Well, we went through some reflecting, and now are coming to the big end of year lists, where I go over some recommendations and not-so-recommendations. This year might have been the best for games in a long time, but a negative of that, alongside my own queue battles, is that there were too many things to play. Thus, in both these lists do not be surprised if you don’t see a game you like here.
Still, we always start with the worst. This year I felt was generally better than last year but some pretty poor retro compilations dragged stuff down a bit, along with a few things that didn’t quite nail it for me or missed the mark. So let’s go into all of these!
10: Battle Kid (Switch eShop)– Bad news, this is a barebones port with barely any extras and some irritating audio pitch glitches, with some very minor input lag to boot. Good news, it’s still Battle Kid, a very fun and challenging game, and the devs behind this port did turn out better ports for their other releases this year, so I’m gonna chalk this up mostly to growing pains for the dev porting NES games. The fact this is at the bottom of the list and I don’t hate it should really indicate how good I felt this year was for games.
9: Lone Ruin (Steam)- This game was the first 2023 game I ever played! And even with all that leadup time and practice to write a good review, Lone Ruin made me feel empty. It had some good ideas, looked pretty neat, and controlled OK enough, but as a roguelike it just failed to engage me, and as a game in general it just was really unmemorable.
I barely remember anything I did in this game and had to re-read my own darn review to refresh myself, and the game didn’t seem to get any sort of major patches to polish up my gripes with it. Oh well, not all of these games can be winners, but this isn’t abhorrent or anything either; just a dull game in an oversaturated genre.
8: Magical Drop VI (Steam)– Oh what a disappointment this was. The core gameplay is still as fast and fun as ever! But there’s hardly any content, with only one update of a promised several of them squeaking out before this list went live. And considering how high score chasing wasn’t even a thing available at launch, despite being part of every prior Magical Drop in some way, shape or form, and this just feels like a poorly managed mess.
Maybe in a year it’ll be fully packed with content and be the best thing for the IP in ages, but I never, ever like when games launch incomplete and they just feel like finishing it later with “free updates”. Doubly so when the updates get delayed quietly and the state of the product as a whole seems very up in the air, likely because nobody wants to buy a game with next to nothing to do in it.
7: Cannon Dancer- OSMAN (Switch eShop)- This one is a bit weird. The port plays fine, it’s a fun arcade gem that emulates OK, but it barely has any bonus features, is a very short game to begin with, and doesn’t have much replay value. Priced normally like Avenging Spirit or Shockman, I would not even have it on the list at all. But the MSRP for this game is $30, which is absurd for the amount of features it has on offer. (ie, almost none).
I normally don’t like slapping games with a poor recommendation due to their price, but when this one just doesn’t last long at all and is stupidly expensive for the sake of being a retail product for a limited print company, I can only really advise that you nab this on sale; and considering how deep a lot of ININ sales are getting, this may actually be a pretty easy to recommend pickup before too long.
6: A Boy and his Blob: Retro Collection (Switch eShop)- You know, I find it rather funny at how this collection came about. Announced over a year ago alongside a port of Rendering Ranger R2 and another set that ended up on this list, this was meant to be a set of the two classic entries in the Boy and his Blob series, put in a neat little package via the constantly touted “Carbon Engine” Limited Run cooked up.
I generally liked what I saw of it in Shantae and River City Girls Zero, so I expected something of that quality for this set whenever it came out, but wow, does this set fit the definition of “lazy port”. Despite how much LRG puffed up their Carbon Engine and made a good first impression with it on Wayforward stuff, sets like this prove the blunt reality that it is little more than a set of basic emulation wrappers, and in one of the game’s cases, it doesn’t even emulate the NES properly! The sound channel from the game’s ending is just completely missing, and it still remains unpatched as of this post.
Even the Game Boy game, which plays decently like I remember it suffers from the compilation’s very barebone featureset, which doesn’t even offer save states and instead replaces them with a terrible “Save and Quit” system, despite a Save State feature being in both Xtreme Sports and Shantae. There’s only one color palette option, and the cool borders don’t save properly upon closing the application, which just leads to this compilation in the so-called “brand new engine” feeling like little more than four roms in a very generic, buggy wrapper.
