Written by guest writer and friend of the site Boocanan.
HI EVERYBODY!!! How are you? That is so awesome.
Earlier last year, after I expertly crafted their new branding, the beautiful people at Scanline reached out and asked me if I’d like to do a GOTY list or something, and obviously I said Absolutely Yes Baby there is nothing more I love than talking about video games. Call me “Bylines Boocanan” for the rest of the year or you can go ahead and not call me at all!
My GOTY list consists of titles released this year, titles I only got around to playing this year, titles that got core updates this year, and titles I have played every year and was simply fortunate enough to get to write about them. It’s a very anachronistic list, and this probably upsets some of you, which I fully understand. My rationale for this is shut up. I have also supplied you with an ALSO TRY section, for further digging into things that exist in conversation with my nominations.
HONOURABLE MENTIONS:
– Signalis (which would be the absolute #8 spot on this list had I beaten the game in time)
– Splatoon 3 (Really really good but I would like a game with Splatoon’s world that plays completely differently, at the same time I also understand not actually having access to that world is sorta part of the charm)
– Super Mario 64 B3313
– SFV’s final season finally making F.A.N.G. a halfway funtioning character. Seriously, I paid seventy-five Canadian dollars to pre-order that game JUST to play that character and it took them six years to make him ANY good. If that’s not a sign you shouldn’t take this write-up too seriously, I don’t know what is.
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6. THE STANLEY PARABLE ULTRA DELUXE
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Man you know what I am not above starting this list with some Stanley Parable. You walk up to two doors, a narrator tells you you went to the left, and then you go to the right instead, and there’s a whole other video game on that side, and then there’s a whole other video game at the NEXT choice, and then another and another! That is actually incredible. That’s STILL actually incredible dude.
Anyways, Shin Stanley Parable is great! It remains a lot of silly fun, and all the new content is really good and made me smile/laugh/cry/what have you. The Bucket stuff is incredible, Davey Wreden finally full-tilting into his Portal worship by making you equip a shiny new Companion Cube whenever you want to look at the new content for the game. Before the game came out, Crows Crows Crows frequently hopped online to assure Youtube commentors that everything they were adding to Ultra Deluxe would amount to roughly double the size of the original game. For ninety-five perecent of that new content to just be “new endings for every route depending on whether or not you were holding a bucket” is a lede-burying that should be studied in schools like the arrow in the FedEx logo. Absolutely perfect stuff.
I’d like to take special note of the stellar level design of the maps, especially the perfectly moronic dev studio office/expo buildings in the new content section of the game; I spent three months last year working at a VC tech company in Vancouver and playing this part was like stepping back into my own brain. Of additional note, the late 2010’s – early 2020’s is an age where non-euclidean archetechture, & “liminal spaces” are extremely easy for the young internet-goer to catalogue and reminisce over, and playing through Stanley Parable, a game that uses linked_portal_door like I use commas, is now re-existing at the exact nucleus of that moment. It almost feels like it’s aware of its place in that sort of youtube horror Backrooms-adjacent media, and realizes it actually kind of LOVES to play into that hand? Like, you new kids can come in and play in its space, and we’ll all have a great time, but Stanley was here first, and Stanley’s still here now. Really cool!
ALSO TRY: go play The Beginner’s Guide again!, The Catacombs of Solaris, the level of shame I felt when I was immideately able to recognize Alex Hirsch as the voice in the little new content intro segment
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5. ROLLERDROME
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Rollerdrome is a game that managed to push all my good buttons at least 75% of the way. It really does a little of it all for me, man! You got Moebius shaders, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater controls, a grenade launcher, goofy sci-fi display type & fake branding for every level in the game, cheats, cool helmets, score tokens, the grenade launcher again, big mechs, it’s over, wait, it’s over?!
