My favourite gaming experiences 2024

31 Dec 2024

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Ah, 2024. A year in which I vowed to work on my personal projects more, but instead spent about 70% of the time feeling burned out and getting nowhere. You might expect that the time that I spent not writing blog posts this year (hello, GOTY 2023 exactly two posts before this one) could have instead been spent experiencing more video games than usual, but unfortunately it didn’t seem to shake out that way. Indeed, I initially struggled to recall more than three or four games that I played this year, but I think I’ve now managed to put together a respectable list, including one that is competing for a spot on my best-of-all-time list!

Like most of my years in the last decade, 2024 has been centred around my PC. Whilst I used my Switch a fair bit last year, it has been gathering dust recently. I did pick up Mario Kart 8 and Digimon Survive at some point, but neither managed to hold my attention for too long. Meanwhile, my PS4 remains a WipEout box, my PS3 is in hibernation until I find a copy of Armored Core 4/Answer, and my PS2 has sadly been superseded by emulators that are capable of HD output.

I say “sadly”, but emulators are pretty flippin’ great. I’ve got a new emulation handheld that satisfies me for everything up to PSP, whilst PS2 and Gamecube are right at home on the computer. Higher resolutions, more controller options, portable home consoles… if you’re not emulating old games, then you should start emulating old games.

In fact, let’s start by talking about a game I emulated.

Armored Core (and Project Phantasma)

Last year, I got into the Armored Core series by playing Armored Core 3, the sixth game in the series. This was intended to be the earliest game that I would play, as I expected the PS1 games to feel too primitive and clunky in the modern era. Unfortunately, I accidentally fell completely head-over-heels in love with the series and now I’ve committed myself to playing through all of the main series games that I can get my hands on.

As it turns out, Armored Core 3 is basically a remake of the original Armored Core, so almost everything that I loved about that game also applies here. Yes, the controls are clunky - even more so than 3 - but that only contributes to the gamefeel of piloting a heavy war machine. I won’t pretend that the gameplay couldn’t be better, but I am comfortable reccommending Armored Core to the right type of mecha pervert.

In terms of mission design, Armored Core beats out Project Phantasma rather handily. Aside from the fact that it has over twice as many of them, there’s also a greater variety in terms of length and objective. A game like Armored Core needs this variety, else the player might be able to breeze through the whole thing with a single build, never having to engage with the garage. Believe me when I say that you should spend as much time building your mech as you do piloting it!

Although Project Phantasma did feel a bit lacking compared to its predecessor, I still found it to be an interesting artefact in the history of the series. Compared to Armored Core, it makes a much greater effort to tell a traditional story, with a corresponding increased focus on cutscenes and recurring characters. I don’t think it quite pulls it off - I dare you to tell me one interesting thing about either Sumika or Stinger - but it’s interesting to see the attempt given how Armored Core 6 would eventually turn out.

A far more successful attempt at writing comes in the form of the Arena, which made its debut in this game. Each opponent you face comes with a little blurb about their history or fighting style, and these tiny snippets of text convey so much more character than appears in the campaign. This is a style of storytelling that Fromsoft would come to be known for in the Souls series, so it’s fun to see it develop here in the early ACs as well. (It may originate back in Kings Field actually, but I’ve not played that.)

Cassette beasts

You know, I played Pokemon Fire Red for the first time this year and really enjoyed it, but when it comes to monster collecting games, my seal of approval must go to Cassette Beasts.

Things that Cassette Beasts does better than Pokemon:

• More character building options…
• Leading to more options in combat
• Greater focus on exploration
• Better animations
• LYRICS COMING IN DURING THE CLIMAX OF A BATTLE

Seriously, I cannot emphasise enough how much fun I had building my team in Cassette Beasts compared to Pokemon. Making moves easily transferrable between monsters was genius because you never feel like you’re locked into a decision that you made twenty hours ago (I learned recently that TMs in Pokemon are once again single use and was stunned into disbelieving silence).

Then once you’re into a fight, you can do so much cool stuff. Having moves fire off automatically at the start of battle, transferring AP between your team, extending status durations into infinity… It feels awesome to find these synergies. Pokemon really needs to make double battles the standard if they want to catch up.

A monster collecting game lives and dies on the quality of its monsters, and luckily Cassette Beasts has an awesome roster. There’s a great balance between cuties, beasties, and weirdos. My favourites are Palangolin, Decibelle, Thwackalope, Robindam, and Arkidd.

