Main Listbold games are games that have been beaten, previously beaten, or are unbeatable.
italicized games are in progress.
standard games are games I am not currently trying to beat.
strikethrough games are games that have been abandoned.
1.
Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit Remastered (X1)Went back to this one again because I needed something I could play in front of my impressionable kid, and this is mostly fine. I don't remember the grind for level 20 being as annoying in the original, and I certainly don't remember having to play this much online to get all of the achievements. So I'm not having a terribly good time having to play online, which doesn't earn much xp, or repeatedly playing the same levels over and over to get xp to hit level 20.
Rating: Soft pass
2.
Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion (PS5)
Been trying to start this one for a while. Kept booting it up and never starting. Did the prologue and just didn't come back... and now here I am, trying to play it, and I even took time off work, which partly was going to be used for this, and with this stupid fucking arctic blast I'm dealing with plumbing shit because I don't know what the fuck to do to not have my pipes burst and shit. Had someone come out today and they super did a temp job and are coming back in a couple of days to weld on a more "permanent solution", and something, I don't know what the fuck it was, did a loud banging noise for like 7 seconds and we have no clue what it was. Pipes didn't burst because the water main shows no water usage when I turn off dripping faucets, water was dripping not running, so I wouldn't think water hammering is what's happening, my only thought is now something is fucked up with my water heater. Anyway, I'm on Chapter 2 or 3, I'm really not sure, I'm doing missions which is interesting, especially in the whole doing side quests when there is an uber urgent main mission awaiting my attention. Played most of the game doing my own thing and not getting too caught up in the game's systems, but then I started getting towards the harder missions and decided to look stuff up, wound up having to look up how to defeat a bunch of duders because they were invulnerable to physical and magic. Got all the way to the Minerva fight and was just blown away by how BS that fight is. It's almost RNG to win, but I guess if your stats are just right you can survive anything once so just gotta play right, once I had my stats right I beat it without issue. Story didn't really answer any questions but just left more, I will say I'm hyped for Rebirth. It's kinda weird too, I've never been a FF fan, but my wife has, she made me get Remake day one and she played it like crazy, Rebirth is coming out and she doesn't care but I'm hyped. We'll maybe see if she changes her mind, but she hasn't been about playing games for years at this point.
Rating: Soft recommendation
3.
Pokemon Scarlet (NS)
Needed a day time game to play because my kid is too impressionable and I basically can't play anything with violence at all. Even pokemon is a problem because it has violence which winds up making my kid start hitting me every time the pokemon do anything. Anyway, this game is pretty awful, like one of the worst pokemon games ever released. The game crashed multiple times and so much slowdown so frequently. Game was nearly unplayable at times in handheld mode. A lot of, if not all, characters seemed, I don't know how to put it other than they seemed like they weren't designed by the Pokemon team. The entire game feels like it was developed by a western developer. Again, I don't know how to put it other than that, it just doesn't have any of the same feel as previous Pokemon games, it feels like Game Freak just handed development over to like a 2nd party US Nintendo studio and just let them run with it. A bunch of stuff makes no sense too, like Toedscool/Toedscruel, why are these new pokemon and not regional variants, and how are they different from these ancient pokemon that are obviously ancestors to current pokemon. This entire game feels like a fan hack written by a hormonal teenager obsessed with gen 1.
Rating: Soft pass
4.
Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name (PS5)
I've had this for a while, but for some reason or another just never got around to it. I hate that I waited literally months to get around to writing this. I'm consistently in a slump in keeping up with stuff. I've got a stack of games to add to VGC/VGPC. Anyway, I think this game gets some shit because it's not technically main line, but this game is essentially a true Yakuza 7, it continues Kiryu's story after 6 through the events of Yakuza 7. Plus this game is great. I also like the traditional Yakuza games over the new RPG style games, not that they are bad, but I enjoy these better. Tons of content in this one, and honestly probably the easiest platinum in the entire franchise, I don't have the platinum yet, but it won't take but an hour or so to grind out the last trophy or two. I have to think about 2024 game wise at this point (months later) because this one is definitely on the list if not at the top.
Rating: Solid recommendation
5.
Simmiland (PC)
The playtracker mystery game of the season. Small rant, playtracker moved to 3 month seasons instead of monthly seasons (they may not have called them seasons before) and part of the excuse was that with 3 month seasons the site could afford to spring for better games as the mystery game... this seasons game is a cheap sokpop game, kinda feels like a slap in the face considering, but free is free, so whatever. Anyway, this is definitely not the type of game I would play on my own, so it is interesting to be pushed outside of my comfort zone. The game isn't the worst, but again isn't a game I would play on my own. The systems are a bit convoluted and taking learning, plus the RNG nature of deck based games. I played some on Steam deck and then realized that I wasn't going to be able to successfully hit my goal for this game without using mouse and keyboard, so I transitioned to playing on PC... or maybe I hooked up my steam deck so I could use a mouse, I don't recall, it's been months. Anyway, not a great game, but you definitely get your value for a $5 game.
