It's that time again! What's your favorite game you played this year?
Choosing favorites is so HARD! Looking over my Switch Year in Review and just now realizing Night in the Woods is a game I played last year, leaving this year kinda bereft of games with stories that really impacted me. So, what did I play?
Kicking off with the Pokemon block, this was my first year playing through Pokemon Colosseum! I liked it a fair amount, but there are some big flaws in it. I liked the double battles and the added challenge of battling opponents with a similar level to you, but it would maybe have been a quality of life change to heal you after battles since money is too infrequent to be spending on too many healing items, so I ended up walking all the way to the nearest healing machine (which was often quite a ways away) after every battle or two.
As someone who plays pokemon mainly for the collecting funny little critters and for which minutiae of pokemon battling is an intimidating ordeal, I've been ever so slowly getting more used to it and I might even enjoy it a bit now! Speaking of battles: Colosseum's creature game is on point! I love the exaggerated way the monsters wiggle around!!! YES!!!!! It almost makes it forgivable how time-wasty each battle can feel. Orre is a really cool place and
I still have the disc sitting in my gamecube and I need to clean up a bit with the post game, I'd really like to purify all the pokemon and tackle Mt. Battle to receive Ho-Oh this year; if I can get around to it.
On the topic of gen 3 pokemon: This year was also time completing Pokemon Emerald! When I initially started playing it a few years ago after buying a used copy, I was into pokemon glitches and oversights and stuff and I tried searching for a save where shiny pokemon appear on an early frame after turning the game on. I did manage to get the intro Zigzagoon to appear shiny, but I got bored of that and thus also lost motivation to keep playing the game until I would get interest in looking again.
That never happened and I decided to cut my losses and finally start playing the game casually- tho I might eventually do some glitches that'll get me access some event pokemon.
It's a cool game; definitely the definitive game compared to Ruby and Sapphire. Though I can't really say it was a necessary revamp with enough in it for me that sets it apart to make it worth it over it's predecessors. Like Colosseum, I still need to go back and complete a few post-game things like finding the Regis and Latias... maybe I also wanna play around with the Battle Fronties, but I don't really care for it honestly.
Uhh, also played gen 1 pokemon games at least 3 more times. I finally unlocked Dodrio tower in pokemon stadium, so that gave me the energy to play pokemon yellow, which is my least favorite of the original gen 1 games. Just not as many cool glitches in the game and the monster sprites compared to R/G/B are just not as expressive and unique (though I have warmed up to them quite a bit since starting to do my own sprites).
Got really stuck in yellow when my save file kept getting deleted and the resolution that I eventually landed on after replacing the battery with higher-quality one's and re-flowing the soldering in the cartridge was that the jury-rigged way that the power cords in the basement where I have the N64 set-up was causing some sort of power flow issue that messed with the cart. The basement now has proper electrical wiring and I haven't had the issue again (also less of a fire hazard)!
I also started playing a copy of pokemon Green!! I guess I just wanted... to see the original sprites in action? Idk, man; gen 1 pokemon is a comfort game to me, I don't need to spice it up particularly for me to enjoy it, lol!
Also played more Pokemon Violet. I'm burnt out on it at the moment, but its fun hunting some shinies as events pop up on occasion and I'm sure I'll probably get super into pokemon again (uhhh, compared to my usual level of being super into pokemon), and fill in some gaps in my collection and more shiny hunting and stuff. Still gotta get the few alpha pokemon I'm missing in PLA... Now that I've been talking about it, I kinda wanna return soon...
OK, before I get to newer games, let's go back to the GameBoy: I bought Catrap/Pitman (The American cart is called Catrap, the Japanese version is called Pitman and is cheaper and that's the one I got, identical games with no dialog, so it just didn't make sense to get the one with the cuter name) and it's a very cute Gameboy puzzle game where you push boxes and bump ghouls. Few unique graphics, but the graphics that are there are very strong and cute!! I haven't gone all the way through and I'm not huge into puzzles, so I can't judge on that merit, but it's a neat little game!
