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Add games you beat as you beat them. And remember, if you don't post about beating it, it doesn't count as beating it. Dragon Quest I HD-2D Remake Didst thou best thee worst Dragon Quest? Thy deeds are those of a hero, indeed! And let none say otherwise. Right glad I am that thou didst finish thy RPG? Sure. No but seriously, the whole 1 character thing is hard to pull off in this day and age, I don't envy Square Enix's position here. Change too much and the hardcores will riot. Don't change enough and you've created a tough experience for anyone else to get into. Personally, I would have had Princess Gwaelin become a party member after you rescue her, as she talks the whole time after that. As it is, with only one party member but not a very deep combat and levelling system, you end up with a pretty frustrating game where you spend a lot of your turns healing yourself and then attacking, repeat. The final dungeon of the game is also rich with liquid metal slimes, so you end up getting way over levelled by the final boss, even without trying to farm them. Fortunately the game doesn't overstay it's welcome and you're able to power through it pretty quickly. I just wish they would tone down the old timey speak, jfc. Onwards to Dragon Quest II HD-2D!

Starting off the new year with some highly anticipated titles:

An interesting mix of games this year. E33 probably being my game of the year, but there were several very good releases this year including Ninja Gaiden 4 and Ragebound, Silent Hill f, Ghost of Yotei, and Absolum. 1. Ghosts 'n Demons 2. Metaphor: ReFantazio 3. Ultros 4. Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth 5. Fantasian Neo Dimension 6. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 7. Sea of Stars: Throes of the Watchmaker 8. Onimusha 2: Samurai's Destiny 9. Post Trauma 10. LUNAR Remastered Collection 11. Death Stranding 2 12. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection 13. RoboCop: Rogue City 14. Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist 15. Astro Bot DLC 16. Nine Sols 17. Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater 18. Silent Hill f 19. Ghost of Yōtei 20. Little Nightmares III 21. Ninja Gaiden 4 22. Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound 23. Cocoon 24. Once Upon a Katamari 25. Absolum 26. Jusant 27. Alan Wake 2 28. Tormented Souls 2 29. Ninja Gaiden (NES)

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Ok, I see it's appeal now. This game is awesome and deserves all of the accolades. What else can I say about it that hasn't been said? I will say, I played it on my Deck streaming through GeForce Now, which is so good it's kind of nuts. EDIT: And another one! Red Dead Redemption 2 So I played through most of this game in what I thought was a few months ago, turns out looking at my Steam profile I put 156 hours into it between January and March I got deep into the epilogue and, I can't remember why, but I got distracted with something else and never went back, even though I meant to. Knowing I was close and wanting to finish off one more game in 2025, I finished the last few missions tonight. I beat the game on PS4 when it came out and this time played through it on Steam Deck. After some tweaking it ran pretty good on Steam Deck, I got a solid 45fps. There must have been some sort of an update because it ran horribly tonight, textures taking forever to load, you could see right through the game world a few times. Forced my way through to have it polished off. I will say this: Arthur Morgan is the best video game protagonist. I thought that in 2018, I still think that now. I really hope we get another Red Dead in the next few years. That brings, according to my spreadsheet, my completed 2025 games to: Unless you count unlocking mirror mode as beating Mario Kart World, in which case you can add that on too. Other than that I'm not sure what I was doing between 99% of Red Dead 2 (mostly in January) and Super Mario RPG in June

Road to Empress First game completed in 2026! This is a kind of FMV choose your own adventure/visual novel where you play as Wu Zetian, the first and only Chinese empress regnant, starting as a consort entering the palace and having to intrigue your way first to survival and then to the top. You'll definitely die a lot of times along the way though. It's a lot of fun, completely over the top in a good way. EXCEPT APPARENTLY IT'S ONLY PART 1! I haven't been got this bad by a surprise cliffhanger since Across the Spider-Verse. Still though, great game, a lot of fun. Perfectly achieves what it sets out to do, no notes. Grade: A+

