Death Bat's 2024 Computer Gaming in Review

 2024 was the year I really started to feel my age. I've complained about this before, and as you can see my gaming lists often include some older titles, or titles I played 2 or more years after their release, but this year was especially onerous. To look at what I did in 2024 I can turn to my Steam Review, and the equivalent on Xbox and maybe PlayStation, if they do that sort of thing. I would label this year the "year I Learned to Love Walking Simulators and Creepy Retro Horror Games That Don't Ask You To Do More than Run Away When The Time Is Right." My aging reflexes can handle those games just fine!

The Steam Metrics

According to Steam I played Destiny 2 the most, though only through March after which I quit, and I haven't been able to bring myself back to it, not even for the grant finale of the Final Shape. I also apparently played a lot of Division 2, which I can't really get enough of, and also a fair amount of Forza Horizon 5 which surprised even me until I realized that we're talking like maybe 20 hours in that game spread out over the course of several months. I also played a lot of Diablo IV in October and November of this year (because it works really well on the Steam Deck). 

Xbox - Year of Decline

Beyond Steam I had some very minimal engagement on the Xbox, which has all but ceded its position in the market to PlayStation and PC (and Switch, technically). People play on Xbox now because that's the walled garden you invested in. If you have even one alternative route out of there, odds are you've already taken it and not even noticed. Either way, my year in Xbox can be summed up as: Alan Wake Remastered, which I played with the intent to get to Alan Wake II on Xbox, but I haven't done so as of yet. Part of the holdup is by the end of Alan Wake Remastered I felt the game was so far up its own butt with the metatextual "author creates literal reality" that I felt their grand plan was being let down by the needs of the video game medium to turn it all into a shooter (of average quality) at the expense of what, in a future time from when Alan Wake was made, could have been just as easily a jump-scare driven walking simulator.

PlayStation 5

My PlayStation time was spent early on getting so burned out on Fortnite I bailed entirely and missed three seasons in a row. I jumped back in for an OG season, and stuck around for the current season. Then they put Skibidi Toilets into it and I was slapped in the face by the cold reality that I was enjoying a game which had moved beyond the realm of memes I could generationally feel comfortable with. So yeah, I'll probably take a long break from Fortnite in 2025 (again).

Aside from that my clan got PS5 VR2 headsets for the holidays and have already played a ton of VR games. It's really good, actually....but I am glad I waited until they shaved $150 off the price of the headset. It has an optional hookup to use it for PC, by the way, improving the versatility. A few of the games are excellent exercise inducers, too. Not for everyone, of course, and VR is most definitely not how one relaxes with gaming, but if you want to merge "moving around a lot, sometimes a whole lot" with "playing a video game" then VR has you covered.

Oh, and I played completely through Horizon Zero Dawn (again) on PS5 and PC, and am halfway through Forbidden West on both. So there is that! 

Switch (and also all the weird indie horror games on Steam)

On Switch I played a lot of games like Blood Wash, Night at the Gates of Hell, and The Silver Case. I also played a lot of games like this on Steam (such as Ad Infinitum), but the thing is....none of these games take more than a couple hours of your time (usually), so they are a "blip" on the Steam tracking radar (though they do contribute to the 158 games Steam says I played over the year).  They are fun and short romps, sometimes also terrible games but not bad enough to feel regret...and occasionally they are brilliant. I highly recommend Pools, for example, its both weird, creepy and relaxing and meditative.  

This was also the year I realized I buy too many JRPGs on Switch and play them for a few minutes to a few hours before either (roll a D6): 1-2 losing interest at a plot driven by anime teenagers in school; 3-4 getting disgusted with the recycled plot of some generic anime fantasy realm; 5-6 getting tired of the grindy parts (usually after a fantastic lead in with a good plot). I did play Persona 3 Portable on Switch and...you know what? That one was pretty good until it got grindy, even with all the angsty teens in school. Alas, I will never capture the lightning in a bottle that was Final Fantasy VII on the original PlayStation. Not even the FFXVII Remake can do that.*

So this year, I have plenty of games I enjoyed, some more so or less so than others, but it was mostly a year of "playing comfort games" mixed with lots of short fun experiments. But go check out Pools if you want a fun, relaxing and enigmatic walking simulator that doesn't pressure you at all. Much.

