#467

This blog has been updating, interrupted by the occasional hiatus, since 2018, and I do quite like the idea of making a Factual Game of the Fucking Year Retrospective, so that is the program for the day--with a Factually Top 25 All-Time Games appended for good measure. Ah, the madcap hedonism of writing lists, and the devil-may-care yet earnestly delicious thrill of commenting on the lists! A dense sandwich cookie of joy and satisfaction.

Indeed, there may be no better way to kick off the criminally titled

FACTUALLY GAME THEORY 2024

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The Factual Game of the Fucking Year Restrospective

Well, here's the deal though. I don't really play new games all the time, particularly not all year long--I am not that kind of hobbyist, or, gamer, as the wicked parlance of the vagrant youth would have it.

The Factual Game of the Fuckin Year, then, is not a list intended to assay or compass the industry or the form in any way--no, like all the factually pointless lists featured here on Factually Pointless, it is about me and what I am up to and my reasons for it and my feelings about it. Indeed, of little use to anyone--simply an amusement for myself and a record of my deeds. Therefore, a game released in 2016 might be my game of the year 2020--simply because that is when I got around to it. 

However! If, belatedly, I played a game that came out, or some other special modifier on the framework, I shall nest the retroactivity and award it the same award in a different tier or category. I may use several such disparate labels as context demands. You'll see what I mean with the first entry and as we go along. Plus, honorable mentions! That should populate this space with some notable videos game.

There are many reasons I might miss a game, finances and the limitations of time itself and competing demands for a share of my supply presenting the main hurdles. Also I might simply not care, or live fated to miss a game I might have loved through apathy or inattention or other sad chance. It's the same with books or movies, and there is no point in allowing this absurd breed of the fear of missing out to taint one's life. Global cultural production is overhwelmingly valid, and there was more culture produced in the last decade alone than a person could reasonably hope to take in during their whole lifetime even if they devoted eight hours a day seven days a week to it for eighty years. And you couldn't even do it, because how would you play every MMO ever produced at the same time as having the experience of taking your game to the professional level in first-person shooters and also reading the length and breadth of Western and Eastern literature and also becoming conversant with all the podcasts and reading every new book that comes out? It should be clear that one cannot, however delicious the fantasy of being the kind of extradimensional entity that could take it all in and suspend the completeness in the intellect like a perfect crystal.

Look, man. You have one span in which to exist. Get used to the idea, relax, and set your own agendas at your own pace designed to maximize your own pleasure by your own standards. That is all. Thanks for enduring my ted talk (me, talking to my younger self in actual paroxysms because absorbing all extant human knowledge is a tragic impossibility). Now, the list!

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TWO THOUSAND AND EIGHTEEEN

Played In The Moment: Fucking Nothing!: The year of the blog's inception was, it is safe to say, one of the lowest points in my life and a time when I didn't even have the spiritual energy to listen to music, a long illness chronicled in some detail through the course of the blog. If I was playing games, it could only really have been on my handhelds--I didn't have a Switch yet, I pawned my Xbox 360 and a bunch of other shit at one point, and I wasn't plugging my N64 or my PS2 into jack shit--woulda sold those too, probably, if anyone had offered any money for them at the time. 

Came Out, Played Later: Chasm: As a rule, I don't need to explore metroidvania-style dungeon descenders outside of the definitive series entries in themselves, but I do love it when a game exaggerates a genre to the extent that it becomes its avatar--see the 2024 winner, the impeccable Unicorn Overlord. Chasm excels as homage and gold standard in one, loved every little second of playing it (2021). It really just does every last aspect of itself to exacting perfection, and it has infinite replayability, which I value highly. It's on the "'vania" side of things; if the same team made a twin game called, say, hypothetically, "Station", to honor the Metroid side, I would also love that. I see myself tucking both games into bed at night, laying a loving, gentle kiss upon each brow.

