Needlejuice Records: Other Album Recommendations

NEEDLEJUICE RECORDS

Mystery Boxes: 2022 – 2023 (Part 1) – 2023 (Part 2)

NBW Special

Other album recommendations

I figured I’d do this one real quick, because I mostly talked about one band last Friday, and figured I’d expand a bit. One thing I noticed that was missing from my previous Needlejuice articles was a quick mention of other albums I recommend for each band and/or artist I discuss. There’s a lot of artists signed onto the label, and though many of them have multiple albums on it, they also frequently have albums that aren’t on there.

I figured I’d give many of them a little bit of extra visibility by listing the albums I, personally, enjoyed the most and felt like adding to my own collection. Not every band discussed across these past articles is listed here; I already covered everything I’ve got from Nuclear Bubble Wrap, and some bands haven’t wowed me to the point of getting more. I might also discuss in a later article some albums listed below that are indeed available on the label, so this list is bound to be modified over time. The albums for each band/artist are listed chronologically.

So, to make this quick, and in the order that I’ve talked about them: The list!

Eldren: Welcome to Deathville

Blinker the Star: Still in Rome, Songs from Laniakea Beach, Love Oblast, Animal Math, Occult Classic

Ookla the Mok: oh okay LA, vs. Evil

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: *takes a deep breath* Float Along – Fill Your Lungs, I’m In Your Mind Fuzz, Nonagon Infinity, Polygondwanaland, Gumboot Soup, Infest the Rats’ Nest, Live in San Francisco '16, K.G., L.W., Omnium Gatherum, PetroDragonic Apocalypse; or, Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation, The Silver Cord, Flight b741 *phew!*

Nick Lutsko: Ends

Bryan Scary and the Shredding Tears: The Shredding Tears, Mad Valentines, Daffy’s Elixir, (and a side-project) Evil Arrows EP 1 & EP 3

Marc with a C: Popular Music, Flowers for Analog, (and a side-project) Have an Okay Time with Claire and the Potatoes!

Not necessarily a big list, but one I felt was worth sharing anyway.

Needlejuice Records: A Nuclear Bubble Wrap Special

NEEDLEJUICE RECORDS

Mystery Boxes: 2022 – 2023 (Part 1) – 2023 (Part 2)

NBW Special

Other album recommendations

I’m hard at work on the next articles, since I have huge plans for VGFlicks this time around. Plus, I didn’t get a mystery box of music last year, so I figured I’d just go through fewer albums this year.

I’ve done this intro each year since 2024 now: Needlejuice Records is an indie label from Nashville, Tennessee, that I greatly enjoy. I started off knowing just one band from their lineup, then expanded thanks to mystery boxes, and now I’m going as far as to try and at least hear everything their artists have put out. Some bands I’ve discovered this way are now big favorites of mine. Are you into indie rock? Maybe metal? Prog? Techno? Punk? Vaporwave/slushwave? Comedy music? Damn near every genre’s covered in some fashion. The label is very LGBTQ+-friendly, and has both a Bandcamp page and a website. (And a Discord server, too, accessible from Bandcamp.)

This time, I’ll do things differently by focusing on a specific band. This journey of mine began with one musical act: Nuclear Bubble Wrap (shortened NBW), whom I discovered around 2010. Crazy to think that’s been 15 years. Songs from the band were posted to a forum dedicated to “Weird Al” Yankovic by the band’s frontperson (and one of its singers), Jace McLain, which is how I first discovered them. McLain, one of the founders of Needlejuice Records, still puts out music both with this band and as a part of a few side-projects.

I did buy some physical albums from the label in 2024, including an anniversary box set of NBW’s fourth album, Exploding Head Syndrome (shortened EHS), packed with three additional CDs – so instead of bogging down a whole list of 10 albums with constant repetition, I figured I’d just dedicate an article to covering all four discs. Along with the other album of theirs I’ve got that I haven’t covered yet. And maybe throw in another album that felt like foreshadowing towards the existence of the label.

Once again, I rank from my favorite to the least favorite, starting with…

Psycho Delicacy

This was the first NBW, non-EP album to be made up entirely of original songs (zero parodies) that all have either a comedic or psychedelic edge. Sometimes both. At a sprawling 72 minutes and 21 songs, Psycho Delicacy, released on May 13th, 2014, is NBW’s longest official album, funded through Kickstarter. I backed it; along with the physical CD, my reward included a bonus disc containing demos from their next album, Multiverses, and other random songs.

Retrospective 2025

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.

The Most Obscure Games I've Ever Covered - Other Results

The list – Other interesting results

I figured I hadn’t obtained all these survey responses to answer only one question! The interest of data collection is to parse out additional meanings based on the results. Yeah, once again, these would have probably changed somewhat if I had received more than 42 responses – but hey, gotta work with what I’ve got. Let’s jump into this, shall we?

THE GAMES EVERYONE HAS AT LEAST HEARD OF

My previous article was all about finding the games that (seemingly) nobody has heard of. Well, there’s the opposite possibility: Games that everyone has heard of. At the very least, all 42 responders at least have a passing knowledge of the existence of these. And, as you can imagine, those are much, much rarer than the opposite! Going at it alphabetically.

The first, a surprise, was Cuphead. I mean, it is one of those games that’s got a huge following, and even expanded into a TV show, so I guess it shouldn’t be that surprising. But hey, I’ll always approve of indie games enjoying such fame. (I guess part of the weirdness is that even larger games and franchises, like Undertale or FNAF, all had at least one person going “Never heard of ‘em”.)

