first time plays 2022, ranked
I'm at a point where I feel like I pretty comfortably know my own tastes and so I play stuff that I know I'm gonna like, for the most part. Really followed my nose this year. I think of the nearly 60 games here I only truly dislike maybe the bottom like FIVE of them, after that it's mostly stuff that's at least interesting and by and large 2022 was fuckin' banger city for me! I might squeeze in a couple more by the end of the year, pentiment's really callin' my name but i'm also most of the way done with a phantasy star save and damn castlevania is calling my name but i'm seeing people start to publish these and i do love to be in da zetgeist
60 Games
VIDEO GAMES DO NOT GET BETTER THAN LIVE A LIVE!!
CHAPTER RANKING
CHINA
COWBOY
SPACE
CHAPTER 8
JAPAN
PRESENT DAY
NEAR FUTURE
CAVEMAN
FINAL CHAPTER
REVIEW
CHAPTER RANKING
CHINA
COWBOY
SPACE
CHAPTER 8
JAPAN
PRESENT DAY
NEAR FUTURE
CAVEMAN
FINAL CHAPTER
REVIEW
make sure you get this down because it's the only time you will ever hear me say it:
i love boys
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i love boys
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MISTER FREY YOU HAVE SIMPLY DONE IT AGAIN, IF YOU LIKE SLOW BURN HORROR YOU OWE THIS ONE TO YOURSELF. HAVE A TREAT.
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Possibly the most perfectly paced and purely fun pokemon game there's ever been, i love all my guys (pokemon) and all my guys (human npcs) very much, fuckin wicked good time right here man
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going out on a limb and staking my claim here: joseph schreiber is possibly THE all time great Silent Hill Guy. Must Play game imo, great capper on a great run, team silent the best of the best. here for a good time not for a long time
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i didn't write a review but this is one of the most elegantly made video games of all time in every capacity, literally perfect, all time great shit going on here, actually genius stuff
what a fucking GAME bro everybody who worked on this thing is a galaxy brain genius i am so fucking psyched to play SaGa 2, this is one of the most enthralling games i've ever played EASILY
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in a world where i am constantly looking at things and saying "this feels like d&d (derogatory)" i have finally found the work that feels like D&D (complimentary)
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i think what we have right here is a top five nancy drew game EASY and that's not even just because it's so fuckin gay
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such an infectious energy here bro, they don't make games that LOOK like this anymore, and they don't make games that FEEL this authentically saturday morning cozy anymore, even ones that are directly inspired by this
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the vibes here are immaculate as a nostalgia piece but ALSO as a normal cool platformer with excellent atmosphere and mechanics, one of my surprise faves this year!
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14
everything people have to criticize about splatoon 3 is fully correct but really i don't care about most of them, there are substantial improvements to the play experience, big tweaks to tons of stuff, all for the better, and I guess I'm just okay with buying a new one after five years even if the improvement is incremental. I just love to splat, man
16
sometimes you play a game and you're like "i don't think this is very good" and then you dm your friend who doesn't like yakuza about it nonstop for a full morning and then you write 1500 words about it because you can't stop thinking about all the cool stuff it's doing and you realize it's your favorite Like A Dragon actually
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a SHOCKING amount of meat on this bone if you're a person who loves worldbuilding and environmental storytelling in a real sense and not like the funny meme skeletons in the toilet or messages written on walls in blood, which i am
ALSO a genuinely sick racing game which is nice
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ALSO a genuinely sick racing game which is nice
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sometimes you play a game that is not famous at all and find that you like it quite a bit and that's nice too actually
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this is not my cup of evil wine from the funny cutscene everyone loves but i cannot deny that it is a high quality glass with good color nor that it makes a satisfying sound when dracula does his gay little toss of it.
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in no other dragon ball game will piccolo beat up a bunch of dinosaurs who are bullying local farmers or carry eggs down a mountain for a friendly lady. these things are cool and this game is good
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21
only cing that can deliver such achingly nostalgic vibes for a past that was actually really bad to you packaged shoulder to shoulder with comically simple baby's first DS Feature Puzzles and a huge dose of absolutely goofy anime sci-fi nonsense. you love to see it. Well. I do, at least.
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more finnicky than the first two KQs, more unfair, and much more demanding, but also a lot more daring and ambitious in its storytelling and the ways it weaves that storytelling into the play experience. Certainly a game that is unpalatable to modern sensibilities of control and like, mental comfort lol but for people who can handle something this ancient it's WELL worth it imo, best one so far by a mile
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26
there's something very 90s about x4, more than its predecessors. it's a sick game, they nailed it in a moment where they really needed to nail it. one of the better mega mans imo.