If you only play each level once or twice, Rollerdrome amounts to an EXTREMELY short game (its story is intriguing but also very thin & subdued), in exchange for an incredibly tight engine and feedback loop that could effortlessly convert anybody that plays it into a multiple-time speedrunner of the game. There is no way you walk out of Rollerdrome without inadvertently becoming a pro at it. The four weapons you get are simple but fun and always do something different against each enemy, so while there’s a correct solution to each horde of baddies you have to kill on paper, figuring out how to nail it is just as fun as nailing it. You will hit the perfect line and kill that guy. You will show everyone that you are Rollerdrome. It is fucking awesome.
I gotta say I was pretty disappointed in the music, though. It’s not bad or anything, but I kind of realized I’m not an Eighties Outrun Drive Hotline Miami girl like, eight years ago. Conventional synths don’t impress me much! Don’t get me wrong, this is not an aberration in Rollerdrome’s identity, it worships the ground the Eighties continues to bleed all over on every level, but at the very least the rest of the game has its lens on a Hypothetical Eighties that hasn’t been completely mined out by Netflix or Google or any company that puts a purple grid and a palm tree for “nostalgia bombs” in their marketing pitches. Let’s flip it up! It didn’t stop me from loving the actual game any less, but if you pride yourself on a discerning ear then you can probably swap it out for something else.
Ultimately, I loved Rollerdrome, I just wish there was more of Rollerdrome to pour over. After you beat the core campaign and win the championship and say FUCK YOU to the man running the joint and save sports forever, there’s a muted redux of the campaign with a MUCH tighter difficulty curve awaiting you (along with your character’s defiant all-red tracksuit swapped out for a deliciously macabre all-black number), but after you beat those levels, that’s all she wrote! You’re free to fiddle with gameplay modifiers and cheats in old levels, but that’s what you got! If they really wanna execute on that DOOM meets Tony Hawk thing they got going, then you gotta get a level editor or like maps from other games modded in or SOMETHING, I don’t care. Somebody just give me more Rollerdrome and we’ll be fine.
ALSO TRY: SSX3, THUG Pro, honestly you could listen to Audio Video Disco again and it’d be pretty good
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4. OUTRUN 2006
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I already know what you’re going to ask, so let me answer with some questions of my own: Have you ever hit a drift in OutRun 2006. I mean like really just put some phat heat under that sucker and cleared that shit so clean you could eat off it. To your knowledge, is there ANY game that was released this year that has that kind of feeling that I also happened to play. That is why OutRun 2006 is on this list. Sit down.
Early this year, I purchased a copy of OutRun 2006 at my local PCSX2 and played it through the entire fall season and I was just completely knocked on my fucking ass by how sick it was. It’s crazy man there’s like a red car and you have a girlfriend and sunglasses and you do the sickest lines in it. You can fucking go to PS2 Easter Island. You can drive REAL FERRARIS in it!!!!!! Holy shit Outrun 2 dude!!!!!!!!!!!!1
Maybe this is too early 2010’s game crit of me to be sensibly writing on, but when I wasn’t getting knocked out the window at how good the game felt, I was also deeply intriqued by the emotional moodiness sort of going on under the hood here; The most basic gamemode consists of your virtual girlfriend wanting to get away from it all and demanding you get in your car and drive as far as is physically possible. Do you have a say in that? Literally no, because you are a PS2 man in a red car and sunglasses, but when the actual you is silently driving through cities, farms, mountains, countries overseas, islands, right up until there’s a bunch of people suddenly at the end to cheer you on and score how well you “got away from it all”, what’s the overhead on that? Does your character feel anything about this? I guess you’re too young and too free to worry about these kinds of things. Just drive in your Ferrari with your girlfriend and find the world.
Anyways, game rocks. You probably already knew that, but it bears repeating.
ALSO TRY: Go find an old Outrun cab at your local arcade and just spend a day on it, watching Smokey Nagata compliations on Youtube, Frank Ocean – White Ferrari (Jacques Greene Edit)
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3. THE ROLLBACK BETA FOR GUILTY GEAR XRD REV2
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GAMEDEV IS A BLOWUP BULLYING WORKS BABEY WE GOT ROLLBACK IN REV2 LET’S GOOOOOOO
I might not get called back for this next year, so I would like to talk my shit before we begin.
