Hey everyone. Your friendly neighborhood Bones here. Hope you’ve had a good weekend. Hope you’re having a happy new year! What games are you playing? What do you think of them? And a thought: when the new year starts, it tends to be catch-up season for many of us game aficionados, whether because releases are slower or we still are in the pitch of GOTY season, etc. In the spirit of that, I ask you whether there were any prompts from 2023’s Weekly Games Threads that you missed in the moment for whatever reason, but would like to revisit and participate in now! For me it’s definitely Wolf’s wonderful annual Game Song of the Year from last week.

From my 2023 GOTY Thirsty Suitors, the whole soundtrack by PRI and Marskye is superb, with a terrific blend of influences. Let’s go with the lyrical main theme, What’s Your Thirstsona?, which pulls you in and captures Jala’s troubled state perfectly while also being an outright banger. So many tracks deserve shoutouts, but my runner up comes from the penultimate boss fight: Blood, Sweat, and Tyler. In my testing for this header, these were the two songs I simply had to re-listen the whole way through.

Oh, and an update on where the news roundup is. You’ll see it at the usual hour a week from today, this month was just way too busy with holiday stuff and co-running the Peelys, and there was more game news than expected that deserves the most thorough coverage possible. My apologies for the delay.