Second, also not too surprising, is The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Probably one of the most famous AAA games ever made, with more re-releases than one can count. It deserves that reputation, even with all its glitches and bugs.

And… that’s it! That’s the only two!

And the games that “almost” everyone has heard of, with only one answer going by the negative: Five Nights at Freddy’s 1, Goat Simulator, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Undertale. That’s all, yep. I won’t lie, some of these surprise me as well.

The Most Obscure Games I've Ever Covered - The List

The list – Other interesting results

After writing so many Top 12 lists, I decided I wanted to get creative with them. My two lists of worst marketing campaigns required a ton of research, and I loved that aspect; so I felt like digging into a different type of research, this time data collection. The results could be… interesting, after all. So hey, why not make a list of the least known games I’ve tried?

Just the first 8 questions... of 473.

For this article, I created a Google Form cataloguing every single game I reviewed on this blog (all 473 of them), and for each one, gave four options:

-I’ve played it (does not necessarily mean its player owns the game);

-I own / have owned it (considering how many gamers I know with massive backlogs of games they’ve never touched, I felt something would be missing if this wasn’t included);

-I heard of it (saw someone else play it on a livestream, or know of it through word-of-mouth, advertising, or reputation);

-Or I've never heard of it (the element that matters today).

I knew most games covered on this blog were likely to be in that last category, especially since I pivoted to playing and covering a lot of indie games after joining Steam in 2016. Yet, there are still plenty of surprises to be found.

At the time of writing, I had received 42 answers to this survey, but it was enough to cut down the list to… 34 titles. That’s a long way from 12; so expect me to lump together titles for which I have the same comments to make. Had I received 50 or 100 responses, maybe this would be different; maybe I would have ended up with much fewer unknown games, maybe even fewer than 12! Thus, you can take today’s article with a grain of salt, I know my sample isn’t as representative as it could have been. That said, I think the results are interesting! In fact, tune in this coming Monday for more data I’ve picked up from studying the survey results. By the way, you’ll notice that there isn’t a single console game on this list – it’s all PC, indie games. Oh, and if games are no longer available for purchase but their Steam page is still up, I’ll include a link to the page anyway.

Alright, let’s start this list! We open with…

12. Free stuff

Examples: Pink Hour, Pink Heaven, Elisa: The Innkeeper – Prequel

Oh, I remember thinking this one was so cute.

When I joined Steam, my first order of business was to find as many games as possible to add to my new collection, in a short time and on a small budget. The solution? Go down the list of Free games, and pick among those. Now, I’ll differentiate between Free-to-play (which can make its budget back through players’ in-game purchases), and full-on Free. Generally small stuff that a developer could easily give away without feeling a blow to their finances. I’d imagine that such games are often released without much fanfare, with their studios either banking on their pre-existing reputation (like Studio Pixel, which released the Pink duology but is better known for Cave Story+), or a freebie that ties well with the remainder of their output (like the Elisa prequel, which ties into games with a price tag). You have to seek these out, basically. With that said, offering free games is a winning strategy; it seems to have worked well for Epic Games’ own platform...

My Needlejuice Mystery Box 2023, Ranked (Part 2)

NEEDLEJUICE RECORDS

Mystery Boxes: 2022 – 2023 (Part 1) – 2023 (Part 2)

NBW Special

Other album recommendations

Continuing today with the remainder of the albums from the mystery box.

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard – Live in London ‘19

The members of KGLW have released more bootlegs in 2024 than ever before (37!!), which makes their previous 14 bootleg-friendly live concert releases pale in comparison. The way the bootlegging program works is that the band openly offers the stems and files on their website, free to download, and any label can use them to create their own variant of any album made available, be it a live concert, a demos collection, Teenage Gizzard (which I discussed), or Polygondwanaland. The band’s one request is to be shipped copies of the created variant, to sell on their label p(doom) records’ own website.

Their most productive year for those, prior to 2024, was 2019. That year, the band’s albums were the boogie and blues-inspired Fishing for Fishies, and the intense thrash/doom metal of Infest The Rats’ Nest. Along came six live “official live bootlegs” recorded between July 12th and October 14th, three of which (Brussels, Adelaide and Paris) were released in January 2020 to amass money for a charity fighting the Australian Bushfires. The other three (Asheville, London and Milwaukee), released in late 2020 or in 2021, also prominently feature tracks from 2019's studio releases.

I heard them all. And despite being the only one I own out of those six, Live in London ’19, recorded at Alexandra Palace, might be my least favorite. I know live bootlegs aren’t the place for incredible sound quality (…or might not have been, but then again, compare this to the sound quality of their 2024 live output), but even here it doesn’t feel so great. Maybe it’s because I’m a lyrics guy and I like to understand the lyrics when I listen to music that has them, and it’s a bias.

Don’t get me wrong, this album has lots of fan favorites from King Gizz’s discography. The Mind Fuzz Suite (though it’s missing its finale!), Evil Death Roll, Rattlesnake and Float Along – Fill Your Lungs are examples. However, when compared to the other live bootleg albums from that year, London ’19 has little that makes it stand out. The longest track, Crumbling Castle, while still my favorite, doesn’t even reach 11 minutes. Very few songs here are given the jam treatment, so it feels like it just doesn’t have enough of what makes KGLW concerts interesting.

If it’s only your first or second time hearing a live performance from the band, it’s fine on its own. However, at the time, there were already plenty of live bootlegs with more adventurous setlists. Honestly, it’s only middling in comparison to the rest of their output; on its own, it’s pretty good and does feature the range of their sound from the time (let’s just say, they’ve expanded it a lot in 5 years).

