Games of 2023

Looking at a lot of year in review lists, 2023 is another year like 2017 where a lot of very good games were released. I’ve started playing more games on “PC” now, although I went back to long time favourites (not least because the old Mac Laptop I’m playing on is not exactly a modern graphics powerhouse).

So of the five 2023 released games I played all were on the Switch and three of them were from Nintendo.

As is traditional, I've organized the games I've played into a few rough categories:

The Alright

Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp

 We’ve established that a) I like strategy games and b) I’m not *good* at strategy games. This leaves me with the exact position of “I kinda liked Advance Wars, but it’s harder than I think is fun,” so it’s alright. I’m also just hitting a point right now that I’d like to play strategy games that aren’t combat / warfare based. What does that look like? I’m not sure yet, but it’s making me think.

Mineko’s Night Market

 

I picked up Mineko’s Night Market hoping to play a light crafting / store management game. It is that, but honestly the technical problems on the switch are keeping me from enjoying it. It does an alright job of the crafting and store management, but it’s maybe a little too self aware for it’s own good and when it’s not being self aware it seems a little short on charm and personality (the only interaction with towns folk is them demanding things from you, often stuff you have to buy). The game feels a lot like the art took the lead (and the game is gorgeous) and game play and technical functionality got lost.

 

The Very Good 

Pikmin 4

Pikmin 4 might actually be great. It certainly hits all of the things that make me happy about Pikmin games and there is a lot of it. Sometimes Nintendo accidentally irons out the fun when they polish their modern games, especially those based on older series and I think they’ve done that here. They added in a lot of very good fun as they went, but it’s just less charming than the nonsense that was Pikmin 1, 2 and 3.

Super Mario Bros. Wonder

 I’m not super in love with the 2D Mario games and Wonder has kinda followed along. There’s something in the mode of 2D exploration that just doesn’t make me want to spend a lot of time, the way I did when I was a kid. Based on Dan's PlayFrame Let's Play, I've tried to slow down and really explore the world, but I just find compared to exploration in something like Odyssey, or even 3D World, I’m not that engaged.

The Great

Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Tears of the Kingdom is great. I think this it’s actually two great games which is kind of what keeps it from being excellent. It takes all of the things that were excellent in Breath of the Wild and improves on them. The game play is better, the story is better, the experience is better, the side characters are better. The Zonai building mechanic is amazing and a ton of fun.

When I play Tears of the Kingdom, just like when I played BoTW, I am totally absorbed in a way almost no games absorb me. Each moment of game play is fun and fulfilling.

The thing that holds me back, just a little but from totally and unreservedly loving this game is that it doesn’t feel like it matters. Riding a horse across Hyrule felt like a feat in BoTW, but in ToTK it’s a dumb thing to do because you can just *fly*. I played the game wrong, and hunted down the side quests when I should have just pushed through the main story, loved it and then delved so deeply into the world flying around on my flying “Akira” bike. I did it to myself, but there’s just that tiny bit of how much more I could have loved this game.

Sea of Stars

Mountains’re nice.

Chrono Trigger is still maybe my favourite game of all time. (No I’m not writing down a list, it’s more fun to warp it to whatever I need.) Chrono Cross was not the sequel that we wanted. However people feel about Chrono Cross (I myself feel at least 3 ways about it), at the end of the day the feeling and the heart of Chrono Trigger aren’t there.

Sea of Stars is made by people who understood that feeling and that heart. I spend so much of my time playing saying to myself “Yeah, that’s how that’s supposed to be”. So you meet a monster in the first bit of the game and he tells you not only that “mountains’re nice” but also that “this is the life,” and “man, you’re noisy.” Your teammates gather around the campsite and chat with you about what’s going on. You team up and combine your powers to clobber enemies that you stunned on the screen.

If Sea of Stars had no references to Chrono Trigger, it would still be a great game. Traversal is fun and the puzzle solving is just the right level to be satisfying without being boring or frustrating. I also think that a lot of the puzzles are unique to the game. I think the story is just a little shy of brilliance, but that’s because I’m 40-something now and I read a lot of stores.

