It's a new record! I honestly wrote this in January and never got around to posting it, but better late than never.
This year had a lot more gaming than last year. I didn’t have to build a house, and I got a full year out of my Analogue Pocket, which allowed me to complete a ton of old, short games during a little downtime here and there. The following is a list of games that I completed in alphabetical order:
Actraiser
Advance Wars 2
Aladdin (SNES)
Animaniacs (Genesis)
Battle Garegga
Borderlands 2
Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel
Breath of Fire
Bucky O’Hare
Cuphead
Danny Sullivan’s Indy Heat
Dead Cells
Dead Cells: Return to Castlevania
Fire Emblem: Engage
For Whom the Frog Bell Tolls
Gimmick!
Gran Turismo 7
Kirby’s Dream Land 3
Little Samson
Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope
Mario Golf (GBC)
Metal Slug 4
Metal Slug 5
Metal Slug 6
Mickey’s Ultimate Challenge
Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers
Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: The Fighting Edition
MLB The Show ‘24
Mother 3
Ninja Gaiden II
Octopath Traveler
Rock ‘n Roll Racing
The Simpsons
Sky Blazer
Super Mario Bros. Wonder
The Twisted Tales of Spike McFang
Tiny Toon Adventures 2
Yoku’s Island Express
38 is pretty solid! A far cry from my candidly embarrassing 65 clears in 2017, but much better than the 22 from 2023.
Let’s get started with the awards!
Honorable Mentions
These are games that weren’t quite good enough to get in the top 10, but were fun, memorable, or unique enough to warrant a mention.
Animaniacs (Genesis)
For the love of all that is holy, do not play Animaniacs on SNES. The Genesis version is very solid, though. Great homage to the cartoon, controls well, and is simple and fun. It also has the honor of being the oldest member of my backlog to be cleared this year. I used to have this on Genesis as a kid and never beat it. I have now rectified that.
Ninja Gaiden II
This gets the honor of being the hardest game I defeated this year. Absolutely brutal, and thus very rewarding. The first one is better, though.
Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers (SNES)
Games oriented towards newcomers to a genre get a bad rap from Hardcore Gamers. They shouldn’t. We all had to start somewhere! This is a very fun and polished beat ‘em up simplified for kids. It’s a great intro to the genre for children or those not quite ready to dive into Streets of Rage.
Sky Blazer
I had never heard of this game before and found it totally charming! It’s a side-scrolling action game, but you can play the levels in a variety of orders, with different rewards for each. You can upgrade your character with several new spells that feel very rewarding to play with. It also looks great and controls beautifully. This is absolutely a hidden gem on the SNES.
Dead Cells
If you haven’t played this game and enjoy Metroidvanias, give this a try! For a game that touts randomization as a core feature of the game, it feels a little vanilla after a while, but it boasts superb controls, well-thought out enemies, and an engaging gameplay loop that lets you feel absolutely unbeatable with the right mix of perseverance and luck.
For Whom the Frog Bell Tolls
Thanks to Frank Cifaldi for highlighting this one, and for the stellar retro gaming community for translating this Japanese exclusive game to English for all our benefit! It’s an R&D 1 developed puzzle game/RPG for the Gameboy, and it oozes polish and charm out of every pore. The story is cute, the gameplay is unique, and it’s one many gamers probably have not checked out.
The Twisted Tales of Spike McFang
Thanks to the Analogue Twitter account, which regularly publishes gifs of gameplay footage for featuring this one. Everybody knows the heavy hitters of SNES RPGs, but few know about this delightful little action RPG romp. You play as a tomato juice slurping vampire prince intent on reclaiming his future kingdom from the forces of evil. It’s got great graphics (seriously, this game looks as good as almost anything else on the SNES), excellent controls, fun enemy and character designs, and well-designed combat. It’s super short, too.
Danny Sullivan’s Indy Heat
Having listened to the Completely Unnecessary Podcast for years, I have heard this game referenced as an in-joke dozens (hundreds?) of times. So I finally decided to check it out on my Pocket. And I have to say that this is actually a sweet little game with great controls, graphics, and a nice car progression system that feels fair and impactful. If you like top-down racing games, check this one out.
Now for the Top 10!
10. Borderlands 2
I know, I know. How did I miss this wildly popular smash hit the first time around? The Xbox 360/PS3 era was my nadir for awareness of current developments in gaming. College was filled with mostly intramural sports and anime, with a sprinkling of playing on my PS2 and NES and SNES emulators. I didn’t even learn about HDMI until probably 2013, embarrassingly. Anyway, I played this with my brothers-in-law and son this year and had a lot of fun with it. It has a unique personality and well-designed characters and scenarios that lend themselves to a fun time for any style of player.
9. Gran Turismo 7
This game is gorgeous, with fast loading times, incredible physics, and a huge selection of cars and tracks to pick from. It also absolutely NAILS the progression cycle you’re hoping for in a game. It gives you tons of rewards for playing, but those rewards are always scaled appropriately for your current situation in the game. This one scratched every itch in my lizard brain.
8. Super Mario Wonder
Another Mario game, another spectacular experience. Nintendo’s development staff is simply the best. While this is far from my favorite Mario game, the new wrinkles they added create a lot of memorable moments and opportunities for Nintendo’s boundless creativity to shine.
7. Little Samson
This was high on my list to experience on my Analogue Pocket because I’d never played it before, and it’s so expensive to get a physical cartridge. I walked away from this game very impressed and simultaneously grateful that I didn’t spend $2,000 to buy a copy. I have crossed this one off my list to obtain…no game is worth that kind of money. But I do highly recommend playing it for the spectacle alone. Nothing on the console should be capable of looking and playing like this. I’ll be saying that again shortly for an even better game, though.
