Oh my god. We did it again. We somehow made it through another one of those pesky years. And it was the 10th anniversary of this blog, too! What a time we had, you and I. Now we're going to cap off 2023 by talking about some good computer video games I played. It's kind of funny how this started as a video game blog, but I only ever talk about them on here a handful of times now. I guess I save all the talking for this big thing I do at the end of the year. 2024's going to start with some game talking, and you'll even see a bit of that subject matter here. Why don't we just get into it, then? Let the end of year festivities begin, with this here game I played almost a year ago...
HARDEST GAME OF 2023
SynchroniZ v. 1.0 (PC)
My pal Polly makes lots of good computer games, and this is one of them. SynchroniZ is a test of ambidexterity, controlling two smiley faces simultaneously in a series of deadly mazes where timing and accuracy are required. It was intensely hard, but the ways it's hard interests me, along with the ways it is easy. To talk the latter first, there are plenty of accessibility options that let you mess with lives and the time limit in order to tailor the difficulty to your own tastes. They were very welcome because this is a hard video game, but its difficulty is based entirely on wrapping your head around the ambidextrous nature of the game. It was not a case of mastering reflexes and pattern recognition; learning how to play this game felt like learning a musical instrument. As Polly is musically inclined, this means that I see quite a lot of her and her passions in the computer game. As I played I was wrapping my head around the synchroniZity of it all, shouting out reversed ambidextrous controls to myself to keep it straight in my head. W DOWN! S UP! D LEFT! In the spring Polly released a 2.0 version which toned down the difficulty a bit, but my time with the original version was quite unique and Polly earns the hardest game badge with pride.
BEST FOOTBALL GAME OF 2023
Tecmo Bowl (NES)
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I don't know what the hell happened to me, but in the early months of 2023 I really got in to playing Tecmo Bowl. The degree to which I am not a football fanatic cannot be understated. I was playing this game without even understanding what the fuck a down was first, or why the game was arbitrarily changing me between offense and defense. I learned by playing, and it helps that Tecmo Bowl hits the sweet spot between complexity and simplicity. Everyone swears by Tecmo Super Bowl, but I found it to be just a little too complex for my non-football brain. There's a snappy arcade-style pick up and play action to this thing. You just have four plays to consider at a time, and it's something I've often thrown on just to kill time by playing out a quarter. Actually beating the game turned out to be a little bit of a nightmare thanks to the increased potency of the AI, but I managed to do it and win the Tecmo Cup or whatever it's called. It's a great game, and I'm going to leave my discussion of it with a favorite clip of Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert playing it, and being just as confused as I am about what the hell is happening but loving it all the same.
BEST ROM HACK OF 2023
Shin Zelda Densetsu (NES)
Tears of the what now? I spent my spring playing this ROM hack of the original NES Zelda, which actually stars Princess Zelda. About time. It was a good time, but goddamn this one was hard. It was tricky enough that I did resort to guides and whatnot just to wrap my head around things and actually survive parts of it. It was not 1987 and this was not my forever game with time to bomb and burn every wall and bush. That being said, I did enjoy doing that in the dungeons as they were more self-contained than an entire dang overworld. Even that faltered in the face of the final dungeon, when I just wanted to put the hard game to bed and be done with it. Nevertheless, it's something that I enjoyed, and so it gets a spot on this list.
BEST RPG OF 2023
Final Fantasy Legend II (Game Boy)
Nine years (!) after finishing the first Final Fantasy Legend, I went back to yet another weird and wild multiverse as crafted by that gonzo genius Akitoshi Kawazu. This was an absolutely incredible RPG experience, breezy and episodic as you travel between worlds and solve their problems for them. It fits well for a Game Boy game, something you can just fiddle with for an hour or so and feel a sense of accomplishment as you save a particular world. Once you get used to that, the last few worlds unleash that KAWAZU EDGE and become a fierce struggle to just survive the onslaught of shit being thrown your way. Instead of feeling overwhelming, though, it feels just right. You've had time to get used to all these mechanics and intricacies, and now your knowledge is being put to the test in a desperate high-octane life or death fight. This game was an absolute fucking blast, and we'll have to see if 2024 brings me to another showdown with the old gonzo genius...
BEST SPOOKY GAME OF 2023
Resident Evil Remake (PS4)
This game was the subject of one of the actual video game writeups I did on the blog this year, so I won't re-litigate that too much here. I will simply summarize that lovely little article equating this masterpiece of survival horror to spicy food. Resident Evil is a series that has always scared me, and not because of the spooky zombies. It's the difficulty and resource management nature that has kept me from it, but this summer I immersed myself in it and found myself vibing with it. I hoarded, I explored, and I was cautious. It made terrifying hallways a space of my own, and it made this game one of my own. It was a lovely time being haunted by the hallways of that tiny room, and so I give it the space it deserves here.
