Greetings! I draft these starting in November to get them ready for the final days of the year, so if you see this, that means I got it done ahead of time, even if I somehow died between the scheduling and the upload. Hopefully that did not happen and cause the universe to cease existing.
I did do the long overdue site redesign and new logo! Thanks so much again to AlisonKira for doing that for me. We’re here again with general rambles on stuff that happened (and did not happen) with the site this year, a random ranking list of every year SFG has operated and my life during those times, along with my usual “I answer predictions from last year to see what I got right or messed up on.”. Let’s get into the reflections.
(Almost) The Worst Year so Far, and let’s just compare all of them
In terms of “years in my life since I started SFG that made me stressed the hell out when i’m not writing for the site, I think this year would slot in at No 2, hands down. The only things stopping it from being worse was a world ending calamity or anyone I knew as closely as Toony or Grandpa passing away, or someone I looked up to being a monster. In a weird way though, despite the hardships I had this year, I think it was necessary experience to prepare myself for the future and weirdly be optimistic about the chances of a better world. Lemme explain, though before I do, I might as well ramble on about the other years since SFG started (2014) and how I’d rank them, in case someone asks. Higher number is the best year, lower is the worst.
2014: Origin of the site, origin of the first time I used social media that wasn’t with family only, and I barely started. I was honestly surprised so many of my reviews got received as well as they did since reading back these older reviews they seem nigh unreadable to me now. (it also is the source of the only “Banished” review I ever made for SFG due to me literally upping a review score as part of a request from a scummy publisher/developer of a fitness music game that fooled me into caving because it was literally my first month reviewing games. It’s the only one that never survived the migration to the WordPress site.) Still, I found this a decent year. I rank it at 5.
2015: Kinda got a feel for things, but a lot of toxicity on the internet started to rise around this time and I nearly fell for some of it. It was damn clever at trying to play on grievances and me being irrationally mad about Pokemon Alpha Sapphire not being a good game, I almost blamed it on really, really dumb shit I do not want to repeat now that I’m a decade older and wiser.
There was also a campaign by serial losers over localization and whatnot I would have without question fallen for a year or two before but I was taking Japanese at the time and oops, that made most of the arguments I saw fall down like stacks of cards and me beginning to realize they were full of shit. You cannot exclusively rage at games with boobs in them getting small content edits, while falling asleep at say, Japan causing devs to make content edits so their gory game doesn’t get a Z rating.
The fact these people weren’t finding it outrageous or at least funny Retro City Rampage got a Z rating in Japan but god overly mad an underage character got clothing edits to not be as problematic, made it blatantly obvious a lot of these people were just using this as an excuse to hassle devs and localization teams while also making it somewhat likely these weird nerds needed their own hard drives checked at the same time.
Luckily all that stressful internet nonsense was mitigated by the arrival of my current all time favorite game, Pokemon Super Mystery Dungeon. That game was yet another motivator to go for a goal I eventually accomplished, and the pre-release cycle of that and hanging out in an online community going over every single new drop of info and coming up with theories was way more fun to be apart of than twitter outrage over boobie games.
Even with me liking Shiren 6 a lot more in a lot of ways, the whole journey Super provides along with it being a well deserved sendoff to a series that got me out of the roughest part of a post-adoption life makes it still my all time favorite game in history, and I nearly wrote a 10 year anniversary article celebrating it before I got busy with other things and couldn’t start it. I think this makes 2015 in the long run, at least to now, my second favorite year running the site, and thus a 2.
2016: Lots of stressful stuff happened this year, but not the stuff you’re probably thinking about; I was genuinely indifferent to that back then. No, rather it was the continued nonsense of the online outrage machine and dweebs continuing their outrage campaigns, only this time I didn’t fall for it and just spent most of my time blocking people.
I was still dealing with understanding stuff in the world outside of gaming more and more, and meeting a bestie who’d later reveal herself as transgender was honest to god one of the best moments in my life and helped put me on the path I am now to being a better person. Genuinely, I do not think I’d have learned to fight for those LGBT values as hard as I do if I hadn’t met her and if my Aunt didn’t come to help me understand, too. Turns out having someone in mind when you fight for LGBT rights helps a lot for understanding, especially back then. This was also when I moved SFG to the WordPress site you’re on right now, and it helped me feel like I finally made it, little did I know it was just the first big step!