Favorite track:

My Needlejuice Mystery Box 2023, Ranked (Part 1)

NEEDLEJUICE RECORDS

Mystery Boxes: 2022 – 2023 (Part 1) – 2023 (Part 2)

NBW Special

Other album recommendations

Doing this again this year! Same concept as last year. I feel it’s just right to do this, as though I am doing my part to promote Needlejuice, a record label that has its big names, but also a lot of lesser-known artists that can benefit from the spotlight. Needlejuice Records, from Nashville, specializes in indie artists, providing physical versions of these artists’ albums (in vinyl, cassette and CD formats, and beyond). They have a Bandcamp, a website and a Discord server. From 2021 to 2023 ('24 was too busy a year for them to do it), they sold mystery boxes through which they pass their overstock, even adding extra goodies. Each mystery box I purchased contained three vinyl records, three cassettes and three CDs, with a bonus vinyl test pressing and an extra surprise.

In my previous article, I said I wasn’t sure why it took me a full year before ranking the albums from the first mystery box I purchased. I do have an answer; before making this list, I want to make sure I understand each album within the wider context of its creator’s discography. Which is a fancy way of saying that, like the madman I am, I shove every studio release from each artist into a single Spotify playlist and listen at random, getting a good feel of each artist’s stuff and giving me a new perspective on the album I received. I even plan to check which albums I enjoyed the most in that playlist, and will buy those too.

Why yes, my music collection is big, why do you ask?

I purchased a second box in late 2023 and received it in early January 2024. This has given me a year to hear these albums several times (some more than others) and do that deep discography dive. I threw into that playlist every studio album from these artists, and for good measure, I also included any new albums from artists I had already heard (from the previous list) and who had new stuff out.

Another 11 albums, once more ranked from favorite to least favorite. Remember that if I rank an artist lower, that doesn’t mean their stuff is bad – it can just be that it didn’t click with me. Maybe it will click with you. Oh, and the previous article was too long, so this time, I’m splitting it into two parts. Starting with…

Nick Lutsko – Swords

The sad clown says it all.

Nick Lutsko, from Chattanooga, Tenenssee, has been releasing music since 2012. He made a name for himself providing comedic songs for Netflix and CollegeHumor, including a longer stint making satirical tunes for entertainment company Super Deluxe. He has albums that are satirical, albums that are more comedy/horror (he has released a few songs every Halloween since 2021), and the occasional serious one, with today’s album being an example of the latter. He performs live with The $100K Band.

Keeping up with the news, even if to do funny stuff with it, means being constantly exposed to everything messed up about the world. Lutsko came out of a long period of writing satirical songs, I paraphrase his words, “disillusioned with the zeitgeist”. If there’s a group of people that’s painfully aware of the state of the world, it’s comics and comedians.

Swords is an odd beast; Lutsko hesitates to call it a concept album, though the signs are there. Each title is a single word starting with S (so… S-words?). Most songs are about a deeply troubling aspect of the world we live in. Starting with self-destructive willful ignorance (Sideshow) and xenophobia (Superior) and moving on to social media addiction (Straitjacket), hopelessness (Sometimes) and more. If the lyrics to Software, the closing track of the album’s original version, were too subtle, the video spells it out: It's about the general unwillingness to prevent school shootings from happening so damn often in the U.S.. Ouch. The songs are tied by recurring motifs and lines, and the instrumentation to many tracks incorporates circus-like music in some capacity. The result is indie alt-rock/progressive pop that sounds incredible from beginning to end.

Although this album has elements of his career up to now, it also stands as his most serious. The cassette I got included the tracks from “Seven Inch Swords”, a minidisc follow-up that includes Spineless, a song so good I keep thinking it’s part of the original Swords. It also includes two demos and two live versions. I think Swords is his best work so far, and I love it, even though he himself admits to it being “a bit of a bummer”.

If you want to hear more from him, Nick has the satirical Songs on the Computer duology; and he compiled his recent Halloween songs onto HAUNTED, released in 2024. He has also been working on a follow-up to Swords titled Ends, and I am HYPED for it. One single has already been released.

Favorite track: 

Retrospective 2024

Fuck 2024.

…

…

…

Oh, you expect me to say more? World’s going to Hell, magnitudes worse than it did 12 months ago. We can fully expect America to crumble under the weight of its own bullshit, pulling down several other countries (including possibly mine, because I’m right fucking next door!) along with it. Hate has won and is on the rise. And I would be here happily munching on my popcorn watching the leopards of the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party having the feast of the fucking millennium, if so many of my friends across the United States weren’t getting caught in the crossfire!

Will things get better? I’m doubting it more and more. I am genuinely terrified of what’s to come. Across the next months, across this year that has just begun, across the next four years and beyond. These are not flashbacks to 2017; no, it’s so much worse. I am not seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. And from my position, the best I can do is reskeet posts about current issues and show my support any way I can. If shit comes knocking at my door, I’ll take my signs and march in the streets. My scope of action is limited, so I’ll do what’s possible. It’s kind of odd just how militant I became against the rising bullshit when it struck. My first order of action was to leave the site formerly known as Twitter, and become a recurring poster on Bluesky instead. Join me over there, it’s got its issues we must fight against, but otherwise it’s going much better.

You know that joke from Airplane!, “I picked a bad week to quit drinking”? 2025 looks like a good year to start.

Okay, you know what? Life’s gonna suck, but if I keep crying about it, nothing will get done. Besides, you are not here to hear me mope, and moping won’t solve anything anyway. If you’re here today, you’re here to be distracted from the *gestures wildly at everything* and have some escapism. So… I’ll provide. It would do me some good, too, to think about something else for a moment.

