Happy Complete Solar Orbit!
I don’t know about you, but for me this particular trip around the sun felt uniquely… eventful. Read: 2018 can actually choke on my dick. Man, oh man, was this the roughest one in my books, folks. And I don’t say that to be trendy.
But a terrible year on the whole doesn’t mean great things haven’t happened! Despite everything, video games continued to be a huge source of fun for me in an otherwise taxing 2018.
So, in an effort to remember those little pockets of awesome, I want to highlight some dumb, but outstanding games—or moments they brought me—rather than do an assessment of objectively good games I’ve played this past year, because doing so will be a blast to write and hopefully something positive to read.
Now, if you’ll indulge me, here are some games (not strictly from 2018) that improved my existence this past year in no real order. Maybe I can carry some of the things they brought me over into 2019. Enjoy!
The Jackbox Party Pack 3
I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but chances are more than likely that you are reading this article thanks to a combination of contained lightning and beams to/from space. This fact routinely delights me to think about and I hope that never stops.
Playing The Jackbox Party Pack 3 is one of my absolute favorite uses of space and lightning. As someone who left a small town for a city in a different country right after high school, this game has been the perfect way to stay in touch with my family and friends from home, as well as to meet some new folks.
Now, I don’t have as much to say about this game as I do about the others on this list (largely because there are multiple games to play within Party Pack 3), but trust me when I say this entry is definitely a favorite of mine. Especially Quiplash 2 and Tee K.O.
2019: Goof around via space and lightning.
Cuphead
Alright, admittedly this entry should surprise absolutely no one who read my Cuphead animation article. But I’m not in the business of lying to you, and my pants would burst into flames if I didn’t mention how much fun I had playing this game. Side note: Would a lie of omission still cause pants fires? Leave your answer in the comments.
This past year, I both S-ranked and P-ranked Cuphead, and got all the achievements in the game.
Let’s talk about the way my feelings towards any game I’ve played can be categorized because I’m not sure how relatable this is gonna be if I don’t.
- 10% of games = Head over heels for
- 85% of games = Good/fine
- 5% of games = Actively dislike
Now, that ‘good/fine’ category has its own hierarchies within itself and I haven’t given the ‘actively dislike’ games a proper assessment. But when I fall head over heels for a game, I notice I do it in almost the same way every time:
- I absolutely hate the game and put it down after a very short time.
- I take the game back up after a little while and decide maybe it isn’t so bad.
- It’s all I’m playing and I totally fail to realize how deep it has me sucked in.
- I replay the game immediately after beating it.
- I collect all the stuff, do all the things, get all the achievements, etc.
- Suddenly there’s nothing left to do in the game and like the dawn breaking over a new day, I realize, “Oh, I think I loved that game.”
I’m slightly worried I have occasional bouts of video game Stockholm syndrome.
This really isn’t much of a dramatization; these games completely blindside me. In any case, I can say pretty much unequivocally that this is the exact process I went through with Cuphead. And the weird part is, I really couldn’t tell you why.
The games I fall for don’t have much in common with each other. My hypothesis is that the barrier between the 10% and 85% comes down to simple subjectivity. Which is to say I think I love them because I just really super duper do. And not to get all Plato’s Symposium-y with this, but I don’t think you really need a reason to love something. (Plato doesn’t know it, but he and I have some real beef.)
It’s no secret how much pure admiration and adoration I have for the art and animation in Cuphead. But I genuinely don’t think that’s part of the equation. I wouldn’t have S-ranked all the bosses because I love the art. All you do is replay the bosses, but everything is harder; there are no new animation sequences or anything. I definitely wouldn’t have gotten that Bravo Zulu P-26 achievement because of the art style, I’ll tell you that.
Sometimes I will go on Twitch and watch people playing Cuphead because I miss what it’s like to not have played it. That’s how bad this game has me in its clutches.
Also, and this is completely irrelevant, but in doing so I’ve discovered that Twitch streamers thanking people who have subbed to them or have given them bits is one of my favorite things that currently happens in the world. The streamers are always so genuinely thankful when they say it, but everyone on Twitch has ridiculous usernames. So this year I heard Twitch streamers thank in all seriousness, from the bottom of their hearts, such users as Cannibisaurus_Rex and, if I remember correctly, fartboy6969. Again, this has nothing to do with Cuphead, I just will never not find this funny and I want as many people to know as possible.