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i do not have a lot of love for modern nintendo's philosophy in terms of how they direct their overall development ethos that governs all of their teams, and Forgotten Land certainly doesn't escape Modern Nintendo Sensibilities unscathed, but Hal Labs is one of the unsung heroes of the game, churning out ROCK SOLID shit every single year and this is a wildly successful transliteration of their formulas into 3D, had a fantastic time
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easily one of the two outright scariest nancy drew games in a series that i often applaud for it atmosphere, and the one with the most mature and nuanced interpersonal writing, unfortunately it is also Very Racist, which does mar my lasting affection for it pretty significantly
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30
the only piece of media i consumed this year where an act of technical cannibalism was nonsexual in nature so it has a certain uniqueness factor going for it
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right as i started writing this entry i remembered the big twist from the end of the game for the first time since like the day after i finished it and i got SO mad (complimentary)
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35
idk if this is anybody's favorite mega man but i deeply appreciate how many weird greebly little ideas that don't have a place in the structure here, how many pointless guys are present, how many plot elements are introduced at the last possible instant of this saga, never to be resolved. Swing for the fences my guys hell yeah
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i know it's fucked up that this is my line in the sand after all the cop shit and racism but the way she treats ned in this game is truly outrageous, nancy is the worst person of all time anyway i rated this game four stars
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sometimes you play a game that is famously hated and find that actually it's completely middle of the road and this is a pleasant surprise
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another npckc banger, kind of a quick n dirty game in their output this year but one that works through its metaphors with both efficiency and feeling. Always love a new one from this creator, they're one of my faves
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this is exactly what i like to see in indie games which is shit you could never do in non-indie spaces, and here that means scares that aren't extreme, a balance of humor, and an emphasis on simplicity that all work pretty well. I am very glad that the next project by these guys is not trading on any indigenous mythology.
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it's like faith 1 but with more cool stuff but also way more shitty boss fights! it wasn't worth it imo!
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you truly love to see when the distant first entry in a fabled series that doesn't really resemble what it would become is still doing something really really cool in its own right
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43
Realistic 3D platformer is an underrated genre with not enough entries and this is a mostly pretty good one of those with frankly one of the most out of pocket lead characters in all of video games. Lara Croft is truly iconic and must be stopped
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a game that is doing a lot of cool stuff in its context that i just couldn't help but wish was leaving its traditional elements further behind itself and pushing its innovative ideas way harder
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a game that is stitched together from many poorly focus tested elements that are all at odds with each other and constantly buckling under the strain that mostly still works p okay anyway!
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even the most shallow and tedious matsuno game is better than most other games haha. I may think that every single idea in this game is explored with greater depth or more style somewhere else in his directorial oeuvre but that doesn't make the pleasures here any less fun, and it certainly doesn't discount the incredible work of all the artists and designers who put the actual audio-visual and play elements of this together (even though i do actively kind of dislike the play here - way too grindy for my tastes, considering how long even inconsequential battles take).
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we all know this is the bass show but as a weird mega man 8 demake it actually gains a lot, had a lot of fun with this one
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this game i think is generally unremarkable besides being a pretty successful translation of this to the gameboy, which is nothing to sneeze at! I will play the rest of these sure
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54
there is undeniably a lot of cool shit in this game that for me is just drowned by a lot of common open world design trends that i hate and remixes of stuff that lands less well for me than that sort of thing has in the past. for someone who is already a Modern From Skeptic on a good day it's all too much for ollllll' ina
crying shitting throwing up begging insomniac to fire the writers they hired just for this game
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56
i really don't like this game but at least the ways it fails in my eyes are BIG INTERESTING SWINGS which are always worth more to me than something like x3 which is just a fart game for asses
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It was a really cool idea to launch an even lower budget subseries of nancy drew games in an adjacent genre to appeal to other sectors of the ultra casual non-gamer PC market, and there ARE neat ideas here, in the style and setting and the play, which makes it even more disappointing that it all comes out to kind of nothing in the end
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a completely inferior version of Final Fantasy in essentially every way, buoyed by incredible sprite art and the bones of a really great game. I dislike it on principle but it turns out I was also pretty cold on it in practice!
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59
this is maybe the first mega man game i ever played that i think just actively sucks ass, just not fun
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the same as the other Nancy Drew Dossier game but all of the improvements on the formula are drowned out by being really annoying and tedious nonstop the whole time!!!
shoutouts to that one communist saboteur guy tho he's sick
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shoutouts to that one communist saboteur guy tho he's sick
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