...Okay.

Despite everything, it’s still me.

Year Plans 2024: What I've Missed

Last year, I made a list like this, going over all the games I had planned to cover during the year but didn’t; that meant playing roughly an hour of each of them, and collecting my “first impressions” (by default of not having enough time to play through their entirety, like I try to for regular reviews) into a single article.

I thought I had done poorly this year, but no – when compared to 2023, where I had 14 games I hadn’t played through, this time around I have 17, which… yeah, it’s more, but it’s not that much more. It’s unfortunate that I couldn’t hit my goals, but then again – I did overshoot while setting up my Year Plans. I won’t explain my method in depth, but it’s more than just “roll for a random number”. As usual, I’ll be setting this up in time for my retrospective, next week.

One thing I noticed when going back over the titles I didn’t play this year: I had a lot of RPGs in there. When I was picking these games, I also stumbled on a few two-game franchises and put the whole franchise in there to make it simple. So yeah, I had a lot of stuff to check out. Opening with…

The variety

Wait till they toss in bugs! And fire! And MORE!

Starting with a funny puzzle game (that I had almost forgotten about!), Girls Like Robots is a creation of Popcannibal. In this game from 2014, we seat girls, robots, nerds and various other characters (with the loadout changing at every chapter) to reach as much happiness as possible. Girls love to sit next to robots, but a robot cannot stand being surrounded by four girls. Nerds like edges, corners, and robots, but girls don’t like them. Girls and nerds like pie, but robots don’t! New requests, character interactions, and rules get added regularly to shake things up. It’s fun, and gets surprisingly tricky even an hour in.

12 MORE Worst Video Game Marketing Campaigns (Part 2)

Read Part 1 if you haven't seen #12 to #7! Ready for more?

6. Your mom hates Dead Space 2

Scaring women in the name of advertising! Yeah, that's
one Hell of a low-hanging fruit.

Studios are likely to cater directly to the target audience of the game they’re about to release. It only makes sense to do so. And since a lot of video games are horror or shooter types, who is the audience? Teenagers! And what is the stereotype of teenagers? That they hate their parents, or that they think their folks aren’t cool! Therefore, if their parents – or someone similar – object to their product, that product will instantly look cool to these teens! Sound logic there!

In 2011, Visceral Games and Electronic Arts made big plans for their latest survival horror shooter, Dead Space 2. Heavy stuff, hunting down monstrous aliens on a space station and dealing with mental illness. My brain who has never played this franchise immediately went, “that sounds like Aliens meets Resident Evil”. Anyone versed in the franchise can correct me. This combo says exactly what you can expect: Blood and guts galore.

That rating at the bottom couldn't be clearer!

The ad helpfully informs us that the women presented in its 32 seconds were part of an “actual focus group”, not actresses. So, we can assume their reactions are genuine. Grandmothers, moms, older women, you know, exactly the kind of person unlikely to enjoy what is being shown. Beyond the ad, the official Dead Space channel included full versions of some of the interviews. Hammering in these women’s outrage and anger at what they’re shown.

There’s just one problem: The game isn’t directed at younger teens. The ESRB rated it M for Mature. AKA, for older teens bordering on adults. I'm not saying they must have outgrown "your parents suck" at 17, but at that age, there's no need to involve the parents into the advertising. So, this campaign, on top of traumatizing multiple women, also completely missed the mark as to who it was speaking to. The whole thing was considered in very poor taste. The use of an age-old (pun intended) stereotype also turned away many people outside of the ad’s target demographic. To say nothing of the ESRB, who got a strong talking-to for allowing the ad to be broadcast.

12 MORE Worst Video Game Marketing Campaigns (Part 1)

All natural? Nice. Maybe don't advertise your burgers with
gross pictures of what they'll look like after a month.
That's a quick way to make anyone not feel hungry anymore.

It’s that time of the year again, and instead of thinking up a new idea for a Top 12, I’m going back to a well I began exploring two years ago. As I said at the time, marketing is a fascinating field to study and discuss. Some marketing campaigns have practically changed the world for the better. And on the opposite end of the scale, there have been several embarrassing campaigns; oh well, wipe the slate clean, try again later. That is, unless the marketing campaign bankrupted the damn company; you’d be surprised how often that did happen.

When it comes to video games, it’s as if anything goes. The target audience is kids and teens, sometimes families or adults. Such campaigns were aired as TV spots or as full pages in print magazines for a long time. In the age of the Internet, we see a lot of campaigns thanks to YouTube and on various social media platforms. And although the Web may be great to promote your product, it can become a double-edged sword.

SEGA does what Nintendon't. Like pissing jokes.

In the original two-part article that I wrote on the topic, I overplayed my hand. If you reread it, you’ll notice that I frequently talk about more than one disastrous campaign at a time. Maybe I should have kept some on the side, just in case I wanted to do another of these, right? Well… During my research for this new list, I found several more promotions that went haywire and gave exactly the wrong kind of attention to the product. But hey, you know what they say: Even bad publicity is still publicity.

This time around, I’ll leave more room for types of campaigns and stunts that weren’t as prevalent in the original list. Other than that, everything’s on the table, games and consoles alike. After all, failing to adequately promote a console means that said console’s entire library of games is at risk of underselling.

Be aware that some topics discussed may be heavy, and some images may be disturbing.

12. Bloodvertising

Oh, this is gonna be funny.

Just as they opened my previous list, Acclaim once more find themselves at the front of the line. Some companies have left their mark in the world of crazy advertising, and there are plenty of examples; but few have gotten as tasteless and horrid as some of the ideas that Acclaim’s marketing team came up with.

