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Assassin's Creed Nexus I've been playing this off and on for the past couple months. It only takes about 15 hours to beat if you don't worry about the side stuff but I've just been busy/distracted by other games. If anything, this game manages to prove that the formula can work in VR. You can do pretty much everything you'd expect to be able to do in an Assassin's Creed game, and most of it works pretty well. Unsheathing your hidden blade by flicking your wrist is always a fun bit of immersion, and being able to throw your melee weapon directly into the face of a charging guard always feels badass. Obviously, the game is of a smaller scale than a traditional AC title, but the maps are still decently sized in each chapter and you have plenty of tools at your disposal to approach a situation in a multitude of ways. I only have two gripes to speak of. Firstly, the climbing can be a little finicky. The climbing part itself is fine, but pulling yourself up onto a ledge or jumping to a distant handhold doesn't always register the way it should, which can mean falling back down if you don't catch yourself in time. It mostly works, but the climbing in Asgard's Wrath 2 still felt a lot more responsive and tight. Speaking of Asgard's Wrath 2, the swordfighting in this game can't even begin to compare. It works fine, nothing is broken, but it's pretty slow paced like most VR swordfighting games are, giving you pretty wide windows to block and parry for the sake of not overwhelming the player. It may help to mitigate frustration, but it feels more like a rhythm game than a true sword battle. If anything, it feels a little too easy for a game that is supposed to be emphasizing stealth over brute force. The actual assassination mechanics are a lot more fun and feel more natural, though. As VR games go, I'd say this is still one of the better ones, maybe on the lower end of a top 10 list or just barely outside of it.

Alright, the post I know you all wait for all year, TME's gaming summary! First, the full list of games I beat for the first time this year: I beat 55 games this year, up from 48 last year. More than a game a week! I'd say that's pretty respectable. On average each game was 2.5 years old when I finished it, but that's being thrown way off by Final Fantasy VII (OG) and Dino Crisis, both of which are 25 years old. If we look at the median instead then it drops to just under 4 months, which I think is a lot more reasonable and representative. Continuing to the platform breakdown, as you can see PC dominated this year, not surprising since I built a new PC in January, though to be fair to Xbox a great many of those PC games are Xbox-published, like Hi-Fi Rush. The two Xbox games I did play I actually could have done on PC, but both of them (Signalis and Venba) due to the art style and 60-fps caps wouldn't have been any better on PC so I played them on Xbox just cause it uses less power. With Playstation and Nintendo the only games I played on those platforms were exclusives. Pokemon really drove up the total hours for Nintendo, which is why it's so disproportionately high, as you can see in the average hours per game. Xbox is low mostly because Venba is really short, like 2 hours, and even Signalis (the other game I played on Xbox) is only like 8 hours. It's interesting how close the averages were for PC and Playstation, and how close they both were to the overall average too. And that brings us to the breakdown of the calendar. October had the highest number of releases, which I suspect would be true of a lot of people this year, that month was nuts. May was low cause I was playing Tears of the Kingdom, same with October because of Starfield and then Cyberpunk. My highest completion rates were August, which is a bunch of short games I think just by random coincidence, and December, which is because I was trying to clear as much of my backlog as I could before the new year, so I was specifically playing small games. I'm still going into 2024 with 9 games on my backlog though!

Got Starfield in there as a combo-breaker on your Nintendo streak.

One last game!!! Metroid Prime Remaster Fun fact: I've never finished this game before. I got maybe half way through on the GCN version (playing on a Wii) back in '09 or maybe '10 but stopped somewhere around the part where you see Metroids in tanks and the lights go out. I'm not sure exactly why! I do recall enjoying it. Maybe Uncharted 3 came out and I got distracted? Anyways, so essentially I've been playing a 20 year old game for the first time. When this game is great it's very great. Unfortunately it's also very tedious: Did you just walk back into a room you were just in? Fuck you! The enemies are all respawned. Seriously though, for a game that wants you to backtrack they sure didn't make it fun. Save points are few and far between. Defeated enemies will give you bombs when you need health or vice versa. The underwater section, without the suit that makes mobility easier, is SO slow. And then when you do get the suit the platforms are all still arranged for the old suit so you can easily over jump an fall all the way to the bottom. Speaking of the underwater section, I got about 75% through it and then the game told me I can't progress. Thanks for letting me waste my time! Want to get to the ice area from the overworld? Ha fuck you! See something cool that you can't get yet so you want to mark it on your map to come back to? Also fuck you! However, the world design is (mostly) great. The music is great. The power ups are awesome. Most of the bosses are cool (except Thardus who got stuck in a wall which made hitting it's weak spots very annoying. Visually the game is gorgeous Nintendo/Retro did a good job cleaning it up. I just wish they'd put some QOL changes into the game as well. Score: B+ That finalizes my list of games that I've completed this year: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom - 2023-06-21 The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D - 2023-06-23 Super Mario 3D Land - 2023-12-03 Starfield - 2023-12-03 The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds - 2023-12-23 Super Mario Bros. Wonder - 2023-12-25 Metroid Prime Remastered - 2023-12-31 This is compared to three last year (both Pokemons and New Vegas) so.... I'm basically MetalCaveman or Pojo. Ok maybe not but as you can see I did pretty good in December.