The Ringer-Verse - 2024 Games of the Year Draft | Button Mash

Episode Date: December 23, 2024

Ben, Steve Ahlman, Matt James, and Justin Charity wrap a podcast present and put it under the tree. First, they name “naughty” and “nice” trends in gaming this year, from high-profile, live-service flops to the decline of console exclusivity (08:55). Then, they celebrate the most unforgettable titles of 2024 by drafting their favorite releases across several categories, including sprawling RPGs, riveting action adventures, and indie darlings (39:20). Host: Ben Lindbergh Guests: Steve Ahlman, Matt James, and Justin Charity Producer: Devon Renaldo Additional Production Support: Arjuna Ramgopal Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Millions of business owners already trust Spectrum business. So visit Spectrum.com slash business to learn more, restrictions apply, services not available in all areas. And welcome into the Ringerverse, your nexus feed for all things fandom. I am Bumbenberg, senior editor for The Ringer, welcoming you back to Button Mash to kick off this holiday week. And joining me in the Button Mash major today are three kings who have come from far and wide, bearing the gifts of their wit, intellect, and opinions about video games. You know, the day after Christmas, some people call them.

it Boxing Day. Some people call it St. Stephen's Day, the Feast of St. Stephen, which is really the case for almost every podcast we do here at the Ring of Verse, because we're joined now by a Midnight boy and a junior mint, St. Steve Alman, who really is a saint. Hello, Steve. Hello. I've brought Mur, but it's only Mur from impractical Jokers. Okay. Yeah. I mean, look, most people don't really know what Mer and Frankencent are, and really are those things even so different to begin with, show some creativity in your gift giving, maybe they were re-gifting their mur from someone else who gave it to them. Ooh, secondhand mur. Ugh.

At this time of year, many people give to charity, but charity gives to us because we are also joined by ringer senior staff writer, Justin, Charity. Hello. I give to no one. I mean, this is a form of giving you, right? Yeah. Don't hold that on us. Give us your all on this podcast.

When we first connected, your audio was coming through your dual. sense controller, which was connected to your controller, which was not... That's a commentary on society. Gammers with a Z lives on. It's pretty on brand for ButtMesh. It just wouldn't have worked for the podcast because you couldn't actually hear us. Sometimes that dual sense, I want that thing to keep quiet. Actually, I find myself silencing the dual sense more often than that.

We'll find you otherwise if you're not careful. Yeah. We're also joined by Ringer Deputy Art Lead, Matt James. Matt, I don't think I have a holiday. themed introduction for you. You got anything? Any plays on Matt or James, King James Bible. I'm reaching here. It's always a festive occasion when we have you on. No, it's all business. I'm here to win. No. Happy holidays, everyone. Yes, you too. You are the defending champion of the most recent butmash draft. I report with some regrets. But look, I agreed to abide by the democratic process.

And you did win, according to the people who voted on the PlayStation draft, you were victorious. Now, would I have disqualified you in retrospect? Because we didn't realize, as we were recording, that you drafted an ineligible game. You drafted Marvel versus Capcom, which came out on Dreamcast before PlayStation, like a whole year. So we really should just scrub the record, take your trophy away. None of you all called that. And if you had, I would have just picked Street Fighter Alpha 3, and I would have just picked Street Fighter Alpha 3, and I would have won anyway.

Okay. Sure. I actually agreed. That's been off the fly, yes. Alternate history. We'll never know. Between that and the category fraud that both Steve and Rob perpetrated in that draft, to be clear, I came in second, so I don't actually have to disqualify Rob or Steve.

I only have to disqualify Matt somehow. And I think I found a way. But, no, I will abide by the people's will here. Congratulations, Matt, on winning the PlayStation draft. Thank you. And let me just briefly say, I intend. tend to fully lose this draft with games that you've never heard of. Wow.

Okay. So usually that's that's charity's role. Usually talk about this. Let's have a meta just sidebar up front. Because I feel like when people react to these drafts, right? There's often this commentary of like I can't believe like there's this sense that I'm supposed to actually be competing like I'm supposed to be thinking competitively where it's like, no, I'm here to leave my mark.

button mash. That is how I think of it. I'm with you today, Charity. Amen. You know what I mean? Like, I'm here to leave my mark. I was there to win the PS1 draft, but today I'm right there with you. Yeah.

No, it's always tough. Are you currying favor with the public or are you staying true to your own beliefs? I want to talk about really good games. I'm going to do my own thing. We're creating content for a podcast and so we want to be competitive, but we also want to be entertaining. We're just pulled in all sorts of different directions. As we are this week with all the holiday options available to us,

whatever you celebrate, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza, it's all happening. And what better gift could we give you than our annual games of the year draft? That's what we're talking about. And this is a special time of year for many people, but one that I have positive associations with because I was born on Christmas. I'm a Christmas baby. That's why I led with the manger imagery. I was making myself Jesus in this scenario and you were all bringing me the gifts of your presence. But even if I don't have a God complex, I have a lot of funness for this time of year. because even though I'm not a religious man, I do worship at the altar of commercialism. And as a kid, I was in a family that was not really into casual gift giving throughout the year.

And because Christmas and my birthday were the same day, I had to make hay, not the hay that's in a manger of video games. If I wasn't going to get those games on Christmas, that I wasn't going to get them ever, maybe, or for a really long time. So I had to get all my gift getting in on Christmas days. And it was just a very, very high stakes day. And I always judged the Christmas hall, more or less, by the video games that I got. And I'm sure I'm not alone there. I'm glad that you survived that traumatic upbringing, though, not having a birthday to get video games on outside of Christmas. I know.

It's true. Yeah, a lot of people, they always ask me, did you get cheated? I don't know. Maybe not. But just in terms of the concentration of the gifts, I really had to do all the damage on that one day. And there was nothing better than when you got basically your entire year's worth of video games on a single day. And, you know, I'm not Mr. Physical Media Man. I'm not the Sean Fennessee of video games here necessarily.

I do worry about what the transition to digital will mean from a game preservation standpoint. But generally, I'm not getting hard copies of games, even if they're available. But I would think that for gift giving and getting, there was something to be said for seeing, say, a stack of video game box-sized presence wrapped under a tree waiting for you. Because if you're just giving someone a gift card or maybe an email that says that you got them a game on some digital marketplace, just not the same, right? You want to be able to rip the packaging off something. It really is like there's nothing better than probably like opening things up and then

at least as far as my nostalgia goes, like just missing game manuals. That really was where we actually were putting the real craftsmanship into our passion here. It's true. We've lost that art. It's coming back. There's some boutique manuals out there. And then whatever hall you had, you would have the week between Christmas and New Year's, whatever we're calling it, dead week or twixtmists or whatever term it's going by,

a week when you had nothing to do except just to gorge yourself on the games that hopefully you got. So I wish that to everyone, whether they got physical games. or not, hopefully you have something to play, and you can work on that pile of shame that might be more mountainous after this week. So if you are still in the market for last-minute gift-giving, I guess that's the good news about just being able to buy someone a game online. It's a little lazy maybe, but you can do that at the last minute. You don't have to find an EB Games or a Game Stop that's open on Christmas morning. So if you are in the market for last-minute recommendations, we're here to help. You still got a couple days when this podcast is

going up to get some games for Christmas, and we're going to name some good ones that you can give to someone or to yourself. Before we get to the draft, where we will assemble a roster of the best video games from 2024, or at least the most interesting ones based on the way that some of you may be approaching this draft, we want to do a little year and review now that it's almost over. This is the way we started our Goody draft episode last year, too, where we did a little naughty and nice. And we talked about trends from this year and what defined the year in gaming. So maybe we could go around and we could talk about some things that we liked or didn't like. Like, Matt, do you have a naughty trend? I have a naughty and a nice trend, Ben. And they're the same

thing. It's the concept of early access. A big trend in the year 2024. A lot of games. A lot of games. more than ever, it seems, coming to early access, released in early access before their official 1.0 release, I got to play Hades 2 this year, and Hades 2 is not out, kind of. The 1.0 hasn't hit yet. And man, it's really cool that I've gotten to play Hades 2, but it kind of sucks that I at some point had to stop playing because I wanted to make sure that I, I could. could finish the game when it was finished? So it's this real kind of double-edged sword for a lot of games where you're just so excited to play it.

But ultimately, maybe he would have been better off waiting until it was released. And it's happening more and more. And obviously for smaller games that need assistance from the community to really develop it into the gem that it, you know, is to become, Early access is a really wonderful thing. But on the other side, there are a lot of games that maybe you are just kind of outsourcing free labor. And you're a big enough studio that you should have enough internal testing and development and feedback that it's a little bit of a weird choice and ultimately doesn't serve the game. So that's my naughty slash nice for this year is early access.

Yeah. It's not new, obviously, as you're saying, but it has become more and more pervasive. And it's worked out really well sometimes. I mean, Baldur's Gate 3 being one example from last year, but it does lead to also this desynchronized conversation where some people play it the second that they can and others wait. I have not played Hades 2. We didn't do a button mash about Hades 2. We thought about it.

And then I thought, you know what? I want to wait and play this game in its final form. It's fully polished, complete state. And so maybe there will be another round of conversation when it's actually the 1.0 release. But more and more, I have found that I'm just not. interested because it's not as if there's any shortage of great stuff to play that is finished or at least says it's finished whether these games are actually in a complete playable state when they are quote unquote finished is always TBD. I find it very interesting. The idea of,

I think mainly any of these tools and it's going to lead into my, I'd say, overall naughty of my gaming year trend. But like to me the concept of early access I think is both a double edge sword only because it's dependent on the developer's use of its product when it is in early access. I think the idea of a Hades to, I'm remiss to use Baldos Gate 3 as an example of anything because it's almost a standard that even developers don't want to be held to. But the idea of not only crowdsourcing input for what a game can be in its development stage, while still like effectively, you know, a strong percentage done, the onus is on the developer to actually utilize that feedback and actually like implement the feedback of the game that hopefully its fans want to make.