My Needlejuice Mystery Box 2022, Ranked

NEEDLEJUICE RECORDS

Mystery Boxes: 2022 – 2023 (Part 1) – 2023 (Part 2)

NBW Special

Other album recommendations

I wanted to do something very different, a surprise article for once, something that would allow me to showcase some stuff I enjoy. This is an article about music, not gaming – and it’s an easy one to do while I work on the reviews proper.

What’s "Needlejuice" in the title? It’s an independent record label that formed in September 2017 and operates from Nashville, Tennessee. It has both a website, a Discord server and a Bandcamp page, and features a lot of (but not exclusively) artists from the LGBTQ+ community. It favors indie bands and musicians and covers a very wide variety of tones and genres, from the comedic to the serious, from pop to rock, from psychedelic to prog passing by vaporwave. The label is dedicated to production of physical media: CDs, of course, but also cassettes, vinyl records and more. This short description doesn’t do them justice; I’ll simply close on saying they deserve to be more known. Maybe your new musical obsession is waiting for you somewhere in their large catalog.

My 2022 box also included a shirt!

Since 2021, the label has been offering mystery boxes on their site at the end of the year. The boxes include albums in three formats – the Tier 1 box had one CD, one cassette and one vinyl, Tier 2 had two of each, and Tier 3 had three of each, plus a vinyl test pressing and extra goodies. The first such box I purchased was in 2022. (Why did it take me till 2024 to write this? ...Hell if I know.) When making a mystery box, the label considers the buyer's purchase history, ruling out what they already own, and will include albums both old and new. The box I ordered in 2023 had stock fresh from the year as well as albums that date all the way back to 2008.

I figured I would help with their visibility in my own way, by listing down the albums I obtained in that first box from the one I enjoyed the most to the one I enjoyed the least. This is all subjective, and that I didn’t like a band or artist doesn’t mean they’re bad – merely that their stuff didn’t click with me or fit my personal preferences. Even with the ones I didn’t like, I’ll do my best to be positive. In summer of 2023, thanks to Spotify, I did a deeper dive into all these bands’ larger discographies, so my adoration for the bands may not match the position they’ve been given here - I’m ranking the albums themselves. I’ll also include an embed to my favorite track off each album.

If anyone from Needlejuice reads this and notices some facts that are incorrect, tell me and I'll correct them!

Starting with...

Nuclear Bubble Wrap – Problem Attic

I’ve been following Nuclear Bubble Wrap (whose frontman Jace McLain is also one of the founders of Needlejuice Records; shortened "NBW") since roughly 2010, when I discovered the band through a forum dedicated to "Weird Al" Yankovic. Back then, the band did both parodies and original comedy music, but evolved in the following years to ditch parodies and focus on a psychedelic sound, albeit retaining a comedic and often geeky edge. They appear a few times on this list.

Problem Attic (geddit?) has been described by McLain as the last album of a trilogy, and whereas their previous two albums discussed anxiety and depression, this one covers the sources of both in modern society for the younger generations. The first half is more comical in tone, with tracks about murderous AI, late-stage capitalism, and conspiracy nuts. Side B is where the facade breaks, with songs about sexist legislators, climate change, police brutality and the growing dread towards the future. The title track is a brutal takedown of the older generations who allowed, if not encouraged, things to get this bad for their personal benefit, their children be damned.

It is, as far as I can tell, their most socially charged album, and will probably remain such. It’s a bleak but sobering listen with biting satire and only a few alleviating moments, like a song about how the Mars rovers are awesome or another about T. Rexes being perfect creatures because they can’t jerk it. Yes, you’ve read that right.

Jace McLain and the second singer, Kyle Thorne, offer great performances. I cannot recommend this album enough, it’s a great display of their skill. I’m so hyped for their next full-length release.

Favorite track:

Retrospective 2023

Yet another year that’s been alright for me, yet one that’s been catastrophic on a larger scale. The Ukraine-Russia war is still ongoing, and we have the Israel-Hamas war on top of that. Canada is on its way to a recession, the prices of everything skyrocketed this year, and I can feel the financial dread increasing. Speaking of dread, there’s a lot of it regarding next year's elections in the United States. I don’t think Americans quite realize just how influential, for better and especially for worse, their politics are to the rest of the world, and there’s potential for another disaster. On the plus side, just as I predicted last year, some people are finally getting their just desserts. Let’s hope the trend continues in 2024.

Meanwhile, X, Formerly Twitter (nobody will ever call it just X), is somehow still around, despite every attempt from Elon Musk, accidental or not, to destroy it from within. The guy even had an AI designed for the website, called Grok, and it instantly turned on Musk and his ass-backwards, teenage edgelord worldviews. Some will say I shouldn’t feast while billionaires have their crap blow up in their faces; I don’t care. Pass the popcorn.

But of course, things are always a little brighter on a personal level. Let’s see... On the negative, I think I never went to more funerals than this year, I caught Covid in August for what I assume to be the first time (In fact, I don't recall being sick as often in a single year as I was in 2023), and I’ve had a streak of intense bad luck in the very last days that were topped off by another cold. However, I can recount many positives: I finished paying my car; I got myself a Switch and a brand new computer; I again went to a convention in the U.S.; I joined Bluesky; I discovered new music bands I’m now addicted to; and I participated to two podcasts in French, which have been posted to YouTube, the two videos are this one and this one if you’re interested.

Oh, and some time ago I donated to a Kickstarter by Stray Fawn Studios, who made Niche – a genetics survival game. In my original review of that game, I said I wanted a plushie of the starting character. Well, guess what:

I originally said that as a joke! I’ll have to joke about that more often!

