I do my own little list every year. Also, the games don’t even have to be from 2025, I just have to have played them in 2025.

“Wow, Curtis, you had so much free time during your recent vacation, did you do anything cool?”

Ha ha, no, definitely not.

One thing I did do, however, was make a video game.

In 2019’s “A Short Hike”, you’re a girl, Claire, and also a humanoid bird on - what is essentially - an Animal Crossing island, and in order to get cel-phone reception you need to get to the top of the mountain.

okay, so, I hear on the grapevine that Black Deck Gold Stake is the nastiest challenge in Balatro.

If you were to ask most people what they think the visual design of social VR looks like, I think they would say “Cyberpunk”.

The Oasis, the Metaverse, virtual reality as a crowded, public, bazaar.

uh oh, we built a transmetropolitan

and why I think that’s important

Hey, did you see this thing? “The Game Prototype That Had to Be Banned by Its Own Studio”.

One of the things I loved most as a kid was manuals.

It’s a card game! It’s a narrative game! It’s a combination card game narrative game!

i only have 2 data points but yes

Need to do some BUSINESS! in the 1990s?

If you can listen to this without a little pixelated city coming to life before your very eyes, you had a very different childhood than I did.

@ArmyofOneandaHalf - 2 years ago

Ah yes, this delivers unparalleled value to the consumer

Okay, what about if you’re playing a little SNES game with prerendered graphics about a plucky little apple?

@egg_mittens - 1 year ago This album has perfect nintendo game flow.

• World 1: Large, more powerful than the player, but very easy to outsmart. A simple fellow to help you get the controls.
• World 2: The game starts showing you a bit of its edge. This boss is entirely antagonistic, but is also very charismatic and you kind of grow to love when they’re on screen. Thinks they’re very cool.
• World 3 mini-boss: duck
• World 3: Coming right around the midpoint of the game is the first proper challenge: a doppleganger boss. Propells the main story forward, genuinely a little scary. Defeating this boss feels like a huge achievement.
• World 4 mini-boss: Yeah, it’s a little silly, but also kind of a tank and you don’t fully believe it’s a mini-boss. It plays around with the environment and hits like a truck.
• World 4: We’re nearing the big bad now, so this is a huge challenge in the game’s core mechanics. The fight itself contains a puzzle aspect that is really frustrating because it’s like playing tic tac toe with lava.
• World 5: Final thing before the big bad and while they’re tough to beat, it’s nothing you haven’t seen before. They’re really there to hype you up and to get you pumped for the final boss. Making you overconfident. What’s the worst that can happen?
• World 6: Complete lovecraftian horror. A full departure from the lightharted, kind of campy aesthetic the rest of the game has had, it is now you against an unfeeling, all-powerful darkness. The threat they pose is existential, every time you die to it you feel stabbing pain and fear in your heart. This is the worst thing that can happen.

Mom: “we have Balatro at home”

Balatro at home:

The last time I bought a VR game was 4 years ago, I assume the whole industry is cooked

“I’m a big fan of Starman”

“You’re a fan of David Bowie?”

“David who?”

A friend of mine has released this VR game where you… stack things.

It’s got a kind of “Katamari Damacy” vibe. It’s fun, and now it’s available on the Quest - if you have one, and also enjoy stacking things, you should give it a try!

Stacksquatch

If you’ve played Street Fighter 2, you know that Ryu is from Japan, whereas Ken is fr the USA.

But where in the USA? The answer? Hoboken!

whatbeatsrock.com

this game is fun, you just have to keep proposing new things and a rather stupid AI will judge them for you

welp, already stumped

ha ha, a record

okay, diamond beats powerful buttcheek man,

baseball diamond beats regular diamond,

field of dreams baby

a live baseball team beats the corn field,

this is fun if you’re creative, just getting a bunch of firsts

I like to write, and draw, and code, and design games - and I’m not amazing at any of these skills - and it feels like the output of these skills are largely things that there are simply too many of already.

there are enough novels, and books, and comics, and board games, and video games, and TTRPGs, I’m not sure if there really needs to be more of those things

there is simply enough art, what could I possibly add?

my new hobby is going to be releasing unofficial tie-in cookbooks for games that have no conceivable cooking angle

ARMORED CORE VI: FIRES OF KITCHEN

“emulation isn’t piracy” is, IMO, a “guns don’t kill people” argument: while it’s technically true, it’s also not helpful?

that’s not to say I’m against it: I’m actually all for emulation, but I think emulation’s benefits are arguments in favor of piracy rather than arguments for why emulation ISN’T piracy. (sidenote: which, it isn’t, unless you use it for piracy, which you almost certainly will)

to be honest “we’re #29” doesn’t have that much of a ring to it but it ain’t nothin'

like, it’s definitely something to have held on to a spot in the top 50 on Steam for so long

I’m not sure what exactly but it’s something

I’ve been watching someone talk about Kings Field for hours on YouTube because they love Dark Souls so much that they’re willing to deeply engage with these shitty, unplayable games.

say what you will, but literally nobody is nostalgic for games that looked like this without some kind of severe brain damage:

I was in my primo nostalgic gaming years just when the PS1 came out, and even then I’m hard pressed to gin up nostalgia for early 3D.

well, okay, I can make a few exceptions…

i thought i was here for avalanche safety training but this huge black guy with a gun for an arm tells me that we’re going to blow up a power plant so I just nope on out

You know what? I’m almost always excited to discover some new weird internet thing. something has to go in the end of the year roundups.

