No, that year is not a typo.

So… I wrote this whole thing about a year ago and never got around to posting it. Here we are, at the end of 2024 and I’m working on my current year and so little feels like it hasn’t changed. So my 2024 review makes sense, I’m going to just post this and go from there. Below is the unedited post that I’d more or less wrapped up back in February. Look for this year’s “year in review stuff” soon, likely on New Year’s Eve. But who knows. I’m scheduling this to post at the start of December and a lot can go seriously wrong between now and then.

Also, it’s just sad how much of this is the same, except worse.

2023 can * bleep * right off. I don’t think that’s honestly a controversial opinion. Sure, 2020 gave us a Pandemic, and 2021 gave us it’s terrible sequel year. 2022 was the year where things looked like they were improving a little bit, but not really, while 2023 is where everything started to come apart at the seems. Not sure about you, but it’s the year where all the inflation caused by unchecked corporate greed, legislative inaction, and decades of tax breaks that benefit the .01% have made everything vastly more expensive than it has to be.

Not gonna lie, this last year was absolutely brutal for me. I have scaled back my posting over the years just because… you know, life and what not, but this year there are a few more things pushing that. (Not at all) fun fact… I learned this year that long-term general anxiety can develop into full-on depression. You can probably guess how I learned that. So here we are, in mid-February, and I’m finally getting around to writing about last year.

There’s a whole bunch of talk of “the economy” being good, except that honestly doesn’t feel true for the middle class (where I’m firmly seated). Where I live in Texas, houses went from “scrimp and save” to “you’re never gonna get one of these.” Groceries bills have more or less doubled, because that’s a spot where inflation has hit the hardest. So many companies that I like(d) or have purchased from have gone from “companies are not your friend” to “actively trying to destroy the world.” Oh, and obviously… Texas.

So a lot of 2023 was spent treading water and spinning plates, desperately trying to keep them up… and by the end of the year, I’d mostly failed at that in the end. I won’t dump a whole lot here, that’s for when I talk to my therapist (seriously, y’all, therapy can help – it’s not a cure, but it helps)… more just saying why this list is what it is. There were also fun things like the vicious cycle of weight loss and gaining a lot of it back, some skin cancer and surgery to remove it (thankfully all gone), money troubles because of unexpected expenses, and working in technology when unchecked greed and corporations start laying of thousands for fun.

It wasn’t all bad things, though, there were some legit fun things. I did more stuff this year in my core hobbies, and even may have purchased a toy or two for myself. Or one very expensive toy that 3D prints toys.

LEGO Sets

Wait, what? Since when do I get LEGO sets? True fact, I have a bunch of sets around that I need to take pictures of for reviews. Most didn’t come out this year, and my paralysis at getting things done has made some of them kind of pointless, since the sets are no longer available.

LEGO Icons Atari 2600

This is one of those reviews that I need to get done, because this might have become one of my favorite sets of all time now*. Which… is honestly saying something. The Atari has a weird place in my life… I never had one, but had a cousin that did. I was supposed to get one for a Christmas back in the early 80s, but my dick of a father decided to return it after I found the poorly hidden gift since it was “no longer a surprise.” Which, you know, is just a great thing to do to a five year old. Funny what memories you can remember despite it being several decades ago. Can’t remember what I did six months ago, can remember that as one of my earliest memories.

While the Nintendo was a more formative part of my childhood, the Atari is what defined it early. I remember that ugly 2600 box and being blow away by the massive pixels of the machine and playing games with my cousin.

More than that, though, as a LEGO set, this was simply a joy to build in a way that the Nintendo Entertainment System just… wasn’t. I still need to get the review done, but there’s so much to this set, so many little wonderful things, that are just fantastic. While I rated the NES highly, and love the set… the biggest knock on it was that it was more about the engineering than getting the little bits and touches. Fixed buttons, a cartridge insert that barely worked, and one Easter Egg that you wouldn’t ever see unless you knew it was there.

This set, by contrast, is just dripping with those little touches and Easter Eggs. This set is designed as a celebration of the the set, rather than an engineering marvel of being able to turn a screen. There’s still some of that, with “working” switches and power buttons, but first and foremost, it’s about just being a beautiful celebration of when Atari wasn’t a shell of a company that just hawked its brand.

This is a review i need to finish before the set gets retired, but since Icons stuff seems to hang around a lot longer than normal sets, it’ll likely stick around for some time.

*For the record, I’d say my top five sets of all time are (in no particular order):

Of course, if I had to build this list a week from now, it’d probably be full of different things. But those are sets that I have that get rebuilt and displayed occasionally, and I won’t ever get rid of.

