Sunday, January 08, 2023

Games of December 2022

Apparently this is was the year of being pretty focused on one game at a time and this time up it was Tactics Ogre.

My top five games (by play time) for December were:

Tactics Ogre: Reborn - Given how bad I often am at tactics games and how hard I bounced off Tactics Ogre when it came out on PSP, I'm a bit amazed at how much I'm enjoying it now. I'm not necessarily doing super well, but I'm certainly having fun. There's something about the flexibility of the different units and the customization of weapons and skills that makes the game perpetually interesting.

Tunic - My partner and I agreed to play this together. The exploration element and the mystery of the instruction booklet is really cool. As the person with hands on the controller I ended up getting seriously smacked around by the second boss and that kinda dampened my enjoyment. I think the approach to accessibility, adjustability isn't quite right.

Rune Factory 5 - I figured I should check out at least one farm sims in the year of farm sims. It's no where near as good as Stardew Valley on any criteria you'd choose to name. It has no internal consistency in design, narrative or game play. It's also not interesting, far to into anime tropes (or maybe memes), no balance of challenge, no fun in the farming or crafting. It also has really frustrating slowdown and jank. Disappointing and it sounds like that's indicative of the year of farm sims.

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 - Replaying has been fun, the little I've done. They tied in a lot of things that you don't see until later. I am a little disappointed that there's not too much to do in a new game+, but there's still enough that I'll finish the second play through at some point soon.

Mario Kart 8: Deluxe - Vrooom.

Here's my total play time chart for December:

And here's a chart of how much I've played over the month:

Sunday, January 01, 2023

One of the benefits of tracking what I play is that I get to make a little post at the end of the year talking about what I played and how my year was in video games. While 2022 was not a great year in a lot of ways, it did have a lot of pretty good video games in it.

Time Spent

I played 33 games for 600 hours in 2022. That's about the same amount of time as last year, but with fewer games. It was a pretty tactics / RPG heavy year, so had quite a few games that took a lot of time and then a few games trailing along at the end.

Overall my top 10 games by time played where:

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 - 158 hours
Dragon Quest Builders 2 - 74 hours
Triangle Strategy - 64 hours
Hollow Knight - 49 hours
Tactics Ogre: Reborn - 43 hours
Ogre Battle 64 - 35 hours
Mario Kart 8: Deluxe - 28 hours
Loop Hero - 27 hours
Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - 23 hours
Eastward - 22 hours

Xenoblade 3 Screenshot: The Main Six's ship, sailing past an island with a floating castle in the background and aurora blazing across the sky.

Xenoblade was an absolute joy to look at. Good in a lot of other ways, but Monolithsoft know pretty games.

Finished Games

Last year I started tracking games I finished. The list is pretty short this year, but mostly the games I finished were the ones that took the longest to play.

Dragon Quest Builders 2
Triangle Strategy
Eastward
Xenoblade Chronicles 3

Dragon Quest Builders 2 Screenshot: A view of a house under construction in a happy looking farm.

Building myself a farmstead.

Favourite Games

I've recorded how I felt about the new games I played this year, but overall my favourites for 2022 were:

Eastward
Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Ogre Battle 64
Super Mario Odyssey
Tactics Ogre: Reborn
Xenoblade Chronicles 3

Nothing really surprising on there. The one game that *maybe* should be included is Dragon Quest Builders 2, but I'm not sure I loved it so much as got obsessed with it.

If you haven't played Eastward I would suggest you look it up and spend some time with it. I think it's an absolute gem of a game and a wonderful example of a really well designed and built game. Especially if you loved 16-bit era games, there's a lot there for to feel nostalgic about but in a new and well thought through way.

Eastward Screenshot: Sam and John stand looking at a run down tower with a helicopter stuck to the top.

The whole game is beautiful and rundown and messy and sharp all at once.

Things about Games in 2022

My PC broke in late 2021 and I spent all year meaning to get it fixed, (or replaced) but never really got around to it. There are a whole mix of factors into why, but the outcome is that I spent all of my game time on the Switch, which worked out well with a number of big RPGs and some really strong tactics games.

I'm utterly in love with Tactics Ogre: Reborn. I'm not quite sure why that series gets to live in my head so deeply, but I love them and Reborn has been a lot of fun. Sparks of Hope is also really good and just below that "Favourite" threshold, but certainly fun to play. I've grumbled a lot about Triangle Strategy, but it is a really strong take on the Tactics Ogre / Final Fantasy Tactics model. Other than my complains about slowness, I think the other reason Tactics Ogre wins for me is that it gives you so much more flexibility in how you want to take down problems.

