Oh hey, it’s the thing that replaced the worst of the year game lists! like last time, I swapped formats because I didn’t feel like listing games that were bad anymore, and also the fact that if I wanted to outright call something the worst of the worst gaming wise, I only would need to spend a couple of minutes on digital stores buying random games and I could call it a day.
So like last time, I figured I’d just share five general disappointments in the gaming space/gaming adjacent stuff to go over for the year. Honorable mention too, just like last time. Here we go, before we get to the goodies (GOTY/Great games) tomorrow.
Disappointment 5: The eShop (and other stores) are still in AI Hell
Last year one of the top rankers of this very list was a troubling observation: in 2024 the eShop got flooded with way, way more crap games using GenAI thumbnails than should be allowed, and some other storefronts like PSN/Steam were as well. As GenAI becomes the lazy shortcut tool for people needing art assets, (why did you think i was stubborn on making my new SFG logo for a year+? I ain’t ever using that shit) that also means it was a great tool to accompany low quality shovelware with hideous artwork.
Enter a gajillion supermarket simulators and other simulator clones with a GenAI thumbnail to maybe trick some unsuspecting buyers that want something like Thief Simulator but for something they like or, even more depressingly, they see a viral game on Twitch, go to look up on their console, and end up with sad situations where someone buys ripoff game Gigabonk instead of Megabonk because Megabonk isn’t on the consoles yet.
Anyhow yeah, that was back in 2024, pre Switch 2, pre chance for at least Nintendo to shake up their store, (and for the other platforms to get their game together on blocking that shit) and maybe for widespread condemnation to lead to major reforms. Unfortunately we’re near 2026, and I don’t think the problem got better. In fact, I think it’s even worse despite the Switch 2’s best efforts with a much faster store.
Before I praise the ways Switch 2 attempted to remedy this a little bit, let’s just rip into the usual situations: shitty AI banner thumbnails, low effort asset flips/clones, tricks to get people to buy shit vs a real game from other platforms, and tons and tons of bundle spam. Seriously, when a rumor came out earlier this year the Switch eShop might restrict bundle opportunities for publishers, people were honest to god hopeful because that’s one of the most consistent ways low-effort games flood the store, by just bundling themselves over and over again to become a “new release”.
Even publishers I reviewed from in the past seemed to have fallen into the shadow realm and used this tactic, such as QubicGames, which went from publishing small scale indies and fun gems like porting the Bit Trip series to Switch, to just porting mobile phone games over and over again. One of which is some weird hole vore game that I think is popular on phones and thus gets rebundled anytime a new skin is out. (They also published some Om Nom game and have done it with this too, yet actual Cut the Rope isn’t on Switch. Come on, at least port the best of mobile games!)
I assure you, just boot up your Switch eShop, go to newest releases, and you’ll find these AI barf thumbnail games or asset flips almost immediately. It’s so outta hand, my casual gamer coworker who has a switch asked me why Nintendo “allows Hentai” on their eShop and how it made for an awkward conversation with their kid. (There’s a ton of eShop games using the word Hentai as a catchall for boobs or women or just anything remotely in that sexist nature, even if the actual games are not even close to NSFW or are as in-depth as being literal jigsaw puzzles. A lot of the newer ones just use AI images of women, which is honest to god really disturbing. Bless the ESRB for at least keeping AI nudity off the stores.)
At the start of the year with the Switch 1, the super duper slow eShop made matters even worse since you’d have to sift through dozens of games just to stumble upon a new game you recognized or an obscurity, and speaking of obscurities, actual gems became a lot harder to find when buried around piles of AI shit thumbnails. (I will not use the word “slop”. It is far too weak for how dreadful this practice is) There have been times games I assume might have been low effort titles with simple/crude thumbnails were just an asset flip that forgot to get AI art made, only for them to actually be real video games being buried, while other times certain publishers will actually get the rights to publish a pretty decent game only to just slap an AI banner on the store page because why not.