BEST GAME MADE BY FRIENDS OF 2023
A longtime pal of mine, beepsalt, made a computer video game this year and I quite enjoyed it. Pet is a short hourlong affair, a visual novel about just trying to get home to feed your cat which quickly becomes supernatural macrocosm about an eldritch being beyond comprehension which sees you as a pet. The endings are absolutely wild, and what really stood out to me were the descriptions of the mysterious items you can get from a strange vending machine. The humor is where beep's voice really comes through, and the descriptions amused me a great deal. It made a fun little stream, and beep should be proud of having gotten their voice out there in a computer video game. Now you're on the list of some blue-haired dork from Newfinlind.
BEST GAMING ACCOMPLISHMENT OF 2023
Castlevania No Death Clear (NES)
I got a few of these one credit/no death runs this year, particularly on Castlevania and Contra games included on anniversary collections. There's a handy dandy feature where you can just save your gameplay session as a replay, which made it easy for me as a video maker because I could just hit the replay button and play back the run for commentating over it on Youtube dot com. Of the four runs I got of Castlevania and Contra games, I had the most fun getting a no death clear of the original Castlevania. It was a perfect mix of great fun, expert execution, and just straight up winging it to pull off a clutch victory in the difficult stage 6. I'm glad to have it under my belt, and it was definitely a great experience working on it.
BEST SATURN GAME OF 2023
Panzer Dragoon (Saturn)
And here's your intrusion upon the future, your first meeting with River Song, as it were. I got Saturnbrained in late 2023, for reasons you will discover sometime in early 2024. As such, I am stuck in the position of wanting to give this game praise but not saying everything about it before I get to it next year. Know, then, this. This game has an absolutely immaculate aesthetic, a grace and beauty. It also has that early 32-bit aesthetic which resonates with me today. It also, as it happens, was hard as fuck to get the clear on. It really made me work for it and I beat the final boss with but a sliver of health left. It was lovely, and look forward to hearing more about it and some other Saturn things in the future. To tell anything else would be... well, spoilers.
GAME(S) OF THE YEAR 2023
Atari 50 & The Making Of Karateka (Switch)
That's right, we're doing a double again! Both of these are from the same company, and doing basically the same thing, so it only makes sense to group them both together like this. If I may make a bold claim, these two compilations don't just pave a way forward for video game history and preservation, but they almost transcend the medium themselves. On the surface they may just look like a compilation of old Atari games and ports of an old Apple II computer game, respectively. It's the ways in which they're not quite what they seem that you get this ambiguous blurring of what they are, and the combination of all those factors makes them into something new. They're part retro game compilation, as I said, giving you a whole bunch of ports and things to play around with. They're also part documentary, giving you many video interviews of people who worked on these games sharing their memories about working on the things. They're also part coffee table book, given that the whole presentation is chapter based and you just read along a timeline of the history of the thing in question. They are all of these things but not quite pinned down to totally being one of these things, and that mix creates something special.
Atari 50 goes for macrocosm, the rise and fall of the first major video game company. It doesn't just go for the bullet points of "Pong, VCS, 5200, crash" either. This is an incredibly thorough look at the early days of computer video gaming, and even beyond that. You get a handful of games from each era of Atari to play, giving you just enough of an interactive snapshot of the gaming ethos of the time that pairs along with everything to read and watch about the history of the company. The Making Of Karateka, by contrast, is intimately microcosmic. It is telling the story of Jordan Mechner, a kid tinkering around with his Apple computer in the 80's who eventually struck gold with the titular Karateka. Whereas Atari 50 shows you the history of the company, Making Of Karateka gives you a glimpse into the game design workshop of one guy. You don't just get to see how Karateka was made, but you get to see the making of an unreleased arcade action game called Deathbounce at every step, from the various prototypes to actual correspondence and feedback from computer gaming publishers. Then you get to see all of that for Karateka.
If all that wasn't enough, Digital Eclipse goes above and beyond in updating things to pack these collections to the gills. For Atari 50, they not only made like a dozen glossy remasters of famous Atari games like Haunted House or Yar's Revenge, but they made things like an original game medley themed around vector games. Or the infamous Swordquest Airworld. That's an Atari 2600 game that was going to be part 4 of this big contest they had going, but the 1983 video game crash saw it cancelled. Digital Eclipse made the fucking game. From scratch. Making Of Karateka not only has all the iterative versions of Deathbounce, and a handful of varied ports of Karateka, but it has full remasters of both Deathbounce and Karateka. You can even play Karateka with director's commentary for both versions. Holy fucking shit. I have been rambling on for ages about these two games, and I could do more but I'll cut it here. This is a bold step forward for video game preservation, history, compilation, and just plain telling the stories of interesting designers. In 2024 Digital Eclipse are going to give the Karateka approach to game designer Jeff Minter, famous for making Tempest 2000 among other things, and I can't wait to experience that story. For now, these games are intriguing, bold... and the best experiences I had this year in computer gaming.
...AND THE REST
So if you don't know the drill, this space is for all the games that I don't have a whole lot to say about, or which already slot into a category that I gave an award for. They're good games and worth talking about, and I played a lot more for which I have practically nothing to say and aren't being included on the list. Those will remain a mystery forever, but here's a quick rundown, in chronological order by how I played them.
Wario Land 3 (Game Boy Color)
I have beaten this game before, a long time ago, but in February it came out on the Switch Online Game Boy service and I sank two days straight into playing the hell out of it. It did something right to hook me like that, and I loved its exploration and bite-sized challenges, while also enjoying how it had just enough fairness to not get totally lost in it. Hell yeah, Wario. You go get that treasure.
