Deathbat's 2023 Year in Video Games

It's always a good year when I manage to finish some decent games, and even better if some of them were even new for this year! Without adieu, here is less of a "Death Bat's awards for 2023" list and more of a "These are the games I found most encapsulating of my time" list.

I'm going to be straight up, though: I haven't touched Baldur's Gate 3 yet. There are several reasons for this, not the least of which is I am afraid I'll pick it up and discover it is not as exciting to me as the many, many reviewers and friends around me who have played the game suggest it might be; I'm also a bit gunshy of Larian Studios based on their prior titles, which I found interesting but not enough to dive deep in to; I've always preferred my fantasy gaming at the tabletop, and it takes a lot for me to motivate to play a CRPG. 

On the plus side, this means not playing BG3 has allowed me to enjoy Starfield (somewhat) without judging it against its better competitor. Instead I have been able to enjoy Starfield on its merits and flaws as a Bethesda game. 

Anyway, the list!

Best Shooter from the Past I belatedly enjoyed in 2023: Outriders

I spent an inordinate amount of time in Outriders, a game from 2020 which took me a while to motivate myself to play. There is a point in Outriders where the story suddenly gets more interesting, and it is a shame that getting to that point was hidden behind some fairly rigid cover-based shooting experience right out of the Xbox 360 era. When the game finally opened up a bit and revealed some more depth to the plotline I got more in to it; the Outriders universe is about humanity's war-torn survivors coming to a grim world that does not want them there, and then they descend into thirty years of war, creating one of the grimmest crapsack worlds in gaming history. This is an example of a game world I do not want to visit, and it takes some effort to truly enjoy it as a gamer, too. But I did....and I ended up really enjoying it as a result.

The game's plot is fairly linear, but I was really in the mood for linearity earlier in the year and I stuck with this one for weeks as I uncovered the grim and incredibly unpleasant universe of this game. I can't say I'd suggest it for the multiplayer (which I am sure is dead) but as a single player linear campaign goes this one ends up paying off fairly well. The expansion campaign was also worthy of a playthrough, and despite some reviewers online I found it sufficiently robust and interesting. The endgame content is decent enough too.

Runner up goes to Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3 Remakes, both of which I finished this year. Great remakes! I have not, as is tradition, touched Resident Evil 4 Remake yet, though my son finished it the same day it released. Gotta save that for a future year!

Best CRPG that is Full of Problems: Starfield

Starfield is not actually bad, it's just an old design approach on an old engine that was renovated mainly for shiny graphics and totally overlooked the possibility of some B studio competition coming along and eating their lunch. Starfield has been fun so far, and I am likely to be playing it in spurts for the next several weeks or even months (I can't binge play games anymore, just not able to do it), and its totally fine. When I am done I will finally get Baldur's Gate 3 so I can marvel at how much better that game is, but thankfully I can enjoy this one now without comparison.

If you're wondering, though, I have found this game runs well enough on the Asus ROG Ally, and its been a fine experience on my desktop. The complaints about the menus, while slightly exaggerated for effect, are not wrong; it can be hard to find things sometimes. There are weird mechanics in odd places. Why is my guy running out of oxygen in New Atlantis? It's weird. Why are some planets not worth visiting? Why put empty filler in that has no redeeming value to it? Bad design choices. But....nestled within is a classic Bethesda experience, for better and worse.

Runner up goes to Solasta: Crown of the Magister, which I finally started playing, as I figured it would also be another game I'd find less enjoyment in if I don't play it before Baldur's Gate 3. I love how faithful Solasta is to the D&D 5E system, and its a solid turn-based experience. 

Also, honorable mention to Final Fantasy XVI for trying really hard to be interesting. Now why can't I properly get into FF games anymore? I have only completed FF VII and VIII back in the old PS1 days. 

Best Actually Good FPS: Turbo Overkill

Not quite a retro boomer shooter and not quite a modern glamour shooter, Turbo Overkill presents you with a cyborg character who has a chainsaw leg and sliding maneuver to rip enemies apart as well as one of the finest and most overall useful arsenals of weaponry you could ask for in a fast paced FPS like this. By the end of the game you can end up all chainsaws as you chew your way through a plot worthy of the nineties, and all I can say is that I have enjoyed this game a lot more than other recent AAA shooters.

