The trend has been around for a few years now: the end of the year is an excuse for all kinds of retrospectives. It started with TV shows — which Bob couldn’t care less about — and has now extended to other platforms. For the past few years, Spotify has been offering me my annual retrospective. At first, I didn’t pay it any attention, but now I check it out with interest because the soundtrack of the past year is directly influenced by the events I experienced, and the retrospective has a certain charming ‘Proustian madeleine’ quality. So, I immediately looked at the retrospective Steam offered this year. (I think it’s the first time — even though I’ve been on Steam since the original Counter-Strike, so 2003 or 2004 — but maybe it’s just the first time I noticed it.) I completed it with games played on other platforms. In total, old Bob, who complains about never having time to play, went through 28 games in 2024! Since I only counted games I spent at least five hours on, that’s a minimum of 140 hours of gaming — almost six full days, which amounts to 1.64% of my year. Considering we spend a third of our time sleeping, I devoted 2.47% of my waking hours to gaming… And thus 97.53% of my waking hours to doing things I don’t care about. T_T Life is tough…
Let the young folks not laugh: this is the fate of every responsible adult who’s a parent and a business owner… But hey, those 2.47% are the ray of sunshine in my year, so I might as well admire them one more time! Of course, a gamer dad like Bob isn’t going to play the same games as the teenager who spends 50% of their waking hours gaming (and the other 50% failing at school). As a true video game connoisseur, Bob has a varied and high-quality selection! It’s worth noting that — probably for the first time in my life — I didn’t touch a PlayStation or an Xbox this year. There just aren’t any exclusives on these platforms, whether old-gen or new-gen. Since I have a very powerful PC (note to the tax office: an Nvidia RTX and a pile of DDR-5 RAM are absolutely essential for remote work, perfectly justifying the purchase of a gaming PC as a business expense 🙂 ), I don’t see any immediate reason to give my money to Sony or Microsoft. That said, market trends might rekindle my interest in the months to come.
Anyway, Bob’s retrospective will focus on PC, the Switch, and retrogaming. Because revisiting a classic from time to time — or discovering a great game you missed out on — allows you to have fun while deepening your video game culture, which is completely useless and therefore absolutely essential !
On PC
I started my year above the clouds with Flight Simulator (2020), on which I often spend a quick hour. It’s a nice game, but I wish it offered an ‘arcade’ piloting mode, as I enjoy FS more for its contemplative side — the actual piloting interests me less (which might sound paradoxical, I admit!). Next, I returned for a few hours to Operation Wolf Returns: First Mission, already discussed on this site upon its 2023 release. But my first new game of 2024 was Crusader Kings III, giving in to the passionate reviews from Canard PC. It’s an excellent game but with a pretty slow pace, which probably explains the next, more ‘dynamic’ series: Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, Wolfenstein: The Old Blood, and Mortal Kombat 1. I finished both Wolfenstein games, which had been languishing in my backlog for quite a while, and returned to MK1 thanks to a sale on a DLC. A bit of gratuitous violence in this harsh world does feel good ! Then came my Helldivers 2 phase, which I’ve already talked about. Around the release of the sixth and final season of Cobra Kai — the unapologetically nostalgic Netflix series that I’m almost ashamed to love so much! — I tried the beat ’em up inspired by the franchise, simply titled Cobra Kai. It’s not a game with huge ambitions, but it’s not a disaster either… Go figure, but after that virtual brawling, I dived back into a classic with Age of Empires: Definitive Edition, a modernized masterpiece that naturally led me to the Duke Nukem 3D mod for Serious Sam Fusion, called Serious Duke 3D. An absolute riot ! Unlike Cobra Kai 2: Dojos Rising, which is hard to defend… A new Steam sale drew me to Jurassic World Evolution 2, mainly for my daughter, Bobette, who is a huge fan of dinosaurs. She managed to clock about 40 of the 50 hours the game logged on Steam… It’s a very pretty and enjoyable management game but too simple for a genre veteran like Bob the father ! A Bob who didn’t have the luxury of summer vacations and consoled himself with the turquoise lagoon of Bob the Diver, a 2023 indie gem I’d missed. It was a lovely summer interlude before relapsing in September: I poured about 20 hours into Total War: Empire (which didn’t ask for it — with the Darth Mod, this game is in my absolute top 10, and I despair that Creative Assembly still hasn’t released Total War: Empire II…) and about 10 into Total War: Rome II. Finally, my PC year wrapped up with Kill Knight, a twin-stick shooter focused on scoring, with plenty of gore and brutality.
On the Nintendo Switch
Since the release of the Switch, there’s one game I’ve been playing consistently, either solo or with family: Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. A masterpiece, in my opinion the best in the franchise. Another classic I indulge in everywhere, in every place, and on all platforms: Tetris. The multiplayer version, Tetris 99, is one of my favorites. Apart from these two favorites, my year on the Switch was quieter: a few family nights on Mario Party Superstars and some matches with Bobby Dupneu on EA Sports FC 2024, which I only bought for the UEFA European Championship mode (as I do every four years, so there’s a bit of evolution between two soccer games!). 2024 was also the year of Super Mario Bros. Wonder, which once again showcases Nintendo’s platforming expertise. And a Japanese end to the year with Yakuza Kiwami — where I got stuck for far too long on that ridiculous car chase ! — and especially Joysound Karaoke, available on the Japanese store. With a USB microphone and a subscription, you can turn your living room into a karaoke box. Note for those interested: there are only Japanese and English songs available. You’ve been warned… And to end on a sweet note, a few segments of Suika Game, although the trend seems to have already faded in the Land of the Rising Sun…
Retrogaming
I hesitated to include Skyward Sword HD in the section dedicated to the Switch: the game was released in 2021 but actually dates back to 2011. To be honest, I don’t really distinguish between a recent game and an older one. So, I don’t feel like I’m engaging in retrogaming when I fire up an emulator. Actually, if I were a hardcore retrogamer, I wouldn’t even dare to imagine playing on an emulator and would only enjoy games in their original conditions: a crackling and whistling CRT screen with bleeding colors, a NES cartridge that works when it feels like it, no save feature… But no, I enjoy the comfort of emulation and end up spending more time playing old games than trying to get them to work! Not to mention the financial aspect: for example, Punch-Out!! on the Super Nintendo costs nearly €40 loose and over €130 boxed with the manual… Yet, I spent hours on it in 2024 on the Switch’s Virtual Console, without spending more than the cost of the Switch Online subscription. Same goes for Super Metroid, which I finished once again this year. Among the other classics I completed in 2024 — not counting games I only spent a few half-hours on — are Rocky on the GameCube, a boxing game with an amazing atmosphere, and Super Mario Bros. on the NES, which I restarted from the beginning and finished, something I hadn’t managed to do in years due to a lack of dedicated practice ! Finally, my lack of winter vacations was (somewhat) compensated by the hours I spent on 1080° Avalanche for the GameCube, a game I had never played before, even though I spent weeks mastering its predecessor, 1080° Snowboarding, on the Nintendo 64! It just goes to show, it’s never too late to discover a forgotten classic !
To wrap up this article, I present to you Bob’s 2024 video game retrospective video! Happy New Year!
