About a year ago, I released a blog post called “A Harmless Bit Of Self-Promotion” which covered much of the content that I’ve been producing as of late. However, besides a few things that I can’t talk about yet, something new that I’ve been trying lately is to stream myself playing games. Now that it’s been a couple of months, I thought now was as good a time as any to take a look at my current plans for streaming video games, how you can access the content I’ve already made and what you should expect in the future.
Let’s start, of course, with where and when you can find me streaming. I’m currently streaming games on Twitch every Sunday (or, if circumstances prevent me from doing so, Saturday) at around 2pm IST. I’m a variety streamer with the games I’m choosing to play being titles from my video game backlog with one caveat, I’m currently staying away from games with an excessively long playtime, as determined by HLTB, as I don’t want to spend too long playing a single game this early on as I think I can catch more people’s attention with a wider range of titles.
The three games I’ve streamed so far as of this article.
I remember the days when people would loudly declare “Single-player games are dead” and, thankfully, this has not come to pass. I touched on this well over a year ago when I compared the most popular games on Steam with the most popular games on the Steam Deck and found that single-player games were thriving on the handheld. As part of their Spring Sale, Valve have released a list of the top 100 games on the Steam Deck from March 2023 to March 2024 in order of highest daily active player count. While I certainly won’t be going through the entire list within this article, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at the top played games on the Steam Deck last year, discuss some that stand out to me for one reason or another and why this list signals that single-player games have a long, healthy and prosperous future awaiting.
Let’s start with which games from this list that I’ve played on my Steam Deck within the past year, thus contributing to their ranking. Working from the bottom up, the first game from these top 100 that I played on my Steam Deck within the last year is Middle-Earth: Shadow of War. I had enjoyed the first game enough that, already owning the second due to Humble Bundle, I decided to give it a chance. I didn’t really feel like it did enough to distinguish itself from the original and, while certainly enjoyable in a braindead manner, I was more than ready for the end when I finally finished the game. I’d played Monster Hunter Rise before March of last year but I picked up the Sunbreak DLC this year and played through that recently. It was nice to return to Monster Hunter but I will say that I thought there was a bit too much repetition of monsters from the base game throughout although particularly at the beginning. Finally, the only other one I played on the Steam Deck in the past year was Vampire Survivors. I knew of this game for a long time but I got it as part of a charity bundle on Fanatical and decided that I should give it a shot. It has proven to be a surprisingly addictive experience and I love how the achievements continually unlock more and more content.
The top 22 games (it was the most I could fit and still have it be readable!)
Well, it’s that time of year again! The Epic Games Store has released a new Year in Review for 2023 so I thought I’d write an article discussing it as well as some other information about the Epic Games Store. I admit that I was debating with myself on whether or not to write this post due to a concern that the information may grow repetitive with regards to previous articles covering the Epic Game Store’s Year in Reviews but I was buoyed by some other information we received regarding the Epic Games Store and decided that it was still worth covering. Without further ado then, let’s take a look at how the Epic Games Store is continuing to flounder so many years after its release.
Let’s start, of course, by looking at the new Year in Review and comparing it to the last one. I also do want to commend Epic Games for, if nothing else, their courage for continuing to do these Year in Reviews even when the results are sure to generate unfavourable headlines like the one above. Let’s start by looking at the aspects that are more favourable to Epic. Total PC users of the Epic Games Store has continued to grow with 270 million compared to the 230 million of last year. Monthly active users has also grown from 68 million to 75 million and, as a whole, revenue is up (more on that later). Their social media presence has also grown with an increase of 100,000 followers on Instagram, 300,000 followers on Twitter and a remarkable 444,000 on TikTok, that last one being a growth of 148%!
I remember thinking to myself, many years ago, about the concept of video games being exclusive to particular platforms and, for the first time, thought about how silly the mere concept was! “After all, Blu-ray discs don’t require specific players to function! Why should video games be any different?” were my thoughts and, while it isn’t quite as simple as that, we now see that the industry is beginning to think this as well. Therefore, I thought I might discuss video game exclusivity, why it’s dying and why that’s fantastic news!
For as long as the video game industry has existed, there have been games exclusive to particular platforms. Limitations were certainly a factor in this since many earlier games used Assembly language, a programming language which prevented programs from being released on multiple devices. This meant that the same game released on different platforms at the time were actually completely different titles and would have their own quirks and differences! However, the advent of high-level programming languages meant that titles were no longer restricted to specific hardware and could be released across multiple platforms. Despite this, we have seen video game exclusivity make its way into the present day with numerous titles artificially restricted due to contractual agreements. The idea was that video game exclusivity helped to move hardware by creating an artificial and, usually, unnecessary difference between platforms that would influence consumer decisions and spending.
Previously restricted to the DS/3DS, the games in the Apollo Justice Trilogy were released on multiple platforms this year.
I was recently recording for Victory Achieved Gaming, specifically Ori and the Blind Forest, when, among many other topics, Kathlynn and I began talking about Avatar: The Last Airbender due to the upcoming Netflix show. While it proved to be an interesting discussion, it did end up highlighting a particular difference between myself and other fans and, upon watching it again in editing, I thought it might be interesting to do an article where I share some of my opinions that diverge from the mainstream and briefly discuss why.
