The Super Nintendo World section of Universal Studios Epic Universe in Orlando has been open for just about a year now, and for our big multi-family trip of the year we planned out one grueling day at Super Nintendo World followed by two comparatively chill days at LEGOLand. The kiddos aren’t really super interested in anything else offered at Universal, so we figured surely we’ll be able to squeeze all there is to squeeze out of the Nintendo Quadrant in a single day.

WHO LIKES SEQUELS?!

Anyway, let’s do Categories this year. And worsts. There were a lot of worsts.

Game That Isn’t Finished

• Best: 33 Immortals
• Worst: Marathon

Absurdly Delayed Game

• Best: Silksong
• Worst: Metroid Prime 4

Game I Didn’t Play

• Best: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
• Worst: idk, man. Joke Answer: Destiny 2

Nintendo Game

• Best: Donkey Kong Bananza
• Worst: Metroid Prime 4

Most Unexpectedly Emotional Powerhouse

• LEGO Voyagers (incredibly close runner-up Keeper)

Best Indie Game

• Three-Way Tie: Hades 2 & Silksong & Blue Prince
• These were all outstanding for their own reasons, and all fit what I think can reasonably really be called “indie” games.

Best Game of 2025

There were a lot of really good games. Like look at the ones I listed above. And like, BALL x PIT? I 100%’ed that. And Mario Kart World?! And Pipistrello?? And BLUE PRINCE?!!? AVOWED?!?!!?!

I have played a lot of Destiny in the past 10 years. I have 1,186 hours in D1 and – at time of writing – 3,639 hours in D2. I’ve obviously played a lot of other games in that time too, but since the launch of D2 in 2017 I’ve dutifully logged in and at least done my weeklies, and typically would spend endless hours grinding out gear, pvp, chasing goals, chasing titles, chasing new exotics, bashing my head against raids, and in-between all this, I’d be finding time to argue with internet friends about what the worst part of the game was at the moment.

I played fewer titles to completion this year than usual, but I played more than twice as many as usual thanks to the glorious bounty that is UFO 50. Going to call that one a wash. I think this wasn’t a quantity of games year, this was a quality of games year, so here’s my picks.

Best Indie: Incredibly strong list of games this year between Animal Well, Balatro, The Plucky Squire and UFO 50 (as well as many others I didn’t play), but of these only Balatro ascended to the level of forever-game.

Background

I’ve been emulating games since finding NESticle in the late 90s. A huge amount of my gaming diet of the early 2000s was spent tinkering with emulators, graphical settings, following dev builds, endlessly hunting for the best gamepad to use, and generally catching up on multiple generations worth of games I missed in the aisles of Blockbuster Video. In recent years, though, I’ve been more interested in having a single device hooked to my TV that can reliably emulate as many systems as possible, in a way I can reasonably fit in with the rest of my consoles.

2023 was a truly ludicrous year of gaming. Maybe not on the scale of 1998, but man there were a whole lot of great games.

Best Indie: A very close toss-up between Dredge, Cocoon, and Sea of Stars… but my heart says Sea of Stars if I had to choose. (Edit: Suika Game and Cobalt Core also get big big big late honorable mentions, but Sea of Stars was still the one I enjoyed the most.)

In the 2022 EOY Round-Up, I mentioned plans to run through as many of the Good Zelda Games as possible leading up to Tears of the Kingdom in May, to provide my 4-year-old kiddo with sufficient background context for the game he’ll be watching me play for a good chunk of the year.

It went great. . . but it’s also where the vast majority of my game playing has gone for the first half of the year. Here’s a brief recap with my kid’s thoughts.

2022 was a pretty solid year for gaming. Less solid for me than others, because Elden Ring isn’t my jam, and because Ragnarok wasn’t like, the best game in the history of time to me, but still solid all around.

It was an easy one for picking my Game of the Year, though. Without question: Tunic.

No game has so completely consumed me in recent history like Tunic did. No game has so perfectly captured the delightful experience of a sprawling ARG within the walls of its own game since Fez or maybe The Witness, but I feel Tunic did it the best.

There was an expectation that 2021 was going to be the year that all the stuff that had its last-mile upended by Covid would finally come out . . and that hasn’t happened. Some good stuff did come out, though.

All my top games for 2021 were from not just Indie but incredibly ridiculously small Indie teams. Two were from straight up solo devs: SNKRX and Cyber Shadow. The other is from a partnership (though, heavily augmented by contractors): Death’s Door. These are all also games from VERY early in the developer’s careers. SNKRX is the first “big” game from that dev, where most others were game-jam ideas that he shipped because why not. Cyber Shadow was the dev’s first project. Death’s Door is the studio’s second game (following the boss-rush game Titan Souls).