This was also a pretty miserable year for gaming for me, since the Wii U was well, the Wii U. I didn’t get A PS3 until this year, which helped keep me busy the last half of the year, then I got a PS4 because the Assault Suit Leynos remake came to it and I wanted to play it. The era of mostly being Nintendo focused (save for the PSTV I bought a short bit beforehand) came to an end, and even with a new Ninty system the next year my PS4 would come in handy quite a bit. (And also be a big bane on my queue) I rank this at 6.
2017: The Year of the Nintendo Switch! And a year I tried making my Youtube channel more of a thing. The SFG Youtube never really did well unfortunately, but I met some great friends this year and this was the year I got a bit more online to meet more likeminded people. Thanks to the “Add friends from 3DS” feature, I even reunited with an online bestie of mine I lost touch with due to them using the same screen name on Twitter. Win!
I may have been rather cynical about the Switch at launch due to it not having achievements and me being a bit of a trophy addict back then, but I still had decent fun with the games this year, and this was also when I became more of a retro-obsessed gamer, since the Wii U VC was long dead and now we had Arcade Archives and compilations to lead the way. Pokken and Soldam were exceptionally fun Switch games that kept me busiest. I rank this a 3.
2018: Well you can’t always have a banger year for games. Life was pretty mundane then for me, so a slower game output made for me getting a bit lazy. And also to the point this is when some of the infamous legacy queue games sprouted. Shenmue I/II made me question reality and that’ll be a hard one to finally cover.
Still, this was a relatively calm year, and I got into a nice groove then. I was slowly improving my writing, getting more into retro adjacent stuff to write about, and did OK with my youtube stuff. SNK 40th was the highlight for sure and also helped me get more into gaming history as a whole! I’d rank this otherwise mundane year at 4.
2019: The hell year. I already wrote a huge reflection of this year, and I’m not gonna repeat myself. You know how this year was the biggest decline in productivity for SFG, and why it’s responsible for most of my legacy queue existing to begin with. Despite all that however, I still got a lot of great reviews and pieces done, with my Konami Anniversary Collection trilogy of reviews doing very, very well for the site, and encouraging me to just keep reviewing whatever retro thingy I could pick up in my spare time going forward.
There were also still some fun games out then too. I bucked the online negativity train I was (yet again) almost sucked into for Pokemon Sword and Shield, when I realized the people raging were wackadoos when I saw a post Junichi Masuda made honoring the victims of the Nagasaki Atomic Bombing getting bombarded by people whining about why their starter wasn’t in Sword/Shield or whatever. When it was clear earlier, yet I still fell for it?
Well, I just was being a dork and thinking that because a series was on an HD system it should be effortless to carry on as usual and found it confusing as to why they were scaling back a bit, and having one of the things I was hyper passionate about be ridiculed by weird nerds more mad about Pokemon than honoring one of the most tragic days in the world’s history made me step back and get some perspective. When I went in blindly to Pokemon Sword and had a blast, it made me realize a bit that maybe being online too much was a bad thing. I’d give this year the lowest rank of 12 hands down, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t good in it and I didn’t have fun with video games.
2020: You thought this was the hell year? Luckily for me, I made it through OK. My location wasn’t really impacted by the pandemic until the final quarter of the year, when I was also given the misfortune of working retail during the peak period of the pandemic because a relative who went from believing it was an issue when I called it an overblown hoax and got mad my toys were delayed (which was the first sign that no, it was real and not just Fox News being Fox News again), was now calling it an overblown hoax when I was made very aware of the grim, dangerous realities of the virus and how to properly distance/mask up around it and took it fully seriously, yet said relative thought it was no big deal to get a retail job during the worst period of a pandemic with no good treatments or vaccine then, worrying sick if you’d be the one bringing home a virus that could kill a loved one.