And in the case of a Hades II, obviously that's been a success story and a critical darling for all of us to see. But when used improperly, which is going to be my overall naughty, I'm picking the, you know, use of generative AI for a lot of things that are coming out of gaming. And I know that this is a catch-all because AI, as we can all agree, has kind of just been over-leveraged, in industries writ large. For the case of gaming, it seems to me that it's been all encompassing from both formulating like aspects of a game whole cloth, such as like level design or art, or even something as rather innocuous but still noticeable as, say, the art that you see on a loading screen. And you could easily pay attention to those things and those will easily get swatted

down and being chastised for their usage. But it's only the beginning of an exceedingly steep and exceedingly slippery slope that we're going to find ourselves in in the coming years. Yeah, it was the beginning. We didn't go whole hog, right? There's still enough resistance or backlash or just it not being in a fully ready state that we haven't reached the end state of whatever this is going to look like in video games. But I think there's some potential uses that maybe no one would really object to that might actually be helpful and would just save people a bunch a boring work in time without making anyone lose their jobs. But there's definitely going to be a lot of people losing their jobs as there was. And people are worried about that. And video game voice

actors are still on strike currently over this issue and the concerns about AI voices, just replicating their voices. So that does feel like it could probably be a naughty trend for the next however many years we're doing this, right? Because it's not going to go away. Yeah. Do you have a nice, Steve. Nice. Probably I like really cool developers calling out over-leverage systems that are being taken advantage of by the likes of Blizzard and Activision. Really, I like Balders Gate 3 director basically calling up and not naming Activision and Blizzard

by making their audiences commodities rather than people that want to consume their art. And it feels really cool to feel seen like that. And then we get Astrobot as Game of the Year. And that feels really, really good. Yeah. Not only the Game Awards game of the year, but the Ringers Game of the Year, because we have already put up a ringer ranking that Matt and Charity and I contributed to at the ringer.com. What a great website. That'll be separate from the results of our draft today.

Exactly. Also, that bullshit that Bellatro got a Peggy 18 rating in the UK because it has simulated gambling as opposed to actual gambling like FIFA. It's nuts. It doesn't even have simulated gambling. But it has poker hands. It just has cards in it. It has add addictiveness. Queen's blood is gambling. If you look at my sort of brainwave fat or Oh, yeah. Is that your nice from this year? It's just queen's blood. Let's start with naughty for me, right?

Because it's like, first of all, we should make clear to listeners, right? Like, we're talking about naughty. We're talking about nice. We're talking about the industry. Because if it was gaming culture, I'd be like, I don't want to have in 2025 any more conversations like the Witcher or the Assassin's Creed. Oh, like all that crap. All these, like,

But they're bald, Justin. They're bald. But it's just like, that's the, that is the gaming culture in a larger sense, naughty is like, stop it, stop it. Gets in hell. I'm sick of this. I can't do another one of these discourses. You're shaving years off of my life.

I mean, we could talk about that because that's, we're not necessarily talking about just the industry. Like, I was going to mention that too. And I'm with you. And I don't think that us saying stop it is going to stop it. I don't think it's going to stop. But please. Stop it.

No, but it's like, I feel like there are ways to, if people would have, like, debates about the sort of like bent and biases of games, it feels like there's, there's somewhere you can imagine and actually like interesting and civilized version of that. But of course, that's not the version that exists. And that feels like it's culminated this year. Instead, it's just the most, like, facile, brain dead, mean-spirited bad faith, like, framing of stuff that is just, it's just like YouTube chum. And it's, yes.

Yeah. And it's just bad. And it just makes games feel worse. And I don't know. It just feels like there's so many toxic feedback loops involving, like, you know, journalism and content creation and the developers and publishers themselves. And we're all kind of, I think, trying to break out of these toxic feedback loops. And I want to find a way in 2020.

to be like those old memes of home girl stepping up. You know, is the girl stepping out of 2020? I get you. All the things she's falling out of her purse, you know, toxic relationships, dysfunction, alcohol. And then 2025 is Jesus. And yeah. And it's like that evolution, she goes right to the pew. No.

Yeah. No. I don't know if there are any other goings on that happened in 2025. that might actually fuel more terrible feedback loops. But just in gaming, it feels like there's this uncracked code of, if you were to just simply look at the YouTube chat of the game awards, you would know that we as a society don't deserve Grand Theft Auto 6 yet. Because we have not earned it.

I think that's why Gabe Newell is just saying silent on Half-Life 3 until we learn how to behave ourselves. That's real. He's doing his part. It was sadly. Just unfortunate staple of this year. There was hardly a major release that went without some of this, whether it was Stellar Blade or Black Myth Wu Kong or Star Wars outlaws or naughty dog

turning off the comments on their intergalactic reveal trailer just in anticipation of this. And the whole sweet baby backlash, the narrative consulting company, Sweet Baby that was just distorted, I think, beyond all reasonability. It's just a very tiresome. repetitive kind of conversation. You can sense what's going to be said before it is actually said. And I think some of it is. It's childish. It is. It's the most childish version of itself. It's kind of a grift a little bit in certain cases. I think just inflaming the worst passions. And this all probably dates back a decade at this point, the seeds of this being in Gamergate. Right. So it's nothing new, whether it's

harassment of developers or media members, but it did reach a new pitch this year. And it just felt inescapable, but I share your desire to escape it somehow in 2025. What was your noddy going to be? My naughty, otherwise, if we're talking about it, we're sticking to the industry, it was going to be, I think Nintendo should stop suing people. I would humbly recommend that Nintendo stop. The emulators, power. Come on, come on.

You're the good guy, otherwise, Nintendo. And I just feel like they are turning into an overzealous ace attorney antagonist, funny enough that stop sending people. I'm like, I'm going to need you to make a singularly okay online account system first before you sue

those. These are all great dreams to have. I don't anticipate them coming true in 2025. Yes. My nice. I have my nice though.

Please give us your nice. I think Phil Spencer should continue to talk to the press. that it's nice. I think he should continue to give people heartburn about the future of Xbox. I especially appreciate that Phil Spencer, whatever he talks to the press,

there's this air of him becoming like a Christian existentialist. It's like, what are video games really? What is the Xbox if you really think of it? What are games? There's something about the way he is sort of managing expectations about the future of the Xbox where I'm like, yes, I'm sicko.

You know, it's the sicko mean. Yes. Yes. I like your transparency of thinking. This was going to be a trend I was going to bring up, and I don't know how to categories it. I'm not sure whether it's nice or naughty. It remains to be seen.

Maybe it's neither. But just for me, maybe the major trend of this year was sort of the end of exclusivity. And to some extent, the end of consoles. I know that's kind of a refrain people have had for years at this point. But the Xbox campaign of like, this is an Xbox and it's, you know, your toaster or your refrigerator or whatever. whatever, right?

Like anything that can stream GamePass games, I don't know. I think there's a lot of just uncertainty, as you're saying about like, well, what does this mean for Xbox? Is this just the software company now? They say they're continuing to make hardware, that they're making the next Xbox,

that there might be a mobile version of that, but they are actively essentially telling us that we don't need that product also. So it's hard to pin down exactly what the future is. Like, I think we're still away from, a ways away from game streaming. being viable for everyone in this country and having the bandwidth needed to do that.

But between Xbox, between PlayStation Portal, now being able to stream without streaming directly from your console, you know, just mobile consoles and Steam Deck and all of its competitors just giving this gaming on the go. It just, you know, console sales stagnating as some of the systems get longer in the tooth. I don't know where this is all headed.

Like as a lifelong console gamer, I guess it makes me sort of sad, but ultimately, as long as I can play my games on some sort of device, maybe we need to free our minds from being married to some big hunk of plastic. Did you know that you're hosting a podcast on an Xbox right now? I mean, I'm definitely playing it on a device that can play Xbox games, which I have multiple such devices within arm's reach right now. So, like, what's the pitch when the next Xbox console does come out? if it does, how are you going to get me to buy that thing while also telling me that I have

seven other Xboxes already in my house? But really, I think the wider trend, and this is related to that one, is just the end of software exclusivity. And it's not the end, obviously, but we've seen just those barriers fall almost. Like we've broken down those walls, basically, because you've got Xbox games everywhere, even on PlayStation. You've got PlayStation games on PC and Switch even. and we're just now at this stage where whether it's because of competition from other forms of entertainment, whether it's just economically tough to make bank selling hardware now, it's just all about getting your software, your games in front of the maximum number of people. And that means putting them on all the systems.

And so we're still not seeing Nintendo, like put out the biggest first party stuff on other systems or even Sony with its like most major first party stuff. there's still some lines drawn in the sand here, but a lot of that feels like much less distinct than it used to. And a lot of that happened this year with, you know, sea of thieves going to PlayStation and just everything else that has followed that. So I don't know. Do you guys think that's good or bad or it just is?

Wait, you don't think I'm getting Mario Kart 9 in early access on my PC? Just putting all these threads together. Yeah, I mean, my only concern. I'm imagining that, actually. This is not a good thought. Matt, by saying that you are now under litigation by Nintendo of America. Moratorium on mentioning Nintendo on this podcast just in case. But my only concern, I guess, is that if everything is on the same consoles, like, is there less competition?

Is that ultimately bad for consumers in some way if you don't have this sort of access of three different console manufacturers who are kind of competing? and even if it's different lanes and it's not like as heated as it was back in the console wars of the 90s, let's say you do still have competitors and competition is generally good for people like us. So that worries me slightly.

But I also like games just being accessible and not gated. So again, it's like double edged sword. It's a win for the children. I mean, if you're a kid right now and you can only afford one of the big boxes, you have fewer exclusives that you can't get your hands on than ever before. When us olds were growing up, we would have to constantly just have to make friends with other kids to go play games that we didn't,

and we couldn't play on our system. It's just the worst. It's really inconvenient. Yeah. There's a tactic creator I like a lot. It's a DX. You made a video essay recently called How PC won the console war. And I feel like, yeah, that essay engages with a lot of stuff that I think a lot about in this context, right?

which is like, I don't know if you think when a lot of us were growing up, I think the terms in which these pieces of equipment were competing with each other are really straightforward and clear, right? It's sort of like people were thinking about it in terms of what has the best graphics, which has the best sort of games libraries, right? And it feels like those distinctions break down, right? As graphics get good and the curve is not exactly linear. And as, yeah, there's this sort of ambiguity about what,

is the games library of an Xbox going to look like and what is the games library and meanwhile you have you know, Steam, PC, right? Like PC which is like a totally different beast when you and I were in college been like I don't know, like

the kind of niche you had to be to want to be a PC gamer over a console gamer was just totally different than it is now and yeah, there is this kind of globalist you know, this is kind of flattening of all of these distinctions And so I think a lot of the anxiety you're describing is people scrambling for people want to feel that thing that they felt maybe in the 90s or the 2000s, right?

Of here are the clear value distinctions between these pieces of hardware. And people just don't know what the successor, again, if it's not going to be exclusivity, what is it going to be? What is going to be that magic, that bad quality in the marketplace that Phil Spencer is going to come to you and say, okay, this is why you walk into my ecosystem and not into Sony's. And I think it's convenience. I think it's convenience is what is developing to be the time breaker here. You know, like, it's kind of shocking that Sony released the portal and kind of beat Xbox to a piece of hardware that does what Xbox has been doing best.

Xbox has been doing cloud gaming way better than Sony, has been doing game streaming from your console better than Sony. and yet Sony jumped out in front of them with the portal and sort of reaffirmed everything that Xbox has been working towards and probably is working towards in the future too. Doesn't that kind of feel like odd and arbitrary though? I feel like these races are won by like hairs rather than it used to be feet.

