*waking up after bumping my head and vividly hallucinating the entirety of Wicked (2024) to find myself in bed surrounded by the concerned faces of my dear friends Ariana Grande, Cynthia Erivo, Jonathan Bailey, and also Ariana Grande's boyfriend for some reason*

But it wasn't a dream — it was a musical. And you, and you, and you, and you were there!

See also my review of the collection itself on Backloggd.

Barbuta: An appropriate introduction to the collection in more ways than one. Much hay has been made in my earshot of the "kaizo-like" trap in room one, and to a degree that's emblematic of the logic of UFO 50—it does ask you to take your lumps and learn what it's teaching you without focusing overmuch on a concept of "fairness"—I think it's not the heart of what either the game or the collection is about.

A stronger indication of what's to come is found in the game's pacing, the slow walk speed and deliberately long load times between screens, the way the game is structured like a search action game but doesn't have internal saves, asking you to replay it from scratch each time and thereby map out your preferred route rather than just passively accumulating everything in one run. Stronger still is the sense of mystery: even with a cherry in hand, there are rooms I haven't found and mechanics I haven't used. Barbuta challenges the player to dig deeper if they so choose, and in doing so presages the deepest puzzles the collection as a whole has to offer.

Bug Hunter: My arc with this game presaged my own personal experience with a lot of UFO 50. When I first picked it up, I got so overwhelmed that I put it right back down and wasn't sure if I was ever going to go back. Every decision has so many cascading outcomes that it was hard not to feel like I wasn't drowning in opportunity costs. But Cera loves it and coached me through the basics enough that I began to get the hang of it.

One of my favorite things about UFO 50, the thing that made it a slam dunk for my game of the year, is the way it gets people swapping hints like they're all hanging around a cabinet in an arcade. Almost every single one of these games had someone I knew championing it, someone who was also willing to sit down and help me not only beat it but understand what they saw in it. The true joy of the collection is the community it inspires.

Ninpek: I started out so bad at Ninpek, but what really got my goat was that as I kept attempting it I could feel myself getting better. It's not fair of it to be so fair! And the better I got, the more fun I would have just jamming it over and over again, and the more I jammed it the better I got... I went from “no way am I golding this” to getting a cherry within a couple weeks, and it felt so good.

I never actually played a run-and-gun enough to become good at it before Ninpek. Once again, an early illustration of the theme of the collection: the presentation itself encourages…

sometimes the dishwasher sings to me
a tiny song, three or four notes long
no clear reason, when it's empty or full
I think it's just happy to be alive
(I know it's not alive
but it doesn't know
why spoil its little joy?)

Obviously "All Cherries" as a category is essentially infeasible due to games like Rail Heist, Rock On! Island, and Grimstone taking over on the order of hours individually, but just choosing a subset of games feels very arbitrary. So instead, maybe select a chunk of time arbitrarily (two hours? three?) and say "the best run is the one that gets the most cherries within this time". That way, if a given game gets a way faster strategy, it can be routed in; there's also a lot of toothsome choice between which of the games you do or do not include, maybe even with differences between runners

With 2024 truly over and finding myself with the day off work, I want to take the time to write a retrospective of the media I enjoyed over the past year. I like "best of the year" decisions as a driving force for this sort of retrospective not necessarily because it matters all that much what gets chosen, but because putting disparate works of art that I like for very different reasons up against one another inspires me to focus on what specifically I value about each of them and how I prioritize my values.

In addition to picking favorites, I'm going to post my updated of-the-year lists for both films and games. These are living lists I've been curating for years in which I choose my favorite example of the medium for each year^[1]. This helps mitigate the problem that I don't ever see or play everything in a given year and so my "best of the year" at the time is never going to be fully-informed, and it gives me a better perspective into years long past as I explore what they have to offer. Historically, I've updated these lists throughout the year as I watch particularly good films, but for most of this year I've been saving the updates to do right now. It's a fun way to look back on what the year has brought to my doorstep and how my tastes have changed.

Film

I don't have concrete numbers prior to the first full year I was using Letterboxd, 2019, but I'm pretty confident 2024 was my lifetime high-water-mark for most films watched (so far) with fully 251 films under my belt. 2019 was my previous high point, in a year during which I was walking to Scarecrow every week and really starting to ramp up my independent theater attendance with Christa and Liz. The pandemic brought that all crashing down. In 2020, I only watched 139 films; in 2021 and 2022 I didn't even hit a hundred.

Part of this was just where my attention was at. I was more focused on video games in those years for my leisure activity, and in 2022 in particular I got deep into helping out with the Elden Ring wiki. But I missed film, and it felt like something else the pandemic—and the total lack of mitigating behavior on the part of the general public—had taken from me. Starting to dig back into film last year and going so deep this year has been a healing experience, especially since so many of the films I've seen have been with dear friends and a few have even been in the theater (with a heavy-duty mask on, of course).

There are a few focuses of my film watching this year. The director I watched the most of was Orson Welles (Othello, F for Fake for the third time, The Lady from Shanghai, and Touch of Evil—almost all films that are brilliant in…

Last year, Christa jailbroke and USB-C-modded my old 3DS XL and I told myself that once I got an acceptable way through my before-bed reading backlog^[1] I'd allow myself to add a new bedtime activity of playing through some of the old handheld games I'd been recommended. It took me most of the year but I did start earlier this week! Multiple friends have been hollering at me for years to play Shu Takumi's oeuvre, so I'm starting out with Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney^[2] and doing about one in-game day per night.

And it's been really lovely! It fits snug and cozy into the same spot in my night as reading manga, while being a little more interactive and keeping my fingers busy. Visual novels and adventure games have always been kind of slow going for me—they compound my less-than-swift reading speed with the need to periodically wait for animations or even just click through text—but that friction is kind of a feature before bed because it encourages me to play just a bit and then try to sleep. I'm sure the backlight isn't great for sleepy hygiene but you can't win 'em all.

The only real problem is that the damn 3DS doesn't have a screenshot button okay actually I hadn't even thought to search up "3ds homebrew screenshot". Turns out the 3DS homebrew launcher does have a screenshot function... but it doesn't work when playing original DS games. But the original DS launcher has its own screenshot function! But it can only take screenshots of the bottom screen. So as I was saying: there's no screenshot button so I have to resort to photographing my screen. Oh well!

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1. Mostly manga^[3], a handful of Western comics, and of course Zionist Relations With Nazi Germany. ↩︎

2. The DS version that was the first official English release, because I really like the old spritework and for its sake I'm willing to put up with the surprisingly shitty copy-editing.^[4] ↩︎

3. I caught up with She Loves to Cook + She Loves to Eat and Asumi-Chan is Interested in Lesbian Brothels! and got six volumes deep into each of Dungeon Meshi and Hakukei & Mikochi. ↩︎

4. It's always frustrating when a writing-forward indie game seems to consider an editing pass dispensable, but to see it happen from a studio as big as Capcom is a shock even in the 00s. Especially when you see how much love and care they put into localizing the humor, and how excellent that turned out, seeing a bunch of basic grammar and vocabulary errors is very jarring. But I hear these are largely fixed in subsequent releases, so this is pain I have fully brought upon myself. ↩︎

Phoenix Wright really said "I have to avenge my mentor's death and track down her true killer in the most effective way possible... as a defense attorney!" and somehow by the logic of the world in which he exists he was correct

playing Against the Storm is like looking back and forth between my constituents and the "enable ethnostate" button to tell when to press it and when to let go

Nicholle Tom is so dykey in this. I think I may have underestimated how much of an impact this made on young Natalie's mind