bad habits. Despite a few adult jokes, a scenery-chewing bad guy made out of bugs and rats, and actual death scenes, the sequel feels kind of toothless compared to the original movie. That first one had a much more sinister vibe, and the way the jungle started warping the surrounding house and town made the titular board game feel almost apocalyptic in a way that the video game version doesn't. There's still dangers and risks, and there's grim implications of what happens when a character loses all their lives, but having them all trapped safely within the confines of the video game universe of Jumanji means far less collateral damage to everyone else at their school and town. It even softened the requisite "guy has been trapped in the game for years" arc: the 1996 kid from the prologue, Alex, has been inside Jumanji for two decades, causing his parents to go insane trying to figure out the secret behind his sudden disappearance and leaving his once beautiful home in a state of disarray; an urban legend for the kids that occupy the same neighborhood years later. However, from Alex's perspective he's only been in the game for a few months, since time passes differently in there. It's not quite the same as the original movie's wild-bearded Robin Williams who had to live through every one of those long years in a hostile environment.

It's a relatively anodyne and inoffensive movie with some fun performances and scenes, all-told, and definitely not the unmitigated disaster people were expecting (or perhaps hoping) from a reboot of a not-great movie franchise that mostly lived on in VHS and DVD sales thanks to nostalgia. After all, Jumanji has about as much cultural cachet in 2017 as Space Jam, or Kazaam, or Hocus Pocus (sequels for all of which, from what I've heard, are also on the way). I'll say this much: the movie had to work hard to not be a complete trashfire, and it pulled it off. Damning with faint praise, perhaps, but it could've been so much worse.

TV: Mob Psycho 100

Be assured that my fortnightly dalliances with the TV world won't all be anime series - while there's a lot out there, I'm only really interested in the cream of the crop. However, I wanted to catch up with 2016's Mob Psycho 100 because it's based on a manga by the enigmatic artist "One", the same guy behind One Punch Man. The One Punch Man anime was an unexpected delight: a superhero parody comedy that attempts to make an empathetic character out of someone who is effectively invincible, something that various Superman writers have had a hard time accomplishing. One Punch Man's Saitama isn't just a compelling protagonist because he can hit things really hard, though: he got into the superhero business because he thought it would be fun and rewarding to fight evil and bask in the gratitude of the civilians he saved; instead, every fight provides zero challenge and despite his many victories he looks so innocuous with his bald head and mismatched costume that people rarely acknowledge his successes, which gives him a mostly passive and bored temperament which the manga/anime mines to great comedic effect.

Mob Psycho 100 features on a similar theme: the titular Mob is a middle-schooler who has a profound mastery of psychic abilities, but doesn't want to use them because he doesn't feel like he should. Psychic powers are a crutch when it comes to being a regular hard-working adult, his magnanimous mentor and employer (and shady conman) Reigen tells him, and Mob gives himself strict rules to never use his powers against other people and instead work on normal aspirations like improving his physical stamina, or focusing on his studies, or becoming popular enough to attract the girl he likes without resorting to his gift. It's why he looks up to his younger brother Ritsu - who is smart, popular and athletic - despite the fact that Ritsu has a serious inferiority complex about his brother's god-like psychic powers, which he himself lacks. A lot of the anime's humor comes from Reigen - a self-proclaimed psychic who actually has no powers whatsoever, and instead cons clients looking for exorcisms either by asking Mob to "take care of the small fry" as ostensible practice, or fixing his client's problems via more conventional methods such as massage or Photoshop - and a megalomaniacal evil spirit called "Dimple" (though the actual Japanese dub calls him "Hecuba") that is roundly defeated by Mob and later befriends him and teaches him how to use his powers responsibly, but is really just trying to figure out how to grow powerful again.

The show also draws drama from the few times when Mob is forced to use his powers, usually against evil spirits or hostile espers who are strong enough to be dangerous, and reaches his "100%" moment: when one of his emotions, which he struggles to suppress as the source of his psychic powers, reaches breaking point and erupts in an absurdly powerful fashion. Each emotion has a slightly different effect when "maxed out", but it's usually treated as an instant win button the same way Saitama's punches are - the humor is that neither character really wants to rely on this tactic and would prefer talking things out, which can mean letting the bad guys have their way until the hero is eventually forced to intervene with a single decisive move.

But even beyond the silly jokes and awesome moments, Mob Psycho 100 has a brilliant sense of style and some of the animation for the espers and their powers is amazing to watch in motion. Each esper in the series produces a slightly different aura, all of which have these odd almost-screensaver looking filters, and the way Mob transforms from his standard bowlcut look and gormless expression to his almost Super Saiyan "100%" form is often a coup of animated artistry. I particularly like when the animation drops into this charcoal-like drawing style - like the Doctor Strange movie, the animation has a lot of fun trying to adapt a particularly comic look into another medium, making ample use of colors and shadows and art styles to produce a very distinctive aesthetic. The character designs, also, aren't afraid to get ugly and weird: some of the regular people featured in the manga have a particularly unattractive appearance that the show makes more of an effort to recreate, as opposed to the more generically anime-standard characters of One Punch Man.

I really liked Mob Psycho 100, and am now looking forward to watching subsequent seasons. This first batch of twelve episodes did a fine job of building a world and an eccentric cast of ancillary characters, and a fairly open "sequel hook" for future seasons to explore (and, of course, there's still plenty of manga stories to draw from as well). I hope it continues to build on Mob's humble desires to be more physically fit and popular, since that led to some of the funnier incredulous responses from Dimple, Ritsu and the enemy espers. I'm also hoping for some payoff with regards to a recurring female schoolmate of Mob's who wants to use telepathy to contact aliens - One Punch Man's first season memorably ended with an alien invasion, and I'd be happy to see Mob Psycho 100 get equally weird with its expanded universe.

(Minor anime side-bar: I also got to see the first episode of Pop Team Epic, the anime adaptation of the beloved ornery gag manga that has already launched a hundred Twitter/Tumblr memes. The show is just as goofy as the manga, and equally prone to meta humor: the whole first episode plays twice, with only a change of voice actors for the main characters as the most noticeable difference, as well as opening theme music from a wholly different show. Time's going to tell if they're able to keep this level of energy and ingenuity going throughout the first season's run. Also, where else are you likely to see brief riffs on My Neighbor Totoro, Berserk and Skyrim, each coming right after the last?)

Game: Persona 5

Demon's Crest and SteamWorld Dig 2 took a lot of my attention away from the opening chapters of Atlus's Persona 5 this week, but even with the small amount I've played - I've yet to complete the first "Palace" - I already love the game's style and the degree of freedom its non-dungeoneering parts offer. The game's world is spread across three regions right now: Yongen, a relatively quiet neighborhood in Tokyo where the protagonist is staying with a legal guardian due to his probation, related to an incident that sets the game's themes about the fairness of Japan's legality systems and how much adults suck; Shibuya, which is our glimpse into the everyday chaos of the city; and Aoyama-Itchome, the neighborhood that contains Shujin Academy, the only school that would accept the protagonist after his criminal conviction. Setting the game in Tokyo, with its busy streets and almost claustrophobic smaller neighborhoods, makes the game feel far more lived-in than previous entries, even for as much as I loved exploring Persona 3's island metropolis of Tatsumi Port Island and Persona 4's idyllic burg of Inaba.

The star of the show here is the game's endless style, from its fantastic soundtrack to its dynamic menus and post-battle results screens. I've yet to get to know the characters enough to say whether or not they rank with the series' best - so far I've met Ryuji Sakamoto, who sort of combines Kanji's unfettered brashness with Yosuke's bro obliviousness; Morgana, who takes on the Teddie role of mysterious shadow world inhabitant and team mascot; and Ann Takamaki, who continues the franchise's long legacy of assertive blonde heroines after Persona 2's Lisa Silverman. I've also met a few of the game's "Confidants", which includes the protagonist's guardian and ornery cafe proprietor Sakura Sojiro, dubious goth doctor Tae Takemi, and good old Igor, who I guess is also a social link now.

The one element of Persona 5 which is irking me a little, though not to any serious extent, is how the game renamed all its mechanics and features to befit its legality/prison/thief stylistic theme. So social links are now "Confidants" (though the game could've easily gone with "Accomplices"), persona fusion is now "Persona Execution", dungeons are now "Palaces", the all-out attacks are "Hold Ups" because they now also let you negotiate with monsters while they're vulnerable, and so on in that fashion. I sort of get wanting to go all in on a new paradigm, but it's a little goofy in practice.

I'm definitely sticking with this one, though I'm a little apprehensive about some of the more divisive aspects of the game coming up. I've yet to fully start exploring the first dungeon, for instance, only poking in occasionally for story-specific goals like awakening the personas of the first four characters or figuring out how the Palace "Kings" and real-life versions of those people can affect one another, and I'm wondering how much different it's going to be compared to the previous games. I'm also a little spoiled for choice with spending time outside of dungeons: there seems to be more venues for earning money through part-time work, boosting "personal" stats like knowledge, guts or kindness through books and DVDs, spending time with social links, shopping, building "infiltration tools" for dungeoneering, and a whole lot of vendors and other places to visit across the game's Tokyo districts. It's a little overwhelming, but exciting also, in that special way that most RPGs tend to be when you're early in and don't know how anything works yet.

It was only a few months ago when I caught up with SteamWorld Heist, but here we are back once again in Image & Form's endearing steampunk/western robot universe for another excavation in SteamWorld Dig 2. Dig 2 is the classic example of a sequel done right: it keeps the spirit of the original intact, but adds a lot of iterative gameplay changes, makes the game larger in scope without necessarily making it feel more padded, improves the presentation both graphically and musically, and doubles-down on the elements that worked in the previous such as having more of the gauntlet/puzzle-like side-areas and a larger variation in upgrades to choose from. It's a fantastic sequel to an already sterling first game, but let's break this down like so many ore-filled blocks.

SteamWorld Dig 2 is the direct follow-up to 2013's SteamWorld Dig, with the second game's story picking up shortly after the events of the first. Rusty, the first game's protagonist, disappears soon after his climactic battle with the sinister entity lurking in the depths of Tumbleton. One of Tumbleton's vendors, Dorothy, decides to follow him into the mines for any trace of his whereabouts and eventually picks up a tip that he has made his way to the robot city of El Machino. Dorothy plays effectively the same as Rusty, working through blocks with a trusty pickaxe and using a combination of wall-jumping and various traversal upgrades to make her way through the environment. The game takes a similar step as Grow Up, however, in that it expands its once largely vertical world horizontally and as such has adjusted its upgrade path to include a few horizontal-focused power-ups, like a fast sprint which increases horizontal jump distance. Dorothy eventually acquires a large array of equipment, some of which are steam-powered - this means finding sources of water to recharge them, possibly as a means to stop players from spamming them against enemies - and, in true spacewhipper style, they tend to unlock new areas to explore. Oddly enough, SteamWorld Dig 2 is comparatively backtracking-free: not only are there pneumatic tubes (i.e. fast travel) everywhere, but you usually have everything you need to complete one of the game's many side-area caves the first time you encounter them. What tends to happen instead is that you'll reach a large new area with a newly acquired piece of equipment, and the first few side-area caves you find in that area will put you through the paces for that same new gear. It's an elegant solution for what is often a common irritation for those less enamored with the spacewhipper approach, and I rarely found myself needing to take notes on where I would need to backtrack to once I had acquired the right item.