Oh man, I beat a bunch of games between Yotei and the end of the year that I hadn't posted about: Star Fox 64: Starship - This is a PC port of Star Fox 64, played it on my CRT, was a cool fun time. Grade: B+ Majora's Mask Recompiled - This is a PC port of Majora's Mask, also played on my CRT. I think this game is slightly overhyped, the time loop mechanic was a cool idea but it did mean I didn't engage with the world as much as OoT because stuff would get reset instead of sticking and going through the steps to bring it back to the new state was too time consuming to bother with. Grade: A- Dead Letter Dept. - Creepy supernatural horror game about being a dude whose job it is to type the addresses from envelopes that the computer can't read on its own. Cool and short, definitely recommend. Grade: B Faceminer - Clicker game about training an AI to recognize faces. Interesting, though unsubtle. Grade: B Kaizen: A Factory Story - Puzzle game about setting up assembly machinery in a Japanese factory in the 80's, from some ex-Zachtronics devs. Fun, though not as good as some of the Zach games I might compare it to (specifically Opus Magnum). Grade: B Q-Up - Not actually a clicker, but in the same vein, made by the creator of Universal Paperclips. It's a satire of e-sports, where the sport is just coin flips that you have no control over, so it's perfectly balanced. The game part comes in setting up scores and things to raise your matchmaking rank regardless of the outcome of the flips. I'm glad it has an end and isn't a real forever game, because it's pretty addictive. Grade: A

I almost put Dispatch but if I'm being honest with myself this is the game I obsessed over the most in 2025. I loved the tactical combat and with 100 endings to find among wildly different routes, I ended up playing this for a stupid amount of time in my obsession with getting the golden ending. There aren't really any lazy fade to black text over a blank screen endings in here that I could find either. They all have their own art and scenes and were interesting enough to motivate me to keep going to find the next one. I still haven't found all 100 of them, though I imagine someday I'll go back to get the rest.

Dragon Quest II HD-2D Remake Now this is a video game. I assumed it would be another middling game which is the reason it got grouped together with DQ1. Now I don't know how the original was but this is easily the best of the trilogy, and I did really like DQ3. The party, the story, the game play? All top notch. At times it really reminded me of Dragon Quest XI with the way it was structured ...and some other reasons It's well worth it to do the post-game stuff and get the true ending, really good stuff. I'm part way through DQ8 3DS, maybe I can get through that before VII.

Wuchang: Fallen Feathers Gameplay, atmosphere, music, bosses, enemies, everything was a 10/10, easily one of my favourite Soulslike games, Fromsoft games included... Then update 1.5 happened lol. 1.5 Added some good stuff (elevator speed being the main thing imo), but it also changed a ton of stuff in terms of story and NPCs, the result is that the story loses a lot of impact, several enemies are now passive towards you, some bosses no longer die, they just need a nap and they're fine, some dialogue was changed and some new lines were added to reflect the rest of the changes. So, even though the rest of the game is still a 10/10, the changes made to the story make it hard to recommend.

It's that time of the year again. Digimon Story: Time Stranger This year I played through Cyber Sleuth and I'm currently going through Hacker's Memory, both have been really fun, so when I booted the demo for Time Stranger and saw how much better everything looked, that immediately was my "GOTY" moment, been playing for a bit and so far everything seems like a huge improvement (except for agent level, but we'll see how that goes lol).

Game of the Year: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 What is there to say that hasn't already been said? This game is dramatic and emotional and funny, the worldbuilding is fantastic and the combat feels great, it's everything I could want from an RPG. I love this game so much, it's my favorite game in years. Runner-Up: Citizen Sleeper 2 If you like story based games and haven't played Citizen Sleeper you should, it's kind of a visual novel but also a resource management game, where you play as an android trying to survive in a system that doesn't recognize your personhood. It's a little bit Murderbot, without all the violence, and the sequel expands upon the first in a way that manages to be a lot more than just more of the same. Honorable Mention: Zenless Zone Zero I've never played a gacha game before, I kind of have philosophical objections to the whole concept, but this game has its hooks in me bad. It's a lot of fun, the periodic events keep things changing up, and the stories it tells are surprisingly moving for a gooner gambler game. It's not the best game I've played this year, but it's definitely a big part of my year in games, I started in February and I haven't missed a day since.

