Scott McCrae Says It's Okay To Fall Behind | Winter Spectacular 2024
2024 was cool but also bad. I played a tonne of games released this year that were very cool, I did a lot of work that I’m super proud of, and I went to a lot of cool places and saw cool people (including getting shipped to LA for SGF with just over a week’s notice, which was as sick as it was fucking stressful). But also I lost my main source of income and in many ways feel exactly back to where I was two years ago thanks to the joys of full-time freelance work.
2024 was a phenomenal year for long RPGs, which – as it turns out – makes it super easy to burn yourself out hard when reviewing games. Did I adore the first game I reviewed this year, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth? Absolutely. Is playing that game in about 3 weeks reasonable? Nope. That game was followed up by the likes of Persona 3 Reload and Dragon’s Dogma 2, which are also super long.
As a result, I missed out on some of the biggest games of the year. I haven’t touched Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, or Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess, and I didn’t come close to finishing Shadow of the Erdtree despite it being one of my most anticipated things of the year (I did, however, play too much of Stellar Blade despite how mid it was).
As game writers, we feel the need to follow trends and keep up to date to more effectively do our jobs. I wouldn’t have played half as much Helldivers 2 as I did if I wasn’t working with it (it’s an excellent game; I’m just not into co-op stuff), but at the same time, there’s just so much that it becomes a stressful endeavour to keep up.
So at some point, I just didn’t. I came to appreciate how freeing it is to play something completely irrelevant to the news cycle with no pressure to ever write about it. So I want to write about them and give my props to my games of 2024, the ones that I had no intent on ever talking about and kept me from burning out.
Also shoutouts to The Binding of Isaac Rebirth, Super Mario 64, and Monster Hunter World, which I’ve played before but had a tonne of time in 2024.
Dead Rising: Deluxe Remaster
What better way to start a list of games that are not from 2024 than with a game that is from 2024… kinda. The original Dead Rising is one of my favourite games ever made, and Capcom deciding to reanimate the dormant series with a RE Engine remake of the first game turned out to be one of the best surprise announcements of the year.
Cosy games just aren’t my thing. I see the appeal in building up your own farm or whatever else, but I’m not here for something slow-paced. Despite the copious amounts of violence and viscera on display, there is something therapeutic about Dead Rising. For me, this is cosy. Returning to the Willamette shopping mall after all of this time single-handedly pulled me out of a slump that had been brewing since getting let go. Plus, it’s the only game to date that I’ve ever gotten the Platinum trophy for before a review embargo ended.
Tony Hawk Underground 2 + American Wasteland
My other cosy game for the last few years has been Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 and Pro Skater 3. Whenever I’m just looking for something to do, I’ll pop one in and blast through the career with a new skater. However, having done that a few times, I figured I’d look for something new. I’m not the biggest fan of the direction the Pro Skater series took after 3; the two-minute timer to do as many tasks as possible is a far more engaging gameplay loop than the mission-based free-roaming found in later games.
While I’d played Underground 2 and American Wasteland way back when I didn’t realise these games had their own classic modes that replicate the first three games with the two-minute challenge runs. Suddenly, the games I had written off as the leadup to the series’ downfall suddenly became some of the best experiences the series has to offer.
METAL GEAR AC!D²
Metal Gear is my favourite thing ever, and I’m an absolute sucker for turn-based tactics, but I never got around to the Metal Gear Acid duology past dabbling with the first game a while back. And now that I’ve played them, it’s mainly down to Metal Gear Acid being kinda rough. But goddamn, Metal Gear Acid 2 is a bona fide classic.
Not that a Metal Gear game can really be underrated, but Metal Gear Acid 2 really isn’t spoken about as much as it should be. The storyline is dumb for sure (albeit not as bad as Acid 1 with the psychic puppets on a plane), but the encounter design and the core mechanics are so good that I could’ve played another four of these games in a row. I don’t even like deck builders that much!
I also finally played Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops (pretty good) and Fights in Tight Spaces (phenomenal) this year, but this seems like a great place to shout both of them out.
Silent Hill 2
If you asked me what the best game I played in 2024 was, then I’d likely tell you it was Silent Hill 2. It’s another game where I’ve started it up countless times but never gotten past the apartments, but with the solid preview impressions of the remake, I figured now was the time. As someone who isn’t into horror, especially tank controls horror, I figured I’d struggle, but over the course of a single day, I played the entire thing.
Silent Hill 2 is one of the greatest horror stories I’ve ever experienced across any medium. The characters are so incredibly detailed that even someone like Angela, who probably only gets about 10 minutes of screen time, becomes a character that has stuck with me ever since. Even going in knowing the game’s big twist reveal that James is a bit of a dickhead (to put it lightly), you end up feeling sympathy for him - despite the horrific acts that have sent him to the town in the first place. It’s a phenomenally written game that has stuck with me ever since, and the final monologue from Monica Horgan is up there with Kaiji Tang in the coin locker scene of Yakuza: Like a Dragon and Tommie Earl Jenkins’ final scene in Death Stranding as the most incredible bits of voice acting seen in a game.
The intense symbolism across the enemy design, areas, and the characters themselves as you dig deeper into the psyche of James Sunderland is so incredibly affecting. Every single bit of this game seems to have been crafted to absolute perfection. It did, however, come with the side effect of making the remake worse for me as I played it a week later and the ways it lost some identity through some unnecessary additions in both storytelling and game design, but that’s for another time. Special shoutouts to the Silent Hill 2 Enhanced Edition PC team, who make this masterpiece playable on modern hardware when Konami's only offering is the Comic Sans version.
I get the need to feel up to date (it’s my job to an extent). I've been stricken with the need to play all the big releases I want to before GOTY season comes around, even before I was a writer. But now that I’ve done it for a few years, the biggest joy this year has brought me in games is catching up on stuff I’ve wanted to play for ages. I’m sure you have a big Steam backlog kicking about, or some PS2 game you’ve been eying up (I KNOW you haven’t played God Hand yet; hurry up!). Go play those games; you aren’t going to play every essential release from the year, especially in a year like this where all of those essentials are 90 hours long. It’s just not feasible. Then in 2034, you can write on Startmenu about how you finally got around to playing Dragon’s Dogma 2 and that I was right all along.
