A Green Mushroom

When I published my post about Belghast's passing the other day, I noticed this draft sitting in the backend of my blog CMS. It was drafted in August of 2023 and I had a few initial notes as seeds for ideas I could build out into a full post.  That's pretty typical for how I used to jot down thoughts that I would later craft into a full blog post. Without giving you the exact words, my notes essentially boiled down to the fact that Twitter was in rough shape and felt like it was on the way out, I was trying out Mastodon, and I was feeling a little unmoored on the internet. Now it's three years later and Twitter is essentially dead (for everything I used to use it for anyway), I haven't used Mastodon after that initial few months of 2023 experimentation, and the closest thing I have to a "home" social media is Bluesky. But even Bluesky just doesn't feel like a true home.  It feels like the place I go to scroll a few times each day when I want to get a puls...

Belghast was a longtime friend of mine.  At this point, we must have known each other for almost 20 years.  If you haven't heard yet... he passed away yesterday.  MassivelyOP has a write-up with some more details , so I won't go into those here. Looking back, my last post was almost 3 years ago.  I'm not going to focus on me in this post, but I just wanted to acknowledge that it's been awhile.  But, I couldn't let this go by without writing something. Belghast has always had a stream of consciousness writing style so I'm going to embrace that for this post and not overthink it. Bel created communities.  He was the heart of so many of them.  I originally ran into him in the early days of the blogosphere as it existed in the mid 2000s.  He made so many friends and so many connections.  At some point I got pulled into his orbit and into a few of the groups he was at the center of. And he was truly the center and the heart of so many of these com...

I jumped right into the previous post without actually explaining Blaugust.  So... what is it?  Blaugust is an excuse to get people blogging... in August.  Hence, Blaugust! I'm not the best person to pitch it, but Blaugust is put on by a long time friend of mine, Belghast.  Here's what he had to say about Blaugust for the 2023 kickoff: Blaugust is a month-long event that takes place in August each year that focused on blogging and other serialized content. The goal is to stoke the fires of creativity and allow bloggers and other content creators to mingle in a shared community while pushing each other to post more regularly. For years blogging has been dwindling, and in part, Blaugust was my attempt and reversing that course by compiling a bunch of veteran bloggers in one place and making it super easy to ask questions and get answers. The idea is that this festival of blogging can help reignite dwindling fires for the next year and give folks a sense of kinship as a...

I decided to participate in Blaugust this year for the first time in a few years.  My intention is to write 1-2 posts per week.  I don't have the time in my day to day life for daily blogging at the moment, but I thought this might be a nice blogging jumpstart after being dormant since the end of last year. Also, it really feels more important than ever to have your own little piece of the internet that you control.  With everything going on with social media lately, I thought it would be a good chance to look at this blog again with fresh eyes. The first thing that immediately jumped out to me was that my blog's website theme isn't really up to modern standards.  It was still serving up a different specific mobile site, and that's just not how things are done anymore.  I decided it was time for a new theme. For reference, I'm still using Google Blogger.  WordPress is actually the better toolset for owning and customizing your own blog-like site... but I us...

This running Games of the Year list has been an interesting experiment.  I decided to start this series right as we were shutting down the Geek to Geek podcast as a way to keep creatively broadcasting some gaming thoughts out into the world.  I learned a few things from sticking with it this year. The main thing I learned is... I just don't have as much desire to broadcast my thoughts out in public as I used to when I started this blog or when I started podcasting.  I still love to have in-depth discussions about current games and general geekery, but I feel less and less need to broadcast those thoughts widely.  Honestly, it's been over a decade of blogging and podcasting at this point.  It would be more surprising if my relationship with the media landscape hadn't  changed. Around mid-year I started trying to use Twitter as more of a microblogging platform to do very short quick-hit thoughts about games but didn't get much traction or conversation going ...

