The Games That Defined Jordan Black's 2023 | Winter Spectacular 2023
January - GoldenEye 007
In January of 2023, I was broke. With only my Xbox One and my late-night bar security job that allowed me to maintain a Game Pass subscription, my video game diet had morphed from excitement for new games to excitement for whatever was new on Game Pass. Mentally and emotionally, I was also still recovering from being laid off from a full-time job as a narrative designer due to budget cutbacks at a small independent studio.
Playing GoldenEye was one of my earliest gaming memories. When I was maybe five or six, my mom had been given an N64 and PlayStation by a friend who didn’t want them and thought I’d enjoy them. It was a big gift for a struggling single mother, one she likely never could have managed on her own.
On the GoldenEye cartridge, every cheat had been unlocked, so my early memories have a lot of Big Head Mode and Paintball in them. For whatever reason, my mom eventually took the game away. I suspect it was for a very similar reason to why my Qui Gon Jinn Lightsaber got taken as a child when I wouldn’t stop hitting people with it.
Experiencing GoldenEye in 2023, with a career in games journalism and a decade of critique behind me, is a surreal experience. The port faithfully recreates the original thriller with manageable modern controls, but more than anything I was struck by how closely the framework of the game was reflected in more than a decade of setpiece-driven shooters in the Call of Duty mold.
Certainly, GoldenEye has more trial and error and more than a few confounding sections where objectives aren’t clear, but the broad strokes still make for a thrilling and surprisingly familiar shooter. It’s a good reminder of how little has truly changed in what makes a game fun and engaging. Also, I still play with Star Wars toys, so I don’t know how much I’ve changed either.
February - CrossfireX
Every so often I fall into a pit of Achievement Hunting. CrossfireX, an interminably dull shooter that was on Game Pass, seemingly offered 1000 points for hours of mindless grinding in generic shooter arenas.
Outside of gaming, I found myself in a rut. I felt I had just wasted a year of my life on a game that will never be released. My YouTube channel, which I had started with high hopes, had barely reached 1000 subscribers in a year and a half, despite a slew of deep-dive documentaries and video essays. While my security job was beginning to morph into an “expo” position for a local comedy club that saw me doing sometimes 13-hour shifts with no breaks until 2 AM.
So I found other things to pour my attention into. I finally got around to watching Transformers: Prime, which was a majority of the background noise for my tour of duty in CrossfireX. I played the game in what free time I had for maybe a week as the seeds of a new video for the channel gestated.
There was nothing aside from a simple need to press buttons and watch things happen that kept me coming back to CrossfireX. Xbox’s weird deal with Smilegate and Remedy games somehow appealed to my lizard brain impulse to make numbers go up and as a result, trapped me for as long as I wanted to be distracted.
I stopped playing due to boredom a few days before the game was taken offline forever, so there will always be one final achievement I was just short of attaining. I immediately deleted CrossfireX from my hard drive and hadn’t thought about it until I wrote this list.
March - Dead Space (2023)
The Dead Space remake came out in January, but it wasn’t until March that I made a video on it - the first explicitly political video I had done - ”Everything is Woke”.
I had spent years keeping my political opinions largely to social media and off of my channel for fear of dividing my already small audience. However, when I caught wind of the incredibly stupid controversy around gender-neutral bathrooms in the Dead Space remake, I was struck with inspiration for a view on how right-wing grifters use these fabricated culture wars for their own profit.
The video did well but wasn’t a breakthrough success until June, when my hate church video would lead viewers to my other tangentially political content. Still, I feel I almost owe the Dead Space remake a debt for getting me into politics. I had played the original trilogy and even dove deep into the expanded universe novels and books, making videos through the first months of 2023 on them all. But this video was the one that has come to mean the most to me. And the remake itself is very, very good. Please remake 2 next.
April - Marvel’s Midnight Suns
I have fond memories of pouring through the 25-cent comic bin at a used bookstore near my childhood apartment complex. Of course, I gravitated to characters I recognized from the early 2000s films like the X-Men and Spider-Man, but they led me to plenty of other Marvel heroes like Ghost Rider. Later, I would fall in love with a little-known superhero team called the Runaways.