Honestly, the only downsides to Cassette Beasts seem to be a direct result of its indie budget. The dungeons, despite having fun conceits, were really short; the open world lacked a bit of variety; the main story was spread a wee bit thin, etc. I reckon that if the devs want to make a sequel, now that they have the engine already built for them, they might make something truly special.

As for now, they have merely made something excellent.

FFXIV Dawntrail

2024 saw the release of the latest expansion for FFXIV, to the same universal acclaim as the previous ones.

Dawntrail was not as loved as Shadowbringers or Endwalker before it, but-

Dawntrail is perhaps the most divisive expansion for FFXIV, but-

Screw you guys, I enjoyed it.

Unfortunately, it’s impossible to talk about Dawntrail without at least lampshading its popular reception, which tends to range from middling to awful depending on who you ask. Now to be fair, I also do not think that Dawntrail represents FFXIV at its best, so I know that plenty of the complaints about it are valid, but that still leaves a good number that frankly baffle me.

I wonder if a decent portion of criticism is born from fatigue of the formula that the devs have been following for a long time now. The fact is that FFXIV has always had really boring gameplay outside of duties and I can’t think of a MSQ that doesn’t have long stretches of poor narrative pacing. With Shadowbringers being absolute peak, and Endwalker wrapping up a decade long saga, there was enough momentum last time to distract from the lacking base gameplay. Dawntrail was never going to be as lucky.

For the record, this is my personal ranking of the FFXIV expansions:

1. Shadowbringers
2. Endwalker
3. Heavensward
4. Dawntrail
5. Stormblood
6. A Realm Reborn

Here’s the thing though… I enjoyed A Realm Reborn. I am satisfied running around doing fetch quests if I get to learn more about this world that I’ve invested so much time into. For me, FFXIV is a cosy game that occasionally rises into emotional climaxes that represent the best writing that the medium is capable of. In this respect, Dawntrail did pretty much exactly what I wanted it to.

Story thoughts (MSQ spoilers ahead!)

In a game that is full of strong men who think that they need to make hard decisions for the fate of the star, it was a nice change to travel with someone as doggedly optimistic as Wuk Lamat. Her bid for the thone is almost waylaid by some bandits and whereas everyone else wants to respond with increased patrols, she recognises that there must be some underlying issue that drives them to criminality. She is most qualified to lead her nation not because her strength or knowledge, but because she genuinely loves and listens to her people.

I also disagree with the idea that Wuk Lamat should have taken a back seat in the second half of the expansion, because she needs Sphene to act as her foil. Both Wuk Lamat and Sphene hold immense love for their people, but Sphene specifically represents what can happen when that love crystallises into an exclusive obsession. Sphene is willing to burn the universe to extend the long tail of her (literally) dead civilisation, and so she inevitably betrays her allies when they are no longer useful for furthering her goals. She is what Wuk Lamat could become if she didn’t also love people she’s yet to meet.

In particular, the final zone of the expansion is one of my favourite narrative sequences in the whole game. I found it to be much more emotionally affecting than Ultima Thule before it, because I knew that the events of Ultima Thule would not be permanent as soon as a character appeared to die offscreen. Meanwhile, the process of closing down Living Memory had actual consequences, both to characters that we know and countless strangers that we do not. I managed to avoid tears, but the weight of each life ended weighed on my soul.

During this sequence, I was reminded of the story of the Warrior of Darkness that we learned from Tesleen back in Norvrandt:

“Warrior of Darkness, servant of death
take care of our souls at our dying breath.
Let sinners and eaters of sin go with thee
That all may return to the sunless sea.”

The Warrior has taken the lives of so many people by the time of Dawntrail, and yet we find ourselves not in the position of a blade cutting down its foes, but as a shepard, who must lead Sphene’s flock unto their natural end. Though each mind in Living Memory appears to live in all ways that should matter, their existance is one that bleeds the lands dry; it is as unsustainable as any primal, and so for the benefit of those who come after, we have to lay them to rest.

Having said that, I do think that there are some things that I would probably like to see done differently.

As much as Krile managed to have an arc over the course of the MSQ, I can’t help but feel that she deserved more focus. Her stated goal is to learn more about her family. She does achieve this goal, and there is an emotional payoff, but I wonder if anything has actually changed about her worldview as a result of it. One revelation in particular should have called into question her very place on Etheirys and directly feeds into her insecurity about her combat prowess, but she never gets to respond to it. I’ll forgive this if, in a patch, she brings it up again, but until then I think it’s a missed opportunity.

