Game of the Year 2024

Turns out, playing video games with a two-to-fourteen-month infant is challenging. Now, that’s not a complaint (it also turns out that having a child is very rewarding, if exhausting), but it does change how I play games and in turn what I play. Largely gone are the days of multi-hour weekend gaming sessions that let me knock out a big RPG in a couple weeks; I don’t know that I played any single game for more than 90 minutes at a stretch this year. This means more games that are playable in quick sessions, where I can feel like I’ve made some tangible progress in that span. Handheld and mobile gaming were key.

Playing longer games wasn’t impossible, but I had to find new ways to fit them in. To stay active in the winter months, I like to ride a stationary bike, and gaming while pedaling for forty-ish minutes was an effective way to burn some calories and make some game progress. I expected that slow-paced games were the only ones that would work in this context, but I found that once I got used to game-biking (my own term, please don’t steal it, ^{TM TM TM}) I was able to play even some pretty intense action games. I’ve already got some good bike games queued up for winter ’24–’25.

This year my job intersected with video games in some nostalgia-inducing and even horizon-broadening ways. I had the opportunity to write and edit some lengthy children’s nonfiction books about multiple games and franchises. This got me back into a franchise I loved twenty years ago (Pokémon) and gave me a renewed appreciation for a series I’m still following (Mario). And learning more about Minecraft and Fortnite helped me understand why those mega-franchises, long a blind spot for me, are so fantastically popular. (Another great way to find time for video games is to play them while on the clock.)

Gaming podcasts were again a big part of my relationship with the gaming hobby in 2024. And now I can actually quantify that! My podcast app of choice, Overcast, added some year-end listening stats, so I can now tell you that there were four gaming podcasts that I listened to for approximately 100 hours or more during the calendar year. I’m mainly there for the banter between personalities I enjoy, but I also like the industry analysis and recommendations for relatively obscure games. Once again this year, a game discovered via podcast ended up on my top five, so the podcast-to-GOTY pipeline remains strong.

OK, with the preamble out of the way, let’s look at some cool games!

5. Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket

Developed by Creatures Inc. and DeNA. Released October 30. Played on iPhone.

A mobile game? Featuring Pokémon? On my game-of-the year list? Yes, I’m surprised too! But let’s back up for a sec and explain what this is.

Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket is essentially a simulation of what it’s like to be Arnold in 1999. You open packs of randomly selected Pokémon cards, hoping to get rare ones to fill out your collection. You use those cards to build decks that are used in competitive play—back then, at Toys R Us; today, in online battles. And you get sucked into a promotional hype machine that makes you want to buy more cards and become alarmingly invested in this franchise about pocket-sized monsters.

Working on books about Pokémon at work primed me for Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket, but there’s another factor at play too. Like a lot of early Pokémon fans, I fell off the series a couple generations in, somewhere in the early 2000s. I know the first 151 Pokémon extremely well, the next batch of 100 reasonably well, and the following 800ish barely at all. The initial selection of cards in the game is very heavily weighted toward those initial 151, so I believe the game’s pretty squarely targeted at those like me—millennials who were onboard at the start, lost interest, but by now are in their thirties and might just be willing to spend a handful of dollars in a mobile game. You got me, Creatures Inc.! Well done.

(The flip side of this is that as they release more expansions for this game, they’ll presumably begin using more of those latter-day Pokémon. Will my interest drop off? We’ll see!)

To be clear, the game is purchase-optional. You get to open two free packs of cards each day, and you can build up a decent collection that way. But you can also get their premium pass for ten bucks a month, which gives you an additional pack per day and some other bonus goodies. (Yes, I’m on a three-pack-a-day habit.) For me this has been well worth it, considering how sharply the game taps into my childhood love of opening booster packs, arranging my cards into protective binders, and looking at those cards adoringly.

The battling aspect in Pokémon Trading Card Pocket is decent, using a simplified version of the physical card game’s ruleset to speed up matches. But for me the main attraction is opening those packs and seeing what’s inside. And here the developers knew exactly what they were doing. When you open a pack, you’re presented with a carousel of gorgeously rendered 3D booster packs you can choose from. Once you tap on a pack to choose it, you swipe your finger along the top as if you’re slicing off the packaging. Then the cards are shown one-by-one; swiping away the top card reveals the next one. You can even tilt the stack of five cards slightly to see if any have the shiny edge characteristic of a rare card. This pageantry is entirely for show—apparently the game determines what the cards will be the moment you decide to open a pack based on rigid internal percentages, and all the subsequent actions or decisions have no effect—but what a show! The developers’ effective deployment of nostalgia gets Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket into the number-five slot on my list.

