In 2024 I got laid off, and therefore had more time for games. I played games for research, and then started playing games for fun. I dusted off my PS4 and got Gran Turismo 7 working. I dusted off my Xbox 360. I played a lot on my Miyoo Mini. I went to lan parties with a decade old laptop coming apart at the seams. Here's an unordered list

Games...of the year

Death Stranding

I was going to build up to Death Stranding by playing the Metal Gear Solid series in order, but gave up at MGS3 when I waded through water and my health started to depleate, I discovered I had leeches and I was out of health items - so I could either wade through the water again hunting for fish or quit the game. So I quit the game.

Then I got Laid Off

Death Stranding is a real contemplative game. Choosing one's path through the game world becomes a series of looking at rocks and inclines and paths and meandering through them optimally. Optimally placing cargo. There's gorgeous vistas and beautiful ruins. The vehicles are incredibly stiff to control. The writing isn't the greatest but the performances are incredible, to the point where it actually felt like I was watching acting and performance and not thinking "People don't talk like this...ever". 

Like most Kojima produced games, once you start getting to the end the entire game becomes a freight train with a momentum that is impossible to stop until all the train cars come tumbling into place. Not even the very frustrating fight with Higgs at the end could get me to stop the game, but perhaps I should have paced myself because the game overstayed it's welcome for me and I ran out of my infinite grace for artistic vision.

In Death Stranding there's 3rd person combat, but you can't kill anyone in the game and indeed I never did, despite a big temptation to - MULES and such attack you with real bullets and are an incredible nucience in the early game so taking out that frustration is really tasty - but the baby doesn't like that, and anything the baby doesn't like I don't like. But this 3rd person combat is actually better than most 3rd person shooters where you have to kill people, and this feels like a flex on every other videogame out there, a flex nobody will pay attention to. 

BeamNG Drive

The actual game I played the most this year and probably last year. It's a virtual car sandbox. You drive around empty maps without the hassle of having to complete a campaign. You smash cars into each other in slow motion. You can configure cars with a huge variety of parts - I was obsessed with building shabby cars that were driven by the down and out. I'd drive around maps and imagine their feverish and desperate lives, and then I wrote a story about some of them. 

Every few months the BeamNG team will add or improve new cars. In the last one they added a 1940's car and every iteration of hot rod based off them - including ZZ Top's "Eliminator" - their attention to detail is second to none for anyone who knows these little in-jokes. 

Pacific Drive

High concept games like this really don't exist outside of indie developers. Jalopey and The Long Drive are both in the "First Person Driving and Survival" game microgenre and both of those have a love for the vehicle that comes through. Pacific Drive is no different but that love is for a station wagon. 

A terrifying amount of systems and UI screens. It feels like it would be too complex to work, and indeed it was - I had to turn off some of the systems in the difficulty menu because my progress became glacial. The game's randomness and constant pranks on the player become grating after a while. The nesting doll of keys and locks in the form of crafing and resource access becomes a little frustrating. The car spun out in the climactic final jump and i had to finish the game driving backwards. 

But I can overlook these things because the game does something really well, it's beautiful and terrifying. There's even a love story. My coworkers figured out I was gay from the little pride flag I stuck on the back of the car. It's a triumph of the circumstances of videogame's current dire predicement. 

Mafia 3

In spite of the game's long middle act that stretches too long - it is very cathartic to shotgun racists to death. A GTA Game if GTA hired actual writers and were interested in a setting that was not just constant fart and dick jokes and homophobia. A GTA game if Rockstar actually cared about making a 3rd person shooting system that felt good, and a driving system that felt good to drive. Rediculous at times. Funny at times. A Terrifying amount of Content - buildings - city streets - vehicles - NPCs - Voice Lines. This is the high water mark for Prestige AAA games everyone's been searching for. 

John Woo's Stranglehold

A 3rd person shooter with a product lead that designed pinball machines for Stern and based off one of the greatest action movies of all time - Hard Boiled - it's the only game I set the controller down after a level and clapped a little in appreciation. A chaotic bullet ballet. Tony Hawk-like levels filled with rails to run on and zip lines to glide down - all while directing a symphony of exploding barrels with dual weilded pistols. Chow Yun-Fat reprised his role as Tequila and it's good. The game has a slavish recreation of cigar smoke hanging in the air. All the levels come apart with incredible destruction. You can do flips off walls. There's powerups. They don't make games like this anymore because nobody who makes games watches John Woo films anymore. If you're a game designer, play this game, then watch Hard Boiled, then watch A Better Tomorrow. Read a fucking book for once. 

Gran Turismo 7

Still runs like a treat on my base PS4. Somehow. Every few months Polyphony digital will add cars like the Volvo 240 Station Wagon, or the Toyota Hiace Van. They have made recreations of storied Gran Turismo tracks like Grand Valley Speedway, but reimagined on the coast of California. The Cafe's menubook system is a little weird, but I appreciate the quieter tone to Forza's brashness. I spend hours applying body kits and wheels to cars I will race once only to discover they are uncompetative. 

The handling is second to none. The presentation is second to none. It's clear Polyphony Digital actually care about cars and that care comes through in the final game. 

Gravity Rush Remastered

A breezy 8 hour platforming experience that made me miss breezy 8 hour platforming experiences of old. The PS3 era that is. A fantastical setting and story. Great music. Funny and well written characters. A movement and combat system that's fun to get good at. We got one more and then Studio Japan was shuttered so Sony could make Conchord

MARK CERNY IF YOU'RE READING THIS: PEOPLE NEED GAMES TO PLAY IF THEY'RE GOING TO BUY A PS5 PRO! YOU CAN'T JUST REMASTER THE LAST OF US AGAIN OR FUCKING HORIZON ZERO DAWN. 