(In comparison, I found the level of focus on Erenville to be entirely appropriate. The dude is naturally very reserved, so it makes sense that he ends up being a bit of a wallflower. Besides, I think we got plenty of context to explain why he is the way he is, and why he decides to make a change later on.)

Here’s one complaint that will earn me no friends: Every existing scion bar Krile and maybe the twins should have not made an appearance in Dawntrail. The popular opinion is that the old-guard scions were underused this time round, but I look at their lack of screentime and come to the opposite conclusion. Endwalker wrapped up the ten year story of the Ascians, and I thought that Dawntrail was supposed to be a new start - I was fully on board with a completely new cast of characters. I can only fear that the response to Wuk Lamat will cause the dev team to return to the fan favourites instead of trying new things.

After all, this was supposed to be a criticism of Emet:

Gameplay thoughts

As I said before, the overworld gameplay is the same as it’s ever been in FFXIV. CrossCode showed me how fun and varied an action rpg can be, so I do believe that an overhaul of some kind is sorely needed, but we should also remember that FFXIV is a MMO built upon a rotting codebase and no amount of money being thrown at the problem is going to make it easy to fix.

I would suggest that fellow FFXIV players look to the small things for joy during their time with the game. For example, I normally go out of my way to avoid overworld combat encounters, seeing them purely as a distraction from travelling between objectives, but this time I elected to get into some fights just for the hell of it. In Yak T’el, there are these little beasties that have an arched spine that is covered in spikes:

And I said to myself “If this creature doesn’t have an attack where it spins up like Sonic the Hedgehog, I am quitting the game”.

It was nearly dead and I was nearly despondent when a line AOE marker appeared. On that day, my prayers were answered, and I experienced true joy.

Real credit to the animators and combat designers over at Development Division 3; I expect few players appreciate things like that even though so much work went into it. I myself will be paying more attention to the details in the future.

When it comes to instanced gameplay, the dungeons and trials are as good now as they have ever been. Readable enough that I was able to muddle through my first run without a guide, but involved enough that repeat playthroughs are still fun. I adore Vanguard, not just for the sick music, but because you get to fight Char Aznable on his red motorbike.

Oh, and the first part of the Arcadion raid is just :chef’s kiss:. Every single fight is fun - the chaotic line AOEs at 70ish% in Honey’s battle always get the party panicking - and the presentation is immaculate. The effort to make the announcer respond to the players’ actions goes such a long way to making the experience feel more lively.

Halo (MCC)

I went and played most of the Master Chief Collection this autumn and I had a great time! I had originally attempted to play Reach back when it came out on PC, but something about it didn’t work for me back then. As it turns out, the thing that was missing was that I was playing it with mouse and keyboard, because this time I gave it a go with a controller and I quite simply fell in love.

It’s funny that by using a “worse” input method, I was able to appreciate the games more. Obviously the Halo games were built for controllers, and are therefore optimised for them, but you would think that the precision of a mouse couldn’t be beat!

As a playstation kid, I have no nostalgia for Halo, which means that I am the most qualified person on the planet to offer a definitive rating of the games in the series. So, from best to least best:

1. Halo
2. Reach
3. Halo 2
4. Halo 3
5. ODST

I think this list is so self-explanatory that I don’t need to elaborate on it.

…ok if you insist.

Putting the original Halo at number one is an interesting choice when nostalgia is no factor, but when I review my experiences with the series it is the one that I am most fond of, and I don’t even understand why that is. Every subsequent game is “better” by any objective metric, and yet it is the janky original that captured my heart.

Halo 1 has fun guns and a great set of enemies that all feel mechanically distinct, but the vehicles handle like arse and the level design has both feet firmly in the swamp of “copy-paste rooms arranged in a maze” that was birthed from people trying to copy Doom and not quite succeeding at it. As I said to a friend at the time, it’s a really good job that Halo is so linear, because you would never be able to navigate its levels using only landmarks to guide you. Don’t get me wrong, these combat rooms are well made, but by the tenth time you’ve seen each one, you can’t quite tell if you’re still moving in the right direction.

And yet…look at this dreamy skybox:

The blue-purple-green palette of the Halo rings is so much more colourful than I expected from Halo, and rendered in those comfy sixth generation polygons, it paints a picture that few other games can match. The music is on the other hand, is as good as expected: which is to say, exquisite.