I stopped updating my spreadsheet at some point but I haven't actually beaten that many games in the last few months, so it was pretty easy to fill in the blanks by sorting my Steam library by "last played". Assassin's Creed Origins Yakuza 5 Remastered Final Fantasy VII Rebirth Monster Hunter Wilds The Last of Us Part II Assassin's Creed Shadows Ys X: Nordics Onimusha: Warlods Onimusha 2: Samurai's Destiny Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury Donkey Kong Country Returns HD Metroid: Zero Mission Super Mario Odyssey Super Mario RPG Donkey Kong Bananza Powerwash Simulator Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater Silent Hill f Ghost of Tsushima: Director's Cut And I guess I might as well use this post for Ghost of Tsushima while I'm here. I still need to finish the Iki Island DLC but I did beat the main game. I loved it overall but it kinda overstayed its welcome a bit, so I decided to take a break from the DLC. In part because I really wanted to use my extra free time over the holidays to start a new playthrough of Divinity: Original Sin. I never finished it and I'd really like to play both Original Sin games before the new Divinity comes out. Anyway, Ghost of Tsushima. I don't have a ton to say about it. At first I found the combat a little awkward and loose but I got used to it and ended up enjoying it a lot. Playing on hard made the combat satisfyingly lethal early on but by the end of the game you're so overpowered that it barely even matters anymore. The art direction was fantastic and I especially loved how they used the wind to guide you instead of an awkward quest marker. The only real issue I had was how repetitive the open-world stuff was. I think they should've either made the map smaller or had more variety to it. Following a cute little fox to a shrine was fine the first few times but around the 20th shrine it started getting really old. So yeah, I'll definitely play Ghost of Yotei when it comes to PC but I'm in no hurry, they can take their time with the port. Also, my game of the year is uh... Bananza? TLoU Part II is my real top game of the year but it's a late port so I'm giving it to Donkey Kong because it was insanely fun. Which reminds me: buying a Switch 2 was horrible idea! I barely had time to make a dent in my backlog in the first place and now I have so many Switch games to play on top of that!

Nightmare Reaper What a pleasant, addictive surprise this turned out to be. I thought it was a roguelike because of procedurally generated levels but it really isn't despite what the store page claims. You don't lose progress when you die other than dropping your currently carried guns and having to start the current level over, so you'll never drop your hard earned coins for the upgrade shop or get sent all the way to the beginning. Good thing too because this game has roughly 90 levels. They all take maybe 5 to 10 minutes to beat, not counting the battle arenas that you do on the side for arena coins. My final playtime when I finally put it down clocked in at 33 hours. The real star of the show here is the guns. Yes, the game uses sprite and voxel graphics so the guns aren't super detailed but the sound design on them is immaculate and enemies explode into showers of blood and gore so pretty much all of them feel great to shoot and there's a ton of variety to boot. I actually lost count of how many weapon types there are, though they all fall into the melee, light, heavy, or magic category. It's not just your typical pistol, shotgun, sniper, smg rotation either. Those are all in there, sure, but then you get things like spell books, a scepter that summons meteors, pirate cannons, a scrap cannon, a howitzer, a black hole gun, a railroad spike launcher, a mini nuke, a god damn orbital laser, and much much more than I can possibly list here. The store page on steam claims there's 80 weapons and I have no reason to doubt that. On top of already having 80 weapons, each one you pick up comes with modifiers so they'll function differently. It's kind of like Borderlands in that sense, but the modifiers aren't just passive stat increases and they can wildly change how two versions of the same gun feel to use. I found all kinds of crazy combos. My go-to starter gun in the second half of the game was a magnum that fired electric stun bullets and had 675% knockback, but the most memorable gun I found was probably the smg that fired flaming, explosive piles of poo with every shot. You just never know what you'll get. As if that wasn't enough, your character gets a lot of upgrades too. You'll start off fairly weak and squishy but by the end I was double jumping, grappling, air dashing, and even kicking back enemy projectiles. It's a ton of fun. My only real criticisms are the ending (at least the one I got) is pretty anticlimactic and sometimes I got lost in a level for several minutes trying to find the key I needed to progress. These levels can be full of big, open spaces sometimes and keys aren't marked on the map so you have to hunt down their little glowing sprites which can sometimes feel like looking for a needle in a haystack. Other than that, this was fantastic. I'm already starting NG+.

Sektori It's Geometry Wars with a shiny coat of paint and some really great animations. I don't normally go for these games, but I'd heart it recommended on The Besties podcast and yeah, it's absolutely perfect if you're looking to kill 10-15 minutes. Honestly, if I'd had more time with it I could see it creeping into my top five of the year list. Super cheap too.

Fuck it, one more!! Very vague spoilers below Assassin's Creed Shadows Apparently I was about 99% done this game too. A pretty decent game, I think both Naoe and Yasuke were the best protagonists this series has had in a long time, from a gameplay but also personality/back story too. For a game with a lot of bloat it just sort of ends unceremoniously. It didn't feel like it really built up to anything. Yasuke even claims to have started a war before the epilogue and then in the last mission they're both like "we're done!"