That doesn’t mean I wasn’t worried the rest of the year; I definitely was and moreso for my friends and family more than myself, but the small benefit of being in a rural area (And also going vacation to an even more remote area that summer) was being able to just walk away and take it easy without having to check for daily updates on case totals and whatnot. Were my friends on discord and text OK? Good? Good. Were we following protocol? Good? Good. Made the year go by a lot easier, but it still was a horrible year across the board for a lot of people, and I can only just consider myself lucky this year was tame and it was the previous year that felt like actual hell.
Gaming wise and site wise, stuff continued. I reviewed more games, albeit more slowly with a slowed down queue, and I’d write one of the first limprint articles because Dispatch Games started doing some funky shit around this time since nobody else was bothering to. Oh, what a long, annoying journey that’d end up as. I got really addicted to collecting modern LE CEs around this time, not just from LRG as I did off and on in the years prior, but from pretty much everywhere I can think of. I never got stimulus money, but I was still spending like I did get it, and that would kinda lead into the reflection that took place in the year after.
There were still some fun games coming out, and I particularly enjoyed 3D All Stars and the Fire Emblem 1 translation, although I bought it mostly for the fancy CE (hey, that addiction again!) and played the actual game on JP NSO at the time. I actually never touched Animal Crossing during this whole time, since I wasn’t a fan of New Leaf and remain a Gamecube purist. I literally bought the Space Invaders Invincible Collection the week AC came out and regretted it the minute I learned you couldn’t save high scores locally.
Oh, and a PMD1 remake came out, that I pretty much memory holed not because it was bad (It’s a great starting point!), but because it was the first sign I realized that you can’t recreate nostalgia 1:1, even if there’s a remake of a video game that’s sentimental to your life, and the mental conflict I had took some years to realize. I rank this at 8.
2021: My bestie’s birthday being on an unfortunate day aside, this year was pretty darn good. Nintendo had an excellent output this year, indies had a pretty fun one too, and lots and lots of retro gaming compilations started trickling out this year as well. I finally put my foot down and largely ended the issue that led to the legacy queue to begin with, (just asking for everything I was remotely interested in, no matter how long the game) and the only lingering title from this year was Mary Skelter Finale. (That’s the next Legacy Queue game!)
I also met one of my best friends in the gaming industry over dunking on the cruddy remake of a certain Sega Rail Shooter with too many weird nerds defending parts of it that didn’t need defending to the extent their behavior was showing. I got involved with a twitch community of a good friend that later became a VTuber, and thus got a lot more active with friend groups and more social, albeit on the internet, due to how everyone else was using internet voice chats and such more often.
This was when I also learned the unfortunate reality of the oppression in Gaza, and started to join others in the gaming industry in pushing for peace and an end to the conflict that had ramped up then. Seeing some big name sites cover it only to get struck down by their execs was a real sad thing to witness, but also made me more determined to keep being 100% solo as I always have been. I always want everyone to be safe, protected and in peace, and that applies to Gaza too, and I’ll keep pushing and hoping for a peace in the region as long as it takes in my lifetime.
Then a few months later, uh, all the circumstances leading to this piece happened and boy, that was another lesson in “wow being part of internet outrage is exhausting”. Still, it led me to liquidate most of my obsessive collection and keep only the valuable ones, and I started anew with Retro games/consoles and Evercade stuff. Hey, there’s a new niche I could find that wouldn’t cost me $100-300 a month! Some excellent games like Metroid Dread coming out this year also helped my mood, I went on a trip to see an internet bestie and have a good time, and I was starting to plant the seeds for something big…. I’d rank this one a 7.
2022: The year started off rough with the scary start of the invasion of Ukraine. I was legitimately panicking for friends in Europe due to that, but when it became clear there were people giving them aid and the frontlines froze, I became a dumbass and got more mad at both of them for Advance Wars getting shot into space for an entire year because of it since that was the big game I looked forward to that year and almost nothing else really did it for me until Atari 50 blew my mind. There are more important things to worry about than not being able to hear Veronica Taylor as Andy Advance Wars a year earlier than you actually would.