Though I complain about the specific construction of the levels, the overarching pattern - of moving deeper into the ring in the first half of the game, then re-tracing your steps backwards in the second half, culminating in a return to the room where you first woke up - is really clever.

I even like the level “The Library”, which appears to have tortured a whole generation of XBOX owners. Yes, it is a long slog through an absolute wall of enemies, but that is exactly the vibe that a zombie plague like the Flood should invoke, and I welcome Bungie’s commitment to the bit.

Time and time again, I find myself drawn not to mechanical refinement, but to interesting vibes, and the original Halo has those in spades.

I also was not expecting to enjoy the character of the Master Chief as much as I did. Sure, he is every bit the stoic badass that years of adverts had prepared me for, but underneath it there’s a surprising playfulness and wit that gets to shine through every now and then. In Halo 1, there’s the scene where a marine is freaking out about abandoning the Autumn and Chief attempts to reassure him by patting him on the shoulder. He has the famous “Boo” in the second game. And then this scene in Halo 3:

Cortana: “Got an escape plan?”

John Halo: “Thought I’d try shooting my way out. Mix things up a little.”

Such a cute little moment of our soldier boy trying to comfort his friend with a joke.

Another thing I love: the chapter titles. They’re so good, adding yet more character to the whole experience. My personal favourite is from the first game, after you learn the purpose of the rings: “The Gun Pointed at the Head of the Universe”.

My favourite things from each Halo game

Halo

• The overall fantastical vibes
• The way that each level feels like Bungie dropped a bunch of enemies and vehicles into some geometry and let the player loose
• The pistol (expected) and the shotgun (a nice surprise)

Halo 2

• Playing as a cool elite
• The way that the colour palette becomes 200% more vibrant when you leave Earth for a Halo
• The Covenant Carbine and Energy Sword

Halo 3

• How pretty it looked
• That moment when the giant fuck-off ship swoops in above you
• The final romantic drive with the Arbiter

Halo ODST

• Stalking round the deserted city looking for audio logs
  • Seriously, this should have been the whole game

Halo Reach

• The most varied and best gameplay
• The increasingly tragic tone

Metroid: Prime

Metroid Prime is one of the greatest video games ever created.

I have loved the Metroid series ever since I first emulated Zero Mission in preparation for the then-upcoming Metroid Dread. The sharp controls, exploration-based platforming, the lonely atmosphere - they all came together to create a series of games that stood head and shoulders above many others in the same genre. And for some reason, I did not immediately pick up Metroid Prime once I was done with Dread.

What a mistake that was!

Because Metroid Prime has everything that made the 2D games so good, translated perfectly into a 3D world that was just begging to be explored. But it was not just a direct adaptation, because on top of that solid foundation, Retro Studios layered the scanning system, the best soundtrack in the series, and a level of attention to detail that games in 2024 cannot hope to compete with.

For example: In a couple of areas, there are invisible platforms that require you to use the X-Ray visor to perceive. However, because one of those areas has constant rain, I was able to notice the platforms just by spotting the water splashes where the raindrops were colliding with the platforms.

I don’t have much to say about Metroid Prime because I love it for the same reasons why everyone else loves it. It’s just perfection rendered in code.

I straight up cannot believe that the Metroid series went through a dark period during the Wii/Wii U era. These are some of Nintendo’s absolute best games, and they just…stopped making any for years and years. Were they just scared about Metroid overshadowing their beloved Mario?

Play Metroid. If you take nothing else from this post, then for gods’ sake play Metroid.

The Talos Principle 2

The Talos Principle is my favourite game of all time, so when a sequel was announced, I was both excited and nervous. Talos entered my life during a period of transition, when I was living on my own for the first time (at university), and its themes - of loss, inheritance, love - resonated with the particular version of me that existed in that moment.

It may be silly to say this of a computer game, but I genuinely believe that The Talos Principle helped to shape the person who I am today. I believed this so much that when I transitioned, I named myself after Alexandra Drennan, whose boundless love for humanity drove her to sacrifice the last months of her life so that something of ours could persist into a future where it might be appreciated once again.

Though I am prone to fits of misanthropy - I struggle not to in the face of right wing populism and willful climate disaster - it is the philosophy of The Talos Principle that I refer to in order to remind myself what we are capable of when we’re at our best.

This is all relevant because it’s what I was thinking about going into the sequel. Could it possibly be as good as the original?

As it turns out: no, it cannot.

But not being as good as my literal favourite game of all time is not a condemnation; The Talos Principle 2 is entirely a worthy successor to The Talos Principle.

