I debated moving this list to Cohost (after all these years, the Tumblr text post interface still makes me want to punch a wall) but whatever, here we are! Keeping it relatively short this year.
A lot of the games I played aren't going to be on this list because I don't have much new to say about them (MTG, Dwarf Fortress, Strive, etc), but for those that I do, here's the games I played this year.
fujimoto is the most guy of all time
The Seventy-Eighth spirit is Dortax. He is a Lesser President in power and appeareth in the form of a flamingo wearing a ducal crown, standing atop a tortoise. His office is to grant men Wi-Fi. He governeth four Legions of Spirits, and his Seal is this, which he obeyeth when he seeth it.
A collection of Sasquatches from Zorak and I's Bigfoot of North America video.
A couple weeks back, Arc System Works put out a Developer Backyard talking about the feedback they received on the previous Guilty Gear Strive beta. They talked openly on a number of topics, including planned improvements, their general philosophy for the game, and how thirsty the audience was for particular characters. But one area in particular has received umbrage from enfranchised fighting games players: ArcSys' philosophy towards tutorials.
2020. Boy, what a garbo year huh? Didn't actually play that many games this year all-in-all. Happens! My backlog is getting pretty big, but I just find it hard to focus on games when I could be working on something. Or put off working on something, as it may happen to be at times.
My arbitrary decision from years ago to only attach a numbered ranking to same-year releases is getting increasingly silly, especially given my propensity to wait on playing games until I’m in the right mood, but whatever. That order matters than the dumb numerical numbering anyway.
2019 sure was a year that happened where I happened to play some video games. Here’s the ones I played enough to form opinions, in a rough ranked order of preference.
It’s kind of weird that I’ve done this for five years now, but hey. I like to talk about things that I like / dislike. Hopefully you’ll empathize with my complaints, and give ones I enjoyed a try.
After considerable effort, @chorocojo and I were able to create a definitive guide to the Bigfoot of North America.
2017 was a weird year for me. In terms of my personal life, it's been something of a holding pattern; I'm a year older, but I've not accomplished nearly as much as I'd liked to. I've had a lot of good times, and I've done my best, but I probably haven't made an entirely meaningful use of my lingering youth.
But on the other hand: I got to play a whole bunch of video games! 2017 was a good year for video games. It had to be a good year for something, I suppose, and if the rest of the world was going to be getting it nasty this year, video games might as well be the thing that gets its due.
This write-up is an overview of what I thought about every single game I played this year. Only games that released this year qualified for a numbered “place”, as interpreted through my own rules. Here we go!
Hajime Isayama’s Attack on Titan (or Shingeki no Kyojin, if you’d like) is, at first blush, little more than a particularly smart and stylish take on the usual apocalyptic-horror formula: existentially-terrifying monsters in a world already lost, with a heap of unanswered questions. This conceit is ubiquitous these days; it’s at the core of hundreds of zombie and zombie-like apocalypse narratives scattered across a dozen different mediums.
How did world get into this mess? How does one survive in a world like this? Is it possible for society to survive in a situation like this? These questions form the backbone of fiction like Attack on Titan— internally within the narrative itself and externally in how the audience engages with it. One of the fundamental weaknesses of most zombie-like narratives is an inability to move past this core conceit and answer any of the questions. Few even try— as to do so might undermine much of the fundamental appeal of the narrative: the life-of-death tension and unknowable nature of the mystery.
Attempting to evolve the narrative past the status quo (no matter how unstable that status quo may logically be) runs the risk of alienating an audience who became engaged with the work because of that status quo in the first place. Oftentimes, the questions raised are far more interesting than the answers, and authors sometimes have no actual answer in mind when they ask these broad-sweeping questions in the first place. At the same time, maintaining a status quo indefinitely is boring; it’s at the core of why zombie fiction is so same-y and garbage.
One of the things that’s most remarkable to me about Attack on Titan is how it is not only willing to abandon the initial status quo, but continually evolve and develop the concept of the narrative while not betraying the themes and events it began with. It’s natural in a way that most apocalyptic monster stories aren’t. It continually raises more nuanced, challenging questions while answering older ones, and each new status quos raised is as perilous as the one that preceded it— just more complicated and nuanced.
Very little of what I’m talking about here is particularly revelatory if you’ve been keeping up with Attack on Titan, and if you haven’t been this discussion is going to amount to little more than the world’s strangest Cliffs Notes. I just want to nail down just how much Attack on Titan has been successfully evolving its themes while staying engaging, largely for my own satisfaction having just recently caught up. Spoilers for Attack on Titan through Chapter 98 after the break.
My Hero Academia, Kohei Horikoshi’s shounen manga take on Western super hero comics, has been running nearly three years now. I am something of a binge-reader when it comes to media; I don’t care for the drawn-out schedule that comes from following serialized releases. But My Hero Academia (alongside One Piece, Berserk, and One Punch Man) is one of the few that I actively follow. Lately though, I’ve been wondering why.
It’s not that the comic has taken a particularly egregious downturn in quality or pacing – it’s been fairly consistent all in all. The current arc about the class becoming intern sidekicks has been interesting, and it’s been moving at a rather brisk pace. The issue I’m struggling with is more fundamental. It’s a problem My Hero Academia has had since the beginning, and it’s done little to ameliorate over time.
The main protagonist and antagonist of My Hero Academia are just not very good.
I played a bunch of games in 2016. Here's what I thought about them, in a ranked order! This is my list, and if you have problems with me putting games released in previous years on it: fight me.
IDW’s Generation 1 Transformers comics are fantastic.