Now, if the consumer that we're thinking of is going to make those decisions based on a portable cloud-based like streaming platform that may or may not have already been there from a certain company that maybe somebody is just coming to the race. I feel like that's just like either hyper-specific or the

breadth of, or the library of games that are now mass appealing has just gotten so wide that those are the decisions that we have to make. Like I got to think about, well, if the most amount of games that I could possibly play is on a Steam deck versus the only four

games I'm going to be able to get to play, in a year, happen to be on PlayStation, what kind of things can make those decisions for me or make that decision easier? And that's going to be a difficult thing as time goes on because that's going to get more and more blurred. And does it change the economic model for making games if you're not making games to sell systems, but just to drive sign-ups to your streaming service, which is something that we've seen elsewhere in media and TV, where we have cutbacks and maybe the streaming model is a little

less lucrative than, say, the broadcast model was before that, and you can't afford, it's not profitable to make as many scripted shows. I mean, consoles, hardware, sometimes those are lost leaders, and you're just trying to get people in the door to make money on the software sales. But if you don't have console wars driving those things, if it's just we're adding yet another game to the pile of games of thousands of titles on this streaming service, then what are we going to pay for that if it's not call of duty or something that's going to make a major difference in signups? And then, yeah, does that kind of take something out of the market for funding game development? So so much of this is really just up in the air. It is a time of

transition. And I guess it's too soon to tell whether this will be a good or a bad thing. I think there will always be a market for just being able to veg out on a couch with a controller and play on a TV without having to worry about your graphics card or whatever it is, right? And maybe that is some sort of steam deck or maybe it's like Valve making basically a computer console again, as it has in the past. But something simple, unless it's just purely like it's on your TV, it's an app. There's an Xbox app and you can just play all your games there and that's how people will interact with this medium. I don't know. So I guess my naughty is also sort of tied to my nice, and it would be the big flops that we saw this year, especially the AAA flops, and probably

the most noteworthy of them would be Suicide Squad, which we discussed on this pod, and then Concord, which is just the flop to end all flops. And then you could even lump in X-Difiant, let's say, which Ubisoft just shut down recently. It's just tough to break into this live service ecosystem. And that's not news necessarily, but it was hammered home time after time after time that people just don't have that much more space in their rotation. They have some staples.

They have their fortnights and they have their Vowrence and they have their Grand Theft autos and Roblox and Minecraft and all of the Counterstrike, you know, the staples that people play. perennially. And if you want to break into that space, it's crowded and it's tough and it's risky. And that's naughty in the sense that, you know, not great to see massive flops and studios closed and people laid off. But nice in the sense that I guess maybe we'll stop shoehorning games into that model and stop trying to take the people who are making amazing single player

Batman games and say, make it that but live service and it just doesn't work and you end up with Suicide Squad. Yeah, it's a bigger nice for me. The industry needs to learn that lesson. We need to get more interesting games, and obviously you don't want to see studios fail. You don't want to see studio shut down because of the bad decisions that executives

have made. But I'm hoping that executives will learn from these bad mistakes and prevent further awful things from happening in the industry. It's just so frighteningly high leverage because the thing that I think Concord to me was the most fascinating story,

that came out this year, only because with the quickness at which this was a failure. Like, a failed launch or like a dud at an opening can kind of be expected for certain things, but we expect certain communities or certain things to find their niche or at least find a way to begin to improve. And we expect some sort of patience on the part of the developer to, you know, at least weigh those options. but within the span of less than a week, question mark, that is both taken offline, shutters a studio, issuing refunds to consumers,

and basically taking a massive hit for not only the industry, but seemingly a massive wing of Sony's catalog that just goes away. And you're thinking, wow, they have this many resources to simply throw away and then just shutter in the span of a week. I think it was closer to two weeks, Steve.

Give Concordid's due here. I think it was. That is what made it fast. Even when you were opening the segment, Ben, or when you're opening your list, and you said the biggest flop was Suicide Squad and then Concord. And I was like, I don't know. I feel like Concord was like exponentially more spectacular because that was a game that was just vaporized.

Like it felt like it felt like Concord ended with like J&K from Men and Black coming and flashy thing everyone and being like, this game never happened. This game never happened. Yeah. And borderline kind of bums me out because I'm like, I played the beta and like I would have thought that like, okay, maybe they'll go free to play or that like something will happen to this. Like it'll find its footing somehow in some way at some time.

Or then maybe it gets shuttered. But like there would be like a memory hole for us to just toss that thing into within a few short days to just be gone forever. And then apparently we're going to have an episode of secret level coming out about this thing. that's going to be preserved in amber. Yep. Which is going to make this more weird. Yeah.

Two weeks ago, I felt differently than I feel about it now as well. Because two weeks ago, I thought, okay, this is a major touchstone in gaming history. Like executives are going to learn we can't afford to spend ungodly amounts of money chasing the one game that everyone is going to play, putting all our resources into that. And now, as we are into the Marvel Rivals era, I'm a little bit concerned that the lesson goes from, we can't keep chasing that cash cow to we can't keep chasing that cash cow without an IP behind it. Right. And to be fair, free to play as opposed to charging people to get in the door, which is tough.

I do think Marvel Rivals still would have been successful at $40. I think that IP, the IP, The IT thing is, I don't know, man, Marvel Rivals is blowing up right now, and I feel like all the executives that we're like, we're not doing that ever, now like, hmm. Yes, right. Maybe we won't do that. Maybe if we make a DC version of this. Yeah.

Well, haven't we kind of been there? But yeah, I guess, I mean, right, that's another trend that is not new, but what we talked about last year, just all of the doubling down on franchises, sequels, remasters, re-releases, remakes, That is not going away. That was a trend. As was, yes, the continued layoffs and closures. And then I was going to say the other upside of, okay, you have some AAA flops. But for every surprise flop, there was a surprise sensation that kind of came out of nowhere in many cases.

And often it was an indie game. Sometimes it was a one person developed game. It was a balacho or animal well or something like Manor Lords, which fits into the early access category as well. And maybe that's because you have the Unreal Engine or you have these dev tools that you can sort of start from a baseline where you may not need a massive team to produce something that people will play. Or you just hit on a great game and a great idea and you work on it for years and polish it to perfection. But how many times this year? I mean, whether it was Powell World or Hell Divers or what? It was like we just did not know what we were going to be talking about the next month because something could blow up that wasn't even really on our radar.

So that's an exciting thing about games at this time. And sometimes there's a whiplash. It's just what is big on Steam right now that people are streaming and everyone's checking it out and then they move on to the next thing. But sometimes they're staying power. So that's, I guess, the good thing about some of these established titles flopping. So let's talk about the games of this year and let's draft the games of this year. I would say that it was a good year. It was not last year.

It's tough to follow in the footsteps of 2023, which was an absolute all-timer. But I don't know about you guys. I was personally concerned that this would be a slump, that basically all the studios, they used all their ammo, they blew their load last year, and given the development cycle in video games these days, that there would be a lull. And that is not what happened, really, starting from just everything that came out early in the year, Prince of Persia, Powell World, Helldivers, on and on.

Like, this was a good gaming year. You know, it's not quite as deep a bench as we had when we were drafting last time. But I'm going to have no trouble filling out my roster today. No, we got some heavy hitters for sure. I'm really just kind of curious about, like, I said to Matt before we started, I'm like, this feels like a race to the middle. Because, like, I think there's like only a couple of slim pickings on the certain,

a couple of categories. And I'm like, oh, boy, like, I don't know who's going to get this after this goes. Yeah. So this will be an interesting one for sure. All right. This episode is mostly about looking backward, but programming notes. Let's look forward briefly. This is the last but mesh of the year. I know, sad, but not the last ringerverse podcast or the last time you'll hear me. This Friday, the Midnight Boys, PooPew, will be back to give you their midnight mulligans. A week from today, we'll have December's edition of Ringervverse Recommends, which we will be pairing this month with a squid game season two. And what if season three check in?

featuring yours truly and Daniel Chin. And then on New Year's Eve, you can celebrate with Steve, Jomey, and Jess, who will close out the year with Mint Edition's list of things they missed in 2024. Nothing gets by, you guys. You didn't miss anything. I look forward to listening. On the 30th House of R,

we'll have an episode on their top moments of 2024, and they'll get us all started in 2025 with a skeleton crew episodes 5 and 6 deep dive later this week. And we've got some good stuff planned for button mash early next year, including our annual most anticipated games pod and coverage of Mythic Quest. One of my favorite shows returning after a long layoff late January to Apple TV Plus. Maybe not quite as hotly anticipated as severance, but I ride for Mythic Quest as well. This episode is brought to you by WeatherTech.

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Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu-like symptoms, or need a vaccine. Explore what's possible. Ask your doctor about Tramphia today. Call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more or visit Tramphiara Radio.com. So, the draft. I think we're going to stick with the same format that we used last year because that seemed to work well. And the idea here is to differentiate this episode from your standard Game of the Year list, which again, we published in written form on the ringer.com,

but this is more about assembling a roster in different categories. We have six categories. So we've got action adventure, RPG, ongoing game. So that is a live service game or a game that got DLC or some sort of expansion came out initially in some prior year. Indy game, rerun, which is one of those remakes, remasters, re-releases that I talked about. or a wild card, which can be anything. And of course, some games can fit into more than one category.

And we can debate that. And something like action adventure tends to be a bit broad with our definition, our classification of what falls into that. Any questions, any concerns, anything we need to straighten out before we get our draft order. So we need to have like an existential conversation of what is an RPG? What counts as an RPG? Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, we've had that conversation, I guess, related to Final Fantasy. We can definitely hash that out if it comes up if someone tries to smuggle something into the RPG category. Because really, isn't every game? Aren't you playing a role in every game? Aren't we really playing a role in real life? Yeah, yeah. Look, Metal Gear Solid is a stealth game. Okay.

And what is your role that you're playing? I am absolutely with you on that one. All right. Devin, can you give us a draft order? So the order is as follows. Justin, you are up first, then you are second, Matt, you are third, and Steve, you are fourth. Hot corner, all right. Okay, and we're snake in here, snake draft, so Steve will get to pick two times as compensation

for not getting to pick early on. All right, well, charity, I've been wondering whether you would assemble an all Atlas roster this year. I can do it. You can shoot the moon. Yeah. You can probably do it. What are you going to go with?

Number one. So again, the categories are action, RPG, live service, indie, rerun wildcard, right? Ongoing. Ongoing. Oh, and ongoing. Oh, and ongoing. I'm going to start.

I'm going to be a cliche. Come on. Yeah. Get it. Be you. Be you. Come on. Rerun Percent of 3 reload.

Right out the gate. Right at the gate. Right. Nice, man. Yeah. It's like the past couple of years have been interesting for people who like Atlas games. There are dozens of us. There are dozens of us.

