2024 is drawing to an end, an absolute dumpster fire of a year, but one that had many good games in it, so what were your favourites this year? They don't have to have come out this year, none of mine did, let's just talk about our top few we played through this year and why they made the list, no dry bullet points, no score out of ten, inject a bit of flavour into your reviews, a little bit of you.

For me, in no particular order:

I'm cheating a little bit right off the bat here as this is two games, but really they're very very similar in content and form, similar enough to me to basically be the same game, and they're SHMUP's in the bullet hell genre, the first Touhou games I've actually played after being bombarded with the music for years.

I really enjoyed both, though I think 2 is a much more solid game, the gameplay is tighter, more legible, the English translation makes something approaching sense, the music is banging, and IMO it looks much nicer, 6 is a great game but it looks horrible on a modern monitor, super blurry and ghosty, and it doesn't feel quite as nice to play as 2. 2 is a PC98 game and the art holds up super well, the pixel art is for the most part simple but high quality and easy to read, and the drawn artwork is not as.... special as the classic windows era Touhou art. It's a much slower game than 6, while still being quite hard, as a result I think it feels a good bit fairer, it's easier to learn what to do and you can usually avoid making the same mistake twice without having to commit patterns to memory.

The music for both is fantastic and they're very replayable, I haven't managed to 1cc either game but I think I'd like to try for a clear on 2 at some point.

Touhou 2 works flawlessly in Neko Project (The Retro-arch core is the easiest way to get this, especially on linux) and Touhou 6 is a windows executable. Directions on getting 6 and the other windows games running on Linux with the community patches et all can be found HERE

Ultra stylish PS1 racing game, incredible soundtrack and design, slick gameplay with a very high skill ceiling and motion sickness inducing speed.

Very, very replayable despite only having a handful of tracks due to the satisfying gameplay and the variety the various craft types present, the regular Venom race series is fast, fun and loose, giving you some easy tracks to cut your teeth on before throwing some harder layouts at you once you've got the basics down, and polishing your skills to the point where you can race a perfect series unlocks the Rapier series, which takes the training wheels off completely, it's extremely fast, demanding total concentration and a thorough understanding of the game mechanics to clear.

The only real negative point is that there's no single machine multiplayer (back in the day you had to do races by directly linking your PS1's together, the machine was running flat out rendering the game at 60FPS and doing split screen was beyond it) There is exactly one hard corner in this game, but it's piss maddeningly hard. Emulates perfectly.

A short and sweet trip down into the guts of the earth to see what tasty morsels those fucking disgusting jackbooted thug mental health practitioners are hiding from you. (It's a lot, they're hiding a lot, the vermin) About two hours to see everything, quite cheap, oppressive atmosphere, you can hit people with hammers, most of them have it coming to them.

Rebooted my interest in little weird games, has a sequel/full version out now that I'll probably pick up at some point. I have an enduring interest in this kind of subject matter but others might find it offputting and gross.

A roguelite schump pixelart topdown dungeoncrawler other buzzword game, but a good one that isn't gacha crap, one made with passion and understanding of what makes a fun 20 minute pick up and play game and what makes a 20 minute pick up and play game playable for hours on end.

It's been my goto game for a quick burst of non bullshit fun for a while now and I think it will continue in that role for a long time to come. Gungeon is about guns and the people that shoot them, you are a little guy, and you are out to kill your past (by shooting it, with a gun) for the chance to outshoot fate and avert some horrible event.

To that end you've come to the gungeon, where everything is guns, except the people, because they're bullets, carrying guns. The art in this game is silly and gorgeous, everything is cute, everything is guns, and there are so very many guns, lovely guns, awful guns, stinky guns, squishy guns, guns that are bugs, guns that shoot guns, bullets that shoot guns, guns that shoot guns that shoot bullets that shoot guns, there is a virtually endless variety of weapons on offer and just as many viable combinations of guns, sub items, passive powerups and strategies to use them with.

The variety on offer really is one of the core strengths of the game, the game is structured like a classic dungeon crawl, a murder spree down to the bottom, but the combat is based around arenas, enter a room, fight or die, explore, fight, explore, boss battle. Simple, addictive, easy to plough through if you just want to work out a funk but offering plenty of opportunity for strategy, there's lots of secrets scattered about too, false walls, hidden levels, broken powerup combinations, unlockable characters with unique playstyles, backed up by a system for unlocking new items that feels fun and rewarding without being onerous or necessary (you can get to the bottom on your very first try if you're good enough)

Combat is a mix of tactical twin stick shooter and schmup, especially the bullet hell genre, you have a projectile clearing bomb, called a blank, a dodge roll, the ability to kick over and slide along tables, John Woo style, to go along with your guns, and your enemies start out with a range of little guys with basic pistols and shotguns that move towards you and shoot, standard RPG slimes, sapient grenades and chunky guys with the first pattern attacks in the game and get steadily stranger and more frantic as your descend, until you're fighting Mineflayers and the dread legions of the jammed in the bottom floors.

A fantastic Detective RPG/Absurdly long visual novel/Ham sandwich simulator. You play as badass and definitely sober superpig Raphaël Ambrosius Costeau as you attempt to solve a labour relations dispute between the local unproblematic dockworkers and the benevolent and historically progressive Wild Pines shipping company.

Become a neoliberal, become a regular liberal, become a communist, become a "traditionalist", become a hobo, do a racism, sexism, drugs in front of children, police brutality, police humanity, police irony, get drunk, high, sober, shot, irradiated, give advice, art criticism, xenophobic tirades, alcohol to homeless people, warnings of the end, stock tips, sick fucking kung fu kicks, unsolicited hugs to random women on the street.