It’s made everything for discoverability of actual gems not found via Press Release/other platforms a headache, and a far cry from a decade ago when the worst that happened on Wii U was RCMADIAX’s asset flips and Skunk Software introducing the number 0 to my scoring system. Now I’d be able to make a fairly safe assumption any random peepeepooppoop asset flip game by a company that has 100-400 games published on the eShop would score in the range of 0-3, so if you want to get technical and wanted this to be a “worst games of the year list”, just go to your eShop and you’ll find some. You’re welcome.
So, how did the Switch 2 improve things. Well the store is faster, so you can drive by all the shit. Doesn’t mean there isn’t shit though. You also have popular games featured on the top of the recent releases section, just high enough that Nintendo’s basically going “don’t look behind the curtain!” in hopes you don’t scroll down far enough. Unfortunately, the Coming Soon/Best Sellers pages is just as terrible as always and while the discount/on sale page genuinely had some decent effort made to feature more known games before any cheapo asset flips/AI banner trash, the eShop is by and large still infected by this parasite.
Short of permabanning certain publishers from publishing entirely, (Or geoblocking repeat offender locations, but that would be collective punishment that would hurt actual well-meaning devs from those regions and I’m not fond of that), I genuinely do not know what else Nintendo could do. The other stores having issues here don’t help matters much, and even though Xbox/Steam manages to just hide obscurities if they’re barely looked at to begin with as a mitigation measure (thus they’re more likely to recommend actual games to you), that also can catch the super duper obscure indies by proxy. Dare I hope for any level of improvement in 2026?
Disappointment 4: Salamander III is too Stagnant
This is the only one that’s an outright game, and even still, Salamander III is not a bad video game. Let’s get that cleared up immediately. If you like shooters this one is a decent one to loop and there’s OK scoring systems. The compilation it’s in (Gradius Origins) is even one of my favorite games of the entire year.
That’s why it’s a bummer to me that, at least compared to M2’s other efforts with retro reduxes (including their equally small scaled Haunted Castle Revisited), Salamander III is just lacking any kind of magic or wow factor, even compared to the outstanding Gradius Rebirth. Sure, that was a redux game as well, but it had a lot of clever nods to prior games, some fun weapons, and an outstanding, god tier soundtrack. Plus it saved your high scores locally.
Yes, Salamander III doesn’t locally save high scores. This sounds a little silly, but that’s a big deal for me. I love competing in online leaderboards as much as the next person, but I also like competing against myself a lot too, especially if I come back to a game years after I last played it and try to beat an older version of myself from years ago. Online leaderboards help with that, but they won’t be around forever, so I end up liking to do local scorechasing too. Most Arcade games back in the day would lose scores when the power went off, hence the whole “Score of the Day” thing a lot of older machines would highlight. You can at least write them down or screencap them though. Thus, retro compilations would often just not have it autosave the local high score and prefer you use a save state instead, and that’s fine.
Salamander III though… Acts like a faux retro throwback, stating it’s a what-if a Salamander III hit around the year 1998. Thus I guess to really hammer home that point, they also kept the “erases your high scores after quitting the game” thing too, despite other M2 throwback games not doing this unless it was literally developed for older hardware. That’s the first irritation. The other is how the rest of Gradius Origins has an excellent CRT filter that’s genuinely one of the best ones I’ve seen in a retro collection, and for some reason, Salamander III’s CRT filter is just not as good. Still better than most CRT filters, but just not as good as the rest of the set.
You kinda see the trend here; Salamander III, in a sea of some of the best shooters ever released and some of the best reissues of said shooters, is just not as good as the rest of the set. It’s a fine Gradius entry, but you can clearly tell they were on a time crunch. The stages play it safe and are more throwbacks to Salamander without doing much new. The big gimmick is a button that just makes your shots bigger for a bit before they weaken temporarily, which pales compared to the Option Seed mechanic of Salamander 2, and most disappointing of all is just how bad the sound design is.
I legitimately remember more OST tunes from Gradius IV than Salamander III, which is damning. From a very bored sounding narrator, (which lacks subtitles, unlike every other game in the set) dull remixes of older Salamander songs and little that’s fully original, (The Fire Tripper remix was pretty excellent, though) and just dull sound design all around, it’s baffling how poor Salamander III sounds. The same composer did a much better job with Haunted Castle Revisited’s remixes, and even then they all pale compared to the OSTs from the Rebirth games.
