Ughhhhhhhhhh…
For your sake and mine, I’ll spare you ten paragraphs of intense screaming at everything that was wrong this year. This fucking year. 2026 doesn’t look like it’s going to be much better, either. But god damn, 2025 was probably the worst year I’ve ever lived through. And look – for me, personally, years never go THAT badly. I keep my job, I am financially stable, I have decent relationships, the blog is doing well (in fact, it’s doing better than it’s ever been). But as someone with some empathy and who feels the need to keep track of news, these past twelve months were some of the most mentally and emotionally exhausting shit I’ve had to deal with.
I knew we were in for a bad time all the way back in January when-
CRAP! I said I wasn’t gonna do that! Okay, you know what? I’m going to focus on the blog. ‘Cause I really, REALLY don’t want to start on another tangent with all this. (And I’m holding back, ‘cause gaming, in general, has been a huge bearer of shitty news all year, from Nintendo’s attempt at patenting creature-battling to all the game development studios going mask-off with A.I. at the end of the year and – Dammit! Moving on!)
But it’s like I said. My year? On a purely personal standpoint? It was alright. Speaking strictly of employment and hobbies, that is. I think I mostly stayed true to my desire to keep this blog as a pure hobby, so that’s at least a net positive. I’ve written articles I had wanted to do for a while (the Sonic movies, Pokémon Sun/Moon and their rereleases), and I once again covered a decent number of games across the year. (If we count all the ones I covered in my itch.io and Nintendo Classics articles, then I technically covered more games this year than ever before, but… should those really count, with how short most of them were?) I'm just glad I started both of these, too, as they're two concepts I quite enjoy writing for.
I didn’t overshoot too badly with my Year Plans, but I think I could have done even more if I hadn’t landed myself a Balatro addiction. (Seriously. I’m 250+ hours in.) Perhaps the best blog-related achievement this year was the sheer number of views. It took me from 2013 to 2024 to reach a million views on the blog, then 2025 casually comes around and boosts those numbers by 450,000! For a short time around the last week of October and the first of November, I got over 9,000 views per day. Several days in a row. Ever since October, I’ve been getting over 55k views per month, blowing my previous record of views in a month (40k, back in May 2017) right out of the water. I still have no idea where this sudden spike came from, but hey, I’m not gonna complain!
Slowly but surely, I’m going through my collection – now, if only I wasn’t buying damn near as many games as I finish… Okay, enough chitchat, time for the yearly lists.
Favorite reviews/articles this year
Surprisingly, a lot of solid articles outside of gaming!
10. Spectrobes: Origins. I always like to discover a new franchise, though it was weird to discover this one through the game that required the most knowledge of the rest of its universe. I guess I did a pretty good job nonetheless, researching the info I was missing out on.
9. Hylics 2. I had so much fun parsing the nonsense of that universe and coming up with some of my own!
8. The Most Obscure Games I’ve Ever Played. I think I would have preferred this one if I had gotten enough answers to truly cut the list down to 12 games, but I think I’ve found a decent workaround by splitting games into twelve categories.
7. RollerCoaster Tycoon 3: Platinum!: I had fun streaming (once) while playing this game to make my way through the campaigns and test out the other park categories. The result speaks for itself!
6. Super Mario Odyssey. I think I could have done even better in covering this one, going from kingdom to kingdom, but the end result is still great. It’s not like most Mario games have all that much plot anyway.
5. Resident Evil 4 Wii Edition. The last proper game covered at the end of the year, and I had a blast both playing it and writing about it (even if, admittedly, it meant cutting out a lot of unnecessary detail from the plot and its progression). Good practice towards better brevity, I guess.
4. The Needlejuice Mystery Box 2023. I love making these articles because they require a lot of research, I do everything to ensure that the information is accurate, and that my listing represents my opinion. I think I might make this a yearly thing, as long as I’ll have albums to talk about anyway!
3. Pokémon Sun/Moon and Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon. These two, well, four games cannot be split apart, and I always intended to cover them like this, even with full knowledge of the amount of work it would be to do so. Ten parts comparing both sets of games, what each one did better than the other, and which aspects in the Ultras were improvements. It’s very thorough, and I’m proud of it.
2. VGFlicks: Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Just like the first film, I knew I had a lot to say about this one, and as a result writing it was easy (not as much as the first, as by that point I was getting a little fatigued by the topic of Sonic movies), but I covered all the points I wanted to make and probably even found a few more to add on top of it all.
1. VGFlicks: Sonic the Hedgehog. Is that cheating? Screw it, I’m doing it anyway. I usually can judge how much I have to say (or how much I had in mind before writing) about something. And I knew everything I had to say about Sonic 1, and writing flowed. Probably one of my favorite movie analyses, ever.
