This one’s a remake of Ys 3, which itself is kind of Ys’s Zelda 2 moment. It switched from top-down to side-scrolling action and the series never really came back to the format again.

Weirdly though, I think I preferred the TG-16 original? The music was better, the storytelling never tried to be overbearing and was kept much more in the background compared to the action.

That said though, I think if I had played this on it’s original PSP release I would have found it incredibly cool and probably become an Ys fan right then and there. It’s the kind of simple monster bashing joy that would have worked wonderfully in that context.

In Time Flies you’re a fly. A fly with a short lifespan and a sprawling bucket list of things you wanna get done before you die. Each area is like a little adventure/puzzle game. You buzz around finding things you can interact with and see what happens when you do. It’s a little bit Untitled Goose Game in that way. The way you complete many objectives gave me a chuckle.

You won’t succeed the first time, but over successive fly lives, you’ll find out what you need to do and devise a path to get it all done in time. Little dots on the floor where previous flies met their demise, a reminder of the generations that came before and gave their knowledge to you to hopefully succeed. It’s a little bit Expedition 33 in that way, now I come to think about it.

Time Flies is a quick little game, and one that got me thinking about the idea of generational knowledge or making the most of what time you have - be it years or seconds. A lovely way to spend an afternoon.

The premise is neat enough - people in this world Thanos-dust away at 33 years of age, and every year an expedition of adventurers at the end of their lives are sent out to defeat a mysterious being called The Paintress and rid the world of this short-life curse.

This initial idea is intriguing, but for me at least didn’t really hold my interest. I found myself pushing forward purely because I enjoyed the elements of combat and team building, and overcoming the challenge of bosses and the like. The story did throw some interesting revelations in along the line, but generally I found it wasn’t why I was playing.

That combat is pretty fantastic though. The marquee feature is the active dodge/parry system where in a way similar to the Mario & Luigi games, you can dodge or parry hits with well timed button taps. You’ll absolutely have to get good at doing this, as encounters soon essentially require effective dodges at least as a few hits will be enough to take out your team in a lot of instances. Learning parry timing and tells of enemies, especially bosses, is great fun and creates a great level of engagement and challenge.

The less spoken about aspect of combat (but maybe more interesting to me) is how much you can play characters’ abilities off one another. You can set up certain status effects, and then have another character’s attack improved when certain status effects are in play. Each character has their own system for how their power ebbs and flows - one powers up with every time they attack and dodge, but loses power when they’re hit for example. Another accumulates elemental tokens and cashes them in with other attacks to do more damage or apply extra effects. Building a team of characters with complimentary abilities is immensely satisfying and a huge part of why I enjoyed the game.

I found navigating the world a little problematic. Many areas are so intricately detailed that they’re quite difficult to navigate. Once I entered and left a battle screen, I’d often struggle to reorient myself with where I was going before the battle happened. More than once I pushed forward and found that at some point I had turned around and headed backwards. The environments look technically impressive, but I don’t think they are particularly well designed as spaces to traverse.

The characters too are a bit of a mixed bag for me. None really stood out as particularly interesting. They were mostly on the spectrum between kinda-there and obnoxious. I did not like basically any time Esquie talked.

So yeah, I generally enjoyed the game and did so enough to see it through to the end on a mechanical interest - but the world and characters left me a little cold. Regardless, it’s nice to see success from a relatively small but ambitious team.

It’s very effective. Without giving too much away, you’re stuck in a kind of purgatory. At the bottom of what seems like a train station corridor - stark white tiles lining the floors and walls.

A sign tells you to look out for any anomalies. If you see one, turn around immediately. If you do not see one - continue forward. The game makes you hyperfocus on the tiniest of details in such a way that heightens tension. Was that poster always like that? Is that guy walking strangely at all?

It makes for a very effective, unnerving piece of experimental horror - though one where if you’re like me and are incredibly bad at noticing anomalies, eventually wears off in the sheer pursuit of spotting anomalies and finally reaching the Exit 8. Absolutely worth a go if anything I’ve said intrigues you. It’s a few bucks and shouldn’t take much more than an hour if that.

I think I played the campaign once on the Xbox I owned for a few months, but it’s been a very long time and my memory is super foggy - so it was exciting to jump into Halo 2 again.

What a rollercoaster of cool ideas and weird executions, especially when playing the Anniversary edition.