Runner up goes to Trepang2 which is am amazing and wild ride, and some people feel it is comparable to the original FEAR Games, which I can see (at least the feel, not the supernatural stuff). Trepang2 is a real pleasure to play. I would have ranked it as the top shooter of 2023 for sure if I hadn't also discovered Turbo Overkill.

Best Adventure or Horror Title: Dead Space

Obviously Dead Space! The Dead Space reboot is the right kind of remake, and the prospect of new and more Dead Space in the future is a good thing. I also quite enjoyed Callisto Protocol, but playing that and then Dead Space sort of hit home how there's a special kind of magic going on with the original that is hard to beat. Still, both are worthy of a playthrough or two.

Runner up is Alan Wake Remastered and Alan Wake 2. A real trip, but make sure you play Alan Wake Remastered first if you haven't. I actually hadn't played Alan Wake before, so needed to tackle that game first. Also, if you have never played Control before that's in the same Remedy Universe, and its really interesting to play these games in their related context. Avoid only if you dislike precocious authors whose written works seem to recalibrate reality!

Best Indie/Small Team Game: Earth's Shadow

I sank more time in to Earth's Shadow than many other titles with bigger teams and greater budgets. Earth's Shadow is an exploratory procedural roguelite that plays like a budget edition of Returnal. Just like Returnal I can't get past the first boss (what I assume is the first boss, anyway....dude in the temple), but I have to say I have really enjoyed my hours with this game. Check it out on Steam if the concept of a Returnal-like roguelike sounds fun to you.

Runner up is Dungeons of Sundaria, a crazy entry into the "small team with big concepts" roguelikes with procedural design. Make a heroic dungeon delver, join a team or go solo into eight different dungeons. I just got this and while I was initially thinking, "No way this has staying power for me," before I knew it I was compulsively leveling my elven fighter and seeing how deep into the haunted graveyard I could go. The strikes against it are that the gameplay is interesting enough that I wish it was a real game with a storyline and not a roguelite. It reminds me of Hunted: The Demon's Forge and Kingdoms of Amalur, except without much of a plot beyond "go in dungeon, murder the stuff you meet." The skeleton of a better game lurks within Dungeons of Sundaria, but as a mindless dungeon hack'n'slash it's pretty good.

Some new games did not get played yet so I just can't speak on titles such as Atlas Fallen, Lords of the Fallen, Diablo IV and of course Baldur's Gate 3. Any one of these games could have soaked up way too much time for me, so I have held off on them for that reason. I'm also saving conversation on "games as a service" entries for next time, when we talk about the year's duds.

Okay, that's enough for this year's interesting titles. Next up, maybe we'll chat about the duds! I have a few I think are worth mentioning...

Monday Has Arrived! On Dead Space 2 and the Nineties

Well, nothing ready this week for posting (yet) but I'm sure I'll find a spot of time in my schedule to line stuff up. Or some good news, or something interesting!

I finished the Dead Space 2 campaign over the weekend. Yes, I'm (as usual) about two years behind on this one, but hey, got here eventually. Now I can start Dead Space 3 in earnest, hopefully sooner than 2015. For the record, it was a very good game, and I felt it lived up to the first rather well, albeit with a storyline bigger in scope and style, and slightly less of the claustrophobia that the first visit on the Ishimura generated. Isaac having a voice was a Huge Step forward for the game, and many other titles need to learn from them. I am so very, very tired of the silent protagonist, which is effectively a lazy developer's way of an easy out on creating a decent story and character for the players to relate to. Please take note, id!

My epiphany came while watching Twin Peaks (also, X-Files) on Netflix, and realizing that I know now why I am not really in sync with so much of the rest of grognardia, or the generation which idolizes the seventies and eighties. I was born in 1971, so most of my formative youth in the seventies was spent as a small kid, and the sum total of influences on my life in that period consisted of Star Wars, Alien, Superman, Star Trek, Clint Eastwood westerns and World War II movies. I didn't really hit full-titl nerdom until 1980 with the discovery of Gamma World and D&D, and even then I was still just doing stuff kids did. The eighties were heavily about "doing all this stuff" and enjoying the unique culture of gaming life from a teenager's viewpoint at that time, but the profundity of the experience really didn't slam me until 1990s, I now realize.



