I am working on getting every ending on Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, and doing so either involves 1) playing through the entire game four complete times or 2) doing some fuckery with backing up your saves and, on an Xbox, preventing your game from automatically backing itself up to the cloud while you’re on a backed-up save that you don’t want to be permanent. There’s one ending that actually ends the entire game prematurely, and I wanted to snag that one tonight, but it involves being good enough with a particular boss that you can crush her more or less at will (on it) and making sure you understand exactly how the Xbox Series X’s cloud backup works and when it chooses to back up saves to the cloud. Because if you do it right, you let it back up, beat the game the way you don’t want to keep so you get the achievement, then back out of the game and delete your local save, forcing the game to go back to your previously cloud-backed-up save.
Do this wrong, and you’ve either locked yourself into finishing the game prematurely, meaning you need to play through again to get the other endings (bad) or in a worst case scenario you screw up badly enough to delete your save entirely, meaning that not only do you have to start over again but you have to do it from scratch.
Anyway, I successfully pulled it off, to wit:
Check that completion percentage out, yo.
Anyway, there’s still more game before those last two endings, where I have to do this over again, so I can still screw this up. But at least the most annoying one is out of the way.
I was all ready to write a big long post about the best video games of 2024. Then I thought about it for a while.
Turns out … there weren’t that many, really? At least by my standards? And that’s really surprising, to be honest. I spend a fair amount of time playing video games, as all of you know, although my rabid devotion to reading certainly stole a lot of time this year that might have been spent on playing games in previous years. This year has been a lot of either mediocrity or “Oh, that was fun, I guess” types of games without much staying power.
One way or another Shadow of the Erdtree is Game of the Year.
But … man.
I basically went through all of 2024 and didn’t touch my Xbox. Check this out:
Unpacking is a cute little thing but is entertaining for a couple of hours. Palworld is a Pokemon ripoff that I played with my son for a little while, and that’s already a year ago. Of the four games left, the only one I liked (and, frankly, the only one I played for more than a couple of hourswas Lies of P, and I’m pretty sure that was in 2023.
I played zero Switch games in 2024.
My PS5 game list is a little more robust, but still, it’s really nothing to write home about. I’m having fun with Cult of the Lamb right now, and I downloaded Carrion earlier today because I was curious and it was five bucks. Neither are 2024 games. Baldur’s Gate III left me cold and I never finished it, quitting after Act II. It’s highly unlikely that I’ll ever go back. Lords of the Fallen was fun and kept stepping on its dick. There have been tons of updates since I beat it, so I might go back at some point, but I spent at least 20% of the time I was playing it absolutely hating it. I played through The Surge; the sequel was a vast improvement. I still haven’t finished Rise of the Ronin because Shadow of the Erdtree got in the way. Dragon Age: The Veilguard and Black Myth: Wukong were the only challengers to Shadow for my personal GOTY, and really, neither of them were very close. BM:W is definitely the best full game of the year, but Erdtree is a better game.
I know there was a recent expansion for BM:W, and there’s supposedly big DLC coming, so I’ll probably go back to it at some point. I need to play through at least part of Veilguard again if I want the platinum. I’ll probably do it eventually.
As far as the rest of the actual GOTY candidates … well, I’ve played the ones I’m going to play. Deckbuilders hold no attraction for me, so Balatro is out. I want nothing to do with the Final Fantasy series, much less the remakes. Metaphor: ReFantazio has too stupid of a name for me to even look into it, and I refuse to admit that Astro Bot is even a real game. The whole series is a marketing gimmick. It might be a good game; I just don’t care. And it takes a lot to get me into a platformer anyway. I definitely enjoy one once in a while but they’re rare.
I wasn’t expecting this post to end with “Blech,” but … blech.
One random thought tonight, as it has been a tremendously sleepy Saturday and I’ve pretty much just been lazing about and reading and playing video games all day and have no thinks left: I have been tremendously enjoying Dragon Age: Veilguard, which was a great weight off of my shoulders after quitting partway through the last installment, but at 55 hours in I would very much like to put it to bed now, thanks. I just went through the trophies for the game and there appear to be five or six more story chapters, which just makes me even more tired.