I think between sort of like the present and future Prisota, the SMT and now metaphor. But I think Prisotasota as a remake is super, like I think when people, a lot of people obviously got to persona with like Perota 5. And Percent of 5 is interesting because compared to three and four, like, Percent of 5 is urban, right? It takes place in Tokyo and it's just, it goes really hard on the jazz stuff. And Prona 3, I think, is like a more intimate, like,

you can tell it's just from a different time of making those games. And so when Prona 3 gets this remake, I think it does a really good job of updating that game in a way that, in a lot of ways, feels true to the original experience. At least, you know, I played like Persona 3 portable. There are a few different versions of Persona 3. And yet, I think a lot of the animation and the music and the feel and the quality of life of Persona 3 reload makes it feel super vivid, super vital, super stylish, super splashy. And I think maybe in terms of the gameplay, if I'm comparing Prona 3 reload, SM5, vengeance, and then metaphor refect.

Don't spoil all your picks for this year. And metaphor repatasia. It's like persona three, I think is, you know, it's kind of like the easiest of those three games. I might prefer the other two to it overall, but certainly in terms of like remakes. Like, yeah, man, like Atlas wins me in this category and this might not be the only category that Atlas.

Yeah, we'll see what falls to you, I guess. Strategically, I don't know if this is the first Atlas game that would have been off the board by our other drags. afters here necessarily. We will find out whether this would have fallen to you in round two. But okay, you took care of business. You've got the rerun category checked off. And for my first pick, I'm not going to overthink this.

I'm going to go with our game of the year. I'm taking Astrobat. So it was all a choice. It was my game of the year. It was not a surprise. Is it a role playing game? Is that RPG for you? Look, you play a role.

You play as Astro. I could make the case, but I won't. This was, there was action, there was adventure, there was charm, there was just incredibly polished platforming. This game was overflowing with ideas so much so that some of them came and went too quickly for me, some of the best ideas in Astrobat. You could build a whole game around those mechanics, and it was just, it was a one-off. It was just tossed out there for one amazing level and never seen again.

And this was so immensely satisfying to me that this game was everything I wanted it to be because I've been following the progression of Team Asobi and just working their way up to this. And Astrobat Rescue Mission is maybe my favorite VR game of all time, which I played for PSVR. And just the announcements that they were going to be making a full-fledged platformer that would be longer than the VR version and obviously more widely accessible. that was so exciting to me. And the fact that it was announced and it was, what, a few months away by the time we even learned of its existence so we didn't have that long to wait.

And then it came out and it was perfect. It was just perfect. And it's the gift that keeps giving because we're getting winter holiday levels. They're trying to turn this thing into almost an e-sport. Right? And, you know, just trying to like lower our times

on certain levels and speed running this thing. And it's good for all ages. My three-year-old daughter enjoyed watching me play Astrobot this year and even taking the controls herself and just felt so inventive in kind of a classically Nintendo type way, except in the most PlayStation way possible. Because literally you're assembling PlayStation consoles and collecting PlayStation characters. But the actual core platforming experience here just felt like a little bit of a throwback in the best way, but also kind of taking the lessons of platformers past and coming. combining it with the best technology of today. Just an absolutely great game. Joy rides from start to finish.

Completely agree. I wonder how many years it's going to be before we see another non-Nintendo action platformer as game of the year. It'll probably be when the next Astrobot comes out. Maybe. The one after that. It's going to be a while. It's almost a dying genre.

So it is fascinating to see a game of the year in 2024. It's a platformer. That's strange. Do you feel like this post game awards backlash of people that just don't get why Astrobot could be game of the year? The fact that it doesn't re-event the wheel and the fact that it doesn't seemingly push some sort of like industry standard forward. Do those people just straight up don't get it? Or is there people out there that actually kind of like have a point of like, okay, well, maybe we're just like kind of like playing the hits and just kind of saying, well, we don't have a Mario game this year. This is the next best thing.

I mean, I think that anyone who's making the case against Astrobot is simultaneously making the case for whatever game they thought should have won. Right. I think like denying Astrobot its merits like on its own with no other Altiromotive is incomprehensible to me. Yeah. You're making a case again. What are you talking about? We just try to get rid of feedback loops that were bad. What are you talking about that? You're anti-fund if you don't like Astrobat. I'm sorry.

It's one of those things that at face value, it almost makes the most sense just. at face value because you're like, I see how somebody who's just sort of glancing over the category looks at Astrobot as the obvious Sony industry plant. Right. It just has the vibe of like an industry plant. And but it's like, well, if you've actually played it, you know what I mean? It feels like people who haven't played it and are just looking at it and being like, that seems like an industry plant thing. Yeah. And I will concede, and I mentioned this on the Master about PUD, there's an aspect of Sony SpanCon to this entire enterprise. I mean, it's not subtle.

This is, this is, I think it was a selling point for a lot of people. Horizon one game of the year, we'd be having a different conversation. Horizons game of every year for me and charity, but not for, not for everyone. Yeah, but if you want to talk about industry plants, good Lord. Yeah. Okay, here we go. Now we're about that. Now we're about to have a discord.

But, no, I think that was part of the charm for a lot of people, just wallowing and the nostalgia of collecting all these playshaves and characters and seeing them be cutely animated and everything. That was not really the draw for me. I didn't mind it. You know, recognizing some character I hadn't thought of in years was nice, but I wasn't coming for that. And in fact, I have said and still believe that I think this team, the studio, should be freed from the shackles of Sony SponCon now. Now, I don't know if they mind that or if they even want that. But I don't think we necessarily need to bind them to this duty of basically advertising Sony systems and Sony first party software, right?

Like maybe now having one game of the year and we'll see. Maybe the popularity of certain genres is cyclical and a game like Astrobaugh comes along. Maybe it inspires other people to make this. Maybe we get a wave of platformers like this. But I would hope that their next adventure, they get a chance to just separate themselves from the burden, the responsibility of promoting PlayStation. stuff and just say this is a great system, a great franchise in its own right. Like this is its own stand-a-line IP.

It doesn't have to be repurposed to promoting all this other stuff. Not that I mind it. I just, I want them to have the freedom to make whatever they want next. All right. Who's up next, Matt? I'm up next. Okay, what you got? What do I got?

I'm going to make a pick in the ongoing category. Oh, okay. Oh, no. I'm going to pick Shadow of the Nerd Tree. The Eldon Ring expansion from this year. Many people's game of the year. I guess are you drafting actually Eldon Ring here then, I guess? It's like the ongoing game and Earth Tree, Nerdtree is why it's ongoing.

Sure. Okay. Yeah. Label it however you see fit. Man, I thought that this DLC was going to be just a DLC. We have maybe 20 hours of extra content. Sounds fun. Man, they made a whole ass game out of this DLC.

yeah that's a game that was an entire game and it was an outstanding game until you got to the very last boss and it was kind of stupid how hard that last box was well it was an experience oh my god

and they nerfed him they nerfed him like a couple weeks ago I think yeah after I beat him annoying yeah you really should get some sort of like mailed in prize like a serial boss yes Well, it's okay. My tattoo is pretty legible. That's fair.

Yeah, I drank four loco before the FDA got to it. Yeah, Brad, exactly. Yeah. I was real hard. You live to tell the tale. Yeah. No, this is a good fick. And we've in the past, we've maybe excluded DLC from our written top tens at least,

and maybe even from our draft last year, I forget. But it's just, I know it became a controversy when the Game of Awards shortly before was like, oh, yeah, actually, DLC counts now, which. seem to be kind of, you know, specifically so that nerd tree could win. But I have no problem with that because it's a full-fledged game. Like the bar should be high for DLC. It should be a game of the year quality game. But if it is, and it just so happens to be DLC, as we started out saying,

all games are downloadable now. So what's the difference really? Everything is DLC. And I will reiterate that Bellotro is poker DLC. Sure. And if from Software just came out and said, this is actually a sequel now, which often happens, something starts out as DLC and then it's spun off into its own thing. That could have happened here, but it's ultimately the same thing, right?

It's just, if anything, they probably should have done that because maybe more people would have bought it if they hadn't had to play through a lot of Eldon Ring to get to it. But ultimately, if it stands on its own, essentially as a full-fledged experience, then why shouldn't it count? It certainly took up an amount of time in my life that was equivalent to multiple video games. That's for sure. Yeah. And I do kind of admire that they're like we're not making an Eldon Ring direct sequel, which everyone wants them to. But they have turned Eldon Ring into an ongoing game at this point, even though it's a quasi

single player game with a finite amount of stuff to do. It's DLC, it's Nerdtree this year, and then it's Night Rain next year, which is just an entirely different thing based on the brand of Eldon Ring. So they're not making a direct sequel exactly, but. We need the from software launcher. Yes, exactly. The Call of Duty launcher. Right.

Right. Yes. Install one terabyte of Eldon ring content. Hard even to open it. It crashes your computer trying to get the launcher open. Just got to get good at opening the launcher. All right. Steve, you have multiple picks to make. Mm-hmm.

I do. I do. All right. I'm going to go in ongoing. I'm going to pick probably like the first like, I think, super hot fire sensation of the year. in ongoing, I'm doing Hell Divers 2. Now, hold on, hold on.

I'm throwing a flag on this play. Can we pick an ongoing game that is new this year? Because I feel like the spirit of this category, I thought, is sort of like this game is not new, but it did something new this year. I would argue that it is created, it is designed to be an ongoing and evolving game. And it's especially a stronger argument in the past week

when they have just released a huge new update. Right. That changes the game as well. It is in the spirit of ongoing for sure. Yeah. What I could have done for ongoing is pick Marvel Rivals that has been out for about a week. And you can't say that that hasn't been going well for Marvel rivals.

But no, this came out in like February, I believe, of this year. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And it's definitely designed to be an ongoing game. I think it's fine that it came out this year. It's just it is clearly designed to be ongoing. Okay. Yeah.