I love fighting games very much. I have played Yoshimitsu in Tekken at a competitive level for almost 15 years, and if you need to verify that I would love for you to come see me. My team in MvC3 was Hsien-Ko, Arthur, & Viewtiful Joe in that order and I put Dream Team numbers on that board after school every day ending in Y, and if you need to verify that I would love for you to come see me. I have put more hours into Waku Waku 7 than double the lifetime amount of money your little brother’s spent on V-Bucks, and if you need to verify that you can go into the Epic Game Store and check his purchase history and right after then you COME SEE ME.
Guilty Gear is not my main fighting game franchise that I play, but I can pretty well put boots up asses with Faust, which is why when I say I fucking HATE the video game Guilty Gear XRD Rev2, you know it comes from a place of recognition and respect. This is an insane game made by insane people, and played by people at various stages of insanity. If you’ve spent the last little bit utterly dazzled by Strive and all its silly characters, and feel like you’re schnasty enough to cut your teeth on some older barbed wire, then find your main in Rev2 and realize just how much they flipped the script on you in the game you play. “Why is Potemkin so small”, I hear you ask. I do not answer, and instead hit you with Elphelt’s shotgun nine hundred times in a row, which I know you are not going to block. It used to be so much worse, I will say to you. And if you stay with Rev2, in time you will come to understand that.
ArcSys took a look at Strive’s online numbers and saw that people like playing games with rollback netcode in them, so they’ve been going back and updating their older games to run off rollback, instead of the standard delay-based netcode that most online games run on. Now, I don’t know how many people reading/listening to Scanline understand the diff between rollback and delay based netcode (Imagine you were learning guitar with somebody, and depending on where you sat down when you played it, there were multiple seconds of delay between you strumming a note and it being played. Sounds like a pretty bad way to learn how to play something!) but the formula is simple enough to follow: Remove the “delay”, and you simply have “based netcode.”
Do you know how gratifying it is to play a video game where there isn’t anything to blame losing rounds on except yourself and your play? It’s incredible. People still don’t know you can duck Elphelt’s 5HS. It’s literally hard coded to let people duck it. You can just fire it off whenever you want and rack up damage.
Most of the time, living in an era where both gamers and companies both have a literally-phenomenal level of access to each other & their rationales seems like pure shit, but fighting games live and die by fostering their people more than anything else, and I’m happy ArcSys decided to go back and make sure everyone was eating good. Looking forward to what comes next! Not looking forward to how Harada weasels his way out of making sure we’re back on delay-based netcode for Tekken 8!
ALSO TRY: Accent Core is on sale for like 12 cents every day, DBFZ Rollback (if it actually comes out) but I get fucking SMOKED by my friends in that game so if I get asked to come back to do a 2023 list next year that will not be on there
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2. ROLLERCOASTER TYCOON 2
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Look man.
I honestly just think RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 should just be on everybody’s best of list every year. It’s a really good video game! I love rollercoasters! If you haven’t played RollerCoaster Tycoon 2, this year you should play it and see how it ranks up against the other video games you played this year. You may be shocked at what you realize! It is at minimum WAY BETTER than the new God of War.
ALSO TRY: You should totally get OpenRCT2 if you don’t already have it, makes the game feel like you’re actually supposed to be playing it on modern computers
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1. JABRONI BRAWL: EPISODE 3
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The shortest version of this game’s story that I can tell you; Jabroni Brawl: Episode 3 is a free multiplayer mod that has been in closed development for AT LEAST fifteen years, itself a once-official now-fanmade send-up to a cult multiplayer mod for Half-Life 1 called Half-Life 2: Jaykin’ Bacon: Source.