4. Minishoot’ Adventures

Developed by SoulGame Studio. Released April 2. Played on Steam Deck.

Here’s this year’s heard-about-it-on-a-podcast game. This is one of those smaller titles that might never have surfaced for me if I weren’t plugged into games media. I’m super glad it did. Minishoot’ Adventures is a top-down game where you explore a large world, fight against enemies, and discover items and abilities that help you become stronger and unlock new areas. Sounds like a classic Zelda game—except that, also, you’re a spaceship, and all the enemies shoot intricate patterns of energy bullets at you.

Mashing up bullet-hell combat with the template of a Zelda game is an inspired concept, and the developers at SoulGame Studio live up to that promise with incredible execution. Minishoot’ has a charming, colorful, cartoony look; I’ve seen some complaints that it looks like the cheap Flash games of yore, but I think that its clean style gives it a readability that is vital for managing the bullet-hell chaos. (It kinda reminds me of amazing indie Nintendo Switch launch title Graceful Explosion Machine, which dates to the era before the Nintendo eShop was junked up with shovelware. And another thing—I really wish Minishoot’ would have come to Switch by now. I played it on my wife’s Steam Deck, which was a fine experience, but I’d love if this great game were available to a wider audience. OK, mid-entry rant over.)

The controls are as smooth and responsive as you’d want in a twitchy action game like this. The power-ups are useful and worthwhile; there’s none of the lame “+3% to some random stat” stuff you see in other games. With upgrades like improving your movement speed or bullet range, you immediately understand how they’ll affect gameplay and are excited to level up and get them. And the map design is clever enough to stand up to those classic Zelda maps; it’s such a satisfying gameplay loop to see a secret just out of reach, get an ability that makes it accessible, and then return to grab it. Minishoot’ Adventures makes that happen a lot.

I’m an editor by trade, so let’s talk about that weird apostrophe in the game’s title. It’s confounding, but there is an explanation. In an online post, one of the developers says,

The title comes from the contraction of Minimalist Shooter Adventure => Minishoot’ Adventure. It might be completely dumb tho! We just grew fond of it... Not sure if we can still change it, or if I would have better ideas.

Evidently they either couldn’t change it or never had any better ideas. I think it probably is completely dumb, but I also kind of grew fond of its weirdness.

Grammatical gripes aside, Minishoot’ Adventures rocks. It’s a twelve-hour adventure that feels like a complete satisfying package, and it was like fifteen bucks. The game handily earns the number-four spot on my 2024 list.

3. Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth

Developed by Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio. Released January 25. Played on PlayStation 5.

Here’s the sequel to my number-three game of 2020, Yakuza: Like a Dragon. While that game brought a serviceable new style of turn-based fighting to the long-running series, this one features the most enjoyable turn-based combat I’ve ever experienced in a video game. During a battle you are able to move freely within a set radius, and this positioning enables you to interact with other characters and in-world objects to perform combo moves, special attacks, and more. It’s dynamic, it’s engaging, and it finds a perfect way to mesh together the beat-em-up and turn-based styles, letting the player participate more actively in what can often be a pretty hands-off battle system.

And so the battle system is great mechanically—but it’s also incredibly funny. Busting out breakdancing moves, whacking people with surfboards, and calling in a movie director to order an unsafe fiery stunt are three of the many, many amusing ways you can attack enemies. The developers managed to put a genuinely hilarious and on-brand wrapping around what would otherwise be pretty standard-type RPG attacks, and combined with the super-solid core mechanics, this kept the battles fresh for dozens of hours.

One of the highlights of Infinite Wealth is the new setting. Historically this series has been set in Japan, with the games almost always taking players to the fictional Tokyo district of Kamurocho and usually also venturing to other parts of the country. But here we spend a good chunk of the game in Hawaii, which offers a delightful chance to look at US culture through the lens of Japanese developers. As with the franchise’s Japan, it’s an exaggerated presentation rather than a documentary approach, but this hits much different when it’s a culture you’re familiar with. The game goes surprisingly hard on issues such as police corruption and homelessness, while at the same time having a lot of fun with the Hawaiian setting. You can go into a first-person mode while walking around, and I found myself looking through shops and other areas that way to get a closer look at the game’s Hawaii.

