You know what else owned bones this year and I forgot it was this year because time has ceased to mean anything in the Covid Era: Citizen Sleeper.
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i thought i was the only one with a broken image
it’s a bit silly but it does piss me off
get it together valve
kind of a paltry offering this year
i didn’t play too much for too long besides ffxiv and a few visual novels that made me feel like shit
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Cat games!
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I only played a couple games released this year so I’m just gonna do as every year and post a list of games I saw the credits roll. Will probably write about some of those later (guess I already wrote about EDF6, Mario vs DK and LiveALive).
(bug’s 2022 in reverse order)
Mario x Rabbids DLC was today, but that still counts imo. I actually liked this a bit more than the main game because all the (to me) annoying puzzles in-between battles were optional. Except for two big ones. What a nice 7-hour game. I just put Sparks of Hope in my Switch and hope it’s gonna continue this trend.
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Got my kid Kirby and the Forgotten Land for Xmas and we’ve been playing it co-op. It’s such a pleasantly engaging game with lots of manageable platforming plus optional challenges and neat secrets. I’m adding this to my list of highlights up thread.
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Definitely one of my favorite games of the year! Single-handedly made me not regret buying a Switch, tbh
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I just realized that every year on my backloggery page I compare my completion stats from January 1st of a given year to them on December 31st, yet never shared them here; this is likely because I don’t think 90+% of you would care (rightly so). Still this topic exists and I have the numbers so what the heck.
January 1st 2022 → December 31st 2022:
Unbeaten: 505 games → 619 games (booyaka)
Beaten (not 100%): 819 games → 886 games
Completed (100%): 259 games → 287 games
FYI 456 of those unbeaten games are PC ones, the majority of which are from various gigantic charity bundles. Also I don’t feel particularly proud of beating that many games in a single year but this happens when you play a lot of tiny ten minute games and bother to keep track of them.
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Yeah this is getting added to my canonical list of 2022 games, it’s really really solid and does that whole Mechanics + Story thing that most games fail to do right. I gotta do a longpost on it at some point but it’s phenomenal
first game to make me cry in a long time?? dang
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It struck me that my own numbers were insane and it turns out I left the 2021 numbers in place for the beaten & completed games by mistake last year (when I still spent half the year big bundling) so I am relieved to say that I did not in fact beat like 300 games last year, I now feel much better about the state of my life (numbers fixed and such).
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cleaning up old stuff from 2022, had to add Redout II to the list. That somehow sneaked past me, and I had two short sessions playing this with friends of mine back at my hometown, mainly to show off the tracks and it’s wild visual design language.
Was good times, but Sonic Frontiers remains my GotY’22, just flying above most of Open World Zone tres alone is fun times.
also, since i was staying over at a friends place during new years eve, i noticed that i seem to have not tracked my 2021 GotY anywhere, which irks me a bit. Yeah, I am that kind of person that likes to track and trace these things 
in any case, I am pretty sure it was Outer Wilds, so yeah, gotta start a letterboxd for games account if i can find the thread again that pitched that Website.
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Oh boy Sparks of Hope is so much worse than Kingdom Battle? They got rid of the grid! I mean, it’s still there behind the scenes but you have to navigate it freely, which makes it much more cumbersome to control. I regularly misplace characters painstakingly switching back and forth to line them up for team jumps, only to miss my landing or stomp attack because you have to be quick as you don’t stay in the air for long. There’s few things I detest more than action elements in my turn based battles.
And you can’t buy weapons anymore. With coins I mean. You need the special currency you only get from completing side quests. Which means I’ll never get to buy a weapon in the game and enemies are bullet sponges. There’s also enemies roaming the overworld now like it’s a JRPG. I aggressively skip all of them leading to me being underleveled to a degree that some enemies can simply end one of my teammates with a single attack. And I never have enough gold to refill my health because health doesn’t refill after battles. Like at all. You gotta pay for it. Did I mention there’s healing items now that you can buy and use in battle without restriction? If you have the spare cash, of course. I had to decrease the difficulty to easy, but that’s almost too much. There’s few things I detest more than encouraged grinding in my turn based tactics games.
You can’t freely choose to shoot first and move second anymore, shooting always ends your movement. This alone reduces the options you have available significantly. They also took away secondary weapons and secondary abilities, and replaced them with two equippable Sparks, which either have a weapon buff or a close range AoE attack or (rarely) something more interesting like an enemy pull ability. Elementary buffs were built into weapons in Kingdom Battle, so you got two for free but they’d trigger randomly, now you have to choose between those or another attack or ability. I guess it’s nice to be able to trigger elemental attacks reliably, but equippable attacks and abilities also make characters more interchangeable and there’s just not enough ability sparks (haven’t seen ink or vamp yet) and too many boring buffs and AoE attacks, which are basically all the same except for their element. Having to enter “tacticam” to look at enemy weaknesses and resistances to see which elemental buff or attack to trigger and which not, is just tedious busywork roleplayjng as an interesting decision. Imo.