Still, as much as most games coming out that year didn’t do much for me, and as much as having to write Limprint articles on various subjects (And dealing with weird nerds in the process) drove me nuts, I do think it helped me gain long-lasting writing experience in the long run. It also helps that I did my life dream and got Shinichiro Tomie to do an interview with me, which I’m amazed actually happened. I may have gotten way in over my head though, thinking I could replicate the success of that article in a Youtube video, but as my final big piece for the SFG youtube, I do think my video companion on the matter later that year was well worth the effort, even if it took years for me to admit it was instead of beating down on myself. (And also being bitter Twitter got bought out, but to be blunt it wasn’t that great beforehand) Going to my first huge con shortly after the video launch did help my spirits, though, so much to the point so I’d rank this year at 1. Seriously, it was a net positive for me in the end even if gaming wasn’t giving me all I wanted then; I pulled off a dream accomplishment and was proud of it.
2023: Excellent start. Great games, great writing (even if Limprint annoyances came back and I really was starting to tire of writing them), and lots of fun all around. Then the horrific genocide in Gaza kicked off as reaction to the horrific October 7th attack (and as the UN and other orgs have rightfully noted, collective punishment is never the answer), and just hearing about everyone dying (not to mention the continued struggle in Ukraine) really drained my spirits to the lowest they’ve been in quite some time.
My honest to god faith in the world and humanity took a massive hit as the result of all that played out, along with dealing with seeing dumb take after dumb take online from people who first heard of Gaza via the news that year and thought they were Middle East geopolitical experts making me feel worse, even if I was luckily insulated from most of it due to being boneheaded enough to make Cohost my primary social media. (Remember that, anyone?) I was still in good enough mood to write reviews and articles, do them well, and have a good routine/flow, but I didn’t feel like playing much games outside of reviewing due to just how drained seeing everything in that last quarter made me. It really shook me to my core, and I’d rank this at 9 as a result.
2024: The absolute end of the year saved this from the whole year being a drag. I was basically forced to leave Cohost when it became obvious the site owners were utter morons and people in denial were trying to gaslight you when suggesting ways the site could get better wouldn’t listen to reason about their finances. Then oops, their finances took a shit and they died as people predicted they would.
Anyhow I moved to Bluesky, and it was pretty darn nice most of the year, even if IRL I was having a lot of anxiety about the elections in the US that year and was struggling with how to prepare or help volunteer for them, since I was pretty new to all of it and dipped my toes in that thanks to people on Bluesky advising that as a way to ease anxiety. I also got my other big interview done at this time, and that was another great moment of writing, even if it obviously didn’t do Tomie numbers due to being someone not as involved with PMD.
Gaza Discourse being a thing continued to piss me off and I started to want nothing to do with it by the middle of the year, since I just wanted the genocide to end and everyone in the region to be safe and get the help they needed and realized the more I tormented myself with uncut war footage, the more I was not helping myself or anyone in Gaza, but Bsky wasn’t nearly as bad as Twitter or other social medias were at that point. (I was a bit too reddit pilled then) Thankfully, I didn’t have a Tiktok and I cut back on Twitter by that point, so I avoided the worst of the internet in that regard, but still, I couldn’t feel joy or still enjoy games much at all outside of reviews due to feeling horrible about a genocide I couldn’t magically end with a prayer or wish. Don’t even get me started on all the AI crap flooding the web by this time.
The hopelessness was strong this year, and the end of the year cemented that. But at the last moment, hope came through; finding more content creators and people dedicated to the cause of building a better world through local political action, charity work, and mutual aid got me inspired enough to break my IRL fear of social contact and join a local community group. I met my first IRL friends since High School, and have since become an active participant in my local community’s politics.
Realizing how even if I singlehandedly can’t stop horrors in other parts of the world, I can make my own place better and my own part of the world better than it was, was enough of a seed of hope for me to keep going into the new year. Bluesky wasn’t helping me much though, since a ton of people flooded the site after the election, and the quality of it tanked since then, I’d rank it at 10.
