[ Previous entries: 2016 … 2017 … 2018 … 2019 … 2020 … 2021 ]

So, it feels like I played a bunch of games last calendar year. But that’s probably because I sampled a bunch while not necessarily going deep in any particular game. Steam actually highlights this with a year-end wrap-up called Steam Replay. According to my SteamDB profile, I managed to finish the year at exactly 2300 hours – 2262 hours in 2021 = only 38 hours? Looking back on it, I guess that tracks. There were 2 games into which I invested quite a bit of time on 2 different weekends. Otherwise, I seemed to get heavily into racing games this year.

Ah, racing games. I was surprised to realize that, prior to this year, I didn’t even have cause to create a “Racing” category in my Steam library because I had no racing games. This year, I managed to sink a lot of time into various racing games. Actually, it seems like a lot of time, but I didn’t technically log a lot of hours, because each short play session was usually packed with enough action, and then I moved on to some other non-gaming activity.

However, the above stats don’t tell the whole story. I was motivated to branch out from the Steam platform this year, mostly enticed by various freebies. For example, I got a new phone carrier plan that gave me a free 6-month trial of a bunch of different services. New services I tried include:

• Apple Arcade: 6 months included with my carrier
• Google Play Pass: 6 months included with my carrier
• Amazon Luna: Amazon’s game streaming service which rotates in a new selection of 4-6 free games every month
• Epic Games Launcher: Epic’s effort to achieve dominance in the game launcher wars by giving away as many free games as it takes

Not much happened for me on the MobyGames front, with only 33 contribution points, all cover art. However, that wasn’t my only archival work this year– I finally got serious about filling in any holes I can find in the Internet Archive. See my archival log blog posts for more details on that.

1. Dungeon Warfare II: First game I played this year, several weeks in. There’s still a ton of content I haven’t gotten to on this one, but it’s very difficult.
2. Bayonetta: God of War (the newer one with Old Kratos) was released on Steam early in the year. It made me yearn for the earlier entries in the series to also be released for PC, but alas. Then I remembered that I have a number of games of a similar spirit and that I still have yet to play Bayonetta. Interesting for a bit, but I just don’t understand the world that it tries to build.
3. Into The Breach: I finally got around to figuring this game out. From the creator of FTL, which also took me awhile to warm up to. It’s frustrating but these roguelikes have a way of sucking me in anyway, once I figure out the core gameplay.
4. Opus Magnum: Getting back into this machine-building puzzler, which runs great on a lower end Chromebook that I recently reformatted as a general purpose Linux laptop.
5. Dungeon of the ENDLESS: This game has always looked interesting to me, even though I wasn’t quite sure what it was. It came up for cheap enough in January that I pulled the trigger. It’s some kind of rogue-like, but set in a sci-fi universe of Endless Space. It’s really confusing to me. But just like all such Rogue-likes, it’s able to suck me in just enough that I spend at least an hour on it. It makes me wonder about its relationship with Team Fortress II, as it seems to have numerous characters influenced by that game. Later on, I realized that this was because the game came bundled with a bunch of DLC, including characters from TF2.
6. Pix the Cat: I picked this up sometime last year, likely because it looks minimally interesting and was on sale for very little. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect going in. I suppose that by now, I should expect games to mess up my windows on first startup. I know it’s a petty complaint, but it roils me every time. Anyway, it’s a well-done and reasonably fun game. It’s like a Snake/Nibbles-type game in which you have to grow your tail, but also shrink your tail in order to finish the level. It’s fun in small spurts. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to retain the resolution settings across games. Also, the music seems to be synthesized in real time (like a MIDI or tracker format) and sometimes gets jumbled, as if they processing load is too high.
7. F-Zero (SNES Classic Mini): This sort of serves the role of “comfort game”. I’m good at the first 3 courses and I don’t think I have ever cleared the fourth.