It did win best ongoing game at the Game Awards for what it's worth. not that we need to be bound by that, but yeah. Listen, I'll follow Jeff Keely's rules today. The only game that is not ongoing is Concord. It's gone. Low blow. But no, I pick Hell Divers, too, basically because this in the beginning, and only now does it feel like the more, like,

I don't want to go into like the purity of live service games as to like ones that like are more consumer friends. or at least consumer forward, but this really feels like this is probably the best of both worlds of things that you can actually consciously endorse as a live service game to the best of my ability, while still being a ton of fun every time that I pop on with my friends to do it. This game took the world by storm when it first came out

and then was kind of mired in forms of controversy for the first few months that it was out after the fact due to Sony's account systems. Yeah, the PSN sign in Lossack. exactly. And still while some of those problems persist, that seems to be the thing that we're going to have to put up with for, you know, the ideas of Sony getting into the live service gaming and PC gaming writ large. And it's still a hell of a goddamn game. And I still can't find a real thing wrong with it other than the fact that like my friends aren't around to play with it more with me more often. And outside of that, I think this is probably one of the better contenders for the game of the year. that I can think of because I might have had some of the most fun

with it outside of the next pick that I'm about to make. Yeah. Yeah, it was probably my second favorite game of the year. Yeah. I just had a great time with Hell Divers,

and it just felt fresh and just to get away from the PVP and to just indulge in the PVE and the endearing jankiness that it's had and the community and the memes and the cosplay

and the catchphrases. And yeah, when we, did our pod on it, maybe back in March, we talked about, like, can they keep this going? Can they sustain this goodwill? And no, not consistently. Like, the pace at which they were pumping out content was probably unsustainable and the illusion that they were tailoring their campaign to player performance and preference that wore thin at a certain point. And, you know, there was buggyness and there were patches that people didn't like and nerfs and buffs that were controversial and all

of that, but through it all, whenever I just picked up and played some hell divers, I had a fantastic time. And now at the end of the year, with just a third enemy and vehicles and everything else, like this is positioned to be an ongoing game, I hope, four years to come. All right. What's next? With that, I'm going to go, I hope, I hope, accurately in the indie category, my personal game of the year, and I don't think I'll ever be shutting up about this game for the rest of my life. Balatro. I think that Bilatro is probably, if you were to strip away like one element of this game's design, you would have a game that's as pure as Tetris. I feel like it's just a hair shy of being that good and that everlasting. I don't think that I've found a game that can be

both as easy and simplistic to both recommend to people, as well as finding new and different ways to exert my own limitations as a gamer, to like make my own like Nuslock runs, to make my own types of like things that I want to challenge myself to think of how to play this game better because it encourages the way that you think and play it every time while still being just a simple like lose hours of your life to this game. I don't think that I've found a more pure adrenaline rush of like capital G gaming than Bellatro this year. And you say that as a Marvel snap recovering.

I'm out of jail, all right? Yeah, I don't know if you have fully rehabilitated yourself. But, yeah, this could have been a trend, either not of your nice, just card games. This was just a big year for card-based games, whether it was Bellatro or Pokemon TCG Pocket or Queen's Blood, Charity's favorite, or even Sabak in Star Wars Outlaws. Yeah, it's a terrible year for you as a card game hater, Ben. Yeah, no. Yeah, really. Real 10. Noddy for me.

Nice for everyone else. But yeah, definitely a trend. Real quick, Charity. If they had made Queen's Blood into a standalone, would that be your game of the year? I hope we find out next year. I have to be honest.

I can't be a meme all the time. It would not have been my game in the year just because so many Atlas games came out. Okay. All right, fine. Okay. Back to Matt. Well, speaking of Atlas,

no, I'm not going to do it to you, Justin. I'm not going to do it to you. This is actually. funny that it's come down to me with two of my games the year back to back here. I am going to be taking an RPG here. And I've had a lot of debate in my mind about whether I value FF7 rebirth or metaphor refentazio more. And it's so, it's such a dead heat for me, which is a little bit of a surprise, because playing through metaphor has been an incredible experience. And I can't say enough about that game's story, about the world, the setting. It's an original take on a game,

whereas FF7 rebirth is obviously a reimagining of Final Fantasy 7. I do think, though, that at the last 10% of metaphor refantasio soured me just a just a hair on it. it, just how grindy it got. The pacing of it just kind of bottoms out right before the climax there. And that kind of dropped it into a dead heat for me with FF7 rebirth. So I'm actually going to take Final Fantasy 7 rebirth here over metaphor, partially out of the kindness of my heart to Justin Charity. And partially because FF7 rebirth was and will be one of my strongest, most amazing gaming

memories of 2024. To see Final Fantasy 7, the section of that game specifically that I liked most, completely reimagined and fleshed out and the incredible soundtrack. There were so many incredible moments

in that game that I'll never forget. So I'll take FF7 Rebirth here for RPG. It's a good pick. It includes Queen's Blood. It encompasses the card game, so you get that as well. But yeah, it's, you know, I tire sometimes of the remake remaster, re-release trend. Yes, I want games to be broadly available and playable, but also

make some new stuff sometimes. And if you're going to remake something, then do it like this. I mean, my, you know, my nice trends or my nice award was almost naughty dog actually making an original game or announcing one, which is years away. So again, make new things. But if you're going to revisit old things, then do it the way that they did it here. And, you know, it's huge. And is it maybe a bit bloated. You could certainly make that case. You don't have to do all the side stuff. You don't have to do it.

Yeah, it's true. All right. Back to me. Oh, wow. Okay. This is tough. I mean, now I'm contemplating

depriving charity of an Atlas game. It just feels mean because like he deserves it so much more than I do. He wants it so much more than I do. Just take Shid and Magami Tensei 5. Just do it. Right.

All right. See, I really want to take Prince of Persia of the Lost Crown, but I already selected my action adventure, so I'd have to take it as my wild card unless I could convince any of you that it's clearly not an indie game. It's made by like an indie-ish studio, but it's part of Ubisoft. So it's not an indie game, and I don't think I can sell it as an RPG. So I think I'm going to take it as my wild card.

Good for you. Yeah, I hate to take this category off the board, but if I'm being honest about games I really loved this year that need appreciation and should not be forgotten because they came out on January 18th, which seems like a very long time ago. You know, this year, like, we used the whole calendar. We had great games in January. We had indie coming along in December and Marvel rivals and everything. Like, we really used the, we explored the studio space here.

And Prince Persia of the Last Crown, I know you feel the same. way that I do about it, Matt. It was just a glorious gaming experience and one that I was not anticipating would be as good as it was. And it was a year full of Metroidvania's. I guess basically every year is at this point. But as good as some of the others were, I think it was all downhill from Prince of Persia, the Lost Crown to me, which just the traversal, the combat, the platforming, which was challenging but not frustrating and just made me feel good at games in a way that I don't usually.

And, you know, the story maybe was a weaker aspect of it, but I didn't really care because, you know, and of course the innovative map and being able to record where you had been because always the biggest headache in Metroidvania's is the retracing and the backtracking and trying to remember where that thing was and the fact that you could take screenshots

and mark where things were to keep track of them was a cool innovation. Just a great game. And sadly, didn't sell super well. And the studio that made it already has been sort of scattered to the winds within Ubisoft on other projects. But please, people go check out Prince of Persia.

I'm at the point where I'm just scolding people who haven't played this game. It's not very becoming of me. I know you're all waiting for Prince of Persia remakes. And yeah, there's Sands of Time coming in a couple. couple years. Don't wait. A great Prince of Persia game is already available to you. And it's on pretty much every system. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Back to charity. And we left all the Atlas titles for you. I'll go actually with indie first. Nice. All right. Crow country.

Yeah. Hell yeah. This is actually kind of a close category for me. But Crow Country, Crocunchy is even a game that, like, I spent so much time with when it came out when I heard that buzz for it. People haven't played it. It's, you know, old school survivor, horror, nostalgia, throwback, you know, PS1 era, recursive unlocking style horror game with a kind of like, not to get too heavy into spoilers, but with an interesting environmentalism theme to it that emerges in its narrative. It sort of goes in a very, very interesting direction that I found really nice. Like, video games are a medium where sometimes storytelling is the aspect of video games

that test my patience the most, and I actually thought that Pro Country, especially for a game of its scope, just did a really nice job, both its environmental storytelling and just, yeah, with its writing, just really, really good characters, really fun for a horror game. Excellent. Yeah. Really good twist. When I say I went back and forth on it, you know, I think there, it feels small. It's sort of like if it's a game that's kind of competing in your memory with like the original Resident Evil, there are times where it feels like a kind of small map.

It feels like the sort of, it's not really actually the same flow of reclusive unlocking. But then I think about it some more and I replayed it a bit. And it's like, yeah, it really gets at that idea of like you're kind of in an environment that you don't understand. there are puzzles, so to speak, that you can kind of solve in different ways. And the fact of how you solve different puzzles sort of means you can solve things out of order, in different order, alternative order, and just sort of toying around with a game like that, like it's a kind of Rubik's Cube. And that game also having like a really neat but actually quite effective story and just having

an immaculate vibe, if we're being honest about ProCountry. Did you notice the control scheme? Obviously, you probably played it with a control stick. Did you touch the D-pad while you were playing it? No, I think I did. Tank controls on the deep-pad. Oh, that's funny. I did not notice that at all.

I noticed it like three-quarters of the way through my play-through. I was like, oh, my God, no. Another question I have for you, Charity, as a PS-1 head. Did you go into the arcade in Crow Country? Yeah, yeah. Did you find a particular basketball game in there? No, I'm trying to think. I don't think so.

They have Super Dunk from Final Fantasy 7. The basketball game that you play in Golden Saucer in Final Fantasy 7, that is not in the remake. It's not in Rebirth this year, by the way. It is in the arcade in Crow Country as an homage to the art style of Final Fantasy 7 that clearly inspired this game. Attention in detail. This is a game that I think to these points. It's a game that just has a really loving and beautiful attention to detail.

tale and like, like he's like, good twists. Just really good twist, really immaculate storytelling sense in Crow Country. That is my indie for this year. Beautiful. What's your next pick? RPG. What could it be? Don't keep us in suspense.

Here's the thing about metaphor. Okay. So metaphor refantasia, that is the pick. Despite having bad title, should we just call it metaphor? Like, let's just skip that out of the way. Yeah. Fantasia. I played the game three times.

I still don't know what a refa. I get it. Sure, I get kind of what it's gesturing at, but refantazio, come on, no. I think the reason why that game became a sensation, right? It's like very different from why something like Persona 5 became a sensation. Like this game, I was kind of astounded, especially because I guess, like, I'd played persona 3 reload by the time I played this, but I'm thinking of something like SMT5, not SMP5, Vengeance.

The original Shimigami Tensei 5 that came out a few years ago, to me, is like a video game that just had like the worst story I've ever played in a video game almost feeling. And I love that guy. I love Shippegami Tensei 5. That story is awful. Characters are awful. It's like watching paint try whenever people start talking in that game. And so I had negative expectations going into metaphor in terms of storytelling chop. And I did not expect a couple of things.

One, for metaphorie Fantasio to be like, imagine capital letters, the video game about racism that actually kind of nails that. Like it kind of nails being, it's like this very weirdly unsubtle sort of like multiracial democracy plot that's just kind of beautiful. and is kind of in an unironic way about the power of friendship and tolerance. And it's, it's kind of adorable in a lot of ways. And yet the other side of the coin of that being this game, having the greatest villain in video games in recent memory. Like Lewis,

Lewis in metaphor is his drip. I think I even said this in the blurb, like his drip, incredible. right, his smarm, unparalleled, right? His delivery. Like, everything about Lewis is just the most smarmy, but also charismatic. He's that kind of villain who really is good at selling you on the idea of, it's not the thing that people often harp on with villains of like,

oh, the villains, you know, he's actually right. He's not that kind of villain. Instead, he's like, the villain you love to hate. I loved hating Lewis so much. He is such a dickhead. I'm sorry. That, yeah. And it's also just sort of the confidence that game has in its villain.