2025: Oh hey we came around full circle! And boy, this was the second worst year. Suicidal Ideations came into my head for the first time since middle school, no thanks in part due to me getting addicted to social media and all the bad takes that had flooded bluesky in the months since the election. While I felt great at my local community group, it seemed anytime I’d log back onto the internet I’d be hit like a train again and again. Even if I avoided bluesky, I could not escape. My local news would mention something depressing, or a friend would mention something worrisome, or something dumb would happen federally that’d mess up friends I know in certain fields; it was constant attack after attack after attack.
February was the worst by far, and to be completely blunt I nearly considered ending my life that month. I partly blame myself for getting overly depressed over things far from home again, but I also kinda realize looking back that it was the fucking modern internet that made me feel the extremes I did, and in a weird sense I began a whole deconstruction of a lot of things, partly thanks to the meetings I went to locally, and also partly thanks to finding even more optimistic but realistic content creators who pushed back and stomped down on doomerism.
I have a lot more on this to say later, but TLDR: boy, did a lot of people who had it nice and comfy all these years freak out the minute the same sort of behavior POC and other marginalized communities have dealt with for centuries, and I admit that was myself too. Just the fear of me losing someone ala 2019, and feeling like it was my fault for somehow not making that bad future happen was enough to nearly send me over the edge. The reason I blame “the modern internet” is because the modern internet really, really likes to focus on stuff that gets clicks and attention more than actual quality, and not just on social media platforms. Good news or good followups to bad news stories (ie; the bad thing doesn’t happen or gets reversed) get hardly any attention while news stories theorizing or being opinion pieces that amount to “no hope is coming, everything will be over, give up” get a kajillion shares and views, and it’s infuriating.
To avoid not spending too much time on it today, I’m just gonna end off with a general recommendation for you all: even if you have anxieties, rightfully so, especially if you’re in direct danger from what’s going on in the world right now, please do not just post that everyone is doomed and we’re all gonna die. This has gotten much better since the start of the year when I went in my spiral, but in Feb/March it felt like you couldn’t go to a single thread about anything remotely scary/bad without people writing fanfics about how the world would end or humans would go extinct before the end of the year, or how there’s no hope. And even some who touted themselves as “optimistic pundits” would throw in random threads complaining/panicking about something and thus spiraling, which in itself is infectious as all hell. Thus, seeing some of these people crash out, led me to crash out, and thus oops, I felt hopeless so badly I almost considered the unthinkable.
So be a lot more wary of letting your “we’re cooked” mentality online and be aware that shit can be contagious; not to mention if this year is the first time you’ve had any hardship whatsoever? Well, realize your privilege and get involved in a local community group. Mutual Aid, indivisible, charity, dem party, whatever you have free time for. That is action that’ll make you feel better and also help you do something instead of posting on the internet while curled up in the corner from your bedroom. Needless to say, using appblockers (more on this in a future article), and having best friends step in to snap me outta this and get a grip and be inspired to take action that isn’t just posting and whining about how everything sucks all the time, (thus preventing the contagion I have with my anxieties from spreading to my followers; that’s why I’ve held back on posting on Bsky!) plus following content creators who don’t give into doomerism while being realistic really did turn my perspective around.
The future is unknowable, but it can be brighter if people put in the long, long, hard work to make it a better place for everyone. And the best place to start is by knowing your neighbors/townspeople and working on how to help them and your community. I give this the second lowest rank of 11 still for the whole “wanting to die” period i had this year, but I feel like with my new perspective of “fuck you make me” instead of “waaaaa we’re cooked”, my new local community meetups, and general hope for an eventual better future and to not give up, next year just might be a year that’s not in the bottom five. I’ll just make sure to work on that for my community and hope others do the same.
Our brains were not designed to know about so much bad shit going on at once, so please do not hesitate to log off, touch grass and meet some people. It’ll seriously do more for you than you may think and as a result this was the first year I had genuine joy playing a non-review video game since early 2023.
Never give up.
Oh yeah anyway, what did I write this year?