In addition to this world-broadening equipment are upgrade abilities powered by a finite collectible currency that the player can assign and unassign as they wish. New abilities become available as players upgrade their equipment with the gains from their resource-mining, but also occasionally from blueprints earned after completing side-quests, registering the game's other collectible type (artifacts with little jokey descriptions, most of which are from the long-gone human world), and finding hidden NPCs in the mines - the latter tend to give you blueprints for abilities that make the game significantly harder for some risky benefits, like earning double XP with the trade-off that enemies stop dropping health items. Stronger abilties, like one that will allow you to be resurrected at full health once, require more "upgrade cogs" to enable than something more simple, like reducing falling damage. Upgrade cogs are everywhere, and make up the bulk of the game's hidden items, but throughout the entire run of the game I always had fewer cogs than places to put them - it pays to strongly consider which abilities benefits your personal style of play most, and how best to mitigate the specific types of danger in the area you're currently excavating.

But all this nuance is simply a carrot on a rope; a means to work towards one or several concrete goals while spending your time exploring, figuring out how to mine all the valuable ores in the area, completing the game's many obstacle courses, and spending a few minutes beating walls and tunnels to check for secrets (there's a few secret-finding upgrades too, if your perception needs some help). That cycle, when you're digging through tiles for the next piece of ore and warping back to town to sell your minerals for upgrade money before warping back, is a compelling enough flow on its own. The game is helped immeasurably by what I can only call excellent exploring music; a soundtrack of atmospheric ambient tracks that always sets the perfect tone wherever they're heard. I particularly like the chill lofi hip-hop/prog track town theme; it's a great tune to relax with, if the more dangerous areas of the mines ever prove too intense.

It feels like January's going to be a whole month of "damn, wish I'd played this a little earlier so I could've talked about it in GOTY terms" cases. I recently completed Super Mario Odyssey and am in the early hours of Persona 5, which took a day off from for SteamWorld Dig 2: three games that would've easily made 2017's top ten if I hadn't put them off until now. SteamWorld Dig 2's unlikely to be lost in last year's shuffle given its pedigree and acclaim, but all the same it's a 24-karat Indie spacewhipper that pulls off the difficult trick of surpassing a great predecessor in part because it is smartly designed for maximum accessibility, so don't let it stay buried in your backlogs for long.

Rating: 5 out of 5.

The SNES Classic had a sterling assortment of games from Nintendo's 16-bit star console, but it's hardly all that system has to offer a modern audience. In each installment of this fortnightly feature, I judge two games for their suitability for a Classic successor based on four criteria, with the ultimate goal of assembling another collection of 25 SNES games that not only shine as brightly as those in the first SNES Classic, but have equally stood the test of time. The rules, list of games considered so far, and links to previous episodes can all be found at The SNES Classic Mk II Intro and Contents.

Episode I: Demons & Angels

The Candidate: Capcom's Demon's Crest.

My only memories of Demon's Crest prior to this week were renting it and being completely flummoxed by its lack of direction. It has a memorable start: Firebrand, our demonic anti-hero, is dropped in an arena and forced to fight an enormous zombified dragon. The fight itself isn't too difficult, but there's very few games that start with a climactic boss fight with zero build-up or plot. After that, you're required to complete the rest of the level - again, no tutorials for what Firebrand can do, though the player should catch up pretty quickly just by testing the face buttons - and then are given a world map to explore with four levels to visit and a handful of unmarked locations.

What plot details you get are sparing: Firebrand found a bunch of superpowered crests one day that gave him ultimate power, but he was betrayed by another demon, Phalanx, and sealed away. After reawakening years later, Firebrand has found that the Demon Realm is the thrall of Phalanx who has used the crests to install himself as ruler, and the aggrieved fire demon sets out to take back what is rightfully his.

I figure this backstory refers to a previous game in this series: Demon's Crest is actually the third game in the Gargoyle's Quest sub-series, a spin-off of Capcom's macabre Ghouls N' Ghosts. The first two Gargoyle's Quest games were released for the original Game Boy, and were called Red Arremer: Makaimura Gaiden in Japan, or "Firebrand: Ghouls N' Ghosts Gaiden"; I'd assume the renaming and greenify-ing of Firebrand overseas was done to provide some distance from the whole "demonic" angle that parents and moral crusaders were keeping an eye out for, though they appear to have dropped the Bowdlerized facade for Demon's Crest. Red Arremer/Firebrand was originally a notorious minor villain in the original games, since he had this unpredictable swooping attack pattern that made it difficult to avoid him, and the subsequent love/hate attitude he received from players made him popular enough to prompt his own spin-off series.

In Demon's Crest, as in Gargoyle's Quest, the game is structured in a semi-spacewhipper like fashion. Firebrand can find various upgrades through exploration, from permanent HP boosts to new forms that confer additional abilities. Each stage has a few bosses and alternate paths, and the player is free to leave the stage whenever they reach the end of a path or get a game over, and try somewhere else. Even in his default form before finding any power-ups, however, Firebrand has a few abilities that make traversal more palatable: he is capable of a form of flight which essentially amounts to hovering on the same horizontal plane, albeit indefinitely, as well as a standard fireball projectile and a headbutt that allows him to break background objects. Different forms provide new projectiles as well as new abilities that replace Firebrand's headbutt: the Earth elemental Ground Gargoyle form, for instance, switches the fireball with a power geyser-like move that travels along the floor, while the headbutt is now a charging tackle that can destroy obstacles. However, there are often caveats: the Ground Gargoyle lacks the ability to fly, for instance, and his projectile is far weaker when fired from mid-air. The projectiles of the various forms follow a sort of Mega Man system, where certain types seem to work better against specific bosses, though the flipside is that they sometimes have no effect at all.

True to its spacewhipper roots, you'll often acquire a new form and then be encouraged to revisit previous levels to unlock new paths and items with the new abilities that form provides. Revisiting stages with bodies of water with the Tidal Gargoyle form, for instance, opens up underwater passages that would've killed you to reach otherwise (water and fire demons don't mix, turns out). It's not always clear where these items and paths are hiding - there's no incidation on the world map or elsewhere that a region still has secrets to find - but the game is comparatively short even compared to something like Super Metroid. The whole game is about fifteen to twenty areas across seven zones - the fifth and sixth open up the more forms you collect, and the seventh only becomes available when the game determines you're ready for the final boss - and it wouldn't take that long to backtrack to them all if you're hunting for the last item on your checklist. Unfortunately, you do need to find everything to unlock the true final boss, but I sort of like that there were spacewhippers around back then that put so much value into 100% item acquisition.

The star of the show here is the flexibility of the hero, both in terms of how well his hover and wall-grabbing come together when traversing the trap-filled levels, but how his multiple forms greatly expand his exploration opportunities. It's neat to come back to some early level and discover a new passageway, which uncovers a completely different zone with its own visual design, unique enemies and a tough boss at the end. With all that in mind, it's time to put it through the rigors of the P.O.G.S. system:

Preservation: Demon's Crest has held up very well indeed. Between its structure and sharp and expressive pixel graphics, it's a game that could easily exist today as an Indie spacewhipper. There are surprisingly few irritations common to archaic game design of the nineties: in fact, the game lets you continue as many times as you want, as well as providing the option to escape to the world map if you need to stock up on consumables or hunt for more power-ups elsewhere to be better prepared for the dangers ahead. It still has a password system and won't replenish any consumables used up between retries, which is a little vexing, but it's a remarkably affable game given the abjectly cruel "Nintendo Hard" legacy of its parent franchise. 4.

Originality: The game was released six months after Super Metroid and it shows in a lot of ways, but at the same time it's also the third entry in a series that was already doing the spacewhipper thing to some extent. That, of course, leads to another originality issue: how novel can a game be if it's the third game in a spin-off series? Taken in the abstract, Demon's Crest is a fairly distinct experience for SNES owners, given its structure of revisiting stages for new pathways and the fact that spacewhippers as a genre hadn't really taken off yet beyond Super Metroid and a few edge cases. 4.

Gameplay: A few difficulty spikes aside, Demon's Crest controls phenomenally well, and each of the game's zones contains their own distinct mixture of obstacles, enemies and level design. Aerial sections where you have to glide between enemies, or a slightly-maze like forest that becomes all the more dangerous once a flaming demon sets it ablaze. There's sections where the lights go out, causing annoying bat-like enemies to awaken and come after you, and you need to relight candles to deter them. It's a game full of surprises that doesn't outstay its welcome, and the versatility of Firebrand's abilities makes him one of the better action stars for the console. 4.

Style: Demon's Crest goes all-in on the macabre trappings of its forebears, creating some particularly grisly looking foes and backdrops. It also has its moments of beauty too, like a castle made entirely out of ice that the player visits during a clear night with a sparkling starry sky. It's one of the better looking games for the system in general, and even its Mode 7 overworld is presentable enough. I particularly like the level of detail that went into Firebrand and his various forms, each one perfectly modified for its particular strengths - fin-like flaps on the arms of the Tidal Gargoyle, for instance, or the gold trimmings on the wings of the late-game Legendary Gargoyle form. 5.

Total: 17.

The Nominee: Quintet/Enix's ActRaiser.

Enix came out of the gate swinging with ActRaiser, the fourth video game to be released on the Super Famicom (along with a port of Populous, which seems like a weird thematic coincidence). It was also the first game developed by Quintet, a new RPG studio set up by some former Nihon Falcom developers who dedicated themselves to producing some of the most distinctive games for the SNES system. We'll be visiting almost all of them in this series: I consider it a major ignominy that no Quintet game made it to the original SNES Classic, though given the current nebulous state of the studio there might be some licensing issues. ActRaiser, so far, is the only game of theirs to have made it onto the Virtual Console at least.

While it probably requires no introduction given its reputation and history with a certain long-suffering staff member on this site, let's do the thing anyway: ActRaiser is a combination god-sim and platformer, in which the player takes an active role in repelling demons from the lands inhabited by humans before chasing them into their lairs and annihilating them entirely. The game's structure is set up in such a way that the player first clears some space with an action stage, helps a human civilization to prosper while fighting off the waves of demons that come to cause chaos, and then completing a second action stage to wipe all remaining traces of demonic activity from the continent. While the action stages are compelling enough between the imaginative bosses and the tricky level design, it's the god-sim element that shines most: with the help of a cherubic assistant, the player has to clear out land to make it inhabitable for humans, direct the humans' growth to these areas, collect their tithes and answer their prayers, and destroy enemies and their spawners wherever they pop up. Each new territory brings with it new challenges, and it's tempting to maximize the amount of living space for your little mortal worshippers before moving onto what will no doubt be a gruelling boss encounter with the local area's demonic overlord.

The game was one of the first I can remember playing to combine "active" and "passive" (if only comparatively) gameplay modes as a way of creating a sort of gameplay "tide" that ebbs and flows to create something compelling in its malleability. You know that there's going to be a chill civilization-building section right after the tense platformer stage you're in, and likewise you can look forward to dropping into some hack and slash action if the current pattern of clearing land for settlers becomes dull. It's a pattern that has worked wonders for many of my favorite games to appear in the years since, such as Stardew Valley, Dark Cloud and the Persona games - the variation not only in the goals you're expected to accomplish, but the pace and immediacy with which the game moves. ActRaiser's definitely one of my all-time faves for the SNES, but how does the science pan out?

Preservation: ActRaiser's fairly timeless, and while there have been plenty of games that have done its individual aspects better - the platforming and the god-sim management - I'm struggling to think of any other game that has combined them, including ActRaiser's own sequel. It might be a little simple compared to modern games, but its unique structure is still as compelling as ever. 4.