There’s a lot less shootable blocks on the maps to alter enemy movement, like sticky or bouncy blocks are nowhere to be seen? There’s some barrels of water placed next to enemies weak to water here and there, and you can still burn enemies to make them run out of cover, but there also seems to be a lot less destructable and more indestructible cover. There’s also a lot of jump pads that allow you to extend your movement almost infinitely on some maps, kinda like with pipes basically giving you infinite team jumps, but they make traversal so much slower and more imprecise because it’s harder to tell how your landing movement radius translates to actual grids once you land.
Maybe that’s due to the difficulty I’m playing at, but friendly fire seems to be gone? I have to check the higher difficulties to make sure.
There’s nothing I detest more than less interesting choices in my turn based tactics games. And I think that’s the case here? But maybe that’s just me not playing the game as intended, lowering the difficulty because I want to skip what I see as filler. It’s quite possible. But it’s not just the mechanics I don’t like. Aesthetically this game is a lot less colorful. Less joyful I think. Taking itself more seriously? Not just with the world and enemy design. Even the rabbids. Now they talk! I don’t know about this, feels wrong to me, like watching dubbed anime. I guess they want them to be more than Minions with fur. There’s also two Navis now explaining stuff to you. All voice acted. Who asked for this? Not me.
I was so hype. Now I am disappoint. Like I wouldn’t have batted an eye if you would’ve told me Intelligent Systems had their hands in Kingdom Battle, I think I like it more than Code Name: S.T.E.A.M. Lincoln vs Aliens. But Sparks of Hope? I dunno. Guess I’ll still try the Rayman DLC later this year, even though I was hoping for one with playable Wario + Waluigi rabbids instead.
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thank you for saving me from this because the first game was one of the most surprisingly good games of that year, but had a number of decisions that almost teetered it into unplayability. My specific complaints were:
- good god the writing was awful
- why am i stuck with mario, please let me use someone else in that slot
- …god the writing was really awful though
- the little side quest things were tedious (but compulsive)
and it sounds like they’ve doubled down on some of that while making the game worse in significant other ways. I might still pick it up if it gets real cheap but definitely not a >$40 purchase.
Really sucks though because damn I really loved the first game.
also this is fucking absurd, what the hell, why would
why would you do that
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Thanks for agreeing with me on the grids. I love grids!
I didn’t have much of a problem with Kingdom Battle’s story, I guess the lack of voice acting and the silliness of it all made it easier to digest for me.
To be fair they fixed what minor complaints I had with the first game mechanically, like you do get to pick your team freely, no more requirement for mixed Mario x Rabbid teams or even Mario, and while equippable sparks make characters more interchangeable, they don’t share any weapon types anymore and now all have unique ones. You also get a map and the overworld looks less samey, so it’s harder to get lost, plus the puzzles are not hardcore Sokoban and mostly less challenging lock and key type deals, I had to pull up youtube less often for a solution, but I also found them less memorable. The stuff you find also seems more worthwhile, like you get mostly usable items instead of cosmetic collectibles?
And then they kinda “unfixed” so much else. So much more(?) important stuff. What I really loved about Kingdom Battle is how they managed to give you so much with so little. Like every one of your three characters only had four moves (two attacks and two abilities) and movement as options. But then they allowed you to move characters in any order, trigger moves in any order, and that combined with the range of movements and the movement altering options you could inflict on enemies and they could inflict on you, including destructible blocks that alter said options, plus friendly fire and so on. The amount of possible interaction to consider seemed so vast, piecing it together was satisfying in ways Sparks of Hope hasn’t been for me yet. Another imo telling example: when the battle ended in the first game, you got scored depending on if you lost any team members and if you managed to finish within a certain amount of turns. Perfect for replayability. In Sparks of Hope you level up. Which makes your HP grow? Maybe all your stats? I don’t even know. In any case, I’m not really encouraged to do better, I’m just encouraged to do more. Grind more money and EXP.
I think my ideal Mario x Rabbids SRPG would just be back to back grid based turn based battles swiftly broken up by brief cutscenes in which the rabbids do their thing. I don’t really need any of this world traversal puzzle solving opening chests collecting stuff. I guess it doesn’t hurt, but at the end it all seems auxiliary to me. Oh well anyway, I ordered me some Three Houses next, the “most auxiliary stuff ever” in a Fire Emblem? Oh boy.
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now that i think about it i actually liked the cutscenes because i think the rabbids kinda rule? like, honestly…i also like the minions, so it works. it’s slapstick! slapstick rules.
i just hated that little fucking Amazon Dot Wannabe motherfucker who you technically played as all the time. i really didn’t like him for some reason. i do not know why.
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Yeah, that’s another unfix imo.
Just gonna say this much: I appreciated the repurposing of Beep-O as segway by Rabbid Cranky in the DK DLC.
(stole this from deviantart)
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