Uh, sorry for all that rambling, but I think it was needed to give context on why this year was so bad for my mental health, yet why it also feels like I’ve done a turnaround of sorts and have some optimism despite the year being net negative. Thankfully due to said better moods for writing at times, I think I did some pretty good things on the site; some more good reviews, including a good amount of Evercade content, multiple system reviews like the Analogue Pocket, Evercade VS and a Technos Super Pocket, and a few review code titles I really enjoyed. My GOTY 2025 list is pretty exciting to craft, so I’ll move positivity on that in a couple of days, but despite the lack of any opinion articles outside of one I did calling out Nintendolife’s kickback eShop store that marked indies as spam, I did get more longer-form content done via those system reviews.
Oh yeah, and there’s a super huge article that should have been here by now. Sorry, you gotta wait just a little longer. I need another weekish to finalize it and I think it’ll just end up being one of my first of the new year, and my finale on anything limited print related in longform fashion.
We’ll have longform opinion pieces on more fun things afterward, such as Switch 2’s Backward Compatibility and retro titles I think should be on modern consoles, along with general musings. Maybe a PMD RRT 20th anniversary article for the US launch? Either way, I’m way more excited about 2026 in terms of opinion articles since I get the gargantuan 1MT weight off my back that was the LRG Part III piece.
Predictions for 2025, Answered
I will be here to type this next year: Well, as far as I know with this going live, mission accomplished. I had a lot of close calls with my inner demons though, and indeed, the past year has been a brutal battle that’s been the hardest on me mentally since 2011. I think it definitely was the worst around February when DOGE was fully active in the US government and caused me tons of anxiety due to knowing some people that got laid off/were at serious risk, not to mention the continual stress of tariffs and how they’d impact my small business friends. But there’s been a lot of chaos, especially in the past month, that have had me on edge and having those scary thoughts in my head again.
Thankfully, having good reliable online friends, finding some political content creators who do not propagate in doomerism and focus more from a realistic POV, and continuing to help out my local community group have all kept me somewhat sane. Not to mention new therapists and psychiatrists to keep me saner than my old ones. (continuing to realize my old psychiatrist was one of those “autism curer” freaks was uh, not fun this past year)
Obviously things are nowhere near perfect nor will they ever be, but I feel like at the very least, logging off and joining your local community/indivisible group is a great idea if you’re in the US right now. While there are a lot of helpful people on the internet, there are also a lot of people trying to use this to build their grifter platforms or keep you scared 24/7 instead of energized to push back on any of the danger ahead and stand up for your community. People in areas like Portland, Chicago, Charolette, etc, I salute you for doing the right thing with peaceful protest. Let’s keep the energy going, and I aim to try and interview some of my favorite content creators who also had ties to the gaming industry to highlight some of my favorite people who keep me sane.
The Switch 2 will be mentioned in January, you’ll see what it looks like, but you won’t hear anything else for months: I was kinda right here. It was revealed in Jan, leading to boneheaded takes from people complaining it wasn’t gimmicky or different enough (that… that’s kinda what we wanted?), and then a general silence until April, when it was fully revealed the same day as the tariff unveiling. Oopsie. But somehow Nintendo did OK, dealt with stock/price mayhem and have kept the system pretty much in good availability since launch.
I leaned toward Sept for the release since Q1/2 felt impractical, but it ended up coming out in June. Pretty decent launch, and the huge BC upgrades made those early, rougher months very much worthwhile for me. Donkey Kong Bananza was serious fun too, even if it didn’t blow my socks off, and Mario Kart World I only just got for Christmas because I didn’t want it until now. Not the biggest Mario Kart fan, and enjoy MK64 the most even after all this time. Skyscraper, baby!
Really the only downside I’ve had with the Switch 2 was the slow rollout of dev kits to third parties; so many games that would benefit from Switch 2 Editions just never got any, or won’t get them until next year because Nintendo was ass slow on Dev Kits. At first I was very opposed to this, but seeing the rollout slowly increase with time and now that we’re near the point we might be getting too many Switch 2 games per month, I think they did the right call of a slow rollout here. Besides, none of this matters for the newcomers opening their first Switch 2 on Christmas day, who have a lot of titles to pick from.
