2018: The worst year yet? in video games?

I started 41 new games this year and finished 43. As the uneven numbers suggest, among the 43 completed were quite a few being cleaned up from previous years, and among the 41 started, many remain in progress. The ratio remains on track from the past couple years*, demonstrating that I'm doing a good job keeping to my one-in/one-out rule. Given that the list is expanding more slowly now, I was hoping to finish at a higher advantage, but a couple factors kept the completion total in check.

First is that I binged on a lot of Switch arcade games. I'm guessing I bought nearly 20 NeoGeo / Arcade Archives titles over the spring and summer and finished nearly none of them. Arcade games are arcade games - good for repeated 10-20 minute bursts, but unlike platformers, you can't count on the brute force Arino-clear.

Speaking of sidescrolling platformers, I barely touched the staple genre this year, less because of disinterest than because the well is drying up. Sonic Mania led to a cleanup on aisle Chaos Emerald, and Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze was fantastic, but I really didn't have much else to pick from. A dozen years and dozens of games later, I've whittled Wii's Virtual Console down to scraps, with remaining options the caliber of New Adventure Island and Kirby's Dream Land 3. And Rayman, over on PS3. Unless the contemporary trend of adventure-platformers abates or I find new patience with PC emulators, this looks to be the start of a long winter. A real shame - for many years there's been no safer bet than grabbing a random 16-bit sidescroller on a Saturday night and playing til the credits roll or the sun rises.

Run-and-guns at least seem to have retained some popular support beyond the plague of 'roguelite' and 'metroidvania', and the aforementioned arcade libraries are only helping. Beyond the many hours of Super C loops, Alien Soldier, Bleed, and (the final release version of) 20XX were among those I finished, with a few more newly underway. Mega Man X7 and X8 were more... rewarding... than expected, enough so that I intend to revisit both on the re-anniversary collection. 3D platformers provided plenty of substance too, with Rayman Revolution being the highlight, Rayman 3 being the lowlight, Jak & Spyro as pleasant surprises and Jak II an ill-forgotten curse. Sonic and the Black Knight happened too, and like X7, doesn't really deserve its awful reputation.

But the main story of the year is of course the shift in taste that has left me spending the majority of my time with racing games and shmups. I've always enjoyed both on a seasonal basis, but 2018 was an endless chain of both genres in parallel (though Raiden V did aggravate me off of shmups for a couple months). Nine 1CCs nearly doubled my lifetime total, and I'm still hoping to make Raiden IV the tenth before the new year. Deathsmiles was a clear favorite, though Axelay is close behind and only Forgotten Worlds caused any pain (well - any bad pain. All shmupping is pain). This was the other big detractor from the ratio - the length of shmups is hard to predict, and for each of the nine I beat, I started another, nearly none of which got finished (goddamn Ikaruga). Put a lot of hours into Mushi-F without much to show, but Akai Katana won't last much longer.

Fuel may be the best driving game and the best open-world game I've ever played, combining a huge world of Skyrim-like terrain with simulation-nuanced physics and as wide a range of vehicles as can be fitted with tires. The races are fucking hard and the landscape is complex, complicated further by the free-range navigation imported from the continuous overworld. It's hard to express how many light-years more interesting this is than something as precious and decompressed as GTAV, but it's buggy, doesn't have side-quests, and the netcode was weak (forget the hundred hours of single-player gameplay), so it tanked in ratings and sales. Burnout 3, Hydro Thunder Hurricane, and ExciteTruck provided some arcade counterpoints, though Burnout got hairy at points with insane AI and arbitrary traffic creating challenges too reflex-dependent to be especially satisfying - still, it's close enough to working that three times out of five you can see the great game underneath. It'll be interesting to check out Paradise. Crazy Taxi snuck in there too, but I wasn't feeling the alien technical maneuvers that seem fundamentally cabinet-bound. Ultimately I've wrapped back around to Codemasters with GRID 2, strapping the mechanical range and dynamism of Fuel to more traditional level design. So far that's a go.

A few action-adventures and RPGS filled the adrenaline troughs, but not many made the clear list. It did feel good to finally retire Darksiders II after many years of prolongation, and my feet are starting to sink into the mud and muck of Ys VIII. Yakuza 3 is a really neat River City Ransom sequel which, unexpectedly for a beat-em-up, would probably win story-of-the-year if I'd finished it (actually, no, Wolf Among Us). 60 hours into Final Fantasy VII I am STILL on disc 1. OCD and materia are a dangerous mix.

That's about it for the year. Greg and I partner-played six games, all distinctly unnotable: Resident Evil 2, Resident Evil 6, Munch's Oddysee, Rayman 3, Pikmin 2, and Metal Gear 2. The dual themes of the series were A.) solid foundations spoiled by overfocusing on one stupid element (dungeons in Pikmin, combat in Rayman, etc.) and B.) going on for way longer than necessary. I pretty much disliked all of them, though RE2 is more boring than bad, Munch is a promising alpha, and RE6 was shallow incredibly trashy eye-rolling fun. I mean RE6 was definitely the best one. That's how good a collection of games we're talking about.

* 2015: 74/54, +20
* 2016: 55/55, +0 (I may have tracked 'started' differently for 2016)
* 2017: 60/59, +1

2018: The worst year yet?

I think we all know and remember by now what a terrible year 2017 was. It is scarred onto our brains like those ubiquitous marks on pears that make you never want to buy them at the grocery store, as each and every one of us struggles through treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder which doctor's are campaigning to have renamed as "2017 disorder". Carrie Fisher died. A show I liked on TV got canceled. Netflix. And probably the worst thing about it is that it came directly after 2016, which was far and away the worst year of all time, for reasons that I cannot recount without being immediately hospitalized into a psychiatric health facility.

The question we've come together today to answer, as we count down the final years of 2018 (which interestingly enough is only the 2017th year since there wasn't a year zero or August for a while) is whether things have gotten any better. Let's a take a look back at the ten biggest events that afflicted us all this year and consider how things stack up.

1. Kavanaugh got supreme court
2. The rape crisis
3. The opioids
4. (*U.S. ONLY*) Democrats won Congress but Republicans won the other half (end *U.S. ONLY*)
5. The heat doesn't work in my new apartment
6. At Super Bowl they didn't kneel for the flag
7. Trump took a picture shaking hands with a fascist tyrant who murdered more people
1. (Trump tweets) (not a separate event)
8. Slatestar doesn't support marijuana anymore
9. Lives lost that the world probably cannot cope without:
1. Stan Lee
2. Charlie Krauthammer
3. John McCain
4. John Carpenter
5. Lyric McHenry McHenry, who appeared on EJ Johnson’s Rich Kids of Beverly Hills spinoff EJNYC, was found dead in the sidewalk in New York City on August 14. She was 26 years old. 
6. Simon Kerr
7. Joe Jackson
8. Aretha Franklin
9. Everyone in Marvel when Thanos snapped (spoiler)
10. Suicides
1. Anthony Bourdain
2. Avinci
1. Possibly not a suicide
11. Margot Kidder, Superman's Wife
12. David Spade
13. What the hell Mark E. Smith died and no one told me about this? That's what I get for not checking Prindlebook anymore
10. Bill Cosby was in the news again

The evidence is definitely in and we can safely declare that 2018 is definitely the worst year ever, and that's with a month and a half left for things to get worse. Post in the comments how your life changed because of some of these events.