What makes Salamander III the most disappointing for me though, is that Gradius Origins was where I first got to properly play Salamander 2 outside of a broken machine. Man, is that one magnificent. The OG Salamander is one of my favorite games of all time, especially the NES Life Force port, with the Arcade game only having the fault of the last two stages of the game getting incredibly cheap. Even then, that NES port does a lot of good at making it a fun, balanced shooter that’s a perfect memorization game and one of Konami’s best.
Salamander 2 on the other hand? It toys with you. It does many things to defy expectations from anything the first game might remind you of and come up with new ways to put you on your toes. It has a brand new OST from the ground up that consists of some of the absolute best Gradius-adjacent songs in Konami history, with some excellent remixes of the old songs only kicking in during the second loop. The stages are wonderfully designed and a joy to memorize, and the option seed mechanic is a great way to get yourself out of a pinch at the expense of losing extra firepower. Even the final stage is a masterpiece that feels far more fair than the original game, with an actual final boss to fight.
Compared to that gem, Salamander III feels like it forgot Salamander 2 exists, even though there are still some references to it. Even if I deleted Salamander 2 from my memory, it just feels like a lesser version of the first Salamander, and while it is still a very memorization focused endeavor with pretty fun enemy patterns on the second loop onward, (and a fun unlockable ship, which does save, unlike your high scores) this just pales in almost every single way I hoped for. It’s a fine co-op game, decent new entry after so long in the Gradius series, but when M2 is behind your retro revival and they are the same masterminds behind Fantasy Zone II DX and GG Aleste 3, I get rather bummed out Salamander III wasn’t better, and just ended up OK.
Disappointment 3: Payment Processor Panic
As a member of the furry fandom and one who has plenty of friends that have made/do make NSFW content of some kind, I’ve kinda known about this for a while now, and my thoughts as one not too much into NSFW content nowadays (I’d much rather write about retro games) has generally been “well that’s weird, it’s a TOS thing, but man they don’t seem consistent about this at all and the system seems easy to crush someone’s paypal account or Patreon with little effort”.
Basically, payment processors and platforms have their own TOS, and if you don’t follow the rules, you’re thrown out. Duh, simple and easy. At least it should be, but due to well, the nature of everything to do with NSFW content, there’s a huge range of stuff that could be considered NSFW, and thus that means some platforms just decide to blanket ban or get way too carried away due to wanting to be risk adverse; even for games that are rated by the ESRB or have similar titles rated by the ESRB, console platform holders, including Steam have just said no to certain games for next to no reason, with little explanation given to a pub/dev.
My standard for video games has always been; if the ESRB says it’s OK and it follows console guidelines, it should be allowed to get released on the platform even if I’m personally confused by some of it. Itch/Steam do a good job at banning content not suitable for the internet as is, so there shouldn’t be any external forces mandating that they also ban X or X as well. (I’d argue more of the stuff needing to be banned/regulated, is less NSFW/sexual stuff on these platforms, and moreso outright offensive and hateful shit. Don’t even get me started on the Steam forums and what I think of those, and why I’m annoyed the EU hasn’t stepped in and slapped Valve with a fine yet)
Yet this year, Payment Processors have gone from just targeting super niche NSFW artists on patreon or other art platforms, to pretty much anything remotely NSFW even if it’s somewhat mid-range or popular. Due to some advocacy groups popping up and making some calls, certain games have been wiped off/banned from certain platforms, or some platforms have mandated changes to payment methods because processors got uncomfortable being yelled at by weird nerds on the internet and decided to pull out of certain regions for say, Steam.
The sort of content being penalized is completely inconsistent, barely makes any sense, is not even remotely offensive/already age restricted/ESRB M rated to begin with, and is done so haphazardly the true intent is blatantly clear; use it as a means to just banish anything you don’t like if you make enough noise, even if there’s nothing illegal about it nor does it violate the TOS of the platform holder. It also seems more apparent these organizations would really like to try and snipe upcoming M rated games that let you go wild with sex such as Grand Theft Auto VI, despite nothing illegal being in those games, so since they can’t dare tackle a behemoth yet, they’re going after the smaller scale stuff in hopes nobody will notice or care.