8. Contra III: The Alien Wars (SNES Classic Mini): I actually started to try getting good at this game.
9. Super Castlevania IV (SNES Classic Mini): Another oldie but goodie on the classic console.
10. “Manos”: The Hands of Fate, Director’s Cut: A curious title I found on Steam while searching for the upcoming Rifftrax video game. It was cheap enough and it looked novel enough that it was an instant pickup. I was curious to see how much NES side-scrolling action they could squeeze out of the legendary Manos movie. It looks like they pulled other stuff out of famous MST3K episodes and didn’t just stick to Manos lore. A fun little romp before the gameplay got too challenging for me.
11. Refactor: I found this tower defense-with-a-twist at a publisher sale. It wasn’t even on sale. Sadly, never got into it.
12. Titan Souls: I watched a Let’s Play of this game a long time ago and I picked it up recently because it was cheap enough. It’s a fascinating challenge that’s simple enough to grasp. I’m trying to figure out how to classify it; I’ve decided to file it under “puzzle”. I felt quite a sense of accomplishment when I figured out how to beat one of the titans. Then I beat the second one and the game crashed, so I didn’t get credit for it. Fortunately, I was able to beat the titan again, more easily the second time.
13. Exodus Borealis: At the start of May, I realized I had only managed to sink a whole 10 hours into Steam gaming since the start of the year. I guess that’s not necessarily a bad thing in the grand scheme of things– perhaps I’m just doing more productive things with my free time. Or maybe there’s a “They Are Billions“-shaped hole in my gaming life. So I went searching for games that might be similar to Billions and this title showed up in some recommendation lists. With the anthropomorphized fox protagonists, I wondered if I discovered the furry version of Billions. There was a demo available so I gave it a try. I emerged 3 hours later, having played as much as the demo would allow me. It’s a very beautiful game with some quite chill music and I found it overall quite pleasant. I was a bit despondent, realizing that I would likely never have the opportunity to play it again. Serendipitously, however, I came down with a minor illness and had to stay home for a day, plus, a long audiobook came up for check out from my local library. Thus, I spent an entire Saturday playing this game while enjoying the audiobook, perhaps the gaming highlight of the whole year (at least, according to my Steam Replay report, ahem: “You picked up this game for the first time and were immediately hooked”).
14. Klocki (Android): Dipping back into a bunch of Android games I have on my phone, I started with this old puzzle game. It’s really ingenious how it starts relatively simple, leaving you to think “is this all there is to it?” before slowly ramps up by adding another mechanic.
15. Capcom Arcade Stadium: Street Fighter II: The World Warrior: This came up as a Steam freebie in June. Actually, I guess it’s always a freebie, as it’s just a virtual arcade framework and delivery platform for classic arcade ROMs and emulators as DLC. When I got it, the freebie was the original Street Fighter II (not Champion Edition, not New Challengers or anything else). So I took it for a quick whirl with Guile. Always a challenge to play with a gamepad vs. the original arcade scheme.
16. Capcom Arcade Stadium: 1943: I think this is the freebie arcade game that comes with Arcade Stadium. I don’t think I’ve ever played it before. Quite fun.
17. Hotshot Racing: I first learned of this racing game from a Penny Arcade comic, which noted how it’s a throwback to very early Sega Saturn-era 3D racing games like Virtua Racing. I snatched it when it came up for sale and I really enjoy it. Great music, racing gameplay that isn’t especially deep or complicated, and wonderful race tracks which are pastiches of real places, and a treat to decipher. The game almost makes me want to invest in some kind of racing wheel setup. But this game doesn’t have official support so I would have to spend time configuring x360ce.
18. Redout: Enhanced Edition: I picked this up for cheap, probably as a promotion because the sequel was about to drop. It’s described as the spiritual successor of F-Zero and Wipeout and I can definitely see that. I also appreciated that it allowed me to jump straight into the action right away with a quick race, just to sight-see. At the end of my little race against myself, the game awarded me a 1st place gold medal, which felt a tad patronizing. Still, this game also made me wonder about a racing wheel setup. However, this game also doesn’t support such a setup directly and relevant forum discussions note that it’s not really an appropriate form of control since this is more akin to flying than driving. This makes me want to dust off the HOTAS I bought last year.