Sure, you may lament the lack of many true exclusives outside of Ninty games, but I really don’t care about exclusives anymore at this point. Too old for them, and the more people can play a game the better, just as long as your ports are well-done and not bad. And thankfully, it doesn’t appear Switch 2 has had any disaster ports left. Let’s hope it keeps up that way and they fixed Elden Ring when it hits next year, as I’m hyped to finally check that out.
Tariffs might attempt to hit the gaming industry, but gaming lobbyists/the companies will fight back: Eeeeeh, kinda. I heard/saw rumblings of the ESA being upset when the tariffs got announced, but nothing further since then. I don’t even think the gaming industry… Seems to care? Whatever the case, physical games are unaffected for now, since it seems they must have not been bad enough for Mexico to hurt Bluray discs much, and the Taiwan/Japan made Switch carts seems unimpacted for now too. I don’t think this had anything to do with games being thrown on Game Key Cards, either. (more… on that later)
Where Tariffs did have an impact however, were hardware. Evercade got hit, the Xbox Series systems got gargantuan price hikes that might spike even more due to various shortages, and the PS5 got hit too. Even the original base Switch got struck, but not the Switch 2 as of yet. I don’t expect that to be the case forever, but we may have some relief from tariffs next year. Hopefully, probably.
M2 will put out cool stuff in 2025, but most of it will be Japan Only. Another ehhhh from me. They put out the excellent Gradius Origins, but also threw in Salamander III, a game I was so conflicted on that reviewing the collection took me way, way, way longer than it should have. They then put out Operation Night Strikers, which included four fun Taito games… But the initial launch was a buggy mess, got mostly fixed, and now Night Striker replays/save states are borked. I’m kinda gobsmacked M2 released a set in any sort of buggy fashion to speak of.
Lastly we have Night Striker Gear, which is a fun sequel/throwback to the original. It’s shorter than the OG, but way more fun and replayable than Salamander III. Still, I wish something they did blew me away as much as Gradius Rebirth or Fantasy Zone II DX, though. The closest was GG Aleste 3, which was easily of that caliber. Maybe they just need more Namiki? Either way, they didn’t end up doing any Japan only stuff this year, and their other reissues were fairly basic, save for Gradius. Hopefully next year is better.
The Limited Print Companies will struggle with Switch 2: Well, uh, kinda hard to judge when nobody has announced anything besides CEs for existing games. AA publishers have put out Switch 2 third party releases on full cartridge, usually being $10 over other consoles MSRP due to the nature of full carts VS GKC… But I gotta be honest, outside of those kind of publishers, I don’t think traditional limprints will do much on Switch 2 with the limprint bubble basically flat as of now and it being much more expensive to do a full cart experience on Switch 2.
Maybe LRG/Clear River due to Embracer money, but I don’t expect anyone else, and if they do, it won’t do so hot. I think AA publishers like PM Studios and Atari will likely be the bastions of full cart experiences on Switch 2. There are rumors of smaller S2 carts being made available finally, but they’re still pretty expensive, so I don’t think most publishers except those targeting collectors will make non GKCs. And even then, i don’t honestly know how many of the purely collector type are left post Limprint Boom.
The Switch 2’s killer app will be Mario Kart, and nothing but Mario Kart: I think I was spot on here. It was the launch game, the bundle game, and the first/current $80 USD game. Absurd price, but it worked with a crazy high attach rate nevertheless. I mentioned how Mario Kart is basically the win button for Nintendo, and it seems they knew that too with how Mario Kart was the original pack-in before Pokemon Z-A.
Online discourse aside, most people will buy the game regardless of price because it’s one of only a slim amount of games that can do that. I don’t expect many more $80 games in the future, and when other companies tried it out and had issue with the pricepoint, I think that demonstrates the unique strength Mario Kart has.
Evercade will get a license that’s big enough to get them mainstream attention: Not quite yet. RARE/Activision was their biggest get this year, and that is pretty big, but none of the games are mainstream/blockbuster status. Definitely made a lot of EU people happy, especially with Spectrum titles being added. SNK was another big license, but having that publisher tied up with terrorism is rather awkward, hence why I have to buy all of the SNK stuff used before I cover it on the site. I might even do that with RARE/Activision due to the whole BDS thing going on, but at least I know for a fact there are people in both companies opposed to what their parent company is doing in that disgusting, warmongering aspect.