Thankfully, a lot of the internet, especially NSFW artists who have known this to be a possibility for years (and were unfortunately often ignored/deemed hysterical) immediately took action and have been calling payment processors non-stop ever since the summer when this all started picking up. As far as I know, a decent chunk of people are still doing that, even if it did simmer down in the months since. (mainly due to nothing of major status being publicly banned in a similar fashion in a while, but that doesn’t mean other games aren’t getting rejected for no reason)
I was honest to god thrilled to see way more people than I expected on my timelines, even those who I know would not dare care for NSFW anything in any capacity, posting about their phone calls to Visa or Mastercard and letting them know to leave that stuff alone and have the platform holders be the ones deciding; not outside groups bugging payment processors to yell at them. If anything funky happens next year, I can be certain similar backlash will take place, and even though this is clearly a long game attempt from these groups to eventually push away certain types of content, (especially some groups who are outright targeting LGBT media) the amount of attention this has gotten and the fact wayyyyy more people than I ever hoped did it now, before anything like GTAVI has been remotely targeted, is enough to make me feel reasonably optimistic something will eventually give. (Just don’t get so life-impendingly anxious about this to the point you will end up in a hospital; I’ve unfortunately seen more than one NSFW writers do just that)
(Oh, and of course the kinds of people I railed on yesterday who got hyper fixated on anime games to the point minor clothing edits done/OK’d by the original developers a decade ago made them rage at localizers, were suspiciously quiet about all this. A few got the memo and I was a bit happy to see some even realize they were had for falling for the outrage machine of 10 years ago, but shocker at the amount of goobergobbers who didn’t give a shit when actual censorship by outside forces came to video games and just pivoted to another talking point to get mad about, like a black person being in their video game.)
Disappointment 2: Xbox, EVERYTHING
Holy Fuck. I’m not fond of admitting I’ve been wrong and fumbled assumptions on a console so hard (most since the Wii U), but everything with Microsoft and the Xbox Series X this generation has just been sad to watch. From acquisitions that went nowhere (I foolishly, foolishly believed the Activision buyout would lead to freedom from Bobby K and a bad work environment, not realizing it would instead lead to being thrown into another bad one/layoffs everywhere), big games that got announced and are still not out yet, to what ended up being the biggest factor for me this year, game cancelations, a winding down of operations, and tonedeafness in the face of company protests.
Let’s start with the cancelations. Some of those games announced seemed pretty darn cool. A reboot of Perfect Dark that looked rad last year, just completely canceled and done for with little fanfare. Not much slated for next year, unless you like Gun Game Mcgee: Generic Dude Strikes Back, Halo: Hire This Man Edition, Car Game in Japan or Is this Fable or another game? We don’t know. This year was a bit better with more smaller scale games, but even then MS tried some stupid shenanigans, such as Outer Worlds 2 almost being an $80 MSRP game because Mario Kart did it, until people refused to buy it for that price because Outer Worlds is not Mario Kart. Grim for the first party output.
For me though the biggest sell for Xbox was as a brand newcomer was the sheer impressiveness of the Backwards compatibility. 360 games are robust and well made on the platform, and the original Xbox was just kicking off when the Series X launched. Even if no new games ever came out that I was into, I’d have a ton of fun games to discover for the first time ever, which is mostly how I’ve used my xbox besides it being a good 4K Bluray player. But even then, buying multiple years of Game Pass had me trying a lot of fun stuff for a while, and with day one launches it seemed like a fantastic deal beyond anything else.
Unfortunately, Game Pass just got worse over time, too. From lackluster first party games, third party games that would just come to Xbox exclusively for Game Pass (meaning a lot of third party games that didn’t get Game Pass’d, just never came to Xbox at all), and lame price increases with nothing beneficial in return (I hope you like Fortnite and Call of Duty) just made it more and more unfun to use. My usage of it declined more and more, and Microsoft’s resistance to internal company support for the BDS movement to the point of spying on people was what led me to canceling Game Pass once and for all, and cutting back my support for the platform entirely.
