Games of The Year

Hard not to preface a blog about 2025 without saying how much the year sucked, both for me personally and for a lot of my friends. It seemed like we are all enduring rolling disasters on a micro and macro level. In between sometimes there are videogames.

Game of the Year - Baby Steps

Baby Steps sucked me in and didn't let go until I reached the top of the mountain, in one of the gayest and most wholesome endings to a videogame that I will think about for a very long time. A game that has you learning and mastering the skill of walking - a truly open world game where traversal is the point and not a means to an end. 

Anti-Game Of The Year - Arc Raiders

The extraction shooter sets up players to be victims or become cruel monsters in the name of survival. Subscribing to a dim world view of survival of the fittest. I lost $40 trying to see what all the fuss is about. Imagine spending hours getting a high level gun and then losing it because someone else has a slightly better gun and your gear is reset. 

Deadlock award for Deadlocking - Deadlock

Once when I returned to Deadlock after a few months absence I was put against someone in my lane who admitted in chat that they didn't have a job and just played Deadlock all day. No matter how much knowledge and muscle memory and pratice you get at this game, it is not enough, you are constantly chasing the idea of this game being fun but it's constantly being extinguished by a firehose of people who live in the game. It's a shame because Valve made a hero shooter that doesn't suck the soul out of me with cringy characters and awful catchphrases. For a time Deadlock reminded me of the fun chaos of TF2, but then the rest of the world got in and a "meta" emerged. One of the more interesting games of the last half decade is a cast-off side project from PC gaming's rent-seeking monopoly - and it continues to exist because it escaped containment. 

Turning 360 degrees and walking away award - Ridge Racer 6 + Ace Combat 6 (tie)

Microsoft seems bound and determined to smother xbox with a pillow while it dumps unheard of money into the AI black hole. In a freak accident it made it's xbox one console actually useful and included backwards compatability for scores of 360 games. I played through the excellent Ridge Racer 6 and Ace Combat 6 - both exclusive to the 360 and both benefitting from upscaled graphics and use of a better controller. They are 20 years old but they feel modern and fresh. It's quaint to play something like Ace Combat 6 and spend about 6 hours in the campaign - around 15 or so missions - and feel like you got your money's worth. Ridge Racer's drift mechanics are second to none. The backwards compatabilty system is a great way to go to a used game store and find something new and playable for cheap. I feel like one day it will suddenly vanish.

Super Mario Brothers Remastered

I have never actually played SMB, and I feel like that's a big thing amoung a lot of gamers. SMB feels like a baby game that isn't nessicary in 2025. However, SMB Remastered is a great way to experience the original, with smoother graphics and extra visual flair on the sprites. Cleverly - the game requires an SMB rom provided by the player - so that it can unpack the graphics and sounds into the re-implementation - getting around the pesky copyright restrictions. World 7 is hard and took me several days to get through. World 8-1 I have only gotten through once. It's a marvel watching the game take a basic set of gameplay pieces and assemble them into something that becomes very challenging. Later levels trick you into making mistakes and contain traps. It makes me want to make a platformer game again - something most games can't get me to do 

Dillons Dead Heat Breakers

Every year I dust off the 3DS, play the most stressful game of all time, and after finishing a mission that does not advance the game I set it down for a few months until I go back. At least once during this playthrough an NPC will say something so charming I have to take a photo of the screen. I have been playing the game this way for over 5 years. I don't know if I'm ever going to finish it.