Games completed in 2021 ranked and reviewed to my taste as of 12/24/21 Returnal = Break the cycle Hollow Knight "Good Ending" - Had me Bugging Dishonored 2 = High Grade Whalepunk Fire Emblem Three Houses (Third run. Blue Lions) - Regal Revenge Realization Fire Emblem Three Houses (Second r...

Thomas Quillfeldt convinced me to finish this game. My original intention was to tackle it on release, and for four nights after it came out I spent my free time joyfully zipping, flipping and floating through the game's landscape of luminescent grandeur while gathering four of the five wisps necess...

In the late 80's, as a seven or eight year old kid playing Castlevania for the first time, I would have told you whipping monster butt with a cool chain whip felt good, looked good, and sounded good, but I sucked at it. Under closer scrutiny, and with thirty years of on and off gaming under my belt,...

Metroid, along with Link's Adventure, the original Castlevania, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom belong to a special club of games my brother and I begged our parents to rent for us to play on our NES, only for our feeble six and eight-year-old selves to turn them in a few days later complet...

My one complaint about Ghost of Tsushima was that three quarters of the way through the game, my bloodlust was satiated. I don't think this is because I've evolved to the point where arterial spray or the ability to cleave through bone as easily as sky doesn't give me deep satisfaction, nor does thi...

Klonoa is a Sonic character wearing too many clothes to fit into that series.

I laugh at this at least once a week.

In the winter of 2016, before I picked gaming back up as a hobby I went into a Gamestop to buy a Christmas gift for my nephew, and I vividly remember seeing Dishonored 2 discussed on one of those advertisement/review shows American Gamestops run on a loop that must drive the employees insane. I wasn...

I think the most interesting thing about this remake is the art style, which I could not properly describe until I read Matt Alt's excellent book, Pure Imagination about the export of Japanese pop culture to the West. In a chapter about San Rio's Hello Kitty character Alt explains the Kawaii aesthet...

Xenoblade Chronicles Definitive edition journal I want to start out by saying thank you to Cane and Rinse, and in particular Simon Cole for working as catalysts that ignited my interest in Xenoblade Chronicles this year and Fire Emblem a few years ago with issue 139 on Awakenings. I'd come to the sh...

I'd never played a true indie game before the spring of 2018, but then, after lingering for months in Breath of the Wild and Mario Odyssey immediately after my wife gave me a Switch in the winter of 2017 and right when I discovered the Cane and Rinse podcast in the now infamous Vice article, I playe...

This is my third year posting a list on this thread, and although I know it's self-indulgent to expect anyone to care what I think of these games, I've ranked them based on how much I enjoyed them, not that any one of them has been unenjoyable. The nice thing about being a part of this community is ...

I've got a pretty full plate right now but I would love to do this some time. I've only ever used the game in the high school class I teach as a team building activity, but that's just because I haven't got anyone I know who's into it.

Thanks for the heads up. I like that justification for the repeats. Stay safe everybody.

I've always wanted to make suggestions, but I want to avoid duplicates. Is there a spreadsheet somewhere that shows what's already been on the show? If so can someone throw me a link to it. Thank you.

Super Mario Odyssey if nothing else celebrates the title character's maximalist nature. After all this pixelated polymath has made coin as a mascot, platformer, race car driver, painter, plumber, hand to hand combat expert, hospitality worker, sports star, space explorer, healthcare professional and...

One of the high school students I teach recommended The Return of the Obra Dinn to me after I told him I'd beaten Cuphead. I don't really know why this particular student thought my enjoyment of the first game would make me take pleasure in a point-and-clickish nautical fantasy murder mystery set in...

Like a lot of people I booted up Tetris 99 on release day, in part because of the novelty of it, and in part because, like a lot of players I imagine, I had a question I wanted answered: Was I any good at Tetris? It turns out I'm okay. I found my way into the top ten that day, and over the last 18 m...

Oxenfree is the first walk and talk game I’ve ever played. It hooked me pretty quick with its ingenious twist of using a radio dial to function as a sort of ouija board, which felt symbolic of how the player is always trying to find just the right balance in this game to bring everyone home in one p...

The thing that impresses me most about The Gardens Between is the way it’s stuck with me despite my having not played it since it first came to Switch in 2018. I finished it in two sittings, but there are flourishes in this game that I can still recall after spending hundreds of hours in other virtu...

Whoever put this game on the show list this year, I owe you a big thank you. Until this February I had never played a Paper Mario game. I’d tried Super Mario RPG and it didn’t work for me enough to stick with it for more than an hour. In fact it made me write off all Mario RPG’s, but Cane and Rinse ...