Like, I feel like a lot of RPGs do the thing of like the villain is actually some other thing or the villain is actually God, right? And this game is like, no, this dude sucks. And it's an extended meditation this game on how much this one dude sucks. I loved how much it wasn't about like we gotta kill God like so many RPG it was very much like no the people here are the villain there is a villain and it is a person

and he sucks can I like quick piggyback because again as somebody who has not finished metaphor and is like well aware that like in most of the things in the Atlas milieu if it's not as digestible for me

I know that I won't finish it but I can respect anybody's appeal to do so when the themes of power of friendship overcoming racism and all those things like we joke about that amongst the JRP and like just like anime storytelling community in general like how does that

how is that played with a straight face and not becoming a joke of itself because that's just like that's everything tries to do that like why does it nail it so well? The answer is I don't totally know I mean I think this game like if you use anime as a reference point. I think this game does a kind of admirable job of balancing that stuff

that feels very heightened anime power of friendship thing with what feels actually like a really grounded plot, right? Like it is a, it's a strange, I guess it's because this game is about like a contest to determine the ruler of society in this sort of distantly post-apocalyptic neo-feudal or neo-medieval context. It's like there's something, the game wants to be grounded, is why. I think on the flip side of it being anime,

it wants to be grounded and it wants to, like I think about the fact that one of the little side quest, the past, or one of the activities you can do to pass time is you can give speeches in the public square where you kind of face off against the other contenders for the throne. And like, that's a good example of the kind of detail where it's like,

no, part of this quest, as much as it's about killing monsters and slaying people. It's also about, like, again, it's like a democratic exercise in the most mundane ways. And I think that's the thing. It's like mundane and heightened. It's a cycle. I think the whole game is a cycle of those two things, right? It's trying to be something that is as big as you, you know, you have to kill God.

And I guess that's kind of true with all of the Atlas games. But I think that's where it matters that with metaphor, you're not playing with teens. And you're not playing in this kind of blank canvas. Like humanity's been wiped out except for these players who are jockeying to determine what the reborn world is going to look like. No, it's like it's a society. People are living. People have families. Like I think a lot of it is the fact that it's the most kind of grounded depiction of a society.

but where you play as an adult, right? Like, I think a lot of that stuff informs why this game, I think, is both anime and kind of relatively grounded and approachable as such. I think also, like, the reason why it's so successful at the whole, like, friendship, you know, conquering all trope is because it shows you that the alternative is just terrible.

What the alternative is being divided and angry and having the weak suffer with no one to speak for them. So you have either this inclusive society working together or you have an angry divided society and they do a great job of showing what that looks like at a granular level in a society. How timely. It's always nice when a video game can comment

on what's happening in society in a non-corny way. But magically without because. coming the kind of discourse object we were talking about earlier. Like, it felt like this is a game where it tried to do those things. And somehow it holds it off. Those people who didn't play this game. No, I don't think. I just heard that.

I think plenty of people. Even they liked it so much they couldn't come through. Yeah, I think plenty of people from various corners of gaming actually kind of rallied around a metaphor. And whatever it was, whatever it is that's exceptional about this game, despite it being literally a game about racism, that's how good the game is. The game is just that good that I don't think you could kind of like take it down. on a peg with some really stupid discourse about whether this game is woke actually or something like that.

Like, no, it's just that good. Yeah. Well, I would subscribe to a podcast where you just discuss metaphor of Raventazio every day in great depth. But we must move on. And for my next pick, I will be selecting in ongoing game, the game that's kind of the king of this category for a different reason every year, which is Fortnite. Fortnite had a big year. When does Fortnite not have a big year? It is incredible to me that I wrote a year-end piece for the ringer in 2018

about how Fortnite had conquered culture and gaming, and here we are six years later, and that victory is still very much intact. It just feels like nothing can derail Fortnite. And it's not just kind of coasting along on the built-in popularity. It's doing different stuff. Now, one thing it did was rewind and play, a World Warcraft classic move with Fortnite OG just this month, which a lot of people are loving,

which, you know, is part of that whole, like, nostalgia impulse, but if you're offering it alongside your later offerings and you just want to give people a chance to dive back into the game as it existed in its earlier state, then that's nice. And it can be a fun trip down memory lane. And you might realize actually things weren't better then. Or you might decide to stay in that happy past. But it wasn't just that because it was also put. Fortuny Fortnite forward with first-person mode. So now, Fortnite can be first-person. So it can really be everything.

And whether Fortnite ballistic is your cup of tea or not, this just feels like we're at the point now where we might get to a year where just all the new good games are inside of Fortnite or Roblox or something. Like, that is kind of what's happening in a low-grade way where if you have Unreal Engine 5 built into this thing because it's an epic game and you can get tons and tons of eyeballs on it. I'm not saying

that would be a great thing. But every time I look up, it's like Lego Brick Life is this new Fortnite game that's like a Lego game that is Lego meets GTA. And it's just inside of Fortnite. Yeah. I mean, like, you know, everything is Fortnite and Fortnite is everything. And sometimes Fortnite just swallowing every other successful game mode sort of sucks, but sometimes it actually is kind of this incubator for cool games that might not have been made otherwise. So just the addition of first person mode, that just it feels like a pretty big step forward. And I don't know. Like is this so cemented now as the quote unquote closer thing, closest thing we have to the

metaverse that it cannot be dislodged? Like is Fortnite too big to fail at this point? or do you think that there could ever come a time when Fortnite is passe where we've all outgrown Fortnite or like can that just not happen now? Hard to imagine. Fortnite is future proof

because it can basically be anything. Don't know. Yeah. scares me. And it is the children who are wrong. All right. Next up, Matt. All right.

Well, I'm going to make a pick here specifically to snipe something from Steve that I'm worried that he's going to end up getting it before me and I need it. Okay. So it's not necessarily the next best game on the board, but I'm sweating. And I got to come away with this one.

So for my indie game, I'm going to pick minishoot adventures. Oh, okay. Yeah. No? Fine. No. Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on.

Hold on, hold on, hold on. No dis to mini shoot. All right? Let me make that very clear. All right? Mini shoot rules. Okay. I was more so fine with that being taken.

That was fine by me. Okay. That was it. Talk about Minishoot, please. I will because people don't know about this game. Minishoot is one of my favorite games of the year. It's a near-perfect video game. There just aren't flaws in this game.

It's basically like if a top-down Zelda game met a twin-stick shooter. It is on Steam. If you have a Steam deck, you need to have it. It's perfect. I don't know why this is not Switch yet. They must just not have a big enough development team to get that done fast. But, man, this game is. phenomenal.

If you ever like Zelda games, if you've ever liked shooters, even if you haven't liked shooters, it controls super well. The exploration in it is great. The upgrades that you can get, the way the map connects to different parts of the map, and you unlock,

it's got a bit of a Metroidvania feel to it, despite being an overhead game. I could play sequels to this for years and years to come. I will constantly think about this game when I think back on 2024. I can't really speak highly enough about mini shoot adventures. Yeah.

This is, I was going to ask each of you guys if there's one 2024 game that you haven't had a chance to check out yet that you want to play in 2025, which might be a tough question for you to answer, Matt, because I know you've played every game released this year. But minishoot is number one on my list of I have not played this and I really want to play this. It's this and then a thousand times resist, which I hope is how you say that. I want to play that. X times. Whatever. Yeah.

Minishute, I guess I'm waiting for those Switchport or I'll crack and finally play it on Steam if I have to. But this is number one on the list for me of my gaming regrets. So you won't be risking much. Yeah. Yeah. It looks fantastic. I can't wait to play it. No, it's a magnificent game.

Okay. Steve, back to back. All righty. Okay. I'm running through. I'm going to give you my rerun of the year. And that is going to be Silent Hill, too. Mainly because it was such a miraculously pleasant surprise.

I genuinely thought this was going to be terrible. For real. People seem to think that. And, like, everybody was, like, almost determined to be, like, finding excuses to make this game still bad just for the sake of being right. And I'm like, no, there's a beauty in being wrong with something like this. To see a Konami banner on a game trailer and not have, you know, the utmost confidence, maybe is a little pragmatic nowadays.

But I was just absolutely blown away with how well and like such a tender love and care from this development team to know what Silent Hill 2, specifically that story means to people and translated in a way that is both modernized and yet does not lose any of its sense of self from a game that's like notably known as a poorly translated or like oddly crossed over to Western audiences

type of story, it's still beloved. And this is kind of giving it its Last of Us treatment and giving it the kind of reference that a lot of people have put onto it over the years with incredible performances, an amazing soundtrack, a like really, really good modernization of its dialogue and cinematic choices that,

really give you something that is like a sight to behold for understanding why Silent Hill 2 as you remember it should be re-examined. And I think it's a perfectly good, one of the best remakes that I've seen this year, obviously. The fans were not mad. Yeah. That's quite an accomplishment.

All right. It's absolutely incredible. And then, okay, this is probably going to be my first, like, deep in the crate. No. Get it. Do it. No, man. Okay. Yeah, action adventure. I'm going with Space Marine 2.

Nice. Okay. This fucking game. This got me reading like six books. And I can't... And I really can't be mad at a game that got me reading again. Like, granted, the Warhammer 40K lore and, like, IP in general, I don't think I could find anything that's more like, scaring the girls' territory. or like making. I got your sense into something.

I did. I really did. But it's, I can't talk about it for too long. But what I will say is that it's probably the best, like, dude bro exercise in positive masculinity that I've ever had in gaming in this year.

But it's really good. Like, picking up where Hell Divers 2 left off and just giving you a great PVEE experience with an incredibly, like, all killer, no filler. Like, it's so short and so compact and so tight with its campaign that it allows you to just go off and do these PVE missions a la Gears of War, a la, anything that came from like, it's one of the greatest, like, eight out of tens I've ever played. And for that, it makes it

a nine. Does that make it, does that make sense? Sure. Like, I don't think that I could have had a better experience for a short amount of time that I've ever had other than, you know, than like, I don't know, push a tease last album. Like, that's probably it. I love this game. Wow. I loved it. It's my turn.

Wait. No. Damn it. I get to pick that game, not you. Okay, go ahead. I'm going to pick the game that you're going to pick. I'm going to pick in the remake category. I'm going to pick Paper Mario a thousand year ago.

Oh, you sniped me. And guess what, Ben? Unbelievable. Here's the real kicker. I haven't played this game. Oh. It's one of the only games I haven't played. How dare you?