The fact it was put up for sale as a physical product on their site months before this game even hit the eShop shelves also makes me scratch my head, and I can’t help but wonder if that’s why the bugs and such haven’t been fixed. Are LRG so focused on the FOMO nature of their business that they won’t fix the bugs out of fear of upsetting people who bought this physically? Who knows, but when even Ratalaika does more in-depth compilations and standalone reissues these days, it really makes this Carbon Engine thing a lot more disappointing.
5: Slap Fight and well, Bitwave Toaplan in general really (Steam)– If I were to include every Toaplan Steam Bitwave port on these lists, they would be all over the place. Some of them I really liked due to all of them having low input lag and smooth controls in common, along with decent QOL. But even putting the worst of them all here with Slap Fight, I can’t help but also feel sour about the other games in this set, even the ones I previously praised, because they’re all broken messes that have been utterly neglected.
See, Toaplan games are pretty fun and good scorechasers. They also need a lot of care to get right with porting. While the gameplay aspect has been handled mostly well on this front, one aspect that became apparent when covering Volume 2 really drove me nuts to this day, and that was how the sound effects are emulated. Hoooo boy, even all these months later they’re still horribly off-key, and I even noticed this to be the case for Vol 1’s games too. Still, of all eight games currently on steam, Slap Fight is by far the one that feels the most “how the hell was this allowed to released?” of them all. Being a PSG game, the sound effects being off is immensely more noticeable here, and just completely sours the experience.
I had hopes they’d maybe patch up the sounds quickly and fix the pitch of them, but 4 months later, and our “sound patch” barely fixes anything besides a few other sound effects. The PSG audio is still way, way far off in comparison to a real PCB, Taito Egret Mini or Evercade, which is just laughable considering how early of a game Slap Fight is.
It kinda feels as if this initiative to bring good Toaplan ports to PC fizzled out with little fanfare, and in its wake we have games that play like butter but are horrible to listen to with other weird bugs that remain unfixed, some going as far back at the first volume’s launch in February, whether that be weirdly simple achievements not unlocking properly, bonus widescreen toggles throwing up errors, or leaderboard issues.
So while Slap Fight itself is the absolute worst of these ports and the one I can’t recommend you buy at all, really all eight of the Bitwave releases feel like missed potential ports that have been horribly neglected, and the inability to fix sound effects after so long really have me doubting the remaining games will be much better. Seriously devs, you had to have known something was off with the sound considering the prelaunch build of Volume 1 had music that sounded like AtGames quality, and now the sound effects are only barely around that quality. Here’s hoping gems like Fixeight and Tatsujin Oh don’t get butchered next year.
4: Qubyte Classics: Beat Em Up Archives– Oh hey! Last year we covered the same lineup! Oh hey! They didn’t learn a thing about emulation or input lag or the bad wrapper! Oh hey! Reviewing this game and giving it a bad score got me pulled off of Qubyte’s Press List for a bit. (yes, I can confirm this as all PR releases from them stopped and they didn’t return any emails about my Visco Collection inquiry, though as of this week, I finally got an email from them for the first time since so… Maybe just a weirdly timed fluke? Still a funny coincidence though…)
Considering we went from a decent Breakers Collection down to this low-effort set with abhorrent input lag, I’m honestly unsure what the hell Qubyte is doing. Even if not everyone is a fan of Piko games, I at least feel the games deserve more than to get thrown into the most barren, context-dry wrappers imaginable with so many bugs and input lag so bad that it isn’t even funny, and when the company’s response to being constantly reminded this lineup of games have bugs unfixed from nearly two years ago is to just… delist you from their PR list, it really goes to show where their priorities lie with these releases. Here’s hoping the Top Racer Collection launching next month somehow turns this around and gives those games better treatment, since good lord at the idea of playing a racing game with input lag.
3: Ninja Jajamaru: The Lost RPGS– Two Famicom RPGs fully translated! An average Dragon Quest clone and a cool Zelda like. Both are decent games, even if they aren’t the second coming or anything, and it was very good to see such effort put into niche games like those. So why is this set on the bottom of my list?
Well, because one of the games has a laughably stupid bug that has gone unfixed since it launched back in February. For a quick summary, basically imagine playing a port of Mega Man 2, but when you beat robot masters, you can’t select their weapons, except for Crash Man and Bubble Man due to a bug. Yeah you can beat the game, but the fun of using those other weapons are gone.
