Video Games

Predicting Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds’ Year 2 DLC

/ Michael Beckwith / Leave a comment

September 25th marks the one-year anniversary of Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds and though I ranked it lower than Mario Kart World in my best games of 2025 list, I’ve honestly found myself playing it far more frequently thanks to its regular online events, numerous in-game challenges, and it just being a fun time. This is the game that made me a regular PlayStation Plus subscriber so you know it’s doing something right.

As such, I was pleasantly surprised to see Sega announce it would be supporting the game with a second year of DLC, especially since Sega had previously admitted CrossWorlds wasn’t meeting sales expectations and publishers are all too eager to kill post-launch support if video games don’t become overnight successes nowadays.

So, to celebrate the game’s anniversary and for my own amusement, I’m going to see if I can predict which characters will be added to CrossWorlds throughout its second year. To be clear, this isn’t a wishlist of characters I want to see. My aim is to try and get inside of Sega executives’ heads and figure out what sort of characters they’d pick as both free and paid DLC.

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Top 10 Games I Beat in 2025

/ Michael Beckwith / 2 Comments

In 2025, I finished 26 video games. More than the 24 I finished in 2024 and yet it still feels too few. It honestly would’ve been slightly longer had I managed to finish some other major releases, but it goes to show just how many quality games are available nowadays, all fighting for our attention. Anyone who sincerely thinks there are no good games anymore is frankly a fool.

Anyway, I don’t want to waste too much time on the preamble. Like the 2024 list, I’m sharing a rundown of every game I cleared this year (in order of completion), with slightly more detailed breakdowns of my personal top 10. The one difference is that I will not be including any games I replayed; I want to highlight new favourites rather than old ones.

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The Nintendo Switch 2 Direct Was Exciting, Frustrating, and Everything In Between

/ Michael Beckwith / Leave a comment

So, how about that Nintendo Switch 2 Direct, huh? I think we all experienced a variety of emotions watching that thing: excitement, confusion, delight, frustration… the whole thing wound up being a rollercoaster and what was supposed to be an infallible ray of hope in an increasingly tumultuous time for gaming became far more complex in how people feel about it.

I’m not here to offer some deeper analysis on the whole thing, though. I just have thoughts on the Switch 2’s debut presentation and (almost) all of its trailers, and am compelled to jot them down and share them with you like the egotist that I am.

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Top 10 Games I Beat in 2024

/ Michael Beckwith / 1 Comment

For 2023, I wanted to do a retrospective on every game I managed to finish that year. That was frankly a mistake. Between its length and the fact I had taken on a full time job at the time, I didn’t get the retrospective fully written up until nearly four months into 2024. Still, I liked the idea enough that I wanted to try it again for 2024, but I’m doing things a bit differently to hopefully make things easier on myself.

Rather than essentially do mini reviews on every game I cleared in 2024, I’m only going to highlight my top 10 favourites of the year. It doesn’t matter if they were brand new releases or not, or even games I had replayed for the first time in years. If I rolled credits on them, they went on the list.

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2023 in Review: Every Video Game I Completed This Year

/ Michael Beckwith / 1 Comment

You know those Twitter threads where people list off every video game they’ve completed throughout the year? It’s something I’ve always been a bit keen on doing, but I figured summing up each game in a single Tweet wouldn’t do them justice. So, throughout 2023, I decided to keep a record of every game I completed, composing what are essentially mini reviews to try and cover every facet I liked or didn’t like about each one… and that was a mistake.

This wound up taking far more time and effort than I expected. And between a new job, other real world responsibilities, and me wanting to play more and more games, I failed to get this done before we rolled into 2024. Sunk cost fallacy meant I didn’t want to abandon all the work I already put in so, screw it, I’m putting this out even though we’re already a quarter of the way into 2024. Just know I will not be attempting something like this again, at least not to this degree.

For the record, this list isn’t exclusive to games that launched in 2023. No matter how old it was, if I beat it, I included it here. What counts as clearing a game is often up to interpretation but, for me, it’s at least hitting the end credits, though sometimes I made a point of clearing post-game content as well. Right, with the preamble out of the way, let’s run through every game I beat in 2023.

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My Top Five Video Games of 2022

/ Michael Beckwith / 2 Comments

Normally around this time of the year, I put together a list of the ten video games I’m most looking forward to in the following year. After some reflection, though, I’ve decided to stop doing that because, frankly, those lists aren’t exactly timeless. They get outdated so quickly, whether it’s because some of the games in question wound up not coming out or turned out to be bad. Plus, sometimes I struggle finding 10 whole games that I’m super excited for and we never know what the coming year’s full release schedule looks like.