Fairly early into the game you discover the first major twist, and very cool reveal. You won’t be playing as Master Chief the entire time like before. Instead you’ll play a good portion of the campaign as The Arbiter. A Covenant Elite with the dulcet voice talents of Keith David, is blamed for the Covenant’s losses in the events of the first Halo and as penance is given the role of The Arbiter - a religious saviour sent to do the dirty work of the Covenant’s religious puppeteers.

Not only do you get to play as a new character, you also get to pilot a bunch of vehicles and wield weapons that were off-limits in the last game. It’s incredibly cool to go from wondering how it must be to pilot a Wraith tank or slice through enemies with the same Energy Sword that carved you up in the hands of your enemies previously - to then get given those toys to play with. If memory services, Halo 3 pulls this same trick with the Gravity Hammer that you’ll inevitably be smashed with countless times in the final encounter of Halo 2.

Anniversary on the left looks like an entirely different time of day compared to Classic on the right!

I initially opted to play in the classic visual style, as in the first game I found the new coat of paint very technically impressive but completely missing the mood in a lot of situations. Halo 2 Anniversary commits the same sin. One late game area in particular demonstrates it clearly. It’s a moment of darkness in both the literal and emotional sense. Things are going badly, the building you’re in is failing and along with it the power. In the original this created a tense sequence where you’re walking around by torchlight, haunted by grotesque creatures lurking in the shadows. In Anniversary though, you barely need to turn on the flashlight. Everything is well lit, nothing is hidden, and it felt like a slightly dimmed version of any other inside section of the game. It’s a genuine shame the mood and seeming intent of the original game was paved over in pursuit of Better Graphics with More Detail and Realistic Lighting. Ah well, at least there’s the classic visual mode for freaks like me who want to play it that way.

Except, that’s also kind of broken in its own way! The audio mix in either mode is totally all over the place in a way that had me checking my audio channel settings to make sure I hadn’t screwed something up. In Classic mode, the music is extremely quiet. With all my settings at default, music was barely audible. Moments of triumph or intense action normally accompanied by orchestras and butt-rock guitar are instead met with muted guitary ambience. It was bad enough that I switched the game to Anniversary mode, because for whatever reason the audio mix for music is better in this mode. It still had some glaring issues like radio chatter being almost too quiet to hear over game action while at the same time characters in universe being ultra loud - but I’ll accept that over losing the music.

For all its promise at the outset, Halo 2 ends on a bit of a downer. Even knowing it was coming, it was hard not to feel disappointed with how things finish here. Being the second in a trilogy it has to set up the next game, but there’s no moment of victory or catharsis at the end of this. There’s a really annoying boss encounter and then things just kind of end. Chief talks about how he’s going to Finish The Fight and then credits appear.

I’ll have to see whether Halo 3 is able to cash the cheques Halo 2 writes, because I genuinely remember nothing of it’s campaign at this point - but man what a spot to leave people on when they had to wait for the next generation of consoles to continue the story.

At least they had some of the best multiplayer experiences available at the time to pass the time, I suppose.

Going back to it now (through the Master Chief Collection on Xbox Series X) makes me remember why this was such a big deal in 2001.

The levels are monstrously big, with seamless transitions between vast outdoor battlefields and tight indoor spaces. Compared to today some of the open spaces can feel a bit empty, but the addition of vehicles at the time made them feel huge and alive.

I’d never seen anything like the vehicles back then. The way you could bounce around in a warthog complete with a mate on the rear gun and a CPU marine in the passenger seat was unmatched - and then you found out you could pilot the Covenant opponents’ hovering nimble Ghosts as well. Wild. There was just nothing else like it.

The opening level Pillar of Autumn has you fighting legions of covenant enemies in close quarters as they attempt an attack on your home base ship, and leads to some real survive by the skin of your teeth moments. The Silent Cartographer’s mix of wide open areas and claustrophobic spaces complete with vehicles and heaps of allied marines who fight somewhat smartly alongside you is another highlight.

This high bar isn’t maintained the whole way through. In particular I found much of the second half of the game fairly tedious. Lots of repetitive enemy waves in repetitive indoor environments. There are cool story reveals during this time, but the playing of the game itself doesn’t hold up as well.

The final area however is incredibly cool. A final run on the Warthog across the spine of the Pillar of Autumn, against a self-destruct countdown (as so may good sci-fi endings do) keeps the tension high and the spectacle similarly exciting.