It’s my own fault; if I wasn’t such a blasted completist in this type of game I could probably be done with it by now, and the worst thing is that I know I missed one– and only one– trophy, necessitating an eventual second play through. I was probably going to do that anyway to see how a bunch of different story decisions work when I make them the other way, but now I have to, at least for certain values of “have to” involving being an obsessive dork.
God, it’s good there aren’t any real problems in the world, right?
The cherry on top of the shitshow that was this week is that my new, ridiculously overpriced PS5 Pro that I wasn’t even completely sure I wanted came out of its box tonight, and … it’s bricked. Three different known-good HDMI cables and two known-good power cords later plus the two out of the box, it’ll turn on but absolutely will not output a signal. So I’m returning it, and I’m not particularly interested in an exchange. I’m just getting my money back.
Parent-teacher conferences at my kid’s school today, which ate up most of my evening, and then I had two tests and an assignment to write for tomorrow, and I’m contemplating how long I’m going to wait until I take this big bastard out of its box:
… so, I have spent money unwisely, but fuck it, I get to give the original PS5 to my son and get some good dad points, and fuck it, the world’s ending so I may as well buy useless shit, right?
I haven’t reviewed a video game in forever, for a whole bunch of reasons, including but not limited to the fact that that for a long time I was saving that for the YouTube channel, and– perhaps more saliently– it’s been forever since I actually beat anything. My gaming backlog, assuming I’m going back to anything that I started and put down, is literally longer than it’s ever been before, and contains some genuinely good games that I just stopped playing for no good fucking reason and moved, ADHD-style, on to the next shiny thing. I quit playing Baldur’s Gate 3 because it depressed me, but Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, Armored Core 4, and a couple of others are also out there, and I’ve also downloaded The Surge and Sifu for cheap-as-hell and free, respectively, and not touched them yet. It’s too damn much, I tell you! Too much!
I started playing Nobody Saves the World because I’d hit a section of Prince of Persia that my platform skills weren’t up to par with without a lot of practicing and I wasn’t in the mood to beat my head against a wall any longer. Also, I thought I had downloaded a demo, but apparently I bought the entire game, I assume on the cheap, and then … forgot? But I played an hour and a half or so before realizing that I’d accidentally started a whole-ass new game and wasn’t playing a demo, and by then I was stuck. And I don’t mind being stuck, because this is a hella fun game, with its only real drawback being that it’s impossible to stop playing and it took up more of my life than I wanted it to on more than one occasion.
See all those characters up there? With the exception of the wizard Nostramagus, who is the only one with eyes, they’re all you, including the egg. At the beginning of the game, Nobody– a pasty white humanoid who looks more or less like the Pillsbury Doughboy without his clothes, and who, entertainingly, doesn’t appear in the above image– gets a magic wand that lets him change shape. You start off being able to turn into a rat, and over the course of the game gain a ton of other shapes, including a bee, a dragon, a robot, and the aforementioned egg. Each form has its own abilities and powers, most of which can be readily swapped between shapes, so by the end of the game you might be using the Dinosaur but have added the Slug’s mucus trail (seriously) to his abilities and also be borrowing a passive ability from the Bodybuilder that lets you knock enemies back further than you might have before. Everything, and I mean everything, is upgradable, and one of the reasons the game is so hard to put down is that there’s always a reason to play another three minutes– you’re either right on the cusp of gaining a level or a new form or a new power for a form or there’s a dungeon over there that’s ripe for pillaging or you just figured out how to solve a puzzle halfway across the map that requires the power you just unlocked, or or or or or.
It’s kind of repetitive, and at 25 hours for a damn-near completist run I’d say maybe don’t shoot for a completist run, but there’s a world out there to be saved and you’re the doughboy to do it, one way or the other. The art style is lovely and the music is burned into my brain rather unpleasantly and the sense of humor throughout is really great.
My recommendation: Go wander through a big crowd until you get Covid and an excuse to stay home for a week (Screw you, CDC!) and then download this (it’s apparently inexpensive) and go to town.
First, the I’m-maybe-a-third-of-the-way-through review: Elden Ring is phenomenal, a towering achievement that has all sorts of interesting things to say about its predecessors from FromSoft and the notion of “open world” gaming to boot; this is one of the best games I’ve ever played on any console, and if my opinion ends up changing on that front it will be because ultimately there ended up being too much of it and it got overwhelming.