2022 was a good, stable year over all (as far as games go). Beyond getting a little taken away by Dragon Quest Builders, I was pretty intentional with what I played and I played a lot of good games.

Xenoblade Screenshot: Eunie saying "I am actually trying to control myself. If I start going crazy, nudge me."

Eunie's the boss.

Saturday, December 31, 2022

New Year Resolutions 2023

I spend more time thinking about what I should do, compared to doing the things I want to do. That’s one of the things I’d like to do better about next year. Still I’ll put together some resolutions for 2023, so I have something to look back on in December. (I do like a good look back at the year, but a year is a big thing to hold in your head.)

A lot of where I’m at this year is also where I was at this time last year, so I think a lot of my resolutions will be similar, but I’ve tried to reframe them to help them be more meaningful for my life.

Finish Projects: If you’ve been here for any length of time really, you’ll know that finishing things has never been my strength. Overall I’ve been struggling a bit with the meaning of productivity, how it ties into my feelings of self worth and where and how I want to value my time. Still, I’d like to improve the two-part habit, of planning out reasonable sized projects to do and then finishing them.
Read more Text: I’m generally happy with how much I’ve read the last year and reading more seems like an excellent way to move away from mindless Social Media. Most of my reading has been in the form of audiobooks. That’s been great and allowed me to read regularly, but I have been missing text and after getting a Kobo for Christmas last year, I’ve been glad to read more written word. I also find it’s been good for thinking about how things are written in a way audiobooks don’t do.
Move: This is the thing I feel like I really fell down on last year. I was fairly fit before the pandemic started, but it’s just been hard to pick up physical activity again. I don’t want to categorize this more, since that always leads to failure, but I do want to feel good in my skin and I’d like to feel like my body can do whatever I ask of it.
Adventure: This year was pretty stressful and we didn’t do all we could to enjoy it. For the next year I want to join family and friends and do and see things that we haven’t seen, either ever or even just recently.
Choose Happiness: One thing that came to me this year is that I spend a lot of time trying to clear out stress or obligations or mess to find happiness. I’d like to work on finding ways to feel happy, whatever else is going on and wherever I am in the world and my life. I’m not sure exactly how that works, and sometimes my brain just refuses, but I’d like to learn.
Sleep Better: I’m tired. It seems like more sleep might help with that. At a minimum, if I’m tired I’d like it to be for a good reason.

Thanks for reading in 2022. I hope 2023 is good and kind to all of you.

“Fireworks” is copyright copyright 2014 Amir Kbah and made available under a
Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license

Friday, December 30, 2022

Games of 2022

Considering that I'm not always the best at going out and playing new games, this has been a pretty new year for me. I've played eight new games and while some where maybe a little more up my alley than others, all of them had something to recommend them. They're all Switch games because I really need to get off my butt and do something about my poor old PC.

I've sorted all eight new games into rough categories based on how much I liked them.

The Alright

Mario Strikers Battle League

With some updates, this might be better than it was when I played it. It's a well put together game, and in multi-player it might be great to play, but playing single player was just boring.
Rune Factory 5

Given how great Stardew Valley is, the question feels like "can a studio make a farming sim game with that much quality?" Rune Factory 5 is a pretty strong indication that no, they can't. At a very high level there's some fun to be had here, but honestly the low production quality makes it pretty hard to really have fun with. The game has technical problems and design problems and world building problems and story telling problems. It hasn't felt like a game that would reward playing too much, but it's pretty and good hearted.

The Good

Nintendo Switch Sports

If you have the time to play and want to move, this is a nice modern version of Wii sports. It has a very Wii, fun, cozy vibe (you get to play volleyball in a bookstore), and it does a lot to get you up and moving. We played once or twice and never really got back to it which is why it ends up as "Good" in my estimation.

The Very Good

Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope

There's a lot to really like in Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope. I think it's a fantastic sequel and moving tactics games off of the grid works really well the way they've implemented it. My only complaint, such as it is, is that there hasn't really been a reason to pick one team over another and to upgrade any character one way over another. I haven't played as much as I might have, so that might not be a real problem as you go later in the game.
Triangle Strategy

As I've said in my monthly updates. This game is slow. Overall I think it's a wonderful modern tactics game, but I can be in and out of a mission in Tactics Ogre in 15 minutes and here it's way longer. You have to jump through multiple cut scenes for every story mission. The story is really well written, the art is beautiful and the mechanics are great and inovative. Overall it should a great or excellent game, but it just feels like a wonderful concrete block in my life.