I've been on a huge boomer shooter kick recently. Played through all of Blood: Refreshed Supply and Duke Nukem 3D. I picked up Selaco and Rise of the Triad and Dark Forces Remastered on the steam sale. The most interesting one I got, however, turned out to be Nightmare Reaper. You play as a mental patient going through procedurally generated levels in her dreams (so I assume since you go to bed in her cell in between levels). The randomized layouts do mean the levels aren't super complex but it makes up for it with the guns. There's an enormous variety to pick up and they all have modifiers kind of like Borderlands. After each floor you also have to sell every gun you're carrying except for one level 1 gun you're allowed to take with you, which sounds annoying but it keeps you from clinging to the same weapon for the whole game and you get new guns pretty quickly on the next floor anyway and most of them feel pretty good to shoot. You can only equip four guns at a time but you can carry dozens of them in your inventory on each floor and can swap them out anytime you want to try new loadouts. I've been looking for that endlessly replayable old school shooter that never runs out of stuff to do and I may have found it with this one.

Playing through a bunch of games right now, but I doubt I'll finish any of them before end of year, so here's my list for 2025: Star Fox 64 Star Fox Adventures Star Fox Assault P.N. 03 Area 51 Def Jam: Vendetta Def Jam: Fight for NY Ninja Gaiden Sigma Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor's Edge Elden Ring Nightreign Sekiro The Suffering The Suffering: Ties that Bind Lords of the Fallen Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth Ninja Gaiden 2 Black The Surge Ninja Gaiden 4 Two less games than last year, still better than expected though.

Metroid Prime 4 Beyond Honestly I thought this was pretty solid. It seems like a lot of people wanted The Force Awakens of Metroid Prime and this is not that. If you can accept that they tried to do something different and appreciate it for what it is, I think it's a solid FPS with Metroidvania elements... maybe sometimes even some Zelda elements (dungeons). I do have a few nitpicks: Samus should talk and it's weird that she doesn't. Since you can't see her mouth move, I do fully believe she had lines at one point probably late into development and they removed them. It's fine to have her be a bad ass woman of few words but when people ask her general questions like "where are we" "what do we need to do" etc it's weird when she's just silent. It's not like Zelda where it's implied Link is talking sometimes. The green crystals... I have a few left and can't find them anywhere. Fuck those crystals. I don't mind the characters talking at Samus, even over the radio, but we could probably scale it back slightly. Let me ride around smashing crystals on my motorcycle, Miles. Fast travel would be nice. I hope they get a chance at Prime 5, I feel like they have a lot of stuff here with potential that just needs some refinement. Having a fresh start without inheriting some other studio's work would be good for Retro, I think. As for a score I think somewhere in the 8s would be appropriate. I need to reflect on it more.

Ninja Gaiden 4 It's 100% a Platinum Games game, just with the Ninja Gaiden name, the gameplay, music, writing, story, everything is 100% Platinum. Which isn't a bad thing, IF you're looking for a new Platinum game, if you were looking for a new Ninja Gaiden game, your mileage may vary. For me personally, I wasn't feeling it at the start, then towards the end I had some fun, even started to like it, except for one thing: The Platinum Platforming Bullshit (PPBS for short lol), if you've watched the trailers you've seen part of it, Yakumo rail grinding or gliding while dodging obstacles, I've never been a fan of this stuff, and this was no exception, chapter 10 was particularly bad because of this. The worst part is that every time I felt like I was actually having fun, PPBS would strike and take me out of it. Overall, if this had been a spin-off I would have enjoyed it a lot more, remove the PPBS and it would have easily been a 9/10. Grade: B-

The Surge This was a thing. A sci-fi Soulslike is a cool concept, and one I'd like to see more of, but this game is just lots of interesting ideas and systems, but with a pretty clunky implementation, it's also a bit of a grindfest. The whole "target different body parts" is an interesting idea but most weapons feel really clunky and slow, heavy weapons specially, feel completely useless with how slow they are and how easy it is to get staggered. Leveling up is different too, you don't put points into stats, instead, you level up your energy, which allows you to equip more implants, which is what determines your stats, want more HP? Get HP implants, or stamina, or energy, etc. Implants are how you build your character. This is part of the grind, not enough HP? Farm for a better health implant. Need more energy? Farm for a better energy implant, repeat for any implant you may need. Right from the start, you don't get your full gear set, you need to farm for the missing pieces, more grind. The whole idea is neat, want a specific helmet? Target the enemy's head! This applies to the different gear pieces, except once you get it, you get the schematic, then you have to farm for materials to craft or upgrade each piece. Got a trophy for clearing a dark area with a specific weapon type simply because I couldn't get the chest piece (which has your lamp) to drop, instead got a weapon that glowed and decided that was good enough. There are different areas, but within each area it's super easy to get lost because everything looks the same. Last boss was a pain, actually uninstalled the game for a while, then today I went back and managed to defeat it, I was ready to give up again when I saw it had a second phase lol. Overall, I wouldn't recommend this one, second is supposed to be better so I'm looking forward to it. Grade: F