As with all the Like a Dragon releases, Infinite Wealth is rife with mini games and diversions, including some enormous ones that could genuinely be games of their own. The one I got drawn into was DonDoko Island, which takes you to a rundown resort island that you slowly clean up, develop, and rid of bad guys. It’s essentially a little Animal Crossing or city-building game, and it’s all pretty much optional. I spent probably a dozen hours in this side game gathering resources, crafting objects, collecting bugs, placing buildings, and beating up trash-dumping pirates to get my island to the max level. (The reward for doing so, on top of a heap of cash that enjoyably trivializes the economy of the main game, is a ridiculous orbital-laser attack you can deploy in battle that enjoyably trivializes most combat encounters.) The DonDoko Island stuff ended up being great game-biking fodder.

The story in the game is mostly solid but not as strong as past games in the franchise. The side quests were, as usual for a Like a Dragon game, funny and surprisingly touching throughout. But the main narrative started slow and (especially) dragged in the back half. It started to lose me so much in the final hours that I just blasted through those sections to get to the next combat encounters, which were still engaging. The story not only went on too long but also got so convoluted that my interest faded. Still, even if the story didn’t hold up as one of the series’s best, the gameplay, setting, and tone of Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth puts the game at number three on this year’s list.

2. Balatro

Developed by LocalThunk. Released February 20. Played on Nintendo Switch.

Balatro takes some of the basic concepts and theming of poker and uses them to create something that, unlike poker, is actually fun to play. In this game, you draw cards (like, regular playing cards) and try to construct poker hands that you play to earn points. Playing three of a kind gives you more points than a pair, but a full house gives more than both, that sort of thing.

Two factors add additional levels of strategy. First, you are also collecting Joker cards along the way, each of which modifies hand values or multipliers or other aspects of the game. And second, over the course of a game you are able to deeply manipulate the composition of your deck—adding bonuses and multipliers to individual cards, adding new cards, or destroying cards outright. With the use of these powers you are able to bend and twist and break the rules of poker in delightful ways, and you pretty much have to if you want to reach the game’s highest levels.

Balatro really nails an approach to game design that appeals to me, and which I wrote about in last year’s list: wide-open gameplay with clearly defined aims. With the zillions of decisions you can make about your hands and Jokers and deck, there’s a tremendous amount of space for creative synergy. But at the same time there’s a rigid, mathematically defined set of goals you are trying to achieve. To clear a round, you simply need to beat a given score. The game gives you enough control that you can generally overcome bad-luck card draws, striking an impressive balance between chance and skill.

“Breaking” the game feels awesome. In early runs, you’re happy if you get through the game’s standard 8 rounds with a 100,000-point par score. But as you unlock new Jokers and gain a better understanding of how they can work together, things get nuts. For instance, the Four Fingers Joker lets you create a flush with four cards instead of five. Then you can add the Smeared Joker, with which Hearts and Diamonds count as the same suit, and Clubs and Spades count as the same suit. Suddenly you’re able to play flushes with essentially every hand you draw. You can use the Supernova Joker to increase your overall multiplier each time you play a given hand, in this case a flush. Add the Tribe Joker to give you a 2x multiplier when playing any flush, and mix in some card-multiplying modifiers, and you’re soon scoring potentially millions of points per hand. Finding these synergies was one of the most exhilarating things in video games this year. In a moment, when the cards lined up right, you could go from struggling through a run to finishing it effortlessly. The rush of seeing astronomical scores multiply onscreen puts Balatro at number two on my 2024 list.

1. Astro Bot

Developed by Team Asobi. Released September 6. Played on PlayStation 5.

Astro Bot is the latest in a series of games made by the Sony-owned Team Asobi. The studio’s releases—The Playroom, The Playroom VR, Astro Bot Rescue Mission, and Astro’s Playroom—have largely been small-scale tech demos meant to show off the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5. They star a cute little robot named Astro Bot and showcase graphical capabilities, camera accessories, VR headsets, controller features, etc. The first two were mini game collections, but beginning with Astro Bot Rescue Mission they have been 3D platformers. The only one I had previous experience with was Astro’s Playroom, which came included with the PS5. It’s a colorful and creative platformer that is built around the capabilities of the PS5’s Dual Sense controller, using stuff like the motion sensing and resistive triggers. It didn’t make my top five that year, I think in part because it was just a handful of hours long, but it was a tantalizing look at Asobi’s capability. I wasn’t alone in hoping the studio would flesh out that concept into a big standalone game.