Sea of Stars is a great game for anyone who likes turn-based JRPGs and it gets better if you liked Super Nintendo turn-based JRPGs and better still if you loved Chrono Trigger and wanted that true sequel of the heart.

Looking back at 2023's New Year's Resolutions

I liked how my 2023 started, and then I feel like I lost focus on the things that mattered to me. I think I made progress on a lot of things, but I also feel like I didn’t move the needle on some of the things that matter to me. Certainly ending the year getting flattened by COVID hasn’t been a really great experience.
 

I write a resolution post as part of finding focus and I don’t always do a *great* job of checking on my resolutions throughout the year, but writing a post to check in on what I wanted to do and where I’m at in my life now is helpful as part of that focus.
 

For 2023 I had six resolutions:

• Finish Projects: Specifically I said I’d like to “plan out reasonably sized projects and finish them”. Instead I started writing *another* novel and then got hung up and didn’t work on it. Still over the last couple of months I’ve been thinking about what I want out of my life next and hopefully some of that will translate into getting more things done.
  
  
• Read more text: I did this. I read a lot of text and felt good about it.
  
  
• Move: I’ve started moving more, but have a long way to go. Just going in to the office opens up how much I walk and I try to remember to get out of my chair. Still I'm no where near where I was at my fittest or even at the start of the pandemic, but I feel like I'm on the move.
  
  
• Adventure: I started on being more adventurous but I wasn’t very good at it. Similarly to moving, going into the office more has been a big help in seeing more of the world and we did actually take a trip all the way to Victoria and back. Still I've tended to opt towards staying home rather than getting out there and adventuring.
  
  
• Choose Happiness: This is probably going to be a life long goal. I’ve started to find ways to think that make me feel happier and I’m slowly untangling my sense of happiness and self worth from my productivity and the world around me.
  
  At the same time, one of my COVID symptoms was a prevailing sense of doom and as I write this I’m still finding it hard to feel any way other than “here and alive”.
  
  
• Sleep Better: I guess I’ve started on this, but I am still not a person who is awake and happy about it. On the plus side the quality of our bed is really good now.
  

So 2023 was a year, not one I was super intentional about, but I think it can stand as a launching point to do better.

What I Did About The Books I’m Reading and What I Should Do About the Games I’m Playing

Back at the beginning of the year, I posted about wanting to change up the way I was keeping track of the books I read. Previously I posted a book post every few days with the new books in a big list. I was inspired by Sharon Lee who does that and it seemed like fun.

I wanted to make the changes for a few reasons. First off as technical task it was surprisingly frustrating to maintain a list over a series of posts and it was a bit redundant as my GoodReads profile is public and you can see the list there. The other reason was that the book posts were inflating the number of posts I was making in a month and taking time away from working on other things. I though, as a next step, making a monthly “infographic” update might be fun and interesting and maybe teach me a few things at the same time.

As someone who has worked in post secondary education for a while now, I can assure you that nobody (including myself) has any idea what an infographic is. So I settled on an answer that was high on info and maybe a bit low on graphics.

All of the posts are under the Books in 2023 tag and they look more or less like this:

I’m pretty happy. As I said, it might not be as pretty as it might be, but at least for now I’m enjoying making it. I learned, for example that for some reason I haven’t read a single book published in 2023, which seems weird, but now I know.

More technically, I learned a bit about getting formatting to work properly. I also learned that books are almost never in a 2:3 ration. I mean, I shelved books for years, I knew this, but until I tried making a grid of book covers I hadn’t realised just how wacky the world of book cover sizes is. I also messed around with hand crafting a word cloud, mine is certainly not as pretty as some, but I kinda like it.

I’m doing a very simple translation where the author’s percentage of the books translates directly to the font size the author. So in the June example above, Tomohito Oda represented 26.4% of the books I’d read to that point in the year and her name is in 264 point font. Elizabeth Bear only accounted for 1.6% at the time and so she’s in 16 point font.