Originality: Well, as previously stated, I don't think there are many games out there doing what ActRaiser did. We have seen a small burgeoning of RPGs with town-building systems, such as a few of the games mentioned above or the likes of Terraria and Dragon Quest Builders, but none of those employ 2D platformer stages as a frenetic counter-balance to a comparatively serene god-sim mode. Originality may well be ActRaiser's greatest strength to this day; unless I'm completely ignorant I don't think anyone's ever tried to bite its style just yet. 5.

Gameplay: ActRaiser both benefits and suffers from being two games in one, each a fairly solid example of its genre but due to the split focus of the game neither really stand out too much either. But that simplicity also helps: a full-bodied god-sim might not work so well on a console, especially one that had yet to introduce a mouse peripheral, and if the platforming was any more demanding it would probably be a roadblock to the less able player who had come to the game for the more casual god-sim aspect (though that person would still be completely screwed on the punishing final boss rush). Between the bosses and the new abilities earned on each new continent, there's enough variation to keep anyone's interest. 4.

Style: Graphically, ActRaiser is a little hit and miss. It's one of the first third-party games developed for the system, so in some ways it could be considered a trial run for what could be done with 16-bit graphics: something Enix and their erstwhile rivals Square quickly capitalized on. While the graphics are relatively plain throughout, there are a few touches of graphical genius, like the imposing crystal dragon boss and the seamless Mode 7 as you spiral your way down into a dungeon from the previously static overworld. 3.

Result: 16.

< Back to Intro and Contents

I had a great deal of fun writing and organizing last year's PlayStation 2-themed The Top Shelf, because it afforded me an opportunity to do three things I loved: write about games, fuss over arbitrary rankings, and give me an excuse to catch up with and finish some really old backlog items. I was looking to do something like that again this year, though perhaps only every other week so I can try out some other ideas, and settled on a feature revisiting the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.

Two significant events related to the SNES happened in 2017: the release of the SNES Classic in September, which features 21 (or 26, if you also include the exclusives the Japanese Super Famicom Mini received) of the best games for the system, and the completion of my own SNES Wiki Project to ensure that the Giant Bomb wiki features a sufficiently complete page for every non-Satellaview SNES and Super Famicom game ever released. I couldn't help but to compile a mental checklist of SNES/SFC games that piqued my interest as I worked through that catalogue over the years, as well as recalling the fond times I had with the many I'd already played to completion.

With the SNES Classic Mk. II feature, I'm going to be exploring two games every installment: one game that I'd never had the chance to complete, known as "the candidate", and another that counts among my firm favorites for the system, known as "the nominee". These games were not available on the first SNES Classic, but I'm putting forward the case that they should be considered for the second. To properly render verdicts on 90s video games, I'm relying on a method of scientific scrutiny known as the P.O.G.S. system: Preservation, which retrospectively gauges how well the game has held up in the decades since its release, since this thought experiment is predicated on releasing these games in a contemporary video game marketplace; Originality, a wildcard asset that will give a game an edge over its less imaginative peers; Gameplay, which gets to the meat and potatoes of how the game functions and whether or not it does well by its genre, or transcends it entirely; and Style, an elusive quality that combines a game's graphical prowess with its sense of personality, the idea being that good graphics don't mean a thing without some strong artistic direction behind them.

Each category can receive anywhere from one to five stars, and the twenty-five games with the highest scores at the end of this project will become my proposed library for a hypothetical second SNES Classic. It's all for funzies, of course, but if I can play a bunch of SNES games I've had my eye on for years and also put together some cogent arguments and raise some profiles for some of my overlooked favorites, then all the better.

So, to reiterate the rules:

• Each installment, which will appear every other Tuesday, will review two SNES games: A highly regarded game I have little to no prior experience with, dubbed "the candidate", and one I have plenty of experience with and have completed once already if not several times, dubbed "the nominee".
• None of the games to be considered appeared on the original SNES Classic. The intent is to create a whole new line-up.
• Each game will be rated on four categories: Preservation, Originality, Gameplay, and Style. This collectively forms the P.O.G.S. system, because it's the only thing that embodies the 90s as much as the Super Nintendo does. Well, all right, there are probably lots of stuff. The ABC sitcom Dinosaurs, perhaps.
• With twenty-five anticipated installments (I'm taking Christmas off) we should end up with a list of fifty games, the higher-rated half of which will become the SNES Classic Mk. II line-up. The rest will have to wait until I make a SNES Classic Mk. III feature (don't hold your breath).
• A few bonus rules: I'm avoiding the temptation to fill the list with JRPGs, if only because I want to spend some of my time doing other things this year. There are still a few on my list, but they're either relatively short or really worthwhile. There'll be a few fan-translated SFC games on here also, since in my perfect SNES Classic Mk. II world Nintendo will have reached out to those translators for a deal that officializes those localizations and compensates them for their hard work.

For a list of games reviewed so far and the blog installments they pertain to, consult the table below:

Welcome to 2018, everyone! Maybe this year won't suck quite as bad! I feel like we could probably use that statement for every year from now on as the new replacement for "Happy New Year". At least we can make the best of January with this weekend's Awesome Games Done Quick event, which always starts the year on a positive and charitable note, and spend the quiet Winter months checking out some of the prior year's best games now that all the GOTY results are in.

January's also a time for resolutions. I don't make those often, because I rarely keep them, but I have two this year that I plan to fold into my blogging to some extent. They relate to the fact that, while I spent a lot of free time gaming last year, I let my other passions of TV and movies fall to the wayside a little. 2017 was a good year for both those media too, even if the proliferation of quality video games did ultimately overshadow them, and there's a lot I still need to catch up on. The Twin Peaks reboot, for one, and the new seasons of Stranger Things, Mr. Robot, Black Mirror and Star Wars: Rebels. There's also a huge amount of great TV I've yet to even start into as well, including a few anime series people have been recommending in the blogging community here (shout-outs to @zombiepie, @arbitrarywater, Hamst3r and @dochaus for their rundowns). Likewise, I still need to see Logan, Arrival, Baby Driver, Kubo and the Two Strings, Mary and the Witch's Flower, Your Name, Coco, Valerian and The City of a Thousand Planets, The Nice Guys and a bunch of other 2016-17 movies. My perfectly reasonable New Year's resolutions, then, are to watch at least one new movie every week and a new season of TV every fortnight. Like the Indie Game of the Week, it's really just an excuse to do more of what I already enjoy; hardly the same as quitting booze or doing more volunteer work. I suppose that's what's going to make them easier to hold on to.

Speaking of using my time wisely, how about a quick glance at all the blogging I didn't do this week?

• I wasn't ready to launch into my new replacement feature for the now concluded The Top Shelf on Tuesday the 2nd of January, for what I hope are obvious reasons, so the only regularly scheduled blog feature this time was the triumphant return of Indie Game of the Week. With its new season on the way, the fifty-first entry concerns Telltale Games's fantasy noir serial The Wolf Among Us, on which I'll have plenty more to say in its sub-section below. If, like me, it's taken you a very long time to get around to it, I recommend just reading the non-spoilery IGotW appraisal and skipping the in-depth stuff further down the page.
• That was the only blog, but I have been busy making some lists this week too. The first is the obligatory "List of Shame 2018" list, which is once again half backlog items and half highly-rated 2017 games I'll be looking to sweep up in sales/price drops and try out in the following year. The second is my "GOTY 2016 (Adjusted)" list, which updates last year's GOTY top ten to include all the 2016 games I caught up with in the subsequent twelve months. I'm planning to update my GOTY 2014 (Adjusted) and GOTY 2015 (Adjusted) lists for 2017 too, but all in good time.

Addenda

In addition to games I played that week, I'm also going to start adding a paragraph or two for the movies and TV I've been consuming, as per my above commitment to watching more of both this year. It's a form of self-encouragement to keep my resolutions, though I recognize that it will make these Summaries even longer. I'll have to consider how best to slim these down in the coming weeks...

Star Wars: Episode VIII: The Last Jedi

(I swear, there's no story spoilers here.)

In retrospect, I was incredibly fortunate to not have this movie spoiled after procrastinating about watching it for two weeks. Without getting into plot details, I feel mostly the same way about The Last Jedi that I do about The Force Awakens: the Star Wars universe still feels like this oddly anodyne and bathetically sincere place, where it's garnered so much respect and a really persnickety fanbase that no-one wants to offend that every director since Lucas has played it completely safe. It's why it's still a shame that Lord and Miller (of Clone High and The Lego Movie fame) couldn't make the goofy young Han Solo movie they wanted, and Disney left it to Ron Howard to strip of any personality. The Last Jedi's a little more iconoclastic than The Force Awakens, at least, since it doesn't feel like a shot-for-shot recreation of an earlier movie in the franchise, but it's still short on moments of earned levity, big on totally earnest messages about oppression and redemption and the meaning of heroism and learning from past failures.

That latter theme actually makes this movie an interesting take on the typical "dark middle chapter" of these trilogies: it's less to do with everything going wrong for the heroes because the suddenly competent bad guys need to prove how scary they are, but more to do with the fact that the heroes themselves keep messing up and are learning to become better people from those experiences. It's like if the pivotal thing to take away from The Empire Strikes Back was that Han was an idiot for trusting Lando explicitly or Luke was an idiot for going after Vader before his training was complete - we tend to think of TESB as being the movie where the Empire gets their shit together and starts getting the drop on the heroes, largely because it's right there in the movie's subtitle, but it's mostly the heroes' own screw-ups that puts them in that dire situation leading into the third movie.

All the same, the movie has a lot of baggage, a lot of unnecessary characters (mostly Benicio del Toro's morally gray nothing of a hacker character; Kelly Marie Tran's Rose Tico and Laura Dern's Admiral Holdo were both fine, even if I liked one more the further into the movie I got and the other less), some odd decisions concerning the older cast, and it drags quite a bit during its side-stories. Not this incredible new benchmark for the franchiser, but not the harbinger of doom some fans are making it out to be, and probably slightly better made than The Force Awakens overall. I'm guessing anyone reading this has already made up their mind whether or not they want (if not need) to see the new Star Wars, but if you're generally apathetic about the franchise or have been avoiding it since The Phantom Menace you could probably safely maintain that pattern.

Super Mario Odyssey

I could probably stretch out the effusive praise I have for the new Mario game for several thousand words, making this particular entry of the Saturday Summaries untenable in its verbosity, but I'm not sure I need to. Super Mario Odyssey is my perfect 3D Mario game - one that perfectly recreates the feeling of discovery and accomplishment that the original Super Mario 64 did, as well as magically recreating the sense of wonder and surprise that game regularly doled out whenever you uncovered a new secret or were tasked with completing a challenge you'd never seen before. The persistent hunt for new collectibles from every nook and cranny from every one of its enormous open stages was like catnip to me; I've never had this much fun with a collectathon platformer, and if nothing else it's an indication that the biggest issue with Donkey Kong 64 wasn't that it had too much junk to collect, but so little variation in how you go about collecting them. By the time I finished Super Mario Odyssey I had over 900 Power Moons - an insane number of collectibles - but somehow the game never lost its spark or creative ingenuity for the entire time it took to accumulate them all.