Ghost of Yotei Good game, as I'm sure will come as a surprise to absolutely everyone. Its tale of revenge is not original, but it's pretty well told, and manages to not just fall into the grimdark take on it like some other Sony studio's game... I'm not in love with it though like I was the first one. I enjoyed it, but there were little niggles that hampered the experience for me. Like there were numerous times in the game where it felt like it was setting you up to make a choice about what to do, but then no choice was forthcoming. Which is fine, I don't need choices in all my games, but it felt a little like a bait and switch each time it happened. I wonder if they were originally planning to have player choices at those moments and then changed course during development. And the combat... I like it on paper, but in practice I felt like it was unfair. Like 75% of the times I got hit I felt like it was the game's fault, not mine. It was frustrating, and not in a good way. Overall though the game is good, I enjoyed my time with it, there's stuff to do in the world but it's not too cluttered, it manages to chart a different course than Tsushima and not just be a repeat. It's number 6 on my top 10 for the year right now. Grade: B+

Ninja Gaiden 2 Black More accurately, Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 Black. This builds upon NG Sigma 2 improving things, removing some of the boss fights that were added for Sigma, removing an area in the late game that was pretty annoying, plus some other good stuff. Overall, it's a pretty big improvement over Sigma 2, still doesn't beat OG 2 IMO, but if you don't have access to OG 2, this is the next best thing. Grade: A+

Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth Though it has some serious issues with localization/translation*, it was still a really fun game, with a cool story, ending had me in tears lol. *Some stuff doesn't make sense, other stuff feels out of place, in the Digiline thing for example, there's this message exchange that went a little something like this: What?! Being the complete edition, which includes Hacker's Memory, there's a ton of Digimon that you can get, I was able to get pretty much all I wanted for my main party, only one missing was Beelstarmon, but I don't know if she was around when these games came out lol. Fun thing, on Switch (don't know if this happens on PlayStation), putting the console on sleep mode doesn't stop in-game time, this means that any Digimons you have on your farm will continue to level up. This makes it super easy to end up with Mega Digimon early on, depending on how often you play, it's cool though, because you can leave a Digimon on the farm while you do other stuff, then when you come back to play, you can add that Digimon to your party and they'll have leveled up a bunch, no need to grind for XP. The main dungeon does get a bit repetitive, different floors have different gimmicks, but it all kinda looks the same, however, that didn't bother me that much. Only thing I had an issue with was the last boss, felt more like a test of patience than a challenge, but that was mostly due to my party, apparently depending on which Digimon you have, you can end that fight super fast. Definitively recommend this one if you're a fan of Digimon. Grade: A+

I have returned! Ok, so this didn't turn out quite how I had expected. I now have a better grasp of what was going on, what the different character's motivations were, their relationships to each other, etc. All the endings put together really paint an overall picture that explains all of that very clearly. The thing is the endings don't quite work together in a "this is what happened" kinda way. Without getting into spoilers, the first NG+ cycle immediately drops a bomb that was deliberately omitted from the initial playthrough. So basically every conversation in the entire game is recontextualized. It feels kind of artificial but it makes the first playthrough pretty mysterious and mindfucky so I don't really have a problem with it, I guess. But after that, the other endings mostly serve to flesh out everyone's motivations and feelings with ending 4 providing the last pieces that tie everything together. It's hard to talk about this without dropping a huge spoiler so I'll just say that the game never quite explained the parts that I was the most curious about because, ultimately, that wasn't the point of the game. Or maybe there's some stuff I just didn't pick up on... I'll probably watch some youtube videos to see what others have come up with. I'm sure there's a ton left to unpack since the endings have some contradictory elements and even some hints that But yeah, overall I really enjoyed the game. I'm not enough of a Silent Hill superfan to say whether or not it's a valid entry into the series but I loved both the SH2 Remake and this and I'm looking forward to Townfall, whatever that turn out to be.

