It all began in the old autumn of ’22. Or as those of us in the know call it, the Autumn of Andor.
My reputation’s never been worse so…
I was listening to my cute little Star Wars podcast. Yada yada Binks, yada yada Clone Wars, something something Andor? Wtf is Andor? Another new show eh. Hmmm…
Yes these intrepid podcasters (shoutout AMCA) had to pivot in the rather early days of their Clone Wars re-watch series because, whatever Andor is, we gotta pay attention. And…Ohhh I see, this wasn’t just another Star Wars show, this was THE show, but, ya know, you gotta find out for yourself. Yes lil’ baby Grogu was adorable and mostly delightful, and the show he was in, The Guy In That Armor We All Know, was pretty good too. But Andor, hoo boy this was the real one.
You know, it’s the prequel show to that prequel/sequel movie, Halo: Reach Rogue One. I will say for all you Legends-heads out there, I so far cannot find any relation between Jolee Bindo’s old pal Andor Vex, and our beloved Cassian Andor.
Anyway, please watch Andor. “But Max, I don’t really–” Shut up! I know that Star Wars is 93% hot garbage, babyeee. But Andor is the essential goddamn post-golden age television series for Weary and Uncertain Kinda Gay Communists. “But Max..” No! No more questions! Shut up and watch Andor you goof! Before it’s back to finish the tale in April ’25. Watch now, thank later.
All I need from you is all your love
Sometimes a thing is over, and then you’re all like “uhhh… what I do now?”
Naturally, I went over to the ol’ giant bridge there, tied a boulder onto my leg and was about to jump in to keep the fishes company. Then some guy was like “Oh, don’t do it brother. Um… they’re still making peanut butter.” So I didn’t jump. Because it’s true, they are still making peanut butter. So I kept on living. I kept on…SURVIVING. *ahem*
That’s right, I kept on Vampire Surviviors‘ing. My #3 game of 2022, a game I played probably for just the last 5 days of 2022, and then rolled it into ’23 and ended up being my most played game pound for pound of ’23! So if it didn’t dominate in your house, don’t invite me there. Oh what’s that? You’ve got peanut butter flavoured coffee? Nice try, asshole! I’m still not coming over if you’re not down with SURVIVIN’.
Seriously, there’s so many people at this very moment playing just utter wastes of time like [redacted for kindness], [redacted out of respect for my friends], and [redacted for [reason redacted]]. Bummer, eh? But seriously, fuck Roblox. Ask your doctor if Vampire Survivors is right for you.
How did I truly ring in the New Year ’23 though? Well, by breaking a quasi-promise that past-me made to future-me, and present me was just along for the ride all like “damn we’re doing this eh? Allllllllrighty then.”
I did it. It took me one solid month of playing this game and mostly nothing else, but in January ’23 I played The Last of Us, Part II. A GAME ABOUT HATE? Ahahahaharofllolololcopterlololololmfao. No they were pretty accurate on that actually. Holy fuck. I sure hated myself by the ending of TLOU2. Whooooowheee. Yeah I think I said back in 2019 that I would never touch TLOU2, and for a couple years, I didn’t. Shit comes out right in the early-mid pandemic days? Nah I’m good. We Jackboxin’. We Zoomin’. No thanks. But a year passed, and a year passed again, and the game was heavily discounted and curiosity got the better of me. I done played it. I played the whole thing, I saw the end.
And oh my god. I’ll admit, I don’t hate TLOU2. TLOU2 hates you, and me, and itself and everyone. But I don’t hate it. Specifically, it took the gameplay was pretty swell– they took most elements of the original game and made them kinda better, so I enjoyed the act of playing the game moment to moment. But the story? Well, it’s not that I dislike the story exactly. There are compelling aspects of it. Namely when I’m playing as Abby and making pretty bad choice after pretty bad choice. But our girl Ellie is back too. And some of her choices? They are beyond the pale godawful insufferable travel-backwards-in-time-and-please-make-me-not-exist type decisions. This game could be called Ellie: Bad Choice Simulator. And to be clear of course, all choices in this game are those of the character you are driving around. They are not your, the player’s, choices. The player is merely Clockwork Orange’d along for the ride to see just how much human beings can suffer and hate themselves and each other. The answer, unsirprisingly, is A LOT! But damn if TLOU2 isn’t just too much hate and suffering. Plus, the game is as long as twenty-five Marvel movies on top of it all, so it begins to feel like a never-ending demented carnival of self-destruction. You have been warned.