That’s basically what happens in the Zelda clone due to a stupid failed implementation of an all-items cheat, which does make the other weapons work properly when toggled, but not when left off for a normal playthrough. The only ones that work are some early spells, which you can use to beat the game, but considering the whole point of this game is to, you know, collect spells and use them to do zelda-y dungeons, it kinda sucks having a lot of the game’s mechanics unavailable to use unless you toggle a cheat. Doubly so when the company publishing this set hasn’t put out a patch to fix this in the nearly-a-year span of this set of games being out.
The other Jajamaru retro collection has some trophy bugs too, but at least all of those old games play properly! Really, it just blows my mind when sometimes I see a retro compilation, have fun with it… And it becomes apparent nobody tested something obvious about it properly. And then when it fails to get fixed months later and the game is neglected, that just makes me more sad.
2: Irem Collection Volume 1– Good lord. I somehow, by some miracle, managed to avoid putting this at number 1, if only because one game did something so stupid I couldn’t not put it at the top of the list. But this one is still a crushing disappointment for me as a scorechaser, and megafan of one of the games included.
I noted all the various issues in my review of this set, so I won’t repeat myself, but this is basically a compilation of three games, one of which has various ports that are all horrendously buggy and not well emulated here. They had a fast forward feature that somehow caused framerate issues in a NES game, which they responded to by just removing that feature outright in a patch, they replaced the pause button with the A button, leading to unexpected bugs that still aren’t all fixed, and the online leaderboards were clunky and broken in some aspects for a good while.
Considering how Jajamaru just above is still unfixed even now, I had good reason for expecting the same here, but it does seem that ININ has patched it a few times in small ways over the past month. Likely to prep for the JP release soon. Still, it just goes to show that this publisher really isn’t letting Ratalaika do what they need to get these sorts of compilations out right the first time, especially when their own self published work manages to be surprisingly robust and full of cool bonuses, none of which are in this expensive set. When they also announced five volumes of these at once and the first one is this poor, lord knows how the other four will turn out, and I hope next year I don’t just have all four of those back to back on the list.
Honorable Mentions
I usually try to keep stuff here to a minimum so that it doesn’t end up being a long list of “urgh this game sucks and smells and i hate it” and more of a “damn the bottom really sucks but the top just missed potential”. So i’ll just note some general game disappointments this year, along with industry-stuff I kinda feel would fit here to vent on.
Front Mission 2 Remake’s stupid translation. I reviewed the first Front Mission remake this year, and it somehow even became my most played steam game this year in the process. (Fuga 2 might surpass it by the time this goes live though) But the second game hit Switch a short bit ago, and while I’m waiting for the PC version to launch so I can play and cover that game, impressions of the translation for it are… very bad. Short and to the point, a lot of it feels like stilted, machine translated garbage and takes a JP only gem and goes for the most barren, low-effort attempt to translate it into other languages imaginable.
Apparently 1st Remake was similarly shoddy for any EU languages that didn’t get the DS translation imported to it, so it just makes me real sad to see a game come to the west for the first time ever, only to be so stilted and not well translated to the point it basically becomes nonsense and it stands as an insult to localizers who do work on stuff like Live a Live, Atelier Marie Plus and other such retro ports/remakes and provide better translations. When companies that only know Japanese go this route when self-publishing their game on the eShop this sort of thing can be a little more understandable, but not a big company like Forever. Just, no. Hopefully when it hits PC, they hire actual localizers to do 2nd justice.
PS Plus Retro Games are still shitty- I basically said the same thing last year but every month for the super expensive PS Plus tiers, we’ve pretty much gotten nothing but random ass licensed games for the PS1, and an absurd amount of PSP games. PS2 continues to get ignored and the emulation quality on all of these systems remains pitiful compared to other emulations found in other compilations or even fan emulators. When Ridge Racer R4 launches and the pixel scaling is so poorly done I don’t even want to touch it, you messed up. Also when a game like Up for PSP ends up being a big highlight of your service, uh… That’s a bad thing. I never want to hear anything bad about Quest for Camelot or Eliminator Boat Duel on NSO ever again, since at least they aren’t crusty PSP games blown up to look like butt in 1080P.
