Now that I’ve had a chance to settle down and catch up after my trip to Japan over the holidays, I can look back at last year. There was a fair bit of varied activity on this little old blog; a few updates to my ridiculously completist Zelda timeline, my quite popular (by my standards) translations of the official Castlevania 4koma strips, and a whole heck of a lot of pixel art after I’d discovered an inclination for it. I also got a couple of other comic releases out, the Lufia and Game Boy Camera specials from German (very proud of those), and started scanning video game manuals. Not to mention the big Donkey Kong Card Game project!
But what about my games played and reviewed? I caught up on my backlog, I replayed the classic Donkey Kong Country trilogies, I did the whole Lufia series, a bit of a Castlevania bender, and of course my massive Rayman series playthrough. That was great.
There were some edge cases and fuzziness, but it looks like I played 25 console/PC games, and 31 handheld/mobile games. Why, that’s 9 less in total than last year! I guess I played longer games or did other things more often. I seemed to focus on playing Wii and DS games, with some new 3DS games and cracking some PS3 games too. Only 1 Wii U game (Yoshi’s Woolly World), which is a little sad… but blame Nintendo for not releasing compelling games! Mainly RPGs and platformers, as to be expected of me, but I think I ventured into a few other genres like 3D action, FPS, and racing too.
But let’s cram a few “Game of the Year” awards into this post too. By which I mean arbitrary prizes for games I played this year. Again, fuzziness… I won’t count games replayed or Rayman Origins and DKC2 would get in there easily, and Chrono Trigger and Majora’s Mask are good remakes… so many good ones to choose from.
Multiplayer Powerhouses: Yoshi’s Woolly World and Excite Truck (special mention to the Gen 3 Pokemon remakes, since my wife and I completed our Pokedex)
Hidden Gems: Lufia: The Legend Returns (also wins most played soundtrack on my phone), Rayman Raving Rabbids GBA, and the pinball mode of Kirby Mass Attack
Surprisingly Compelling: Mario Hoops 3-on-3, Rayman Arena (race mode anyway), and Rayman Raving Rabbids (Symbian version)
Solid Choices: Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals, Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, Paper Mario. Gosh, lots of good choices this year.
The Smiling Poop Emoji Award for a game that turned out to be crap: Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II. There might be more games in this category but for my low expectations and mostly playing nothing but Angry Birds on my phone.
That’ll do! Hakuna Matata! Tonda Gossa! Banana Slamma! Thank you so much to anyone who’s stopped by my blog this year for any of my content. It really does help my brain to see people appreciating my stuff, and I love to do it as it helps me to appreciate the stuff I talk about. Who knows what I’ll get up to this year. Not me, I don’t have a big plan like Rayman for this year. My game plan is to keep loving, playing and yakking about games!