Here it is, the final ranked list of every video game I played this year that I found interesting enough to write about! Elden Ring Xenoblade Chronicles 3 FFXIV Endwalker Citizen Sleeper Marvel Snap The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe Pokémon Scarlet and Violet Horizon Forbidden West Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge Pokémon Legends: Arceus Chrono Cross: Radical Dreamers Edition Cult of the Lamb Neon White Halo Infinite Vampire Survivors Gotham Knights Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin Playdate Season 1 Immortality Cyberpunk 2077 Forza Horizon 5 Hot Wheels DLC Triangle Strategy Mario Strikers: Battle League Multiversus Pre-Season Stray LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga Nobody Saves the World Unpacking God of War Ragnarök Kaichu Tinykin Splatoon 3 Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope Shovel Knight Dig Total War: Warhammer 3 Tunic Looking back at the year, there are a few games I would move around in hindsight.  But, part of the fun of doing a list like this and build...

It's interesting when I can see that a game has a lot going for it but fails to connect with me personally.  God of War Ragnarök is extremely polished and has incredible production values.  I can absolutely see why so many people love it so much. But, for me, the game failed to click. The parts I enjoyed were the story and performances.  Unfortunately, the core gameplay mechanics weren't doing it for me.  The traversal puzzles wore out their welcome almost immediately.  They weren't ever hard, they were just annoying.  And the combat left a lot to be desired.  It felt very hack and slash.  I'm wondering if Elden Ring spoiled me and now I just expect more from my action combat systems. There's a ton written about God of War Ragnarok, so I'm not going to go deep here.  You can find tons of reviews of this game around the internet. In my personal Games of the Year list, this one actually lands fairly low down in the bottom fourth of my list: Eld...

Pokémon Scarlet (and Violet by extension) was the rare Pokémon game that hooked me and kept me interested all the way through. I'm not doing a full review, but I do feel the need to call out how much this game struggles on performance.  It chugs along, has tons of bugs, and the frame rate is just brutal.  Although, none of that really detracted from my overall enjoyment.  Your results may vary. The two things that truly let this game get its hooks into me were the open world and the new quality of life feature auto battle feature.  The open world fairly quickly gave me three main story progression paths to go down and complete freedom in the order I wanted to pursue them.  The typical Gyms are here but so is a storyline about Team Star and a completely different storyline about Titan Pokémon. Given the freedom of the open world and the ability to do almost instant auto-battles for experience, I quickly threw on some podcasts and audiobooks while just r...

Marvel Snap is the best digital card game I've ever played on mobile.  In general, it's one of the best digital cards games I've played in years. Their are a few key factors here.  The two biggest of which are the speed of play (fast) and the monetization (cosmetic).  This isn't a trashy mobile pay to win game.  If you want to spend money, you can spend it on cosmetics but you can't spend it on power.  As you "upgrade" cards you're just upgrading how cool they look, you aren't upgrading how good they are against other players.  Which means this game can actually be balanced and fun for everyone. The speed of a single game is also super fast.  Most of my games last 2-5 minutes and that's just about perfect.  You only ever play six turns and then the game is over.  It's enough time to engage your brain and feel like you actually did something mentally stimulating, but short enough that it's not a big deal to lose and you never feel like y...

Gotham Knights is an interesting entry on this list.  As much as any game can be measured objectively... this one isn't great.  It feels like a solid 7 out of 10 type of game and it's hard to argue for it to be rated much higher than that. But, for me, this is one of the 7 out of 10 games that just hit right and kept me interested.  I was craving an open world game and I enjoy the Batman/Gotham setting.  This hit at the right time and was good enough to keep me coming back to play more. It's extremely rough around the edges, doesn't always feel great to play, is full of compromises and odd decisions... but I had fun messing around in it.  Honestly, this is probably higher on my list than it would have been if any other open world game hit around the same time.  The release timing on Gotham Knights was right around the time we typically get Assassin's Creed games which tend to scratch the same itch for me.  Without one of those around this year, my atte...

Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope was an interesting game to play around with.  I made it through the first world and a half before realizing the game wasn't what I was in the mood for.  It has a lot of interesting things going on with it, but ultimately didn't click with me. Which is interesting, because I could also see this game being the game of the year for certain people.  It's trying new and interesting things in the turn based strategy X-COM-like game space.  I loved the move away from a grid and instead having a certain radius distance you can run.  The addition of movement abilities that don't use your two "actions" each turn was super cool too.  It was consistently fun to do a slide dash through a bob-omb, pick it up, throw it at a group of enemies, watch it explode, and then realize I still had my two primary actions left to play around with that turn. In the end, it was the Rabbids and some minor annoyances that turned me away.  The game take...

Shovel Knight Dig is a game I almost didn't add here but, in the end, decided to capture some of my thoughts about it. Shovel Knight Dig is a roguelike take on the core Shovel Knight platformer gameplay.  As much as I still love the core platformer gameplay on display here, the roguelike nature of this one caused it to not land well with me.  I was hoping for some consistent meta progression that would help me make my way deeper into the game at regular intervals.  There is some meta progression but it wasn't consistent enough or interesting enough to keep me hooked. I wish I could see more of the game without feeling like I'm just grinding the same thing over and over.  I know that each run is actually unique, but it all has that typical roguelike feel of "I've basically seen this before" that quickly wore out it's welcome for me. If you are a Shovel Knight fan and a roguelike fan, you will most likely love this game.  For me, it managed to make it on thi...

Splatoon 3 is both good and disappointing at the same time.  At its core, Splatoon 3 is a solid game.  It still has lots of fun with squid kids, octolings, and fresh styles. All the fun from the past Splatoon games is represented here and there are nice quality of life features that are notable improvements as well. But, unfortunately, it doesn't actually do much new.  There's new gear, a new single player campaign, and one new (time gated) mode.  Besides that, it's basically the same game as Splatoon 2. So, although the core gameplay is fun, this one ends up fairly low on my list since it's not really doing anything new: Elden Ring Xenoblade Chronicles 3 FFXIV Endwalker Citizen Sleeper The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe Horizon Forbidden West Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge Pokémon Legends: Arceus Chrono Cross: Radical Dreamers Edition Cult of the Lamb Neon White Halo Infinite Vampire Survivors Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin Playdate Seas...

Kaichu is a cute and lightweight game about Kaiju dating.  You take on the role of a Kaiju looking for love.  The core premise is that Kaijus date through destroying landmarks together. The gameplay quickly shows itself to be a fairly simple game about trying to guess the right answer for compatibility on your dates with other Kaiju.  It's not a complex game... but it's cute, it's cozy, and it has a lot of heart. This one was a quick hit but I had more fun with it than I thought I would.  It ends up near the bottom but... not in a bad way: Elden Ring Xenoblade Chronicles 3 FFXIV Endwalker Citizen Sleeper The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe Horizon Forbidden West Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge Pokémon Legends: Arceus Chrono Cross: Radical Dreamers Edition Cult of the Lamb Neon White Halo Infinite Vampire Survivors Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin Playdate Season 1 Immortality Cyberpunk 2077 Forza Horizon 5 Hot Wheels DLC Triangle Strategy Mari...

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 blew me away in a completely unsuspecting way.  I love a good JRPG but had previously bounced hard off of the first two games in this series.  This one looked like it had some good quality of life improvements and the story hook was more interesting than the previous games, so a few friends were able to convince me to give it a shot. I'm so glad they did.  After about 70 hours and rolling credits, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is currently sitting as my runner up game of the year right behind Elden Ring: Elden Ring Xenoblade Chronicles 3 FFXIV Endwalker Citizen Sleeper The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe Horizon Forbidden West Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge Pokémon Legends: Arceus Chrono Cross: Radical Dreamers Edition Cult of the Lamb Neon White Halo Infinite Vampire Survivors Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin Playdate Season 1 Immortality Cyberpunk 2077 Forza Horizon 5 Hot Wheels DLC Triangle Strategy Mario Strikers: Battle League...