All ya gotta give to me…
I came up for air, came up for a little life and some not-self-hatin’, and it wasn’t the smoothest ride ever, I’ll say that much. I really wish that I had liked Deathloop more than I did. I gave it a good 10 hours but it just didn’t cast a spell on me the same way that Dishonored 2 did. So I turned to a little ol’ beloved classic, Stellaris. A game that if I were to stream it on Twitch, I would probably be the only person not doing a playthrough called “Is Slavery Really That Bad? Let’s Find Out! Just Askin’ Questions, Bro!” Yes, bro, it is really that bad. I swear to the big ol’ Lordmeister, every fucking person I see playing these weird strategy games online always just happens to be doing their authoritarian slavery playthrough (just curious, brah!) and still talking about the emails of some lady who lived a million years ago. Not me, I’m doing my Let’s Free the all the Motherfucking Gay Space Communist Races playthrough. Come at me, incels.
In a shocking twist of events, I played a relatively recent game called Immortality. This is uh, one of those games that’s all meta within a meta within a confusing onion of realfakereal confusion? The whole “game” is watching and scrubbing through snippets of B-movie clips– oodles and oodles of them– trying to unravel the mystery of what happened to ol’ so and so, some actor lady whose fictional name I forget. I’ll describe it the way I’ve seen a lot of books described: “a cracking good yarn!” Yeah it’s pretty cracking good. I stopped after pouring about ten hours into it because I had got the gist at that point, but it was neat and worthwhile.
I then decided to fire up an Xbox copy of The Orange Box, because why not? Half-Life 2 is still pretty good all these years later. It’s actually still really good. Even on not-PC. And all of these old Xbox 360 games have been really spruced up in the backwards compatibility department, it’s quite a thing they’ve done. I’ve been hearing all these damn critics for a handful of years now “oh games there’s no games where are the games blah blah blah” and yeah it kinda maybe seems like the industry is dying, and sure it’s been sped up immensely by the faux boom of the pandemic. Shit has come back to earth, and yeah there don’t seem to be as many new and interesting AA or AAA games as there once were. To which I say, shrug? There’s a bajillion old games to play and all of these backlogs I’ve been hearing about for two decades straight. Now is the time.
There was another Life is Strange game, True Colors. It was pretty cool like the first game. Didn’t hit me as hard as 2, but I still enjoyed it. I played Redfall for 31 minutes. Yikes! I honestly can’t believe I lasted 31 minutes. Seems more like a 13-minutes kinda game. Oof! Oh, I “played” The Quarry on movie mode, what a cool lazy experience that was. This is one in the same vein as Until Dawn. So instead of just making each character choice as your play the thing out, movie mode let me just set parameters for all of the characters, what they were likely to do in certain scenarios, etc etc. And I just got to watch it play out. It was like getting to watch a teen horror flick that I myself kinda-sorta directed but didn’t really have to do to much. The height of laziness, and I’m here for it.
Look what you made me do
Oh right, Star Wars. So yeah, the Autumn of Andor led me to rewatch the prequel trilogy (still pretty rough), watch the long running Clone Wars cartoon (all 7 seasons – mostly pretty good, especially the last three), start watching Rebels (so far so good), and after 20 long years, revisit the Knights of the Old Republic franchise. Wowee! I got good news, and I got some bad news. The bad news is that KOTOR, unsurprisingly, ain’t quite as good as ya remember. It’s still good, but a bit less good. The good news is that KOTOR 2, I’m gonna say also unsurprisingly, fuckin’ slaps and is even better than you or I remember it. That’s right. Yep. Mmhmm.