Maybe next year will be the year? Either way, it still feels like a good niche, and I like it as a good niche. Maybe it doesn’t need to be a mainstream thing.
Gaming Influencers will become even more insufferable with cross promotional stuff. I was kinda wrong here, since I expected a flood of bad content with more excessive promotions due to the economy/influencer gig sphere/companies wanting promotions and such, but nothing in that aspect particularly changed.
Rather, the true nuisance came from smaller influencers for certain games/genres, notably the fighting game genre (with SNK) and The Sims (with EA), both having a lot of influencers who rightfully called out the Saudi’s increasing influence on gaming through buyouts, while also having some laughably moronic people who still insist that nothing is wrong, that it’s bad to ignore/boycott companies bought out by a hostile foreign government fully owning them, and refusing to take the most basic of stands.
Even with these annoyances though, I found it pretty relieving to see so many people call out this bullshit, especially in EA’s case due to them owning a lot of studios with LGBT content and those all being at pretty dire risk of censorship or closure/shutdown because of this impending buyout.
And lastly, The Switch 2 will disappoint people in a big way: I was convinced it would be something power related. Maybe weaker specs, maybe bad BC support, or something with a game coming out that upset people in some way. But no, it was the Game Key Card aspect.
I have a whole article idea in my head for this; basically going into why they suck and are annoying, but not the apocalypse that people make them out to be online, and boy, if you go into online discourse on Switch 2 at all, these things might have well been the Antichrist. People acting like if a game is on a GKC, it doesn’t exist on the console at all, acting like the majority of Switch 2 gamers want them dead and buried, (when to be blunt from my own IRL experiences with casual coworkers, most ordinary folk don’t care and just see them as needing big updates and are more annoyed at the ones like Madden having a kajillion GB to download) and that there’s zero benefit to going with them over a digital purchase you don’t need to insert the cart for all the time. (I mostly agree with this one, but you’re fooling yourself if you wouldn’t buy a bargain bin used $15 Madden GKC vs an eShop discount nowhere near as low)
So yeah, needless to say, physical collectors, storage space savers, and game traders are all understandably disappointed by the heavy usage of Game Key Cards; I do think a lot of the more hyperbolic takes on them though are pretty stupid, and maybe that’s a side effect of me being less on the internet this past year. I don’t have time to worry about if my Bravely Default HD cart will download an update 20 years from now when I’m more worried about if my friends, family, and the planet will be safe, happy and protected 20 years from now.
I’m sure responses if The Pokemon Company chooses to use a Game Key Card for Pokemon Gen X next year to avoid leaks or for whatever other weird reason will be perfectly normal and not insane.
Conclusion
In conclusion, this year was rough. Real rough. Not just for me. I have more of a pep talk for tomorrow in my 5 Gaming Disappointments part of the SFG year in review, but then we get to a fun piece with my GOTY list on Tuesday. Yay! Either way, I hope seeing all the years I ranked for myself in context may help illustrate why this was particularly taxing on me, and how super thankful I am to all my dear friends for keeping me going despite all the stressors; and to myself for learning to download and use a frickin appblocker to get off stressful website.
Obviously we can’t magically fix the bad in the world overnight; I wish we could. But there’s a thing called a long game, and you’re in it right now. Some have been in it for decades. Some for hundreds of years. Whether you want to or not, you gotta slowly work for the change needed for a better world, and do you think all the wins we have gotten over the past century were done because people got spooked, said “we’re cooked” and curled up and cried or just instead got mad it wasn’t like a movie that ended in 2 hours with sunshine and rainbows? No!
So join a local community group, donate to a good cause, etc etc. AGDQ is literally around the corner and is a phenomenal place to help people in need for a great cause that needs it more than ever right now. Because boy, we have to stick in it together. And I hope somehow, someway, maybe I inspired at least a single individual to make a life change in their life to help themselves and their own community.