2023 in Games

I've been tracking the games I play for a long time now and partly that's so that I can write a post that looks at how I played from a ten-thousand foot view. I've reached a point where that's less important to me than it was and my priorities have changed. I'm going to keep tracking in a way, but I think that's going to look a little more like what I'm doing with books now. I've written a bit more about that in an update earlier in December. but my longer term goal is to make sure that everything I'm producing is fun to make and makes me happy, so that's going to inform how I capture playing data going forward.

I also got very clobbered by COVID in November so my tracking, which has been spotty all year got even worse and I haven't written down a single game I've played since December 10.  That really helped me see what was and wasn't important to me. Earlier having very detailed information mattered to me, but now it's just not a priority for when I play or what I do. If I'd finished that software to track playing time, that might be different, but I haven't, I don't really want to and I'm looking to focus my time differently going forward.

That being said, I do know a few things about the games I played this year, so here they are.

I played 31 games this year for approximately 500 hours. That's slightly fewer games and significantly fewer hours than the last few years. My gaming PC broke a while back and between pandemic and other things fixing it was never my priority. Mostly I've been playing on the switch, but that's felt a little less fulfilling this year so I've started to broaden out again, finding the things I can play on my ancient Mac Book Pro and since my birthday on SteamDeck.

Fortunately the Switch and Tears of the Kingdom, which is a great game, even if you play Tears of the Kingdom on your Switch in the game!

 

Important Games

The five games I think were really important to me this year were:

1. Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
2. Tactics Ogre: Reborn
3. Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age
4. Pikmin 4
5. Sea of Stars
   

I also played a lot of Mario Kart 8, Dicey Dungeons and Into the Breach, but in less intentional / important ways. 

I've merged time and favouritness this year, at least partly because I haven't tracked well and as I'm looking forward, I'm thinking a lot about what I play for the experience of the game and what I play for managing the moment.

I will say that Tears of the Kingdom is a masterpiece and I've love it to bits. It builds beautifully on everything in Breath of the Wild and is just in general a great game to play. Pikmin 4 is also really good and honestly fills in almost every need I've had in terms of a Pikmin game.

I'm also deeply in love with Sea of Stars, although because it is very much an homage to Chrono Trigger it may not be as great an experience for someone without my rose colour glasses. Still if a modern polish of 90s RPGs is something you want in your life, there's really nothing better.

Sea of Stars, home to every thing I've kinda wished SNES RPGs would do, and more.

 

Finishing Games

I didn't finish any games this year. There are a bunch of games which I've started and which I think I will finish with soon, but soon is as good as it gets.

Again with my overall change in how I'm going to track things and think about game playing generally, I'm much less interested in what I've finished. I may keep track, but honestly looking at a lot of the games that have come out in the last few years few of them really even have definitive endings, where you aren't encouraged to go back and play. Even if there's not a New Game + mode, for me the space ending a game leaves in my head often leaves me going back to play a game over again right after I finish until my attention shifts to somewhere else.

Finding What Works on The Mac

Since I did open Steam again for the first time in a year or more, I thought I'd mention what out of the games I like worked well and what didn't. Overall, Steam and most video games don't work well on an 8 year old Mac (Steam has stolen focus from me 8 times writing this paragraph so far, just for example).

Smaller windowed games have been great, so I've played a good chunk of Dicey Dungeons and Into the Breach and a bit of FTL: Faster Than Light. I tried some Civilization VI and some Stardew Valley, but neither was a huge technical success. 

Invisible Inc. was probably my favourite Steam game this year (obviously not from this year). It worked well on the Mac and had the right amount of tactical thinking for me.

Getting some desktop gaming back was nice, but I want to play with a lot more intention next year.

Into The Breach, because throwing giant bugs into lakes (sometimes of acid) is a good way to relax.

 

Cataloguing Screen Shots

This is probably dumb, but I learned the correct way to get screenshots off of the Switch this year. You may recall that in past years, I very slowly passed them out via Twitter. That was a slow and laborious process, but I wanted to make sure that I had a lot of screen shots of a game in case I wanted to write about it later. As it turns out you can hook your Switch up to your computer and so long as you have a manageable number of images you can just copy them over. So I now have a fairly good archive of screenshots that I found interesting this year.

Because some day I might need this...

New Year Resolutions 2024

Looking back at my resolution posts over there years there are certainly some themes that have developed, be happier, do more things, go on adventures, move. They also feel like they’ve gotten a little less happy each year as the weight of everything piles up. So this year I’m going to try to be happy and well, I’ll be following on my themes because I don’t do these things as much as I’d like to.

So here are the things I’d like to work on this year:

• Choose happiness: I want to laugh more, and do light things and be light. I talked last year about finding happiness inside myself (as that’s the only place it can be found), and that’s a goal to continue for this year. There is pain in the world, I have fears that are justified, but I want to push back on the greyness that sits in my mind and find joy again.
• Be more intentional: This is something I’ve been working on for a while, but the way my brain works, I often find myself doing things that I didn’t mean to do. As part of my other resolutions, I want to do what I mean and mean what I do. So I’m going to try check in on myself regularly to see if I’m doing what I want to be doing.
• Do: On that note, I’m putting one of my old favourite resolutions back on the list. “Do” means I want to have a bias towards action. I often struggle to separate my sense of self and self worth from my productivity, but at the same time I feel better if I do things. 10 minutes of cleaning or half an hour of writing make me feel better and I want to remember that.
• Finish (small) things: As I mentioned in my review of last year’s resolutions, the big thing I ended up working on this year was another novel and I certainly didn’t finish it. Some of my projects are big, and they need to be finished. That being said, finishing the small things, like a scene or a chapter or a bit of a coding project or tidying part of a room or building a thing are all important too and I want to get in the habit of finishing. More importantly, is that I would like to get in the habit of finishing and feeling accomplished rather than just looking at all of the things I haven’t done.
• Read more non-fiction: I’ve read a ton of fiction in 2023 and I think it’s been good for me. I have a big pile of non-fiction books that have been sitting around and it’s time I developed the habit of reading those too.

So 2024 is certainly a follow on to my themes and I hope I’ll be able to use this post as a reminder when I’m feeling unsure about what I want to do.

 

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.