Games Beaten 2026

[MrPopo]

Previous Years: 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025

1. Dead Space (2023) - PC
2. Dead Space 2 - PC
3. Dead Space 3 - PC
4. The Legend of Heroes: Trails Beyond the Horizon - PS5
5. Stellar Blade - PS5
6. Dragon Quest VII Reimagined - Switch
7. Silent Hill 2 (2024) - PC
8. Silent Hill f - PC
9. Resident Evil Requiem - PC
10. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Hyperstone Heist - Genesis
11. Sins of a Solar Empire II - PC
12. Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War! - PC
13. Gauntlet Dark Legacy - GC

Gauntlet roared back into the arcades with Gauntlet Legends, bringing the classic gameplay into the 3D era. Dark Legacy is effectively an expansion pack, adding four new realms and four new heroes, as well as a new final boss. It's a pure upgrade to Legends, and the home version is even better.

The four new heroes are effectively variants of the original four; each one specializes in one of the four stats, but they have a minor shift in the stats (e.g. 50 more of one stat and 50 less of another). Reall, it comes down to which turbo attack you prefer for a given stat specialization. Just like the original four heroes, the new ones are linked to one of the four new realms. The stages in the new realms are substantially larger than the original, and have more interesting stage design. The home version adds a few more stages than the arcade version has.

There's two other significant changes in the home conversion (other than removing the auto health drain because it's not in the arcade). The first is that items now are toggleable, letting you build up an inventory and bust them out when it is useful, rather than right as you get them. This makes the anti-death aura much more powerful, as you can always have it ready when you find death. The second is the game forces you into taking the realms in a particular order. Each realm requires you to collect a certain number of colored crystals to unlock, with the vast bulk of them available in the immediate preceding realm. The realms are also grouped together; to unlock a group of realms you need to collect a certain amount of a special item in the previous group. These items drop off of certain special mobs, as well as sometimes existing as special treasures.

The bosses are significantly tougher than the arcade version; it's expected that you collect the items in the realms that weaken them, and those items are almost never in the same realm. You'll probably want to wait until you're in the late game to do a big sweep of the bosses. The nature of them means you need a certain amount of health and raw stats to be able to beat them, as avoiding their attacks is not very viable. It is still an arcade game, after all.

Overall, this is the best iteration of the franchise. There's enough going on that you need to keep your head and react to what's going on, managing your resources. If you enjoy this type of game, this is the one to get.

[REPO Man]

Why we haven't gotten a full-on remaster of Dark Legacy on modern consoles, I'll never figure out. It would slap HARD with online and local co-op multiplayer sessions.

[ElkinFencer10]

but even the worst Resident Evil game (which, of course, is Resident Evil 5)

This take is so hot it's single handedly causing global warming. 6 is the worst Resident Evil.

Resident Evil 6 had Leon. Therefore Resident Evil 5 is worse.

[MrPopo]

Resident Evil 5 had Wesker, so that ties the Leon energy. RE6 is trying to start a new story and fails miserably at it, not to mention not even bothering to pretend like it might be something other than CoD Zombies.

[RobertAugustdeMeijer]

I hear some hardcore gamers love Resident Evil 6 for its gameplay. Can anyone explain?

[Ack]

I don't know anything about RE6, but RE5 has casual colonial racism and Chris Redfield punching a boulder. So, you know, peak Resident Evil.

[ElkinFencer10]

I accidentally edited my Resident Evil 9 post instead of quoting it....>_<

Games Beaten in 2026 - 6
* denotes a replay

January (2 Games Beaten)

1. Metal Slug 2 - Neo Geo - January 20*
2. Metal Slug X - Neo Geo - January 25*

February (1 Game Beaten)

3. Metal Slug 3- Neo Geo - February 23*

March (3 Games Beaten)

4. Star Trek: Voyager - Across the Unknown - Switch 2 - March 2
5. Resident Evil: Requiem - PlayStation 5 - March 5
6. Pokemon Pokopia - Switch 2 - March 19

6. Pokemon Pokopia - Switch 2 - March 19



Pokemon Pokopia is a game that I don’t think many expected to be a smash hit. I was on the fence about it until the last minute, preordering more because it was a Pokemon game than because I thought I’d actually enjoy the game. The first three or four hours seemed to prove my initial hesitation valid; it was fun, but it felt monotonous and boring. Then it just...clicked, and I was addicted. A game I expected to play for five hours and then drop ended up being a game I’ve spent nearly 100 hours and counting on. On paper, it looks like a game that should bore me after the initial impression fades - a building life management sim. It’s almost a perfect blend of Dragon Quest Builders and Animal Crossing: New Horizons, even going so far as reusing some of New Horizons’s sound effects.