As one who’s been vocally pro Palestine since the West Bank raids of 2021, it’s been remarkably upsetting to see how that movement has been used as an excuse for a variety of horrid actions, and I am still glad a lot of well meaning people in the games industry are keeping up the good push for a free state of Palestine, including a lot of people at Microsoft pushing back against higher ups for their support of genocidal actions or Developers who outright cut the platform off due to their resistance of BDS. In a year where it feels like the Palestine crisis has been used as an excuse for some dipshits to be outright racist or bigoted or to score dumb political points for arguments, I’m just relieved there are still plenty of people pushing back and fighting for a good cause despite the attempted hijacking.
But yeah. Price increases, canceled games, shuttered studios, lack of interesting games, and the death of Backwards Compatibility. All of it combined together to make the Xbox Series X the purchase I was most excited for at the start of the gen, to one I regret immensely save for that 4K Bluray support. Outside of that and watching Youtube, (since Switch 2 has no Youtube app yet) my Series X is essentially a dustbox for the time being. Huge, huge shame, and I’m absolutely not buying the next Xbox in any capacity. I got burned once giving it an honest try, never again.
(On the topic of Gaza, obligatory Fuck Geoff Keighley for how he treated the Future Class; I didn’t watch a single second of TGA this year and I’m glad I did after finding out the extent of how that was mishandled)
Honorable Mention: Modretro’s coverage across Retro Gaming spaces
Oh hey, the same thing as last year’s honorable! Also the same near 2nd place pick as last year because until very, very recently I was of the grim assumption that only big name gaming websites would have the balls to not cover this thing without a callout, since it seemed as Analogue’s 3D system got more and more delays and suffered from bad communication, more Retro Tubers and retro gaming websites would just go with this company’s alternative.
Heaven forbid you remind them what kind of person is making the M64; or the fact that now that their Game Boy handheld is not exclusive for Gamestop anymore. (and thus, not a thing you can wave away with people buying because a dad comes in, sees a cool looking GB and buys it for nostalgia, now you gotta willingly look up and buy this thing) Nooooo, the guy behind it, the cousin of world renowned politician who is totally not a creep Matt Gaetz, is still a totally cool dude!
“Look, he went to Portland Retro Gaming Expo, played Mario Kart with me, and is a super cool dude! That means he’s a true gamer.” is one take I have depressingly seen more than once from people who’s given these dorks oxygen. Look, I get the whole “no ethical consumption” and blah blah blah and the desire to not be an obnoxious scold about everything, but I think there’s a difference between say, struggling with how to cut Amazon or Microsoft products out of your diet due to how much they’re in everything, compared to a company making HD Game Boy/N64 products that aren’t the only ones out there, and not a necessity for one to live.
If you are made aware of Luckey’s connections and are still like “well does it matter?” yes, yes it does, because by promoting that shit you’re spreading his shit and making that stuff more tolerable in the retro gaming community as a whole, a community that already is a bit too loose to let bad shit fly because they want to time travel back to being a kid and keep getting mad when even the best of retro tributes never manage to do that because such a thing is impossible. Sorry, you’re an adult that needs to pay attention to taxes and local politics now, bitching on the internet about everything all the time can’t shield you from everything. You gotta be wary of what things you buy or what connections someone has to what if you’re openly aware of such.
Thankfully what kept this from being my no 2 disappointment, assuming the retro tubers and most retro sites would just casually cover this thing because they go “wow HD N64/Game Boy and it’s free of tariffs” (I wonder what political connection would make avoiding tariffs easier? HMMMM) was something they did that I am sure was a deliberate troll towards people who call out the military connections with Luckey’s Chromatic. He owns both a drone company and a retro company… So why not a mashup?
Thus they announced a limited edition Chromatic openly tied to his military company, which focuses more on making attack weapons of war that kill people than you know, any potential for humanitarian aid and ways to help stop wars instead of prolonging them for eternity. Ukraine in need of actual money, assistance and defense to stop an aggressor trying to steal their land? Nah, just drones drones drones for everyone! Not any super drones that would finish off russia made just for Ukraine, no that’d be too much work!