Find cool hats, cum stained pants, old guns, new guns, human remains, comfy chairs, horrible Finnish gremlins, mentally ill people that have been abandoned by their families, yummy drugs, tare, tare, lots of tare, especially on day 2, the killer, semiochemicals, bits of broken porcelain, yourself, self respect, little quiet spots, random phone numbers that seem oddly ominous.

Explore beautiful and mostly intact downtown Martinaise! Where everyone tells the truth and likes the police. Step out onto her promenade and smell the sea air and the Mazut and the apricots and the despair.

Search through her bins and back allies, break into people's apartments, accuse them of sex crimes, accidentally assault the physically disabled, feel the secret heartbeat of one really run down and poor part of the capital city of the world, explore her lovely bars, bustling ports, quiet hamlets, spooky churches, history, future, people, the darkness of your past, the horrible truths of the world you live in.

On a serious note I spent about 40 hours on Disco Elysium and if I'm totally honest it's the only game I've ever played where I've come away feeling like I got out something worth that amount of time, it was deeply effecting, and is one of the best examples I can think of of the potential of video games as a serious storytelling medium. Martinaise and her inhabitants are so very painfully alive, alive in a way the best books are, the way computer games basically never manage to achieve. Everything came together to make an outstanding experience and you're never getting a sequel.

Another cheat, my favourite game of 2024 was not a video game, it was an analogue game, played around a table, in person, with other sweaty nerds.

I got into D&D and TTRPG's in a big way this year having never tried them before and I'm having a ton of fun, 4 hours of saying stupid shit and rolling dice on a Monday night is the absolute best way to start a week and I feel so much better after doing it than I did before, going forward whenever I have the choice between them I'm always dumping video games in favour of playing pretend with other people IRL. I'm starting a VTM game in the new year and I'm really looking forward to acting like an edgy goth monstrosity for a couple hours a week.

If you've never tried D&D or another table top role playing game I'd really recommend it, everyone that plays these games is weird, everyone I've met so far has been nice, and it's enormous fun and very pro social, a great way to meet people. I've even played video games with a few people I've met playing D&D.

thank god because I didn't play a single game that released this year.

I finished a handful, but some of the best ones were

God of War (2018)

This game seemed like a really lame AAA action game at first, but it really grew on me. It clearly had some influence from the Souls games in that much of the boss fights were about dodging attacks while managing to get some attacks in. The combat was really engaging because you had a lot of different tools to use in a fight and knowing when to use them became the meta of how the combat system works

Overall a really solid game, and I'm excited to play the sequel

Need for Speed Most Wanted (2005)

This is the best racing game ever created, nothing comes close. The game splits its time between cop chases and then the actual proper races and honestly, the cop chases are enough to make this game amazing. They really get your heart going.

Mega Man Legends

This game isn't actually very good, but I love it for the aesthetic and atmosphere. It's a silly with really eerie moments and I really have a soft spot for PS1 polygon graphics. I think they work really well in the context of a mega man game.

do you usually play rougelikes? I tried Hades and spent a couple days playing it, but it didn't catch me. I was thinking about trying Enter the Gungeon hoping it would be more fun

Not really to be honest, I tried Transistor (made by the same people as Hades was) for a while but it didn't stick with me. Gungeon really hooked me, the roguelite elements don't matter all that much. There isn't heavy story elements or dialogue either, it's almost purely gameplay centric. It feels very arcadey in that way

I suppose Project Zomboid is somewhat roguelike, but it's so mechanics heavy and knowledge based that its closer to something like CDDA then a Hades type gauntlet game.

Yeah, can't blame you there. The only (non-demo) ones for me so far have been MaiMai Project and WakuWaku Darkride, which are basically still the same games as dc_gachan's every other side-scrolling shooters. I liked Darkride better though, it's nightmare mechanic is closer to the one of Mimumu-chan no Okimochi Trip, just in reverse, sort of, I think the Plumeria sisters are quite cute, and the shield mechanic is a nice addition. Does it surprass Okimochi Trip though? Ehh… nah. No upgrade shop, no branching stages, etc...

As for games not released this year. I put 300 hours in Scarlet Blade — and I made a fansite archive for it. I've been meaning to finish that storyline ever since playing back in 2013, I didn't expect to have quit more or less at the peak of the storyline, which was Mereholt. Things kind of… deteriorate slowly from there, the 30-39 zone having some lore but it's mostly just Beatrice going for a philosophy lesson to the tune of "enemy do bad thing, kill them". There is no feeling of something larger lurking behind the shadows or any sort of plot point it works towards. The zones 40-42 and 43-49 do but then they abruptly cut it in favor of a new storyline before it goes anywhere — forget the mutant lab experiments, we're reclaiming stardust deposits now… forget the stardust deposits, we're fighting the nephilim now (who?!)… forget the nephilim, we're fighting the other faction now. It's kind of, disappointing. And then the 50+ zone is a train wreck, they did the Mother AI's character really dirty. Gameplay is okay but it doesn't evolve, it's click on things and press numbers 1-9 until they're dead which I don't mind, really. If anything I got some very cute new sentinel-type NPCs out of it, particularly Maede.

I also played a game of Space Rangers 2, which was fun enough even though I killed so little I ended up with practically no score at the end (and I kind of soft-locked myself). It's one of those games where the sum of its parts are definetly greater than the individual ones. Trading, running errands or black hole diving only get quite tiring after a while, so it's good that you can mix them up. It does discourage owning multiple ships for different purposes, though. In the end I just got myself a large, luxury space liner and turned it into a super-fast inpenetrable battleship. If planetary battles would have worked instead of crashing the game, I'm sure that'd have also added some extra flavor.

Botany Manor is honestly among 2024's underrated masterpieces it's this first person puzzle game for the switch, ps and xbox very cool graphics and interesting story