In all seriousness though, truly, I think Cuphead just happens to be one of my absolute, exact jams. It’s wonderful that I can add this game to my head over heels list because I know what it took to make that game and its existence still completely baffles me. I’m also glad to have found another game that’s made me fall in love with it for no real reason.
2019: Love something unjustifiably.
The Impossible Quiz
This game doesn’t deserve the attention I’m going to give it. But I’m going to do it anyway.
For those of you who may not know, the Impossible Quiz is a Flash game made in what I can only describe as the height of ‘lol random XD’ internet humor. I do not remember when or how I first came across it. From what I can recall, I found it around the same time I played RuneScape.
Turns out I still know my login for RuneScape and was able to get a 10-year anniversary cape. (I use the only life I’ll ever get to do very important things.) Anyway, that cape tells me I must’ve stumbled across the Impossible Quiz somewhere around 2008 or 2009, possibly earlier.
This is not a joke, but I wish it was. Almost without fail, at some point during most years, I have one day in which my mission in life is to defeat the Impossible Quiz.
Alas, 2018 was not the year of victory, but I sure did come close.
The quiz does not list how long it is, but I believe it consists of 100 main questions followed by a final set of ten questions called the Epic Ten. Most questions are multiple choice, though some questions are more akin to mini-games and some simply require the player to click the screen frequently. It is very much so a mixed bag.
There are a number of skip arrows you can collect throughout the game that allow you to skip questions. Last year, I discovered that if you make it to what is probably the very last question in the quiz, you cannot pass it unless you have collected and not used every skip arrow in the game. So this time around I focused my energy on figuring out the answers to the questions I had skipped so I can be done with it.
Is this game funny to me anymore? No. Would I recommend this game to anyone? Absolutely not. Do I want with every fiber of my being to one day conquer my digital nemesis? You bet your sweet bippy I do.
As far as I’m concerned, I’ll never have a real nemesis because, contrary to popular belief, my life is not a cartoon. And as much as I would love to have my own Gary Oak equivalent constantly outdoing me and yelling ‘eat my shorts’ periodically, I’ll settle for this dumb internet quiz game.
Why did this game make my list when I played objectively better games this year? I kid you not, I included this game because possessing the knowledge of my own stupid, decade long rivalry with a Flash game genuinely makes me smile on a bad day and giggle to myself on a good day, and sometimes that’s the most valuable thing you can get from a game or anything else, for that matter.
I’m an adult. Like a real, actual adult. I have a credit score. I bought trash cans and a toilet plunger for the apartment I lease from another adult. Heck—one time I built a 3D printer from a kit! I’m a pretty capable person, I’d like to think. Yet, for a decade I have been routinely defeated by a Flash game. And that is simply hilarious to me.
If you haven’t already guessed, my sense of humor is not particularly sophisticated, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
2019: Laugh at your own dumb self.
Mario Kart (Wii and 8 Deluxe)
Mario Kart Wii
Mario Kart Wii gets a shoutout because this past year, as happens most years, I played it with some of my best friends in the world, and the people you play games with truly makes all the difference. One of us becomes just about deadly silent in concentration, the other becomes engulfed in what I can only describe as an Achilles-like rage, and I myself devolve into a state in which I produce wordless, goofy sounds to communicate my frustrations and triumphs.
If you do not have an activity in which you and your friends can watch yourselves revert back into children, I would highly recommend finding that thing or things.
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
That being said, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is the star of this entry because of one very specific instance.
For the past year/year and a half, I have been trying to get people to play Mario Kart 8 on Switch with me at airports. Do you know what people hate? Airports. Do you know what people love? Mario Kart.
If someone asked me if I wanted to play Mario Kart with them at an airport, it would absolutely make my day. So I’ve taken to asking anyone who looks interested or bored to race me whenever I find myself in an airport. Sadly, I often get seated next to suited up business men who decline the offer, and I’m not the world’s most gregarious person so I don’t exactly ask every person I see at the gates.
But this last time I flew, a little before boarding was scheduled to start, a younger guy sat down one seat away from me. No laptop open, no phone up. He looked a little bored, possibly a little anxious. I saw my chance.
I leaned over to him and asked if he wanted to race. He seemed to cheer up a little and accepted the challenge. The guy wasted no time in picking the Inkling girl as his racer and we were off. We played the first two races of the Mushroom Cup on 50cc before the flight boarded.
I was over the freaking moon that I had finally roped someone into my nonsense.