Dispatch Goddamn this game, so good. The story and the characters are incredible, your actions (at least feel like) they have real consequences, even the dispatching game itself, which I could have done with a little less of, plays into the larger narrative in a very satisfying way. Everything just comes together so well into an almost perfect whole. If you have any interest in narrative games you've gotta give this one a shot, it's better than anything Telltale ever did. Grade: A+

I'm not a huge fan of beat-em-ups but even I loved Shredder's Revenge. It's especially great for couch coop.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time After getting through Hades II I wanted to play a something a little lighter, so I grabbed the retro-console and gave this little slice of 90's gaming a look. Now, I'm not really a fan of the beat-em-up; it just wasn't something I played a lot of growing up, and as such it isn't something I gravitate towards. That said I had a good time with this. It's fairly brief, but that's to be expected from this sort of game. Had a good time with it though and I'm probably going to try and play more games in this genre going forward. Any recs? Hades II Technically I beat Hades II. Took me some 50 hours, but I finally hit credits and unlike Hades 1 I didn't have to enable God-mode. Go me I guess? I am however, not yet done with this one though. I want to get through the prologue before I consider putting it down. Dispatch Man, I fucking adore this game. It's been a breath of fresh air and a game I've been delighted to return to twice a week for the last month. I had some minor issues with the games 'tactical' mini-game (which may well be down to me not fully understanding the mechanics), but everything else from its story to it's characters and it's overall presentation was superb and I can't wait to see what Adhoc has in store going forward.

Chrono Trigger DS My first time ever beating Chrono Trigger. I don't know what to say. It was really good. Maybe the best Square game I've played? Loved FF6 and FF9 but Chrono Trigger...! Works great on the AYN Thor, lovely to play it with two screens. Score: 11/10

I also just finished Silent Hill f and instead of returning to Ghost of Yotei like I planned I will be diving right back in for the other endings.

Silent Hill f I bought this to play as a spooky October game and ended up dropping it for most of October... Not because of any fault of the game, I just wasn't really in a gaming mood. Spent most of October watching movies, even started buying them physically again, which I had been meaning to do for a while. But I digress. Silent Hill f is pretty good! It's hard not to compare it to the SH2 remake. Overall, I'd say it wasn't quite as good but not too far behind either. It's also nowhere near as scary but, to be fair, in SH2 I was dreading running into Pyramid Head around every corner and there's simply nothing like that in this game. The atmosphere is incredible, though, and the art direction is fantastic. So yeah, that's ending 1 done. I realize the game is meant to be replayed to get the full picture but by itself the ending felt a bit tacked on. Some stuff I had already put together by that point but the very last section reveals something that I couldn't have possibly guessed or predicted based on everything that happened in the game. I'm assuming I'll start to see the bigger picture as I go through the other endings. I've seen people commenting that as early as the beginning of the first NG+ cycle the game is already dropping little things that start recontextualizing things a lot. So I've got that to look forward to. I've seen a lot of people complaining about the combat and I didn't really have any issues with it for most of the game. You can set the difficulty for combat and puzzles independently and I did my playthrough with both on hard. Combat felt really punishing early on but once I had a good grasp on it the balance felt just right. I had a full inventory for most of the game but when things started ramping up I would burn through my resources pretty quickly. The game kinda goes insane with it in the last few chapters, though, and it started being a bit much. It felt like way too much combat all at once and I was ready for the game to end at that point. So yeah, I'll have to do NG+ soon because I need to know more. Which means

Yep, RE3R was alright but very disappointing as a remake. It's really dumb how they upgraded Mr. X into more of a stalker that roams around dynamically but then went on to reduce Nemesis to scripted encounters and boss fights in the very next game. I'm sure that in reality Nemesis was more scripted than he appeared to be in the original but he was still the original stalker that felt like he could show up at any time. That remake was such wasted potential. It could've been something truly special but instead they treated it like a box to check so they could move on to remaking RE4.

Resident Evil 3 Remake So similar issues in this game with Nemesis as with Mr. X in RE2R, except at least this time it's only the first section and not most of the game. That said, I don't like this one as much. It looses the metroidvania feel of the earlier ones by moving you through new areas so often, I would have preferred to stay in one place and slowly unlock it like the other ones. I also didn't like how much more actiony it was even than Leon's campaign in 2. I still enjoyed it, but it's definitely the low point of the series so far for me. I did enjoy it overall, but not like 2. Grade: C

Resident Evil 2 Remake I really liked this game, though I do think Claire's story is a lot better than Leon's, so I'm glad I played hers first, or I might not have cared to play the second one. I do think Mr. X is a big detractor from the game, he's too omnipresent, and takes too long to go away when you reach a safe room, so you end up spending a stupid amount of time just waiting for him to leave, which is neither engaging nor scary, just tedious. Luckily I was on PC and could install a mod to remove him. If I had been on console there's a good chance I might have just quit the game. Without him though it was excellent, really top notch survival horror, especially as Claire. However, because of that, I don't feel like I can really rate it given that I only liked it because of a mod that changed a core aspect of the game, so I guess no score from me.