Halo remains great fun, and CE was such an enjoyable play that I reckon I might try jumping into Halo 2 soon, one I am almost certain I last played on the original Xbox version (and in an ill-fated co-op Legendary difficulty run that we never quite managed to finish)

I had a bit of a disaster while switching computers at one point where I lost everything and had to start from scratch, but since then I’ve managed to build up a pretty massive collection of music I want to have on hand if someday streamers all die, or the internet falls over, or some other extremely unlikely scenario. Mostly I just like buying and having the music that is important to me. Here’s how I do it.

Ripping from CDs

The bulk of my music library came from ripping CDs I’ve owned over my life. The CD really is the peak physical music format. Bit-perfect rippable to digital, unladen with DRM of any kind, quality that is about as good as the human ear can perceive, and just plain cool. There’s music on this shiny plastic disc! Back in my Windows days I used a mix of Windows Media Player’s ripper, Exact Audio Copy, and finally iTunes disc importer once I became an iPhone person.

These days I do all my computing on a Mac, and have found XLD to be the best option there. I’ve ripped my entire CD collection (and that of my partner for some insight into her music history which was fun) into 44.1KHz 16-bit FLAC files.

Buying from digital stores

I have a bit of a tiered system for where I buy digital music.

From an artist’s own website, if they have one

Not many can manage this, but some artists actually sell their own music from their own stores. Where I can, I do this since it means no other store takes a cut and the artist gets more of the money I give them. Suzi and Ninajirachi’s sites are some examples I can think of that I’ve bought from recently.

Bandcamp

Bandcamp is the goat of music stores. You won’t find every large record label on here, but it’s great for independent artists and some of the bigger ones. I’ve been using Bandcamp since about 2010 and I’ve yet to find a friendlier music buying experience. Buy music and download it in about any format you could care to, re-download it forever even if the album gets delisted from sale and an app to freely stream your purchases. I was worried when they got acquired by Epic Games of all companies a few years ago, but all seems well so far.

Qobuz

If an album I want isn’t on Bandcamp, usually because the album is part of a record deal with one of the bigger record companies, Qobuz is my next port of call. Best known for their high quality streaming service, they also offer a download store with a good range of bigger artists at reasonable prices and with CD-quality downloads (or hi-res files if for whatever reason you want to use up more space and pay extra).

These options cover basically every way I buy digital music. There’s a few other occasional methods like download codes in record sleeves but this covers pretty much every way I directly buy music.

Silent Hill f

I’m so glad a good, new Silent Hill game is possible. f contains some of the most gruesome creatures I’ve seen in games, and is a disgustingly enjoyable journey through the horrors of feminine existence in 1960s Japan. Very keen to play through this a few more times to eke out a bit more understanding of what was going on.

Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor

I technically started playing this one the year before in early access, but it came out proper this year. It’s the game that sold me on the Steam Deck, and a fun exploration of new mechanics in the burgeoning Survivor-esque format. I hope we find a better word for it than Survivor-like.

Croc: Legend of the Gobbos

One of the best remasters I’ve played. The new visual style captures the mid-nineties pre-rendered style of the game’s cover and promo artwork but in real time. They even made a tank-control game work fantastically with analogue movement without ruining the feel of the game.

And Roger…

I felt this one so impactful that it triggered me to blog about it earlier in the year. One of those games that uses mechanics to help you truly feel what a character is going through. Masterful.

Death Stranding 2: On The Beach

I can’t decide how I feel about the streamlining of mechanics. On one hand it reduces friction, but on the other - friction was kind of the point. Regardless, I love making my way through Kojima penned storylines, and the feeling of connection with people around the world was even more emphasised this time. It feels nice to know that all the roads and structures in the game took people some actual effort, and they went to that effort knowing it would make like easier for other people they will never know playing alongside them.

FAITH: The Unholy Trinity

My friend James put me onto this 2022 collection of episodes, and far out I’m glad he did. Another that inspired me to take to the keyboard, FAITH juxtaposes old computer graphics styles with unsettling moments of rotoscoped horrors amidst a good old Catholic demonic exorcism story. This one rips.

Quantum Break

I’ve loved every Remedy game I’ve played so I’m not sure why it took me so long to get to Quantum Break. You can really see some earlier stages of the game/live action combo the studio went ham with in Alan Wake 2. Ultimately I think it’s one of the weaker entries from the studio but still well worth playing for the sheer Remedy of it all.