Trip World is also an impressive looking gameboy game, this time with more graphics. It's prohibitively expensive to get an original copy, so I was happy to grab a copy of the re-released Trip World DX on the Switch for a fraction of the price. I played it in the original monochrome palette and it's a very impressive looking gameboy game! Iirc, it felt a little frustrating to play at parts and it's not very long, but very cool experience.
Finally got around to playing the Super Mario RPG Remake!!!!!! I owned (stole from a cousin) the Nintendo Power guide for it as a kid and it was a seminal piece of reading for me (also after having a dalliance with like half of the game on an emulator a decade ago), so I'm glad to have finally completed the game!! Not big into RPG's (pokemon and probably a dozen other games excepting), so I played on easy, but it was a fun experience; the game's characters and enemies have a lot of character to it in a similar way that gen 1 pokemon has character, imo.
Very happy that Nintendo has decided to make good Zelda games again with Echoes of Wisdom :^). OK, Breath of the Wild and it's sequel just weren't for me and that's OK. There are plenty of good games out there and it's cool that they've curated themselves out of my backlog by being bad :^). I was really worried that Echoes of Wisdom was gonna take a lot of inspiration from them (you, know, ":^)") and I'm glad that it seems only the horrific menu style seems to have been retained and I never had to do any of the cooking or wandering around seeing nothing that interested me.
Echoes were really novel, but there were a lot of redundant ones and it was easy to get caught searching all through the menu for the few unique niche ones needed to solve a puzzle. Idk if I prefer that style over the usual sword gameplay- but I enjoyed it well enough! Story and themes didn't feel like much compared to the best of Zelda games, but it was OK. Ultimately'll leave it to hindsight to see if it ages well in our mind. Right now the view is: it was pretty great and definitely worth a playthrough!
Finally finished playing Luigi's Mansion 3. I really enjoyed solving puzzles throughout the mansion and I rarely felt like they were too obtuse to figure out. Best Luigi's Mansion yet, imo and i hope they free him soon so that maybe we can have a Luigi's Mansion 4 ;-;.
Getting kinda tired of writing and it shows... Super Mario Bros. Wonder is a good game that made me cry for some reason during the Piranha plants on parade segment and I don't know why and I haven't finished the game quite yet, but it's a quality platformer and very good!!!!
I played through I wanna say 3/4's of Deadly Premonition: Origins for Switch before I got a very entertaining, but unfortunately gamebreaking bug where I managed to get forced through a wall to skip a boss in the section of the game where you play as Emily and not the usual main character, York. The game just never changed me back to him and unfortunately Women cannot open file cabinets and a critical piece of evidence is in one and I cannot continue.
It was a very technically flawed, but pretty... fun in a janky ps2 game kinda definition of fun way. The story is goofy and engaging and takes a lot of inspiration from Twin Peaks and a few things don't age well from the 00's that are maybe forgivable because of the developer's more recent works and then maybe slightly less forgivable because of the developers even more recent works...
Maybe I'll start over from the beginning to experience it all myself sometime, but otherwise I know how it ends from watching the Two Best Friends Play let's play years ago, so I'm not in a big hurry. I consider "irreparably soft-locked" as a kind of complete.
Cavern of Dreams was really good!!!!!! Augh, I think I wrote about it elsewhere in slightly more depth, but it's a very good playground platformer with graphics that are inspired by N64 games and I'm a big fan and I wish I had more to say, but it's just really solid and just the right length and you'd have to play it yourself or listen to a more competent reviewer to really understand!!
Right now, I'm playing through Iconoclasts. I'm liking it! I'll probably have more to say next year or whenever I feel like writing about it... next year.
I think that's everything. Woof, that was actually quite a bit now that I've written it all down, and yet I still hunger to play video games more next year!