19. Slayaway Camp: Tried out another Android game. I knew it was some sort of horror theme. Turns out to be a puzzle game with an 80s horror bent. It’s fun.
20. Shadowgate: Every time I have previously sat down to play this game, I always tried to recall the NES game that I completed once upon a time. This time, I decided to just let it roll and treat it as a new experience and I had a better time playing.
21. Stealth Bastard Deluxe: Strange little puzzle game, a genre I always enjoy sinking some time into.
22. Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition: Free weekend, and my first exposure to the venerable franchise. It didn’t click for me.
23. Chessformer: Curious puzzler game in which you use chess pieces to knock out other chess pieces. So it requires knowledge of the game of chess beforehand (actually, no, because engaging with a piece will indicate all the possible valid moves). It also requires buying into the bizarre logic and physics of the world, like when your pieces can phase through solid objects, and when the Wile E. Coyote rules of gravity kick in (i.e., move in a straight line off a cliff, and then drop at a 90 degrees angle).

And now I come to the part of the year when I received 6 months free of several different subscription services, as part of an upgraded cell phone plan. 2 of the 5 freebies were Google Play Pass and Apple Arcade, which grant the bearer access to a curated library of known-good games with all their IAP and ads stripped away. So I can go nuts with these libraries. Still, is there likely to be anything worthwhile? As in, are there any games that are really mobile-exclusive, or which work best on mobile platforms? I guess that would apply to games like Pokemon GO, which I’m really not interested in. Many games which receive their start on mobile platforms eventually seem to find their way to other platforms, and I would much rather play games on a bigger monitor through Steam on my PC. Still, I wanted to delve in to search for some gems.

24. Marvel Pinball (Android): I got a free subscription to Google Play Pass and the first thing I gravitated toward was a game I’m already very familiar with. This is a version of the venerable Zen Pinball with all the Marvel-branded boards packaged in, and all accessible for free under Play Pass. I remember purchasing the Avengers (corresponding to the 2012 movie) and Blade boards a decade ago (and they’re still accessible through my account!). This app currently leads with “Marvel’s Women of Power” a.k.a. A-Force. I’ve never seen so much cinematic footage in advance of a pinball game. Anyway, when I tried Zen Pinball on my new Samsung Z Flip phone last year, it didn’t feel right with the tall, narrow screen, as my thumbs tended to cover the screen when I actuated the flippers. This time, I learned to touch the area below the board in order to control it, so it’s a bit more usable. It’s a little frustrating and limiting to play on such a small screen, but it’s still really graphically amazing. It also occurred to me to attempt to attach an external USB-C monitor, but those don’t work with my phone. Finally, I tried a pairing a new PS4-style Bluetooth controller and the trigger buttons are a much better method for actuating the virtual on-screen flippers.
25. Guns’n’Glory Zombies (Android): This is supposed to be some manner of tower defense game. It has a great art style and theme going for it. And it’s the first game I have gotten to experience that fills the entire 21:9 screen on my Galaxy Z Flip.
26. Enigmatis 2: The Mists of Ravenwood (Collector’s Edition) (Android): I think this is a hidden object game, the first time I have experienced one. I didn’t care enough to go very deep.
27. MechCom (Android): Created by the impossibly generic “Game Dev Team”. Some kind of mobile RTS. It’s not especially involved, but I guess I can’t really expect much from a simple mobile game.
28. Steel Assault (Amazon Luna): I saw that this game streaming from Amazon called Luna offers Prime members a selection of free games reach month. I know that companies have been trying to make a go of this game streaming service for well over a decade, and I remained skeptical. However, I was able to score a cheap third party PS4 clone controller and connect it to this Luna service to try it out (though I would later learn that it also works just fine through a web browser). I have to admit– it works great, at least for me. Steel Assault is the first game I experienced. It’s really amazing. It’s one of those games that did a great job of copying retro aesthetics while vastly improving on gameplay.
