Year Plans 2025: What I've Missed

Boy, this has been… a year. Please ignore my twitchy eye. Or the emotional exhaustion. Let’s just… talk about video games today, alright?

For the newcomers: I started setting up Year Plans in 2023, as a way to force myself to check out games selected somewhat at random through my collection. The idea was that if I only ever chose on my own what I wanted to play, there are games I own that I’d never touch! So why not leave it to luck? Of course, as I realized at the end of that year, I can always misjudge and overshoot. After all, I take direct inspiration from HowLongToBeat lengths to make these random picks, and I can never know how long a game will truly take me, versus how long that website says it takes on average. That said, I’m a very thorough player and I often go beyond just finishing a game's main story, so it often takes me longer than those indicated lengths to finish games.

Every year so far, I ended up with plenty of games I was hoping to cover in those 12 months, that I ultimately ran out of time for. 14 in 2023, and 17 in 2024. This year, however, I am proud to announce that I don’t have a lot of leftovers… only 8. I call that a win! But still, I wanted to operate the same way as before, by playing just an hour of each game and report on it for the last article of the year. Hell, there were so few this time around, I juggled with the idea of playing two hours of each instead! But nah. One hour will be enough. I’ll just write more for each.

The estimated duration of the eight games today ranges between 11 and 67 hours (…don’t start), and would have taken me an extra 250 hours to get done. I don’t think I would have had enough time.

Well then! With so few, I guess I won’t split these into categories!

Team Sonic Racing

Out of my way, Amy! I'm gonna steal the third place from
you!

There are many Sonic racing games out there, though for a while they existed under the “Sonic & All-Stars” umbrella that allowed characters from other properties to join the roster. This doesn’t quite work for Team Sonic Racing's concept, where characters play in their classic teams (with a few changes) and have to rely on each other to win each race. Each team has a Speed character (Sonic, Amy, Shadow, etc.), with a race car that has faster speed than average; a Technical character (Tails, Omochao, Rouge, etc.) with better handling and the ability to pick up rings more easily; and a Power character (Knuckles, Big, E-123 Omega, etc.) that is slower, but unaffected by most road hazards.

Five teams, 15 characters total, and the entire game is built around teamwork. The car of your teammate closest to first place leaves a trail behind, and the other two can drive along that trail to gain a speed boost. It feels a little like teamwork rubberbanding. Racers can pick up Wisps as power-ups – many of which feels directly inspired by similar items in Mario Kart.

One hour wasn’t enough to go too far into it, so I haven’t seen yet whether having to rely on your two CPU allies to get ahead leads to issues down the line (you never know how well the AI will play, after all), so… guess I’ll see when I get around to it.

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...

Movie Review: Five Nights at Freddy's 2

This weekend, I saw the sequel to 2023's Five Nights at Freddy's movie!

The story

The film opens on a scene at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza in 1982. It's a bit tough to describe that scene without spoiling a lot of what happens afterwards, so I'll stay vague and say that it shows the start of this film's main antagonist. Once again, the film tries to call back to several elements that were revealed in Five Nights at Freddy's 2 (the game) and featuring the new animatronic characters it introduced, while bringing its own flavor and twists on the original story and its reveals, switching things around.

Back to the present day... well, a year after the events of the first film. Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson) still lives with his younger sister Abby (Piper Rubio), and seems to have hit some degree of stability in his life. He has kept in touch with Vanessa Shelly (Elizabeth Lail), the police officer he met a year prior; he claims their relationship is just friendly, but even the younger Abby can see right through that excuse. The reality, though, is that due to everything that happened a year earlier, he still has a few doubts about her. Vanessa is still plagued with visions and nightmares of her father.

Speaking of! Due to certain events happening near the end of the first film, the town has seen renewed interest in the myths around the Freddy Fazbear restaurants and a festival is taking place that weekend to celebrate it. Costumes, attractions, all that.

Resident Evil 4 Wii Edition (Part 4)

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4

The Wii edition of Resident Evil 4 includes all prior DLCs from previous editions of the game, and I felt my coverage wasn’t finished until I discussed all of them, too. This time, we focus on Ada Wong, the mysterious spy that Leon keeps running into. First in Raccoon City, then here… What was she up to? Time to find out.

Separate Ways

    Oh, she knows how to use those just as well as Leon!

Ada’s quest isn't a 1-to-1 adaptation; it follows the events as she witnessed them, and her part in them. She’s responsible for a few problems Leon encounters, and saves his life more times than he knows. She can meet the merchant to buy weapons, upgrades to her attache case, and first aid kits, but the menu to upgrade guns is not available. You remain at a disadvantage since you can get all the guns you want but no improvements in firepower and efficiency. Ada has a knife too, but she starts with a Blacktail and a Shotgun, and can buy a unique weapon, the Bowgun (a crossbow, powerful but its ammo is rare and takes up inventory space). Her unique skill is the grappling hook, which she can use to reach high ledges or jump through windows; it’s only usable in specific places, though.

We see from the start that Ada is working under Albert Wesker. Does she know about his plans? That he wants to create a virus that will wipe out several billion people? She sneaks into the village from the first two chapters of the original quest. She’s there at the same time as Leon, who is already mowing through zombies. Ada is tasked by Wesker to ring the church’s bell, which will calm down the Ganados. Logically, Leon should be hearing a second shooter in the area, but he doesn’t.

Sorry, I'm not dressed for church; that's okay, I'm not here
to hear the hymns anyway.

She finds the Insignia key on a rooftop and the emblem for the church’s door. Yep – she’s the one who rung that bell that made the zombies go away while Leon was fighting them. In-between chapters, we get a recap showing that everything Leon learned on his own, Ada (and the organization she works for) already knew. She knows that Las Plagas are controlled through sonic frequencies, akin to dog whistles. It’s implied that all the key items that Leon took forever to find were so because Ada was using them first. She'd hide them off the beaten path, so Leon would take longer to finish his mission – otherwise, his heroic resolve would mow everything down before she could fulfill her goal.

She may not be the one to deal the finishing blow to the big
players of the Las Plagas conspiracy, but she still deals
with major threats in each of her chapters.

She must get into contact with Luis Sera, who has been captured by Los Illuminados. He's the one to will hand over to her the master Plaga sample. Ada starts in Mendéz’s home, follows Leon's path, and ends up saving him from the village chief. Bullets through the window, right in the guy’s back. This leads to her getting knocked out by Ganados and almost offered as sacrifice, but she kill her captors and finds her way back. She gets the key in the barn, reactivates the lift and heads over to the shack, killing an El Gigante on the way for sport. She arrives right after the cabin brawl, and confirms with Luis that he's her contact. However, he doesn’t have the sample yet…