*For those of you who also wonder why this is so, note that it's because the most important ingredient to enjoying "That Game from the 90's I loved" is your younger self. You can never really go back.

R.I.P. Dinklebot

The opening salvo of changes to Destiny have hit this week, including a revamping of the leveling process, the way you accrue light levels, and all sorts of stuff. Most pronounced was the eradication of Peter Dinklage's voice (retroactively) as the Ghost, your ever-present floating robot companion who likes to explain stuff to you. In his place is now Nolan North, veteran and beloved voice actor. And....oh gods, it's like C3P0 and 343 Guilty Spark (of Halo) had a love child.

Let's just say that I miss the Dinklebot.....sigh. Unlike much of the interwebz I always did like him, but I happen to also be fond of Nolan North's work.....so I had high hopes....and yeah it is okay (tolerable, at least) but Dinklage had a nice, neutral yet caustic tone that really fit well. Nolanbot sounds like a whiny, effete Guilty Spark. He really does.

So I guess....thanks Bungie, you've officially pulled a "MMO expansion" move on Destiny players. I look forward to pining for "Vanilla Destiny" in the distant future and reminiscing about how awesome Dinklebot was in hindsight. Or not.

Forbes has a great article on the real problem: a narrative from a robot with no foil to the dialogue.

Death Bat's Top Five Video Games for 2014

for 2014 we had lots of new video games, including a revival of isometric RPGs, an uptick in the "survival horror" subgenre that includes "little or no way to survive and fight back" as an important component, a flood of incomplete Early Access titles on Steam that are all simply amazing if you are good at using your imagination to pretend like the games are anywhere near completion, and the usual AAA console releases which invariably do something that give the necessary wedge for the press and gaming crowd to call for their heads (looking at you, Ubisoft).

But this is a list of the five games I enjoyed the most in 2014, and which also more or less came out this year. It is my list, and it's what most impressed me:

#5. Marvel Heroes 2015 (PC)
Discovering this literally days before the end of the year, Marvel Heroes moved from a "game I have deliberately avoided due to the premise not sounding like a good idea" to a game I have to play every night, as often as I can. It's Diablo, in the Marvel Universe....and it works. My wife is hooked now too.

#4. The Elder Scrolls Online (PC)
Will it go F2P? Who knows. Is it the best MMORPG out there? YMMV vary but for me it very much is. The game manages to take the MMO framework and drape the interesting story elements and a facade of the Elder Scrolls feel on to what could have otherwise been just another fantasy MMO. We have too many of these, but TESO proved to be the one that let me comfortably delete all the rest. Except Guild Wars 2, I swear I'll figure that one out some day.

#3. The Last of Us Remastered (PS4)
The PS3 remastering on the PS4 of what is easily the best survival horror zombie game out there. Coupled with Naughty Dog's ability to tell a story and gameplay that manages to emphasize the survival and storytelling, this is the sort of game I love.

#2. Shadow Returns and Dragonfall (Android)
Wha....and isometric top-down turn-based RPG on my list??? I have to include these. The versions I've thrown myself into are on Android, and the comfort of these games with a tablet touch screen is an excellent experience (but get a larger screen or you'll never read the text). Of all the recent isometric RPGs to resurface or appear in definitive revised forms, these two new entries deserve the most accolades, I feel, both for the smooth gameplay and comfortable experience. Plus, both of these titles have prompted me to sit up and take notice of Shadowrun 5th edition.

#1. Destiny (PS4)
Gabe from Penny Arcade expresses his love of Destiny as well as I could and hits all the important points. This is a game with an almost eerie mythic poetry of violence, mystery, haunting exploration and then more violence. For those who have been engulfed by this game such as myself Destiny is almost a sort of cathartic event, and much like Marvel Heroes and TESO I find myself needing to get a session in as often as I can (I tend to rotate between these three games right now, but Destiny almost always gets at least one mission in each evening). Who knew a shooter could feel so good and be simultaneously so relaxing and so exciting? I want Destiny to grow into something big.

