Wait a minute, Five Disappointments?!? What about the Worst Games of the year?!?

Well, I’m doing things differently this year because in all honesty, ranking the worst games every year got old, especially when years like this don’t have many games that make me outright angry; just disappointed at worst, and only one gave me the biggest disappointment in that regard.

So, I figured I’d trim the list down to five, and cover five general Gaming-ish related things that disappointed me in 2024 as a whole, along with the usual honorable mention. Keep in mind this list isn’t really ordered in terms of severity outside of the last spot and the first spot; I didn’t really like any of these aspects pretty equally besides those two.

Still, with this out of the way, we can still transition into the best of year list tomorrow, and have a much better, more fun time! But truly, the prior years really did teach me how most sites that would make a worst of list probably weren’t doing it because they felt actual distain and to warn consumers on what to avoid, but moreso because they were legally obligated to write such a thing… So, here’s something that I wrote because I felt like talking about stuff I wish would have been done better.

Without further ado…

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Disappointment 5: AAA Companies continue to focus on Online Only Gaming

This one only barely got on the list, since as much as some companies do not want to realize this, you can’t really force your way into a crowded ecosystem when kids are content playing Fortnite and Minecraft and don’t need to join the next big online only craze. Alas, we still had a few instances of some bigger companies trying to shovel out online only games that cannot be played without an internet connection, even ones you paid a bunch of money for up front.

I was gonna use the Suicide Squad game as an example of this, but kudos to the developers for at least adding an offline mode to it lately so it wouldn’t just be lost forever and stuck on a server, even though the game is one nobody on planet earth asked for.

I personally do not mind playing a couple of free to play games or even online only titles (Hi, Master Duel!) now and then, but so, so many of these premium games come out requiring an internet connection at all times now, and it became a trend that really concerned me for a bit.

Key word is a bit, since some games that have done this began to make offline modes or offline versions once the online services go down, with Animal Crossing Pocket Camp being another example of this which surprised me, just wanting you to pay $20 to get a full, complete game. It also seems some online only games still manage to be pretty good, well made experiences that’ll last quite a while, with Marvel Rivals being the newest thing I see a lot of my friends getting in on. So while it does worry me to mainly see western AAA developers think throwing something on a disc and making it tied to the internet only to shut it down weeks later is a good idea, I’m at least glad other developers and the general gaming populace are pushing back against that notion to some extent.

Again, this wouldn’t even be on my list if it wasn’t for having to shelve something to an honorable mention category, and as much as I personally cannot stand Minecraft or Fortnite, I at least trust kids to have a fun time playing those games, which is a huge improvement from the vulgar Xbox 360 online situations my classmates dealt with.

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Disappointment 4: Developers continue to suffer

The Game industry has had a lot of layoffs last year. It has had a lot more this year. Various indies, bigger companies, even a company as rich as Microsoft weren’t safe from just purging a bunch of their employees, leaving so many jobless and the western game industry as a whole in very shaky territory. It feels like every other week I hear of a peer or a peer’s friend getting laid off, and it just really feels too depressing to repeat myself again on.

In a way, this also ties into my next disappointment, which I at least have some specific examples to get heated about, but yeah, the industry is not in good shape in this regard, and several indie publishers haven’t fared much better either. Do not get me started on what happened to Humble Games.

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Disappointment 3: The gaming press is in a concerning state + Fuck You Ryan Cohen

Related to the layoff sadness from above, the gaming press has had its own share of issues. Lots of mergers, layoffs, people taking pay to get out before a website collapses, and too many dumb heads of website ownership thinking AI is the future and thus making terrible articles with other pieces on the website feeding a garbage machine that can’t do anything right. Needless to say, stuff looks bleak in this regard, and my former start page had to be retired since that website, TouchArcade had to shut down! (Though at least the people involved with that site have a Patreon page and a podcast which is still ongoing)

Really, I can’t begin to list or even categorize this all even if I really wanted to. There’s just been so much damage done to this sector of the industry due to the ineptitude of so many corporate ownerships for Gaming themed websites to the point I don’t even know if what we currently are talking about today, will even make sense to someone reading this ramble five years from now. Will more sites end up being ran like mine, as 100% solo ventures that show more of the mind of the person running it VS a team of people? Or will we get some of these sites under control as they end up under ownership who actually understands what a video game is and knows that mistreating the people who put out good work is a bad idea?