Mega Man The Sequel Wars: Episode Red (Genesis)
So this was a wild thing. Someone loved the Wily Wars versions of Mega Mans 1 through 3 that they're working on making Genesis remakes of the remaining NES games. This one in particular is Mega Man 4 in the Genesis style, and I got to play it as Roll. Her main attack is a melee broom, which changes up a classic like Mega Man 4 just enough that it fucked with me a little. I appreciated the shakeup, and that Mega Drive aesthetic leads to a great presentation. It was a fun and new way to play this one!
Doom 64 (Switch)
I played this over the summer in the anime den in Gander since I got it for like, 2 bucks. It was well worth that, and a pretty good Doom game that scratched that satisfying itch of running around and shooting demons with a shotgun. It has its moments of puzzle solving which got absolutely cryptic at times, annoying me to look up a Youtube walkthrough only to discover I had to know to press at this random wall to open a secret switch. The boss fights, particularly the final one, were also some shit. Even so, damn fine shooter game.
S.C.A.T. (NES)
HA HA HA WHY, THAT ACRONYM SPELLS OUT A WORD THAT CAN ALSO MEAN POOPY!!! This game isn't poopy, though, as it's a fun little shooter in Forgotten Worlds style that I enjoyed. It's a classic "short but hard" game where the first three levels were easy but the last two took me ages to crack. I had to be fucking perfect and memorize every one of the 12 billion things trying to kill me in order to stand any chance. I got it, though, and that was an interesting bit of hard game friction.
Pokemon Puzzle Challenge (Game Boy Color)
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I'm not that much of a puzzle game gamer, but there was something about this specific game that grabbed my attention for a hot minute in August. It was relaxing but also challenging, and the Pokemon flavor combined with the Game Boy Color aesthetic must have helped with my enjoyment of the game. It is just Panel de Pon, after all, and that game's been on practically every Nintendo system since the SNES. Even so, I did enjoy myself, and maybe one day I'll be able to beat these crazy blocks on Hard mode.
Monster Hunter Stories 2 (Switch)
This is a game I have yet to beat, but I played a few hours of it after getting a great deal on it during a Grand Bank adventure. Good synergy with the last entry, as this basically turns Monster Hunter into Pokemon and lets you befriend the monsters instead of killing them. That different take on a series I like intrigued me, and it's got a good vibe to the combat so far. I am impressed enough to want to poke at it again someday, as it's quite cute and fluffy for what it is.
Sweet Home (Famicom)
I would have given this best RPG, but Final Fantasy Legend II was right there. This, however, is a masterpiece of prototypical survival horror, a dissonance of tone in every aspect to it and one I was proud to conquer at long last. Luckily, I wrote a great deal about it for the Halloween marathon, so do check that out to see this gem get its dues from me.
Marvel Super Heroes (Saturn)
Yes, here's your other peek into the future world of Saturn that we'll be getting to someday. The Saturn was very good at 2D games and this is a very good mid-90's Capcom fighting game on it. It's perfectly balanced, only getting really hard on Dr. Doom and Thanos, but a game I can still have a breeze with. It's not insurmountable, and I even got a 1CC on it. It's nice, especially with the 6 button style controller I got for playing Saturn on PC.
Karnov (NES)
On this list solely for how fucking tough it was to beat, live on my stream for Monday Night Frezno. It felt like a Ghosts n Goblins experience in how it demanded precise perfection at every point in its short levels, and it was a little janky in places as well, but the sudden shock and satisfaction at my realization that I beat the game was something else.
Sonic 1 Origins (Switch)
Getting Saturnbrained also kind of Segabrained me too, and so I started playing some Sonic games at the end of the year. Beating the original Sonic on the Origins collection in Anniversary Mode with Amy was something else. No, it's not the original 1991 game, but to me it was a fresh and fun remaster of it with lots of nice little QoL features that make the game feel better to me. It's extra nice that they replace lives with coins, which you can use to buy retries at the special stages, but bitching about Sonic special stages would balloon this entry out so let's just end with...
Angels Of Death Chapter 2 (PC)
Hawk McBlade has done it again. Last year for my holiday stream marathon, I was given Angels Of Death, a strange horror adventure game with dark themes and a girl who wants to die paired up with a serial killer to escape a death game together. Chapter 2 of their story was a game I played in one sitting on stream, nearly blowing out my voice giving the lines voice acting, and was an absolutely wild series of death traps and revelations about the characters and how they felt as they tried to deal with the crazed woman out to punish them for their sins. It was a trip, and there are still two chapters to go. Pray for me in December 2024.
That's the list. There's a lot planned for 2024. At the absolute minimum, I have to talk about the new Quantum Leap. The Saturn is one you also know about. There's another thing you don't know about, but one person does. Beyond that, I've no clue what I'll talk about on here... but I do hope you'll join me for whatever it is. You have a safe and happy rest of 2023, enjoy a party to ring in the new year, and I'll be seeing you on the other side of 2024. Until then, lovelies.
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