More on KOTOR 2 later, but that ol’ KOTOR 1 … man how did we not see that twist coming back in the day? It is still a great twist, a fun revelation, but it is the most obvious and telegraphed shit I’ve ever seen in a video game story, and that’s a low bar. Also, everybody always be hatin’ on Rafael Sbarge characters (famously Kaiden Alenko from Mass Effect, and before him Carth O’Nasi), but I gotta say after revisiting KOTOR, Bastila is way more annoying and a way bigger piece of shit than Carth.
In fact, let me holistically rank the two-decade-old characters here for you, from best to worst. Ya got my man Jolee Bindo out here in 2003, before it was cool to shit on the Jedi, being all “hey the jedi…pretty big fuckin’ dorks eh? You should maybe think about that some. Just sayin.” Jolee is an all-timer. Bless that man. Ya got HK-47, assassin/comedian droid, and I’m pleased to say his shit actually holds up pretty well. He still had me laughing out loud a lot, and I can’t say that for any characters in this game beyond him and Mr. Bindo. After the top two you’ve got a precipitous drop off in quality. Ya got T3-M4, who mostly has no personality, which in the rankings of KOTOR characters helps you out a lot. He’s a loyal ass droid who can problem solve like nobody’s business. And he’s handsome, so there’s that. Ya got Mission Vao, precocious blue teenager who was probably the template for Liara T’soni because uh, blue plus girl equals yes? Mission is trying her best, she’s a bit of a dumbass but she means well, even though she’s hopelessly annoying and believes way too much in her piece-of-garbage brother Griff. Next ya got Canderous Ordo, who’s a little bit funny, a little bit not funny like your gramps who won’t give the “good old days” stories a rest, and judges everyone around him for not being him. He’s alright but his schtick gets old.
*takes sip of water*
Then ya got Zaalbar, a wookie whose entire personality is “whoever is the person that most recently did me a favour, I owe my life to them and will do whatever they say.” Yeah? Mkay, bud. Super interesting. Now at number 7 not number 9 (!) ya got Carth O’Nasi, a guy who really needs to take his problems to a therapist and stop blabbing to his boss (?) about all his neuroses. Carth is like sandpaper: he serves a purpose, but boy does he rub ya the wrong way sometimes! At number 8 we have non-entity Juhani, who is such a forgettable character that the developers left massive bugs in the game that easily break her quest chain, and they also deemed her an optional companion who you can just accidentally lay waste to during an early quest on Dantooine. Shrug. Sorry about your sad life, Juhani. Finally in LAST PLACE at number 9, because she is an all-time piece of garbage and this game’s true villain, Bastila Shan! Internet Boys in 2003/04 fell over themselves running to their keyboards to blap blap barf out sentences like “now that’s a woman!” and “wife material.” I am here in 2024, as an Internet Man, to tell you that Bastila Shan is fucking divorce material. She is garbage. Throw your Bastila funco pops into the incinerator. Do it. May she burn in Star Wars Legends hell!
Wow, that sure was a long and…long rant.
The Sequel to the Prequel of the Prequel’s Sequel
It’s like that episode of Mr. Show, The Return of the Curse of the Creature’s Ghost! At a certain point, do words need to mean something? Can’t we just talk a little nonsense!
Well a rather large fella has just peeked his head out from behind some clouds and said to me specifically “you done talk too much, you ken?” I will call this fella, The Lord. So I’m gonna move things along here. What follows is three video games, all of which were released, I’m pretty certain, between Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023. So they fit perfectly into this article about 2023 video games!
#3 – Portal 2
Hoooooooo you didn’t see that shit coming! I finished Portal 2, baby! Thirteen years after I played maybe 3/8ths of it, I started anew and saw it through. Woo hoo.
You were all right! Portal 2 is great! I didn’t get to play co-op, which I hear is the true star of the show, because there’s nobody to co-op it with because everybody is Playing Dota 2 and Destiny 2 for some godforsaken reason. But I finished the campaign after all these years. It was definitely worth it, but like almost everything ever, man it’s way too long. Idk how long Portal 2 is supposed to take. Probably 12 hours? So it probably took me at least twice that. It should have been under 10, like the original. It’s hard to follow Portal, which is truly one of the most sublime pieces of art to ever exist. I believe Portal should be in the video games Smithsonian even if they can only fit in like ten games, Portal should be there.