29. Garfield Kart: Furious Racing (Amazon Luna): I know that the go-karting genre is popular, or maybe that’s just Mario Kart, which I’m not sure I’ve ever actually played. This is a go-karting game with all your favorite Garfield characters. I learned from this game that the Garfield universe has 2 more characters that I’ve never heard of, making me realize that I haven’t read the comic strip in maybe 35 years.
30. Control (Amazon Luna): Another of the first batch of Luna streaming games that I got to try. Some kind of mysterious FPS action game. It didn’t impress me, but it was a good showcase of the streaming technology.
31. Myst (Amazon Luna): This was the last of the 4 free-for-Prime-members games during the month that I first tried Amazon Luna. At first, I didn’t care to try it because I felt like I experienced enough Myst a long time ago when it was still the hottest experience in fledgling multimedia titles. I decided to give it a whirl after Steel Assault started to become too frustrating. This is the neo-Myst experience, clearly. Rather than clicking through a pre-rendered slideshow peppered with small, grainy FMV, this is the version with a full real-time 3D rendering of the environment. I remember playing the original Myst and thinking “wouldn’t it be cool if this were all real time 3D-animated?” So it was quite fun to wander around for a few minutes. It’s a little frustrating to play with a controller, though. It really cries out for keyboard+mouse controls since you have to place your reticle fairly precisely on objects in order to interact with them (I would later learn that this streaming works fine through one’s web browser, not just on Amazon’s own Fire TV sticks). Also, this time around, I found myself drawing on a mental model I’ve built up over the past 2.5 decades of gaming. Specifically, when I know I’m playing a puzzle-type game like this, my mind starts to anticipate the psychology of the original game designers, and how they probably established a finite set of things to work with and that’s what I need to focus on, rather than try to make sense of anything.
32. My Bowling 3D (Apple Arcade): Bowling sim, and the first thing I tried when I ventured into Apple Arcade. Sort of reminds me of the time I played a ski jumping game. Exquisitely accurate, but at the end of the day, it’s still a sim of a single activity.
33. Air Twister (Apple Arcade): Reminds me of Panzer Dragoon (on-rails shooter). Pretty, but there doesn’t seem to be much to it. I have a feeling that this will be a common theme on these mobile apps.
34. Outlanders (Apple Arcade): This looked like a simple town builder that could be fun and would work well on an iPad. Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out the basic game features from the tutorial.
35. Overland (Apple Arcade): Post-apocalyptic turn-based strategy game, which reminded me fondly of X-Com. This showed promise. Ultimately, I moved on.
36. Earthworm Jim (Amazon Luna): This is the first time I have gotten to play anything in the Earthworm Jim franchise. It reminds me fondly of the very challenging mid-90s epoch of action gaming and quirky, zany humor. I finally understand the “Launch the Cow” reference that I’ve heard surrounding this game. Extremely challenging, though, and it wore me down pretty quick. That may have something to do with streaming latency too.
37. Everspace (Amazon Luna): Beautiful, but not terribly interesting space flight game. I used to be really enamored with the X-Wing and Tie Fighter games in the latter DOS years. But these games do nothing for me now, as graphically impressive as they are. Now they’re frustratingly difficult and make me dizzy. I’m probably just old.
38. Party Hard GO (Android): I saw this was available with my Google Play Pass and got excited since I was a big fan of the original game. Unfortunately, it doesn’t support physical controller input, so I bailed right away. I’m not dealing with onscreen controls for an action game.
39. 80’s OVERDRIVE: Very fun racing game. Unlike Hot Shot Racing that I got into earlier this year, this one employs the aesthetic of racers from pre-3D sprite-based console systems. It can be jarring at times, with the way that parallax backgrounds slide around on the horizon. But in the grand scheme of improving over vintage games, this is much deeper than most vintage racing games with a lot more content. I rather enjoy the 18-song soundtrack.