Cut to me taking my seat on the plane. As I wait for my seatmate to arrive, I see Mario Kart guy. I kid you not—like a scene out of a movie, he looks at his ticket and we’re seated next to each other. As soon as we could deploy the trays we played for the rest of our short flight.
(Massive shout out to the Norwegian, Yu-Gi-Oh!–playing physics major who played Mario Kart with me that flight. Hope you made it to Antigonish alright.)
That was by far the most fun I’ve had on a plane, possibly the best in-person gaming experience I’ve had with a man generally, and the best interaction with a random person concerning video games I think I’ve ever had.
The most recent random game interaction I had happened while playing Fortnite. I forgot that my lady voice pretty much outs my gender when I play with a headset mic and that it can drastically change how I’m perceived by people. Basically, I played a round with a couple of Twitch streamers who definitely over-fixated on the whole me being female thing to an audience I couldn’t see for the entire game. It was terrible and I had to report them. Yours truly has seen some real shit over the years and despite having written an entire article on guy’s butts, I’m really not a fan of assholes.
So this random guy on a plane agreeing to play Mario Kart, him and I racing civilly, and then us going our separate ways probably meant way more to me than he’ll ever know. It really doesn’t take much to make someone’s day and to not be a jerk.
In any case, chase your little dreams this year. Find another nerd who will race you in the sky—it can happen. 2019: Sky dorks unite.
That’s My Spiel
Let’s be real, I’m not going to be able to end on a better note than “2019: Sky dorks unite.” So instead, I want to leave you, dear reader, with a list of other things that made me happy in a year where that sometimes felt like the hardest thing in the world. This has nothing to do with video games, but it made me exorbitantly happy to write, and to me that’s a pretty good indication that it might be worth including to some capacity.
And let’s be real. If you made it this far you’ve already suffered through an unnecessary and vague jab at Plato, random Twitch anecdotes, and other general nonsense of my own invention.
So as a bonus, here are some things that really, truly brought me joy, as big, small, or dumb as they are, in 2018.
Family and friends, singing the original Pokemon theme song but imitating Julie Andrews, singing “Total Eclipse of the Heart” but imitating Julie Andrews, New Year’s Eve, voice chatting over Discord, seeing musicals at work, experiencing the hardest I’ve ever cried while laughing hysterically at Patton Oswalt’s “Annihilation” comedy special, Bo Burnham’s “Make Happy” comedy special, John Mulaney’s “Kid Gorgeous” comedy special, Pete Holmes’s bit about magic/magicians, Russell Howard’s “Mr. Dildo” bit which actually made me cry too, the You Suck at Cooking YouTube channel, falling in love with the McElroy family’s podcasts, completely reexperiencing “Over the Garden Wall” two different times and loving it more and more every time I watch it, my tattoo, my parents’ ‘stripper names’ (first pet, first street you lived on), making art, writing, my cat, my old dog, I guess the evil cat too, awesome animation, remembering all the fantastic grocery store interactions I’ve had, the knowledge that there was an actual, real human alive at one time whose name was Hatevil Nutter, vine compilations, meeting amazing people, ice skating, swimming, remembering the time I punched someone in the face, remembering the time I got punched in the face (totally separate occasions), a well-earned shower and/or sleep, inventing homestyle mac and cheese but with Flamin’ Hot Cheetos crumbled over the top instead of bread crumbs or whatever, the fact that birds are basically small dinosaurs that hop around and sing all day, my fake conspiracy theory about dino ghosts that no one in the world finds as funny as I do even though it came from my own brain, ordering mint tea and cookies on an airplane and dipping the cookies in the tea like a goddamn sophisticated adult (a technique I stole from a real adult), my sister saying “I’m making chicken parmesan” in her ‘Italian’ accent, spontaneously bitching to my mom about a movie I thought was dumb for a solid 30 minutes straight all while cackling because I couldn’t handle how dumb I thought the movie was, my dad’s *secret quest* and all the ensuing drama, sfogliatelle, grossly mispronouncing sfogliatelle, creating horrible, tooth-stealing monsters for a tabletop game I ran, the way Michelangelo paints/sculpts women as if they’re just extremely beefy men with grapefruits stapled to their chests (please Google this), thinking about the moment when I found out Prince had died (I don’t hate Prince, it’s a long story and I hope I never forget it as long as I live), that one picture of me in eighth grade, more stuff I don’t feel like writing out, and most surprisingly of all—my current self?
Woof, what a year. Best of luck to everyone in 2019!
