Happy Monday, folks! Welcome to the Weekly Video Games Thread.
I’m in a bit of a rush, I must confess. Not just because we’ve started the Peely Awards, or because I still have two articles that need to go out before year’s end, or my traditional all-day New Year’s Eve marathon, or that huge project I’m starting on January 1st, or the fact that I’ve become paranoid about the smell of my tap water. No, I’ve got goals. Chores, perhaps, though these ones are fun. I often like to end the year by finishing at least one game. Especially if it’s one that came out that year. I won’t be able to get to everything; it’s clear that my time with Soma has just stalled, and Alien: Isolation is clearly a longterm project if I’m too scared to play it for more than a half hour at a time. But I’d like to end on a high—especially since I closed out 2023 by resentfully slogging through the best ending of Sea of Stars—and finish two things. Or rather… one.
See, I beat one of the two games just yesterday! I got the “true” / “good” / more serious ending of Tunic on Sunday afternoon. I’ll have more to say in the comments about the actual experience, and the relationship I had with the game and getting online advice, but suffice it to say that this is a great game and one I should’ve gotten to much, much earlier. Very Wolfman Jew-friendly. So while I intended to write about the experience of pushing through two games with only over a week left and even make a collage header with both of them, that’s not needed. No, all I need to do, gaming-wise, is finish Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown before the end of the year. Shouldn’t be too hard! I’m on winter break from work, I’ve been playing it for hours for the past few days, I’ve gone through tons of the map, and generally speaking, I’m good at Metroidvanias. Even ones with crushing Soulslike fights and some really goddamn hard, Celeste-level platforming challenges. I’m loving my time with this game and am glad it’s getting to close out 2024 for me. Nothing against you, Crow Country. You’re still great.
But this is a strange experience, where I’m imposing an entirely artificial limitation or goal here. This isn’t, say, me pushing hard to finish my Echoes of Wisdom article because I wanted to publish when the game was relatively new. It’s not me dealing with some bullshit time-sensitive challenge from a live service. There’s not a bomb in the cartridge that will blow up my Switch if I take too long, and obviously I can’t do anything to help the beleaguered Ubisoft programmers who’ve been stuck on doomed-to-fail projects in development hell as punishment for this game only selling a million copies. It is only in relation to the way we discuss time (well, that and also I’m starting a super work-intensive three month project in ten days, so giving time to too many other games is gonna be a bit hard). But also, we do think of years in very distinct ways. We often like to go into new years with fresh perspectives and with some outstanding work taken care of. We can put a bow on what we did over the past twelve months. Maybe that’ll be my last Games Thread of the year, next week. I dunno.
All of this is to provide a different sort of prompt for my second-last Games Thread of the year: have you personally experienced this kind of drive to finish a game before the end of the year, and if you’re feeling it this year, for what game? Truthfully, I’m not sure if this experience is even that major for me, as I can’t particularly remember going about this in 2022 or earlier. Ooh, maybe that’ll be some quick extra research into older Games Threads. Quick extra research tomorrow, because it’s night and I want to just relax for a bit longer. But whether or not this is a new thing, it’s clearly something that’s become a bit important to me, and I’d like to know if this is a “me” thing only.
Anyway, whether it’s for this kind of sprint to the finish or just some regular gaming, what did you play this weekend? Oh, and as I said at the top of the hour, Round I of the 2024 Peely’s are up! This is the last time I’m gonna be promoting them until we start Round II on Friday, so whether or not it’s gaming related, if you’ve got an idea for a category in our annual worst of the year celebration, come on in and suggest it. Meanwhile, I’ve gotta go find the secret of that ancient planetarium thing (in Prince of Persia) and find another header image to complement Lennox’s stupid goddamn face (in the real world).