For the first time since 2017, the hub of negativity that traditionally kicks off this site’s annual look back is condensed to five entries. That’s almost entirely thanks to a brand-new list that goes live tomorrow and needs the space, but the kinds of disappointing news and trends that tend to make the cut are also kinda easy to categorise in bunches this year – for the most part. And that means we can also get it out of the way quickly to focus on the good stuff.
As has been the case for many years now, this is a petty personal list first and foremost: it does not tend to cover anything from the (depressingly long and ever-present) list of examples of people treating other people without basic human dignity within the movie or games industries. If I couldn’t use this page to complain about first-world problems, the list wouldn’t exist and we’d just be focusing on positives the whole way down. That said, time to get some things off my chest.
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VR BEST OF 2023 DISCLAIMER
This list represents my opinion only. I am not asserting any kind of superiority or self-importance by presenting it as I have. My opinion is not fact. If you agree with me 100%, go buy a lottery ticket. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.
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5. Curse of the 7s
As plenty of writers were eager to repeat over the course of 2023, it was a bad year to be a publically accepted “7/10” videogame. Before you dismiss that statement as always true anyway and scroll on, remember a 7/10 videogame is not a bad game: it just usually appeals less to players not usually invested in the genre than an 8 or 9 might. Virtually every year my top games list includes a couple of examples where critical consensus and I do not meet, and those paragraphs are often my favourite to write.
But oh boy, this was definitely not the year to be one of those games.
When your competition for people’s free time is the latest Final Fantasy, Street Fighter, Diablo or Zelda, any perceived flaw strong enough to knock you below 75-80 on Meta/Opencritic will always hurt more. In the case of Exoprimal, one of my most anticipated games of the year, that flaw was the lack of any sort of party matchmaking (a blow that would’ve landed the game its own spot on this list any other year). For The Last Case of Benedict Fox, it was a cluttered UI and just a few too many frame drops on the Xbox Series S. For Atomic Heart, an overly chatty sidekick and a failure to capitalise on a strong opening. For Immortals of Aveum – an otherwise impressive Unreal Engine 5 visual showcase with super-slick production – it was a script too eager to ape the modern Marvel movie formula. In the latter case, as well as many others no doubt, the result was the slashing of a talented and promising development team, and when poor release timing is to blame it just feels so cruel.
4. Nintendo’s Wild Patent Spree
Though it never goes down well and usually happens as stealthily as possible, major videogame companies looking to stave off competition by patenting in-game mechanics is nothing new; famous examples include the Nemesis system from Warner Bros’ Middle Earth duology and Namco’s long-standing exclusive ability to run minigames on loading screens. But Nintendo’s 2023 patent application streak for mechanics within Tears of the Kingdom raised more than a few eyebrows when it came to light that the company wanted to own (or take payment for) things as banal as riding a moving object without physically interacting with it, or a fast travel preview on a loading screen.
From one tiny angle this makes sense: you can imagine games like Immortals: Fenix Rising and Genshin Impact scaring the Kyoto bigwigs with some of their direct inspiration from Breath of the Wild. But, like, come on man. A gaming world without a company as big as Nintendo doing its own quirky thing would be unbearably dull (especially with the current sedate state of Sony), but that doesn’t mean the folks at the Big N should own every innovation they come up with – let alone ones they do not. That’s hardly the way to a better industry, and honestly this kind of attitude makes me worry that the current Nintendo upper management might not believe they can continue to conjure up more weird innovation in the future.
This is meant to be a trend-focused post, so while we’re talking about Nintendo-adjacent disappointments:
- The mass disqualifications at the Pokemon World Championships thanks to eleventh-hour changes to how team-building rules are enforced didn’t make anyone involved look good at all;
- Though expected, forewarned and unfortunately kind of inevitable, the definitive closure of the 3DS and Wii U eShops back in March was a grim reminder of the limitations of digital storefronts – and Nintendo’s own distaste for letting people play their old games on new platforms.
Vagrant Rant 