There's other elements I could commend: the music's fantastic; the visuals are sharp and has a distinctive style for each of its worlds; there's a brilliant use for the Switch's built-in screenshot function as you take snaps of treasure hunt clues to find later; there's a post-game achievement system that - naturally enough - rewards moons for certain milestones; New Donk City is one of the best 3D Mario maps I've ever seen, and not just because of how surreal it is to run and jump around regular-looking people and vehicles; the capture mechanic offers a huge array of puzzles and challenges to overcome as well as silly jokes like waddling around as a quivering mass of meat or a boulder; the almost demoralizing way the game regularly invents mechanics that could be used to power an entire Indie game but are just employed here for a single bonus room or two; how Mario's many costumes were a cosmetic treat filled with nostalgic references; the game went all-in on its occasional 2D sections even recreating the above costumes for the classic 8-bit Super Mario Bros. era Mario sprite; the method in which the game expands its own content almost twofold after the conclusion of the story for all those not ready to put the game down quite yet; that the game painstakingly recreates all of Mario's many techniques from Super Mario 64 and then adds even more abilities like a ground-pound jump and a fast roll (take that, Sonic), not to mention the various new moves Cappy affords you; and really just the sheer level of detail lovingly put into every iota of the game. There's a lot here, and I feel I owe it to readers to list them out if I'm going to be making hyperbolic statements like "best 3D Mario ever", but it's really all part of a grand tapestry that is the design geniuses at Nintendo getting absolutely everything right with this game. From what I heard, 2017 was that kind of year for them.

Every time the Mario series sets a new bar - whether that's Bros. 3's map system, World's secret exits, 64's new 3D playgrounds, Sunshine's jetpacking and fluid mechanics, or Galaxy's shaky relationship with gravity - it's impossible to imagine how they could top it, and yet they continue to do so. I really hope this means a return to the endlessly inventive collectathon Mario format, and that the Switch continues to see games of this calibre for the next half decade at least. Next up: Let's see if this new Zelda feels just as vital to the evolution of that franchise too...

The Wolf Among Us

This will be spoiler-central, since I'll be getting into plot details and the choices I made. If you're still looking for a non-spoilery take on The Wolf Among Us some four years after its release, check out the Indie Game of the Week link above.

That'll do it for this week that was. I hope to roll out the new blog feature next week as well as maintain this little side-line of new TV shows and movies to talk about. Been a while since I flexed my critic muscles for those particular media, and I hope it makes for some edifying reading. Until next time, peeps.

Welcome to a new year of Indie Game of the Week! We'll be talking about another fifty Indie games in 2018, barring any apocalyptic mishaps, starting with Telltale Games's 2013-14 fairytale-themed detective noir serial graphic adventure The Wolf Among Us.

I'd originally planned to put this one off for a while despite the glowing reviews it received at the time, in part because I'm generally not all that enthusiastic about Telltale's "choices change the story" shtick but also in case I wanted to do some background reading of Bill Willingham's Fables comic series, on which this game is based. More recently, however, Telltale announced a sequel series for The Wolf Among Us coming in 2018 and I figured I'd better get ahead of it in case its release prompted everyone to start discussing the events of the first game and their choices and what have you. Better late than never, I suppose.

The Wolf Among Us, and Fables for that matter, imagines a world where the fairytale characters from folklore and nursery rhymes were suddenly forced to leave their land of magic and whimsy and try to make it in the "mundane world", occupying a part of New York City that has been magically enchanted to remain low-key and eke out a living alongside the "mundies". It reminds me a lot of Vampire: The Masquerade's world, where there's a community of magical oddballs that are required to self-govern their wilder elements and adhere to a set of rules underscoring the importance of anonymity and secrecy in a world of humans. Adding to this comparison is the idea that the Fables, as these magical creatures and people are collectively known, are effectively ageless, highly durable, and have continued to grow and evolve over hundreds of years, stripping away the more barbaric and naive aspects from their source material incarnations to become closer approximations of deeply flawed humans with a whole lot of baggage related to their chequered pasts.

The Fable that most personifies this struggle is our protagonist Bigby Wolf, a.k.a. the erstwhile "Big Bad Wolf" of Little Red Riding Hood and Three Little Pigs fame. In addition to being the acting Sheriff and protector of the Fable community, Bigby's a ticking time bomb of animalistic rage, barely kept in check by a sardonic and cynical personality that belies a genuine desire to be a better entity, and the player is free to play him as either a raging beast eager to keep the peace by ensuring everyone knows who is boss, or a rehabilitated arbiter of the law who resists his atavistic, violent urges in order to do what's best for his fellow Fables.

I obviously don't want to get too deep into spoilers, given half the reason I'm playing it now is so I don't get spoiled myself - it's a murder mystery whodunnit, like most noir fiction, so spoilers are a little more pertinent here than they would be normally - but to summarize the plot in brief: someone is killing Fables, and in particular seem to have beef with the "Woodlands" Fables, those with enough money to afford a nice apartment building while the rest live in tenements and dives or "a farm upstate", where the more bestial Fables have been sequestered away to keep them out of view of the mundane humans. Bigby's surrounded by deadbeats and vicious drunks, though none he would consider capable of the cold-blooded malice behind the murders, and much of the game so far has been following trails and hunting for clues. The player has an active role in solving each crime scene's little mysteries, piecing together what the evidence suggests; I've no idea what effect it would have on the plot (if anything) if you mess these investigations up, though I suspect an NPC might step in and correct Bigby on his erroneous deductions. When you aren't looking at crime scenes or talking to NPCs, you're taking part in Telltale's requisite QTE-enabled action sequences, brawling with an unhelpful Fable or chasing down a fleeing suspect in cutscenes with timed prompts. The gameplay's more or less what I've come to expect from Telltale after playing Tales from the Borderlands and watching a few LPs of their The Walking Dead games, and it works well enough for them. We're really here for this story and this world, after all, and I think both are solid so far.

I keep saying "so far", so you might correctly infer that I'm not actually done with the game just yet. As of publishing this entry, I'm three episodes into its five-episode season. I thought about doing some episode-by-episode rundowns and talking about the decisions I made, similar to how I discussed Tales from the Borderlands and Life Is Strange, but I think I'd be better off doing it in one fell swoop once I've completed all five parts. I'd get a better sense of how my version of the story came together from the choices I made, and whether or not I felt like I had much control or influence over the way the game will eventually end and the relationships I'd formed. Therefore, my current plan is to finish the game between now and tomorrow's usual Saturday Summaries piece, in which I'll write up a conclusive examination of the game specifically for those who have already completed it and know the general story beats so I wouldn't have to summarize the whole plot, since doing that was always what made those previous reviews far too long-winded.

As for my currently-incomplete, spoiler-free appraisal for the game: I'm really into it, and the usual Telltale jank (some weird facial tics and a part where I reloaded because an item didn't seem to appear) isn't taking me out of the immersive story. I'm enjoying how the game incorporates famous fairytale figures into typical noir roles - Ichabod Crane as an anally-retentive bureaucrat afraid of his own shadow, Beowulf's Grendel as an irritable drifter barfly, or Beauty and the Beast as a married couple with trust and money issues - and the grisly murder mystery linking them all together, and I'm definitely eager to see where the final chapters lead. As always, it's an episodic game I'm thankful to play in one binge session like this, as I can't imagine being left in suspense after its frequent cliffhangers for months at a time was all that fun. I'll go into more detail later, once the game is complete and I can freely engage in spoiler-blocked observations, but I think this will prove to be a promising start to 2018's Indie Game of the Week feature.

Rating: 4 out of 5. (So far.)

Welcome everyone to the last All-New Saturday Summaries for 2017. It's probably time to retire the "All-New", huh? Maybe I'll just go with "Mostly Still Newish" next year. Or just write titles like a normal person, perhaps. Regardless! It has become my custom at the end of every quarter to chat candidly about the games coming up in the subsequent quarter, which is to say January 1st to March 31st of 2018.

Q1 is usually a bottom-heavy quarter, as various games that were delayed from the previous year go into a bug-finding crunch to hit the end of the fiscal year at the very least, and there were probably a number of games who smartly decided to step the heck out of the way of the procession of incredible once-in-a-lifetime games this year and try their hand competing with 2018's crowd for that year's award season. Not that "delay your game on purpose for the sake of awards" is a brilliant business strategy, but it's fun to make up these little dramas, you know?

January provides a bevvy of JRPG goodness for those tru fanz who know the genre is far from being on its last legs. Of course, I'll be busy enjoying some of last year's best JRPGs - Persona 5 and Ys VIII specifically - while this quarter is raging on, but all in good time with these fifty hour goliaths. Speaking of goliaths, I suppose the big game for January is the new Monster Hunter World. While I'm in no rush to play any MonHun, this seems like the franchise's equivalent of Yakuza 0: not only a great gateway for those who have been sitting on the fence about joining in, but a great game in general. We also have Lost Sphear, the next throwback JRPG from Tokyo RPG Factory, the creators of I Am Setsuna. I'm still planning on getting around to Setsuna eventually, and I suppose I should start there before moving onto Sphear (wasn't that a Pokemon?), but here's hoping this continues to be a profitable little side gig for the RPG giant. Rounding out that trio is the new Dissidia, Dissidia Final Fantasy NT, which... I dunno. I like those spinoffs in principle and the amount of fan-servicey dialogue and Smash Bros-style unlockables but the mechanics never felt great. Maybe that's something the new one is planning to overhaul. I'll be keeping an eye on early impressions for it, that's for certain. Then there's also some DBZ thing I don't care about. Moving on!

February looks to be the season for ports, remakes and remasters. We have the two Bayonettas coming to Switch, along with Dragon Quest Builders (which seems perfect for the system, honestly). There's also Owlboy for all current-gen consoles. In remake town we have Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology for 3DS, which was one of the best DS RPGs, and the beautiful new Shadow of the Colossus for PS4 and Secret of Mana for Sony consoles and Steam. We also have a bunch of games that will... be interesting, if nothing else. That includes the zombie-like Metal Gear Survive, the odd medieval RPG Kingdom Come: Deliverance, the next Yellow Turban thrashing sim Dynasty Warriors 9, and the first expansion for Civilization VI. Gotta say, there's not a whole lot from this month that I'm champing at the bit to buy - I'd rather spend money on sequels and new IPs than remakes and remasters of games I've already played - but February looks packed to the gills with a wide array of games to suit every interest.

The big games for March are all sequels: Far Cry 5, Ni no Kuni 2 and Yakuza 6. I'm very excited about all three, of course, but I doubt I'll get around to any of them soonish: they're all fairly gigantic, I suspect, so not something I could feasibly slip in between the stack of 2017 hits I'm planning to get through. I am wondering how Giant Bomb will cover them, however: obviously Far Cry 5 will get the works, but I don't think anyone played Ni no Kuni 1 besides Brad and Rorie, and Yakuza 6 is obviously a tricky case for the GBE duders since they're so far behind with the series. However, we do have an online game suitable for GB shenanigans with Sea of Thieves, which promises to be a silly enough adventure on the high seas suited for those who love holding up maps and cronching bananas. And, of course, we have the total Dan Ryckert games that are Attack on Titan 2 and Atelier Lydie & Suelle: The Alchemists and the Mysterious Paintings. Oh right, and that A Way Out is released in March too: that's the new simultaneous multiplayer prison break game from the studio that brought you Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons and the guy that brought you the embarrassing ranting about the Oscars at The Game Awards. So that'll be a top ten contender, no doubt.

Of course, I can't account for the many incredible Indie games that come out of nowhere every month and manage to wow everyone, but hopefully GB will keep us posted. News spreads fast in this industry, after all, and a great little game can get everyone talking when it's Bombcast/Beastcast time.

