Category: Video Games

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.

Let’s start with a brief history of the Game Awards and the embarrassing moments that have predated this year’s event. The Game Awards were first held in 2014 as a replacement for the Spike Video Game Awards and are hosted by Geoff Keighley. The viewership of the awards has consistently grown year upon year with the 2014 Game Awards being watched by 1.9 million people to a staggering 118 million people watching the 2023 Game Awards. You’d think that this success would have led to a better awards show but issues continue to plague the Game Awards year after year. While the 2022 interruption of the Game of the Year Award may have ultimately been amusing, it highlighted the poor security of the event and the potential for dangerous actions to those attending.

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.

I’ve already made a bunch of suggestions in the past with regards to Sony and their efforts on PC but my new suggestion is inspired by a few news articles that I’ve been seeing lately. The first was a news article from last year that stated fans had developed a PC port of the first Jak and Daxter game that is remarkably high-quality with numerous features such as higher framerates and resolutions. The second was from this summer where a fan ported the PS1 game Wipeout to PC and dared Sony to “either let it be, or shut this thing down and get a real remaster going” while adding “I’d love to help.” The final news came from November, just last month as of the writing of this article, and noted that the fans who had ported Jak and Daxter to PC had now ported its sequel, Jak II, to PC.