I’d prefer to write something that holds up a lot better; something that can be read years down the line and not feel hilariously outdated. So, I’ve decided to follow the crowd and put together a top five list of my personal favourite games of 2022.

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My Ten Most Anticipated Games of 2022

/ Michael Beckwith / Leave a comment

I feel like it’d be an over exaggeration, if not outright inaccurate, to say 2021 was a bad year for video games. Quite frankly, there were plenty of awesome new games or updates to existing ones. On a personal level, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart properly demonstrated the potential of the PlayStation 5, both Great Ace Attorney games finally made it to the West, and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate truly made the impossible possible by completing its roster with Sora from Kingdom Hearts.

But I will admit the industry itself has made it hard to be optimistic about 2022. Over the last twelve months, we’ve seen outright abysmal releases like the Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy remasters, the likes of Ubisoft and Square Enix committing to incorporating NFTs (the newest environmentally damaging grift) into their games, and then there’s just everything about Activision, which has once again highlighted how horrible the industry can be behind closed doors.

While it is important to acknowledge all the bad parts of this industry, even if it’s painful to do so, that doesn’t mean there’ll be no joy to be found in it either. As always, there are already a number of select games I’m looking forward to this year and I’m sure there are a number of amazing titles that haven’t been announced yet. Plus, this is a yearly tradition at this point so let’s get on with things and get to my ten most anticipated games of 2022.

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Review | World’s End Club – 12 Friends at the End of The World (startmenu Preview)

/ Michael Beckwith / Leave a comment

Back in 2017, a group of Spike Chunsoft employees left to form their own company, Too Kyo Games. Among its founding members were Kazutaka Kodaka and Kotaro Uchikoshi, the respective creators of the Danganronpa and Zero Escape series. Given the similarities between both their series, it’s honestly surprising that it took until 2020 for the two to actually work on a project together. Released last year as an early access Apple Arcade title, World’s End Club is the two’s first proper collaboration, with Uchikoshi as director and writer and Kodaka as creative director.

The full game was recently released on the Nintendo Switch and expectations were certainly high for it. Danganronpa and Zero Escape are well-known and beloved by their fans for their complex mysteries, larger than life characters, and off-the-wall humour, so many assumed that World’s End Club would follow in their footsteps. And while in some ways it does, it is a very different beast compared to anything in either series.

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Review | Gnosia (startmenu Preview)

/ Michael Beckwith / 1 Comment

Chances are that if you’re at all already familiar with Gnosia, then you probably know it as that game that’s basically Among Us except with an anime aesthetic. And while that’s not an entirely inaccurate description, it doesn’t do the game justice in the slightest.

Set aboard a drifting spaceship, you and your fellow crew members learn that somebody onboard has been infected by the titular Gnosia. What the Gnosia actually are is a complete mystery, but their goal is clear: the complete eradication of all human life. The goal of the crew is to correctly identify the infected and put them into cold sleep, while the Gnosia must avoid detection and pick the crew members off one by one until they can take over the ship.

Despite the Among Us comparisons, Gnosia is more like the classic party game Werewolf (something it actively acknowledged in its launch trailer), but the key difference is that Gnosia has no multiplayer aspects whatsoever. It’s entirely single-player, which you wouldn’t think would work for a social deduction game where the fun primarily comes from the arguments, distrust, and deception between players. So what has the team at Petit Depotto done to create a compelling experience?

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Preview | Balan Wonderworld (startmenu Preview)

/ Michael Beckwith / Leave a comment

In a world where so many big-budget video games feel rather homogenised, to the point where most new releases can be easily described by just comparing it to another (e.g. Avengers is just Destiny but with Marvel), Balan Wonderworld really stands out from the crowd.

Wonderworld is the first title from new Square Enix subsidiary Balan Company, which is being directed by Yuji Naka (one of the men credited with creating Sonic the Hedgehog). Balan Wonderworld wears its inspiration on its sleeve and is quite clearly meant to evoke a sense of nostalgia from players despite being an original IP.

I’m sure you’ve seen every other outlet make obvious comparisons to old Sega games like Nights and Billy Hatcher, and you can hardly blame them. Watching the announcement trailer made me feel like I had stepped through a wormhole back to the late 90s or early 2000s but despite some trepidation about the whole thing I was admittedly quite charmed by just how strange this game seemed. The world could desperately do with more 3D-platformers that aren’t Super Mario or crowdfunded indie projects like A Hat in Time.

So, with a surprisingly sizable demo now available, it made sense to investigate this new world of Balan and let Naka and his team try to convince me to give this new (planned) franchise of theirs a look-see. Unfortunately, those aforementioned trepidations turned out to be justified.

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