HONOURABLE MENTION

At the time of publishing this list, I'm only on Chapter 3 of Yakuza Gaiden, so I don't feel comfortable ranking it. I have my issues with following up Yakuza 6 - a game so heavily themed around retirement - with one that denies Kazuma Kiryu of that life, but to my bewilderment, it's actually been really great so far. I'm enjoying it far more than Ishin, and I expect this would be in the year's top 3 if I'd had the chance to play more of it before 2024, but I can't consecrate that yet. I'll let you know when I finish it.

It's a neat little game! I'm duty-bound to warn you that it misses so much of the nuance of Dig Dug, whose clothes it's so desperate to put on, but attempt to appreciate it on its own terms, and there's plenty to like here. A peppy, candy-coloured arcade pastiche, where you dig tunnels and trap your enemies behind bombs. Cheap and cheerful, with modest ambitions. It deserves some respect for that. No, I don't think you ought to play this until you understand why Dig Dug is so incomparably superior to it, but I don't think it really intends to supplant an arcade classic. It's just a funny little eShop download for you to mess around with.

So, in 2023, we got a new Yu Suzuki game, and it wasn't Shenmue 4. It was an incredibly stupid mobile game with daily check-in bullshit that stumbled its way onto home consoles. In a way, though, I'm a little glad to see it. It feels like a glimpse of liberation for Suzuki, stepping outside of the obligation to deliver the new chapter in his quarter-century old epic (and one that's rapidly losing mainstream interest). I'm not pushing him to go back. Air Twister feels like something he made with no regard for what his audience wanted, and I massively respect that approach. It's a floaty and underwhelming shooter, absolutely drowning in bizarre decisions, but I believe he liked making it, and I'm thankful for that. The game is utterly baffling. There's flying elephant heads with bat wings for ears, and you mount a fish with legs for a boss fight against a big clock. The levels are too short to even reach the choruses of its background music, which sound like another species attempted to recreate Queen's Greatest Hits. On PS5, there's a trophy you can unlock for repeatedly playing the game between the hours of 3AM and 6AM. The game's a shitpost, and I'm laughing. Good on him.

It's really odd to see a game like the original F-Zero being propped up in the modern climate of videogames. I don't think it does anything particularly exceptional, and I suspect that's how many at Nintendo feel as they continue to prop up Mario Kart as their racing franchise. It was a great game to launch the Super Famicom with, and I think there's still a lot of unique appeal to its sequel, F-Zero X, but I don't know if anyone outside of the SNES owners club would be talking about it if Captain Falcon wasn't the funny one in Smash Brothers. Nintendo's battle royales work on the back of solid, simplistic games though, and an old pre-3D racer works in the format. The game looks like a joke, with each circuit swamped with 100 flying cars, constantly crashing into each other. It's a free game, though, and that gives them the opportunity to try a game that's "just a bit of fun". Something that "kind of works". I like that. There's good design decisions added to the formula that show that they did put the effort in, but it never feels totally slick or coherent, and I like that. It's refreshing. I guess this list really illustrates how sick I am of the homogeneity of modern games design.

For years, Ishin was a Japan-only title, and in retrospect, I can see why. Not only does the game assume its audience is fairly well-acquainted with the specifics of Japanese history, and old-fashioned aspects of Japanese culture in general, its appeal is far narrower than the typical Yakuza. Ishin was the first PS4 game in the series, and its pre-Yakuza 0 vintage shows in the lumpy unevenness of its subsystems and its lack of coherent design. Each minigame and unlock path shows overwhelming depth, and seems to stand with little interest for the game that surrounds it. You can lose yourself for days, attempting to upgrade your stats and equipment through endless fetch quests and farming, and you may need to, if you're trying to match the game's difficulty curve (though you can just buy a million health items and suffer through each fight if you'd prefer). The main story struggles to hold your attention through all the characters with psuedonyms on top of pseudonyms, and secret intentions behind every action, and you can easily lose sight of it as you spend multiple sessions ignoring it to unlock better moves and swords. It's not bad, though. The fighting is flexible enough to keep each encounter interesting, and there's something nice about a game that's this stuffed with content. I still haven't finished it, and I don't feel much interest in doing so, but maybe one of the times I come back to it, the ending will play.

I have to hold my breath a little each time I put on Everybubble. It shows the scars of Taito's recent history in mobile games, and how out of their depth they are in trying to chase mainstream appeal on a new console game. The puzzles play like tutorials, attempting to illuminate you to some secret aspect of Puzzle Bobble design. There is a really good new entry buried under the stiff new character rigs and saccharine writing, though, and I'm really glad that this is the Puzzle Bobble that has an online mode. There's a lot to consider in each shot you take, and it won't take long before you're ranked against people with just a little more confidence and understanding of Puzzle Bobble than you have. I wish Taito could still make games as weird, funny and visually exciting as they did in the nineties, but maybe I just need to give them more money. I'll suffer these boring versions of Bub and Bob every time they're brought to market, so long as I have some hope we're moving in the right direction.