From a production point of view, it takes me about 3 hours to put together the post and certainly requires more hand done portions than it might. When I set out that was fine but as the year went on, I hand wrote more HTML than I really enjoyed, especially when it came to keeping the two column tables balanced. There’s also still some book keeping that’s duplicating Good Reads.

So eventually, I want to either automate the process or make it more manual. I still like the idea of hand building my infographic, but also creating fewer points where I can get in my way seems helpful too. For the time being I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing because it’s fun enough and kind of meditative, without taking up all of my time.

I’m having enough fun with it that I’m thinking about how I can modernise my system of video game tracking. I think those posts are alright, but they have a few problems.

I’ve had a lot of trouble this year keeping track of what I’ve played and when and so the data going into the posts is a lot worse than it was. This has happened before and I might get better about it again, but I’m also a spot right now where games are less important to me than they were. I’m not sure I need to be quite as granular about it as I have been.

There’s also a problem that a lot of games show up every month. If you read those posts regularly you’ll know that my nuanced view of Mario Kart 8 (Deluxe) is “Vroom Vroom Beep Beep” because I really haven’t had that much to say about it in the … almost decade since it game out (the first time). I don’t mind doing a new review for something new or a point about something interesting, but I think those posts are some of my worst writing and I want to put that energy somewhere else.

One of the things I’ve always meant to do with game tracking is build one of those theme river diagrams. At the moment for me capturing the very large things about what I’m playing is important. For example: “The summer of 2023 was the the summer of Tears of the Kingdom” is the kind of insight I’d like to hang on to (and I’m not sure is even that apparent in what I’m doing).

I’d also like to make sure that I have a picture in my head of what I played in a year, new and old. Like right now I know I played Hollow Knight at some point in the last year, and apparently a lot of that was in the winter, and then I played a little bit of Breath of the Wild just before Tears of the Kingdom came out.

Overall, it’s time for a change, I’m just not totally sure what the change is going to be. Writing it out this way makes me think something similar to the book infographic might be the right way to go. Here’s what my 2024 in games looks like at a glance updated each month, with a few insights to spice up everything else.

I think I can also dial back the tracking. I’m not sure at this point that it’s doing me any good and while I don’t think it’s doing much harm if I can streamline to “Here are games I played a little and Here are games I played a lot” that might be what I need. That’s going to be weird and I might end up continuing just because it’s an ancient habit by this point (and imagine all the data I won’t have if I want it later!).

Anyway, those are my Updates updates. Making infographics is fun, if a little bit tedious and even I, after doing something for seven years, can make a change. I don’t know exactly what you can expect in terms of my media consumption nonsense in 2024, but I, at least, intend to have fun with it.

Blog: Video Games of November 2023

I spent a lot of November down with COVID, so I don't really remember the month and certainly didn't have a lot of energy to play. I'd planned to pick up Sea of Stars around my birthday and that turned out to be a pretty good speed when I had the energy for it.

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

1. Sea of Stars - Sea of Stars is a lot of fun. I think it stands up on its own, but it's also the modern extension of great SNES role playing games. It's certainly made with a lot of Chrono Trigger in it's heart and kind works as the sequel I'd been imagining, rather than Chrono Cross.
   
   
   


2. Dicey Dungeons - Dicy Dungeons has been the thing to play when I don't want to use my brain too much.
   
   
   


3. Tactics Ogre: Reborn - I started a new playthrough to look at the differences of the routes. I'm finding the overall story a little flat, and some of that is due to them trying to keep a dark and gritty tone. The game play in each mission is always fun, so as long as you don't think about the war crimes you keep committing, it's fun.
   
   


4. Stardew Valley - I found it hard to come back to Stardew Valley. It's still a good an enjoyable game and the core farming is enjoyable, but I found having played through all of the story years ago, I just didn't really connect.
   
   
   


5. Mineko's Night Market - I thought I'd try this out as something new in the farming / store management genre. It's fun, but not quite what I'd hoped. It's slow on its own and then has some fairly severe technical issues on the switch that make it frusterating to play.
   
   
   

Here's my total play time for November:

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