2024 Year-In-Review: TV I Watched

First and foremost, this year I watched a lot of Star Trek! I watched 24 seasons of various shows and 11 movies; and 7 of those seasons of TV were Star Trek. (That’s first two seasons of Strange New Worlds, two seasons of Lower Decks, and re-watching the first three seasons of The Next Generation for the first time in decades.)

Other things that stood out included:

Cartoons: Delicious In Dungeon was a surprise fun anime crossing a D&D pastiche with a ridiculous cooking show pastiche. My Adventures With Superman remained cute; Harley Quinn remained funny; The Dragon Prince could have ended but still has to stretch out for one more season.

Superheroes: The second season of Loki was solid and Agatha All Along with finally a worthy sequel to WandaVision; but Secret Invasion was forgettable. Doom Patrol and Umbrella Academy both ended well. Marvel’s Legion was weird but interesting, at least for a little while.

Comedy: We Might Regret This had an interesting concept but the writer/producer/lead character was too close to it. Girls5Eva was fun and I may watch other seasons. What We Do in the Shadows had a solid season 5 but I think the fact that it’s ending doesn’t upset me much. Liberty Cabbage, by the folks who made The Gamers, was an attempt at geeky sketch comedy that only somewhat worked.

Sci-Fi/Fantasy: I actually quite liked the live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender and thought 3 Body Problem was decently adapted as well. And, y’know, I watched so much Star Trek and really enjoyed pretty much all of it.

2025 will see the end of The Dragon Prince, What We Do in the Shadows, and Superman & Lois. And I’m already watching more Star Trek: In addition to everything I’m rewatching, there’s three more seasons of Discovery we haven’t watched and the final season of Lower Decks.

(ARR mostly watched the entirety of both the new Garfield show and the 90s Garfield and Friends on repeat.)

2024 Year-In-Review: Video Games I Played

This year saw a few more Talking Time projects: I continued adding to my KEMCO rpg reviews thread, I did another What's on this $10 Handheld 4: The Aojiao Handheld and Gamplae Handheld, and I did a thread of examining How To Win At Game Boy Games: Beowulf’s Game Boy Youth Returns.

I had 495 hours of logged games, which was a big step up from the last few years, and a massive amount of that was driven by my full replay of Stardew Valley, including all of the new v1.6 content and the “Perfection” achievement, totaling 128 hours. My runner-up at the end of the year was Sun Haven, another life/farming sim game that I didn’t 100% to the same degree but still played pretty thoroughly, and logged 58 hours on. Nothing else cracked the 20 hour mark, though a couple of the KEMCO rpgs came close.

I finished 22 games that were new to me: 11 Steam games, 9 Android games (all of them KEMCO rpgs), and 2 Switch games. I logged 13 replays of older games: 4 SNES, 4 GBA, 2 GBC, 1 DS, and 1 PSP; and Stardew Valley on Steam. The Retroid Pocket 3 won the emulator handheld usage by far because I used it for most of the KEMCO games and several retro playthroughs, but also because ARR used it to play N64 games. The Trimui Smart Pro and RG35XX-H also saw decent usage, but nowhere near the same degree.

As should not be surprising, this was another year where the most popular genre was classic RPGs (a lot of them KEMCO games and replays), but again there was a healthy variety to my selection and the two top games were both life/farming sims. Gems of War once again accounted for the vast, vast majority of my casual game time—I actually replaced my Android tablet because the previous one had battery issues; though I’ll note I also used the tablet to emulate Professor Layton for my replay of that, and played two of the KEMCO games on it. (I also joined a top-level GoW guild this year and my ability to upgrade top-level stuff increased significantly.)

I did make some progress on my backlog this year, mostly by knocking out a slew of paid-real-money Steam games in the last quarter. I still have a lot of dross from Steam bundles and half a dozen more KEMCO rpgs for the next time I’m in the mood.

ARR went hard on Kirby: Return to Dream Land Deluxe and Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom; but also replayed a lot of Pokemon and other Kirby and Zelda games. He continues to play Bloons TD6 on his tablet and Minecraft online with his friends. And he played several N64 Kirby and Zelda games on my Retroid Pocket 3, as noted.

This year I’m hoping to clear out more of my Steam backlog and maybe get back the Switch long enough to clear out a few of those, too. But I’ll probably get distracted by more hacks and translations on the various handhelds along the way.