Honorable Mentions: Celeste (amazing music, great writing, awesome raw platforming for which it has deservedly attained great fame) Super Smash Brothers Ultimate (it is fucking Smash Bros Ultimate, motherfucker, it is BEYOND REPROACH IN EVERY WAY. It is just always silly to make it game of the year, since Smash made the bulk of its potent and evergreen statement in 1998. It's kind of like how Final Fantasy is, to this day, Game of the Year. Anyway I have all the spirits and I have played over a thousand multiplayer matches on just my own cartridge. What has Super Smash Bros. as a series asked of me in return for its thousands of hours of peerless entrtainment? Only a valuable chunk of my own soul.)

TWO THOUSAND AND NINETEEN

Played In The Moment: Pokemon Shield (and Sword): People bitched so much about this game before it came out that I thought to determine whether it was an organically originating strife or, as is the way of all things in time, the seedy tentacles of underhanded corporate mechanisms had been at play in the neighborhood. My findings indicated to me very clearly that the brouhaha was evidently the same breed of malfeasance we are accustomed to seeing in the way of discourse manipulation but whose payload is assured, playing as it does on our basest emotions and leveraging raw capital and for the research and the bandwidth to occupy the precise real estate and rhetorical space needed to muddy discourse, just enough to posit that your company was able to hurt Nintendo this much of a percentage or whatever this quarter. Again, this is accomplished by pretending you are a regular consumer in order to aggravate reasoned thought and plant outright fabrications. There was never any goddamn Chinese knockoff that could do a million things Sword and Shield were not allegedly willing to do because the companies are supposedly too greedy to pay enough programmers to make a decent game. I mean it was the kind of baseless rhetoric and straight-up whole-cloth fabrication that I was used to seeing xbox and playstation people level at each other back in the days when the console wars raged white-hot.

Never has such cock and bull raged unchecked. I mean it probably has, but never has such devious goblin-work taken place around something I cared about so deeply.  The Pokemon fanbase has proven highly resistant to these assaults in the past, and I guess I'm not sure what changed.There's always assholes talking shit, they're like weak gravitational force. The universe seems to require them in order to achieve base cohesion at various field levels. It behooves one to learn to merely tune them out and get on with the business of one's work and leisure. But damn. I didn't like seeing that. I am talking as much about the Sword and Shield Conspiracy as I am talking about Console War 3.0, which was only one installment in a conflict that has been fought over uneven ground with many participants staying constant and many fading in and out, known currently as the Forty Years of Periodic Conflagration.

Anyway, I played this game too fucking much. Too many times through. Christ help me, I love it still. If I won't be playing it much anymore, it's only because I acquired Sword Version much later, and will naturally favor that instead next time I wish to return to Galar.

Came Out, Played Later:  Fire Emblem: Three Houses: Have I talked enough lately about Fire Emblem itself, and games like it, on this post in general and especially lately, with the Unicorn Overlord hyperfixation? Hey, guess what I did the other day: instead of anything reasonable or improving, I went out and purchased Fire Emblem Engage. Do you get it yet? Another reason I don't game constantly, or do any one thing constantly: if I really stopped giving a fuck and let myself, I am a person who could spend every cent they possess and even go into bankrutpcy just buying every new thing I think I desperately need. It's everything I can do stagger things and force myself into fast periods so I can have some semblance of a healthy life. To that end, I actually avoided Three Houses till 2022. About the same span I made it on Engage, I see. Good. The wards and charms hold, for now.

Honorable Mentions: Feudal Alloy (charming, amusing, haven't beaten it yet but the Czechs make a great game--I love the premise and the art and the feel of jumping around and swinging a sword, and to do so as a robot is a sheer good I need not explain, like a piece of hard candy when you haven't had anything sweet for a long time) The Eternal Castle Remastered (this game fucked me up so bad the first time I played it I almost hyperventilated. It is fucking too much to look at. If you are a person who didn't think we were done exploring the pixel stylings of the video games of the eighties, and you don't know this game, I reccomend it passionately--and not in a classy, top-flight style like Hyper Light Drifter or No Place for Bravery or something like that. I mean fat, thick lines of choppy pixel in two colors over a black background that sometimes uses a shade of one of the colors as a texture. Someday my mind will be ready to come back to it, maybe. It was also pretty high-difficulty, as these feral, frontier games knew no other way, and this is a high-fidelity project [it is not actually a remaster])

