Monthly Archives: December 2018

2018’s almost over. It’s been a temporally strange twelve months; while there’s that sensation of “the year’s over already?”, there’s also a feeling of “it’s been how long?!” whenever I remember things that came out in the first half of 2018. Things on both a personal and worldwide level haven’t felt amazing, either, but I guess we at least had some good games come out. And wouldn’t you know it, games of the year just so happen to be the topic of this blog post.

While it may be kind of a cliche writing subject at this point, sometimes you just want to sit down and blog about some of the video games you’ve played in a year, so that’s just what I’m going to do. The list is made up of some, not all, of the video games that either came out this year, I’d never played before this year, or had an expansion this year. I intentionally avoided covering anything I quit out of lack of desire to continue such as The Lost Child, games I just haven’t progressed far enough into to give an honest opinion about such as Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden, or games I like but simply couldn’t formulate my thoughts on at the moment such as Civilization 6 or Stellaris. Compilations of pre-2010 games like the Mega Man X Legacy Collection or Castlevania Requiem: Symphony of the Night + Rondo of Blood were also omitted from this post. There were also a few games I had planned on putting on here, but it turned out that I had actually only played last year rather than this year, such as Persona 5 and Nioh. What is time anymore, even?

Cities: Skylines (Colossal Order; March 2015 for PC, April 2017 for Xbox One, August 2017 for PlayStation 4, and September 2018 for Nintendo Switch)

Like the thriving metropoli it allows you to emulate, Colossal Order’s rightful heir to the SimCity throne has continued to update and expand. The game received two more expansions this year, Parklife and Industries, both of which seek to expand on a somewhat minor part of the base game. With Parklife, your city’s parks go from a placeable building asset to actually customizable entities you decide the size, shape, and contents of. Industries similarly turns industrial zones into more customizable spaces, allowing you to pollute and strip mine the planet to your heart’s content in a weird sort of reversal of the previous year’s Green Cities expansion. Cities: Skylines isn’t necessarily a game I play daily, but it’s definitely one that’s great to pull out on a rainy day in order to just see what sort of sprawling population center gets made this time.