And they did! Four years later, here’s Astro Bot, a fully realized platformer that really blew me away. While Astro’s Playroom built its game mechanics around the PS5 controller’s gimmicks, Astro Bot has the freedom to go in new directions; the power-ups and transformations are incredibly novel and inventive and fun to play. Sometimes you turn into a giant sponge, which makes you huge and powerful and lets you squeeze yourself out to squirt water to grow plants. Other times you slow down time so that you can win slot machines and jump on deadly flying knives to traverse gaps. And sometimes you can shrink yourself to micro-size at will, so you feel like you’re playing Toy Commander or Tinykin or something. These are great, and there are several more.

To go with those gameplay mechanics, Asobi created some spectacular levels. There’s a wide mix of themes, as is standard in platformers (fire, snow, jungle, you know the drill), but they find super clever ways to make each level feel fresh, satisfying to play with the available power-up, and nicely balanced difficulty-wise. The feel of Astro Bot’s ice skating, with its smooth movement and subtle controller vibration, and which was also in Astro’s Playroom, is instantly enjoyable whenever it happens in the game’s ice levels. And even the underwater level, which I normally dislike in 3D platformers, is actually pretty good here. Clearing the levels is fairly straightforward, but they also have multiple kinds of hidden items to find, and there are small side levels that are pure, condensed platforming challenges. Some of those were really dang hard, but usually not in a way that felt unfair.

The game’s presentation is unbelievably polished. Obviously the developers know their way around the PS5, what with being an internal Sony studio and already having made Astro’s Playroom. But still, Astro Bot looks strikingly great on the console, and there were a lot of moments that made me consciously stop for a moment to admire what I was looking at. Several of those moments involved the developers’ audacity in just putting hundreds of physics objects—sprinkles, gems, leaves, bolts, dice, whatever—onscreen and having them rustle and jostle and react to your movement in a way that would have blown minds on a previous console. I often took a quick break from the level to just bump all that stuff around; this is one of the simple pleasures of Astro Bot. The music is likewise excellent, and the main theme remains stuck in my head weeks after beating the game.

There’s one important aspect I haven’t mentioned yet, and it’s that in some sense, Astro Bot is a massive love letter to the history of PlayStation. Throughout the game, you’re rescuing fellow bots in each of the levels, and many of those bots are costumed like characters from across the PlayStation library, ranging from the mainstream to the niche to the obscure. Yes, there are God of War bots and Resident Evil bots and Horizon: Zero Dawn bots. But there are also Jumping Flash and Ace Combat bots! And there are a lot of them I didn’t even recognize, so deep were they drawn from PlayStation lore.

I liked this stuff a lot; the designs of the bot-characters are fun and funny, and they have neat little animations that reference their games, and you get to do some enjoyable light exploration in the hub world with the help of your growing collection of bots. I can understand how someone could see all this more cynically as a commercial for the PlayStation Brand, and part of me does wish that Asobi would make a wholly original platformer that’s untethered from all the preexisting IP. But at the same time, they integrate those characters so well, and the game design is so incredible apart from those elements, that it didn’t bug me. They’re not relying on the crossover stuff; it really does feel like a fun bonus on top of a well-designed game. And at the end of the day, players have genuine emotional connections to their favorite games from the past 30 years of PlayStation, so seeing them in this celebratory way can be a genuinely emotional and enjoyable experience. I know I was surprisingly moved when I found the Ace Combat bot. For that and many more moments when the game put a smile on my face, Astro Bot earns the top spot on my 2024 game-of-the-year list.

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Other Notable Stuff I Played This Year

Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon

In last year’s list, I mentioned there were a few 2023 games I didn’t have a chance to play before compiling my rankings. One of them was Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon. Turns out, it’s a real winner!

This is a fast-paced mech action game by FromSoftware, creators of the Dark Souls series, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring. I’ve never enjoyed those games, so I had little interest in this one when I heard it was on the horizon. If this was going to be the same style of gameplay, only fighting robots instead of weird ghouls, then it’d be a pass from me. However, Armored Core VI is not only not that, it’s actually extremely up my alley!