Most gamers who were in their teens or older in the seventies probably are the sort who find Dungeon Crawl Classics really endearing. Those who were the same age and deeply into AD&D in the 80's may feel the same way. Well, for me, that was how the nineties were. It's not the most spectacular generation, but it's the decade that impacted me the most, and there is so much from that period that I find myself utterly entranced by. Twin Peaks, X-Files, Cyberpunk 2020, Dark Conspiracy, AD&D 2nd edition, Playstation, Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Runequest (I played more RQ in the nineties than any other time), and so much more, the nineties were a deeply exploratory period of my life, one in which I was master of my own destiny for a time, free of personal, professional and financial responsibilities, and ready to enjoy life as I saw fit.

The thing is, my experience to this period was distinctly my own, and the nineties were an odd decade because, as Movie Bob has aptly pointed out (he's been doing a nice nineties retrospective here), the nineties was really almost a decade of weird retrospection on the last nine decades before the new  millennium.

The nineties in my head aren't even all that accurate, either. I barely played some of the decade's most popular games (Vampire, for ex.) and I didn't own a television for 90% of the decade (not getting one until I met my second wife-to-be at the time, and even then I only used it for gaming). I had a computer, but it was only for school, and in fact the only meaningful PC gaming I got in was in 1995 when I played all the Gold Box AD&D games I had accumulated but not had time to enjoy. I still remember my hazy, fever-dream whirlwind blast through Treasure of the Savage Frontier. I didn't get gaming like that in again until 1996 when I bought a Playstation and (on a lark) Resident Evil.

From 1980 to 1988 I ran a total of maybe 150-160 game sessions, albeit long and engaging, with my sister and whatever friends of hers or mine happened to be around; we lived in the middle of nowhere, so we had limited access to friends and family who would put up with our gaming habits. Conventions, publishing fanzines, play-by-mail and travel were when I got most gaming in, until I swaggered off to college and got my first consistent, large group of regular gamers in to a semester long series of gaming marathons. That paled in comparison to the nineties, when I got, from 1990 (when I married my first wife, who was also a gamer) to 1999 approximately fifteen campaigns in of AD&D 2nd edition alone....massive campaign arcs that during my college years were each timed to last a semester, and after college would go for a year or more. My first Realms of Chirak campaign was in 1992, but my first never-ending campaign started in 1996 and the last official session with those characters wrapped in 2004.

I ran so many different, interesting systems in the nineties, that AD&D only characterizes one corner of the hobby for me, however. Runequest, Dark Conspiracy, Cyberpunk 2020, Mutant Chronicles, Traveller: TNE, Megatraveller, Chill, GURPS, Call of Cthulhu, Dragonquest, Star Trek, Star Wars, and many many more all got decent levels of attention back in the day. The nineties defined my gaming spectrum for me much more so than the eighties did, even if it was as--or more-- important to me in many ways in the eighties. The eighties was all about enjoying a hobby though unusual effort; the nineties were about it being something I could do practically any time, anywhere I felt like it.

So....this is all a long and round-about way of saying, "I finally get it," as to why I'm not quite in sync with the OSR grognard-driven movement as it's currently characterized. I guess I'll need to wait another decade or two before my own nostalgic nineties comes back into proper vogue!

Thirty One Days of Horror: Dead Space

Day Twenty Five: Dead Space

Back to video game horror! I'm an unabashed fan of Dead Space, having played through it once on the Xbox 360 and twice on the PC. This is a rarity for me; I don't usually indulge in single player games more than once or twice, and very few titles have earned this honor, among them being Mass Effect, Fallout 3 and of course Dead Space.

If you don't know anything about Dead Space then I'll avoid spoiling it for you. The short synopsis is as follows: you play as Isaac Clark, an engineer onboard the USG Kellion, a deep space rescue and repair vessel that answers distress signals (shades of the earlier film Super Nova). In fact, it's just received one from the "planetcracker" mining vessel Ishimura, which has gone strangely silent after what must have been a massive systems failure. This particular ship is one of the first of its kind, a mining vessel that uses gravity tech to effectively gouge out chunks of planetoid and engage in an extremely high-efficiency refinement process to extract a variety of rare metals and other useful elements. It's a rough sort of job to work, and the ship environments in this game reflect an environment and standard of living that makes Alien's corporate-owned Nostromo look like a luxury liner.