Whatever the case, I do still feel the absolute worst, most insulting and pisses me off to no end example of this situation comes in how Game Informer shut down. See, I loved their All Things Nintendo Podcast, and have been a fan of their web content for quite sometime now. No room at all to subscribe and store the magazines, but being able to go to their website, see a cool, well-made article or review of a game and lots of enjoyable youtube content really made it one of the best of the bigger mainstream gaming websites, in my humble opinion. The team was outstanding even as they dealt with prior hardships and layoffs over the years, and All Things Nintendo was a great weekly means to get through my work week just a little bit faster.

Well, while this was after the wise decision for ATN to become independently owned by the Mario World loving creator, Brian Shea, (thus meaning it’s still ongoing and thus, a good podcast you should support/subscribe to if you haven’t already and do enjoy Nintendo news) unfortunately GI itself wouldn’t be safe or lucky, as Gamestop just upped and decided to shut it all down in August.

Fully burned to the ground. Every page redirecting to a generic AI garbage landing page that you’ll get trying to visit the website today. Not a chance for any of the staffers to say goodbye properly or write a farewell issues. Not even a means to archive stuff from their vault properly. All of it just on a whim, being spirited away as yet another horrid decision from the serial idiot CEO of Gamestop, Ryan Cohen, who for some reason, has a cult of weird nerds who still believes ruining many people’s lives will make a shit stock explode into the sky, when the retailer continues to bleed from bad decisions over the past few years.

Who knows, maybe putting more into GI vs burning it into nothing would have actually helped the company in some way, but as it stands, the horrid way they mistreated Game Informer staff with the closure of the site is easily the worst example of a gaming website shutdown I’ve seen throughout the entire year. And when this year has been horrible for layoffs in the industry, that should say a lot about just how badly it was handled. Quite honestly, Gamestop going bankrupt in the next few years and collapsing wouldn’t even make me shed a tear at this point due to their mismanagement of the magazine, and some really talented writers who deserved better respect. I really hope some of these good writers can find a stable job/home in the industry despite all this.

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Disappointment 2: Poopville Simulator Store 2024 Giga Epic Super Special Awesome AAA Cats Dogs Funny Plagiarism Edition (AKA the Switch eShop is horrific)

JESUS CHRIST! If you wanted something where I basically just rant non-stop, congrats, as the Switch eShop easily fits that bar for me. Wondering why a lot of stuff I’ll mention tomorrow in my best of list was something you probably never heard of or knew came out for Switch? Because the damn store on the console is mismanaged, abysmal, and just plain bad.

I don’t even have to cite a certain example. I just threw up the eShop today, and immediately took this photo to show you the most recent releases. I can point out a bunch of them as examples of games that shouldn’t exist or have been allowed on the console because of their poor, AI generated quality, but if I waited a week or two to take this photo, the same darn thing would happen!

This has been a constant issue on Switch for years now, and it just gets worse every week; unlike other platforms that get flooded with this stuff, the Switch eShop still makes it night impossible to discover obscurities or titles that aren’t on sale or came out years ago, and not even the Japanese eShop is safe from this flood of garbage.

One of my all time favorite games to come out this year, just hit switch earlier in the month and you would not know it because it already got buried by a bunch of similar garbage that I showed you above. Devs have been complaining about this for a while, and the big concern is if the Switch 2 uses the same, clunky store with terrible curation and slow as hell navigation, or if they finally start nipping this in the bud and begin to block and filter out games from the store, and retool as much of it as they’re able to.

Because lord knows some kid may end up impulse buying a garbage android game they see in the recent releases section, and with the lack of refunds on the Switch eShop, they’d be stuck with an unplayable, Android template mess of a game. And for the next console, they absolutely have to do something, even if it just hides the garbage into a sector that makes it harder to stumble upon as easily as you can now.

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Honorable Mention: The Chromatic Situation

This was actually going to be Number 2, with the current Number 5 not even existing at all until I had to throw in a replacement. Thankfully, my initial rant was disproven in recent weeks, with plenty of members of the gaming media, retro game community and others calling out several websites that have given this thing fluff and praise without remotely addressing the big ethical crisis that would come from reviewing such a thing.

Then, right before I got ready to draft this, The Verge wrote the best review on this thing yet that I feel addresses the issue without a care in the world about getting future review copies and such; way better than a bunch of the retro YT influencers who won’t even utter the name associated with this product out of fear of losing access to their precious review opportunities due to lack of dignity.