The Marvel I knew then is not the Marvel that is conjured in most minds today. The MCU, while not without its charms, has never been my preferred way to experience these characters or their stories, yet due to the popularity of the multi-billion dollar film franchise, game developers have understandably set one foot in Marvel’s cinematic endeavours for their video game adventures.
Which is why Midnight Suns is such a bonkers game. Taking a crossover Ghost Rider arc from the 90s, putting characters like Nico Minoru and Blade more front and centre than Iron Man or Captain America, and wrapping it in a hybrid deck building/strategy/social sim? It’s the kind of idea I can’t imagine coming from anyone at Disney, certainly.
But with Midnight Suns, Firaxis reminded me why I fell in love with those characters in the first place. You’ve got plenty of fun team-ups, immaculate strategy gameplay, and spandex-stretching goodness. But more than that, I was drawn into Midnight Suns writing, the character interactions, and the evolving relationships between the cast. It’s a hell of an RPG, maybe one of my favourite ever, and should be proof to every developer out there that Marvel has so much more to it than merchandising tie-ins for the latest seasonal blockbuster.
May - Guilty Gear -Strive-
I played a few fighting games through high school, only to fall deep into the genre in college. I specialized in Mortal Kombat but dabbled in Street Fighter, Darkstalkers, Tekken, and more. That said, Guilty Gear never grabbed me.
I had heard great things about Strive and its accessibility. I was naturally also drawn to the non-binary Testament, who I still want to cosplay someday.
When it dropped on Game Pass I excitedly jumped into arcade and tutorial modes. The gameplay was solid, fluid, and fun, but I would only play it two more times.
It made me think back to sometime around 2015 when Mortal Kombat X dropped, and I poured HUNDREDS of hours into learning combos, setups, and battling online. I did the same with Street Fighter V and Mortal Kombat 11. Meanwhile, I’ve barely cracked 30 hours in Mortal Kombat 1 from earlier this year.
Strive is a wonderful game that I’d love to play more of. Every so often, I see it on my Xbox dashboard and think “I should play more of that.” But I’m usually too tired or busy to dedicate any amount of time to do more than just smashing buttons. Maybe I missed my chance, adult life gets busy fast.
In a way though, it’s encouraging to see the other people playing it now, dedicating hours to learning every aspect of the characters and move sets like I used to have the time to do.
June - Saints Row (2006)
While I played the absolute hell out of Saints Row 2 and 3, I only played the first entry in the franchise once during a Middle School sleepover at a friend's house. I had never been allowed to play Grand Theft Auto as a kid, so it was the closest I had ever been to the legendary free-roaming chaos of Rockstar’s series.
From March to May I had slowly pivoted my channel’s focus from solely video games to essays that remained tangentially connected gaming cutlure, but discussed much more serious and in-depth political issues like anti-trans violence and hate speech. Just before June began, I heard about a hate preacher who said all gay people should be rounded up and shot in the back of the head. It was a church in my town, and thus an idea was born.
Through June my creative output revolved around this idea. I would attend the church for three weeks, attending services in person wearing masculine clothing, tying my hair back, and changing my mannerisms to appear cis. During the week, I was hard at work at the comedy club I worked at, keeping terrible hours and an even worse diet. And in my free time, I planned how I would take this idea and turn it into a video.
Saints Row was the game I played when I wanted to think. The story isn’t much to write home about, but the core of the gameplay and the exploration are still engaging enough to have kept my attention for hours when I needed something to do with my hands, and my mind was elsewhere. Also, anything with Keith David is a goddamn treasure in my book.
July - Fatal Frame: Maiden of the Black Water
Once upon a time, I had a nice collection of PlayStation 2 horror games that included the whole PS2 Fatal Frame trilogy. I was quite proud of finding them all for a good price, but when I fell on hard times a few years back I had to sell them off. I never got around to beating any of them, despite getting pretty far into 2 and 3.
I bought Fatal Frame 5 excitedly when the remaster launched on Xbox and Playstation consoles. I played a bit, in the horror survival mood as it came out near Halloween, and then proceeded to not touch the game for a year and a half.
