2022 - Completed Games

Published on November 22, 2022
Last updated on December 9, 2022
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This was a solid year of completions for me. Made it to a solid 20! I played some old favorites and tried some new things too.

Batman: The Video Game (NES) was a surprise hit! I am proud that I beat Elden Ring (PS5)!! Diving back into the world of Final Fantasy VII (PS5) was a real treat. And I am really glad I finally gave the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (NES) a solid go. I now appreciate that game much more.

Here is my ranked list of enjoyment for 2022! Cheers!


Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade

This is the best one player game I have played in a very long time. It was a beautiful remake. It was great to revisit this world in a whole new way! I can't wait for the next part!

Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales - Ultimate Launch Edition

Miles Morales picks up where the first game left off. The story is great and full of emotional character development which makes for a fantastic follow up.

Insomniac really crushes it with their Spiderman games! The graphics on the PS5 are incredible especially with the Winter setting this game has. I didn't use fast travel because it was more fun to swing block by block! A+!

Batman: The Video Game

This was one of the first video games I had on the NES as a kid. It was so challenging to me then that I don't even think I made it to the first boss, certainly never passed it.

Coming back to it now was a joy! I breezed passed the first level in under 5 minutes haha! There aren't many stages but man does the difficulty really spike by Stage 5 (the final stage). I think a lot of that difficulty comes from the NES itself. If you are playing the original game on a NES, there are a lot of spots where the game/console lag can get you into trouble. It reminds me of Mega Man in that way.

The level design is fun and I think it is some of the best NES music out there. The cutscenes with Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson were also great and ahead of their time! Overall I really enjoyed it, even with the ol' NES glitches. Feels great to put a completion on this one!

Elden Ring

Super well made and a great world to explore. Can be super challenging but I feel accomplished for finally beating it!

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1989 NES)

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for the NES always gets a bad reputation. Despite being a huge fan of everything TMNT as a kid, this game was impossible to me. The infamous water level was insane, and even after that, the next area was overwhelming that I never really got passed it. That being said, I still tried to play it a lot!!

Revisiting this as an adult, I have a different perspective (and I finally beat it)! I can definitely appreciate the strategy element to it that I certainly overlooked as I'm sure others did as well. I really like the idea that you are supposed to switch between each turtle depending on the enemies you encounter. It's not a perfect game by any means. The turtles are unbalanced (Don is by far the best), and the jumps can be glitchy. But I think it was a cool approach to the franchise before it went into the more popular beat 'em up genre. It definitely brings back great memories, I can still think of the Area 1 map music!

6


Resident Evil 4 HD

Glad I finally played this! Gameplay is good but story is little corny in hindsight.

Dragonball FighterZ

For me, this is the best DBZ game to date. The animation and graphics are perfect! It runs so smooth! It really captures the energy of the show unlike the other games in the franchise over the years. And as I said before, I am not particularly good at fighting games. So it is nice that they went with the basic Street Fighter type controls to keep combos to a minimum. Every character has the same basic controls, you just need to learn how their moves perform rather than memorize a long string of buttons. I have gone back to this game several times and still enjoy it. A+

8


Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game

This was my go-to game when I was younger! In the days of NES, I played this constantly. Revisiting this was as fun as I remember. The music is great and the graphics are nice and bright. The game is surprisingly long for games at the time and it's definitely a challenge. The Switch version definitely eases the difficulty a little with the rewind option but I still had a blast. When someone talks about TMNT games, this is the first one that comes to mind! A classic!

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project

I always loved renting this as a kid! This is definitely the most polished of the three TMNT games on NES. The character roster is great and it has cool cut scenes to tell the story throughout. It's a cool way to link each level together and was certainly a step up for games on the NES!

My only critique is that the bosses have too much health. It is definitely product of its time -- the only way to make short games longer is to make them harder. But even when you figure out the trick to a boss, it just takes too long. Overall, it was a great way to close out the early TMNT game era! I will always enjoy booting this one up!

Altered Beast (Console)

“Rise from your grave!”

Finally beat this classic from my days as Genesis kid! Had no idea there was a way to start at the level you died in by holding A + Start! If only I knew that back then!

Had a lot of fun playing this! It’s shorter than I realized!

NiGHTS into Dreams...(3D Control Pad Bundle)

When the Sega Saturn launched, I think this was the only game I knew that was on it. It was certainly the most advertised in my memory.