Core gameplay is better, but bonus objectives suffer

In terms of puzzles, I actually think that Talos 2 is an improvement over the original. It introduces new mechanics at a much greater rate than the first game and still manages to riff on each idea to a satisfying degree. Plus, it doesn’t have any of the recorder puzzles, which scared me so much that I would reflexively turn around to leave a puzzle room when I spotted the terminal in some endgame areas.

But whilst the standard suite of puzzles is a straight up improvement, I was less satisfied with the bonus “star” puzzles in Talos 2. The stars in Talos 1 were just floating in and around puzzle rooms and it was fully up to the player to work out how to get access to them. At their best, you had to unsolve standard puzzles in such a way that you could combine elements from multiple rooms in a big area-wide meta puzzle. It encouraged careful observation and out of the box thinking.

By comparison, Talos 2 star puzzles each have a themed tower associated with them, which instantly tells the user exactly what type of puzzle they are. The Prometheus towers are particularly dull, as all they require you to do is find a glowing spark and then chase it back to the tower. That is not a puzzle, it is busywork. Some are still pretty abstract, and I enjoyed some of them, but it does feel like a distinct downgrade to me.

I also preferred the smaller levels of the original game. With only three puzzles in each, and QR codes and secrets plastered all over them, they were built extremely densely. This made exploring them top-to-bottom a real joy; Talos 1 in fact reignited my childhood passion for breaking out-of-bounds and seeing if there was anything there. Talos 2 has massive, sprawling levels with much more open space. There are still things to find, but the process involves less parkour and more holding the ‘w’ button for minutes at a time.

A narrative worthy of the original, told in a less interesting way

The writing in Talos 2 was also pretty solid. I was really happy to see that the plot was a continuation of the true ending of Talos 1, progressing the state of the world to where the new humans (and can I just say that I love that the android people call themselves human, because in all ways except biologically, they are) have built a city for themselves and are working out where they fit into the world that they have emerged into. The best idea that I ever had for a Talos 2 was just a new simulation in some other facility, which is both contrived and less interesting.

The central question that the game poses is the tension between the human desire for progress and the potential damage that this progress can cause. Many of the people of the city are dissatisfied by the artificial constraints that they have placed upon their own civilisation, but considering that the tragedy that befell the original humanity in the first game was literally instigated by global warming, there are other characters who believe that the constraints are necessary to prevent themselves from repeating the mistakes of the past.

I could see merit in both viewpoints, but I wouldn’t say that the game itself is unbiased in its presentation of the dilemma. The character of Byron (yes, named after that Byron), who champions progress, is significantly more charismatic than his opposite, Alcatraz, and the plot throws in a narrative about the systems sustaining the city being incapable of long-term operation.

I don’t necessarily see this as a problem, it was just an interesting observation about a game that seems to want to encourage the player to come to their own conclusions using dialogue trees. Certainly, it is the optimism around humanity’s nature in the first game that made it so special to me in the first place, so it tracks that the sequel would think that our descendants could handle the responsibility of great power if it became available to them.

Personally, I came into this game fully on board with a blind ‘progress = good’, as the conservative faction’s arguments initially came across a bit too similar to the aguments used irl to deny me my gender. But as it turns out, the game contains both dogmatic conservatives - who cling to their intepretation of the teachings of deified predecessors - and people who are just like “Byron, if we give ourselves the power to reshape reality, how long until we pave over the forests to make a new power station?”. It was nice to observe a debate between two informed sides who actually give a shit instead of whatever happens out here in the real world.

You know, for a game about technology and robots, it sure does feel like it was written by someone in the humanities instead of in STEM.

Yes, I was quite happy with the story of Talos 2. My (mild) complaints are in the presentation.

I just think that there was something quite affecting about how the only way the robots in the first game could communicate with each other was by leaving each other messages. Each generation of person, fated never to meet, was brought together by the words they leave behind. If you couldn’t break the cycle yourself, you could only offer help to the people who come afterwards - and isn’t that the theme of the whole game?

Talos 2 is much more grand, bombastic. You can smell the money in the very first cutscene. It’s impressive, sure, but only because it brought the experience closer to that of film. I like my Talos small, intimate, and tasting of an old PC game.

Maybe I’m just a hipster. Maybe I need to play the DLC.

Either way, Talos 2 is a great game.

Summary

You don’t need a summary and I don’t want to write one. Go play Metroid. Happy 2025!