The Worst of LEGO

It was very much a mixed bag for me in this little dabbling of LEGO, because honestly, most of them were just… not all that great? Either the set or the experience, or both. Most Star Wars and Marvel sets feel like “let’s throw this together and hit a price point” rather than builds that feel thought out and loved. The ones that are, like things in the UCS line, command prices that are just absurd and I wish no one would purchase at this point. The price escalation of LEGO overall should have killed it three or four times over, but they’ve strangled out so many other things, or hidden in a marketplace where people (i.e. adult nerds) have just started to accept forever escalating prices with less and less value.

Marvel Collectable Minifigures Series 2

This is another article that I never finished, but if you’re on our Discord, you know why I have a particular grudge against the CMF lines at this point. I stopped collecting them years ago, before i dropped other LEGO sets, mostly because the system was just… gross. It’s gatcha products, and they tie up too many interesting things

Okay, so, I had a whole article that I never got around to finishing, about how bad my experience was. Spoiler for that article… but I bought 20 figures at a Target around me and got… four different minifigs in them. One of them was unique, the rest were repeats of just three figures. Clearly, it had been picked over or something like that, but they had just been put out on the cashwrap area when I got them.

When these came out, there was a whole stream of articles for people who were buying up small portable scales to go and weigh the different boxes to figure out what’s inside, and clearly, I got the end result of that. I’ll go into this more in the article, but let me say this… if you’re an AFOL (or more likely a scalper) who does something like this – f*** you. Just, f*** you. You and the other “bag fondlers” that go through an entire store selection to strip out figures and leave the leftovers are a blight, and you’re no better than the people who buy up every set to sell on the aftermarket or parting them out so no one else can get them. In fact, people who go and strip out the minifigs are probably worse.

I’m and adult and was buying these for myself, but I can easily imagine a parent getting a few figures for their kid while checking out. When said kid opens three of them and gets the same figure, likely someone they don’t even know… that kid’s day is kind of ruined and they’re never going to get another figure like this again. If I bought these for my kids and saw this, there’d be an outright “no, those things are a ripoff” line ready every time I saw a LEGO polybag.

That there were honest discussions about bringing a scale and measuring these to find out what was inside, and that so few stepped back and asked themselves “wait a sec” is an indictment of that whole flavor of AFOL and the product in general.

For my part, I completed my set after collaborating with someone in our Discord to get the ones I was missing after another trip to a different Target with fairly similar results. But those were the last CMF figures I will ever buy.

Movies and Streaming

Unlike last year, where I didn’t actually watch any new movies… I watched at three four* new movies this year. Okay, so, movies still aren’t really by thing to me anymore… most of my time is spent rewatching the old things I’ve always liked or just watching streaming shows or YouTube.

*I forgot that I also saw Spider-Verse, but how about I don’t go into the fact that it was 90% awesome and 10% worst thing I watched all year.

Super Mario Bros. 

This was always going to be a movie that my family was going to see. My son loves Mario, and has loved him for a few years – though his favorite character from the series is Princess Peach, and his favorite Hot Wheel Mario Kart is Bowser. He was dressed as Mario for Halloween back in 2022 (he went as a Pokemon trainer this year)… owns a Cappy, and asked for a Mario-themed birthday party. So yeah, we were always going to watch it.

It was surprisingly enjoyable… not saying that it’s going to win an Oscar or any real awards unless the Kid’s Choice Awards are still a thing (or a Grammy, cause, you know, Peaches).

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

This is the first of three times that D&D is going to show up on this list, so I’ll save the “oh my god, Hasbro, you suck” for a later section. But as a thing, D&D was a sandwich wrapped in a layer of thin crap, with a terrible start and a terrible end to the year with some wonderful things in the middle.

The D&D movie, Honor Among Thieves, was one of those things that should have just been awful. D&D as a whole hasn’t exactly translated well to… anything other than video games, really. The last D&D movie was… just god awful, and followed up on a cartoon from the 80s that’s remembered fondly for just how terrible it was. So when a new one was announced, everything was stacked against it.

At the same time, though, there were some actual big names tied to the movie. Chris Pine was set to star, along with plenty of other big names. It also didn’t look like it was going to be a straight-up lowest effort movie, with actual effects and an existing setting. Honestly, a lot of this has been driven by stuff like Critical Role being genuinely good and loved, and D&D having gone firmly mainstream compared to the other efforts. Still, like most video game movies, the chances of this being awful were high.