Luckily, or unluckily depending on your viewpoint, this was the final straw for an awful lot of people. Multiple outlets that flip-flopped on covering Modretro stuff outright rejected them from here on out and pledged to no longer cover their products. Those who still do or claim they have to because “they need to cover everything retro” (no you don’t, I’m A-OK not covering this shit and i’m practically married to the GBC era) are getting the stinkeye from a lot of retro gamers, and that finally includes a lot of retrotubers who got the benefit of the doubt for way too damn long now.
I genuinely do not think if you’re aware of that trolling attempt and still willingly choose to cover that stuff because “ooooh free game toys”, that is all on you. It sucks it took something so blatantly terrible for a lot of people to wake up, but better late than never, I suppose. Here’s hoping as more FPGA things get made in the coming years, this guy’s contributions will just pale in comparison.
Disappointment 1: Negativity, Hyperbole and Doomerism– I think this one was a bit hard to choose, and this one is kinda less about the gaming industry in general and more about the state of everything. My recent transformation/activity switchups in the past year helped me realize this more as a thing widely done on the internet, but several gaming events/titles and the reactions to such were enough to make me go “OK what the hell is the world ending calamity here?”
Let’s start with some Gaming related things and how that’s tied into this no 1 pick, before I try to cleverly connected it to new things I’ve done this year that’s helped me feel better and thus you too. Yesterday I went into a lot of this so I won’t repeat myself much on the non-gaming aspects, but it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise this stuff happening in the gaming industry is pretty aggravating too.
First off, let’s just mention yet again that negativity sells on the internet. We all know this, it sucks, and a lot of us hate it. I railed on it yesterday, and that equally applies to gaming related things and has for a few years now. Yet this year it feels like that got way outta hand, and as one who managed to actually take multi-week/month breaks from social media and barely tuned into much internet discourse outside of the occasional youtube video, I was honestly flabbergasted by the level of discourse I saw on certain things that really shouldn’t need that level of anger from people, or had it completely misguided.
Let’s take the Switch 2 for example. I have issues with it, and in this very article I went on about a lot of things I felt were genuine issues with other gaming related things. But there’s a difference between “I don’t like this thing and even think this might suck”, to “uh the Switch 2 sucks because it’s missing this random processor chip or this nvidia thing or it’s too similar looking to the Switch 1 or etc etc etc” When it got revealed and those were some of the genuine reactions I saw pundits post online, I knew this would be quite the year of hot takes.
I think where the next factor in the whole negativity/”everything is doomed” mindset came from when the Switch 2 got a full unveiling in April. People genuinely seemed to like the reveal stream itself, and then Nintendo did an Nintendo and revealed the price of everything. $80 Mario Kart, $450-500 console, expensive accessories and outrageous SF6 Amiibo pricing, all of that is very valid and understandably people got irritated. Even moreso when Donald Trump’s Tariff announcement kicked off later that day and completely threw everything into limbo and tanked the US economy, even delaying preorders for the Switch 2 for a while and forcing some other things to get priced higher up. (I’d also note irritation at how more sites than I liked opted not to name the man responsible for everything getting more expensive in gaming or why we have tariffs to begin with, but that’s for another time)
Rather it was in June, when the system launched, and it felt like the internet went absolutely bonkers, so much so to the point it broke into my social media-lite life and I heard coworkers bring up stuff they heard on the internet from YT drama channels, outrageous things or stuff blown way out of proportion for the sake of clicks. From gamers learning what an EULA was for the first time ever and thinking that was a new novel concept that meant Ninty could kill your system forever if you sneezed the wrong direction and drumming up engagement based off that, to Game Key Cards being treated less as a nuisance, and more of a scourge against humanity that’ll cause the apocalypse because you might not be able to have video games all on one cart in 20-30 years from now, and acting bewildered why $30/40/50 games were on those instead of way more costly standard cartridges, thus meaning that Game Key Card games were not real games.