This past July, my YouTube channel began taking off. The video I had done where I infiltrated a local hate church had gone viral, and for the first time, I would be able to pay rent, (at least one month’s worth) with revenue from my YouTube channel.
July was a time of introspection. I didn’t know what I wanted to do next on the channel. Suddenly, I had an audience that wanted my political opinions and investigative work. But I love games, I love covering games and playing them. As I worked on the next videos for the channel, torn between focusing on what my new, sudden audience expected and what I had grown comfortable with, I finally made my way back to Fatal Frame 5 and played the whole thing.
In between long bouts of research for my next projects, and editing, it occurred to me that Fatal Frame 5 was an incredibly middling experience with few new ideas. It’s just fine. I spent more time thinking about getting back to it during that year plus hiatus than I have since finishing it.
August - Quake 2
I love shooters. I have a whole series dedicated to ranking EVERY shooter on the Xbox 360. Unreal and Marathon 2 were my Ocarina of Time and Crash Bandicoot as a child. Yet due to being a kid who grew up with no internet, I never knew much about Quake.
The fantastic Quake remaster from a few years back guaranteed I would be downloading Nightdive’s 2023 Quake 2 remaster day one when it dropped on Game Pass. As I immersed myself in the struggle with the Strogg, I fell in love with Quake 2 much like I had the first game. However, it was Nightdive’s work to archive concept art and preserve additional versions of the game, like Quake 2 64, that struck an additional chord with me.
So, still finding my channel's new footing, I made an emotional video about it. Struck by the love and care shown in the Quake 2 remaster, I just wanted to share my appreciation for the work that had gone into preserving an important moment in gaming history. I didn’t expect much from it, as it was my first video game-focused essay after a jerky pivot to political investigative work. Thankfully though, I wound up being overwhelmed by the positive response from my audience.
Most gaming videos I do haven’t done nearly as well as Quake 2 did, but that’s ok. It was a wonderful reminder that I didn’t have to change my entire online identity to fit some new audience, because my audience had found me and not the other way around.
About a week later I received a private DM from a fan who recounted stories about their father who introduced them to gaming with titles like Quake 2. Their father had since passed away, but in reading their heartfelt message, I began to weep when they told me how much their father would have loved the video, and how watching my video on Quake 2 and the importance of preserving gaming history made them think of their loved one.
September - Starfield
I played about 16 hours of Starfield in the first five days of its release and haven’t touched it since.
For comparison, I logged around 300 hours into Fallout 4.
I did enjoy what I played, but at a certain point, I felt I had already experienced whatever lay in store for my space pirate adventures. Starfield is certainly an ambitious game, and Bethesda’s most polished. But it still bears all the telltale signs of the company’s broad appeal approach to RPG design. Its future space politics paint everything in moral ambiguity with no clear good guys or bad guys. It’s entirely sexless. And there’s nothing in it I haven’t seen before in other shows, books, or games.
Maybe I’ll go back to it when I’m craving that very specific style of exploration and progression Bethesda excels at delivering. But I suspect I won’t ever break 100 hours in Starfield. I’ve had that exploration in Fallout 3, 4, New Vegas, Oblivion, and Skyrim. Similar games with different coats of paint, sure, but at a certain point they blend together. And much like with fighting games, I don’t have the time, energy, or attention span to dedicate hundreds of hours to a game simply because it has the content to accommodate it.
October - Alan Wake 2
Alan Wake 2 is many things, but of the assorted descriptors that rotated through my head as I unravelled Remedy’s horror-fantasy opus, I found myself thinking of it in league with two other pieces of media as an odd trilogy of sorts.
Deadly Premonition 2 and Twin Peaks: The Return. Alan Wake and Deadly Premonition both owe copious amounts to Twin Peaks, to be sure. But all of these sequels follow similar threads in unique and personal ways to their creators. All of them, see their protagonists who have aged beyond their original adventures, fighting against themselves in both spirit and form. Likewise, all of them represent creators returning to franchises that largely defined their careers and reflecting on them through the work itself. Maybe I’ll make a video about all three someday.