So when I watched it in the theater, and not only was it fun and entertaining, it could be called legitimately a good movie. It’s not going to win any awards, and it was full of all the tropes and so many things that are just inside jokes and fan service… but it still was just fun. They managed to create a movie stuffed to the brim with those things, yet could be watched by anyone and still be fun. The story only was enriched by knowing all the jokes, but not required. Unlike anything Marvel does, you didn’t have to do homework in order to watch the film.

Barbie

I’m too “old man” at this point to have cared even a little bit about the whole Barbieheimer or whatever happened this summer… so I saw this when it came out on Max a few weeks ago. I knew I’d like it, and I did. It certainly had a message, one I was perfectly fine with, and it was funny as well. Not perfect, but still pretty great.

The Not So Good

Obviously, I’m not the person to ask about the latest movies coming out. When I can count the number of movies I’ve watched – not just went to in the theater (though that number was two), but new movies in general. Most of that is driven by the fact that I’m just… over a lot of stuff. I’m not going to put Ahsoka on this list, because I’m not really tired of Star Wars, per se, I just don’t feel the need to immediately watch anything that’s not named Andor.

All things Marvel and DC

What I am tired of is basically everything Marvel and Disney are doing in that space right now. I haven’t watched anything this year, and don’t really plan to. The last thing I watched through and enjoyed was Hawkeye… so that’s two years or so where I just gave Marvel a complete pass. They aren’t helped by the fact they waited until the very last minute to drop a known abuser, waiting for an official court verdict, because obviously that’s the thing that a private company needs to do.

Beyond that, though… it’s just honestly not interesting. The last thing I watched and loved was Peacemaker, something I’ve rewatched a couple of times. Gunn, now lording over the DCU and killing the things that are interesting (Henry Cavill clearly needs a hug after losing Superman, and I enthusiastically volunteer to be the one to give it to him; don’t feel bad though, he’s got 40k now) but needed help.

Comic movies, as a genre, are basically gone. The next and likely only thing I’ll watch will be Deadpool 3, mostly because my wife and I will go and watch it together. Oh, I guess I did watch Spider-Verse, I was supremely disappointed in the ending and the fact that the movie didn’t bother to wrap things up before just… ending. It pissed me off then, and pisses me off now. That turned a movie that was a 10/10 into a firm 5/10, because it undermined the whole movie.

Revivals of Old Things

I never watched Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull… Last Crusade was a wonderful way to end the story and it always felt “done.” So when another movie in the series was announced, I wasn’t enthused. In fact, I’m still not, and haven’t watched it.

If the previous decade was all about reboots, the current era seems to be much more about “restarts.” Shows that had been off the air for a decade or more were getting additional, often terrible, seasons. Frasier wasn’t ever my favorite show, but oh my god, the new one is so terrible that it’s just replacements of the old characters with new ones. I made it through one episode before I just noped out and wouldn’t watch it.

Same with “That 90s Show,” which was a new season of “That 70s Show,” something I did like… and oh my god is was as bad as Frasier. I couldn’t finish the second episode, because it was about as funny as anything Aston Kutcher has done outside of the original show. The Futurama “uncancelled again” season was hit-or-miss, with the real highlights coming towards the end and some real awful things in the middle.

Nostalgia is already a dangerous thing to play with, and it seems to be the only idea going for a lot of things out there. Which is odd in a year where we got the best adaptation of a video game ever, and other new shows that are legitimately funnier than just revisiting the old things.

Video Games

I’ve probably played more video games this year than I have in more recent years on record. This was bolstered, in part, by the fact that my daughter, officially a preteen now (which, WTF, time, stop it), has also gotten into games in a big, big, way. She’s also too smart for her own good and snarky, so, she takes after me in a lot of ways – though she’s probably smarter. Not all of them, though, I can’t get her to watch Star Wars or Star Trek.

Vampire Survivors

This was my game at the end of last year, when it came out, and dominated the start, middle, and end of my year as the new DLC came out. I’m not a huge fan of roguelike’s, and yet… this game just does all the things for me.

There were multiple patches and DLCs put out in 2023, including a surprise crossover with Among Us in early December. It also landed on Switch in 2023, added free content, and continued to be worth every single cent you put into it. It was my game of choice on the Steam Deck, and I strongly suggest everyone get it. It’s just that good.

Baldur’s Gate 3

The second major highlight of the D&D year was arguably the best game released all year. Don’t trust me though, the Video Game Advertisements gave it an award too – but didn’t let them stay and talk about a team member who died because there were more trailers to show! Fun fact, apparently 41.5 minutes of the nearly 4 hour show was spent on award announcements and speeches. In other words, the Video Game Trailers Show sucks, Geoff Keighley is a pandering sack of shit that doesn’t care about video games, and Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of the best games ever made.