Don’t even get me started on the weirdly obsessive watching of system sales charts, with internet communities throwing fits or getting mad when Mario Kart World sold Mario Kart numbers despite the higher price, or being annoyed the Switch 2 sold as well as it did despite the internet outrage, or when GKCs end up selling more than zero copies. It felt genuinely worse than normal to see people get so mad a thing they didn’t like did better than they hoped it would, and rather than it being in the “damn it I’m not a fan of that thing”, it was moreso “this success is a sign people hate gaming and gaming is dead and we’re cooked”. It was the worst of negativity bias exemplified, and seeing gamers getting mad that people bought Madden on a Game Key Card and thus called them idiots for not being scolds about minor things in life was pretty darn pathetic.
In the past I’ve been guilty of this too, but over the last year I kinda learned and reflected on the times I did that. Was it really worth getting that mad over Pokemon Alpha Sapphire? No, no it wasn’t. Are their legitimate complaints about Switch 2, the games, or the gaming industry as a whole? Absolutely, you’ve read most of my gaming disappointments of the year in this very article. But there’s a difference between even ranting about annoying stuff to openly belittling anyone else who thinks differently than you do or who likes a thing you don’t.
The amount of Nintendo tubers latching onto Switch 2 drama and people using those videos to hassle ordinary people just posting about enjoying the console or a game like Donkey Kong or whatever have you was beyond absurd, especially when a lot of it was the exact definition of making a mountain out of a molehill. I’d argue the state of the eShop is a way, way more pressing issue for everyone than whether or not a Game Key Card is printed for a video game or the Switch 2 has expensive accessories. Sure, I saw similar outrage for things like Pokemon and whatnot in the past, but this just felt like a whole nother level that didn’t match the reality of IRL experiences I had at all.
Outside of people confused/worried about what they might have seen in some video about the EULA/used games bricking your system or whatnot, most people I met with a Switch 2/plans to get one just wanted it and didn’t really give a damn what the internet discourse around it was. They thought mario kart would be fun with the fam, they liked Donkey Kong or Pokemon coming out soon, or they didn’t even get a Switch 1 and felt it would be a perfect jump-in point. Yet the extreme hot takes and rage I saw around Switch 2, in my limited social media space mind you, meaning I didn’t even spend hardly any time looking at forums or such, was just beyond absurd. It was being mad for the sake of being mad, and little else. Pokemon Legends Z-A would suffer this even moreso for a bit of time, but it seems that didn’t last nearly as long before people moved onto the next thing.
Whether it’s due to the stressful state of the world, trust me, I get it, the stressful state of the games industry and other companies dropping the ball in so many ways, or just people crashing out from the Switch 2 not matching whatever mythical god console an Nintendo forum believed it would be, it sure felt like the sort of negativity/nihilism that plagued just Social Media as a whole spread more into the gaming space this year, and makes me personally glad I was a lot less on social media. Because man, when people are dying of conflict and there’s serious federal funding cuts to healthcare here in the US I have to worry about and shit is expensive, I could care less about if the Switch 2’s screen is OLED or LCD.
Also, it’s OK to say that Donald Trump instituted tariffs that made electronics more expensive like the original Switch or Xbox consoles. So many gaming websites/companies are hesitant to even mention the word tariff free of any political connections, and that just makes the whole thing laughable. You don’t need to be a super in-depth political nerd or anything, but you should at least realize politics will care about you in some form or another eventually. When the gaming industry has a variety of serious crisises to worry about, current and in the future, maybe focus your high amount of anger more on stuff like people getting laid off or Rockstar screwing with their union over whether or not Pokemon Poktopia is on a Game Key Card? In other words, get a grip and focus on the future without just using it to want everything to burn to the ground and for nobody to be allowed to be happy or excited for anything.
Well, those are the five disappointments of the year! It was kinda tough to make this honestly, since some of them are repeats, but with how stuff was with me IRL, I feel like the gaming stuff took a back seat to my worries about more pressing things, which is why my no 1 point is just ripping into how silly people were treating things like Game Key Cards as the end of humanity. Maybe try and take a social media break or meet with gaming normies from work/your neighbors, you’d be surprised how much stuff like that will not come out.
Anyhow, the good news is the negativity/focusing on the downsides is over and done with. Tomorrow, we have a great SFG list of the best games of 2025, and then we end the year with a look towards the future, and more predictions! Until next time, see you.