Oh, and they raised the price, which is the main reason I’m even putting this here again. More money for less quality than the $20 NSO sub!
Bad Industry, Bad! I’m not really an expert when it comes to managing a company or finances or what it takes to lay people off and such. But I do know this year has been hard for a lot of my peers in the game media space along with tons of devs, and it’s so constant to the point I feel like I have to at least say something about how dumb it all is. Lots of layoffs hit the industry in 2023, and they just keep on coming. Most of them stem from Embracer Group being a dumbass who tried to bet a bunch of hasty acquisitions on a deal with a games group associated with a prince who would love nothing more than to have minorites suffer, but when you consider the sheer volume of the companies Embracer owns, that’s a ton of people who got screwed by this stupid gamble.
So many devs who worked on games I covered in the past are no longer employed or at a different company altogether as a result of this. Zen Studios, who made some fun pinball games I love (and not quite love), got a lot of their staff laid off right before launching a new game. Some of them I remember seeing on their socials working for the company for years and years.
A lot of indies partnered with other publishers and hoped the publishing deal would help em out, but when the first sign of it not doing so hot surfaces, they close entire companies and pretty much seize the hard work done by well-meaning dev teams. Some Limited Print companies still screw over indie devs, and even a bunch of bigger companies who should absolutely have the means to get their team another position or help them out decide to lay off a bunch of talented folk anyway, just because. As the industry and the gaming scene gets bigger, it just really irks me to see a lot of people, writers or otherwise thrown away or having to step out of the space because of how big corporations buy up everything and treat people with lives and jobs as disposable.
That’s honestly one of the big reasons I’m adamant on running this site 100% solo, and will continue to do so even if I write freelance articles elsewhere on rare occasion. And while I’ve noticed layoffs every year since I started writing, this one feels like the absolute worst year for them as far back as I can remember, and I hope it doesn’t get worse.
1: Bill & Ted’s Excellent Retro Collection– What the #!$%#. You know, I originally had this sitting a bit above the Boy/Blob set on this same list, noting that despite the Carbon engine legitimately exciting me with River City Girls Zero, this compilation was barren and buggy to the point I legitimately wondered why it even bothered to exist to begin with, since at least A Boy and his Blob are fun puzzle games, with Irem as the easy No 1 due to the abhorrent launch state + the major shakiness of the whole lineup in general, but then something happened this very week that made me shuffle my list and slap this at No 1.
The compilation is getting delisted in mere days from now, on New Year’s. Mind you, it launched in February of this very year. Why? Because more than likely, LRG spent a ton of dumb stupid money on a set that they hoped would sell based off infamy alone, (and when they opened physical orders in the summer of 2022, it didn’t seem to even crack a few thousand of those sold, per an old javascript inventory trick that they didn’t patch for months on end) and when nobody cared to buy it digitally when it shadowdropped on Valentine’s Day, this thing probably didn’t come close to recouping the cost of the IP licensing.
Considering how lackluster and poor this compilation is, I can’t say I’ll miss this set, since even bad games can be preserved well with some interesting bonus content; just look at SNK 40 or Atari 50. But when you throw two ROMs in a buggy wrapper, never patch it and pretty much use it as FOMO bait while also tweeting out that the set will determine if going after other licensed games is viable, then it becomes clear to me this compilation just didn’t have any effort put into it on purpose and was done just for laughs.
And considering all the other great obscure games that could have been reissued, with a lot more polish and care… And these two dirt common games couldn’t even get basic features you could find on a free emulator from the mid 2000s? Yeah, no. Irem Collection is a buggy compilation of great games with features that at least mean well, but may never get patched due to track record. This is just a buggy compilation of bad games that was hardly focused on to begin with, hoping to tug at nostalgia from people double my age enough to buy a $40 piece of plastic for it.
And that’s the worst kind of “game” experience of all.
Well uh, that was quite a list. A lot of poor ports this year, sadly. But the bright side is, tons of great newer games and a few awesome ports/compilations hit this year, and you’ll be seeing what I thought tomorrow! The top 3 are super neck and neck, and I don’t even know my own ranking as I draft this… So it should be super exciting to see which game wins my GOTY prize. 🙂 See you tomorrow!
Bill and Ted deserve better!!