Playdate is a weird one to cover in this list since it's a game system and not a game itself.  But I decided to wrap in all of "Season 1" as an item on this list. If you haven't heard of it, Playdate is an experimental 1-bit handheld game console that came out earlier this year.  They have a cool site that gives the basic rundown so I won't reiterate all of that here. I've had a lot of fun poking around and playing on this console.  I've played a bunch of games I downloaded or bought from itch.io but I've now also completed their full Season 1 content which is why it felt like a good time to add it to the list. Season 1 is a set of 24 games that were included with the purchase of the console.  Each week on "new game day" they deliver the next 2 games to your console.  That must mean I've had this for about 12 weeks.  The games themselves ranged from tiny arcade games, to full on adventure games, to little experimental music generators.  ...

Immortality is a hard one to write about so this may be short.  But, I have to say something about it become it is most definitely interesting. Immortality is an FMV game, but you discover the FMV clips through free association of objects that you click on within any given freeze frame of any scene.  The scenes themselves are clips from a series of made up unreleased movies that all star the same actress. On it's face, the game is about uncovering movie clips and mentally putting them together to see this actress's career.  But, underneath, there's a ton of hidden stuff going on.  There's a whole secondary story that I didn't stumble onto until I had uncovered a large majority of the clips. This one is really strange but is so unique that I needed to acknowledge it in my list.  Personally, I was pulled into the game for one session where I played through the entire thing until I hit credits.  I have a feeling this will be some people's game of the year this...

Tinykin is an interesting game that I almost chose not to write about for this list.  You'll see shortly that it ended up near the bottom of my list.  But the more I thought about it, the more I realized it was doing something interesting that deserves some acknowledgement.  And that was my goal with this running this during the year.  I wanted to highlight my favorite games while also highlighting games that ultimately didn't click with me when I tried them but were doing something noteworthy. Tinykin reimagines what a Pikman style game can be and do.  That's the reason I wanted to give it some acknowledgement.  Pikman doesn't have many games like it and all of the Nintendo Pikman games follow a very similar formula.  You collect Pikman within a level and have to accomplish some collecting objectives within a time limit. Tinykin takes the core idea of Pikman, that idea of gathering a small army of different and useful creatures that follow you around ...

Cult of the Lamb was surprisingly gripping.  It's a cute/horrifying roguelike with town building elements.  There's a lot going on with it and I'm not quite sure if that description does it justice. There are almost two distinct games in Cult of the Lamb, but they each inform the other. One of these two elements is a top-down action roguelike experience with semi-randomly generated maps and levels.  The combat is solid and no one run ever overstays it's welcome. The second main element is a town building (cult building) game that is both cute and disturbing.  Everything is presented in a cutesy aesthetic but it's dealing with real cult-like ideologies and behaviors.  The discrepancy between the two is one of the compelling parts of the game.  In this second piece of the game, you're recruiting followers, getting resources, and building out your town amenities. If Cult of the Lamb had leaned too hard one way or another, I'm not sure I would have liked it as ...

Multiversus is what happens when you take the core gameplay of Smash Bros, give it a slight twist, and then set it in a world of Warner Brothers characters instead of Nintendo characters.  I've been surprised by how much fun I've had with it. I'm calling this my rating of the "pre-season" since I joined when it was in late closed beta and have been playing fairly consistently through open beta too.  The game just went into "season 1" but I actually think I'm going to take that as an opportunity to take a break from it. The core gameplay here is good but could use a little more refining.  I also wish matchmaking was more even since I've had lots of matches where I just get steamrolled and feel like I can do nothing.  But that's kind of a general fighting game thing, not necessarily specific to this game. The part I'm really interested in is seeing how they support this game over time.  If they treat it like a Fortnite style live-service ga...