I remember not being too happy with how serious and downbeat many of my articles were back in 2022. This was corrected in 2023, but the tradeoff is that I feel like I didn’t review a lot of games overall. Only 34 in total. On the plus side, I love my idea of the Year Plans, even if I didn’t cover as many of them as I would have liked; I’ll do these again this year. I had a smart idea with the Gaming Memories, filling in time on weeks without a proper article. I celebrated the tenth anniversary of the blog, and I’m almost at a million views on the blog. So far so good, I guess. I also had my first article hidden by a content warning by Blogger; because I wasn’t clear enough that my article titled “Just Die Already” was about an indie game, hence why I specified the studio in the retitle. I don’t know what to expect regarding my output in 2024. In the meantime, how about I do my retrospective now?

My favorite reviews/articles of 2023

10. Rampage. Gotta acknowledge my January movie reviews in some capacity. I’ll probably do a few like this at the start of the year again.

9. Beyond Good and Evil. It was great to experience such a famous and beloved title for the first time, and I think I conveyed its story and my impressions well.

8. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. This has been a year where I covered a handful of highly appreciated titles, so I’m glad I reported on this one (even if I still think it hasn’t aged super well gameplay-wise).

7. Top 12 Boss Battle Types. It was fun to figure out which types were my favorites and how they ranked, and it feels like I conveyed it well.

6. Freedom Planet. That one had been on my radar for a while, it was great to discover it at last!

5. WarioWare: Get It Together. It was a little clunky to have a paragraph detailing how every character plays, but it was much more complete than just leaving a sentence or two within a paragraph for it.

4. Streamline. Even though I couldn’t really play this one, I still played fair and gave it as best a eulogy as I could, considering the odd situation with this one.

3. The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog. Rarely has a review, short or long, ever been this easy to write. The only reason it doesn’t rank higher is that it’s a Quick one.

2. Sonic Forces. Didn’t get nearly enough views for the effort I put into it. I tried to cover every single aspect and analyze the story in as much depth as I could, so that makes the article stand out.

1. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D. Playing through it did enlighten me to why this game is so beloved and influential.

Retrospective 2022

#IStandWithUkraine

Every year is the same deal; a couple words about the year before I go over what I did for the blog throughout the previous 12 months. This time is no exception, but 2022 was… fuck me, it was a depressing year. Not terrible on a personal level, but worldwide? Well, let’s see…

The Russia-Ukraine war that began in February and is still going on. The resulting international turmoil caused gas prices to skyrocket (and they’re not quite back to where they started). That, in turn, had a disastrous effect on the prices of everything, causing inflation like we've seldom seen before in a single year, and if we’re not already in a recession, we’re headed that way. The Covid-19 pandemic, while much less disastrous than it was a year ago, is still around; and as I said, it might have become endemic, but hopefully there’s work being made on vaccines that can deal with all variants at once. Somehow, I still haven’t caught it. Everything piled up made for two dominant sensations all year: Dread and exhaustion.

In the world’s most cynical moments across the last 12 months, the best entertainment was pointing and laughing at several of the ultra-rich losing their fucking minds in radically different ways. Weird how Will Smith, of all people, set the tone for the year. I hope buying Twitter was worth it, Musk. The less said about Kanye the better. Same for Trump, but hopefully 2023 is the year his accumulated bullshit comes back to bite him in the ass.

Now that the tough part is done, the personal year: Mine went fairly well. Had a steady job all year, went to the United States for a convention, did and got a lot of fun stuff… Yeah, there isn’t much to say really. Despite all going fairly well, I have the impression that I was sort of… angry, this year? Maybe it’s the accumulation of everything in the previous paragraphs, but I also felt I was talking a lot about heavy topics on this very blog, and it might have been too much.

From February, I talked about Nazis in several reviews (Pokémon X / MadWorld / South Park), wrote articles discussing pretty heavy topics (Doki Doki Literature Club, the Top 12 worst marketing campaigns), problematic creators (and J.K. Rowling only sinks lower every day)... It was a heavy year, and though I feel I said what I had to say, I really hope future years for this blog aren’t as heavy as this. The downside being that, whereas I covered a LOT of games in 2021 by virtue of having two sets of Quick Reviews, I covered a lot less games this year (end result is 37). That said, some of the articles posted this year now rank among my favorites, so that’s good.

Oh, and this year I also joined Backloggd in order to keep track of everything I’ve covered and plan to cover. Check out that collection here!

Well, time for the retrospective.

My favorite reviews/articles of 2022

10. Say No! More. I rarely get to use styles or effects in my Quick Reviews. For this very No-focused game, I tried to keep the tone of someone selling the game like a program. If only it felt more like a game than an interactive film…

9. Doki Doki Literature Club!. A tough one, I may have been a little heavy-handed on the game’s discussion of difficult topics, but that review had been a long time coming and I’m glad I covered the game. I’m also glad that despite my commentary, I tried to keep the same creepy feel through the images, the comments, the implications and the tone of the article overall. (By the way, did you notice the titlecard for that one was a gif? Took me forever to make that work.)

8. Eternal Senia/Legend of Mysteria. This year got me covering two more RPG Maker games that went in completely different, yet both clever and inventive ways. One is more of an action RPG, another goes the route of a point-and-click mystery. This is why I want to cover so many of these games even if some would consider them inconsequential; there’s a trove of creativity to be found when looking for the better games to be born from that RPG-making software.