However, we've been talking about 2018 too much. Even though I'm counting down the days for this year to end, let's review the last of what my blogging in 2017 had to offer:

• It's GOTY season, so obviously that means an Awards Blog and GOTY List from yours truly. I'm playing fewer and fewer new games every year it feels like, so this year's list feels more incomplete than usual. Still, I'm happy with those ten - it won't stay that way, but those are ten great games regardless - and how my doodling is coming along after many months away from the ol' MS Paint.
• Even though I was busy putting together GOTY stuff, I didn't let my other features fall to the wayside. Especially not The Top Shelf, which had its finale this week: this blog compiles the forty-four best PS2 games to be enshrined upon my top shelf for all time... or at least until the shelving unit collapses, which'll be another year yet at least. Take a gander at the list, scorn at the snubs, and write me an angry reply about your favorite PS2 games in the comments below. Or, hell, you could always write something nice instead. 'Tis the season, you know?
• This week also saw the final Indie Game of the Week, lucky number 50, with the surprisingly excellent Japanese spacewhipper Pharaoh ReBirth+. The gameplay is solid but unremarkable, but it's worth seeing this game's story in action and the incredible level of detail in its pixel art, from the multiple layers of parallax in the background to the sharp and fluid character animations. I could've done without the minecart sequence, but it's an ambitious and silly game that's worth more attention than it got. If you have a soft spot for Indie spacewhippers like I do, I'd highly recommend it.
• Oh, this was something I did too: Updated the "Z-A of Ztuff" list, which is a combined bucket list and contemporary wishlist, just in reverse alphabetical order because that's how I roll (and because the list would be five hundred games long without some convenient limitation).

And that's going to do it for this week. I've been playing some Super Mario Odyssey on my brand new Switch since Xmas, and while I have plenty of thoughts about it I'd rather cut this entry short for the sake of holiday merriment and double-up on a huge, gushing encomium for it next time. See you all in 2018, everyone, and have a happy new year.

We're seeing out 2017 with, you guessed it, another Indie spacewhipper. However, Pharaoh ReBirth+ is the rare case of a Japanese doujin game: what that country usually calls their smaller, self-published Indie games as a blanket term, but literally translates to "fan game". With all the Indie games I've played this year, I'm realizing there's something modest if perhaps a little reductive about the term "fan game" - you see, while the term can and often does refer to games made with licensed characters that the creator almost certainly does not have permission to use, which are subsequently released in a low-key and non-financially-motivated capacity to escape the notice of the copyright holders, the Japanese also attach the term to games that don't so much venerate specific characters and settings - like Pokémon or Dragon Ball Z - but to types of game.

With spacewhippers in particular, the idea is that these developers are usually homaging the Metroids and Castlevanias that (for normal people, at least) lend the genre its name, as well as the 8-bit/16-bit/32-bit 2D eras they hail from. Pharaoh Rebirth is comprised of several of these homages, from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (or, I suppose, Aria of Sorrow given that two of the major characters are a handsome middle-aged bearded man with a name close to Belmont and an androgynous black-haired man in a sharp suit who is clearly older than he looks) to Metal Gear Solid (you have a bespectacled hacker partner who is constantly radioing in, and are at one point contacted by the United States Secretary of Defense about an illegal satellite weapon and it's as dumb as it sounds) to Uncharted to even other famous doujin games like La-Mulana and Cave Story.

As famed archaeologist Dr. Jonathan Banfield, who was transformed into a rabbit at some point in the past (he doesn't like to talk about it), the player takes part in a series of spacewhipper levels - some of which have areas blocked off until the player has the right abilities - and frequently takes diversions into more overtly action fare, like a sequence where the player uses a jeep with powerful hydraulics to complete what is essentially a minecart level, or runs across a speeding train while carriages are being separated. The ambition for a 2D platformer game like this is impressive, as is the emphasis on a (occasionally poorly localized) story full of cutscenes and silly jokes.

I particularly like the game's look: it feels like when pixel artists create game art they limit themselves to an 8-bit or 16-bit resolution and palette to maintain some sense of fidelity to the old systems they're referencing, but Pharaoh takes full advantage of all 307,200 pixels in its standard 640x480 resolution (which, fortunately, can be up-scaled without losing much) to create these wonderfully detailed environments, especially when you have a full view of its several layers of parallax-scrolling backgrounds. I particularly liked the silhouetted look of the Nile level at night, and how the game messes with you by hiding enemies in its dark shapes. The animations for characters, whether they're bearing down on you with a laser beam attack or idly flexing their fingers, look fantastic too.

But even when the game isn't showing off with cinematic set-pieces or pixel eye candy, there's still a solid platforming experience to be found underneath. The drip-feed of new abilities are accompanied with requisite selections of rooms and puzzles that require that ability to proceed, and while they're nothing you haven't seen before - hookshot, double-jump, slide - the game finds ample use for all of them, and boosts them further with special "collection items": items which sometimes serve no purpose but to fill out a grid of collectibles to find, but more often give you a slight stat boost or modify one of your existing abilities or "sub-weapons" to have slightly more utility, such as using the slide in mid-air. The sub-weapons in particular give you plenty of options for combat, whether you're fighting through regular enemies or one of the game's wonderful boss fights, and since your mana regenerates constantly and refills at save points there's no reason not to go nuts. My favorites are either the handfuls of holy soot, which blankets the screen to hit all enemies but also reveals any secret walls, or the spirit of Jonathan's ancestor who appears behind the protagonist like a Jojo-esque Stand and will fly over and beat the crap out of any nearby enemy until the player's mana gives out.

But what struck me most about Pharaoh Rebirth compared to its other doujin brethren is just how reasonable it is. It doesn't have a part where you can permanently screw up a side-quest and let an important character die, there's never a point where you're wandering around completely lost as to what to do or where to go next, and there's certainly not a whole lot of bullet-hell nonsense being thrown your way. It feels a bit like when I played Xenoblade Chronicles or Metal Gear Solid V for the first time, where I was (with some prejudice perhaps) slightly bracing myself for a lack of user-friendliness and convenience compared to other modern open-world games due to Japan's often stubborn adherence to doing things its own way (see also: most of Nintendo's decisions about its online functionality), and instead discovered the opposite: that they were as deferential to games made all over the globe as they were to those from their own country, and are perhaps the best - or at least you could feasibly make that argument without any eye-rolling - examples of their genre from the evident amount of consideration that went into developing the systems and understanding the needs and wants of the modern, slightly more impatient player.

Pharaoh Rebirth isn't just some odd little Japanese browser game remaster that someone threw onto Steam, but one that fully embraces the decades of work that a global community of Indie developers have put into the genre since its mainstream decline while retaining an inherently Japanese look and sensibility - cute character designs, a bananas plot, and a vein of referential and self-effacing humor - with the combined result forming one of the better Indie spacewhippers commercially available.

Rating: 5 out of 5.

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done, ten games at a time. Be sure to check out the Case File Repository for more details and a full list of games/links!

Well, here we are. It took twelve months, 227 appraisals (49 of which were deep dives) and 74 blogs that collectively contain over 140,000 words to get to this point, but we finally have our list of the 44 games that represent the finest that the PS2 had to offer. Well, at least in my view.

I've spoken at some length about my love for the following games in previous blogs, each of which is linked under their respective entries, and the order is purely alphabetical: I had enough trouble narrowing it down to this number without ordering them (but, uh, you can reasonably assume that Dark Chronicle is at #1. In fact, you don't even have to assume; I'm telling you). However, I will reiterate the most significant reason why that game has made it onto the Top Shelf. After all, great care was made to ensure that this list features a distinctive mix of genres, settings and styles, and each one has very different reasons for being an all-time classic. I've tossed in some useful stats and information for each entry too, just for funzies.

Before we begin, just want to bring up a couple of items: This list is not complete, but is "complete enough". Barring the opportunity to play a few bucket list entries in the future - there aren't many, but this interim blog covers most of them, and I'd like to hope that whomever is in charge of porting PS2 games to the PS4 digital storefront will get around to adding them eventually - I probably won't be writing about the PS2 again any time soon. I also want to thank the handful of people who have followed this gargantuan project from beginning to end throughout 2017, and I hope I didn't dismiss too many of your own favorites too brusquely. Heck, you could always build your own "Top Shelf" in response, though I might urge you to be ever so slightly less meticulous than I was.