Metal Gear Solid Δ: Snake Eater I've been working my way through this one slowly since launch, playing a little bit here and there. Mostly because the Master Collection came out recently enough that I wasn't actually itching to replay the game just yet. So, is it good? Well, it's a fairly 1-to-1 remake, so it's kinda hard to screw that up too badly. At the end of the day, you still end up with Metal Gear Solid 3. So it's hard to complain because that's one of the best games ever made. Personally, I would've preferred something of a re-imagining like Capcom did with the Resident Evil remake. Don't turn it into an open-world or anything dumb like that but at least make it so the maps seamlessly connect to each other, maybe bring over some of the gameplay from MGSV, things like that. The original MGS3 is finally available on modern platforms, so I could've always just replayed it if I felt like having the classic experience. Something a bit new would've been more interesting. Then again, I did notice some slight changes. This may be because I did my first playthrough on hard but I feel like they tweaked how the game works under the hood just enough to throw me off and make me suck at the game in the first few areas. Small things like enemy line-of-sight, how much camouflage actually hides you, how much sound your foosteps make, etc. Also, for the first few hours I just couldn't sneak up on anyone. It was actually starting to drive me fucking nuts. I'd slowly inch up behind a guard to grab them and they'd always notice me at the last second and raise the alarm. Well, turns out this version of the game has a sneak button. So you gotta use that to sneak up on people otherwise they'll spot you. Good to know! IIRC you could walk very slowly with the d-pad in the original but I don't think it was required to be able to grab someone without causing an alarm. You could walk slowly enough with just the analog stick. Another thing I struggled with was lining up headshots with the tranq gun. I would hit nearby enemies fine but would always seem to miss my headshots on enemies further away. Turns out the darts start to drop after a certain distance so you need to account for that when aiming. I don't think it was that way in the original. Also early on I was crouch-walking a lot. That addition alone seemed like a massive QoL upgrade. But by the end of the game, I was barely using it anymore and went back to crawling like in the original. If you want to move faster, you get spotted so easily when crouch-walking that you might as well just stand up and run. I'm sure there's a slight difference but it ultimately wasn't as big of a change as I thought it would be. By the end of the game, I got used to the small changes and I felt like I was playing a shinier version of MGS3 but not necessarily a better one. I don't know if Delta replaces the original entirely for me. The original MGS3 was so ahead of its time visually that it still looks fine to me. You can tell it's an older game but it doesn't really feel dated visually because of its strong art direction. I'll probably still replay it here and there out of nostalgia. But it's nice to have a more modern-looking option now, I suppose. I don't mean this to sound overly negative. In the second half of the game when I started to get a feel for it, I was actually having a ton of fun with Delta and I definitely want to bump up the difficulty and do another run soon. It just sticked too close to the original to really leave a mark of its own, I guess. It's just MGS3 but marginally better. It's probably the best way to play the game for a new player but the original will always feel special to an old fuck like me. fake edit: So a few days passed since I wrote this and I started a new game on Extreme and oh boy, yeah there's definitely been some changes here. I made it all the way to The Pain boss fight and I just... couldn't do it. I looked up strategies online and I feel like I got it down pretty well but I just could never actually fucking get him. I would get to a point where I would only have a shot or two left but then I'd run out of ammo and would need to dive into the water to grab some grenades or some mk22 ammo. And I would just get stuck in a loop of dodging his attacks and never get an opening again. This motherfucker is seriously overtuned. It's legitimately insane. You'll get his shield off with a grenade and he'll immediately bring it back or just go right into one of his attack and you'll have no choice but to dive into the water to avoid it. So I started over in Legacy Mode to see if it was easier. Making it all the back way to the fight was actually kind of challenging because in Legacy Mode you only have access to the fixed camera angles, you can't switch to third-person on the fly like in the original. I'm assuming because the two modes are balanced differently. Anyway, I guess I got used to playing this game in third-person over the years because I kinda hated how limiting the fixed camera angles were. Oh and I wasn't crazy, sneaking up on enemies is definitely easier in Legacy Mode. They still notice you but there's a longer pause between them spotting you and the alert going off, which leaves you just enough time to body slam them into the ground. Also, in Legacy Mode you can easily headshot enemies with the tranq gun no matter the distance. I'm assuming this is part of the balancing to account for the perspective change between the two modes. Anyway, I persisted and finally made it back to the Pain and... yeah, fuck this. I don't know if he's actually easier in Legacy than in New Style but the classic controls are so counter-intuitive that I just didn't have the patience to try more than a few times. It's a bummer because after my initial playthrough I was actually looking forward to replaying the game with more of a challenge (and I was loving everything up to this point) but this is just a roadblock I don't have the patience for. I play these games for the stealth gameplay, not for the gimmicky boss fights. I don't have the patience for this bullshit anymore. If you play this, stick to normal/hard difficulty. Maybe I'll give the original a replay just to see if I end up having the same problem... So yeah, overall it's a fun game but I don't think it quite manages to replace the original. If they do another remake, they should probably do MGS1 cause that one felt dated as hell when I replayed it through the Master Collection.

