Background I’ve been emulating games since finding NESticle in the late 90s. A huge amount of my gaming diet of the early 2000s was spent tinkering with emulators, graphical settings, following dev builds, endlessly hunting for the best gamepad to use, and generally catching up on multiple generations worth of games I missed in the aisles of Blockbuster Video. In recent years, though, I’ve been more interested in having a single device hooked to my TV that can reliably emulate as many systems as possible, in a way I can reasonably fit in with the rest of my consoles.

2023 was a truly ludicrous year of gaming. Maybe not on the scale of 1998, but man there were a whole lot of great games. Best Indie: A very close toss-up between Dredge, Cocoon, and Sea of Stars… but my heart says Sea of Stars if I had to choose. (Edit: Suika Game and Cobalt Core also get big big big late honorable mentions, but Sea of Stars was still the one I enjoyed the most.

In the 2022 EOY Round-Up, I mentioned plans to run through as many of the Good Zelda Games as possible leading up to Tears of the Kingdom in May, to provide my 4-year-old kiddo with sufficient background context for the game he’ll be watching me play for a good chunk of the year. It went great. . . but it’s also where the vast majority of my game playing has gone for the first half of the year.

2022 was a pretty solid year for gaming. Less solid for me than others, because Elden Ring isn’t my jam, and because Ragnarok wasn’t like, the best game in the history of time to me, but still solid all around. It was an easy one for picking my Game of the Year, though. Without question: Tunic. No game has so completely consumed me in recent history like Tunic did. No game has so perfectly captured the delightful experience of a sprawling ARG within the walls of its own game since Fez or maybe The Witness, but I feel Tunic did it the best.

Hi. I’m doing a website again. By Accident.

There was an expectation that 2021 was going to be the year that all the stuff that had its last-mile upended by Covid would finally come out . . and that hasn’t happened. Some good stuff did come out, though. All my top games for 2021 were from not just Indie but incredibly ridiculously small Indie teams. Two were from straight up solo devs: SNKRX and Cyber Shadow. The other is from a partnership (though, heavily augmented by contractors): Death’s Door.

Summer Games Fest - Forgettable. Only stand-out games were the Borderlands Spinoff, Metal Slug Tactics from dotemu and Elden Ring which . . idk I guess I’ll try it. Dark Souls et al have never really interested me. Ubisoft - Snorefest. Sequels and DLC and idk a new xtreme sports game. Devolver - YES, as usual. The new retro shooter from the Gato Roboto team looked great. Trek to Yomi looked a bit too much like “Ghost of 2d-shima” but it’s not like Suckerpunch is the only studio allowed to try and ape Kurosawa’s aesthetic in a videogame.

I played a whole mess of great games in 2020. But what 2020 game was best 2020 game?!!? Toss up between Ghost of Tsushima and Hades. Control was also pretty great, but it wasn’t a 2020 game, just a game I played in 2020, same with Witcher 3. (Though, Witcher 3 wouldn’t have ranked. Control probably would have.) Honorable mentions to DRG and Cyberpunk for being hilariously broken games I’m still enjoying the hell out of.