The Great

Tactics Ogre: Reborn

I'm probably *slightly* overselling Tactics Ogre: Reborn, just becuase it's my current obsession as I write this, but it hits all of the things I love in a tactics game and something about it has just felt really, really satisfying. It also has all the trappings of Ogre Battle which I love, possibly without reason. I barely remember the PSP version of Tactics Ogre, but this seems to have all of the ease of use of a modern game, and it moves so much faster than Triangle Strategy.
Tunic

Tunic has been great. It's stylish and charming and the dynamic of putting together a 8-bit era manual is really really cool. My partner and I have been playing through it together and for the most part it's been an absolute gem. My only complaint is that either the combat is tuned really hard or I just suck at it. It might be a side effect of being the person who does the controls and wanting it to be fun for the puzzle solver, but it really kicked me out of the game when the second boss completely stomped me.
Xenoblade Chronicles 3

I really do love XBC 3, especially the characters. The mechanics are very good and the story is very good, but at the end of the day I spent as long as I did playing it because of how much I love the main six. I think, honestly, the game would have been better with even more focus on them and less on the big plot. As I've said before the Eunie and Sena Show really sold me on the game and it elevates the rest of an already great game.

Saturday, December 24, 2022

Looking back at 2022's New Year's Resolutions

I like to look back at resolutions from last year to see how those things have gone. It’s not really so much about accountability as it is about checking in on what the shape of the year has been, compared to how I thought it would go.

Looking at my post for 2021, I feel like I have a lot of the same things to say, but I’m a doing a little bit better over all. Interestingly I had periods in both years where I felt down, but I’m starting to feel better overall now and I’m getting a bit better at managing my stress (not a lot better, but a bit).

I’m not quite sure what I need to make 2023 a year of comfortable growth, but I think doing resolutions is a little bit helpful. To be clear, I’m not sure that I *need* to make 2023 a year of growth, but I’m not quite “where I want to be” and so I guess there’s nothing to do but be intentional about the things I do and changing my habits for ones that make me happier.

Last year, I had four resolutions:

Move: This has been a bit of a struggle. Specifically, I want to be stronger and fitter and less sore, but I also find it hard to dedicate the time. Being intentional about moving, either as exercise or just as not sitting on my ass, hasn’t been easy, even with the very nice sit/stand desk at work.
Read more non-fiction: This hasn’t been a roaring success either. Again in the time management area, I’m not great at creating time to read non-fiction. My fiction reading rate has been quite high and I’m on track to finish my 120 book challenge this year, but a lot of that is audiobooks and I don’t think that audiobooks and non-fiction mesh very well in my brain.
Do: Do, has been a little complicated. I think through the first half of the year I did okay at working on stuff. I find my relationship to the projects I want to do has changed, especially as they fit in as hobbies. The latter half of the year, especially after getting sick in October and having some other things come up has really derailed “Do,” but I’m also learning to choose where I want to spend my energy. I’m also connecting more to the projects I’m undertaking at work and getting satisfaction there as well.
Learn more about food: I have to confess this is the one I forgot about. To some extent I think I have learned more, having to get a new oven has been educational and we’ve been starting to adjust our diet to be healthier as well. I think this is a thing I’ve started doing, but I still have a lot of learning I’d like to do.

2022 may have kicked me as hard as 2021 did, but in slightly different ways. I will probably always have a lot of growing I want to do and things I want to learn. I’m trying to adopt a stronger growth mindset and also to be more centred in myself so I can take on challenges and surprises more easily.

A chinook sunset, with orange and pink reflecting on the heavy cloud.

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 - Starting a replay has been really rewarding. There's a lot of things I didn't recognize on my first playthrough that I hadn't seen or noticed or understood. It's also reinforced just how awesome Eunie and Sena are.

Ogre Battle 64 - Snow ... but also, the second half of the game still has some pretty interesting parts. It's always a nice game to chill out with.

Tactics Ogre: Reborn - Way back, when it came out on PSP, I picked it up, found it really hard and kinda gave up. Getting to revisit it on the Switch has been good so far.

Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope - I drifted off of Mario + Rabbids a little faster than I thought I would. I still think it's great, but it just didn't have a time it fit into during the month.

Mario Kart 8: Deluxe - Mario Kart felt into a bit of the same as Mario + Rabbids. Not much time really to play it, and honestly, much as I love it, if I had time there was something more appropriate to play.