Rating: Soft pass
6.
God of War III Remastered (PS4)
I had beaten this years ago when I did my franchise run of the GoW franchise (Still need to buy Ragnarok to keep up) but I rolled a trophy from this game as a personal challenge for playtracker. Trophy was to collect certain collectibles, but I found out there is a glitch for this game that grants you invincibility so I decided that I'd work on the platinum trophy in the process. Unfortunately this game has unskippable cutscenes so replaying the game is truly horrendous. I pretty much stopped playing once I unlocked the trophy that I needed for the challenge, but I'm pretty close to beating the game on Titan difficulty or whatever it was that I had left to unlock so at some point I'll go back and finish up to get that platinum, but for now, it can sit.
Rating: See
52 game challenge 2019 tl;dr Extremely soft recommendation
7.
Hidden through Time (PC)
First of many hidden object games played this year. This one is a fun one on paper, but quickly the levels get real big and unwieldy very quickly. It's a neat game, but I eventually reached the point that I wasn't going to progress without assistance, and that's not really fun. I will give the game points that even though it has DLC, the DLC doesn't add achievements that are DLC locked.
Rating: Soft pass
8.
Shredders (XS)
I'm surprised that this is the first Game Pass leaving game I played this year. Not really sure why I decided to play this one other than it looked kind of SSX. Controls aren't great nor intuitive, but maybe I've just lost my whatever with snowboarding/MX/ATV/etc games or maybe they were simpler back in the PS2 era. Story is kind of dumb, like really dumb, it has its moments that are amusing, but overall really dumb. I kind of breezed myself through this game, which was relatively quick, but overall wasn't really enjoyable. If the game had had accessibility options to simplify the controls a bit more, I would've been able to enjoy the game better, but I spent so much time fighting trying to do flips and spins, which is usually pretty basic in these games.
Rating: Solid pass
9.
Bluey: The Videogame (XS)
This hit game pass, which I had already played some on Switch, because I bought it at launch, but decided that earning achievements was a good reason to get me to actually play through the game. A bit disappointing in that it is an OG bargain game, but the game is playable. For its target audience, little children, this game is real great, it even has extra content to keep playing and has some level of replayability of the 4 multiplayer games. But personally, I was hoping for something more akin to Rugrats PSX, but I know that was asking too much, it's just disappointing that such a great show got a phoned in game. Like extra disappointing is just how poor the graphics are, I mean, they didn't even bother to do anything about looking left and right, it's literally just flipping a sprite, so when Chilli looks the other direction, her spots hop to the other side of her face, it's this kind of laziness that just disappoints me.
Rating: Soft pass
10.
Pokemon Puzzle Challenge (GBC)
I actually don't know if I had ever actually played and beat this game before, I spent so much time playing the N64 game, I don't know that I ever actually played through the GBC version. Mostly played this because I wanted to play something old and kind of mindless, and old puzzle games like this are my bread and butter. Spent a bit of time on it earning all of the retro achievements for the game. Not nearly as good as the N64 game, for so many reasons, but I really love Panel de Pon games.
Rating: Solid recommendation
11.
Forza Horizon 3 (X1)
I think at this point I had been playing Yakuza 8/FF7R2, but I was being so stressed because my son has been so out of hand, I needed to be playing something relatively mindless, even if not, I have to play games that are safe to play in front of him which pretty much limits me to like puzzle games and racing games, very seldom does anything else fit that isn't problematic (language, any sort of violence, etc) Anyway, I decided to play this and try to check out things I missed out and the Hot Wheels expansion. Did about as much as I could given that the game isn't supported anymore... plus this game is notorious for being busted achievement wise, so many achievements are kind of broken due to being dependent on Xbox's busted ass stats functionality that launched around the release of this game, so early players missed out on so many achievements that shouldn't have been missable... myself included. There is technically a workaround to earn them, but it requires deleting your saved data and starting a new game and essentially re-earning the achievements... just another reason why it fucking sucks that Xbox stores all saves in the cloud where you can't backup your saves yourself. Very concerning for when Xbox eventually shuts down saves and such because games will literally become unplayable I imagine... but Xbox is 3rd rate, 3rd tier, and not enough vocal users to get shit taken care of.
Rating: Solid recommendation, despite bugs