TWO THOUSAND AND TWENTY

Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity is the Game of the Fuckin Year 2020. As the only new video game I really purchased that year, it sort of automatically slides into this tier. Not that I didn't love it, because I did, very much. Ever since I lost my cherry ro the series with Soul Calibur Warriors*, though, I've needed a little something more, personally, from the Warriors games if they should decide to go futzing around with a property I am invested in. I have even managed to resist the Fire Emblem ones! Being able to say this makes me want to write and subsequently sing a new and joyful song. But the way this one ties into Breath of the Wild (I mean, in a way), the incredible drama of the setting (yes, the Age of Calamity, or to be more [sort of] precise, some type of interdimentional rift that exists in a "compressed" moment in the spacetime of the actual canon) and the period they describe in the canon, and the way they just crammed the thing as full as it would go with the stuff--it simply stated itself as necessary, and I never looked back. Super fun, super beautiful, deep and satisfying, and again, simply full of stuff.

Is it too much fucking stuff? Damn, I mean, maybe. I love Zelda, and specifically Breath of the Wild, with such a burning intensity--it blazes like thermite, vaporizing plates of steel a foot thick--that I bought the Hero's Edition of the Breath of the Wild: Creating a Champion book with the special cloth binding and the clothbound case and the special picture of the champions from the Champion's Ballad expasion and the cloth fucking map of BotW Hyrule and the fricking laser-etched glass model Spirit Orb. Even to consider that I possess such a thing gives me a thrill like no illicit sex could possibly replicate, and my hand tingles, remembering the perfect shape and weight of that flawless glass sphere.

So, you might not feel the way I feel about this game. There are times when even I find it merely tolerable, so. I mean, IP Prefix: Warriors games. They require a certain mood and mindset, is part of it. I would, of course, love to hear from a person for whom playing this style of game is always choice number one, which naturally I have mad respect for.

Also, I guess you know what to expect near, or, y'know, at the top of the next list. Ha!

Honorable Mentions: I sure kept playing a lot of Pokémon! This is common for me, this thing of going nuts on Pokemon a few times a year. Longtime readers may know this. I also played a lot of Smash Ultimate.

TWO THOUSAND AND TWENTY-ONE

Eastward & Disco Elysium: The Final Cut tie for Games of the Fuckin Year 2021. Everyone knows everything about Disco by now, even invertebrates with no possible way of playing or even sensing the game, so I won't spend too much time on that except to restate that it opened up my brain, walked inside of me, and drove me like a meat gundam, and in doing so, allowed me to operate it it with fully-loaded S-tier triple-overcharged maniacal-ass drive, leaving nothing of the game but a rind and some stringy remainders. I'm thinking of something on the order of a mango here. Indeed, once I had finished, I felt distinctly sated, a feeling of having feasted on succulence till the juice ran down my chin and my eyes rolled up into the back of my head. Man, I built the crazy fucker just the way I'm built and went fuckin crazy on those mysteries. Felt good, man. Felt god damn beautiful.

Anyway. 

Eastward is a game that hit me so right from the moment I laid eyes on its artwork in a thumbnail that I feel because it did not shatter the very foundations of this corrupt earth and burst from its shattering crust in a torrent of white light, redeeming all of our sins, that it was criminally slept on. The truth is it might really not be for all comers, and that makes sense. Not to me, not at all, but intellectually, it makes sense. In many other contexts, I can see how things just like this make sense, so I get that it makes sense, but it makes no sense to me. Eastward is damn near the perfect story in damn near the perfect video game. I have never felt things like I have felt playing this game and receiving its visual, aural, textual, and mechanical payload. I can't believe something like this even exists, and that I can just play it, if I want to or need to. My breathing has grown shallow. Know simply that if you are lucky, and open, here is a piece of art that can fucking destroy you in a way utterly its own. 