The original two games, and the spinoff Neverwinter Nights series, stand as some of the greatest RPGs ever made. The game Planescape: Torment, often tops the list of greatest ever, and arguably so (my personal top is Final Fantasy VI or Fallout New Vegas). It was simultaneously under-the-radar, while also being hugely hyped up, because as it got closer and closer to release, what was being said just became more and more bonkers.

You know, like the bear sex.

When the first reviews started to hit, the hype only increased, because people were overwhelmingly in love with the game. Part of that excitement is that Larian Studios made a game that didn’t have any microtransactions, day-0 DLC packs, or all the other crap that modern games “have to have.” It was just pay the money and you get to play the game, all of the game, and enjoy it. That aspect was so refreshing as to seem revolutionary, which is sad, because it’s how things used to work.

That being said, the game itself is awesome, the hype is absolutely deserved. It’s a giant, sprawling, beautiful game. How you can play is unique almost every time, because there’s that D&D aspect of “rolls” tied in to checks, where you can be overpowered and still fail, or underpowered and succeed gloriously. Every quest had multiple, sometimes non-obvious, ways to solve and resolve them… better yet, sometimes, you could just fail and the game let you go on. The story was good and interesting, the companions were legitimately great and wonderful, and the gameplay managed to feel like D&D even with necessary changes to make it… not suck.

And, of course, bear sex*.

*Spoiler for this joke: it’s a druid companion you can romance, not an actual bear

Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

I didn’t get super far into this game, but it basically controlled a few weeks of my life, and currently dominates my daughter’s life. Discussions with her right now are 2% what’s going on for an eleven-year-old and 98% talking endlessly about Zelda. I get to go full “god, I’m old” in response and point out that “yes, I know, I played the original back in 86” when it comes to Zelda lore.

Much like Baldur’s Gate 3, it was a complete game, not split off into a lot of cosmetic loot box or mini DLC nonsense. Of course, for a lot of Nintendo (but not all, their mobile offerings are pure gacha garbage)  games that’s normal. It didn’t fix most of the fundamental issues I had with Breath of the Wild – a great game but by no mean’s perfect. There was still terrible direction-setting of what to do and a flow of the game, weapon durability is still a garbage mechanic that serves no real purpose other than to annoy people, and it’s just as incomprehensible as any other Zelda game.

Yet… the loop is so satisfying and it’s still a Zelda game. More than that, the biggest marvel, is that the game is just huge. More than triple the size of the original game, with new modes of play and unique things to it that make it so, so satisfying. There was so much to it that just… works. It also pushes the switch to the absolute max, making a legitimately gorgeous game on a console that was old and out of date when it launched.

Bad Video Games and Worse Companies Making Them

2023 was a garbage year for video games, despite the great stuff I listed above. Layoffs and studio closures dominated the industry, often not even for failed projects, but perfectly successful ones where the company needed to make a nickel and couldn’t dare cut CEO salary or stop doing stock buybacks, so they instead laid off thousands of workers.

Even with that, though, there were some things that just stood out as games.

Starfield

I’m sure some people in our Discord knew that this game was going to end up here, because I was pretty vocal on all of my problems with the game as I was playing it. Which I did, a lot, because it’s a Bethesda game and they have some things that I genuinely like. Maybe. Or maybe not…

Maybe it’s time to just acknowledge that Bethesda make kind of crappy games that rely on the community to make not suck. Skyrim was not a good game, but you could make it good. Honestly, think about it… how many of you that have played it can explain what the plot of Skyrim is? Or those who enjoyed it have memories you enjoy that are related at all to that plot… or was it all the other things you could do?

It pains me to think that, because I like games like Fallout 3 and 4, but they’re also… you know… not good. Fallout 4’s main plot was infamously bad, the companions were memes, and the best parts of the game had nothing to do at all with playing the story. It was little side quests, building, or doing weird and random things. Fallout 3’s ending was so bad they had to program and charge everyone for a DLC to write a better one.

An aside, but the last act of Baldur’s Gate 3 was much weaker than the first two, and a lot of players were unsatisfied with how some stories wrapped up. Larian listened to player feedback and… patched in new stuff to fix that for free. Bethesda on the other hand screwed over Fallout 3 players more than a decade ago by charging for DLC to undue the stupid ending.