Yes, The Chromatic. A Game Boy Color FPGA replica made by Palmer Lucky, AKA someone distantly related to the guy nominated for US Attorney General that had to drop out of consideration, AKA A weapons dealer who unlike your typical company, is willingly aware of what their money goes to, and does not care about making the situation any better despite being insanely rich. Like, ludicrously rich.

That and he’s just a giant asshole piece of shit all around, and I, unlike most, do not care if uttering that sentence doesn’t get me a free one. Truth be told, I’d rather just save up for an Analogue Pocket at some point down the line, or stick with my old green GBC I’ve been rocking since 1998.

Obviously, there are tons of people involved with gaming products, including stuff I reviewed in the past, that are horrible people. There are people involved with companies I’ve previously investigated who are horrible people, and one of which was rightfully dismissed from said company because of it. We just mentioned a few weeks ago how despite him having no ownership over the IP anymore, the guy behind Earthworm Jim is a piece of shit. There are thus, plenty of things I won’t cover or will cover with highlights on any problematic aspects if needbee, and the Chromatic would absolutely be one of those things if it somehow ended up in my lap a few months ago.

No matter how good a device may be, if the person in charge of making it, leading the company and partnering with developers is directly with his own hand using his own personal funds and any profit from this device to do worse for the world, then I will not let that slide by me.

And quite frankly, it is insulting that some outlets who did cover it, including a site ran by a guy who went as far as cutting my credit out of articles after I called him out for supporting the Intellivision Amico as a legitimate gaming platform, don’t even bother to acknowledge this fact in a one liner. There are people who will go into GameStop to casually buy this because it can play their old game boy stuff very well, who won’t know any better, and I’m not gonna rip into that crowd of consumers. But I will rip into those like that aforementioned site owner who have been warned a bajillion times about covering such things ethically, and end up not giving a shit because the clicks and $$$ wouldn’t be high that way.

And that my friends, is why I insist on working 100% solo on SFG no matter what. The only outside influence, is myself. But really, kudos to The Verge for covering this device pretty much like I would have, and I seriously recommend you read their review. They did the work that kept me from putting this bit as a main numbered entry, because they and others in the industry did their due diligence in calling out the ethical issues with the Chromatic instead of just largely puffing it up like the Youtube influencer crowd did.

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Disappointment 1: Umbraclaw

Well, here’s the game that crushed me the most this year, even if it isn’t really a bad game. See, Umbraclaw isn’t even the worst game I played this year. But in terms of games I was most hyped for, only to be disappointed by, Umbraclaw definitely takes the top spot, for reasons I state in my review.

So, after all this time, did my thoughts change? Does me knowing about the intentional NG+ aspect make the game any better to reflect on? Honestly, no, since even if continuing to replay the game again and again and gaining cool new techniques and means of handling Kuon would make each replay having new benefits in theory, I just can’t get behind a game that doesn’t shift the level design around on a NG+ or make the process of a replay more fun. It feels like having to redo homework for the sake of redoing homework, rather than enjoying the activity and seeing how much faster you can do it a second time around.

It also doesn’t help that the story is just miserable. The great premise the game starts out with quickly falls apart at the endgame, and when only one of the several “bad” endings feels like it has any sort of thought put into it, with even the good ending being lousy and brief and having a sequel hook that I really can’t see them following up on well. So even if the bad ending I did get would end up being the best of them all, I would still feel like I wasted over 3 hours of my life for an ending that ultimately sucked, and sent me back to a mandatory NG+ for the sake of seeing more endings that suck before I eventually see the ending that sucks slightly less. Considering how this is from some of the same team behind the outstanding Blaster Master Zero 3, talk about a massive nosedive in scenario writing, and ultimately my biggest disappointment of 2024.

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Conclusion

Well this was a very different article to write compared to prior years. Still, even if I felt a few of these subjects I had less to say on than others, this was still a lot more enjoyable for me to focus on compared to trying to come up with another boring list of bad games.

I do hope some of you understand my ramblings here a bit, and maybe even find some newer stuff to support in the form of the All Things Nintendo podcast, or that cool Verge article that saved me from putting that thing on my main list. With all that out of the way, we just have two more pieces left for my 2024 wrapup! Tomorrow we’ll cover the ten best games of 2024, and on Tuesday, we’ll end the year off with a look at some future ideas for SFG, and another set of predictions I get to see if I fumble the bag on next year. Will the Switch 2 still not be out by this time in 2025?!?! Hopefully not! But see ya tomorrow for some positivity.