Honorable Mention: I have three of them, actually:

Dragon Age: Inquisition (PS4) - I have been so busy playing other stuff that DA:I hasn't properly been given a chance to grab me. I can see it, I can tell its what I want, but it hasn't captured my focus yet. Not sure why, I expect it will in 2015. Could possibly tie into my general burnout on fantasy as a genre, maybe? That doesn't explain my TESO obsession, though.

Sunset Overdrive (XB1) - this game is amazingly fun in a Saint's Row meets landscape grinding sort of way. It has immense potential, and is eminently playable. SO 2 will be the one that really pushes it in newer directions, I suspect. It's a good for Xbox One to have this as an exclusive.

Halo Master Chief Collection (XB1) - hardly worthy of a 2014 game of the year notice even for a simple not-for-profit private blog, but worth mentioning because it's keeping more than a decade of amazing gaming alive and reinvigorating Master Chief's tale for the current generation, while adding tons of additional (free) content (Spartan Ops went live recently, and word is ODST will be a free add-on soon too).

Looking at the first year of FPS titles of the Playstation 4

"I think my ghost is broken, it sounds like Peter Dinklage with his emotion button switched off."*

Technically it's been about ten and a half months (give or take) since I bought my PS4 but the new holiday season is upon us and it means that we're about to be hit by a slew of new titles in the next two months, even as the first year of games immediately falls out of style and sinks into the digital muck of gaming history. So, what wasn't worth it....and what's worth remembering? I'll look at the shooters this time around....which is most of what came out for the console, anyway.

First off, Destiny arrived not long ago and has proved to be a fantastic game, albeit with some caveats. Chief among the "buts" is the fact that it's a game which suffers from an identity crisis, and depending on whether you approach it as a "MMORPG shooter" or a "Halo but with more interesting design parameters" you will likely have two very different takes on the game. I'll tell you this: it's not an MMORPG no matter how much they doll it up; structurally it is much closer to the original Guild Wars, though that doesn't become obvious until a little way in to the game. By this comparison I mean that the game has a hub, where everyone gathers, then it breaks the game up into discreet chunks which may or may not have small groups of cohorts battling it out. What it really does is present a novel way to integrate single player and co-op content into one seamless whole, and that's where the MMORPG element "feels" like it should be, even though it's not quite there. It also apparently makes for a great loot grind at the endgame but I haven't gotten there yet.

Destiny's only real sin, though, is requiring an online connection when, ultimately, only the "crucible" pvp elements and a few other specific missions (all optional so far) are necessary for that connection. This could have been a long and engaging single player game, and if they'd made it that way they could have invested in giving a more protagonist-focused plot and story to Destiny. As it stands, it exists somewhere in a weird nether: not good enough to rank with MMOs, but definitely superior in structure, mechanics and graphics to all other shooters right now. Destiny, like Titanfall and Defiance, is another stepping stone toward something much cooler in the future; but it's not "that thing" it promised, either.

Still expect to be playing it a lot for months to come, though. Criticism of its focus doesn't change the fact that it's fun as hell. The story criticisms would probably feel more damning if it weren't for the fact that Destiny still does more with it story and amazing atmosphere than most other shooters. The criticism about the story is quite amusing, really. Destiny has a strange almost mythic sort of vibe to it; its story will confuse people expecting the usual FPS story garbage (see below for many examples) or it will annoy people who prefer elaborate Bioware/Bethesda titles where everything is revolving in great detail around your character. Destiny is almost poetic in the way it blends story and atmosphere into a strange, eerie experience puncuated by moments of violence.

Which gets us to the next few games....