What’s killing me is I’ve got the next two games for the channel on deck already, and they’re both also huge, and I recorded episode forty-seven tonight for Elden Ring and … yeah, I’m maybe a third of the way through. Maybe. This is going to dominate my channel for two months, easy, unless I increase the number of episodes per day that I’m airing, and even then I could see it going two months. Three episodes a day for 60 days is 180 episodes. That’s not unimaginable. And I’m regularly crushing my typical 30-minute limit because breaking every half hour just doesn’t make sense the way the game is structured– there are no missions, like there usually are in an open-world game, so there’s not a situation where you can go do something and it takes 20 minutes and it’s discrete. There’s always a tower in the distance or a cave to explore or a new boss that’s killed me five times in this episode and I’m pretty damn sure I can kill the motherfucker with one more try, and it leads to longer episodes. The cool factor is off the charts. I’ve already used the word overwhelming once; it’s absolutely the right word.
What’s a real pain in the ass is feeling like I’ve got to record it all. I started the channel last June, so we’re at about 9 months now, give or take, and I’ve been rock-solid about not missing episodes that entire time; at least two a day, with occasional but rare 8:00 episodes as well. I’ve got 115 subscribers; I was led to believe by the Internet that subscriber counts would start rising more drastically once I hit 100, and so far that hasn’t happened, and … I may be getting tired of waiting. I mean, the chance that this was going to lead to any kind of money was slim to begin with (it is worth pointing out that that 115 followers puts me in the top 5% of YouTubers globally) and the channel definitely has some fans, but having to spend an hour a night or more locked in my office playing video games and occasionally dealing with tech or editing hiccups which takes even longer is kinda getting old. I think I remember what the boy looks like; he comes in occasionally to ask for money.
I dunno. This could just be the tired talking, but I’m starting to feel like the work/fun balance in this whole thing is starting to tilt too much toward work, and I might need to reevaluate some things. I’ll finish this series out, so it’ll be a minute, but I need to think.
(I uploaded four episodes while I was writing this, by the way.)
I haven’t written a game review on here in a while, mostly because I’ve been confining most of my gaming to my YouTube channel, but I just finished Hoa last night and I feel like this one deserves a little bit more of a push. The Let’s Play isn’t going to run for a few weeks– the current game I’m playing is going to wrap up on the 30th and there’s a whole other game I want to play before Hoa runs, but I picked it up on sale and more or less on a whim– at $4.95, I’m willing to play ten minutes and decide I made a mistake– and it’s absolutely fucking delightful, and if you’re any kind of gamer at all you owe it to yourself to check this one out. It seems to have launched on basically every available system, so you don’t even have to have any particular device to play it.
Hoa is a platformer/puzzle game, only about two and a half hours in length– it will run five episodes when I stream it– and all of the art assets are entirely hand-drawn. It is absolutely gorgeous from start to finish, as you move through (mostly) naturalistic, wooded settings, interacting with fish and insects and other forms of wildlife along with the occasional robotic enemy. The game is divided into five or six zones, and the progression is pretty linear– you collect five butterflies in each level and then turn them in to … well, not a “boss,” because the game doesn’t have any combat at all, but a large denizen of the level, who gives you a new movement ability and sends you on to the next area. There is a story, but it’s kind of bare-bones until all the reveals come at the end, so I’m not going to spoil anything.
This is not a challenging game, and I don’t think it’s meant to be; it’s one of the few games I’ve played where I really feel like relaxation was one of the goals of the game designers, and the piano soundtrack (while occasionally a bit too loud) is just amazing. This is a great game to just play through and chill to, and it’s one of the very rare games where I feel like trying to speed-run it might be fun.
What pushes this game into territory where I’m raving about it is how it handles the ending. There is a big chase scene that is actually handled as a cutscene, which took me by surprise, but then the game does something completely unexpected once the game ends, and the way it handles revealing the parts of the story that had been opaque through endgame cutscenes is really impressive. This was a good game until the last half-hour or so and then shifted into something entirely more notable at that point, and I strongly suggest you play it yourself before watching me do it. It’s a steal at $4.95, and I wouldn’t have felt bad at all if I’d paid the full price. Definitely check it out.
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