The game itself is very fun. It plays like what I would imagine an arcade port of a Sonic game would be. The levels are simple and short. The flying is very smooth and it's pretty satisfying to do rings around to collect the orbs, stars, and rings. I really liked how the narrative was very simple. Just two kids getting over their fears! A nice little feel good story!

It is short enough to play in one sitting which was nice but I think this may have been a double edged sword since it was the console's flagship game while competing systems had much bigger games at launch.

Dragon's Lair (1983)

I was really happy to pick this one up! My wife and I spent the evening playing this together and we had fun figuring out the timing and button of each scene. We had a TON of deaths! But that is all part of the game. Some of them were very difficult to get the timing, even after figuring it out. So it got a little mind numbing by the time we reached the boss!

It's a very novel game and I can't say I have ever played anything like it. The animations are great! We played it on the Sega CD which had nice checkpoints (about every 5 scenes). That certainly helped! Really glad we got to experience this classic!

Mega Man 5

My lifelong friend and I have been trying to get through the entire Mega Man catalog over the years. I don't think you can go wrong with any of the NES games in the series. This continues the tradition of a million enemies, game lag, and great boss battles!

14


X-Men: The Ravages of Apocalypse

I'm really glad I found the files to this old Quake mod. I remember seeing an article in some old gaming magazine as a kid for it. For the time it was made, I think this was a great mod with a well adapted story that works for a 1st person shooter and the X-Men of the 90s.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1989 Arcade)

This is a nice starter game for those getting into the old TMNT catalog. The arcade nature makes it short and you basically have infinite lives if you want to.

My wife and I had fun kicking some Shredder butt together one night. A true arcade classic!

Marvel's Avengers

This game is a struggle but not in terms of difficulty... just in terms of staying interested. I thought the story was fantastic and the voice acting was good but the actual gameplay leaves something to be desired. The combat feels sluggish and doesn't give you the satisfaction other action games give you.

It feels like SquareEnix focused way too much on making this have RPG elements that felt burdensome and unnecessary. The side missions are not interesting and feel like a big grind too. Overall I was just disappointed.

17


Monopoly (1991)

I was actually surprised how much I enjoyed this Monopoly game. I was skeptical going in. Since it was for NES, I thought the system would make this game very limited and slow but it did a great job of keeping the game moving and giving you the extent of options for this classic board game.

X-Men: The Official Game

This was a fun pickup for the story. I'm a big X-Men fan and although the movies have their flaws, I still enjoy most of them. This game is a tie-in to the movie stories and acts as a bridge between X-Men 2 and X-Men 3.

The gameplay isn't great but it's not horrible either. I think it is just middle of the road for games of that time. Iceman's levels are a bit monotonous and Wolverine's combat is cool but clunky. I found Nightcrawler's teleporting mechanics to be really fun and satisfyingly fast though it can get messy sometimes. I don't think I'd recommend it unless you really want to get the story.

As a side note, being a big Nightcrawler fan, it was cool to see him back in action in this game and it lightly addresses his absence in the third movie.

Sonic 3D Blast

It's an interesting departure from the other Sonic titles of the time. I always thought this was Sega's way of competing with the "almost" 3D graphics that were starting to pop up, most notably Super Mario RPG. Unfortunately I think the camera motion didn't age well for me (at least on the Genesis version). If I play this game for more than 20-30 minutes at a time, I start to get a major headache! The camera moves so fast with Sonic moving slightly independently of it which can be dizzying on the bigger sized TVs of today (but that could just be me!).

Despite the camera motion difficulties, I really wanted to get through this game so I did utilize the level select menu to help see it all. I just played in small chunks! The bosses are fun and well designed, though the hitboxes are hard to get the hang of at times. The levels and music overall are good but I did find the main game mechanic of killing each enemy and gathering the critters to move on to the next section, then repeat it again to be too repetitive after a while. I found that the best thing you can do is go slow and take your time which is counterintuitive since it is a Sonic game!

It's not my favorite of the Sonic classics, but I did enjoy it. The visuals are great! Perhaps one day I'll revisit it on a smaller screen to see if that makes the experience better for me!

Killer Instinct Gold

I always remember this game being on the N64 rental shelves back in the day! I never did actually rent it but I am glad I finally got around to it via the Rare Replay on Xbox One. I’m not great at fighting games so this one was definitely a challenge. It’s tough and unforgiving like any of these old school arcade fighters but I appreciate it for it being a unique fighter in the 64 bit era. Lots of combos that I didn’t even scratch the surface using. I had to beat it on Easy difficulty to see it to the end!


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