Goddamn, you started the year off with some bangers. I love P5 so so much but I bounced off Strikers at like the second world.

I stopped tracking my games on a spreadsheet a while back, so I just went back through this thread and made a list lol. Some stuff may be missing, I guess, but probably nothing major. 1. Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty 2. Horizon: Zero Dawn – Complete Edition 3. Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty – Master Collection Version 4. Persona 3 Reload 5. Persona 5 Strikers 6. Kingdom Hearts Final Mix 7. Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers 8. Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree 9. Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater – Master Collection Version 10. God of War: Ragnarok 11. Silent Hill 2 Remake 12. Metaphor: ReFantazio 13. Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake 14. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle 15. Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine I was gonna try and do Space Marine 1 -> Boltgun -> Space Marine 2 before the end of the year but I got distracted from Boltgun after finishing the first chapter. Everything was played on PC. Honorable mention to P5 Strikers for being so forgettable I had actually forgotten I'd played it. I'm surprised that I managed to get through two of Atlus' long JRPGs without getting burned out. In fact, I feel like in both cases I went through them much faster than usual. I wonder if that would've changed had I tried to fit SMTV Vengeance in there.

End of the year wrap-up time! I beat 31 games this year, down from 54 last year. As always I only count games I beat for the first time this year. PC was far and away my most-played platform last year, with a whopping 87% of my games and 78% of my playtime. For the first time at least since the Switch released, I had no Nintendo games whatsoever. Xbox barely got in, because I was replaying the old Splinter Cell games and discovered I'd never played the Kola Cell DLC. Playstation won for longest average game because of the 3 games I played on the platform, one was FF7 Rebirth. All in all I'd say 2024 was a pretty decent year for games for me. Bring on 2025!

Cultic: Chapter 2 I feel bad about this. I can tell that Jason Smith worked his ass off on this game and he lovingly crafted these huge, sprawling maps with tons of attention to detail. This game is his baby and I respect the hell out of what he accomplished mostly by himself. However, I gotta say that chapter 2 feels like a step down from chapter 1. There's a massive difficulty spike with the new enemies and level design. Whether that's an issue for you is up to personal preference, I suppose, but even if I'm okay with the game being harder it has one other major issue that really started to affect my enjoyment: these levels are too big. I almost feel guilty complaining about it. Like I said, this game was made by one guy and I can't imagine the amount of time it took for him to make these gigantic areas to explore. One level in this game can be nearly as big as the entire mansion in Resident Evil. You could fit three or four Doom levels in one Cultic Chapter 2 level. It's extremely impressive on a technical level and they're laid out in a way that make them feel like real places instead of mere video game levels. Unfortunately, when actually playing it's also extremely easy to get very lost looking for your next objective. There is an auto-map that fills out while you explore but it only helps so much. There are times when the path forward is practically a secret area. I spent over an hour on a single level at one point and didn't run into a single enemy for half of that time because I was so confused about where to go. I know people like to be snobs about objective markers and compasses but this game really needed it. I had to consult Youtube more than once just to know where the hell I was supposed to go. Maybe that's partly my fault for wanting to do a whole level in one sitting but come on. It's a boomer shooter. That's how they're meant to be played. There's also several atmospheric setpiece moments where you'll be trapped in the dark somewhere, just waiting for something to come at you out of nowhere while you're stumbling around with your lighter. This can be effective in theory, but since I got lost several times this also meant long stretches where I didn't run into any enemies at all because I didn't know where I was supposed to go to trigger the next encounter. I'm willing to accept partial responsibility for it since this is hardly the first time I've gotten lost while playing a game and struggled to figure out what I was supposed to do, but it happened to me enough times while playing this that I started to feel like I couldn't possibly be this inept. Most boomer shooters will have you looking for, at most, 3 keys or key items per level. This one can have you hunting for up to 8 or more depending on the level. It's rough. Maybe I'll have a change of heart on a replay since I know what to do in the levels now but I'm not ready for that yet. I need a break from this one. Shame really because the gunplay feels great as always.