How dare you? You know, everyone I trust who has played this game, and I will play this game within the next few weeks. Bet on that. Wow. Everyone says that this is the greatest Mario RPG ever, and that this particular remake was a real shining example of a remake where they didn't mess with anything.

They didn't fix what wasn't broken. and they updated the graphics and made it look a whole fresh coat of paint on it and that the game itself stood the test of time enough that they really didn't have to do a lot to it. So I can't wait to get to this. Well, I'm glad you heard the game was good. Congrats on getting it. That's really special for you. I know it played a big part in your 2024 gaming experience.

Yeah, let's see what you're going to pick that you played in the remake. Matt was determined to piss somebody off and I'm just glad it wasn't me. We're all going easy on charity here. Yeah, take all the Atlas titles you want. Charity just comes. Like, we were going to snite any of those and actually have a compelling thing to say about it. All right. Well, I'm not going to take a rerun now because I can wait.

I will take an RPG and... You're so mad as hell. Look, there's some... I can snipe right back at Matt here. Yeah, you know my weaknesses. I could take a game I haven't played. I could take like a dragon infinite wealth. Who has that kind of time?

Matt does, and he played it. But I'm not going to take that. I'm not going to do it. And I'm not going to take Dragon Stogma too either. I'm going to leave even though I did play that game. What else? You're not going to do. I know what he's taking them.

No, I don't think you do because I'm going to take something that you might not even think of as an RPG, but I think it qualifies. Oh, okay. Are we going to have to, is this going to be litigious right now? Charity, mom and dad are fighting. Are you going to tell me, is an RPG? No, no. I'm taking the legend of Zelda Echoes of Wisdom as an RPG.

As an RPG? Yes, and I'm doing that because, look, Zelda has always had RPG elements, but this game, it's summons, it's entirely summons. You are not fighting directly for the most part. You are summoning other creatures to fight for you. What could be more RPG than that? I can feel the comments just piling up under this Instagram post. You get dog piled in the chat and we haven't even put the episode out yet.

This is not the biggest reach that we've ever had in a category in our past two drafts, I will say. So I'm going to take Legend Zelda Echo's Wisdom, a game I liked a lot. We left it off our top 10 at The Ringer.com, which I felt a little bad about. But Matt, you were talking about how mini shoot is blending like, you know, bullet shooter, top-down shooter with top-down 2D Zelda. Really good RPG. Yeah. I can't take mini-shoot because I'm not drafting anything that I have in. played because I want to be authentic and sincere here.

But I will take the top-down 2D Zelda at least because I love that. I did really enjoy it. It's a great game. It's a really great game. It underperformed a little bit for me. It was a top three and most anticipated game of the year for me. And I enjoyed it a lot. I would put it as like an 8.5 or a 9 out of 10.

I just thought that like it let me solve most of the puzzles with beds. and like, sure, like, yeah, like I can be more creative about it and I was. But sometimes, like, yeah, you know, you get a little fatigue and you're just, I'm just going to drop beds and get out of this stuff. Bad meta, you know? Bad meta.

Yeah, that's bed. Did you say bad meta or bad meta? Bad meta. Is the bad meta? Yeah. Beds are OP in that game. Charity and I talked about that a bit. Is that better? Yes. Yeah.

Temperporepity tech. I'm glad when they finally made the playable Zelda game that they didn't have acid, that this is like a full-fledged Zelda adventure. And I wanted a 2D original Zelda game, which we hadn't had in a long time, and I was worried we wouldn't again. I want a sequel. Yeah, me too. And yeah, there are a lot of creative moments in this,

and it's kind of like a greatest hits in terms of like the Zelda setting and all the characters and everyone you run into. And the, yeah, the dungeons could have been maybe better at times. Because again, like, I did find myself defaulting to certain strategies. strategies over and over again. But I did really find it pretty charming and entertaining and, you know, about as close as you could come to porting the Breath of the Wild experience to, you know, more of a top down, just blending the old and the new.

I thought they did quite an admirable job of that. Yeah. All right. Back to charity for two picks. Okay. Action. Like I said it, like I'm playing time. Right.

Action. That's how you were filming. You're the director of a. Yep. That's how old I am. Time crisis. Another crab's treasure, weirdly enough. Like, that game was so talk.

And I think it's because I had been on a kick of going back to Sekaro for a bit and going back to Eldon Ring for a bit. Throw some holiday in there. And then I stumbled onto another crab's treasure. And that game is so cute. And also so hard. Yeah, it's hard. And I was like watching.

I was watching streamers play it. That game is just fun, man. That game is gone. Another Grab's Treasure just rips. That game is so good. It has so much personality. It's just that game is a good hang despite, you know, being a little challenging. I really love another crap treasure.

So that is my action game. Another Crows Treasure is such a good hang. It's such a great hang. It's tight. That game is tight. Let me see. What else? I'd say I'll go ahead and do my wild card now.

This could be wild card or. could be ongoing. I'm going to do it as Wadkart. Children of the Sun. Oh, yeah, man. Yeah, children of the Sun. I don't know if people who played the demo. I featured it on Ring Reverse Recommends.

It's really good. Yeah, that game, it could be ongoing because they put out expansion for it. Like, I wouldn't say a couple weeks ago, I haven't gotten around to it. But I spent a lot of time with Children of the Sun. And that's another game. I went back and forth on because I was like, this game is short. It's certainly short. And I think, like, sometimes on some of the levels of that game,

for listeners who don't know what Chorin' The Sun is, it's basically like a lot of cult stuff going on, and you play a sniper and it's sort of a first-person shooter in a way, except the sort of twist of this game, well, it's not really first-person because you sort of get a detached view, but you have one bullet per level. And your goal on these levels is basically to, in bullet time, basically with like mechanics that get elaborated upon and enhanced that you get to other levels

is like you need to kill multiple people in a sort of an area with a single bullet from a sniper rifle. And this involves sort of having the bullet ricochet off of things, have the bullet blow up things that can maybe kill multiple people at once, right? It becomes a kind of geometry puzzle, you know, where you get to fudge the physics of things a little bit, obviously. And it's got a really great style and vibe. And it is pretty short. And it's funny because there's like, there's score, you know, the game keeps score, but in a way where it's like, I wish it felt a little more addictive if that made sense in terms of like being able to optimize. And I'm sure people, there are people who are crazy at playing this game and really optimizing the routing of the bullets.

But like at first, I thought it's replayability might be its biggest limitation. But I am excited to dive into the DLC they put out recently. And yeah, it's just the more I found myself, I think about that game a lot. So I definitely deserves to be on this list. Okay, so I'll be taking an indie game. I got my Nintendo game after Matt's still one for me. So I guess here I'll take one. I don't know whether this would have been on Matt's board.

I would think so. I'm surprised that's fallen this far, but I'll take Animal Well with my indie game. Yeah, I was tempted by Neva. I was making eyes at Nava, but I'm going to go with Animal Well. And when I said earlier that Prince of Persia was the best Metroidvania of the year, it gave me pause. I was thinking, do I actually believe that? Does Animal Well contend?

I mean, it's more puzzly, right, and a little less action-y than Prince of Persia. But this is the file-size champion of the year. If you need to save some hard drive space, then go get yourself Animal Well. It will not take up any room. It's a labor of love. One developer. Yes, who has been making this game for years and just pouring over every puzzle and perfecting it. And it's deceptively deep and it's got a distinctive design.

And you can play it kind of a cursory surface level play through or you can devote the rest of your life to it, plumbing its depths. And I've found myself somewhere in the middle. But animal wealth is just, yeah, might be the indie game of it. the year for me as a non-Belotro player. So happy to have it here. That's a great pick. It's a great game. It's really memorable. I love a game that that doesn't hold your hand and that relies on you to observe and figure things out on your own. Yeah. So it might not be for a lot of people, but Wow, what a snob. What an elitist. Okay. What are you taking? Well, I'm going to take an action Adventure, and this is going to be really tough for me because there are three games on the board,

four, four games that I could pick from here that I feel really strongly about. And since everyone has picked Action Adventure, I could list them, but you still have wild cards, so I won't. This is tough. I'm going to take like a Dragon Infinite Wealth. I'm going to do it. Okay. I was also thinking about Black Myth, Wukong, but I gave that a lot of love in our actual

written piece on the site. So I'm going to go Infinite Wealth here. The only kind of knock on this game that I have is that it uses a lot of systems and mini-games. It is a little bit more of the same from previous Like a Dragon game, but ultimately I think what separates this is that the story is, I don't think you can even argue. I think it's the best story in any Yakuza or like a dragon game. I think it's really moving story, emotionally impactful, in a way that you wouldn't expect from a game in which,

You're also riding on a trolley taking photos of gyrating scantily clad men. It sure is a duality, as most like a dragon games are. But in this instance, the narrative here I think is really special and worth highlighting. And beyond that, you're, you know, when you're not actually paying attention to the story, man, there's a lot of fun stuff to do in this game. There's a lot of silly things going on. It'll make you laugh, make you cry. It's a whole lot of game.

And I got no regrets picking this one. I'm glad. We don't have a best adaptation category, but if we had, I guess, like a dragon, Yakuza, would not have won. There were some good ones this year continuing that trend from last year. Hopefully Sonic maybe fits into that category too.

But yeah, okay. Let's go to Steve. Is this your last two picks, Steve? My last two picks, correct. Okay. Let's do it. So RPG for me, slimmer pickings, but I actually have played this. I haven't finished this yet, but for an RPG that both managed to like excite people, piss people off,

and not really be as good as many of its predecessors, but still be a fun time. I'm picking Dragon Age the Veil Garden. Ooh, nice. Mainly because the combat is actually very good. And it feels like tight and responsive in a way that most Dragon Age hasn't. felt in ever almost and it feels almost anti-bioware to be this punchy and like devil may cry for the types of things and systems that you respond to in an RPG. It's fun. I think the characters are kooky and nice. It's definitely not going to be a thing that many people have written home about,

but I've found it to be pretty endearing for the most part. And, you know, I wish that, you know, the bio-ware of old is long gone, but I think this is probably the better version of something that kind of picks up that mantle and follows you along for a fun and engaging story that is both palatable and, you know, pretty punchy and fun. Okay. Last pick.

Last pick, Wildcard. It's going to be probably the funniest game of the year for me. Yes. It's an indie game called, Thank goodness You're Here. Woo! This game is so goddamn funny. I don't think I've laughed harder at a game ever in my life.

