2024- The Year of 8’s

2023 was a historic year for gaming. If any of you have kids or grandkids who end up loving video games, you’ll be asked about 2023 years from now. There were a seemingly endless amount of amazing games. We saw so many "9’s” and “10’s” floating around gaming websites. Many of us have moved past the point of needing a goofy number to tell us the value of a piece of media. But my simple brain still likes categorizing things numerically. And while it’d be nice to play nothing but the very best, sometimes a nice “8” hits quite well.

I don’t think 2024 has matched 2023 in its onslaught of quality, but it’s absolutely been a good year.

Granblue Fantasy Relink, Persona 3 Reload, Penny’s Big Breakaway, Dragon’s Dogma 2, Rise of the Ronin, Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess, Visions of Mana, Stellar Blade, and Black Myth Wukong.

Those are just a few games from this year I don’t think hit the heights of a “masterpiece” or “must-play” game, but are still worth anybody’s time.

                Kunitsu-Gami Path of the Goddess is easily in my top five games of this year. 

Sometimes it’s good to cleanse your palette with a wide variety of games from different levels of quality. And it’s important to remember that quality is absolutely subjective. You might pick up a game that has a 73 on Metacritic, and feel that it deserves much higher. Perhaps you saw the games I listed above and thought to yourself “Are you really calling (game) an 8/10?!”

This is a good time to note that the typical 1-10 or 0-100 scales that most game reviewers use is completely broken. And it’s not really any of these sites or journalists fault. Most people see 1-6 as a bad game. They say 7’s and 8’s are only worth buying on sale. Only do 9’s and 10’s get full deserved praise from the masses. It’s gotten so bad that I sometimes see indie games on digital storefronts display their Metacritic score on their box art! It’s absurdly reductive to boil art down to an arbitrary number. But you also can’t blame people; money is extremely tight these days.

If you go on social media, you’ll see thousands of people crying that “gaming is dead”. Mostly because of the bug-ridden Star Wars: Outlaws, and historic flops of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and Concord. Whenever a few big AAA games fail within a small time frame, people like to pull out their memories of the PlayStation 2 and scream that “Modern gaming is trash!” But it’s really not true. Again, 2024 has been the year of solid games that don’t reinvent the wheel, but are still fun. What’s wrong with that? If you can’t enjoy a game that is simply good- thats on you.

And funnily enough, as of the time I’m writing this, Sony is about to give us a new first-party game with a fresh 94 on Metacritic. Astro Bot has seemingly stolen the hearts of critics! Reviews came in this morning and the game is totally beloved. By my recollection, it’s the highest scoring non-Mario 3D platformer in many years.

                                                                  I can't wait for Astro Bot!

I’m honestly drowning in good video games to play. Whether it be inventive indie games, high quality AAA games or even ports/collections of older titles. For example, this morning I just finished Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin thanks to the recent Dominus Collection. These next few months look particularly packed for me.

If you’re one of those people who still cling to their PS2 or Xbox 360 and yearn for the “golden age” of gaming, I think you should really recalibrate your tastes and expectations. There’s a lot of good games coming out!