1. The Legend Of Korra Is Better Than Avatar: The Last Airbender
I might as well start with this opinion since I’ve already touched on it and is what ultimately inspired me to write this blog post. I personally believe Korra to be a superior show to The Last Airbender which is something that I’ve rarely heard, if at all, from other people. However, I do have reasons as to why I have this opinion. Firstly, I don’t think The Last Airbender is as great as everyone makes it out to be. Don’t get me wrong, I do like the show overall, but I have a few issues with it. I actually bounced off the show when I first tried to watch it, finding the humour too juvenile and overwhelming the drama of the first two episodes. I eventually came back to it and persevered which is when I ran into my second problem. The first season has quite a few episodes that seem standalone and not important to the overall story. This eventually turns out not to be the case but it takes almost the whole series to finally see their relevance. I was finally drawn into The Last Airbender in the second season but these blemishes as well as a few other issues mean that I’m not as enthusiastic about the show as some others are. In contrast, I was instantly enamoured with The Legend of Korra due to its tighter storytelling and, in my personal opinion, superior balancing of humour and drama. Additionally, The Legend of Korra took several concepts from the original series that I felt was underdeveloped and fleshed them out beautifully. I’m not saying that The Legend of Korra is without its flaws but they interfered far less with my enjoyment than they did with The Last Airbender. Thus, I personally love The Legend of Korra more, in some ways much more, than The Last Airbender. I may be merely one of very few who believe this but this is something that I believe in completely and unerringly.
Ace Attorney was a franchise that I had little experience with in the past. I, of course, knew of the character Phoenix Wright and his trademark yell of “Objection!” but, beyond seeing a brief bit of gameplay at a friend’s house, I had never had the opportunity to play an Ace Attorney game. It was about a year ago when I first began playing the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy, a compilation of the first three games in the series, and my experience with it led to an intense admiration for Ace Attorney as a whole. Therefore, I thought it worth doing an overview of the Ace Attorney franchise and why I’m excited to play more of the games in the future.
The very first Ace Attorney game, “Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney”, came out for the Game Boy Advance in 2001 and was made with a small team of seven people over a period of ten months. Taking the role of Phoenix Wright, Ryuichi Naruhodo in the original Japanese, you must solve cases by collecting evidence before cross-examining witnesses in court and pointing out contradictions. Two sequels, “Justice for All” and “Trials and Tribulations”, were also released for the GBA in 2002 and 2004 respectively but it’s worth noting that these games were only released in Japan at the time. It wasn’t until 2005 when the first game saw an international release as a port to the Nintendo DS with added functionality and a brand new fifth case. The American release proved to be a surprising success, especially strange since visual novels were considered unpopular at the time, and eventually saw the other two games released internationally as well.
I’ve been playing quite a few video games recently across both my Steam Deck and my PC and there have been quite a few that I found incredibly impressive. Some of these games have been popular releases but then others seem to be, in my personal opinion, overlooked by the greater gaming population. Therefore, I thought that it might be interesting to take a look at some of the best video games that I’ve played recently and highlight some titles that I think are worthy of achieving greater success.
Wild Guns Reloaded
I wasn’t exactly sure what type of game Wild Guns Reloaded was as I sat down to play it for the first time. I’d heard it referred to as a rail shooter but I also heard that it contained platforming and bullet hell as well. Turns out that the genre Wild Guns Reloaded belongs to is “Shooting Gallery” and that the original game, Wild Guns, was seen as one of the best shooting gallery games. Wild Guns Reloaded is a remaster of the 1994 original and takes place in the American Wild West that also features robots, laser guns and other sci-fi elements. You control one of four characters who have to dodge incoming bullets while mowing down the enemies and bosses that come wave after wave. The game can be quite challenging to get to grips with, definitely worth looking up the controls before you start playing, but the superb music, gorgeous pixel art, tight controls and more make it a game that is well worth learning, playing and mastering.
I had just taken a look at the Steam frontpage last night and I noticed a big banner saying “Steam Year In Review 2023”. As you might imagine, I was quite pleased to see this since I was not only curious about my statistics over the course of 2023 but also because my article “Taking A Look At My Steam Replay 2022” was one of my more popular posts and doing a follow-up makes perfect sense to me. Therefore, I thought it worth taking a look at my Steam Replay 2023 and breaking down some of the information within it. Also, as before, I’ve made my Steam Replay public so that anyone can take a look at it themselves if they are curious.
First thing to note is that the number of games that I’ve played has gone up slightly from 197 to 200 and the number of new games, those that I’ve not played before, going from 151 to 154. As before though, I do have to confess that these numbers are corrupted by the fact that I subscribe to Humble Choice and that I use a program to farm Steam cards off of these games. More accurate to look at perhaps is that I got 1854 achievements across 61 games, an increase from 1302 across 59 games last year.
Where I live, that being Ireland, the Game Awards tend to start sometime after midnight so I don’t tend to see much of it live when it airs. Not that I’m the kind of person to sit down and watch an awards show for hours when I could just look up the news afterwards but I do tend to look at the beginning of it before heading off for bed. However, while it’s certainly not all bad, I personally think we’ve gotten to the point where I have to say that I think the Game Awards are an embarrassment to the entire video game industry! That might sound a bit harsh but let me tell you why I think this.
I recently saw an article which mentioned that Sony was looking for a “PC Planning Analyst” who would assist in “driving sales success and shaping strategy for PlayStation’s fast growing PC business.” While I feel like I should be pleased to see Sony expanding their PC division, known as PlayStation PC, I am simply reminded of my growing frustration with them instead. While it’s highly unlikely that any people from Sony with the ability to make significant changes to their PC strategy will read this, I thought I’d keep yelling into the void we know as the Internet in the perhaps vain hope that something I say may make a difference in some shape or form. Given all of that, here is my suggestion for Sony and their efforts on PC.
The fact that a native PC port has been developed by fans is a remarkable achievement and opens up a myriad of possibilities for Sony and their games on PC.
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