Yeah. For the uninitiated, you just play as a tiny little man in this, like, cartoon rendering of a small English town where you're here to sell something to the Lord Mayor, and you're just helping people out around the town. And there's just a bunch of goofy, Monty Python-esque jokes that you walk around and have a little, a silly little adventure for for about four hours. And it's hilarious, and Reggie's wife can learn a thing or two. I love this game so much. And it's a clever design too because it kind of, you can't get lost in it. It kind of works you through all of the locale, and it actually kind of works in a way where it loops you through it. So that each kind of loop that you go around the area, the jokes that from earlier sort of have evolved and are recurring in new ways,

oh, this happened now after that last one. and it's just, it's really a brilliant little design, and it is so weird and so English and so funny. And to hammer the point home as to why a game can be funny while also still being unique to gaming, I find myself, like, while also being subject to the jokes that this game has, like kind of making my own comedic timing with thinking when things may happen

and being able to interact with them, because as the player character, the only way that you can interact with something is just smacking it. and something happens. And either like you smack it or a person speaks or you smack something and a table moves or something like that.

But thinking about what's going to happen next and when you interact with something and then having it happen again is kind of up to the player and it only embellishes the amount of comedic resonance that you have after you see something funny and then it happens again.

Because there are certain things such as like reoccurring jokes that happen here or like the rule of three. that you can find yourself seeing, but it's all kind of up to you, and I don't want to, I don't want you to think that this is a game where

like you interact with player choice or anything, but it's just kind of rhythmic in a way that where you're interacting with something, it also makes it funnier. Yeah. Anyone can play this,

and everyone should. And it's got my favorite achievement slash trophy of all time. And I can't spoil it for you, but it involves the way that you speed run this game. And when you figure it out, it is so funny.

It's the funniest trophy slash achievement ever. Anyway, great pick. I love it. What's your last one? I have to pick a wild card, and this is, I'm going to show some more indie love here, and not Indiana Jones,

which, by the way, is a fantastic game. Tough to leave that on the board, yeah. And I really, I should pick one of the blockbusters here, but I'm going to instead go for an indie game just to change things up. And I think there are two that I'm sort of between right now that I think both deserve a lot of love. And that is UFO 50 and 1,000 X, 1,000 times resist. That's a really hard choice. 1,000x resist is an incredible, incredible story that kind of, it looks like it's not going to make any sense.

Like it's going to go off the rails into a way, let's kill God, kind of Shin-Magami, They tend to say five. But for real this time. And I think everything in this game makes sense. The weird phrases that they're using at the beginning, by the end of it, everything ties together. It's amazing. But I think I'm going to give the nod to UFO 50 here. It is the astrobot of indie games this year.

It is a game celebrating games. And if you don't know UFO 50, this is an indie game that is comprised of 50 individual games. The idea here is that you've sort of discovered. this long-lost console from the 90s and all of the games that came along with it. And the games in here are like, this one's from 1987. And the earlier games in the series, the graphics are worse, there's no music.

And then by the end of it, the 50th game, like you're in like somewhere between like Super Nintendo and PlayStation era graphics. There are like sequels. There are recurring characters. Like there's a platformer that has so much success that later there's like a cart-re racing game with that character in it. Not only is it like about where games came from,

it's also about where games are now. And it's taking some of the modern forms of games that exist now and saying, well, what if we had figured that idea out back in the 80s and 90s? What would that look like? And there's no way you would play all 50 of these games and not find at least 10 that you are just way into. This game is tremendous. If you have any connection to retro games at all, or if you have none and want to get a sense of what that would have felt like, this is a really unique and special game. So I'm going UFO 50 with my wildcard. I'm in awe of the artistic achievement of that game, but also intimidated to play it. So I don't know where to start and how much of my time it might consume.

It's sort of scary. But the fact that it exists at all is just amazing. All right. I have one more pick to make. My rerun. I am still upset that I do not have Paper Mario. I am going to take, look, there's a lot of great stuff still on the board here. Shinemogami Tensei Five Vengeance still on the board, I believe. And a lot of just great games that I love that got remasters that I can in good conscience take because they just didn't upgrade it that much, you know, like a Last of Us or Horizon or whatever. I just, I can't give it to a straight up remaster, really. And then, you know, Braid Anniversary Edition, I just didn't play because I played Braid again last year or Dragon Quest 3 or, I don't know, there's tons to choose from. I almost went with the Star Wars Dark Forces remaster from Nightdive because I just, I love that game. And I love that it's available in modernized form, although the game itself is pretty archaic in some respects. And so nostalgia helps with that one. But I think I'm going to go with a game that was one of Brothers A Tale Two Sons, another great game I love that, again, didn't really need a remaster necessarily or a remake in that case.

But one thing that happened this year was like a lot of collections, you know, like Phoenix Wright and Tomb Raider, just like a lot of just packs of many games in a series made available in remastered form or some sort of spruce-up way. And I think maybe the best of those is what I'm going to go with. And that is Marvel versus Capcom Fighting Collection arcade classics. Because if you're going to do that, you've got to do it right. And they did. And they put everything in there. You know, there's just so many games in this game. And also games that in some cases just hadn't been available on console ever or hadn't

been available on this console generation or hadn't been available since they first came out. on console, and they put it together in this really quality collection, supporting all sorts of multiplayer modes and with the net code so that you could play online and just like training modes and extras. It was a lovingly done thing. Capcom is really revisiting its history and resurrecting these dormant franchises and also just showing a lot of love to its back catalog, which is nice. And just seeing people get excited about this game, seeing how much, childlike love Van Lathen had for Marvel versus Capcombein collection. That alone, I think, is enough to catapult it to the top of this list.

So this is my paper Mario, plan B, my consolation price here. Excellent, excellent plan B. Okay. Charity, you have one more? I do. So ongoing, I am indeed. I'll think Shima Gama'i 10-5. God damn it.

Well, it's like at the top, I said the thing about like the one thing about Shimigami Tensei 5, the base game is worst story in the history of video games, probably. Just like some of the worst characterization, storytelling, just bad. And it's tough because I think, I think of the mega 10 subreddit will back me up on this. I feel like in a lot of ways, the gameplay of SMT5 is, you know, if you take Percena3 reload, metaphor, and then SMT5, I feel like, SMG5 has the best in-class gameplay. It's probably actually the best balance and design that Atlas has done to date.

It just feels really good, and it's a good mix of, like, it can be really challenging when you play it on harder difficulty and also just has a lot. Systems feel really rich, right? Something like metaphor or certainly like for something like for something through reload, maybe feels like it's a little easier, it feels like it's a little too easy to cheese things, and it feels like it's a little bit shallow. SMT5 is really great to play. Base game had a terrible story. Vengeance comes out, which is like the sort of updated, the classic Atlas thing of like, here's the real version of this game. And SMT5 just has a much better vibe and a much better flow.

They add characters, they remix some of the character arcs with the characters in the base game. It just feels better. It feels like it's conspicuously better written than the base game was. Even though you can kind of go down the route of the base game, you sort of, there's the branching sort of new route that is kind of the main point of playing SMT Vengeance. And it just feels a lot nicer.

And it makes the game feel like something that I can recommend more wholeheartedly. Because I think it is actually like, again, it's not nocturn. Nocturn is still the gold standard, I think, for that like storytelling in that particular tradition. But like, yeah, like nine day improvement with SMT. Vengeance, right? So that's my ongoing. Draft done. All right. So Matt, you have been diligently tracking our picks here, so we will get you to recap them. And hopefully you will be truthful, and you will not give yourself any extra picks and deprive the rest of us, of any. It looks like

you have really, you have a whole grid. It's on paper. So give us our picks. Okay. Here's the recap. Starting with Justin Charity's picks. For Action Adventure, He has selected another crab's treasure. Role playing game, metaphor, refontatio. Ongoing. Shin-Magame Tensei 5, Vengeance, ongoing slash live service. That's what we're calling it.

Indy Crow Country. Rerun slash remake, Persona 3 reload. And his wild card, Children of the Sun. Nice. And eclectic draft, I like it. That's right. All right, Ben, Ben's picks. For action adventure.

Astrobot for role-playing game, I guess. I guess that's what that is. It's a fantasy setting. Legend of Zelda, Echoes of Wisdom. Dramatic pause. Ongoing slash live service game,

Fortnite, indie Animal Well, rerun slash remake, Capcom Fighting Collection, Volume 1, I believe, yeah? Volume 1. Arcade Classics. Arcade Classics, the official title, I'm not sure.

Wildcard, Prince of Purim. The Lost Crown. All right. Very good. Very good. My picks, Matt, Matt James. Action Adventure. Like a dragon, infinite wealth.

Role playing game, Final Fantasy 7, Rebirth. Ongo-L-L-N-Ring, Slash-L-L-D-Ring, Shadow of the Erd Tree. Indy game, mini-shoot Adventures. Rerun slash remake. Paper Mario, the thousand-year door. I'm sure that's great. Wild card. Wow, twisting the knife.

Wild card, UFO 50. Okay. Okay. And now we do Steve Allman's picks, action adventure, Warhammer 40K, Space Marine 2. Role playing game, Dragon Age, the Veilguard, ongoing slash live service, held divers to indie game, Balatro. Balatro? Yeah. No one knows.

No one knows for sure. Rerun slash remake Silent Hill 2 and Wildcard. Thank goodness you're here. Well, thank goodness you were all here. to do this drafting with me. This was fun. Thanks for playing. Thanks for listening. Sorry to everything we snubbed, which was a lot. Even a couple games on our top 10 in print, Indiana Jones in the Great Circle and Black Myth Wukong, not to mention. They'll be complaining to this podcast as well. Yeah. Oh, sure. Dragonstock, too. What else did we omit here? Tekin we didn't take. We didn't

take Neva, Loreline on the laser eyes, Arco, I thought about Destiny 2 as an ongoing game or World Warcraft,

Alan Wake 2. Oh. Anything else that anyone Yeah, 1,000 extra this. Well, yeah. Going is actually

a pretty inspired pick that I could. Which none of us made, but, yeah, well, Pokemon mobile card game.

I thought about it. I got a pack ready right now. Yeah, I thought about it. Yeah. Yeah, too many games,

too many good games to fit. I thought about call of duty in ongoing if you could count a new Blackop Six as kind of, you know, it's an ongoing. It's the call of duty saga that's been right campaign going on forever, right? But I thought about EA College Sports Football 25. I might have taken that in my wild card if I had had it available. But yeah, you should have taken it for role playing, you know, play the quarterback. Anything.

Yeah, Stellar Blade, tactical breach wizards. We're just listing a lot of good games, right? of the Golden Idol. You know, we've talked about a lot of these over the course of the year. So sorry to everything we omitted, but thanks to all of you guys. This was fun.

Thank you, Ben. Yeah, thanks. And thanks in advance to the art department and Jomi for working their magic and putting this up on the socials so that people can vote and weigh in on who won. And that is a wrap on Buttmash for 2024. Thanks so much, everyone,

for following and listening along all year. we will be back to talk to you more in 2025. Stay tuned for Midnight Mulligans. Ringiverse recommends a Squid Game and What If check-in, things that mint edition, missed, and more. Contact, Buttmash at RingiverseGaming at gmail.com. Thank you to Devin Ronaldo for producing today's episode and most of our episodes this year.

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