Honorable Mentions: Metroid Dread (as with Disco Elysium, it is not certain how much I need to elaborate on how much ass this game kicked. I shall be plain: this game kicks enough ass that we here at Factually Pointless had to fetch more ass for it to kick, and could not secure sufficient supply to meet demand) Pikmin 3 (this game is special in my heart because it was the first Pikmin I really played, because it is wonderful in every way, and because it is the one game Ezra and I have played together and beaten from start to finish, and we had a blast) Death's Door (If I haven't beaten it, it is simply because it is one of those meals so tasty you wanna save about forty percent for later. I love being a little dead crow, and music is so good, and to look at it and move through its world is to know a special, mineral-rich pleasure) Inscryption (didn't play it myself, but when a video game truly seizes Ezra, I take note. Usually it's not something I'd write about on its own merits, but Inscryption looks so much like itself and is so unabashedly cruel and with such good sounds that I have thought about it a great deal. Don't really feel like playing it, but very glad I've gotten to spend time around it) Resident Evil Village (the last thing that happened to me in a Resident Evil, after not liking 5 as much as 4 and not playing very much 6 because indeed they made them impossible to play alone, was I was finally playing some 6 with a buddy and we were in this boss fight where this giant guy charges at you in this huge room. We've tried this thing like twenty times: the room's full of guys and stuff, there's ways to hurt the big guy with the stuff in the room. fighting the rgular guys it's full of is a whole thing. We try a bunch of different strats, we do a bunch of different clever shit, new ideas, regroup, retry, whatever. Kept dying. Finally, exasperated and experiencing a growing feeling of dread as I realized the one thing all of our plans had in common, I told my buddy to grab his magnum and we would both concentrate fire on the big guy's head and face instead of getting out of his way. It worked, but, it didn't just work. It was fucking pathetic. We dropped him like you drop a cow in a slaughterhouse chute, the door opened, and the regular enemies never even spawned. We moved on to the next cutscene. So, yes, as I say, it worked, but guess what?

We really didn't feel like playing any more. So we didn't. And for my part, I kept right on not doing that for four years solid.

Look. It's one thing to force a co-op focus. I like playing games by myself over anything, but I also love co-op and one-on-one stuff, even the occasional free-for-all. I couldn't beat RE5 for a long time because I had no one dependable to do it with, but when I did, the game revealed delicious flavors and textures. That it was no longer really scary is a separate matter. It is another thing entirely to make a puzzle whose solution is not to solve it, but instead, to shoot it in the head until it dies. On that day, they told me in no uncertain terms they wanted nothing to do with me, or "my sort". So, it worked, but it didn't work, unless it was a clear message from the designers: this is no place for the faithful. Something bad has happened here. Go, and be free. So I did. Left the franchise to toil under the sigil of the beer bong and the Greek letters, or whatever the fuck it is that makes a series literally lobotomize itself. It was also even less frightening than 5, to the point that it wasn't, not at all. I guess in one of the sections I fought a zombie all alone in a dark, empty parking structure, which is something I'm afraid of in real life just because of the aesthetics and the echo of the sound and the prevailing quality of the light. So that wasn't complete bullshit, like the whole fucking university after that, after which I quit from sheer not giving a fuck anymore. Games rarely drive me to this point because I rarely pick or toil through games that aren't any fucking good. That's what happens when goodwill built is counteracted by incrementally enshittified product. My natural defenses for my own time and quality of leisure experience a critical delay.

Well. I guess after that, they felt that way too, maybe, because while I was either actively turning my nose up or merely not paying attention, they released a completely terrifying new RE that took place in some hideous goddamn Louisiana backwater fen. It looked good, people said it was a returm to form, but I wasn't ready to open my heart yet. "Swamp people, huh?" I sneered, well after it was out. "What, they have a sleepover, binge True Detective season 1 and get really into the Deliverance soundtrack?" 