	#1: Arc the Lad: Twilight of the Spirits North American Release Date: 25th of June, 2003. European Release Date: 30th of January, 2004. Developer/Publisher: Cattle Call/Sony Computer Entertainment. Status: Added to Reserves List after the first round, added to Top Shelf in final deliberations. Reason for Inclusion: One of a handful of non-Nippon Ichi Software strategy RPGs for the system, Twilight of the Spirits introduces an unforgettable cast of characters across two opposing teams, cleverly dividing the player's loyalty. Current Availability: Digital version available on PS4.
	#2: Ape Escape 2 North American Release Date: 30th of June, 2003. European Release Date: 14th of March, 2003. Developer/Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment Japan/Sony Computer Entertainment. Status: Immediately qualified for the Top Shelf in the first round. Reason for Inclusion: A bigger and bolder continuation of one of PlayStation's most inventive and funniest platformers. Current Availability: Digital version available on PS4.
	#3: Atelier Iris 2: Azoth of Destiny North American Release Date: 25th of April, 2006. European Release Date: 29th of September, 2006. Developer/Publisher: Gust/Koei. Status: Immediately qualified for the Top Shelf in the first round. Reason for Inclusion: The middle chapter of the Atelier Iris trilogy, this RPG perfectly balances the tactical combat and item creation of its franchise, and introduces (and later subverts) a dual protagonist feature that allows for concurrent storylines. Current Availability: PS2 only.
	#4: The Bard's Tale North American Release Date: 26th of October, 2004. European Release Date: 24th of March, 2005. Developer/Publisher: inXile Entertainment/inXile Entertainment. Status: Added to Reserves List after first round, added to Top Shelf in final deliberations. Reason for Inclusion: A satisfying hack-and-slash loot RPG, elevated by a versatile minion system, a brilliant approach to dealing with vendor trash, and some great self-effacing humor and musical numbers. Current Availability: Available pretty much everywhere - Steam, iOS, Android, PS4, PSVita, and the Ouya even.
	#5: Beyond Good & Evil North American Release Date: 11th of November, 2003. European Release Date: 14th of November, 2003. Developer/Publisher: Ubisoft Montpellier/Ubisoft. Status: Added to Reserves List after first round, added to Top Shelf in final deliberations. Reason for Inclusion: In some respects, BG&E feels like the first big Ubisoft open-world game, mixing a bunch of gameplay genres, adding various game-wide bonus objectives to pursue like hoverboat races and photography, and crafting it around what feels like the first part of an enormous space-faring epic. Current Availability: The HD version is available for Xbox 360 and PS3, and the 360 version is compatible with Xbox One.
	#6: Blood Will Tell: Tezuka Osamu's Dororo North American Release Date: 21st of September, 2004. European Release Date: 5th of June, 2005. Developer/Publisher: Sega/Sega. Status: Immediately qualified for the Top Shelf in the first round. Reason for Inclusion: Blood Will Tell manages to create a compelling character action game from an obscure Tezuka manga, featuring dozens of optional bosses and upgrades with a memorable storyline about a demon-killing robotic samurai. Current Availability: PS2 only.
	#7: Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter North American Release Date: 16th of February, 2003. European Release Date: 28th of November, 2003. Developer/Publisher: Capcom/Capcom. Status: Immediately qualified for the Top Shelf in the first round. Reason for Inclusion: The Breath of Fire series had always featured solid if unexciting RPGs, but Dragon Quarter totally subverts its legacy with a grim post-apocalyptic aesthetic and unique mechanics built around restarting the game over and over for incremental gains. Current Availability: PS2 only. Has a digital PS3 port, but only in Japan.
	#8: Canis Canem Edit (Bully) North American Release Date: 17th of October, 2006. European Release Date: 25th of October, 2006. Developer/Publisher: Rockstar Vancouver/Rockstar Games. Status: Added to Reserves List after first round, added to Top Shelf in final deliberations. Reason for Inclusion: Rockstar's best game builds a boarding school caper comedy out of excellent open-world mission design, memorable characters, a great soundtrack, and classes which, miraculously, are actually fun to attend. Current Availability: The enhanced Scholarship Edition is available on Steam, Wii and Xbox 360.
	#9: Castlevania: Curse of Darkness North American Release Date: 1st of November, 2005. European Release Date: 17th of February, 2006. Developer/Publisher: Konami/Konami. Status: Added to Reserves List after first round, added to Top Shelf in final deliberations. Reason for Inclusion: Though the 3D Castlevanias never could match Symphony of the Night or the Sorrow games, Curse of Darkness got closest. Current Availability: PS2 only, and this point I wouldn't expect much more from Konami.
	#10: Champions: Return to Arms North American Release Date: 7th of February, 2005. European Release Date: 18th of March, 2005. Developer/Publisher: Snowblind Studios/Sony Online Entertainment. Status: Survived its Battle Royale and progressed directly to the Top Shelf. Reason for Inclusion: In creating a loot RPG suited for consoles, Snowblind used every trick in their book to guarantee a demanding and treasure-rich hack and slash experience, as well as throwing in a number of experimentally silly ideas for extra challenges. Current Availability: PS2 only.
	#11: Dark Chronicle (Dark Cloud 2) North American Release Date: 17th of February, 2003. European Release Date: 12th of September, 2003. Developer/Publisher: Level-5/Sony Computer Entertainment. Status: Immediately qualified for the Top Shelf in the first round. Reason for Inclusion: Simply the greatest Japanese RPG ever made, Dark Chronicle juggles a dozen different gameplay systems and mechanics to ensure the player always has plenty to do and work towards, and seals it with a charming aesthetic and soundtrack. Current Availability: Available on PS4.
	#12: Disgaea: Hour of Darkness North American Release Date: 27th of August, 2003. European Release Date: 28th of May, 2004. Developer/Publisher: Nippon Ichi Software/Koei. Status: Survived its Battle Royale and progressed directly to the Top Shelf. Reason for Inclusion: A strategy RPG someone could feasibly play forever, filled with inventive progression mechanics and a brilliantly funny cast and story. Current Availability: Available on Steam (as "Disgaea PC"), PSP (as "Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness") and DS (as "Disgaea DS").
	#13: Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King North American Release Date: 15th of November, 2005. European Release Date: 13th of April, 2006. Developer/Publisher: Level-5/Square Enix. Status: Immediately qualified for the Top Shelf in the first round. Reason for Inclusion: Level-5 could do no wrong during the PS2 era, and Square Enix made the right decision entrusting the next entry of what is arguably their biggest franchise to them, producing this expansive and colorful open-world JRPG. Current Availability: Recently remastered for 3DS. Also available on iOS and Android.
	#14: Everblue 2 North American Release Date: 24th of February, 2003. European Release Date: 7th of March, 2003. Developer/Publisher: Arika/Capcom. Status: Immediately qualified for the Top Shelf in the first round. Reason for Inclusion: The greatest Arika creation that isn't masochistic Tetris or a guy in skeleton pajamas, the Everblue series are super chill underwater exploration/salvage games that can nonetheless get pretty terrifying when it's just you inside a pitch-black wreck with a dwindling supply of oxygen. Current Availability: PS2 only.
	#15: Final Fantasy X North American Release Date: 17th of December, 2001. European Release Date: 24th of May, 2002. Developer/Publisher: Squaresoft/Squaresoft. Status: Survived its Battle Royale and progressed directly to the Top Shelf. Reason for Inclusion: Square's big, confident step into the PS2 era was this tropical-themed and vaguely meta epic about breaking the cycle of tradition and trying to live up to one's own lineage, building on the strengths of the series but evolving and changing aspects as well. Current Availability: Remastered for PS3, PS4, PS Vita, and Steam, along with its sequel.
	#16: Gladius North American Release Date: 28th of October, 2003. European Release Date: 28th of November, 2003. Developer/Publisher: LucasArts/LucasArts. Status: Added to Reserves List after second round, added to Top Shelf in final deliberations. Reason for Inclusion: A gladiatorial sim that takes strategy RPG battles and adds a huge degree of mission variation and character customization for players to get lost in. Current Availability: No re-releases, but it's also available for GameCube and OG Xbox.
	#17: Grandia II North American Release Date: 28th of January, 2002. European Release Date: 28th of March, 2002. Developer/Publisher: Game Arts/Ubisoft. Status: Added to Reserves List after first round, added to Top Shelf in final deliberations. Reason for Inclusion: A truly immense RPG with one of the greatest turn-based combat systems of its era in the way it gives you full mastery over the field. Current Availability: Remastered for Steam, though with a few issues.
	#18: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas North American Release Date: 26th of October, 2004. European Release Date: 29th of October, 2004. Developer/Publisher: Rockstar North/Rockstar Games. Status: Survived its Battle Royale and progressed directly to the Top Shelf. Reason for Inclusion: San Andreas is one of the broadest, silliest, coolest and most technically impressive of Rockstar's flagship Grand Theft Auto series to come out in the PS2 generation, and its right balance of dumb and serious means it's still the series peak to this day. Current Availability: Available on Steam, PS3, PS4 and Xbox 360.
	#19: Gregory Horror Show North American Release Date: N/A. European Release Date: 5th of December, 2003. Developer/Publisher: Capcom/Capcom. Status: Added to Reserves List after first round, added to Top Shelf in final deliberations. Reason for Inclusion: One of the most imaginative and kookiest games on the PS2, the player needs to rely on stealth and careful observation to figure out when best to jack valuable souls from the game's many cuboid psychopaths. Current Availability: PS2 only, and only in Europe (or Japan).
	#20: Jak & Daxter: The Precursor Legacy North American Release Date: 3rd of December, 2001. European Release Date: 7th of December, 2001. Developer/Publisher: Naughty Dog/Sony Computer Entertainment. Status: Immediately qualified for the Top Shelf in the first round. Reason for Inclusion: The next step after 2D bandicoot shenanigans, the fully realized 3D world of Jak & Daxter is full of collectibles to find and obstacles to overcome, including various dalliances with other genre types, and is easily one of the most impressive platformers for the system. Current Availability: Remastered for PS3 (as part of a compilation) and PS4.
	#21: Kingdom Hearts North American Release Date: 16th of September, 2002. European Release Date: 15th of November, 2002. Developer/Publisher: Square Enix/Square Enix. Status: Immediately qualified for the Top Shelf in the first round. Reason for Inclusion: Disney's sense of magic, codified for an action JRPG that can drag in spots but generally delivers on its promise of a best of both worlds merger between the animation and video game giants. Current Availability: Remastered for PS3 ("Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 ReMIX") and PS4 ("Kingdom Hearts HD I.5 + II.5 Remix").
	#22: Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater North American Release Date: 17th of November, 2004. European Release Date: 4th of March, 2005. Developer/Publisher: Konami Computer Entertainment Japan/Konami. Status: Added to Reserves List after first round, added to Top Shelf in final deliberations. Reason for Inclusion: I have to begrudgingly accept the level of craft that went into MGS3's many survival and stealth mechanics, as well as its entertaining 1960s espionage story and many incredible boss fights. Current Availability: In the HD Collection for Xbox 360, PS3 and PSVita. Also on 3DS.
	#23: Okami North American Release Date: 19th of September, 2006. European Release Date: 9th of February, 2007. Developer/Publisher: Clover Studio/Capcom. Status: Added to Reserves List after first round, added to Top Shelf in final deliberations. Reason for Inclusion: A picturesque and inventive open-world action-adventure game in the Zelda mold, with character action combat, clever world-changing paintbrush mechanics, and a healthy dose of silly humor. Current Availability: Also came out on Wii. HD version is available on PS3, PS4, Xbox One and Steam.
	#24: Onimusha: Warlords North American Release Date: 13th of March, 2001. European Release Date: 6th of July, 2001. Developer/Publisher: Capcom/Capcom. Status: Added to Reserves List after second round, added to Top Shelf in final deliberations. Reason for Inclusion: An atmospheric survival horror game set in ancient Japan that actually manages to make its combat fun, for a genre first. Current Availability: Also available on OG Xbox.
	#25: Prince of Persia: Sands of Time North American Release Date: 10th of November, 2003. European Release Date: 21st of November, 2003. Developer/Publisher: Ubisoft/Ubisoft. Status: Added to Reserves List after first round, added to Top Shelf in final deliberations. Reason for Inclusion: As well as being a great action-adventure game in its own right, this reboot also introduces climbing traversal and time-manipulation to the modern era of action gaming - two features done so well here that they've been revisited many times since. Current Availability: Available on PS3 and Steam.
	#26: Project Zero 2: Crimson Butterfly (Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly) North American Release Date: 10th of December, 2003. European Release Date: 30th of April, 2004. Developer/Publisher: Tecmo/Ubisoft. Status: Immediately qualified for the Top Shelf in the first round. Reason for Inclusion: Otherwise known as Fatal Frame 2, this eerie photography-based survival horror still earns the dubious distinction of making me the most scared I've ever been while playing a game. Current Availability: Also released on OG Xbox, and remastered for Wii and WiiU.
	#27: Psychonauts North American Release Date: 22nd of June, 2005. European Release Date: 10th of February, 2006. Developer/Publisher: Double Fine/Majesco. Status: Added to Reserves List after first round, added to Top Shelf in final deliberations. Reason for Inclusion: Currently the greatest of Tim Schafer's various experiments outside of the graphic adventure genre, Psychonauts features the platforming adventures of a young ESPer in a psychic summer camp that frequently feels like the best Nicktoons show that never was. Current Availability: Available digitally for PS3, PS4, Xbox 360 and Steam.
	#28: Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando North American Release Date: 11th of November, 2003. European Release Date: 21st of November, 2003. Developer/Publisher: Insomniac Games/Sony Computer Entertainment. Status: Survived its Battle Royale and progressed directly to the Top Shelf. Reason for Inclusion: The scientifically proven best game of the original Ratchet & Clank trilogy, and one that perfectly represents the franchise's mix of frenetic run & gun shooting, platforming and space-sim action in a Looney Tunes-inspired sci-fi universe. Current Availability: Remastered for PS3 and PSVita.
	#29: Rez North American Release Date: 7th of January, 2002. European Release Date: 22nd of February, 2002. Developer/Publisher: United Game Artists/Sega. Status: Added to Reserves List after first round, added to Top Shelf in final deliberations. Reason for Inclusion: Rez is one of those showpiece games that you just had to let everyone you knew see in action, and because it only took an hour or so to complete it was perfect for spreading around which might suggest how this little synesthesia shoot 'em up became such a phenomenon. Current Availability: "Rez HD" for Xbox 360, and "Rez Infinite" for PS4 and Steam (with VR support).
	#30: Shadow Hearts Covenant North American Release Date: 27th of September, 2004. European Release Date: 11th of March, 2005. Developer/Publisher: Nautilus/Midway. Status: Immediately qualified for the Top Shelf in the first round. Reason for Inclusion: One of the most impressive PS2 games that apparently hardly anyone played, the truly epic-sized (two DVDs!) gothic RPG balanced a brilliant combat system, some great character-specific quests and moments, and a massive and elaborate globe-trotting Lovecraftian conspiracy. Current Availability: PS2 only (maddeningly).
	#31: Shadow of the Colossus North American Release Date: 18th of October, 2005. European Release Date: 17th of February, 2006. Developer/Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment Japan/Sony Computer Entertainment. Status: Immediately qualified for the Top Shelf in the first round. Reason for Inclusion: Quite possibly the best looking game for the PS2, its set-piece battles against a series of enormous opponents never once lost their luster or their spark of originality throughout the length of the game, but even in its quiet horse-riding moments the game was wonderful to experience. Current Availability: Remastered for PS3 along with ICO, and soon to be remade for PS4.
	#32: Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 North American Release Date: 9th of December, 2008. European Release Date: 13th of March, 2009. Developer/Publisher: Atlus/Atlus. Status: Immediately qualified for the Top Shelf in the first round. Reason for Inclusion: The PS2's swansong, Persona 4 continued to perfect Atlus's formula of randomized dungeon-crawling armed with a highly customizable party of summoned creatures, with a life and dating sim that often proved to be the more compelling half of the game's equation. Current Availability: Remastered, sorta, with Persona 4 Golden for PSVita.
	#33: Silent Hill 2 North American Release Date: 24th of September, 2001. European Release Date: 23rd of November, 2001. Developer/Publisher: Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo/Konami. Status: Survived its Battle Royale and progressed directly to the Top Shelf. Reason for Inclusion: A psychological survival horror game that puts far more effort into spinning its disquieting and metaphysical narrative than simply tossing hellhounds down a hallway. Current Availability: An iffy HD Collection for PS3 and Xbox 360.
	#34: The Simpsons: Hit & Run North American Release Date: 16th of September, 2003. European Release Date: 31st of October, 2003. Developer/Publisher: Radical Entertainment/Vivendi. Status: Added to Reserves List after first round, added to Top Shelf in final deliberations. Reason for Inclusion: A reliably fun Grand Theft Auto clone made more appealing with how rewarding exploration is for fans of the cartoon, making it not only one of the precious few good The Simpsons games but one of the few licensed games to really do right by its source material. Current Availability: Available on GameCube and OG Xbox. Also on PC, but not digitally alas.
	#35: Sly 2: Band of Thieves North American Release Date: 14th of September, 2004. European Release Date: 29th of October, 2004. Developer/Publisher: Sucker Punch/Sony Computer Entertainment. Status: Immediately qualified for the Top Shelf in the first round. Reason for Inclusion: My personal pick for best PS2 platformer, Sly 2 is an ingenious mix of open-world exploration and quest design that builds up to these hugely entertaining level-concluding heists once the player has all their pieces in place. Current Availability: Remastered as part of The Sly Collection for PS3 and PSVita.
	#36: Stella Deus: The Gate of Eternity North American Release Date: 26th of April, 2005. European Release Date: 24th of March, 2006. Developer/Publisher: Pinegrow/Atlus. Status: Added to Reserves List after second round, added to Top Shelf in final deliberations. Reason for Inclusion: Following the footsteps of Final Fantasy Tactics in structure, this apocalyptic SRPG has surprisingly deep character customization mechanics and some typically unusual character designs from the art director for Personas 3 and 4. Current Availability: PS2 only.
	#37: Suikoden V North American Release Date: 21st of March, 2006. European Release Date: 22nd of September, 2006. Developer/Publisher: Konami/Konami. Status: Immediately qualified for the Top Shelf in the first round. Reason for Inclusion: My favorite Suikoden, and one that perfectly encapsulates the franchise's mix of party-based dungeoneering, strategic army battles and rock-scissors-paper duelling in a sordid and occasionally tragic tale about an attempted coup. Current Availability: So far, it's the only Suikoden game yet to be rereleased digitally.
	#38: Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 North American Release Date: 23rd of October, 2002. European Release Date: 22nd of November, 2002. Developer/Publisher: Neversoft/Activision. Status: Immediately qualified for the Top Shelf in the first round. Reason for Inclusion: The best Pro Skater game breaks away from the time restrictions of its forebears, allowing players to fully explore and experiment in its massive skateboarding levels for all the gaps and secrets they'll need for high-scoring combos. Current Availability: Also released on OG Xbox and GameCube, but no remasters or digital ports yet.
	#39: Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria North American Release Date: 26th of September, 2006. European Release Date: 7th of September, 2007. Developer/Publisher: Tri-Ace/Square Enix. Status: Added to Reserves List after first round, added to Top Shelf in final deliberations. Reason for Inclusion: One of the flashier games for PS2, Silmeria follows its predecessor Lenneth in balancing satisfying combo-chaining action RPG combat with a labyrinthine time-travelling plot based nominally on Norse mythology. Current Availability: PS2 only.
	#40: We Love Katamari North American Release Date: 20th of September, 2005. European Release Date: 3rd of February, 2006. Developer/Publisher: Nowpro/Namco. Status: Immediately qualified for the Top Shelf in the first round. Reason for Inclusion: The first Katamari game that Europe saw, We Love Katamari creates a compelling gameplay basis in giving the player a giant ball that can roll up everything in its path, and then finds numerous creative applications for this premise. Current Availability: PS2 only, but some of its levels are in Katamari Forever for PS3.
	#41: Wild Arms 3 North American Release Date: 15th of October, 2002. European Release Date: 21st of February, 2002. Developer/Publisher: Media.Vision/Sony Computer Entertainment. Status: Immediately qualified for the Top Shelf in the first round. Reason for Inclusion: The best of Media.Vision's western-themed RPGs, Wild Arms 3 sports a strong ensemble cast of bounty hunters and a combat system which is far more tactical than it seems. Current Availability: Available digitally on PS4.
	#42: Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land North American Release Date: 19th of December, 2001. European Release Date: 4th of October, 2002. Developer/Publisher: Racjin/Atlus. Status: Added to Reserves List after first round, added to Top Shelf in final deliberations. Reason for Inclusion: An old-school dungeon-crawler inspired by the granddaddy of the CRPG genre, given a fresh perspective with the Japanese aesthetic and a set of tactical team "plays" that can really make or break a battle. Current Availability: PS2 only.
	#43: Yakuza 2 North American Release Date: 9th of September, 2008. European Release Date: 19th of September, 2008. Developer/Publisher: Sega/Sega. Status: Immediately qualified for the Top Shelf in the first round. Reason for Inclusion: Building from what Yakuza 1 started, Yakuza 2 settles into a groove of occasional insanity and hilarity while otherwise playing straight a traditional tale of noble and less noble criminals and a conspiracy to bring Japan to its knees. Current Availability: Yakuza Kiwami 2, a remake with lots of additional content, is out in North America and Europe later next year.
	#44: Ys: The Ark of Napishtim North American Release Date: 22nd of February, 2005. European Release Date: 16th of September, 2005. Developer/Publisher: Nihon Falcom/Konami. Status: Added to Reserves List after first round, added to Top Shelf in final deliberations. Reason for Inclusion: One of the more reliably entertaining action-RPG franchises out there, the sixth Ys game in particular helps to establish the modern Ys experience of ludicrously fast and challenging combat and awesome rock music. Current Availability: Available on PSP and Steam.