7. All VGFlicks, ranked worst to best. With how far I’ve come with this blog and the many film reviews I’ve done on it, I felt this catch-up was most appropriate, and helped me condense my points about each film (including many that I hope to cover in greater depth later) quite well.

6. South Park: The Stick of Truth. Another article that was a long time coming, and the M-Rated Month was the perfect time for it. Stick of Truth had been sitting in my library half-played for a while and I felt I had the right format now to cover it properly (as an example, I wouldn’t have done it in the days where I didn’t split my reviews with undertitles).

5. The tricky question of supporting problematic creators; An essay-ish. The introduction to this year’s anniversary review, the two LEGO Harry Potter games, is a very odd choice for this list, but I like my points and like the conclusion I come to. It’s not the best thing I’ve ever written, but I felt it had to be said and I had to weigh in on the J.K. Rowling controversy(ies?) before tackling anything related to Harry Potter. Either way, it’s done.

4. Pokémon X. This was another big game for me to cover and I felt I did it justice, covering absolutely everything that I felt worked with and what didn’t, across Gen 6 in general, but in Pokémon X in particular (seeing as most of my issues involve the plot of X and its sister version Y).

3. TOEM. Little to say with this one, I thoroughly enjoyed my experience with the game and, though it was a Quick Review, I felt my appreciation really shined through in spite of the short format.

2. Pokémon 2000: The Power of One. One of my best analytical reviews so far. I’ve found myself coming back to it frequently to re-read my own words, that’s how good I felt I had managed it. Really a highlight of my year, and on top of that, it’s covering a film I was looking forward to reviewing. Hopefully Pokémon 3 isn’t gonna wait another 7 years!

1. Top 12 Worst Video Game Marketing Campaigns. That idea hit me like a ton of bricks just as I was completing my Quick Reviews this year and, even though in my review cycles it wasn’t the “right time” to publish a Top 12, the idea entranced me so much that I just had to. The writing went so well that I wrote the entire thing in maybe three days – and that’s including all the in-depth research. It’s one of the articles I’m most proud of in the history of the blog, and I feel it’s one of my works that I would recommend to a new reader. Hell, this one feels it could actually break through in a big way.

Favorite title cards this year

The 10 worst games reviewed on the blog in 2022

10. Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc. The bottom of the list is made of games that weren’t necessarily bad per se, just disappointing or lacking in some areas. While it brings interesting ideas to the franchise, Rayman 3 has a few too cumbersome ideas and mechanics that make it a bit of a pain to play.

9. Particle Mace. Again not that bad, just that it’s about as simple as it gets, being basically a new take on the classic Asteroids.

8. Just Dance 2. Only on here because, when compared to literally every other game I’ve covered in the series, it’s lesser. Which I can understand; it was the second title in the entire franchise. Still, its failings are only more noticeable as a result.

7. Fortified! We now hit the part of the list where games failed to keep my interest – perhaps due to their own flaws, or simply because the topic didn’t keep me invested. Either way, they’re not necessarily “bad”, but certainly seem to miss that little something. Fortified!, while having the clever idea of mixing tower defense and real-time strategy, falls into that category for me.

6. The Deadly Tower of Monsters. Same for this one – while I do appreciate the tone of the game that’s made like an old ‘60s film with cheap special effects being commented by the director, I tried to play as far as possible into it but eventually the gameplay and repetitiveness annoyed me.

5. The Swapper. Same chorus as the previous two, and yet again it’s a game I really wanted to enjoy – it’s well-regarded, but it took too long to find its stride and I lost interest. Shame, too, because a Metroidvania-like made out of Claymation with a unique puzzle platformer mechanic should have made for an incredible experience.

4. ShipLord. Yet another game that feels like it’s “missing” something. Or a lot of things, really.

3. God Game: The Odyssey. What if Lemmings, but on the sea with water- and wind-based mechanics? Clunky is the result. Not particularly good or fun overall, though there are clever puzzles now and then. Really there isn’t much else I could say about this one.

2. The Maze Escaper. It looks pretty, at least when it comes to lighting and reflections, but it’s just mazes, over and over, and some robots. Really feels like someone making a demo game to test a new development software and selling the end result. That said, I still do hope this paves the way to projects from that same creator that feel more like proper games.

1. DETOUR. This game combining real-time strategy and resource management could have been so much better, but I gave up at the first level past the nine-level tutorial. The difficulty ramps up much too quickly for players to keep up, and the gameplay becomes quickly annoying and bothersome, especially in regards to the CPU opponents. Really not worth your time or money. Yeah, worst game I’ve covered this year, easily. It’s not even pretty.

The 10 best games reviewed on the blog in 2022

10. Super Win the Game. In a year spent reviewing several great games, making this list was a lot tougher to make. Then again, it’s tough to make every year. Says a lot that at the bottom of the list is a very difficult but ultimately completely fair and balanced platformer (no, this isn’t meant as a pique at Rayman 1, what are you talking about?) that I greatly enjoyed playing through.

9. Just Dance 4. I’ve covered so many Just Dance games by this point that I don’t know if they should even be on the radar for this list, but JD4 has a great selection of songs, cool extra songs and modes, and the Dance Quests really add substance and challenge that other entries in the franchise don’t have. Hard for me to say whether any older Just Dance games are must-plays, but this one was worth more than what I spent on it!

8. Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion. An adorable Zelda-like featuring living veggies, an intriguing story, and pretty good twists and gags. When a game makes me wish it was longer, then it’s done things right. A bit on the easy side, but still very good.

7. Rayman 2: The Great Escape. I really enjoyed doing that Rayman retrospective late in 2022, as I had 4 Rayman games waiting to be played and I went through all of them in rapid succession. Of them, Rayman 2 was a definite standout and, though it has little things that feel missing now that I’ve played through the others, I feel it was an excellent foundation the franchise could have kept building on.

