Some Games Squidge Rugby Played In 2023 | Winter Spectacular 2023
Each December, Nintendo takes time out from attempts to copyright the colour red to email each of its account members with a playlog for the year gone by. Mildly comprehensive stats are included - Which games you played the most, what genres you leaned towards, and how many total hours your Nintendo Switch System Family of Systems System was in use. However, when I came to open mine this year, I found it contained no stats, just a small, signed note from Shigeru Miyamoto himself. It read, “Jesus Christ mate, didn’t you do anything else?”.
Editor’s note: I think we should bridge the gap a little between the gaming community and rugby fans by making some helpful comparisons.
If you know anything about either Bill Beaumont or Bobby Kotick you’ll know I’m not being very kind to the other by putting them next two each other.
He didn’t include a return address (smart, because my Elite Beat Agents 2 petition letters are daily), but the short answer is: I did, and that’s exactly why I spent more time with my Nintendo Switch than anyone else connected to my family account.
In 2023, I somehow visited 29 towns and cities, took several hundred trains, watched 365 films including 101 trips to the cinema, hand-crafted 51 videos for The YouTube (a few of them are even still online), published four other articles elsewhere, recorded 50+ podcasts, attended 29 live sporting events, met somewhere in the region of 18 dogs, slept for 16 hours, and somehow managed to find the time to spend 172 hours mincing about Hyrule.
At the time of writing, I have only completed two dungeons in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. It’s the best game I’ve ever played (though don’t tell 2009’s Henry Hatsworth In The Puzzling Adventure for the Nintendo DS) because for as much of it I’ve played, I’ve dedicated almost no time to the core quest. In a year where I was constantly running around, hacking away, solving puzzles, and spent two entire months trapped in a sinister mirror dimension (France), it was so easy to fall into the adventure tucked in my bag that rescued those same activities with genuine awe.
It’s not just the campions that The Legend of Zelda and SA Rugby have in common, its being best at back to back World Cups/GOTY Award.
Tears of the Kingdom is an adventure game in the truest sense, an epic that’s filled with more life, love and things to do than the book yer man’s wife filled in Pixar’s Up. For 35 years, the character of Link has been a deliberate blank slate, an opportunity for players to project themselves. Tears of the Kingdom, arguably for the first time, grants you an adventure that fits the theory. Where Breath of the Wild before it presented you with the most beautiful, unfettered world, Tears of the Kingdom gives you a life. Link is free to be as social or distant as you want him to be. He can save Hyrule in two hours using all sorts of fantastical machinery or remain a Luddite battling through hordes alone in his pants. Without the artifice of character creation or imposed choices, Nintendo gave you all the tools to make an adventure feel your own through gameplay, through action, and through time.
I’d imagine my Link being typically silent but with an extremely animated face - an Elfin Buster Keaton just as prone to falling off things, getting into scrapes, and running the heck away. I spent entire hours on tiny minigames with almost zero reward. I lost days climbing rock faces just to see if I could. I went into The Depths in July and only emerged in November. For over a month, I had no idea you could help the sign guy, so every time I saw him I’d suggest he let go and just watch as President Hudson tumbled down a hill, a small cackle creeping across Link’s face as he shield-surfed away.
Nintendo is a lot like Eddie Jones. Sometimes it revolutionises the game for years to come… other times the Wii U gets knocked out in the pool stages of the World Cup.
Breath of the Wild was the game that got me back into games after six years of playing nothing but Tetris and Rugby World Cup 2011: The Official Video Game. Tears of the Kingdom is a victory lap, an experience catered to exactly what I enjoy doing, what I find satisfying, and what sucks me in for 171 hours without even thinking of finishing the game. I carved a full week out to play it at the start of the year, and yet still feel like I could have given it my entire 2023 - forget the cities, sports and published work - and still barely started dungeon number three. Tears of the Kingdom is a game that made me buy other games, giddy by the idea of what this medium could do and be, and then ate all my time so I didn’t actually play them.
However, I still managed to play quite a lot. Whilst, just as last year, half the big indie darlings (Chants of Sennaar, Cocoon, and this little-known game: Resident Evil 4) are sitting in my backlog unplayed, I did tear myself away from Zelda for long enough to dig through a fair amount.
Pikmin 4 is a lot like Ireland’s attack: a relentless wave of satifying moves and interlinking elements that will wear you down until suddenly it’s 4 am and you are still awake wondering what you’ve done with your life.
Pikmin 4 stands as a pretty clear-cut second place, if I were writing an ordered list. I don’t know what insight into the temples of my brain Nintendo EPD has, but I beg only they keep their findings away from gambling companies. Pikmin 4 has a near-perfect balance of its core ideas and philosophies that just causes something in my brain chemistry to drive me to keep playing. I love a collect-a-thon and big numbers going up (just check how many stats I gave you at the head of the piece), but the decision to bring the camera down to shoulder-level dunks the gameplay in atmosphere. Suddenly, the loneliness on this strange planet feels real, the fear of seeing big beasts creeps up your spine, and the community found when you pluck a lovely lil guy from the ground feels all the greater. I’ve enjoyed previous Pikmin games, but this tucked all the things my brain loves into one constantly satisfying package. The wonder, exploration, loneliness, fear, excitement, steady tactical approach, panicked flurries of hurry, collecting a shitton of stuff and somehow the innocence and beauty of making friends with new stuffed toys as a child, rolled onto one cartridge.