So this was a chance at redemption, to prove they could do something great… and they really didn’t. Starfield is their first new IP of this century (or as my daughter liked to twist the knife when I made my ’86 comment and pointed out that was “last millennium”) – and it was hyped for years, first being teased with a single title screen eight years ago.

The end product is a devoid, lifeless, mostly boring husk. Remember how No Man’s Sky was overhyped and ultimately disappointing? This is worse, because that was just a small studio that clearly overcommitted… this is a major AAA company backed with Microsoft money who underdelivered and made a repetitive and pointless game.

I should do a whole review of it, in fact I was planning on doing it, but ultimately couldn’t get the motivation to do it. So much of the game is just examples where things were quarter-assed to stick in, with clearly too many ideas and not enough refinement of them, and it all comes together as a jumbled, unfun mess.

The worst part, for me, was coming to this game right after playing Baldur’s Gate 3. A game so full of choices and personality, with interesting and fantastic companions who were all distinct and unique, and a story that drew you in while not sitting you entirely on rails. Yes, one is an “open” (and empty) world game, while the other is a structured linear experience, but they are the two biggest RPGs of the year and couldn’t be further apart in underlying execution and quality.

You legitimately build, grow, and earn trust with the people around you in Baldur’s Gate 3. It goes to great length to make you the “hero” but not call you the special. In fact, at one point, you find out that a good portion of your companions are getting the exact same “special one” things you are… you just happen to be the one that the game is centered on as POV.

In Starfield, you’re immediately just trusted (or hated) by everyone. Strangers on the street, on a planet you’ve never been too, walk up and give you life details or quests. The intro is quite literally “here, take my ship, you’re the hero now” and that’s it. And often, there are clearly multiple ways something could be done, but because they didn’t design it that way, you only have one choice to make and one way to go. The only time you have options are when it explicitly gives you more than one.

Which is all to say it’s a bad game that has already been mostly forgotten. But hey, their first big update will be adding “new ways to travel” between pointless planets where you can accomplish nothing. Maybe it’s telling that the best game in any of the modern Bethesda settings was the one not made by Bethesda.

I spent a lot of hours in Starfield, even “beating” the main story, trying to find the good game. But it’s just not there. Also, before anyone jumps in that you have to play it “such and such” way, or play it for so long before it gets good… those are both things that terrible games do.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

It’s weird to put a game I play daily on the bad list, but I’ve talked about how this is a game with a satisfying loop and little else before. They put out a needless version this year of what was a hacked-together story no one remembers at this point, and the same fun multiplayer loop. Cheating is still rampant, there is both too much and not enough to do, and it’s stuffed to the gills with microtransactions.

Really, it’s here because there was no reason for this to come out. MW2 was a solid game that was fun to play. MW3 was rushed and adds nothing of value overall. But still commanded a $70+ price tag supported by absurdly expensive cosmetic micro-transactions.

Tabletop

This will be a little bit different from the other sections, because my good and my bad for this category all stem from the same general places: Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro, Games Workshop, and Asmodee. Those are the three biggest “gaming” companies out there in the tabletop space, and the makers of the games that I deal with.

Games Workshop Games

I’ve been a player of almost everything that Games Workshop has done for years now. I’ve written about it here, covered it in depth with the calendars in 2022, and it’s been my primary hobby for several years. It started with Necromunda all the way back in 1996, which fun fact, I bought while I was traveling to Texas (I lived in the northern US back then) to visit a friend in the Army and drop off a car. We’d stopped off at a hobby store while going through Oklahoma City, saw it on the shelf, and figured it’d be fun to play with our friend while down there.

That was a very expensive path to start down. That spiraled into Warhammer Fantasy, then Warhammer 40k, and I’ve taken several breaks over the years, but back in 2020, got back in, and play Necromunda (again, the new version), Warhammer 40k, Age of Sigmar, and several other games. Kill Team, and slow-planning an Old World army for when I see my friend again that I used to play Fantasy way back when.

That being said… Games Workshop can be an absolutely infuriating company to be a fan and customer of. While a lot of their “fans” ascribe them to be some kind of sinister cabal and empire, they’re often the epitome of “don’t ascribe to malice what could be chalked up to incompetence.” They’re firmly stuck in the past, for better or worse, and they make decisions to protect their bottom line and sales.

Capitalism sucks, and they are a company – not a friend, which means they will make decisions that will piss people off. Like releasing rules for free for 10th edition, which happened last year, only to start pulling them as books get released. Or constantly releasing and “patching” the game as they lean harder and harder into the more competitive modes of play, neglecting the casual and narrative players that make up the bulk of their player base.

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

1 COMMENT

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.