For now, I’m still reeling from Alan Wake 2. Rarely do I take such a slow sipping pace with a game, but for the first time through Alan Wake 2, I savoured each moment like a fine whiskey. In terms of gameplay, Alan Wake 2’s use of layered environments, shifting realities and quickly switching between them at the press of a button felt like one of the first ‘true’ next-gen experiences I had seen. To say nothing of how the technology itself was masterfully used in Remedy’s winding tale of a writer and an FBI agent interacting across time and space to solve an evolving mystery.
It’s the kind of game you *know* you’ll play again, and find something new to appreciate with each subsequent playthrough. A masterpiece in the most meaningful sense of the word; it’s not a perfect experience, but an important and creatively bold one that shows a legendary studio at the top of its game.
November - Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2023)
For most of my teenage years and several adult years, Call of Duty was one of my favourite franchises. Not because of multiplayer, but the single-player. I have played campaigns like Modern Warfare, MW2, and Black Ops a truly inconceivable amount of times because I was enamoured with the cinematic presentation and characters.
As I’ve matured, my interest in the series has waned. I still hop into multiplayer matches when I’m feeling the itch, and always hold out hope for the next entry to have a thrilling single-player campaign that can live up to the ones from my youth. But as the games have grown bigger and shiner, and more bloated by an ever-expanding buffet of content like Warzone, DMZ, and Zombies that need new iterations and developments every year, my interest in picking up any Call of Duty games at launch has only stagnated. The Modern Warfare reboot was fine. Black Ops Cold War was the closest I had seen to an engaging campaign since Infinite Warfare. Vanguard did nothing for me, and I skipped Modern Warfare 2 entirely.
However, seeing familiar faces like Makarov, Soap, and Ghost in Modern Warfare 3’s marketing made me a bit more interested. Would they be able to rekindle some of that classic spark? How could they hope to capture the magic Infinity Ward had crafted all those years ago? Turns out, they couldn’t.
I won’t say I was heartbroken when I heard Modern Warfare 3’s campaign was cobbled together with limp drama and multiplayer maps. I certainly wasn’t surprised when it was revealed to have been turned around in less than a year - a far cry from the multi-year cycles studios used to develop these games in - but I have to admit I’m a little disappointed there’s no reason to return to a series with characters that meant so much to me once upon a time.
The developers of these games deserve better than being shoehorned into one passionless project after another to meet expectations at a shareholder meeting, and fans deserve better too.
December - Baldurs Gate 3
All year I’ve been hearing about Baldur’s Gate 3. I love a good RPG, I’m sold by any game allowing me to use my proper they/them pronouns, and I needed to know more about Karlach as soon as I saw her.
As of writing, I’ve barely scratched the surface of the game. I haven’t even met the muscle mommy tiefling everyone is crazy about, but already I can tell it is a wonderfully made adventure and I can’t wait to keep playing.
However, the ponderous pace has given me a lot of time to reflect and think as I play, meaning Baldur’s Gate 3 has become the ideal game to end my year as I contemplate everything that has happened in the last 12 months and what lies ahead.
I was only able to play it thanks to fans, in particular a generous donation to buy the game, and a generous donation of a PlayStation 5. I’m still not sure what I’ve done to deserve such kindness. That’s one of the things I think about often.
I’m able to engage with fans like that weekly via livestreams where I’ve had hundreds of people watching me at once. Last year I would have struggled to pull in a half dozen viewers, but after a few viral videos, I have an audience now. It’s surreal to think about.
And because I have this following, I am continuing to make content full-time as my primary job. Something I’ve worked more than a decade to achieve. After so many late nights reviewing games, working hard hours at jobs, writing for outlets that could let me go at the drop of a hat and games that could be erased at any moment, I’m here. I honestly never thought I’d be able to make it this far.
It’s a hopeful feeling, though mixed with a constant nagging anxiety that the rug could be pulled out from under me at any moment. But what else can I do except keep working like I have been? It’s seen me this far, and I have no idea where it will take me next.
For now, I’m just going to keep working, and as I begin to plan the next step of my life into next year and beyond, I’m going to keep picking away at Baldur’s Gate 3.