Before the Souls series, FromSoftware was known for the Armored Core games on PlayStation; I had never played them. My main mech exposure in that era was MechWarrior 2 on PC and later Robotech Battlecry on GameCube. I never got deeply into those titles, but now, in 2023/2024, I found myself extremely engaged by Armored Core VI. The game combines the over-the-top Japanese sci-fi action aesthetics of the Ace Combat franchise with the tightly controlled quick-dodging 3D bullet hell action of Returnal. Building and customizing my mech was a neat feature, though I didn’t engage with it a whole lot—I mostly found one build that worked for me (I’ll take the dual Gatling Guns, please!) and stuck with it for most of the game. But the pure fun of the gameplay, including the steep but feasible challenge of the bosses, hooked me.

Resident Evil 4

Like everyone, I loved Resident Evil 4 when it originally came out on GameCube in 2005. The third person over-the-shoulder action horror game changed the formula of the Resident Evil series, marking a major shift from the fixed camera angles and limited ammunition of the previous games. It remains the only game in the franchise that I’ve ever really gotten into, and one of my favorite games ever.

In recent years Capcom has been remaking old Resident Evil games for modern consoles, and in 2023 it was Resident Evil 4’s turn. I was skeptical of the need for a remake—after all, 2005 is still pretty recent, right, guys? It's like five years ago, ten tops? Oh jeez.

In the end, the 15-year remake cycle works out well. Besides the massive obligatory upgrade in graphics and sound, the developers made lots of smart story and gameplay changes that make the game feel not just modern but better. The controls are easier to handle, there’s a smartly restrained crafting system, there’s a new parry mechanic, and the story is expertly paced to break up the big action sequences. The game’s also rewarding to fans of the original—there’s plenty of stuff for longtime RE4-heads to recognize, along with lots that has been tweaked to freshen things up.

I actually tried the demo of Resident Evil 4 when it came out early in 2023 and mildly enjoyed it, but didn’t feel compelled to buy the full game. It felt very similar to the original, the shooting felt too loose and inaccurate, and the idea of breakable knives was annoying. Not until the end of the year, while listening to many Game of the Year wrap-up podcasts, did I hear enough concentrated, rapturous praise to make me buy it. As soon as it went on sale, I snagged it—I’m super glad I did. The Resident Evil 4 remake had an almost impossibly high standard to live up to, and the developers nailed it.

Peglin

Peglin combines the pachinko-like gameplay of the classic Peggle, which I played a ton of on my iMac G5 circa 2009 (i.e., shooting a ball at a screen full of arranged pegs and then scoring based on how the bounces go), with a turn-based roguelike RPG. This cute indie has a charming pixel art style and stars an adorable goblin, and it finds clever ways to tweak its simple premise. You can collect balls with different abilities (multi ball, bonus multipliers, etc.), you can get power-ups that change the nature of the pegs on the board (making them bouncier, making them worth more points, etc.), and you can get relics that give you special abilities for the duration of the run (heal for every peg hit, earn more points when low on health, etc.).

“Points” here are synonymous with attack damage; your goblin deals damage to enemies in a battle scene at the top of the screen based on your scoring in the pachinko stuff at the bottom of the screen. I had a lot of fun with Peglin and managed to finish a complete run once, but for me the element of luck in the game balance felt just slightly off. Whereas in Balatro it felt like you could strategize around the element of chance, in Peglin it sometimes became frustrating when, say, the unpredictable sixth bounce in a shot went a bad way. There’s still a lot of skill to the game, but I didn’t like how the outcome could occasionally slip out of your control.

Helldivers 2

Helldivers 2 was a pretty big deal in the gaming world this year; the cooperative third-person sci-fi shooter kind of came out of nowhere, releasing almost a decade after its predecessor. Heavily influenced by the tone of the film Starship Troopers, it pits up to four human players against hordes of robots or space-bugs. I picked it up after hearing a lot about it on podcasts, and was able to play some rounds with a friend online. It was fun! The gunplay is smooth and satisfying; cool abilities called stratagems let players call in airstrikes, supply drops, and mech suits; and the satirical space-dictatorship tone is funny. (There’s a lot of talk of “managed democracy.”)