Favorite title cards this year
Top 10 worst games reviewed on the blog in 2025
For the record, neither of the next two lists include titles from the Itch.io or Nintendo Classics articles.
10. Spectrobes: Origins. Once again, I didn’t review that many terrible games this year, so the last few of this list are games that perhaps just didn’t do as well as the rest. Spectrobes: Origins is alright at best, but just one game got me to see the franchise’s big flaws, like the very limited rock-paper-scissors type matchup table, or any of the weaknesses that come from fighting alongside your monster.
9. Yu-Gi-Oh! Legacy of the Duelist: Link Evolution: Sure, it includes the Link era, but everything else before it has barely changed, so it feels like just replaying Legacy of the Duelist with a new, slower system (often unadapted to the new mechanics) with a game that instantly pauses when you go to another window, ‘cause God forbid you do other stuff on the side when dueling!
8. Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel. This one has a huge barrier to entry; unless you’re already acquainted with the physical card game (as it exists currently, metagame and all), you’ll probably take forever to get up to date. The system is unintuitive especially when it comes to the deck builder mode and the card pack shop, and it’s real easy to get blocked from playing the deck you want to play because you can’t (or refuse to) shill out the money for virtual cards.
7. Revolution Ace. Really not THAT bad of a shmup really; it does enough things to separate itself from other shmups, and has decent combat ideas (that you’re not always prepared for), but otherwise didn’t do a ton to wow me.
6. Guns of Icarus Online. Makes this list because it’s a multiplayer-only game and its glory days are passed, which made this one tricky to review (good thing I could play it with a friend). I bet it was much better when it was truly active.
5. ZOMBI. I probably would have loved that one, had it not been for the constant crashing, and that it was always happening at the worst possible times. Like on the way to a save point.
4. Recesses. Great concept, but the opposing duelists are extremely specific in which strategies they employ, so you’ll need to switch up your deck regularly to fight the very specific threats you know you’re going to encounter, instead of being able to make a deck that can adapt against those threats. It doesn’t encourage free and open deck-building, which is unfortunate for a game you can’t really play any other way.
3. Asterix and Obelix XXL: Romastered. It’s fun to play as both Asterix and Obelix, but damn is this game so stupidly repetitive. When the final challenges are to knock out literal thousands of Romans… The plot is dumb as rocks, and the bosses are all literal tanks in the age of the Roman Empire. What???
2. Riff Racer. Probably would have been a lot better if there was still some way to upload our own tracks (without having to resort to fanmade solutions, that is). This thing is a shell of its former self.
1. Three Heroes. Basically unplayable, one of the very few games I’ve played this year that I just couldn’t fin any enjoyment in. Miserable experience all around.
Top 10 best games reviewed on the blog in 2025
10. The Inner World. Great point-and-click with sweet animation, good humor, and quite the interesting plot – not to mention a few devious puzzles, of course. Playing through it was a lot of fun.
9. My Friendly Neighborhood. Such a fun concept for a horror game, a super enjoyable time to be had. The scares aren’t too bad, but the jump scares can still stun from time to time. And there’s depth to the story, too, so it’s got a lot of what I enjoy.
8. Scott Pilgrim VS The World: The Game – Complete Edition. It’s a great little beat’em-up with clever mechanics and some fun scenes that dip into both the graphic novels and the movie for inspiration. So glad I got my hands on this one, it was a blast.
7. Balatro. Addictive as all Hell (I am still trying to quit the habit). It is a great game requiring a good deal of strategy and luck, and discovering every possible interaction between Jokers is an arduous task. My one regret is that after doing so much of the progress in it, I’ ve seen some of the late-game flaws and I guess it would have been better to address them in the Quick Review; or maybe give this one a full-length article.
6. Pokémon Sun/Moon. Still a great entry in the Pokémon series, and probably the best story of the seventh Generation. That said, while it does bring a lot of good ideas to the table, you can tell that not everything had the polish it should have had, which makes the Ultra rereleases much better gameplay-wise.
5. Toonstruck. What a classic! And what a funny point-and-click. This one felt like playing a piece of gaming history. It’s got such immense charm, brought from its idea of featuring a live-action character in the animated worlds.
4. Sonic Mania. Although I acknowledge that it is an excellent platformer, I don't have as much of an attachment to it as people who’ve played all the Sonic 2D games possibly have; I’m missing that nostalgic connection. But I can satill appreciate all the nods to Sonic’s history as a franchise that can be felt throughout.
3. Super Mario Odyssey. Of course the Mario game would make its way onto this list! Not that Odyssey doesn’t deserve it, so massive, beautiful, and packed with challenges that it is. I still haven’t 100%’d it, though I know I’m beyond halfway done (seeing as I finished the Darker Side of the Moon…)
2. Resident Evil 4 Wii Edition. I can file this one under games I not regret taking so long to get around to, ’cause damn, that experience was something fierce. Just the depth of the plot, the possibility to learn a lot more about all that’s going on, the imagery, the combat, the difficulty. Not to mention the bonus story with Ada Wong patching up some holes in the events witnessed by Leon Kennedy.
