Best Game - Batman: Arkham Asylum
1st Runner Up - Super Mario Bros. Wonder
2nd Runner Up - The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap
Decent showing of games this year, even if it was pretty heavy in handheld games. It's certainly better than the past couple years where filling the "Best" and "Worst" games lists amounted to ordering everything I'd played.
Worst Game - Donkey Kong Land
1st Runner Up - Mega Man Battle Network 4: Blue Moon
I'm a little torn here because Donkey Kong Land is far more broken than Battle Network 4 but it's also far shorter. I finally went with Donkey Kong Land because I did legitimately have a good time in the Undernet. The only joy I got from Donkey Kong Land was its 8-bit rendition of "Gangplank Galleon" but as far as the actual game is concerned the best it could muster was "not pissing me off."
Prettiest Game - Super Mario Bros. Wonder
1st Runner Up - Star Parodier
Sure, I wouldn't call either game "pretty" so much as "charming and cute" but both are nice and colorful and Star Parodier is full of large, goofy bosses.
Ugliest Game - Donkey Kong Land
Points for trying to get the Donkey Kong Country style on the Game Boy, I guess, but without color it's just a higgeldy piggeldy clusterfuck.
Best Soundtrack - Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance
1st Runner Up - Donkey Kong Land
2nd Runner Up - Star Parodier
So, uh, this is probably going to ruffle some feathers but I wasn't exactly blown away by Metal Gear Rising's soundtrack. Oh sure, "It Has to Be This Way" alone gets the game the top spot but the only other time I really noticed the music while playing was in the Monsoon fight where I'd occasionally hear one of its numerous squealing noises that really didn't help how irritated I was getting with the camera in that fight.
And the soundtrack is the only thing I'm willing to give Donkey Kong Land any credit for, even if it's mostly based on Country's.
Most Pleasant Surprise (Games) - Super Mario Bros. Wonder
Not to keep repeating myself, but the imagination on display here was refreshing after more than a decade of Nintendo running the New Super Mario Bros. formula into the ground.
Biggest Disappointment (Games) - Mega Man Battle Network 4: Blue Moon
Some people blame Battle Network 4 for killing the Battle Network series and ensuring the Star Force sequel series was dead out of the gate, but while Battle Network 4's general crumminess didn't help I think it was mostly good old fashioned oversaturation. Six games on one system, seven if you count Battle Chip Challenge, most with two versions is going to burn people out even if they're all bangers.
Most Satisfying to Finally Finish After Tormenting Me For Years - The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap
1st Runner Up - Mega Man Battle Network 2
2nd Runner Up - Donkey Kong Land
This list could double as "Biggest 'Young Codie Was a Stupid Dumbass' Moments."
And just in case it wasn't clear, no, I did not look up an FAQ for how to get up the mountain in Minish Cap, I found the Deku Scrub with the bottle while casually exploring and figured everything out right away and thought "THIS is what stumped me two decades ago???" I did have to finally look up an FAQ to find that bombable wall in the final dungeon, though. It's the room in the screenshot (it's that hole in the bottom right, and the camera will be a little further up and to the left when you enter), and it's actually not the rupee counter that obscures it when you come up the stairs, it's the key counter. Like, shit, you couldn't have placed the crack a little further up? Or was putting it under a HUD element nobody's going to look, and on a dark wall where cracks are already kinda hard to see towards the point?
Best Movie - The Little Mermaid
Considering it was the only movie I watched all year, we kinda got a winner by proxy here. It is good, at least.
Best Book/Comic - Joe the Barbarian
1st Runner Up - If Cats Disappeared From the World
2nd Runner Up - Controlled Burn
While I originally read Joe the Barbarian on Kindle, towards the end of November a paperback trade was released, which I drove to a Barnes & Noble an hour away to buy and reread. Joe the Barbarian just might be my favorite Grant Morrison comic with Doom Patrol in second. Interesting that my three favorite books of the year involve coping with loss and uncertainty on where your life is headed.
Worst Book/Comic - 52
There was so much going on in the book it was hard to make any kind of connection with it, besides "Of COURSE Grant Morrison turned Lobo into the Pope for a magic space dolphin..."