However! However! When I saw that Village [and I did write about this, I think] took place in or near a castle, and would feature some kind of [potential] lycanthrope, my whole body shook. The shaking was the thud of a harpoon sinking into my blubber. Fuckers had me again. I know now that I was quite wrong about 7 and playing Village was indeed a return to form and perhaps even the foundation for new heights)

TWO THOUSAND AND TWENTY-TWO

Games of the Fuckin Year: Pokemon Violet/Scarlet/Pokemon Legends Arceus: Perhaps the most flasgship year for the series that I can think of as it related to releases which affected me personally, but also, it can be objectively stated. This is the year Pokemon HOME functionality really came into its own, as the depth and breadth of games it serves reached comfortable operating mass. The Pearl/Diamond remakes also dropped! Crazy. I had fun, but they weren't like, FPGotFY level. 

People complained about how Arceus looked but I have no idea what they're talking about. I'm not saying that to be iconocalstic or deliberately obtuse, though I would completely understand if you didn't believe me about that because it pretty much sounds like I am, and also because it is known that I enjoy being iconoclastic. I don't even mean that as a person who came up straight up RBY graphics is all the Pokemon there is to see, so everything ever since has been a stairway to a constantly rising heaven. I am sure that this effect I am describing has a piece to do with what I actually mean, but it is not central to the point. 

Here it is: like Skyward Sword before it, Arceus is not attempting to astonish with the kinds of HD fidelity other games and indeed trends in gaming seem to take for granted as a sign of baseline functionality, rather than aesthetic aim. I mean, if you want me to be the one to say that there are literally PlayStation 2 games that look better than Arceus, I'll say it. What? It happens to even be true! The people that make games like Gran Turismo or Metal Gear Solid or Mass Effect--series which jump out in my mind as really accomplishing high fidelity in significant, full-spectrum ways that serve the piece as a whole--deliver the kind of polish and fidelity to realspace that they do because that is the one of the pillars of their mission, because it is critical to the presentation and feel of the game. That pillar does not exist in the House of the Electric Mouse, so the cars in Forza 2 still look better, in a way, than anything in Arceus, or Violet/Scarlet. That can matter to you or not matter; it does not matter to me. 

I love looking at the new Pokemon games. They are a feast for the eyes. They make my eyes happy. I love inhabiting the worlds they've created, they way time passes and light changes, the way things glitter and flash and reflect, the waterfalls, the woods, the paint, the color balance, the movement and life all around you as you traverse this amazing topography in varied and interesting ways and interact with vibrancy at every turn, at every level, and around every corner. The original cartidges, holding the very first Pokemon games, through some form of alchemy, marshalled their pixels in order to look interesting--every frame, every place, every 'mon interesting. All these places and people endure in the mind. Gran Turismo, by contrast, is showing me a real-life transcription of something I don't give a fuck about. In essence, they are saving me a trip I was never going to take to do something I was never going to do. In their defense, I would, at least, take them up on their offer before I took the actual trips.

I guess cars and guns should look perfect in racing and shooty games, but this is an adventure game ensconcing a strategy RPG rooted in little pictures of creatures a person drew. 

Just ask yourself, as a perceiver: when I look, when I look to see what is there, do I see what is not there? And then, do I blame what I see for not being what I see?

Let us meditate on this, re: games, re: culture, and re: all aspects of life. Amen.

These Pokemon games give me hope for the future. They are some of the only things that do! Amen, amen, amen.

Runner-Up: Kirby and the Forgotten Land: Most fun I've had looking at Kirby and playing Kirby since The Crystal Shards! This game is funmax to the limit.

