2023 Year-In-Review: TV I Watched

I feel like a lot of what I watched this year was less memorable than some other years. I watched 23 seasons of various shows (spread across six different streaming platforms) and 25 movies, including TWO (Dungeons & Dragons and Barbie) in the theater!

Things that stood out included:

Cartoons: Young Justice: Phantoms stays solid, but you need to start the series at the beginning despite the changing titles. Ducktales (2017) and Disenchantment both were getting tired but wrapped up solidly. My Adventures With Superman is incredibly cute. Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is definitively a sequel to the comic/movie, but fun. The Dragon Prince…still wants to be Avatar but isn’t.

Superheroes: We bid farewell to the Arrowverse with the last season of The Flash, and I caught up on two seasons of Superman & Lois. Gotham Knights was a fun one-off in the same genre. I watched the last two half-seasons of Titans and appreciate that wrap-up; I still have half a season of Doom Patrol left from that particular shared universe. I didn’t actually watch any Marvel shows this year. (I also watched mostly superhero movies, with a smattering of other stuff.)

Comedy: The second seasons of Ted Lasso and The Sex Lives of College Girls were both weaker than the first, as in both cases the tone shifted and the writers needed to come up with more to do. I’m hoping What We Do in the Shadows comes up with something new when I get around to the most recent season, because that’s getting tired. The second season of Good Omens was an interim bit of faffing about between actual plots. Up Here was an entertaining example of turning a stage musical into a miniseries and I was here for it.

Sci-Fi/Fantasy: We finally got around to the second season of Star Trek: Discovery, having fallen massively behind. I also watched The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself, which I’ll admit was a mess that leaves off on a cliffhanger but I enjoyed it.

I’m hoping that the various strikes in 2023 will push back enough things to let me clear some backlog. There’s still a lot of superhero TV and three different Star Trek series for me to catch up on.

(ARR re-watched a lot of Alien TV as background noise for months, watched a bunch of Pokemon, and then discovered Adventure Time and has been binging it.)

2023 Year-In-Review: Video Games I Played

This was a weird year for gaming, very heavy on replays and hacks, and around 350 hours of logged games (which falls between my tallies for 2021 and 2022).

My noteworthy “projects” were What’s on this $10 Handheld? Two: My Arcade Go Gamer Edition and What’s on this $10 Handheld 3: The Pro200 and the Lexibook Compact Cyber Arcade. But I also made a thread of all of my KEMCO rpg reviews, which involved playing six more of those, half of them to completion.

I finished 12 games that were new to me, nine of them on Steam, two on Android and one PS1 game. I logged 21 replays/hacks/randomizer playthroughs of older games. Nothing was particularly time-consuming; my most hours logged was my replay of Breath of Fire 3 at 26 hours, and that was one of only three games that cracked the 20-hour mark. My most-used system was the Retroid Pocket 3, though the RG350 still got used, the RG35XX saw a decent amount of playtime, and the TRIMUI Smart Pro and R36S came from behind late in the year.

I did manage to try and cull the remainders from two Fanatical bundles, but in practice my backlog only grew this year.

This was another year where the most popular genre was classic RPGs, but again there was a healthy 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.

As a household, the Switch spent another year as our champion system. ARR went hard with Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom; but also kept up with various Pokemon titles and continues to play Super Smash Bros. His other obsession continues to be Bloons TD 6 (and the Adventure Time version) on his tablet, though he played some more of the Lego DC Superheroes games on Steam and continues to play Minecraft weekly with friends.

Going into 2024, I’m hoping to clear a list of fan-translated SNES titles and then actually approach my backlog of games I’ve paid for. But we’ll see what happens!