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We made it to the end of another year, everyone. Good for us. As always, that means it's time to hand it off to Stick Figure JC Denton to hand out some coveted Mento Awards for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Video Game Excellence - or the MGAs, for you busy millennials on the go.

Disclaimer: I barely played any new games this year, so this awards show should only be consumed as a form of entertainment. They're not legally binding objective truths about the year's best, like the Keighleys are.

Best 2016 Game of 2017

Nominees: Eidos Montréal's Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, HAL Laboratory's Picross 3D: Round 2, Ska Studios's Salt and Sanctuary, DrinkBox Studios's Severed, Naughty Dog's Uncharted 4: A Thief's End.

You know how it is. You spend most of one year playing everything you missed last year as they all go on sale and/or bring out value-added "GOTY Editions". In 2017, I played twenty games that were released this year and twenty-five from last year, so really I should be making this whole awards blog about 2016. I'd certainly have more nominees to choose from.

The winner of this category is Salt and Sanctuary, the neat 2D Dark Souls-slash-spacewhipper from the grim and gritty folks (I'm sure they're really super chill) at Ska Studios. The temptation would be to call it an Indie Souls clone, but it really does far more than just recreate the thrills and spills of FromSoftware's spooky serial suicide simulators in a scaled-down format. Like Bloodborne and this year's The Surge, S&S represents how the model could be expanded in so many ways both thematically and mechanically, and I'm so down for turning it into its own sub-genre. Just need a good name for it, one that can stand the test of time as well as "spacewhipper".

Commiserations to our runners-up Uncharted 4 (fine recovery after 3, but still overlong), Severed (great style, and it was unusual to see an action dungeon-crawler), Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (fun to explore, but kind of low-key), and Picross 3D: Round 2 (I love some Picross, but they could've made it harder to accidentally misclick a box).

Just for funzies, since I also played a lot of games from 2014 and 2015 this year, my Best 2015 Game of 2017 was Xenoblade Chronicles X (I spent so much goddamn time on that one) and the Best 2014 Game of 2017 was Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker (too cute!).

Best 2017 Game of 2018?

Nominees: Larian's Divinity: Original Sin II, Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Nintendo's Super Mario Odyssey, Monolith Soft's Xenoblade Chronicles 2, Nihon Falcom's Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana.

You know, I studied Fortune Telling in college for a few semesters before I ended up dropping out. Just couldn't see a future in it. That doesn't mean I can't use what few lessons I learned to predict what I'll be enjoying in the months ahead from the enormous pool of games I couldn't get around to in 2017. I think the easy choice is the new Super Mario Odyssey, which feels like a 3D Mario platformer tailor-made for my collect-a-thon proclivities. My thanks to Nintendo to going to all that trouble on my behalf, even if it does mean buying yet another one of your goshderned tablet consoles for babies.

Of course, I've no doubt I'd love Breath of the Wild, Xenoblade Chronicle 2, Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana, and Divinity: Original Sin II almost as much, seeing as they're all well-regarded entries in franchises I already adore. Just nearly not enough days in the year, my peeps.

Bucket List Tick-Off of 2017

Nominees: Double Fine's Full Throttle, Capcom's Onimusha: Warlords, Ubisoft's Rayman Revolution, Burst Studios's Toonstruck, Looking Glass Studios's Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss.

2017 was a big year on the retro gaming front. Not only did I finally complete a long-standing project to get every SNES and Super Famicom game on the wiki, in a reasonable level of detail to boot, but a large segment of my blogging time was spent on two features that plumbed the depths of video game history: the PS2-focused The Top Shelf, due to be concluded next week, and May's "May Maturity" which revolved around playthroughs of various PC games made in the 1990s. My favorite of all of these, as well as what turned out to be a fairly significant game from a historical standpoint, was Ultima Underworld: not only the first dungeon-crawler with panoramic movement, but my first Ultima game as well. Never could get into those top-down ones, not even VIII.

Props also go out to the excellent Who Framed Roger Rabbit-inspired point-and-click Toonstruck, the remastered version of Tim Schafer's (first) ode to heavy metal Full Throttle, a 3D platformer I clearly should've paid more attention to back in the day called Rayman Revolution (a.k.a. the PS2 version of Rayman 2), and Capcom's more action-heavy historical horror game Onimusha: Warlords.

Best New Character

Nominees: 2B (PlatinumGames's NieR: Automata), Aloy (Guerrilla Games's Horizon Zero Dawn), Monika (Team Salvato's Doki Doki Literature Club), Rhin (InXile Entertainment's Torment: Tides of Numenera), The Whole Crew of Talos I (Arkane Studios's Prey).