40. Hot Wheels Unleashed (Amazon Luna): So many racing games this year! This game exercises a lot of creativity as you get to race Hot Wheels cars around tracks designed at a small scale. The most interesting bit is when you have to work up enough speed to survive loops. Fail, and your car just falls helplessly.
41. Riptide GP Renegade (Amazon Luna, then Steam): This is my first exposure to the Riptide franchise which seems to take place in the future. I was unable to clear the tutorial. Fortunately, that’s not a requirement to actually play the main game. The gameplay is quite exhilarating. I actually found myself wanting to know more about the futuristic world in which this takes place, but it has been a highlight in the games I’m sampled through Luna. I got to pick it up for cheap on Steam during the Autumn/Thanksgiving sale (I had better luck clearing the tutorial while playing locally; perhaps my troubles were down to streaming). So I have learned to use Amazon Luna as a method for trialing games that I might eventually want to purchase on Steam. Probably not what Amazon had in mind for this service.
42. Star Wars Pinball (Amazon Luna): From Zen Pinball, I don’t think I’ve seen pinball with quite this much story and progression. Also, this is the first time that I feel that game streaming has fallen over. The input response just wasn’t tight enough, between the Bluetooth controller input and the round trip to the gaming server. You eventually figure out how to account for it, but you certainly shouldn’t have to.
43. Per Aspera: Free for a weekend so I tried out this Martian colony builder. I actually got into it, for once. I’m always infatuated with the idea of playing such games, but I can never seem to power through the complete tutorial. It took me about 2 hours of play to get to the first achievement, which indicates that it might be absorbing enough for a purchase when it goes on sale for cheap enough.
44. Earthworm Jim 2 (Amazon Luna): This was free in October on Amazon Luna, the month after the original game was free on the same service. It was more of the same frustrating gameplay combined with the “lol so random” brand of 1990s humor.
45. Blair Witch (Amazon Luna): Ostensibly a scary game for October, free on the Amazon Luna service. I didn’t get too far into what appeared to be a first person walking simulator before I realized I had more important things I should be doing. It is, however, the first game I have played with sidekick dog feature customization.
46. HELLFRONT: HONEYMOON: Thanksgiving weekend rolled around and I remembered I have this informal tradition of playing some tower defense game a bunch over this holiday. I have been stockpiling lots of games over this year and had to dig for some TD games I might have picked up. I settled on this one first. Not great. Very simplistic, to the point that it reminds me of some of the incredibly simple TD games on mobile.
47. Freshly Frosted (Amazon Luna): Excellent puzzle game that was free on Amazon Luna in November. Construct little machine pipelines to prepare and deliver donuts. I keep wondering how it could possibly get more complicated, and the game doesn’t disappoint, always throwing new challenges my way.
48. Thymesia (Amazon Luna): Very amazing graphics delivered by the Unreal Engine. And once again, the game streaming technology shines. When I started playing this game, I assumed it was a spectacle fighter in the vein of God of War. Instead, I ascertained that this must be what the kids these days are calling a “Souls-like” game, owing to its brutal, unforgiving challenge. Indeed, I noticed that Steam has this game tagged as such. Sure is pretty, even if I can’t abide the control scheme, or make it past the first major enemy character.
49. Ninja Stealth: I was scrolling through my list of Steam games, scouting for unplayed items, and I caught that this one somehow boasts 5000 achievements. How is that possible? Turns out that this simplistic puzzle game just tosses you a +1 “Another One” achievement every few seconds (this also explains why my Steam Replay report proclaims that I managed to earn 247 achievements for the entire year, despite relatively little play time). The game starts with a warning that this might actually stress your system’s RAM. Good thing I recently doubled from 16 -> 32 GB. I got a few minutes of play and learned the gameplay, and it was sufficiently novel, fine for the likely “less than a dollar” price I paid for it.