1. Pokémon Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon. We may have ended up with a lesser story, but I think it’s acceptable considering the sheer number of quality-of-life upgrades these games have over the original Pokémon Sun and Moon. They’re so much more complete.
10 goals I had for this year, and whether they were accomplished
10. Rework the other pages of the blog: Not done, alas!
9. Stream a bit more often: I streamed 11 times this year, which is 8 more than my previous year with the most streams. Okay, I mostly played Yu-Gi-Oh!, but still! I progressed nicely there!
8. Slow down on buying games: Wished I could say I succeeded, but I think I failed that one, honestly.
7. Figure out which game to review for my 2025 anniversary review: Well, I have 10 parts about Pokémon; I think that says it all. That one's a freebie, I almost always figure it out, the thing is to make it good afterwards!
6. A new month of movie reviews (Sonic 1 and 2): Yep, achieved!
5. Another article on Needlejuice: That one was easy, I always knock these at the start of the year.
4. Start covering stuff from itch.io: Yep! Only short stuff so far, but still, that’s better than nothing! Also started with the Nintendo Classics (of course the name changed on the exact year that I start talking about them…).
3. A month of horror reviews for October: Not exactly. Failed this because the Quick Reviews took longer than expected. At least I did review a horror game for Halloween! (And caught up with the other horror game I wanted to review, and published about it in November-December).
2. A full month of reviews of Yu-Gi-Oh! games: Yep, achieved!
1. Take this blog as a hobby, not a job: I think I got a little closer to that this year, but I think I still stressed out a little more than I should have.
10 new goals for 2026
10. Redesign the blog? I say it every year, and I always fail. Maybe this year will be the right one?
9. Rework the pages of the blog. I did apply some light changes to the Index, but the remainder needs some love as well.
8. Finish as many planned games as possible in 2026. I ended 2025 with only 8 games unplayed, let’s see if I can keep shrinking these numbers.
7. Review THREE movies for VGFlicks this year. Yeah… I know this will happen, I even know which three films I want to talk about.
6. The anniversary review in 2026. I have a hunch that I might go back to a well I haven’t explored in more than a decade.
5. Try more new franchises. Maybe revisit ones I’ve barely touched so far? That could be fun.
4. Stream more often. Yeah, I have plenty of games I’d like to finish, that I’ve already reviewed. All I need is an excuse to stream them.
3. Keep the Quick Reviews to roughly two months. I’ve got fewer this year, maybe I’ll manage it.
2. Further grow the community around the blog. Maybe joining additional social networks will help – gotta promote wherever possible.
1. STOP BUYING GAMES. Seriously, I gotta stop adding back to the backlog.
The games I’m removing from my Steam collection this year
Auto Age: Standoff
Guns of Icarus Online
LEGO Harry Potter, both Years 1-4 and Years 5-7
Riff Racer
See no Evil
Three Heroes, Zero Reflex, Urban Trial Freestyle OR Turbo Pug
The new list of Steam favorites, with 1/6th of the Steam games reviewed so far
Gaming Plans for 2026
As per usual: Non-Steam games are listed under the picture, separated by console and platform. I’ll try to play a lot more of these this year, focusing on the shorter ones. The picture itself, as usual, separates the Quick Reviews (on the left) to the longer reviews I hope to do (on the right). Only exception: The list has both versions of Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, and I won’t play the game in VR, I just put the two together for the sake of clarity.
Nintendo 3DS: Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance
Nintendo Wii: Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles, Metroid: Other M, Donkey Kong Country Returns
Nintendo Switch: Disney Illusion Island, Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes, Crash Bandicot 4: It’s About Time, New Pokémon Snap
WiiWare: La-Mulana
GOG: Batman: Arkham Asylum
Ubisoft Connect: Starlink: Battle for Atlas, Assassin’s Creed III
And, a new category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection: Duel Monsters I, Duel Monsters II: Dark Duel Stories (not to be confused with the next game, whose title is just Dark Duel Stories), Dungeon Dice Monsters, Destiny Board Traveler.
Some of these titles are returning from past Year Plans, hopefully I do play them this time. I calculated that I’d need to play just a little over 2 hours a day to finish everything planned here, if I don’t try to go for 100% completion of any of these.
2026 is going to be a… turbulent year. That’s the nicest way I can put it. Stay strong, and take breaks from the EVERYTHING AROUND US whenever you need them. Keep yourself healthy, physically but especially mentally. That's truly the best I can say.
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