Best TV DVD - Doom Patrol Season 1
Same thing I said about the movies applies here.
Stuff I Didn't Do Quickies About For One Reason or Another
Supergods and The British Invasion - I wasn't sure how to approach nonfiction, and there wasn't much I could say about either that I didn't already go over in the Grant Morrison/Deltarune project.
Cats V. Conniff - This isn't a book, it's a 130-page shitpost.
Sebastian O, The Mystery Play, Kid Eternity, and New X-Men - I didn't feel like I was in the right mindset while reading these. I was looking for similarities to Deltarune, and because I didn't talk about them in the Grant Morrison project I never really went back through them to analyze them better. I'd rather reread them before writing Quickies for them (although my primary takeaway from New X-Men is that Grant Morrison really wasn't a great fit for X-Men, as his outlandish ideas fit DC and its multiverse better).
Sonic the Hedgehog: The IDW collection (Vol. 1-4) - This is only about half the series, I mainly only read these to get some use out of my Comixology Unlimited subscription, and I'm not the world's biggest Sonic fan so *shrug*. I will say I'm in the group of people who wants Eggman to get bonked on the head again and go back to being Mr. Tinker.
Final Thoughts
2024 was a shitshow. I quit one job at a retail store only to go into another. At least at this new place I'm usually in the back sorting the truck's shipment and putting security tags on stuff instead of dealing with bitchy old women who can't read the price signs and scream "false advertising" when you explain how they work, or want to break their orders up so they can use the "$5 off orders of $25" multiple times even after you tell them it can only be used once. But it's still fucking retail.
This is also the first year where I lost two cats in one calendar year, and both within one twelve months of losing one the previous year. The first cat, Dufie, was 21 years old and it's kind of impressive she lived as long as she did. The second one, Red, came out of nowhere. He'd developed an inoperable tumor under his tongue that was pushing it out of his mouth and preventing him from eating or drinking. At first the vet thought it was just an ulcer and prescribed some antibiotics, but those didn't do shit. It was either put him to sleep or let him starve to death for a week or more, and we went with the former. He was very close with another of our cats, Gabbee, and early this year I bought a pillow that reminded me of them. Only for him to die a few months later.
A silver lining regarding the antibiotics is that a stray cat we call Jackson that hangs around our place showed up one day with a hard bump on his head that may have been an abscess, and we were able to mix Red's leftover antibiotics into his food to clear that up.
The very day we had Red put to sleep I got an email from a former coworker asking if I wanted a kitten. You've already met her, but she's bigger now.
My diabetic cat actually went into remission for a bit, then got a hematoma in her ear that threw her blood sugar out of whack. At time of writing, she's back on insulin. It'd be nice if she'd stop pissing on the floor, at least. She even fried a computer monitor by spraying it, which I didn't even know female cats could do. We have to keep a bag over the new monitor, though she doesn't appear to have sprayed that one in a good while.
In April, I found out my half-brother sold off most of my TurboGrafx, Dreamcast, and card-based PC Engine games. My brother died in back in 2013 and his stuff had just been sitting around in his old room in New Mexico, and my parents finally told my half-brother to empty it out and sell everything. Except they did this without checking to make sure I hadn't stored anything in there in the last ten years (or if maybe I wanted any of my brother's stuff?). And then my dumbass half-brother didn't question why my brother owned a box of TurboGrafx and Dreamcast games but not the TurboGrafx or the Dreamcast, or why he had CD-R burns in there and whose handwriting was on them, or why the hell my brother owned a longbox decorated in characters from the Guardians of the Galaxy movie, which came out a year after he died. But let's pretend those games were my brother's. For some reason he was only collecting TurboGrafx and Dreamcast games, and was holding onto some worthless CD-R burns... why didn't my half-brother ask me if I was interested in those games before he sold them? Probably because he knew I would have been (asshole knows I collect games to old consoles) and all he had to do was keep quiet, cash them out, and I'd never have to know about them.