All of the shooters prior to Destiny now suffer a bit by comparison. Of the titles which predate Destiny (Battlefield 4, Call of Duty: Ghosts, Metro Redux, Killzone: Shadow Fall and Wolfenstein) only Killzone Shadow Fall really offers a comparable experience, albeit in a somewhat more limited form. You can do some stuff in K:SF you can't do in any other game, including Destiny.....but the multi-player element of K:SF is still not up to Destiny-level quality, unfortunately.

Anyway, I finished Killzone's campaign and was ...I don't know.... I guess impressed at the sheer length of the design credits for the game, more than anything. I wish they'd spent more time figuring out how to convey the story; the game has a story, and you can follow it (and also miss a lot of it if you don't hunt for the game's many hidden collectibles) but I never really felt a connection or even a care for any of the characters** except one, at best a twinge of remorse at the end of chapter nine just before chapter ten started with it's "payback" mode (no spoilers, I promise). The bottom line being: people may criticize Destiny for a shallow or poorly conveyed world and story, but this is not a problem unique to Destiny (hell, I would argue Destiny has the opposite problem by keeping it simple and eloquent....and this confuses many players looking for complex and confusing. K:SF has a decent story but it's told through poorly conceived sequences....it's become an epidemic of shooters in general these days. Developers telling us that the single player campaigns are not necessary (Titanfall, cough) or not the main point of their game (Battlefield 4, blech) are deluding themselves (I hope). I can tell you right now for all the time I've spent in Titanfall (hint: not much) I definitely won't buy a sequel until it hits bargain basement prices. And this is as good a segue as any to talk a moment about Call of Duty: Ghosts.

The only sympathetic character in Killzone....and she still wasn't that nice

First, I've played all the "modern" iterations of the CoD franchise as well as the WWII editions. I've mostly focused on the single player campaigns, so my investment is way lower than your typical CoD addict, and I didn't get into the multi-player element until the first Black Ops, which was distinct for recognizing the desire to have bot matches. CoD: Ghosts to its credit continued that trend and you can play multi-player local with bots easily, and the bot AI can be pretty decent....if you're just looking for fun and don't want to deal with the stress of the online PvP crowd then this is great. Of course, there's also the single player campaign...

At this point in the CoD universe they moved the storyline to the future, quite a ways, and the story itself is almost transparently evident as a series of strings tying one location to another. The reason and purpose for the action of your protagonist is tightly defined in a formula that is so wrote now that you can pretty much tick off by the numbers what will happen, perhaps even when. So we get Roarke as the charismatic bad guy over Makarov. We have the driven cohort who spurs us on, the Big Bad Evil Empire which in this case is the South American Federation, and we have lots of places where things happen, each more impressive in scope and madness than the last. And it's damned playable, even if the plot comes right from the scribblings of a Tom Clancy fanfic forum. But....it's gotten too old, too predictable. The end of Ghosts' campaign was a paint-by-numbers in which I knew what was going to happen scene by scene, even as I still conceded I wasn't entirely clear on what the hell the plot was, or why Roarke turned evil-bad. In fact try to play this game keeping in mind that the Federation is basically South America at large....and tell me if you could have guessed that. They discreetly cut down on the extraneous chatter (I didn't hear a lot of Spanish or Portugese being spoken, for example), and no behind-the-scenes major villain ever surfaced, which was weird; usually they're better at this stuff....it would have helped explain Roarke's existence if a more shockingly evil supervillain were behind his "conversion."

And the end: without spoiling it, I'll just state that I really wish they had let these characters alone in the end, because knowing they set it all up for a Ghosts II sequel is not selling the franchise's future to me anymore.

I'm very forgiving of the CoD fanchise, but Ghosts is pushing me to think twice. Luckily Advanced Warfare does not appear to be in the same universe.....but it does suffer from what I call "Crysis but without any weird SF vibe to scare away the mundanes" going on for it. Maybe I'll get it....after I read the reviews, first. Maybe. Or I could wait until they have a sale or two.