Fear The Spotlight

Another James rec, this one’s a survival horror that borrows liberally from the PS1 era in visuals and puzzles. Some genuinely creepy moments and pleasantly cozy (as odd as that sounds to describe a horror game) adventure progression and story.

Dragon Quest XI S

After really enjoying Dragon Quest 3, I resolved to finally play XI. It’s as great as Tim Rogers explained in his lengthy but compelling review years ago. Comfortable RPG times and a bunch of cool friends to hang out with.

Cast Away

A neat little Link’s Awakening-inspired action game where you fight your way through dungeons filled with enemies and puzzles. Short and sweet, and once you’re done it uncovers a rogue-lite tower to run through as well. This one’s a great weekend of game.

So yeah, a bunch of neat games this year! I hope something catches your eye and you find a neat game too!

These are some of the musical works that I found myself listening to over and over this year.

Skeletá - Ghost

I’ve enjoyed Ghost for a long time, absolutely cemented as an all-timer when I saw them perform at a music festival in Paris years ago. They’re just so much fun as a not-too-serious, melodramatic metal act. Skeletá is full of memorable tracks that go from the feeling of hymns in a monstrous Catholic church to songs about one’s ‘love rockets’, to some thoughtful ruminations on death and the impact we have on those around us in life. This album rules.

Even In Arcadia - Sleep Token

2025 was Sleep Token’s year. It seems like they went from bubbling under the surface and deeply loved by fans of long, proggy experimental music to the realm of Popular Music. There was even an episode of Switched On Pop about the album. It probably helped that the band experimented with some more poppy sounds this time around, but it made for an album that is unpredictable the first time through, and continually engaging even as it becomes familiar.

I Love My Computer - Ninajirachi

My discovery of this album is thanks to my good friend Bibby, who mentioned it in an offhand comment during a round of Fortnite. He heard a track from it on Triple J and told me something like “I think you might vibe with this song”. Vibe with it I did. Despite first finding it in August, this album became my most listened to of the entire year. It’s just incredibly good. It’s full of new takes on trance and electronic sounds of the early 2000s and some intensely personal stories about growing up in the digital age. The whole thing is brilliant but Infohazard might be my favourite of all.

Patchwork - Suzi

After making an ill-informed Bluesky post bemoaning the lack of local music These Days, I was set straight by people kindly pointing out that there’s plenty of good local music if I look for it. I encountered Suzi for the first time as a support act for The Wonder Years but she cemented her place as a favourite once I found Patchwork. Folky, intensely personal relatable rock that’s both powerful and catchy. Check out Centrelink Summer and One Way Ticket.

TDJ - TDJ

This year really hit with some early-2000s inspired trance/club music, and TDJ’s self titled was a big reason for that. I think this one popped up for me thanks to a feature on one of the tracks from Hannah Diamond (which is certainly a standout track) but I’m glad to have discovered TDJ as a result. Maybe in a different life I’d have been a club freak.

Some others I couldn’t fail to mention

MAYHEM - Lady Gaga

Gaga falls back onto some reliable Gaga tropes, but they’re reliable for a reason. This one soundtracked my January.

TOY - Dear Seattle

A result of my intentional search for Aussie music, this one has moments that fill a Polar Bear Club shaped hole in my life.

Louder Please - Rose Gray

She featured on a great Kesha track, which led me to this album of London club life.

I’ve loved this year music-wise. It’s been a great mix of nostalgic sounds and a push to explore music more than I had been. I hope you find something to love here!

If you have an hour, a few dollars, and some emotional fortitude to spare - I highly recommend playing and Roger.

It’s a game whose gradual revealing of it’s premise is a huge part of it’s impact so I’m going to be intentionally vague about What’s Going On In It. You wake up as a small girl with a mysterious man in your house. Through fairly simple button clicking and dragging interactions, you experience quite effectively their feelings and challenges they face.

It’s also quite emotionally affecting. There is a warning at the beginning which alerts would-be players that there is going to be some uncomfortable and potentially painful subject matter - and this warning is one well heeded.

I won’t say too much more, aside from if you are interested in game mechanics being used specifically to convey a person’s experience - spending an hour with and Roger is something I can’t recommend more highly.