TheMightyEthan

How does Citra handle the two screens on Steam Deck?

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown This is a really excellent metroidvania. Combat feels great, the level design is great, the abilities are fun and cool, useful in both combat and traversal, it's got everything. It's also got a memory system where if there's like a door you can't open yet or whatever you just hit down on the dpad and it pins a screenshot to your map so you can see what the obstacle was later when you get more abilities. It all comes together into an overall package that just feels really good and satisfying. I have a couple of really minor nitpicks, but the only one even worth mentioning is that I wish there were more fast travel points, sometimes they're unreasonably far apart which can make late game stuff a little tedious. Other than that, it's all good stuff. Grade: A

Yeah, Ubisoft games are really good about that too, usually letting you adjust overall difficulty level, or separately all kinds of stuff like player health, enemy health, player damage, enemy damage, etc etc.

The deluxe edition of World of Assassination is on sale for the first time ever, and I've heard so much good stuff about Freelancer that I figured now was a good time to jump back in. In Other Waters just looked neat and was $4.

The Entropy Centre First game of 2024 for me! It's pretty good too, probably the best Portal-alike I've ever played (besides the actual Portal games). You've got a gun that can rewind time on whatever object you're pointing at, and you have to navigate puzzles and this decaying facility (I did say it was a Portal-alike). The dialog is well-done and funny, the premise/story is neat, the puzzles are engaging, it's got the whole package. The only real knock against it is that the "official" puzzles keep coming back periodically even after you've broken out into other areas, and it felt weird. I get why they did it, they didn't want to copy that Portal formula too much, but every time I came back to one of them it was just inherently less interesting than the more naturalistic areas. All in all though good game, would recommend. Grade: B+

It's an FPS where if you stop moving you die. I saw it on a list of hidden gems in the Steam sale, and it's only $3.74 so I figured I'd give it a shot.

I got the elite strap for the Quest 2. I considered getting the one with the expanded battery but it was more than I wanted to spend, and I think I made the right choice cause even with the more comfortable strap I don't think I'd want to wear the headset for more than 2 hours.

Had my eye on this game for a while and now it's on the Humble Choice bundle so basically I got it for $12.

Looks neat.

I upgraded to the OLED limited edition and I love it. The screen looks amazing, and the higher framerates are very nice. It's also lighter, runs 5-10% faster depending on the game, and has a longer battery life. Though I also was able to sell my original Steam Deck for $400 so that offset a lot of the cost of the OLED.

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!

Game of the Year: Alan Wake 2 This game is so perfectly weird, and creepy, and atmospheric. I love how they converted it into an actual horror game, as compared to the original's vaguely-horror-themed-action. The game is gorgeous, the world is intriguing, the characters are bizarre and wonderful. It's just great. Runner-Up: Hi-Fi Rush This game was such a surprise and delight. I'm not usually a big fan of character action games, but this one hooked me. The explicit tying of everything to the beat really helps get the rhythm of the combat. The characters are a delight, and the game has real heart, managing to pull off a lot of things that could so easily have been cringey. I think the shadow drop was a mistake, the lack of lead-up to it means it's not as firmly embedded in people's minds and it doesn't get the attention it deserves. Honorable Mention: Sea of Stars This game was totally not on my radar, and I'm not the biggest old-school JRPG fan to begin with, but it really got me. It's beautiful and sweet and fun.

Not a bad way to start the new year.

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

Dredge This game is basically a more approachable version of Sunless Sea, which is definitely not a bad thing. You're a fisherman in what at first seems like a fairly idyllic little archipelago, but soon you realize Things Aren't Quite Right (TM). At its core it's what you might expect from a fishing game: you go out and fish, you bring your catch back to sell, you use the money to upgrade your boat, etc. However, at night the ocean is full of monsters that will attack your ship, and you lose sanity while you're sailing in the dark, but there are also valuable fish that are only available at night. You also discover a mystery to unravel that I won't spoil, but it's pretty neat stuff. The trouble is, I think it's simplified a little too much. The characters you encounter are interesting and creepy, and they do a very good job of creating an unsettling atmosphere, but there's just not enough of it. I wish the main quest was longer (I beat the game in just over 10 hours), and that there were more side-quests and characters to engage with. Obviously "I wish there was more" isn't a huge criticism, but it did leave me feeling a little unsatisfied at the end. What's there is good, it's just a little bare-bones. Grade: B+ And that's probably the last game I'm gonna get to take off my backlog this year.

Ghostrunner: Project_HEL Wanted to play this before playing Ghostrunner 2, and it was a pretty cool little DLC for the base game. You play as Hel, one of the bosses from the main game, in the events that occur just before that game starts. Basically you're tasked with taking out the Climbers rebel group, the one the Ghostrunner is tasked with avenging in the main game. It plays more or less the same, but you can jump farther and dash farther, and like Link you can shoot your sword with power if you charge up a meter. All in all I'd say if you liked Ghostrunner you should definitely check this out, but it's not really bringing anything drastically new to the table. Grade: B+

Gettin one in under the wire so it doesn't have to go in the 2024 thread?

Well that's me out then. I still haven't gotten through Alyx, which already feels too long for a VR game, and is only like 12 hours.

You say you're disappointed in the action combat of FFVIIR, but I say I'm fuckin hyped for Rebirth! (But no I agree, I'd like it better if it were active-time turn-based like the original.)

I've never been as big a fan of 2D Mario as 3D.

Do you just wear bikinis for fun, or is there a plot justification like with Quiet in MGS?

Chants of Sennaar This game is really freakin cool. It's a puzzle game where the puzzle is learning (made up) languages. Basically you wake up in a strange land where you don't understand the language, and you have to figure it out to figure out how to advance. You have a little notebook that records each new word you encounter, and you can make notes about what you think it means, and then periodically there are little puzzles where when you put the right words in it confirms the correct meaning so you can be sure you're right. Initially you start out just doing it based on context clues, but eventually you're also using little Rosetta-stone type inscriptions where you can see the same thing written in two different languages. Each language has its own syntax and grammar though, so it's not simply a 1:1 correlation from one to the next, you still have to work out which word means each thing. It's really neat, and you always have what you need to figure out the next part of the language. Other than a few stealth sections that I didn't particularly like, I enjoyed my whole time through. Grade: A

Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion This game is hard to rate. On the one hand, I found the combat fun, even the weird roulette power-up system that I thought sounded dumb when I heard about it. I also really liked the story, which is pretty compelling if you just accept it's complete anime nonsense. On the other hand, the game really suffers from being a port of a PSP game. The whole game is play for 15 seconds, watch a 30 second cutscene, play for another 20 seconds, watch a 15 second cutscene, on and on and on. It really interrupts the experience. For large parts of the game neither gameplay sections nor the cutscenes are long enough to really get into them before you switch back to the other. There was one point late in the game where literally in a cutscene my character walks out of room helping another character who's injured, I help the character sit down on the floor, it switches to gameplay where I walk 10 feet across the room to a door that is the only interactable object in the room, and as soon as I interact with it it switches back to a cutscene wherein I help the injured character back up and we leave the room together, I put him back down in the next room, where it switches back to gameplay and we repeat the whole process! (The next room was at least bigger, I guess?) Like why? Why not just make it one continuous cutscene? Rant aside, overall I enjoyed it, and I would still recommend it to anyone who wants more FF7 backstory. Just be prepared for it to feel pretty disjointed in its presentation. Grade: C, would have been a B+ if not for the weird structural decisions.

That makes sense, would certainly make sweeping the stick easier.