2022 Year-In-Review: Video Games I Played

As with the theme of the past two years (blame the proliferation of retro video game emulator handhelds!) this was another big year for replays. It was also a relatively light year for video gaming, where I logged less than 300 hours of playtime, versus over 400 in 2021 and over 500 in 2020.

This year’s noteworthy video game projects: A Let’s Play of the three Game Boy Castlevania games; and Who wants to play Guess That Machine-Translated Game Title?, where I explored all the terribly-translated game titles on the X2 handheld.

I officially logged 14 new titles and I replayed 11 games (either the original or a hack of some sort), though that’s a little muddy because of where I drew the line of an updated game being “new.” This was also a year I didn’t make any particular efforts to cull my various lists, but I ended up net one fewer game on my backlog because I also didn’t acquire many new games.

While the most popular genre this year was classic RPGs, there was a health variety to my selection. Gems of War once again accounted for the vast, vast majority of my casual game time and also virtually all of the gaming time on my Android tablet (which I had to replace near the end of the year); though my replay of Gemcrafter: Puzzle Journey ate into that a little.

Most of the games I played through were short, with 36 hours of Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity being the only brand-new game to crack the 20-hour mark. (Though in overall playtime, it still fell far short of the first Hyrule Warriors game in 2020.) I logged 55 hours replaying Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and played 20+ hours of Legend of Legaia, SaGa 3: Shadow or Light and Final Fantasy VIII Remastered.

The Switch remained our champion system. In addition to the games I already noted, ARR played a ton of Pokemon Shield, Pokemon Violet, Super Smash Bros, Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and a partial replay of Dragon Quest 9. He also continued to use the 3DS for several Kirby games. Except for the remake of Secret of Mana on PS4, everything else I played was either on Steam or an emulator.

ARR once again continued playing Minecraft Java edition, both with friends on Realms servers and solo. Various Lego games (particularly DC Super Villains) got heavy play on Steam. His big Android game of the year was Bloons TD 6.

By genre, the games that I would say, “This is genuinely good, you should try it if you like the genre,” are:
• 2D Beat-Em-Up: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge (Switch)
• 3D Beat-Em-Up: Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity (Switch)
• Puzzle Platformer: Even the Ocean (Steam)
• Gimmick RPG: The World is Your Weapon (Steam)

2022 Year-In-Review: TV I Watched

I logged almost every movie I watched this year (30) which I don’t think I’ve reliably done in the past; but not a single one was in a theater. I watched 26 seasons of various TV shows spread out across Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, HBOMax and Disney+.

Things that stood out included:

Cartoons: Star Trek: Lower Decks is a delight. What If? was respectable and Disenchantment stayed pretty decent. The third season of Love, Death & Robots had two, maybe three good episodes.

Superheroes: On the DC side we have a season each of DC's Legends of Tomorrow, Supergirl, The Flash, and Peacemaker. On the Marvel side is Hawkeye, Moon Knight, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Ms. Marvel, and She-Hulk: Attorney At Law. Netflix brought us a third season of Umbrella Academy and I also enjoyed The Imperfects, which no one else seemed to. The Arrowverse is ending with the final season of The Flash this year and Marvel seems to be slowing down on the TV shows for a bit, so this was an interesting year for “superhero TV.”

Comedy: The first season of Ted Lasso was great, and that’s as someone who doesn’t like sports. The second season of Dollface was pretty strong. Resident Alien and Maggie were both flawed and it’s debatable whether I’ll bother watching any more of them. What We Do in the Shadows and Our Flag Means Death both entertained me, but I acknowledge they’re an acquired taste.

Dark Fantasy: I really enjoyed the first season of The Sandman, thought Wednesday was good, and had middling opinions of the fourth season of Stranger Things. And I’m really glad I rewatched the first season of Russian Doll (which I liked better the second time around!) before watching the second.

I’m coming into 2023 with a backlog of HBOMax superhero shows and (still) several Star Trek spinoffs, plus a bunch of sitcoms and dramas I’m curious about.

(ARR’s limited Youtube time shifted back to Minecraft videos. He watched a lot of Pokemon, and added Alien TV to his rotation with Captain Underpants, Storybots, and Larva on Netflix.)