It's cliche to say "wow, I can't believe the year is over already" but I honestly can't believe the year is over already. Outside of a couple intense months of Lego building and a couple shows, my days are pretty same-y which is both a blessing and a curse.
Gaming
As my first full year of retirement, you might be surprised to find out that I didn't do all that much gaming, but what I did do made up for in quality what it lacked in quantity.
Dragon's Dogma 2 (2024) *****
Sequel to one of my favorite games ever, it feels like I waited for this guy for a stupidly long time. When it arrived I was away at BricksCascade and then wound up with a below-spec machine. I got through all of that, thankfully and was not disappointed. DD2 builds upon the lore of the first and extends several of the systems while keeping a lot of the basic mechanics. Your NPC helper pawns are back and they're better than ever with better behavior, more lines, and the ability to lead you to quest destinations and other points of interest if they've learned them--within your game or not. I didn't end up writing a long form post on DD2 though I wanted to and might yet if there's an expansion sometime in the unforseeable future.
Dwarf Fortress, Steam Version (2022) *****
I've talkedwritten about Dwarf Fortress at least a few times in these unhallowed pages but thislast year I played a lot of it. The Steam version for me is a mixed bag. I like that it mostly works out of the box. I like that it's much more easily modded. I like that it's a lot more stable. I hate that the interface is at least as bad as the old ascii version and that some subsystems are notably worse than their pre-Steam versions (squads, health, I'm lookin' at you). With every new fortress I'm delving into areas of the game that I don't know as well as I'd like or trying out new ideas on how to build things better/faster/whatever. The last few have been bolstered by playing a race of lupines rather than the standard dwarves so the fortress is filled with adorable wolf people who throw great parties. There's nothing like Dwarf Fortress, no matter how you play it.
Mechwarrior 5 Clans (2024) *****
MW5:Clans had been on my wishlist for what seems like forever. I'm not a fan of the clans in general in the lore but I was pretty sure that Piranha would make something pretty good. I was right! It's a lot more cinematic than MW5:Mercs and it doesn't have its predecessor's replayability but it more than delivers on the stompy robot goodness that one should expect, nay demand, from a Mechwarrior game. It seems like every little bit of the gameplay is a little bit better which adds up to a very satisfying experience. Overall, I don't think it's better than its predecessor which I've played through like eight times. That's the thing, I guess, and how I try to think about it: it's good for what it's trying to be and it's not entirely fair to expect it to be something else.
Mechwarrior 5 Mercenaries, Solaris Showdown (2024) *****
Hot on the heels of MW5:Clans, I picked up the last installment of its predecessor because I had not yet gotten my fill of big stompy robots. Solaris Showdown adds the Solaris-5 mech combat arenas and a short-ish set of missions with the inimitable Duncan Fisher, a beloved voiced offscreen character from MW4. Both additions were good and many of the arena fights were legit challenging even through I have over 600 hours played according to Steam. Many of the Duncan Fisher missions were laugh out loud hilarious which is exactly what I was hoping for. Probably the only bad thing I can note is that the power creep continued with a handful of new quirks/weapons/whatever that cranked DPS up to the point that many of the normal encounters were trivialized. If it were less than my eighth playthrough, I might have been more critical.
Starcom Unknown Space (2024) ****
I played the predecessor of Unknown Space (Starcom Nexus) at the end of 2022/beginning of 2023 and noted it in the
last installation of this annual series. This iteration is a lot like the previous with more polished storytelling and some more interesting building mechanics, particularly heat. Speed still rules and elemental components are significantly more constrained but overall I enjoyed my not quite 40 hours of it. Pretty sure it's still built by one dude who keeps a
dev blog.
The Banner Saga (2014, 2016, 2018) *****
I've already
written plenty about The Banner Saga so I'll be short here. Everyone should play this game. It is a tour de force of blending strong narratives and game design. This would have been my favorite on the year if the year didn't also include DD2.
Lego
2024 was a big year for Lego for me. Part of it was crunching really hard for a collab that was a mess of questionable communication and part of it was a double SHIPtember. I also expanded my Lego storage area (about +40%) which necessarily comes with a lot of sorting as one might expect. I don't have good shots from the show but I did a mess of very small microscale builds to bulk it out in addition to a lot of explosions mostly not shown in the shots to the right.
It was also a big year since it's the first year I've had builds in multiple categories. Toshoki (top left) is my Beastren bestie from Dragon's Dogma 2 and I displayed her in the art category as a mosaic. In addition to straining my collection (and the expected temptation to over-spend on brick) she incorporates two things that I almost never see in other mosaics: she pops out of the background by 2 studs and is built on a plates-up non-square aspect. The math wasn't particularly hard and neither was the palletization of the original screen shot but getting her to/from show was an ordeal. Probably there are more mosaics in my future.
I expect 2025 to be not quite as hectic though I do have some lofty goals on the year.
Hobbying
And last but not least, it was also a big year for hobbying. I blasted past all of my goals though I get a "well, not really" for the NMM bits which I completely forgot about until checking for this post, though I
did do quite a lot of TMM in the NMM style. The total count was bolstered by a couple hundred or so props which some might say are a lot lower effort than normal. To them I
saytype: they still needed paint. Notably, we've already used a bunch of them. I don't think, however, that I'll continue with the terrain piece as a goal since it feels like those have largely been fillers the last few years. I've got an enormous number of buildings already and don't really feel like I need more, though Bad News Tower has been relatively well received. Sadly, it has done nothing for people's shoddy dice rolling.
One of my big breakthroughs this year is finding the patience to do
harder stuff. Part of that is not settling as often for crappy paints
and/or brushes. I still use them, just not as often and I'm less
hesitant to tap a better paint and/or brush when I'm working. My quality
has definitely improved when that's my goal. I'll also note for the
n-th time that my speed is also improving. It's still a wash in terms of
time per fig since my nominal quality bar is also higher than it was.
