A couple thoughts on bringing old games to new hardware…

In 2006, the Jak and Daxter series got its fifth installment: Daxter. It was the first game in the franchise to be developed by someone other than Naughty Dog (though Ready at Dawn’s founders did include Naughty Dog alumni). It was the series’ first midquel, taking place during the time skip at the beginning of Jak II. It was the series’ first game to be on the PSP instead of the PS2, and it was the first game to star Daxter as the main playable character instead of Jak.

Those last two factors go together. In 2006, handheld games were smaller and lesser than console ones. The limits of technology meant that to gain portability, you had to give up scope and scale and graphical fidelity and even some controls (handhelds always had fewer buttons, and it wasn’t until the Vita in 2011 that a handheld came out with dual analog sticks). The PSP was in some ways perceived as the PS2’s more-compact and less-powerful sidekick, so going from PS2 to PSP was like going from Jak to Daxter, and it made sense to embrace that in the game’s design and premise.

It’s easy to forget how much game design and marketing is driven by external cultural, technological, and political developments. It’s hard to see the shape of a moment that you’re in the middle of, but looking back can draw things into better focus. Here are two videos that do that in very different ways.

First is “playstation games that might be evil”.

This is a retrospective of some of the odder games from the first couple generations of PlayStation hardware. For people of my age who were gaming during these times, it’s nostalgic but it also recontextualizes things. It’s easy to forget that a lot of things we now take for granted in game design (perhaps most obviously, movement and camera control in 3D games) didn’t start with an obviously-correct convention and had some wide-ranging experimentation for a while, and in hindsight it’s much easier to see the cultural forces behind then-normal-and-now-weird marketing decisions. Video games are such a fast-evolving art form; it’s worth pausing to look back over the path once in a while.

Second is “Kriegsspiel! How Napoleon Accidentally Invented Strategy Games”.

This is a deeply-researched look at the evolution of strategy/war games over centuries of human history. It discusses their origins, purpose, and development, and how they are downstream of cultural and political changes and the ways people think about (and enact) real-life warfare. I’ve only dabbled in these kinds of games, but Weidman frames things clearly enough that I had no trouble following and I gained a new appreciation for how these games fit in to the way civilization has progressed.

These videos have very different vibes, but I find they improve each other. Starting with a look back at an era I lived through helped remind me how these developments feel while they are happening, and remind me that it’s possible to look back at them and understand them more deeply. That made the sweeping historical overview hit harder since I could analogize it to my own experiences and imagine how things felt at the time but also see how our modern perspective gives us a richer understanding. And looking back that far helped me understand that effects like those in the PlayStation video have been going on for as long as humanity has been creating art.

My Top Five (Non-Incremental) Games I Played in 2025

1. Wanderstop (My 2025 Game of the Year)
2. Haven
3. DC’s Justice League: Cosmic Chaos
4. Caravan SandWitch
5. The Gunk

Other Games From 2025 That Probably Would Have Made the List but I Haven’t Played Them Yet

1. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
2. Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time

I was more stressed in 2025 than I have been for a while. Based on historical data, I assume this is why I also played more games this year than I have in a while too. And because of the nature of the stress, I also played a lot of incremental games in particular. I may write some of my thoughts about their design trade-offs later; for now, here are my favorites from the year.

The Best Incremental Games I Played in 2025

1. Digseum
2. Astrodle
3. Magic Archery
4. Tower Wizard
5. Nodebuster
6. Progress Racer RPG

They say we seek in our escapism what we miss in our normal life. It’s helpful to keep this in mind when your tastes change and you find yourself drawn to something new, as it can reveal things you didn’t even realize were bothering you, and point to what you most need to fix.

For example…

For me, the start of 2025 was a stressful and unpredictable time. Without getting too into-the-weeds on my personal situation: I was working toward a very important life-changing goal and knew roughly what I needed to do, but it was something I’d never done before and a lot of the particulars were outside my control. There were significant aspects of it where I just had to wait and hope. (Everything has turned out fine so far, by the way, and I am in a much less stressful place now.)

At the same time, I suddenly found myself drawn to incremental games more than ever before. Sometimes also called “idle games” or “clicker games”, these are games where the central mechanic is Number Go Up. Typically, you accumulate a resource by clicking, and then spend that resource on various ways to make Number Go Up faster, such as increasing the amount of resource rewarded by each click or making it so that the resource is also accumulated passively over time. A ton of games have built on this basic formula in a lot of varied and interesting ways, but that’s the heart of the genre.

That means these games are more directly about progress itself than most games (heck, the generally-accepted “first” incremental game is called “Progress Quest”). And that progress is clear (you can see Number and watch how fast it Go Up), player-driven (it’s your own actions or choices that make Number Go Up), and inevitable (there’s some challenge to figuring out the best sequence of actions to make Number Go Up as fast as possible, but as long as you keep doing things Number will Go Up).

In thinking about this, I am reminded of Bennett Foddy’s introduction to Getting Over It, in which he contrasts his game to ones that are “empowering” and “inch you steadily forward”. And while there is definitely a place for games that reject that paradigm, there’s also a place for games that embrace it.

Incremental games helped me avoid feeling powerless at a time when I couldn’t tell if I was moving in the direction I needed to go. I’m grateful for them.