Isaac and his cohorts quickly run into trouble and find their own ship disabled. Then they discover that something has gone horribly wrong onboard the Ishimura, which appears to have succumbed to some sort of invasion or assimilation by an alien presence: the necromorphs.

Plot complications begin to pile up quickly. Isaac has a bigger stake in things than normal, too. It turns out his girlfriend Nicole was on board the ship, and she was a convert to a cult of unitarianism that was prominent onboard the Ishimura's crew. The Ishimura stumbled across an ancient alien artifact, the Red Marker, the recovery of which sparked the entire debacle. The story spirals deeply into a troubled nexus of religion, alien transformation, government conspiracies and a desperate need to survive in the face of madness and death. Great stuff!

Dead Space as a game is actually much better to play on the PC than the Xbox in my experience. My original play through on the 360 was a bit frustrating, and there were spots where that frustration grew by leaps and bounds (there's an instance where you man a point defense canon to destroy asteroids threatening to breach the ship's hull, for example; on a mouse and keyboard this was a relatively simple task, but on the Xbox with a controller I almost quit and never returned....only dogged persistence saw me through).



The game was unique when it came out for employing "in game" queues and status interfaces that were effectively part of the actual environment. Isaac's engineering suit has gauges and a unique spinal tube of energy which fluctuates with the health of the character. When he talks to his associates who have hidden away and bark orders at him while staying as far from the action as they can, he relies on a projected holographic field that appears in front of him rather than on the screen. It was an innovate concept which helped greatly with the problem of immersion vs. UI issues other games had wrsetled with, and this innovative format continued into Dead Space 2.

Dead Space was the last genuinely true-to-spirit survival horror game I have played, discounting those moments in Resident Evil 5 or 6 where it touches upon the genre again (Before veering off into other action shooter formats). It embodied mood, a sense of distrurbing revelation slowly building over time, a desperate main character who's isolation and sanity are at odds with survival, and despite a wide arrange of firepower it manages to keep the main character in threat of danger and short on ammo. A first play through of Dead Space will always be hard; it can get easier and more efficient as you go through a second or third time, but even then there's the higher difficulty tempting you with incredibly difficult and deadly challenge.

If you haven't played Dead Space and have a tolerance for the sort of video games that require a third-person sense of spatial awareness, then this is one of the best and last true survival horror titles to come out in the last five years or so. Another one of Death Bat's A+ titles!



For extra Dead Space fun I recommend the novel Dead Space: Martyr written by B.K. Evenson, whose horror work I had run into before and quite enjoyed. Martyr takes place centuries earlier in the Dead Space universe, not long after man's expansion into space, and deals with the discovery of the first Marker, found on Earth, at the center of the Chiculub Crater off the Yucatan Coast. It's an extremely well done, creepy novel which adds a great deal to the Dead Space backstory and also helps to set up a decent explanation for the popularity and origin of the unitarian cult, as well as some of the mysteries of the Red Marker found in Dead Space. A great read, well worth checking out!

Ticking Bioclock Still Ticking and Other Updates: Mystery Men, Loviatar, and More

No baby yet! It's almost to the "late" stage (the 17th) so there may be talk of methods of inducement by the 16th. We shall see.

Jody has a theory that Baby does not plan to come until tomorrow, since tomorrow is Halo Anniversary day. I think her rationale is that its karmic timing, but one might also suggest that he's also my kid so maybe he's got my tastes.

As an aside, I am working on polishing up my Swords & Wizardry edition of the Ages of Lingusia. I may prettify and edit it and make it available through lulu. We shall see. I am also considering best options for the more contemporary Warlords of Lingusia, which is set in the Far Future (3,500 aw) of the campaign and features decidedly different cultural political and topographical issues. Warlords have been entirely portrayed in Pathfinder and so will likely stay that way.