My collections were not completely wiped out. I had about a dozen TurboGrafx games and several Dreamcast games (including Elemental Gimmick Gear, thank fuck) up here in New York and my disc-based PC Engine games were stored somewhere else. I had even visited New Mexico last October and, high on Berserk, pulled Sword of the Berserk and a bunch of other games from that box. So thank you, Berserk, you saved some of my collection, notably most of my rarer Dreamcast games like Giga Wing 1 and 2.
The only game I'd consider repurchasing is ChuChu Rocket, I've accepted everything else is gone. I'm not paying hundreds of dollars to repurchase games that either were frankly rubbish (Night Creatures) or can be played some other way be it another version (Ys III), my PC Engine Mini (Lords of Thunder), or making a CD-R burn. The two I was angriest about losing were Ys Book 1 and 2 and Exile, both games I liked a lot and while Ys Book 1 and 2 was dearer to me, Exile isn't on the Mini. But again, the TurboGrafx has no copy protection so Exile's easy enough to burn to a disc and I even found versions of it and Exile: Wicked Phenomenon that reverse the mechanical changes Working Designs made (the English version of Wicked Phenomenon is notoriously broken due to an overflow error increasing enemy stats far more than intended). But the whole shitshow could have been avoided if somebody had taken five seconds to ask a fucking question.
I spent September and October dealing with a nasty flea infestation after the cats' flea medication failed or something. Though constant vacuuming and flea combing I think I've gotten it under control, but last time I though that and let up the fuckers had a second outbreak.
I guess things could be worse. I didn't suffer any major illnesses or break any bones or anything. The new store I'm at sells art supplies and is close to an actual art store, so it kinda got me back into trying to draw. I also started learning crochet through the Woobles, and dabbled a bit in needle felting.
After not playing World of Warcraft for two years because I was too busy with my job (and because Shadowlands was so bad it killed my guild and I didn't see much reason to bother with Dragonflight) I popped in a couple times through 2024. I had a token and used that to play the Mists of Pandaria Remix long enough to get all the mounts. Then in the leadup to The War Within's release they were offering two months of game time, the Dragonflight expansion, and a token to boost a character to level 60 for just $25. I had about six dollars in Battle.net credit I needed to get rid of, so I bit and within the first area I was given the option of asking a character "What's a majordomo?" and felt like I was in an episode of The Magic School Bus instead of World of Warcraft. At least the addiction "only" lasted two weeks, when I completed the Emerald Dream storyline and lost interest. Finally I bought two months to check out the 20th Anniversary Event which got old very quick.
I was cleaning up a shelf one day and stumbled on some Japanese-language manga I had bought while I was studying Japanese, and something occurred to me: if I had taken the time I had pissed away on World of Warcraft and spent it studying Japanese, I could read these. I'll never be fluent in Japanese as I'll never be able to speak or hear it without living in Japan for a while which will never happen, but I could at least read and write it. As is, I can't even read books meant for babies anymore.
It'd be dramatic to say World of Warcraft ruined my life, but sometimes it feels that way. Eight years ago I graduated with a shiny new degree in Computer Informations, and what did I do? Farm digital garbage for digital dragons. I could have spent that time relearning Japanese, or working on programming, or learning to not suck at art, or making a game before Unity pulled that "fee per installation" shit, or just chipping away on my book and game backlog. During covid lockdown places were offering all kinds of education resources, and I instead spend it farming that fucking brachiosaurus mount. What do I have to show for it? About thirty extra pounds from sitting in front of my computer and a fried attention span? I don't even talk to anybody I played the game with anymore.
During the last few months I was subscribed I'd think to myself "Hey, maybe I should start running Freehold for that red parrot mount" and then think "Why? To use in a game I'm fucking sick of?" But I also feel like by not playing the game I'm throwing away all the time I spent getting all the mounts I do have. Because World of Warcraft is built on FOMO and the sunk cost fallacy. I have to walk away. I'm not playing this game again unless they release a Remix for Warlords of Draenor like they did with Mists of Pandaria, and only because I keep hearing good things about Blackrock Foundry that that train boss. The best time to give up World of Warcraft was before I even started. The second best time is now.
In Loving Memory of Dufie
2003 - 2024
In Loving Memory of Red
201? - 2024