That childhood link seemed to run throughout my play habits this year. The delightfully Irish Bayonetta Origins was an unexpected and lovely throwback to my favourite genre: installments in famous franchises that couldn’t possibly run on a handheld so they made a weird, almost completely unrelated spin-off. I played it primarily on trains to and from Cardiff for various bits of rugby day job bullshit and it tickled me in exactly the same way so many similar-scale spin-offs played on journeys to the Valleys to see my grandparents had when I was a kid.
Bayonetta, like Louis Rees Zammit, changed game genres in 2023… although she probably made less money that whatever his NFL contract will look like
Maybe my first core gaming memory was the day my dad downloaded the demo of Sonic 2 onto our computer for me and my brother to play. We wouldn’t play the full game for another three years because the bastard was tight as hell, but after the months we played those same two levels, tearing through Sonic Superstars in a weekend felt like some universe karma. And what a weekend - it’s perhaps an unpopular opinion, but this felt like a game I’d waited years to play. Full of ideas, fast-paced, and the most satisfying I’ve found Sonic to control in a very long time. I’ve been running away from admitting I enjoyed it more than Mario Wonder for months because I know if I read that from someone else I’d react exactly the same way you are right now.
Italian coaches are basically the Sonic Team of Rugby. Constantly trying new things and struggling to figure out “Just what kind of team do we want to be.” Ultimately though they are always just one more year from a great showing.
I have strong memories of playing the original Advance Wars on GBA in a sleeping bag on a church floor in Newport at about three in the morning (don’t ask), and whilst I couldn’t find any religious temples to play it, Reboot Camp was such a delight this year. It’s kinda been buried, but this is the ultimate package for one of my favourite games ever made, and a cartridge that’s joined Mario Kart and Smash Bros as one I’ll take with my Switch anywhere I go.
On a less nostalgic note: I thought A Highland Song was lovely in a “If this was a film I’d forget it by tomorrow” kinda way, Super Mario RPG made me go “Huh, I guess so” to a lifetime of internet hyperbole I’d read, Suika Game ate a week of my life and then three months of my partner’s, and WarioWare Move It! made me laugh more than anything else I played this year. Metroid Prime Remastered filled in a gaping hole in my ‘Stuff I should have played’ list but sorta exists in its own, separate bubble of time to me. I played it over the course of two weeks whilst having a steady stress meltdown, loved it, then compartmentalised and never thought of that fortnight again.
Fun fact: Suika Game had roughly the same budget as the Irish Women’s team... Probably.
Similarly, I somehow played almost 50 hours of Fire Emblem Engage and have no real memories of it. I blasted through Disney Illusion Island in two days and thought it was a really impressive My First Metroidvania, though my favourite entry in that unlikely genre came in the added Magalor Epilogue in Kirby’s Return to Dreamland Deluxe. It’s a legit, brilliant, immensely satisfying 4-hour experience that provides one of the most entertaining Metroidvania powerscales I’ve ever experienced. Where most Kirby games start off easy, Magalor Epilogue slowly grinds you up to being a world-killing monster who can blast through the remainder of the game, an experience that uses Kirby’s lack of difficulty as a strength and core mechanic. Super Mario Bros Wonder was fantastic but I feel so dirty after admitting what I did earlier so I don’t want to talk about it.
Speaking of budgets. Spider-Man 2’s budget probably wasn’t too far off Racing 92’s.
The only notable time I spent with a Dualsense this year came in the final few days of the year drifting through Spider-Man 2. The way it ties story to gameplay progression and new mechanics is a really exciting, thoughtful way of telling a story in this medium, and I also haven’t finished it yet because I went back to play more Pikmin 4.
My 2023 was an extraordinarily long year that passed very, very quickly. Taking time in the down moments to cram Mario full of coins, Advance some Wars or crawl towards one day saving Hyrule has probably kept me from getting too sane, too ground down, and too empty. The drastically increased commutes contributed, but the real reason I’ve spent enough hours pounding the JoyCon to make Miyamoto wince is I needed it, and in a world where I’ve monetized so many of my other hobbies, I wanted it.
He didn’t include a return address, but if he had, maybe my true response just should have been, “Yeah. Thank you.”
Robbie Owen somehow fell into covering sports after eighteen junior years wasted writing about Mario. They currently run the YouTube channel Squidge Rugby, which even more inexplicably attracts over 200,000 subscribers, and has managed to bring up the game Elite Beat Agents for Nintendo DS on rugby podcasts far more often than you’d think possible. Their thoughts can be found on Twitter in two flavours- @SquidgyGoat (Not about rugby), or @SquidgeRugby (About rugby).