Jaykin Bacon was developed by MrPodunkian, also of Merry Gear Solid fame, and it is a fucking frankenstein of a conversion mod. It took weapons, maps, gamemodes, character models, just about every single thing it could from every other first person shooter on the market to create this anachronistic minefield of pure multiplayer fun. Your average Jaykin Bacon match would have you spawn into a Day of Defeat map running Team Deathmatch from Half-Life 1 and have you dive bombing like Action Half-Life, firing off crossbows, P90s, exploding cats, right up until someone comes up with a finger gun and stuns you to pick up your P90 and plug you in the head with it. While this is happening, you have two health bars on your screen and neither of them are from games on the Source Engine. One of them is from Metal Gear Solid 2.
I hope that paragraph sounds like a good time to you, because it was absolutely beautiful to me. Even now, playing Jaykin Bacon with the homies on a dedicated server is a perfect dream. It is like if Brutal Doom was not actual shit.
Somewhere in 2006, MrPodunkian expressed interest in “making HLDJKS legit”, and invited people to contribute original models to the game on their own time. After some tooling around, MrPodunkian calls off development on his attempt to make Jaykin Bacon legit, eventually moving on to work on some game called Stardew Valley or whatever. Six years later, this abandoned call to action would continue to gestate in the Facepunch forums, a place where fans of Valve products and mods would go to discuss them (and the primary audience for Jaykin Bacon). Hey, we have a lot of gamedev talent on our forums, they said, we should totally get in there and make Jaykin Bacon Three happen!
This review stands on the other end of fifteen years of that call to action, watching development for this game take place over name-changes, legal battles, at least two hundred contributors, more mods being thrown in, graphic design, mod drama, Facepunch’s forums shutting down at LEAST one hundred times, certainly almost hundreds of thousands of hours producing assets, and botched engine license agreements bring us to the eventual release of Jabroni Brawl 3.
None of the games I previously wrote about were ranked. But THIS one. This is it, baby.
Jabroni Brawl 3 upholds the reputation of a perfect box of bespoke mayhem, a universal remote for mad scientists that has the most ridiculous bent on just about anything you could ever ask for in a multiplayer first person shooter. It has diving. It has dual-wield guns. It has three deathmatch modes. It has ONLY dedicated servers. It has co-op and asymmetrical multiplayer. It has maps from E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy. It has anime girl skins. It has exploding cats. It has the Unreal Tournament shock rifle. It has TWO kart racing modes (func_vehicle is a right, not a privilege). It has an original soundtrack. It has the friction grenade, a weapon that will send an opponent flying around the map like a pinball, taking damage on every surface, and it is the best weapon in any shooter ever made.
IT DOES NOT HAVE A BATTLE PASS.
For all these things and more, Jabroni Brawl, once finally released, instantly became the game of choice for me and my buddies on Discord. We will load up the Gun Game mode and the moment I get friction grenades I will just start detonating them at my feet to fly around and clothesline any poor fool in my line of sight. It kicks ass.
Jabroni Brawl is an online social space made by hundreds of people in their spare time who actually understand what the hell an online social space means. It is born from the fire of TF2 conga sessions, meeting lifelong friends clutching out on de_dust, just fragging another person halfway across the world and knowing if you come back the same time next week, you’ll probably see them again.
At this point, I hope it’s clear the list of games I enjoyed this year has an intentional curation to them: A heady mural of player expression, of modularity, of simply playing a video game with the fellas, and having a great time without the slightest concern that something else is trying to be sold to you; the new games in this list are layered & stylish successful iterations on past formulas worn on their sleeves, the re-released games are victory laps around success stories of old, & the old games are wonky and beautiful experiences I’ve only just begin to cherish.
By every metric I’ve laid out across this list, Jabroni Brawl: Episode 3 breaks through the entire damn atmosphere and throws in a bunch of dumb Source Engine geek jokes for its trouble. It is my favorite video game release this year. The future of games, at least for me, lies within exploring our past, insular and obstinate, just for me and you.
Boocanan is a hardworking young woman who uses the computer in mysterious ways. You may already recognize her from the internet. You can find her on Twitter, listen to her music on Bandcamp, and hear her talk about other people’s music with her friends on Hot Singles, via the Export Audio network. She also did Scanline’s new logo!