6. The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth. I still haven’t gotten past Mom’s Heart, but whatever. On the topic of roguelikes, I was glad I actually got to cover the definitive, genre-defining title this year. Yeah, it’s pretty damn tough and you need a very peculiar sense of humor to really appreciate it, but damn, if it gels with you, then it’s one Hell of a ride that might just never end (I’m not even at 100 hours, but people playing it for thousands of hours is not unheard of!)

5. Pokémon X. Yeah, I have my gripes about the story, but let’s be honest – despite that downside, the rest of Pokémon X is actually pretty great. Then again I’m biased for Pokémon games with a greater number of creatures to catch. The world is nice to explore, and the new gameplay mechanics were implemented quite well. It may not be the best main series title in the franchise, but X and Y deserve a lot more credit than they usually get.

4. Superliminal. Talk about messing with your senses. Not only does this inventive puzzle game focus on visual and perceptive trickeries, it keeps on finding new ways to astonish the player with these tricks. One of the best experiences all year, and one I heartily recommend to everyone who hasn’t tried it yet.

3. Rayman Legends. Though I said I loved the second game in the Rayman series, Legends is probably where I felt the most fulfilled, with not only 5 new worlds and tons of extra levels, but also a selection of stages from Origins, and a bunch of playable characters and other bonuses to look for. Pure awesome.

2. South Park: The Stick of Truth. As said earlier, I was due to play through that game, and I’m glad I did. Though I felt it was on the easy side, the utterly wacky world of South Park, recreated to perfection by Ubisoft in both look, feel and humor, is a treat to visit, and there are so many extras and other stuff to do around the place, even with the crazy story that’s presented.

1. TOEM. The years keeps being stressful, so a game like TOEM feels like exactly what the world needs: A stress-free, adorable, gorgeous, relaxing, simple yet effective title. One so fun, I pushed through to 100% it. The journey to TOEM was worth every second. I can’t recommend this one enough.

The 10 goals I had for this year, and whether they were accomplished

10. Do a set of Quick Reviews – Done!

9. Redesign the blog – unfortunately not done, but I’m holding out hope I can do it in 2023!

8. Update the other pages of the blog: I’m not sure I’ve actually fully done it and checked whether each link opened to a separate tab, but I do know that I’ve improved the Index page by adding a link to the main page of every game I’ve played on Steam. Still need to give more love to the other pages, as well.

7. A review of a South Park game – Done!

6. Review the LEGO Harry Potter games – Done!

5. A list of all the video game movies reviewed on the blog so far, ranked worst to best – Done! It was even my first article this year after the previous retrospective.

4. More reviews of Ubisoft games – Done! Between South Park, Just Dance, and the four Raymans, I can say I’ve done that one alright. Hoping 2023 brings more.

3. A full month of Pokémon reviews – Done! Okay, that’s just two pieces of Pokémon media, but still, it counts!

2. To grow the community around Planned All Along: Eeesh… I’m not really sure I’ve managed. That said, I did make some friends to spread the word around a little more1 That counts for something!

1. Make a video for YouTube – Not done… but I’m holding out hope to do it someday.

10 new goals for 2023

10. As promised every year, a redesign of the blog.

9. Also promised previously, an update to the other pages of the blog.

8. Once again, make more attempts to grow the community around Planned All Along.

7. Make a video for YouTube – yeah, my four failed goals for 2022 are back at the bottom of the list this time.

6. Once more, I’d like to cover more games from UPlay. Isn’t it bizarre that I covered more UPlay games than 3DS games this year, and as many UPlay and Wii games? (seeing as my article on Just Dance covers two games…)

5. Cover more Wii games this year. Goes with point 6 to say that I’d like to bring back some of the spotlight on my games in Nintendo consoles, which have been waiting a while by now.

4. Following points 6 and 5… Cover more than one 3DS game this year.

3. A full month of movie reviews. Films are another pile that’s been steadily increasing while I covered Steam games, so I would like to do maybe 2 or 3 films this year. Already thinking of the ones I feel like covering.

2. Once again, I wish to stream more often – I’ve done it a little more this year, especially at the end of the year when I tried to 100% Rayman Legends (I achieved that on December 30th!). Maybe 2023 will be the right time?

1. If my finances are nice enough: Get a Switch! Been wanting one for a long while. It’s purely in the realm of hoping things go the right way for this to happen.

The games I’m removing from my Steam collection this year

Chainsaw Warrior

Gunpoint

Luna’s Wandering Stars

Q.U.B.E. (+Director’s Cut)

Size Matters

Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP

The new list of favorites, with roughly 1/6th of the Steam games reviewed so far

New: Gaming plans for this year

Starting with this year, I’m making a list of games (mostly those reserved for Quick Reviews, but also a number of semi-randomly-selected titles across my entire collection) that I wish to get through and review this year. I might not actually manage to cover all of these, those are just games I hope I can get to. The way I had of doing the list includes a lot of non-Steam games. The picture below: The Left column is the next set of Quick Reviews (unless I expand one into a full review), the second is the year’s hopes. Beneath the picture are the non-Steam games.

Non-Steam:

3DS: Super Mario 3D Land, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D, Pokémon Sun (+UltraSun?);

Wii: NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams, Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sand, Super Mario Galaxy 2, Monster Hunter Tri;

UPlay: Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Beyond Good and Evil, Assassin’s Creed III.

Well, that’s it for this year. Have a good 2023 – here’s to hoping it will go better than 2022.