6. Mario Golf
The Mario sports games on the Game Boy family are absolutely incredible and must be experienced. I didn’t think I’d enjoy this one because I’d already played the GBA entry (among my favorite GBA games of all time) and was worried that it would feel dated. When I booted it up, though, it got its claws into me immediately. It’s very ambitious for a Game Boy Color game, with a wide variety of courses and characters to play as. I sank a ton of hours into it and will probably boot it up to play a round here or there many times in the future.
5. Bucky O’Hare
When I got my Analogue Pocket, I sorted all of the games I was downloading into buckets. I called them Bangers, Japanese, Try It, and Jetsom. This was one of the games in the Try It folder based on the name alone. I booted it up and discovered to my incredulous surprise that this is a little-talked-about late NES platformer from Konami that is incredibly impressive. Graphics, sound, and gameplay all work together to create an all-time classic NES game. Seriously, this game is so underrated. It should have a similar reputation as Little Samson but doesn’t for some reason. This is a top 20 game in an absolutely LOADED library on the NES.
4. Actraiser
Speaking of pleasant surprises, Actraiser was so great! This game is a mix of city-building sim and platformer, and while neither element quite reaches the peaks of their given genres, they’re both solid B+ efforts with a tremendous synergy between the two of them. Throw in a high degree of difficulty for melding two genres together in a coherent whole and how early this game came out in the life of the SNES, and this game gets two big thumbs up in my book.
3. Gimmick!
I hear people talk about Little Samson all the time. It has a certain cache among retro gamers that is totally earned. But Gimmick! is every ounce the technical monster that Little Samson is, and far more ambitious with gameplay experimentation. The enemies have a very sophisticated AI built into them that was unthinkable on the NES, and the complex physics engine they programmed into this game is absolutely jaw dropping. This game MUST be experienced by fans of retro games. The only knock I have against it is that it’s cruelly unfair to complete without save states, but the dedicated could probably do it with enough practice.
2. Advance Wars 2
I have a lot of nostalgia for this game, but never actually completed it. We used to take turns passing a GBA under the desk during Biology class in high school, until Mrs. Fombelle confiscated my friend’s GBA…the savagery. It’s a great hot-seat multiplayer game that also has a deep and challenging campaign. It looks great, sounds great, and is great. I think Dual Strike is still the best entry in the series, but not by much. Check it out!
1. Cuphead
I’ve been pushing this one off for years until I could get a physical copy for a reasonable price. Amazon finally put it up for $20 a few months ago, and I dove in as soon as I could. This is one of the most beautiful video games ever made, period. Its unique aesthetic stands out immediately, but it’s far more than a pretty face. They absolutely nailed the controls and design of this game. It feels great, the bosses are immaculately designed and executed, and the difficulty balance is absolute perfection. It teaches you the mechanics of the game diagetically. Learn them or you die. Many, many times. The game has several of my favorite boss battles ever. And the crazy thing is that these battles occur both as run ‘n gun platform battles as well as side-scrolling shooters. My only small complaint is that the periodic side-scroller traditional platformer levels don’t work as well as the shooter and platform boss battle parts of the game. This is an all-time masterpiece, and any fans of Mega Man or other similar retro games need to experience it.
2024 reTROview Stinker of the Year: Mickey’s Ultimate Challenge
I have worked diligently to break my bad habit of wanting to finish everything I start. The breaking point for me was years ago, trying desperately to beat Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade’s Revenge, when I thought “I don’t enjoy this and could play something I do enjoy, instead.” And so I did. Now, if I play a horrible game, I just turn it off. The days of me spending 40 hours trying to beat Final Fantasy IV: The After Years are long gone.
All that is to say that Mickey’s Ultimate Challenge isn’t an awful game. It’s just boring. But it was super short, and that was nice. It’s just a small handful of milquetoast mini-games that you play to beat the game. It can probably be beaten in 15 minutes easily. I’d have been grossly disappointed to get an SNES cartridge of this as a kid.
Now to revisit my 2024 goals and see how I fared!
2024 Goal #1: Fix more hardware
FAIL. I just didn’t have the money. My Gamecube remains busted. I did replace some broken PS5 controllers, though.
2024 Goal #2: Complete 30 new games
Success! I completed 38 games and really enjoyed the vast majority of them.
2024 Goal #3: Complete Breath of Fire
Success! I did it. It was pretty good.
2024 Goal #4: Complete Suikoden
FAIL. I didn’t get to it. I didn’t want to. But I’m going to do it, hopefully this year.
2024 Goal #5: 1 CC a vertical shoorter
FAIL. This was a stupid goal. Do you know how hard these are? I really tried.
2024 Goal #6: 1 CC Ghouls ‘n Ghosts
FAIL. This was an even stupider goal. Do you know how hard this game is? I beat the first level. 😊
My 2025 goal is to set better goals. Speaking of which…
2025 Goal #1: Complete Suikoden
This is up next on my list to complete after I finish Tears of the Kingdom, which I’ve been working on for 2 months. Wow. I hope my PS2 works.
2025 Goal #2: Fix Hardware
It’s gotta be done. I just got a new job that will theoretically give us some more financial flexibility, too.
2025 Goal #3: Complete 30 games
30 feels right, especially since I’ve spent so much time on Tears of the Kingdom.
2025 Goal #4: Finish all the numbered Mega Man X games
I just bought Anniversary Collections 1 & 2 and am itching to play some. I’ve beaten X through X4 already.
2025 Goal #5: Read 24 books
I do things other than play video games! I’m targeting two books per month. I can do it!
See you soon!
-TRO