I can’t just keep putting three cheese pizza blend in there. (sidenote: that’s a lie, I can and I will)

Like a video from.. I don’t even know, fifteen years ago?

This is cringe humor. This is bad media.

Between Contrapoints’s long video essay on cringe content and the whole KiwiFarms debacle, I’ve become a lot more aware of the many ways that enjoying bad media can get weird and destructive and veer into legitimate harassment.

But, like, you can’t deny the simple joy in finding a weird bad moment on the internet, right?

you haven’t even touched your mega man of crackers

as a VR developer i could not be more disappointed with what “BONELAB” turned out to be, it’s not even 18+

i’m joking

obviously I’m not a VR developer

I’m a non-VR developer at a VR company

One mage, in Baldur’s Gate 3, can summon something like 15 different NPCs if you stack them.

This gives you such an enormous amount of turn order advantage that it doesn’t matter that most of these NPCs don’t do much.

I call it the “fantasy soccer team” strategy and it’s very strong, but my wife asked me to stop because it’s not fun to co-operate with someone who gets 17 turns per round.

Tiffany: “Don’t mind if I do”

Me: hehehehehe

man I fuckin’ love party tim

it’s alive! ALIVE!

I loved Disco Elysium, which is why I was so surprised when I discovered that BC’s Wildfire Service uniform is…

wait a minute that’s kim!

was his outfit based on emergency services outfits or are our boys in orange just stylish as fuck?

or am I just seeing things

some things I’ve shouted at the screen while my wife plays Kingdom: Eighties

“loose child! collect that child!”

“go forth, child army! go forth and destroy my enemies!”

“to be honest, I feel bad for dumpster boy, you should give him a break”

“that was an unusually well-armed child, should he have a sword?”

“he was jock before but he’s dumpster boy now. all is dumpster for him.”

“dumpster boy’s sisyphean task goes on forever, pushing a dumpster up a hill eternally”

“suuure, leave that child in the forest to die”

“you’ve got them hunting for you, fishing for you, and now they’re picking berries for you? this is the worst summer camp ever.”

“oof. scattered remains. I shall require more children”

“oh, that’s pippo, his job is to hand the hammers to the other children. pippo has asthma.”

the thing about Disco Elysium is that it’s very good, so I’ve been playing it until slightly too late at night and then waking up, underslept, with a headache, feeling like shit, with no recollection of the previous day’s events, which is fantastically immersive into the game’s universe.

I’m almost 40, so “waking up feeling like warmed over death” doesn’t take a bender, it basically just requires that I get 30 minutes less sleep than usual.

I’ll tell you this about Disco: Elysium

it’s the most Planescape: Torment game ever made

“What about the classic, well-reviewed, critical darling, Planescape: Torment?” you might ask

and no, Disco Elysium is even more Planescape: Torment even than that.

Inverse King of the Controller: The Superior Scheme

I “invented” (I’m probably not the first person to discover this, but I did come up with it without prior art.) an improved scheme for sharing the controller in “fighting game” or “controller based gamer scenarios”.

In the traditional King of the Controller, the winner holds on to the controller. This system tends towards an equilibrium: the best player just sits with the controller, besting all comers, until someone lucks into beating them.

“Inverse” King of the Controller, the winner of the match is the one who passes off the controller.

Here’s why it’s great:

• “Won’t good players just throw the game to keep the controller?” - hell no they won’t, everybody is too competitive for this to happen. You want to give up the controller because it means you won, and giving up the controller feels good rather than bad.
• Bad players get more time, rather than less time with the game, giving them more of a chance to polish their skills, and making them increasingly desperate to escape by winning a match. This actually keeps the local skill curve much more balanced!

As a result of an Inverse KoTC system, our office Towerfall pool became extremely competitive and evenly matched.

look, nintendo, it has been long enough, it’s time for a wapeach, a watoad, a wabowser

If daisy is peach’s luigi, then there should be a wapeach and a wadaisy in the wings

I checked and oh boy does the internet ever have my back on this topic, these are great

I have this picture from 2019 where I sketched out a geeky but non-existent object, the mythical “arcade wine cabinet” for adult nerds.

I think it would sell!

you trigger a fight with man who overestimated how many groceries he can carry home

watch out, he’s one of the slowest opponents in the game but if he can extricate his welt-crossed hands from his bags he can do big damage with his bottomless inventory and the Throw command

you trigger a fight with the boys in the bright white sports car

the boys are waving their hands in the air

who do they think they are?!?