Without playing Divinity Original Sin II, Persona 5, or a great number of RPGs that came out this year, this category's going to be a little more incomplete than usual, I suspect. My pick for favorite character is NieR: Automata's 2B, but not for the reasons you might expect. Unfortunately, the full explanation requires some major spoilers, so here we go:

Runners-up include: Aloy, the put-upon savior heroine of Horizon Zero Dawn with a mysterious origin and a whole lot of baggage; Rhin, the benevolent street urchin of Torment: Tides of Numenera who presents a number of quandaries from both a gameplay and narrative standpoint; Monika, the (seemingly) most sane and (seemingly) perfect choice of Doki Doki Literature Club's harem of highschool beauties; and all 268 members of the Talos I research station who collectively comprise several hundred little stories about surviving, or not surviving as is more often the case, an unstoppable alien infiltration.

Weirdest F'n Game

Nominees: Spike Chunsoft's Danganronpa 1.2 Reload, Doki Doki Literature Club, Horizon Zero Dawn, Cavalier Game Studios/Tequila Works's The Sexy Brutale, Torment: Tides of Numenera.

My favorite award category, given to games that either utterly break the mold in new and fascinating ways or just enjoy being weird for the sake of being weird. The world of Numenera makes Torment an easy pick for this year's category, stocked to the gills as it is with some of the strangest quest design and settings I've seen in a traditional CRPG. That you spend half the game inside what is essentially Azathoth, or that your mindscape is an elaborate labyrinth that contains the consciousnesses of untold numbers of people, or that you can be vaporized moments after you start by poking a crashed spaceship's glowing power conduit, or that most of the world's industry is based on finding space-age garbage and junk from other dimensions that no-one knows how they work or how they're made but can sometimes confer beneficial effects or just look pretty. It's a surreal setting that takes hours of exploration and thousands of words of dialogue and descriptions before it begins to feel normal, if it ever does, and I loved the challenge of trying to figure it out.

We also have: Doki Doki Literature Club, for self-evident reasons if you play it long enough; Danganronpa 1.2 Reload, which I wasn't going to count for GOTY purposes because they're remasters but they really are some of the most batshit insane games I played this or any year; Horizon: Zero Dawn for its bizarre premise of robotic animals co-existing with a post-apocalyptic tribal society that the game spends its entire length explaining; and The Sexy Brutale for the way its time-travelling puzzles can mess with your brain, though fortunately not to breaking point.

Best Indie Game of the Week

Nominees: Zeboyd Games's Cosmic Star Heroine, Moon Studios's Ori and the Blind Forest, Yacht Club Games's Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment, Severed, Image & Form's SteamWorld Heist.

This overlaps with a few of the other categories, but I thought I'd take in the fifty games of the Indie Game of the Week feature (the fiftieth is kind of out of luck, since I haven't actually played it yet, but I've picked out something I doubt was going to win, so...) and figure out which of them I liked the most, actual date of release be damned. It's going to have to be Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment, a game that is also on my top ten for this year, for improving on an already near-perfect game. That's not an easy feat to pull off, especially for a free expansion.

Close runners-up include the beautiful and fluid spacewhipper Ori and the Blind Forest, the winning combination of XCOM style turn-based strategy and the careful aiming of a Worms or Artillery that comprises SteamWorld Heist, the confident and inventive 16-bit JRPG homage that is Zeboyd's Cosmic Star Heroine, and the dungeon-crawler with the atmospheric Central American-flavored netherworld called Severed.

Best Soundtrack of 2017

Nominees: Cosmic Star Heroine, Atlus's Persona 5, NieR: Automata, Xenoblade Chronicles 2, Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana. (Honorable Mentions: Prey, The Sexy Brutale, SIE Japan Studio's Gravity Rush 2, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment.)

This is the always the hardest category for me, because I don't limit myself to just the games I've played - most soundtracks are available on Soundcloud or YouTube, if only the highlights - and there's often a lot of very talented musicians and composers finding multiple gigs per year. Just boiling it down to five soundtracks I would happily buy and listen to on repeat proved to be challenging enough.

I think NieR: Automata's soundtrack is simply phenomenal, and much like its precursor not only puts in a huge amount of work - the singer invented an entire fake language based on how we might sound in the far-flung future - but perfectly establishes the mood and tone of every scene it scores. Nier wouldn't be nearly as emotional or affecting if not for its soundtrack, and the otherworldliness of it always takes my breath away.

Ys VIII's soundtrack, meanwhile, has the sort of balls-out sheer awesome that Falcom's Sound Team JDK always bring to the table. Frankly speaking, in any other year Ys VIII would sweep this category hands down. Every Ys soundtrack is SO GOOD. I'll never get tired of those insanely fast boss tracks for as long as I inhabit this Earth, and I'm glad that the new Ys has allowed the franchise to find some kind of recognition at last (if, unfortunately, for perhaps the wrong reasons if the furor over the lousy localization is anything to go by). Xenoblade Chronicles 2 delivers a reliably amazing soundtrack, filled with a huge number of tracks that reflect the time of day as well as the regions they pertain to, but I'd have to play the game to get the full experience. Cosmic Star Heroine's soundtrack is beyond catchy, and I loved its more atmospheric city pieces as well as its battle jams. Calling the Breath of the Wild's soundtrack great is fairly redundant, since every aspect of that game is apparently stellar even by Zelda standards. Finally, we have Specter of Torment, in which Jake Kaufman is tasked with remixing Shovel Knight's entire soundtrack to have a more somber feel that better reflects its moody new protagonist, as well as including a new main theme and new hub music. It's a spectacular undertaking, but I've ceased to underestimate Kaufman's talent.

Best Individual Track of 2017

Nominees:

• Cosmic Star Heroine ("Araenu")
• Doki Doki Literature Club ("Your Reality")
• Flinthook ("The Galaxy's Greatest Pirate")
• Gravity Rush 2 ("Lei Havina")
• Persona 5 ("Last Surprise")
• NieR: Automata ("Weight of the World")
• The Sexy Brutale ("The Sexy Brutale")
• Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment ("Hidden by Night")
• Xenoblade Chronicles 2 ("Battle Theme")
• Ys VIII ("Sunshine Coastline")

Really just an addendum to the above. I wanted to let these tracks speak for themselves, as they all perfectly represent the games they pertain to, but I feel I owe them all a small footnote just in case.

• Araneu is the theme for the planet of the same name, a noirish cyberpunk world full of wealth inequity and corporate oppression. I particularly like this track because of how much it reminds me of Cowboy Bebop. I'm sure it's deliberate.
• Your Reality, or Monika's Song, is the full version of the song loop you hear for approximately 80% of the game's runtime. It's a cute little piano melody with equally cute lyrics when devoid of any context, but one that becomes downright haunting by the time you hear it in-game. I... might recommend leaving it be if you intend to play the game at some point.
• The Galaxy's Greatest Pirate is the secret to Flinthook's success: that opening expositional movie, with this swashbuckling music in the background, creates the finest first impression a game could ask for. The version above is a variant of what plays on the main menu.
• Lei Havina is named for the affluent old town region of the game's primary city of Jirga Para Lhao, and I just love the smoothness that this track exudes. It's like the backing track for a daydream sequence in a 1960s French movie. Hard to place culturally, but weirdly familiar, and I loved gliding gracefully through the air while listening to it.
• Last Surprise is effectively the theme of the Phantom Thieves, as well as the main theme of Persona 5, and indicative of the game's surfeit of style and sass. It was a hard choice between that and Life Will Change though. It's an album where I'm trying to save most of it for a playthrough, but I've been listening to selected tracks from it since last year.
• Weight of the World is told from the perspective of 2B and is NieR's most emotional track, and there's a version of it at the end of the game that is somehow even more of a tearjerker, which I excluded here because its name is a spoiler (but you can hear it here if you're not too bothered). It is the crown jewel of an already incredible soundtrack and makes me misty-eyed with gratitude every time I hear it.
• The Sexy Brutale is one of the few games to give Persona 5 a run for its money for sheer honey-dripping charm and a loveable cast of flamboyant masked ne'er-do-wells. The heavy bass on its theme tune is incredible when it kicks in, but the real brilliance is in how the in-game version of this track and many others take on different tones as the day progresses, building up to mirror the dramatic demises of its characters. It's worth hearing it all in action.
• Hidden by Night is Specter of Torment's remix of the Lich Yard, which was Specter Knight's stage back in Shovel Knight. Honestly, every remix in this game is incredible; I just picked this one because it seemed the most appropriate.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is another game I'm being cagey learning too much about, since I've yet to play it, so I'm just giving you the standard battle theme here. It's still one of the best battle themes ever made, but that's the Xenoblade series for you. Very Grandia-ish, feels like. (But "Incoming!" is really good too!)
• Ys VIII was a maddening choice between "Crimson Fighter", "Deadly Temptation", "Gen D'armes", "Red Line -021-", and "Sunshine Coastline". I went for the first area's BGM over my usual boss music jams though because it so perfectly sets the tone for Adol's new Mediterranean island adventure and still manages to kick ass despite being stage music, which are often a little more low-key for the sake of atmosphere.

Giant Bomb's Best Feature of 2017

Nominees: Steal My Sunshine (e.g. The Block That Wasn't There), Murder Island (e.g. The Death Shack), GBE Playdate: Tender Loving Care (e.g. "Fucking Pizza!"), Quick Look: Bequest (e.g. The Haunted Chair), Live at E3 2017: Nite Three (e.g. The Jeep Grand Cherokee Story).

Choosing a handful of hilarious moments for this category in the past has always been a nightmare to narrow down, and TurboMan's got most of them with his "Best of" series, so I figured I'd zoom out a little bit and instead consider Giant Bomb's best overall video features of 2017.

It was a difficult choice between three in particular: Murder Island, the semi-regular Monday PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds feature full of drama, suspense and innumerable total party kills; GBE Playdate: Tender Loving Care, a melodramatic FMV "erotic thriller" with a slumming John Hurt that never stopped delivering unforgettable moments; and, of course, my personal favorite Steal My Sunshine, which takes a moderately popular if slightly unstable Mario platformer and transforms it with a vaguely antagonistic betting meta game.

Respect as always goes to Giant Bomb's regular E3 coverage and nightly interviews, this year's massive spread of Quick Looks, and all the other video features that didn't quite rank as highly in my estimations: there was definitely plenty for everyone this year, and now that both studios are operating at full capacity I look forward to what 2018 has in store for this site and its community.

Best Game of 2017

Nominees: Horizon Zero Dawn, NieR: Automata, Prey, The Sexy Brutale, Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment.

My full list can be found over here, with my absolutely truly for-real and no-foolin' finalized 2017 GOTY list that'll probably get edited at the very last second to include some game I got for Christmas. Such is life when you insist on making conclusive Game of the Year declarations in the middle of December.

My reasons behind each pick and their placement are explored more in the list itself, but suffice it to say it was a very strong year for games and I'm not wholly sure that list will contain my absolute favorite 2017 games for long. All the same, I can wholeheartedly recommend every one of those ten items and I'm reasonably satisfied that it'll stand the test of time for that reason, even if it's perhaps woefully incomplete for now. Hey, I can always think of it this way: there's a lot of great games on there that might've had trouble finding their way onto other lists, given the sheer number of games to choose from this year. If it manages to convince someone to check out a game they would've otherwise overlooked and they end up falling in love with it, then all the better.

That's going to do it for the 2017 Mento Game Awards. Thanks to everyone who has read, commented, liked, subscribed, recommended, laughed at, pilloried, tolerated and contributed to all my blogging output this year, as prolific as it ended up becoming in spite of my laziness, and I hope to see you all again very soon.

Until then, enjoy the holidays, enjoy the January "Awesome Games Done Quick" streams, enjoy Downtown no Gaki no Tsukai New Year's Batsu Game, and enjoy spending the next few quiet wintry months catching up on everything that came out of 2017 that didn't suck. See ya.