The only problem: rounds can go thirty-plus minutes, and that much uninterruptable online gaming time is tough to wrangle these days. I also am not super into using voice chat with random players, and that seems pretty crucial in coordinating your efforts, especially on high-intensity missions. Still, I enjoyed my half-dozen or so sessions of Helldivers 2.

Fortnite

In my line of work, children’s nonfiction publishing, I get to learn a lot about a broad range of topics, including ones that I never knew could be so interesting. Portable toilet cleaning, the history of idioms, birds in general—all were fascinating to research and write about. Well, we can now add Fortnite to the list.

I of course was familiar with Fortnite as a fixture of the gaming landscape, but had never seriously played it. When the project came across my desk, I fired up the game to familiarize myself. Turns out, this extremely successful game is quite fun to play! After an annoying couple of starter matches against dumb bots (during which the game tries to determine your skill level for matchmaking, I guess), I finally faced off against other human players. As the number of players in each battle-royale match dwindled, I genuinely felt the way I did back in 2017 when PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds first hit it big—my heart would race as I found myself in the top 15, then top 8, then top 3 in the ever-shrinking circle. I even managed a couple wins, which was super thrilling. I was also surprisingly entertained by the game’s shameless filtering, reprocessing, and extrusion of pop culture. Reader, I laughed aloud when serial killer Michael Myers started hovering around wearing War Machine’s jetpack wings. That moment was well worth every V-Buck.

Pokémon Legends: Arceus

I was a big-time Pokémon kid—caught all 251 in Silver and everything—but had dropped off the franchise pretty hard in the last fifteenish years. I did check out Pokémon Sword to see what the franchise was like on Switch, but the series mostly dropped back off my radar after that. Naturally, writing about those pocketable monsters brought back memories, and I got the urge to play a Pokémon game.

I settled on 2022’s Pokémon Legends: Arceus, which was a bit of an odd choice in that it’s a significant departure from most of the Pokémon games. In it, you have warped a century into the past, to a place where Pokémon are treated mostly like scary wild animals rather than as the lovable partners they will later become. In past games, you walk through tall grass and randomly encounter wild Pokémon; in this one, you explore open environments where you actually observe Pokémon milling around just doing their thin. You can decide whether to catch them, battle them, or just leave them alone. This style of gameplay has always been the dream of Pokémon fans of a certain age, so I was interested to check it out.

The result is a very solid first draft. It’s cool that there are open areas—but those spaces are pretty empty. It’s cool that you can do quests for people in a true RPG style—but those quests are pretty repetitive. It’s cool that the story engages with the history of the Pokémon world—but that story is crammed with too many cutscenes with overlong dialogue. It’s cool that you can craft items—wait, no it’s not. It’s not cool; in fact I mostly didn’t like or use the crafting.

But what is cool is that Pokémon Legends: Arceus, by rethinking the traditional Pokémon formula, ends up being a streamlined, simplified adventure that ditches plenty of the extraneous features that have built up over the decades. This was a fun way to dip back into the Pokémon universe this year, and if the developers can refine these ideas for future releases I’ll be back onboard.

Turmoil

Turmoil was a key Apple Arcade find during those months when I was spending a lot of time in a nursery with a drowsy or sleeping baby. In this iOS game you drill into the ground exploring for oil, then design a maximally efficient setup of pumps and pipes and wagons to extract and transport that petroleum. At the same time, you have to carefully time when you sell it, as the market price is always fluctuating. Turmoil is pretty quick to learn but has a surprising amount of depth, and the randomly generated levels give it a lot of replayability. (Especially with its daily challenges, where all players get the same level and compete to get the highest score.) Also, what a great name for a petroleum-themed game, wow!

Beetle Adventure Racing

A big activity for me during early 2024, when it was too cold to walk outside with the baby, was going to shopping malls with her to get some stroller walking action and checking out used game stores for additions to my Nintendo 64 collection. Sometimes these were dirt-cheap sports games bought for novelty and perhaps to pad my collection numbers. (Hello, NFL Quarterback Club ’99!) But sometimes I picked up something that turned out to be legitimately good. This happened with Beetle Adventure Racing.