After the somewhat embarrassing launch of Street Fighter V, Capcom pulled out all the stops to present a Street Fighter that worked as a platform. That's how Street Fighter II was, back in the 16-bit days. If you had a friend over, you could kind of play your single-player games, or struggle to get them on-board with the multiplayer in Secret of Mana or Unirally or something, but Street Fighter II was the game that went on if two players wanted to actually enjoy themselves on the same console. As the decades moved on, the wider market chased graphical powerhouses and big 3D playgrounds, and Street Fighter leaned harder on its exclusive audience of die-hard fans, further complicating systems and button inputs. Street Fighter 6 wants the general audience back, while giving the core fans enough to dig into and get excited about. The new game welcomes players with dumbed-down options, and Smash Bros-style inputs that work across every character, and it's been great to see the game work for people who wouldn't dare call themselves fighting game fans, less it invited an elite player to question their credentials. It's tempting to just leave it at that, and call the game a unanimous success, but that would be overlooking all the iffy stuff in it. The microtransaction-fuelled content updates and a repetitive, clunky story mode that sometimes feels like it was pulled out of a PSP spin-off. I don't know. The characters are really fun, and the game's tone matches their sense of energy and cartoonish charm. It's a great Street Fighter game to own.

For all the talk of revitilisation, this feels like the most conservative pick on this whole list for me. It's the new 2D Mario, and I honestly think I might have had more respect for it if they'd just branded it as "New Super Mario Bros. Switch". I think the most original thing about it is the enemy roster, and I wouldn't say it compares particularly well against Odyssey or even 3D World, in that regard. It is a cute little game, though. And fun. It's fine that they made a new Mario game and really worked to make it as attractive and immediately charming as they could muster. Play as your favourite Mario friend, and they're sure to do a lot of funny little things that will make you smile. I really like the game, but I have to distract myself from the decades of Mario baggage I've accumulated to remind myself of that fact.

I went into this with as much optimism as I did for Flashback 2. Resident Evil 4 is fairly bulletproof. You can't really criticise it without ignoring how much every decision adds to its appeal. The foundation of its tension is rooted in finding the perfect spot to steady yourself upon and lining up a vicious attack. The subsequent two decades of third-person shooters have been built entirely in its shadow, so its deeply embarassing to see Capcom attempt to contemporise it. Despite this, they did a really good job of it. The remake loves and understands Resi 4. It doesn't intend to replace it. It stands to its side, expanding upon a handful of its fleeting ideas, presenting curious alternate approaches, and presenting a very fun way to explore its scenario. What's most important to me is how it contrasts against lazy Resident Evil references. You know, all that "Jill Sandwich" shit you see everywhere. The Umbrella Corporation wallets and baseball caps you can buy in Forbidden Planet, and sometimes even HMV. The Baby Yodas of Resi. When the Resi 4 remake references something funny from the original, it doesn't feel cynical or exploitative. I actually enjoy it, and it even made me laugh a few times. The new guys are alright. I'd be happy to hang out with them. They surprised me.

I see the perennial Zelda backlash creeping in now, but I maintain that I've stayed consistent on this one. It's repurposing Breath of the Wild for shallower thrills, and I wish they had the courage and strength of conviction to leave that title on the shelf, but it remains a great game. It sticks with BotW's memory-based storytelling, but due to a time warp contrivance, the events feel like something Link has more of an active relationship with. Nintendo have lost the hunger that fuelled their 2017, and they've become greedy again, but it still feels nitpicky to moan too much about a game this good. Ultrahand stuff is fun, and they've been going back to the Hyrule Historia to dig up shit like Gleeok. I like that. Some of those story beats are actually really effective this time, and I won't dismiss the argument outright anymore when people suggest this Princess Zelda is as good as Ocarina of Time's. Some mad ideas, and they gave the horses more things to do. Pretty good Zelda!

As with the rest of this list, Pikmin 4 is something I have an uneasy relationship with. It feels watered down. 3 really dug into the potential of its gameplay, and delivered a title that celebrated the threatening loneliness of the GameCube original, while 4 mainly seems to be focused on making sure the plush toys sell. The Pikmin for oldheads is hiding in here, though. Within the biggest, slickest Pikmin they've ever made. They've made the dungeons from 2 actually feel up to the standard of a Pikmin game, and the lower perspective makes each new area feel more immersive and richly atmospheric. Yes, I prefer the top-down perspective, where the game feels like you've stumbled upon a colony of insects doing something interesting in your garden, but I can enjoy what a closer camera has to offer. The game is big and consistently enjoyable, but I'm really glad that the developers don't appear to want to replace the earlier titles. A lesser publisher wouldn't have put the 4 on the title. They wouldn't want potential customers to think they ought to play the earlier titles as well. The fact that 1, 2 and 3 have all been brought over to the Switch seems to show their respect for what fans have valued in those titles. Pikmin 4 does not want to threaten the people who love the games for their stark depiction of the desperation of survival, or the themes of ecological catastrophe. It honours that. It's just letting its hair down a little. Do you have a problem with fun? I enjoy the game. Thanks for making it.