A Green Mushroom

Pokémon Legends: Arceus is the most fun I've had in a Pokemon game since at least X and Y but maybe even further back than that.  It fundamentally rethinks the relationship between the player and catching Pokémon. In Legends: Arceus, it's all about building your Pokedex through the observation, fighting, and catching of Pokemon.  The awesome thing about it is that you can approach the Pokedex in whatever way you want.  If you like fighting, go for it.  Would you rather observe and catch?  That works too. The biggest change is the move to a more open world where you can catch Pokémon without needing to engage in battle.  You can just throw a Pokeball their way and try to catch them without ever fighting.  It makes the game move so much faster and the older Pokémon games feel glacially paced in comparison. I was enjoying this one so much that I found myself constantly ignoring the main quest just to spend more time in the open world building up my Pokede...

Vampire Survivors is an incredible game in its ability to have such a core focused simple game that manages to be super fun moment to moment. This is an indie game being developed as a side hobby by one lone developer.  It shows in the art assets but not in the gameplay.  The gameplay is a tight core loop where you control a character that is trying to survivor a bunch of enemies that are vaguely vampire adjacent. The moment to moment sees you dodging enemies while your character auto-attacks.  Defeating enemies causes them to drop experience that you need to swing back around to pick up.  Once you get enough experience, you level up and gain new abilities or more levels of your current abilities. And that's mostly all the game is.  Sure, there are characters to unlock, abilities to figure out combos for, and gold currency to pick up that will slowly increase your characters' meta-strength over time.  But the core run always takes 30 minutes or less (most o...

Nobody Saves the World asks the question, "Would you like to be a poison rat that can also turn into a necromancer, horse, soldier, snail, and so much more?"  Actually, the rat is just a starting place.  Maybe I should back up. Nobody Saves the World is a top down action game with some Zelda vibes that gives you a ton of options for how you want to play.  You unlock a large variety of different forms which all control differently and have individual attacks and abilities.  You unlock the functionality to combine and customize character abilities as you get later into the game and that opens up the door to even crazier character combos. In the end, you're a Nobody... but you're also kind of an everybody?  It's an interesting mix. My daughter and I both had fun in this game for a good 20 hours or so.  We saw a lot of dungeons and unlocked a large portion of the map before we both eventually fell off of the game.  We liked what was there but it became a l...

Halo Infinite is both a hard game to assess and an easy game to assess.  It's essentially just more Halo. But... it's a good Halo.  I've felt like the Halo games have been more "miss" than "hit" ever since Halo 3 and this is the first time I've latched onto one and truly enjoyed it since then.  I did play  and finish Halo 4 and Halo 5 but I didn't think they were very good.  Plus, they felt less and less like the classic Halo I enjoyed. Halo Infinite is a return to form.  It allows you to finally live out the fantasy that the box art from Halo 1 promised all those years ago.  "Here's an open world on a Halo ring.  Go nuts.  Have fun!"  Kind of.  The hedging here is because Halo Infinite also has more traditional Halo levels and they're just not that good. I enjoyed most of my time in the open world but I struggled to stay engaged through the scripted corridors of the more traditional level structure.  The worst part was that th...

  Unpacking is an interesting one to add to the list .  It made me consider the question "what games make it on this list at all?".  I thought about this for a long time and ultimately landed on an answer.  I'm going to add any game that I played long enough to get a true feel for and that I think is interesting.  Unpacking fits that bill. One thing to know about me if you only read the blog and don't listen to the podcast is that I have a tendency to try a lot of games to sample them.  I end up sampling a lot of games for only 10-30 minutes before bouncing off and mentally classifying them as "I get it, but I'm not interested".  Those games will not  get included in this running list. With all that out of the way... Unpacking is really interesting.  It's a game told through the act of moving into new locations.  Most people have moved multiple times in their lives so the act of moving is relatable.  This entire story is told throu...

  We're kicking things off with Endwalker.  Remember, our calendar year here lines up with the Geek to Geek podcast which runs roughly from December to December.  This was one that I had just barely started to play when we did our Games of the Year for 2021, so it qualifies for 2022 instead. That means our running games of the year list looks like this: Endwalker Not a lot to it yet, but we'll build from here. The thing is... this one is going to be hard to top.  Endwalker was the culmination of a decade of story and content in Final Fantasy XIV which gives it a bit of an unfair advantage.  I ultimately think that Shadowbringers was a stronger stand-alone expansion but Endwalker represents everything that FFXIV has done up through 2021 so it gets a big boost from that. Endwalker manages to stick the landing on a decade of storytelling, builds on the world, was fun to play through, and it gives us a soft reset for future FFXIV expansions.  The other thing th...

I've gotten bad at remembering to add Geek to Geek episodes on here as we release them and, as such, the blog hasn't been updated much lately. Overall, that's ok.  This was always meant to be a release valve for creative efforts and I knew I would have periods of more or less writing over time. Starting with this year (Season 7) of the Geek to Geek Podcast we've decided to drop down to an every-other week cadence which has freed up a bit of my creative energies for the first time in awhile. When we do our games of the year lists we typically will do one mid-year episode and one year-end episode.  The mid-year is a great time to check in on things in the first half of the year so that we don't forget about them in the back half. The thing I've been kicking around in my head is that it would be fun to do a running list throughout the entire year.  This would be similar to what I did with my Final Fantasy Project where I drop the games into the ranking as I go an...