So yeah, sequel had lots to live up to. And it nailed so much. Real fun time. Glados gets old, and that Wheatley guy gets really old, but thankfully there’s the second half of the game that puts those characters mostly to the side and lets you breathe a bit. But the second half should have been more like the last third, and of a game twice as short. I mean, I know it’s still a quaint running time looking back, but I’m the guy pushing for two hour run times on all story games. Get me in, get me out. But ya done good, Portal 2. Ya done good.
#2 – Knights of the Old Republic II
Oh boy it tickles me to talk about this game in 2024. I wasn’t joking, it really is better than you remember it. “But Max, the bugs aahhhgababa, the ending wasn’t finishhhhhagababa” yes, yes calm yourself. It’s okay. It’s alright. Did you just now learn that things aren’t all neat and perfect for you? I’m so sorry.
KOTOR 2 is a hot, weird, sexy, sloppy mess. It is the anti-KOTOR in all the best ways possible. Definitive “satisfying” storybook conclusion with good and bad clearly delineated? How about as non-definitive as possible, no conclusion, a morass of who good? who bad? what me do? An intro/tutorial sequence as textbook and straightforward and efficient as they come? How about a weird, murky, wtfwhodunnit what is happening here who is anyone intro/tutorial sequence (that’s maybe a tad too long)? Characters who seem aimless and annoying because writing? How about characters who seem aimless and annoying because mysterious reasons! Oooh!
Give me KOTOR 2 all day. The ending is fine, figure it out. Oh but you need to see the droid planet blah blah blah!! No I don’t. Where did all the characters go what are they goi- shut up! Stop that, baby boy! You’re doing the thing!
Seek not answers. Seek understanding.
Remember the part where you land on Nar Shaddaa, and Kreia chastises your decision, whatever it is, whether it is giving credits or not giving credits to a panhandler. It’s designed to be an early-game “choice” and show you the gray morality, supposedly, of KOTOR 2. This is the moment that everyone remembers– it’s the one that I remembered too, and so with good reason we look back with a bit of skepticism. Because it’s frankly a cheap moment and pretty lazy writing. Oh I’m wrong no matter what? Yeah, I get it. But honestly, that one bit is an outlier. It is the worst example of what the game is actually trying to say and do. The game says and does much better things everywhere else. Don’t be fooled by the memory of this one moment!
Okay just one more thing, little KOTOR 2 characters ranking here. T3-M4 is now #1! Dude is number 1, full stop. Droids are fucking people, okay. I mean, like, droids are thinking, feeling, autonomous beings deserving of rights, like chilling in cantinas; not droids are having sex with people. Although some probably definitely are having sex with people, or each other. Or neither. All of those things are okay.
But T3-M4…motherfucker is a hero. Like if they give me the keys to the KOTOR 3 kingdom (they should), game is about T3-M4. No joke. I want to go on another journey with T3. Maybe we go loot Bastila’s corpse. Let’s fucking goooooo.
#1 – The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Oh I gotcha! You thought I forgot about my boy Link! That I abandoned my boy! Hellllll no I did not. My boy did a lot of work there in 2017. He deserved a good long nap. A six year nap! Oh and he came back so rested. So goddamn rested! He looks younger! Link, what creams are you using?!?
But it’s not even a Zelda game! It’s not ahhhgababablahblah– SILENCIO! No more, no more of your awful, boring protestations! Please, please no more, I can’t take it. You want your mommy’s Zelda? Go play Ocarina of Time, it’s still there. Go play it and like it and let us heathens worry about the 2023 incarnation of Link, aka Zelden Ring!
Yes, it’s true. [insert cheeky smile here]
Breath of the Wild begat Elden Ring begat Tears of the Kingdom begat to be determined.
My name is Spinch, and my horse’s name is Spinch! Confusing? I don’t care!
If you need me I’ll be scouring the Depths for bomb flowers.
For ever and evermore.
The author of this post is believed to have said he “needed space,” (What??); but feel free to tell him all about your champagne problems at xtal@tap-repeatedly.com.