I got Loviatar issues 1, 2 and 3 a couple weeks back and they are quite entertaining. Christian basically provides a sort of homage to the classic era of print fanzines right on down to classic era advertisements, all in a stapled digest package. The contents are primarily aimed at scenarios from his Pathfinder campaign that features an interesting medley of ideas and inspirations (Baldur's Gate, for example, shows up as the place of activity in the first issue) but other systems get some face time (specifically GURPS). I would like to do a proper post on them soon, but will order issue #4 first and need to finish reading issue 3.

I also got John Stater's Mystery Men. If you haven't seen Mystery Men go download it now for free right here. I've read through it and actually quite like the mechanics John's come up with to handle saves, challenges and other resolution tasks. The game is designed to be smooth and rules light, and so far the only feature that I find in the least bit odd is the more conventional XP expenditure system, which seems a bit clunky compared to, say, a more conventional point-buy system (which is what it's masquerading as) but it nonetheless works just fine.

Over the weekend while waiting as a patient husband does, watching his wife deal with pregnancy and feeling vaguely guilty for putting her through such an amazingly one-sided experience, I finished Assassin's Creed. Not 2, Brotherhood or the upcoming fourth one, but the original. Assassin's Creed has been on my "to do" list since they day it came out, but each time I got started in it I played for X number of hours, usually got to the first real assassination and then stopped, decided to get back to it later, and then never did. This time I decided, with so many games finally done under my belt, I had no excuse! So yeah, queue two days later and AC 1 is done and I have started into the first sequel, which I can already tell is a more polished, interesting experience.

But blathering about Assassin's Creed is not why I mention it. Rather, it's because after playing the first and starting the second I now know why Steve Jackson Games published GURPS Crusades and GURPS Florence....these were license-free tie-ins to the Assassin's Creed games. Clever! And both well worth checking out, by the way, if you'd like some concise and useful historical resources for your GURPS (or any other) games.

Anyway, with the exception of Batman: Arkham Asylum (which after an entire weekend of playing, at a point where I felt I must be getting close to finishing, on investigation at gamefaqs.com I discovered I was barely through the fifth chapter....about 33% of the way through!) I believe that I now see before me nothing but a field of sequels, mostly in their "2s" and "3s." Except for Rage. Although I feel like Rage is spiritually a sequel to Doom III, as it is clearly an old-school style shooter all dolled up in modern conveniences.

I also finished (for a second time) Dead Space and am working on Dead Space 2. I also read and finished Dead Space: Martyr (great read) but more about that later in its own Blog Post....I'm considering if I have time to write up a Dead Space entry that provides detailed stats and data for using the creepy future of Isaac Clark in either Traveller, Stars Without Number, BRP or GURPS. Get your rig going!

My gaming time for tabletop has been quiet for a few weeks now. With the beginning of November I decided to halt both game groups so that I could be home and available to my wife as much as possible. This is giving us both more time to prep the house (nesting, she calls it), provide emotional support and avoid any anxiety if I am out or away when the Big Moment arrives. I also plan to take a few weeks off from everything, work included, once Marcus is here.

That said, I am dying to jump back into gaming (though on what sort of schedule after the dust settles) and am taking this quiet time to think carefully about what I plan to do. I concede that I've played a bit too much Dungeons & Dragons (and its many iterations) over the last three decades. A lot of guys my age that have been out of or away from the hobby for years find a strong desire to get back in and pick up where they left off; I find myself less enthused about such, admittedly because I've never left the hobby, and have managed to get at least one game in a week for the vast majority of the last 22-odd years (before that ironically gaming wasn't quite as frequent as I'd have liked it during my youth, due to living in the middle of nowhere). So for me, I feel very...sated, I guess the word would be.

Anyway, who knows how it will go. At this point, gaming for me is the social event that lets me hang out with friends, so that's its key advantage. This here is probably the reason I find all the rules arguments, system wars, Forge discussions and so forth to be so tedious....they're effectively missing the point of tabletop gaming as a social medium. Ah well.

Till next time!

Lest any of you think that Jody and I are anything other than a typical gamer couple, or that my proclivity this season for finishing long-neglected video games is singular, I should mention that while I finished Assassin's Creed and Dead Space over the last two weekends she leveled a Guild Wars character to 18 and as of last night was just shy of making the Survivor Achievement. So yeah...