Honorable Mentions: Sonic Origins (3d Sonic--well. Much ink has been spilled upon the bosom of internet detailing exactly what is and has always been wrong with Sonic games. I don't play the sport myself, I just love Sonic when I can, when they let me. So the GBA Sonics, those were all awesome and I played and loved them, but Sonic Adventure 2: Battle was the only half-decent 3D one, and I think this position is buoyed by various subjective criteria that don't even really hold water. Frontiers, though, brought me only joy, joy complete and condensed and entire--until it proved it was still a fucking Sonic game by making me play pinball so shitty I walked away from the game. Why the fuck didn't anyone stop that shit from happening? Maybe someday I'll come back and finish it) Tunic (wow) Dying Light Platium Edition (all I ever wanted was a zombie game where you could jump around and do parkour shit like a person actually might, instead of running and stopping in any one of four exciting directions--but first, you must turn, hestiatingly, on the spot. When I was playing it, I had a lot of Game of the Fuckin Year thoughts, but it's really just that it did something I have needed video games of this kind to do for more than decade. Fucking awesome, great game, everyone should play it)

TWO THOUSAND ND TWENTY-THREE

Game of the Fuckin Year: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: Presented without comment. What comment could be necessary?

Runner-Ups: Super Mario Bros Wonder & Cocoon. As should be common knowledge out there by now, Super Mario World was the first video game I ever played. The second or third video game I ever owned, however, along with a copy of Tetris, was a copy of Super Mario Bros. Deluxe for the Game Boy Color. So, the basic Super Mario formula is of enormous significance to me. This, the latest entry in that hallowed lineage, delivered such potent, delicious play in this vein that I don't think I was ever unsmiling as I played it. I cannot verify for certain, but it is possible that I may even have been grinning like a loon the whole time. Did I giggle? Did I sing little tunes, in between short gasps of delight? Maybe.

Cocoon was as short and deliciously sweet a time as I have ever delighted in. Pennies Arcade Guys talked perfectly about it and it is why I checked it out, so I refer you to said write-up. 

Honorable Mentions: Pizza Tower (while I have not personally played it--yet--even watching a buddy play this game for thirty seconds tells you how fucking great it is, period, no disambiguation. Any player that spent time in their torrid, prurient youth with Warioland 4 will know what I mean when I say that I don't need to play it to know that it is like a crack rock of pure, hilarious, white-hot fun) 

TWWENNYYYYY TWENNYYYYYYY FOOOOOOOOOOOOORE

Game of the Fuckin Year: As you know, Unicorn Overlord snags the top notch this year. It's okay to just get it out of the way, as nothing else is coming out this year that would register on its axis. This was a flagship year for me personally playing tons and tons and tons of video games. I wonder why I felt such a pressing, urgent need to be a fully transported into a simulated reality as possible.

Special Case: The Final Fantasy games I played, VII through XII, probably saved my life, as things do sometimes. They are each unqualified masterpieces of the highest order. I guess I really didn't feel like going though XIII again, or listening to it again is really the issue, because I sure love looking at it and playing it. But I really want to play XIII-2 and Lightning Returns. So we will see what the future holds. Also I need to go back and play I though VI soon. Maybe sometime after 2028 I can buy the system I'll need to play XV and XVI, or get a real computer or something.

Balatro gets an honorable mention on the same order as Inscryption--have not played it, probably won't, but the aesthetics, design factors and the enjoyment and fascination I have seen it bring to Ezra and to others secures it a place. Violet/Scarlet (the bulk of the hours I put into these games actually clocked in after the expansions dropped, so beginning roughly January 2024 I ran them into the fucking ground. They were already world-class in my estimation, but know this: the full and complete editions of these games is like the erection of a Pokémon Babylon. This is the pinnacle of a civilzation, and tales may one day be told of riches and wonders that the world no longer holds.)

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Ok! Next thing next time here on Factually Game Theory 2024! My little comments, having turned into several lengthy treatises and digressions, have made today beyond unwieldy as it is and may have finally crossed into the territory that even I, and not in jest as usual, might say uses too many words.

Ok peace, think about how I have maybe played over one thousand five hundred hours of video games this year, I know I will

--JL

*Having managed to bring Soul Calibur into this, I may as well admit to you that I bought Soul Calibur IV as well. All right, all right. Also Bravely Default for the 3DS and Guitar Hero III. Might have to return GHIII, though. Apparently any random fucker is entitled to a pound of my flesh as entry to the exhange for one of those fucking plastic guitars for the 360. Think not upon the true, actual asking price.