I won't get to NGC this month, but it's fun to peruse the Metacritic best-of list anyway. These are largely exclusives to the system I've played or have thoughts about. 

I'm deeply obsessed with Hogwarts Legacy right now, but I found some time to knock off a few more gen six games for either keeps or trades. Then I got some black friday sale games already - also finished a book and watched more Power Rangers. 

So in revisiting this 2000-2009 this month, I thought I'd go down page one of the list of Metacritic's best of for GBA in this time range and make some comments for the games I have something to say about. 

Back in 2022, Pac-Man World: RePac was released.  It was a remake of the original Pac-Man World game on PlayStation.  I even wrote an article about it here.  I encourage you to read that article I wrote because the original Pac-Man World game was a very special game to me as a game reviewer, and the remake was even my Game of the Year in 2022!  I wondered if Pac-Man World 2 would get the RePac treatment someday, and this year it did!  I didn’t like Pac-Man World 2 as much as the original, but it was still a special game to me and I thought I’d explain why in this article, and go over my thoughts on the RePac version of this game as well. 

My girlfriend and I am going on a short vacation to our old college in central New York this weekend. Among other things, I'll be looking to see if that arcade machine, Sky Shark, is still there in the pizza shop I used to go to. The odds aren't good after so much time. But anyway, I played a lot of games this mid-week-end that I have (I'm off wed/thurs regularly) trying to decide what to keep of my 90s game collection. 

I know I said I'd be blogging more regularly, but it's been an insanely busy season at the park. We had major construction going on to update some very old infrastructure, and that cut our parking down from 80ish parking spaces to 40ish parking spaces. We're one of the ten busiest state parks in the state now, and I spent most of my time doing traffic control. Yellow safety vest and all. Anyway, back to 80ish parking spaces, a new entrance booth (with electricity!!! Never had that before, lol), and a new bathroom building. Both were desperately needed. And now I have 17 days left of my season, then it's off to work in the local, independent pet supply store down the road, after a well deserved sanity break.

I'm definitely feeling a farming frenzy coming on: glued to the screen, not moving for hours, barely aware of my surroundings, forgetting to eat. It's on the verge of unhealthy obsession, but I just laugh about it and pull myself away at the end of every "weekend" and get back to work.

Mario Kart World was recently released as a Nintendo Switch 2 launch title.  I was lucky enough to get a Switch 2, thanks to help from my family.  So let’s take a road trip tour at all the tracks you can race on in the game.  So grab your road trip snacks and let’s roll!

I decided to go strictly with games released in the 70s next month. This really limits the video game landscape for me, but I made a list, and I'll see what I can do with it. Here's what I got so far. 

I watched the trailer for Farming Simulator 25 where hikers are taking selfies in front of modern harvesting machines and then racing them across fields. Nerds! Haha. I'm okay with my cartoony jeep in Farm Together 2. I've tried the Farm Sims before and they are mondo complexido. I love farming but not that much. 

I dabbled a bit in 360 games and Switch too. Check 'em out. 

I'm ending April this week even though there are a few more days left and moving on to my next theme. It was a grueling month for me who has so little patience for repeating levels and making that perfect jump; but I, like they do in special ops training, pushed beyond my limits as much as I could. I'll be putting up a blog of all the games I played over at wordpress very soon and a what-I-liked best of blog here. Here's what I got to this week before I decended into incremental games out of exhaustion.

So for March I have console Generation 3 as the time period (NES, SMS, Arcades, Atari 8bit, C64, Amiga, Apple II and such - you know, second half of the 80s). To limit the choices, I thought about what genres were interesting at that time to me and Beat 'em Ups came up first but more specifically Hack 'n' Slash games are really my more focused favorite. Also a limit of 20 games, although, I did make a much bigger list in case I run out. Let's get into it. 

Quite a lot has happened gaming wise for me in the last two weeks. I finished up with Twin-Stick and Isometric shooters and discovered several new franchises and another racing game I love. So here goes it. 

My Twin-stick shooter fascination has branched into a genre that is similar but not exactly the same. What I played this week is more along the lines of isometric multidirectional shooters. Really, the only substantial difference is that you use a trigger to shoot instead of using the right stick to both aim and shoot. Overall, it kind of feels pretty similar but maybe with less of a bullet hell feeling. Anyway, here's what I got into this week. 

Seems like a lot of stuff I played this week but between retro games with low gameplay time and various rage-quits it's not as much time spent as it seems. Here's everything, 'cause I need to write.  

Yeah, not doing any more 70s games but I will just mention Space Invaders Extreme 2 as being awesome before moving onto my theme for this month, twin-stick shooters. 

It’s time for my “Best Video Games of 2024 Awards Show!”  Keep in mind that this is my list only and no other outside opinions contributed.  And if a game isn’t on this list, it either just didn’t appeal to me as much or I haven’t had a chance to play it yet.  Ok with that out of the way, let’s begin!

I'm still working out my 2025 plan of going through the console generations month to month. However, I recently started thinking about game genre's, ones I like and one's I'm curious about. So I'm starting to work them into the schedule, featuring a specific genre per generation. Here's what I got so far, subject to change of course. 

The Castlevania Domina collection just cemented something that's been creeping in my head ever since I picked up my PSP again earlier this year: The DS library's highlights looks better today than the PSP's highlights. Back in the 00's, the PSP's graphics were a huge selling point, offering games close to console quality over a decade before the Switch. But despite a strong launch, most gamers were shocked at how it merely carved a niche while the DS took over the world. Yet one thing that the PSP had in its favor at all time were its graphics. Games looked better. 

I’ve grilled up a batch of game reviews I’ve recently written at GamerDad.com!  As always, please click on the links and read as many as you can and maybe post a ‘like’ or comment or two.  I’d really appreciate it.  OK, let’s dig in!

These are my picks from Page 6 on Metacritic for the years 2007-2009. 

These are my picks from page 3 of Metacritic's best-of-all-time for '07-'09.