50. Offworld Jupiter’s Legacy: I played this during game during a free weekend in 2018. I indicated that it didn’t grab me at the time, having played through some of the tutorial. But in the intervening years, I picked this up in a Humble Bundle of games. Playing Per Aspera got me interested in trying this again. I was a bit confused because booting up “Offworld Trading Company” launched “Offworld Jupiter’s Legacy”. However, that appears to be an expansion on top of the base game. I was able to pick up where I left off on the tutorial during the free weekend 4 years ago. It’s a game that I really want to get into, but it still hasn’t clicked for me.
51. Star Wars Squadrons (Epic Launcher): As a huge fan of the 1990s X-Wing and TIE Fighter Star Wars space combat games, I’ve coveted this title ever since I heard about it 2 years ago. It came up for free around Thanksgiving on the Epic Games Store. This finally motivated me to sign up for that service and install their launcher. And I am finally getting to use my HOTAS that I purchased last year. So far, it has drawn me in more than any of the other HOTAS games I have tried. It’s utterly mind-boggling how many different controls are packed into a HOTAS setup.
52. Pinball FX3: I’ve played — and enjoyed — Zen Pinball on so many other platforms that it occurred to me to look it up on Steam. This uses the same model as the other platforms– base game with a couple of boards is free, pay for extra boards. It’s slightly more annoying than other platforms because it messes up my monitor config on first startup, and then has extensive tutorializing, on the assumption that the player has never heard of pinball before.
53. Strike Suit Infinity: Space mech combat game. Something that seems really cool, but I can never get the hang of it. At least I picked it up cheap.
54. Quake (Epic Launcher): Now that I finally acceded to creating an Epic Games Launcher account, I can finally claim all those free titles that Epic subsidizes with their Fortnite money printer. This is the original Quake with original assets, though apparently using a newer engine that runs more reliably on modern Windows. I have never gotten to experience this game before. I actually got into it for a little while. I think maybe it helped that it was still “skating” movement, i.e., it didn’t simulate the up-and-down motion of normal walking.
55. Orcs Must Die 3: This started life as an exclusive for Google’s Stadia game streaming service. As a big fan of the first game (and the second game was pretty good too, but I guess I was a bit burned out after the first), I was eager to pick this up after it was released from its exclusivity. I really got into it towards the end of the year.
56. Horizon Chase Turbo (Epic Launcher): Another racing game, another freebie from Epic. Just like the other racing games this year, I got heavy into this for a little while. The aesthetic here is like an 8-bit racing game, but with fully 3D (flat-polygon) cars.
57. Tomb Raider: Legend: I finally got around to watching Romancing The Stone (1984 movie) and it put me in the mood to play some kind of treasure-hunting adventure game set in exotic locales. At first, I thought about certain Nathan Drake/Uncharted games which have made their way to Steam. Then I remembered that I already own most of the Tomb Raider franchise on Steam (as they frequently go on sale for extremely cheap). I didn’t want to start at the very beginning of the 3D era, when such games were just finding their footing, so I looked up an article describing the chronology and decided that this 2006 entry would be a good starting point. Runs great on current OS and hardware (Windows 10 and RTX 2070), even at 4K/widescreen. Still, the 2000s-era tech makes me wistfully nostalgic, between the PDAs and the CRT monitors featured in-game. It was a novel experience for about an hour, but then I could already feel the experience begin to feel repetitive. It doesn’t help that every bad guy goon is an exact clone of all the others; really jarring when they are talking to each other.
58. ISLANDERS: I was leaning towards picking up Oxygen Not Included during the Steam Christmas Sale, which I would categorize under simulation games in my collection. Instead, I decided to delve into some of the unplayed simulation games I already have in my collection, starting with the game that bills itself as a chill city builder. It certainly is. Starting the game feels like stepping into a spa. However, it’s not especially deep either. So after I got my bearings, I was pretty much finished.
59. Death Coming: This reminds me fondly of Party Hard— pixelated graphic style, great soundtrack, and gameplay centered around surreptitiously ensuring lack of survival among a large crowd of unsuspecting folks, who all have memories like goldfish, as they immediately forget traumatic deaths they just witnessed. A real highlight as the last new game I got to experience before the year’s end.