I’d heard of the game way back when, as it had been on the cover of Nintendo Power, and I vaguely knew it had a “hey, this is actually pretty good” aura about it, but I was still surprised by its excellence. It’s a racing game with big, fantastical, shortcut-filled tracks in which all the cars are different-colored Volkswagen New Beetles. The level design, the driving feel, and especially the soundtrack are all terrific. The one pitfall is the absolutely brutal AI rubber-banding, which can make the (really long) races feel pretty unfair at higher difficulty levels.

satOlite

On occasion for me, the Playdate has been more of a neat thing to look at than a machine on which to actively play games. But I had a mini Playdate renaissance this year, checking out a handful of new games. Among them was satOlite, a space-themed tower defense game in which you use the crank to place your defenses in orbit around various planets on a 2D playing field. The simple, stark graphics look great on the Playdate’s screen. The synth soundtrack provides an accompaniment to the visuals that’s a good thematic match and perfectly fits my taste. And there’s actually a compelling, simple storyline playing out alongside satOlite’s hour or two of tower defense action. This is basically my ideal Playdate game, and it came dangerously close to cracking my top five for 2024.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6

Microsoft spent $70 billion on Activision Blizzard, and as a result I played the new Call of Duty game this year! The acquisition means that Activision’s shooter series now comes out on Microsoft’s Game Pass subscription service, which I already had, and so I downloaded Call of Duty: Black Ops 6’s many dozens of gigabytes and gave it a try. I’ve dipped sporadically into the series over the years, enjoying the early World War II ones, getting super deep into Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare for a while around 2008, and then playing a little here and there in subsequent years. This one seems like a good one! The Multiplayer and especially Zombie modes were so fast-paced and complicated (presumably weighed down by a decade-plus of adding new features) as to be mostly inscrutable to me, but I had a really good time with the campaign mode. It’s set in the early 1990s and features not just the series’s trademark action set pieces but also more ambitious gameplay segments, some of which even involve non-gun spy stuff. I especially liked the one open-world level that felt slightly Far Cry-esque, except with a sensibly sized map and the familiar COD gunplay. The developers found surprising ways to keep this old franchise feeling fresh, at least for an occasional player like myself.

RoboCop: Rogue City

RoboCop: Rogue City has been on my wishlist for a while, and I finally bought it on a Black Friday sale. I’ve seen the RoboCop movies and liked them a lot (especially the first), but I wouldn’t describe myself as a superfan of the franchise. Still, what I heard about the game sounded compelling. It was a modestly budgeted game with a passionate team, and it was more than a straight action game, putting you into RoboCop’s heavy metal shoes to do more than just blast Detroit-based baddies. The game extremely lived up to these expectations.

To be clear, the game has notable issues. The presentation quality is wildly inconsistent; most environments and some characters (really just Robo himself) are impressive, but the animations generally look quite cheap, and there are assorted graphical glitches that crop up repeatedly in the cutscenes. It’s clear this isn’t a game with a triple-A budget.

But the passion of the developers easily outshines those flaws. The storyline feels authentic to the violent satire of the films, we get to genuinely delve into RoboCop’s psyche, and they actually got real Peter Weller to do Robo’s voice (his performance helps sell this as a legit entry in the franchise.) The action stuff is actually kind of unique, with RoboCop’s lumbering movement giving the combat a more deliberate pace than many of today’s ultra quick shooters. And the guns, in the tradition of the films, are extremely punchy and violent in their effects. Especially as you earn upgrades for Robo’s sidearm, the fighting in the game starts to feel like a RoboCop power fantasy, at least on the normal difficulty level. The non-combat stuff that breaks up these action bits is interesting and often funny, showing you another side of the metal lawman. You’ll issue parking tickets, catch graffiti artists, and rescue cats. You’ll even walk around the precinct getting cops to sign a get-well card for one of their injured coworkers. Mixing this stuff into the game makes it clear that the developers cared about the franchise and weren’t looking to merely cash in on the IP to make another generic shooter. RoboCop: Rogue City came out just last year, and if I’d played it then, it might have made it into my 2023 top five.

Still playing, won’t finish in time

I’ve begun playing a handful of 2024 games that I won’t be able to finish before the end of the year; I’ve put only a handful of hours into each, but I like what I’ve seen so far. These might have had a shot at the 2024 list if I had access to a time machine or something. Too many games, not enough time! Stay tuned to next year’s Other Notable Stuff I Played This Year section to see if they ended up rating a mention.

• Final Fantasy VII Rebirth
• UFO 50
• Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
• Mario & Luigi Brothership