Some More Games I played

Deadlock

Sometimes Valve does things like buy out an entire developer so the team can get chopped up and make the UI for "Dota Autochess For Mobile" and sometimes a streamer leaks a game that isn't perfect yet and it becomes a runaway success, forcing the developer to actually release something new. Deadlock takes the MOBA formula and adds 3rd person movement in a unique world and sometimes that's all you really need. I was drawn to Deadlock not for the gameplay but because you can play as a spanish speaking gargoyle with a machine gun. I sat through numerous bad matches and fumbled my way through getting rolled. I watched youtube videos on different builds and experimented. The game was fun because it wasn't Figured Out yet and the sweaty tryhards hadn't decended to create The Meta and ruin the beautiful chaos that every match would decend into. I was saving replays and making frag compilations. I was poking through the discord to find old development art. It felt like the old times again, and then I fell off. Maybe I'll climb back on again. 

FEAR Combat

The Backrooms before The Backrooms. I found a CD for this in a thrift store in Anchorage but it wouldn't install, and some kind individual just gave me a steam key, so thanks for that. An all-timer of a shotgun. 

Parking Garage Rally Circut 

Fun to play with friends. A devil of a handling model that lets you go very fast. Understands what people love about the Sega Saturn. Has a Ska soundtrack that makes you feel good to be alive, like good ska music does. 

Need For Speed Unbound

"People don't talk like this" I mutter as I hear yet another bad fitting music track. I had to start this game 3 times. First time I picked the wrong starter car - a honda civic. It's front wheel drive - there's drifting events in the game - it can't drift - you're fucked if you pick the Civic. I wanted to make a Kanjo street racer. The game wanted me to listen to terrible music. The game gave me a very boring Audi sedan which had better stats than the car I was trying to build up so I raced with that, then I stopped playing. I very recently played through all of Need For Speed Underground 2 which also has terrible writing, bad handling, but some of the music is good - the cars are also good sometimes - it's frustrating but with the grinding advances of AAA budgets they've become overstuffed with the obnoxious. Joss Whedon has a lot to answer for and mainly for ruining dialog in media for an entire generation. 

Helldivers 2

Before getting laid off I too was working on a 4 player online co-op PVE 3rd person shooter and Helldivers 2 coming out felt like a good sign - like we could point the game's success at our corporate overlords and go "see, we could be making this kind of money soon!" and then Concord came out and flopped we were all out of a job.

Helldivers 2 like John Woo's Stranglehold succeeds because the developers watched a movie that wasn't from The Dark Knight trilogy. That movie was Starship troopers. Everyone is embracing the pretend play of being a fascist because we live in a fascist society. No other game has given me the feeling of the futality of war, I'm wading through knee deep snow alone on a forbidden planet while endless nightmare machines come charging at me and I'm wondering why we're here in the first place. My ship name is "Blade of Glory" after the ice skating movie. 

Cruelty Squad

Probably the most famous game made with Godot. Godot as a tool is going to overtake Unity and Unreal as both have become bonafide AAA game engines. Has the Hotline Miami school of game difficulty - it's just really hard get good bro. Does more for FPS design than most FPSes made by seasoned teams. 

Games I tried to play too hard

Bioshock Infinite

I found a copy of this in a thrift store in Anchorage Alaska. It took several minutes for them to find the disc, when I got home I discovered the CD key was already claimed on steam and there was no way for me to install the game. 

I went to a Half Price Books in Bellevue WA, at a mall that was actually populated by stores I'd want to shop at and filled with people. There's a mom and pop gamestore there that's pretty good. The Half Price Books is where I found my Xbox 360 copy of Bioshock Infinite. I bought it. I plopped it into my Xbox 360. It said I had to update the system to play, and I did, and I lost the beloved old Xbox dashboard and it was replaced with something much uglier. I had already lost but I started the game anyway.

Ken Levine has two things he puts in every game: there's turrets that attack you - but you can hack them and they'll attack enemies. There's puddles of water you can electrecute and it will shock enemies stepping in them. The protagonist is so dumb it feels like parody. This is the bog water people were drinking back in the mid 00's. It was not worth the effort to buy the game twice. 

Biomutant

There's a little guy on the cover and I want to play as them. I bought a disc in the last remaining Gamestop on earth - the one in The Mall of America - and when I brought it home the disc was damaged and unreadable by my PS4. A part of the disc had a small dent that was not visible unless viewed at an angle - but the disc would still be recognized as Biomutant so Gamestop gave someone $5 store credit for it and will not let me return it - for there are no more gamestops. 

I tried to download it but midway through the website put a picture of the boss from Office Space and said I used too much bandwidth for the day and I would need to pony up some money to download this DRM free copy of Biomutant. My quest continues.

Eternal GOTY

Dillon's Dead Heat Breakers

This stressful game I have spent years on and off trying to complete. I will take it with me somewhere, prop open the 3DS, and fire up DDHB. I will laugh at the excellent dialog and text descriptions, take photos of the character's cute designs, and sweat myself to death trying to complet an ultra stressful mission involving beat-em-up combat, driving, tower defence managment, resource managment, etc etc. It's a hard game to explain to someone because you sound like you're describing a demented videogame cooked up by a 5 year old. In between stages you can run a shop, play pachinko, pet animals, work at a recycling center, run races, and all of these side games are well designed and stand on their own as full games. 

This is the last game by Vanpool before they closed up shop. A shop that includes linage from Love-De-Lic and other storied japanese developers. it was eshop only in the US and released just as the Nintendo Switch arrived. It's totally forgotten about now and I won't stop talking about it. I hope to one day finish it.