So for the rest of the shooters? Here it is in a nutshell:

Wolfenstein: I'll be honest, as well designed as this game was it got tepid and unpleasant after around chapter fiveish, and I grew increasingly annoyed with the game. Somewhere in the latter half of the prison level I gave up; Destiny's existence did not help my motivation to continue here. Plus, I could not get over the fact that Blaskowzki was stuck in that home for the indigent for years and yet somehow retained his soldier's muscle mass? WTF! I know suspension of disbelief can be tenuous in these games, but this one snapped mine completely.***

Battlefield 4: this one buried the hatchet on the franchise for me completely. I loathe this franchise now, and will not even bother with Battlefield: Hardline or whatever nonsense they plan to produce next. Short reason is the single player campaign was unpleasant, too linear, and just plain old "not fun." The multiplayer was conceivably more interesting but also required a greater degree of investment to become good at, which means time, which I have in too short of supply for this game.

Metro: Redux: this is actually a fantastic game, and if you somehow didn't play it previously the Redux edition is a good starting point. It's fairly linear, but the game makes up for that problem in so many other ways, including numerous realistic touches, a seriously well developed story line and more atmosphere than you can shake a gas mask at. Play it to experience Fallout Russia style.

In Russia game play you!

*In Peter Dinklage's defense I think his voice over as the Ghost is fine, but he has two problems: they don't really give the protagonist enough (almost any) dialogue, and it's impossible to avoid comparing the Ghost to Cortana...and Cortana will always win. Always.



**Contrast with games like Last of Us or Shadow of Mordor where you can feel your very soul gripped by the plight of the characters.


***Don't get me wrong, this is a game about "future" Nazis in the sixties with giant robots and all that, but I'll be honest, I never finished any Wolfenstein previous to this one, so it comes as no surprise that the series' alternate history post-WWII setting just doesn't do it for me, anyway.

Destiny

Destiny is now out, and it's a thing, at least if you're into consoles. PC owners will have to wait a while, I suspect....assuming Bungie actually does release this for PC down the road, that is. They may be quite comfortable with keeping it on console, if only because it's easier to monetize there.

Anyway, it's a great game....not the "be all and end all" of new titles for the next generation, but definitely innovative in a significant way for shooters. The structure of the game is a well-conceived blend of traditional FPS style gameplay and MMO design, creating a mixture of scenarios and open world exploration that blend really well together. The hubs and multiplayer elements are there, and certainly available for exploit by those who crave them, but just as easily a "background detail" for those not so social....you can still get into plenty of firefights with allies without having to group, talk, or do much more than nod appreciatively at the assist, basically.

I'm only a few hours in so far, catching up and surpassing where I got to in the beta test a while back, but the open world areas are huge and gorgeous, the quests generally interesting in a "collect this and kill that" sort of way. Although I can see them getting a bit repetitive after a while, I am counting on the game giving me incentive and opportunity to move on to new regions and events to keep it fresh.

The desolate post-apocalyptic landscapes, sound and music are great....sort of reminds me a bit of the love child of Halo and Fallout 3, but with the lighter fare of an MMO quest mechanic over the more involved RPG storyline. The main missions contain the story, which is told in cut scenes and events....I am eager to see where it goes over time.

Character generation is surprisingly detailed for the kind of game this is, but you don't get to name your character, which is a shame...simple things like that will attract the diehard RP crowd, which Bungie may not be all that familiar with, coming from a FPS console side of the picture. A shame, because I could see my wife and her RP buddies playing the hell out of this game for the character armor options alone.

Destiny won't rock everyone's world, but I think it does set a new precedent for FPS titles. Going back to play CoD: Ghosts, Wolfenstein The New Order or Killzone: Shadow Fall after playing Destiny is a bit hard....they feel a severely lacking for different reasons, to say the least....CoD: Ghosts too tired and focused on rigid formulas, Wolfenstein too on the rails (despite trying to pretty up the experience with the illusion of choice) and Killzone feeling too clunky compared to the smooth, almost effortless control scheme of Destiny. Metro Redux gets a pass because the game's aambiance is through the roof, and its story is hard to beat.

Anyway.....nice to have a really good and unique game out on consoles again. I'll provide a follow-up report once I've had more time to really delve into Destiny's long term potential.