My Game of the Year

• Dungeons of Hinterberg

Literally the Only Other 2024 Game I Played This Year

• Cat Quest III

Game I Played the Most This Year

• Farming Simulator 22, which I still play with Senpai-chan

Games I Returned to This Year

• Faerie Solitaire Remastered, which kept me sane in a lot of hour-long work meetings for which I had to be on camera the whole time but only needed to pay attention for a couple of minutes
• Orbit, an obscure game for an obscure platform that scratches a specific itch that’s otherwise pretty hard to scratch these days

Game Which I Might Have Bought This Year, Except I Felt Burned on Early Adoption of Indie Titles

• Caravan SandWitch, which seemed fun and chill, but after both of the indie games I bought and played around their release had significant updates adding content and polish after I finished playing them, I felt like I was being punished for early adoption and remembered why I often wait to play indie games

There’s a subgenre of game where you launch something and it travels a distance based partly on skill and partly on luck, and the further you manage to go the more resources you collect which you can then spend on upgrades that let you go farther and farther. Like Yetisports: Pingu Throw with a progression treadmill, and kind of a precursor to endless runners like Canabalt and its descendants.

I feel like there were a lot of these for a while, but people largely stopped making this kind of game. Maybe the mechanics were a bit too simple, or maybe endless runners were more appealing. But even the games that were made are now mostly lost to time. The problem is that their style of gameplay as well as the era in which they were popular meant they were mostly Flash games, which of course is now a dead platform, or early iOS games, which is an anti-preservation platform. (Or both.)

One of my favorites was Orbit, which came out exclusively as a PlayStation Mini. Like PlayStation Mobile, PlayStation Minis are a now-defunct platform of small digital-only games. These were aimed primarily at the PSP, but also often playable on the PS3 and later the Vita and PlayStation TV. I think the Minis might technically still be purchasable and downloadable if you have the right hardware, but some of them (including Orbit) are long-since delisted.

If you weren’t in the PlayStation ecosystem when Sony was pushing PlayStation Minis, it’s hard to even find evidence they ever existed. Try searching “PlayStation Mini” now and you’ll mostly just find results for the PlayStation Classic instead. So Orbit is even deader than the Flash or early mobile games of its ilk.

These games were pretty popular, but they effectively only existed for a few years and have been all-but wiped from history. Their remembered impact is so minor that I can’t even find an agreed-upon genre name for them (I call them “distance games”).

It’s a shame, because sometimes this sort of mindless progression is just what the doctor ordered, and I feel like it would still be right at home on mobile. Maybe they just don’t monetize as well as gacha bullshit.

There are two main reasons that game genres are such a mess. The first, which seems to be slightly better known, is that categories are hard. But the second reason, which is both more important and less understood, is this:

A game’s genre label isn’t really about that game. It’s about every other game.

Genre labels are shorthand used for setting expectations. They convey what sort of experience a game provides by invoking a shared reference point. Claiming that a game belongs to a certain genre is a statement that the game is, in important ways, similar to other games in that genre and different from other games outside that genre. Therefore, the most useful genre label for a game depends completely on which other games do and do not have that label.

Suppose Apex Legends had come out in 1994. The exact same game, played the exact same way. It would have been called a “DOOM clone”. That would have been the most useful label at the time. But since it instead came out in 2019, into a world that had seen Team Fortress 2, Overwatch, Battleborn, and so on, it was more useful to call it a “hero shooter”. The only difference was which other games people were familiar with.

The best-known example of someone trying to push this in the other direction is of course Hideo Kojima referring to Death Stranding as the first “strand game” when nobody knows what that means. This completely fails to clarify what kind of experience the game provides. But who knows; maybe in a few years “strand” will be a widely-understood genre label.

It’s expected for the set of commonly-used genre labels and their meanings to shift over time, and for this to accelerate as more games are created more rapidly. And on top of that, the more games come out, the smaller the percentage of them that even the experts can possibly be familiar with.

I don’t really play shmups so it is not particularly useful to me to distinguish between their subtypes. For my purposes, a bullet hell game and a trance shooter game are in the same genre. I literally didn’t even know that “trance shooter” was considered a shmup subtype until I looked it up just now, even though one of the listed examples is Super Stardust HD which is one of my favorites! But of course, to people who care a lot about these particular types of games, the distinctions are significant and having the subgenre labels is quite useful.

Add this all together, and what we have is: genre labels are hard to define, shift over time, and mean different things to different people. This is fine. The goal of a genre label is to compare a game to the constantly-shifting reference points around it; of course it will also be constantly shifting. Trying to “fix” this by getting super-technical and specific with your definition is like trying to plant a flag in the ocean.

(Naturally all this applies to genres in all kinds of media, and a lot of other categories too.)

For me, the most important thing an RPG can do is make its setting feel like a real world inhabited by real people. Having recently played Star Ocean: The Divine Force and Star Ocean: The Second Story R back to back has provided me with a couple nicely illustrative examples to share. Minor/vague spoilers follow for both games.

I’ve been playing Star Ocean: The Second Story R and loving it.

Among the many improvements in this remake are some that make it much easier to collect different endings (much appreciated since there are ninety-nine of them). I decided to make myself a checklist tool, and then I figured I might as well publish it. Pretty niche, but maybe someone out there will get some value from it. So here it is.

Star Ocean: The Second Story R Ending Checklist

Oh, and happy new year.