The premise of Pokopia is actually pretty cool. There has been a climatological catastrophe that has rendered the planet unfit for human habitation. You, a Ditto, awaken unsure of where you are or what has happened. All you have are vague memories of your trainer. You meet a well-read Tangrowth - seemingly the only other Pokemon anywhere around - who convinces you to try rebuilding the town in hopes that it will draw humans and Pokemon back. And that becomes your overarching goal. There are four main areas, each a unique biome and vibe, that you will need to rebuild - the field area in which you initially awaken, a beach area, a mountain area, and a city area. That’s floating high above the clouds for some reason. I stopped questioning Pokemon logic when they introduced baby Pokemon. There is also a fifth area which is intended to be for post-game content but is actually accessible from the very start if you want to skip straight there. It’s basically a completely blank slate with nothing but a Pokemon Center and a workbench for you to build up as you please. There are Pokemon that only appear here, so if you’re going for a full Pokedex, you’ll need to build up this area, but it’s your canvas to develop in any way your creativity whims dictate.



Pokopia is only available on Switch 2 - this isn’t a cross-gen release with versions for both Switch and Switch 2 - and while GameFreak may technically have gotten it to run on Switch, seeing how Legends Z-A and Scarlet/Violet run on Switch and how Pokopia runs on Switch 2, I doubt it would be at any acceptable performance quality. To be clear, Pokopia runs quite well on Switch 2. There are only a few places where I noticed slowdown, and that was mostly during transitions or when there is a lot going on at once, both rare occurrences. If there’s any slowdown on Switch 2, however, I have my doubts about how well the original Switch could have handled it. That’s probably the main reason (in addition to pushing expansion of the new system’s install base) that Nintendo chose not to pursue a Switch version. I think that was a proper decision. What I think was a very improper decision was to make the physical release a game-key card. I’ve accepted these abominations as the new normal for third party releases, but Nintendo had always said - and thus far abided by - that first party titles would not use game-key cards. Despite that, Pokopia breaks that and is a game-key card. It’s not the end of the world - an all-digital experience is inevitable, so even game-key cards just postpone the inevitable a little - but does feel like a bit of a betrayal to the players who like physical games.



Having gotten the nastiness of the game-key card business out of the way, let’s take a look at the game’s sound and visual design. The game, while not stunningly gorgeous in any way, looks great. It takes the cartoonier look that Dragon Quest Builders and Animal Crossing always have, and that makes it feel like it fits right in visually with modern HD Pokemon games. The Pokemon models look great, and most importantly, the environments look great. This is especially true of the water. It’s certainly not photo-realistic water with accurate ripple and mist animations, but it looks great within the confines of the game’s art style, and there is a sort of mist effect at the bottom of waterfalls. There were a few decorations that I felt should have had better looking models, but all in all, I’ve been very pleased with the look of the game. I’ve also been quite pleased with the sound design. Background music is pleasant but unobtrusive, and the sound effects are spot on from Pokemon cries to the splat that Ditto makes if you jump from too high a place and land hard (don’t worry; there’s no falling damage here). Throughout the game, you will find CDs as rare treasures. These can be used with one of the few CD player decorations you’ll encounter throughout the game to play music from the main series games spanning all the way from the original release of Red and Green on Game Boy to Scarlet and Violet on Switch. I don’t usually end up using them outside of one or two especially iconic tracks, but I love that they were included as collectable items.



The thing that will be the make or break for people with Pokopia is patience and willingness to endure tedium. If you’ve played Minecraft or Dragon Quest Builders, you know exactly what I mean. I have spent DOZENS of hours clearing out mountains to build cave homes, flattening mountaintops to build villages, and building structures one block at a time. That’s before I spend even more hours decorating the buildings to suit a Pokemon’s taste. How happy your Pokemon are in a given area determines its environment rank, and for progression, you’ll need to get every area at least to level five, but each area has a maximum environment rank of ten. Every rank you advance opens new challenges that can be completed for Life Coins, used at the PC to buy rare items and unlock new recipes. I always had every area at rank ten before I even finished that area’s main missions, but I was also a bit...obsessive-compulsive with making Pokemon as happy as possible. At least until I hit rank ten; after that, I don’t care if they live in squalor and misery.



I finished the main story in Pokopia and rolled credits Thursday night, but here I am on Monday, still chugging away reshaping the landscape, building up my settlement, and overengineering a completely unnecessary and over-the-top railroad system connecting the various parts of the map. This is the kind of game that most will probably get their fill of and never touch again, and I’m no exception to that, but while I am getting my fill and scratching that creativity itch, I’m having a significantly better time than I expected. This is one surprise hit I can definitely recommend to anyone who enjoys creative or construction games regardless of attachment to the Pokemon IP.

[MrPopo]

Previous Years: 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025

1. Dead Space (2023) - PC
2. Dead Space 2 - PC
3. Dead Space 3 - PC
4. The Legend of Heroes: Trails Beyond the Horizon - PS5
5. Stellar Blade - PS5
6. Dragon Quest VII Reimagined - Switch
7. Silent Hill 2 (2024) - PC
8. Silent Hill f - PC
9. Resident Evil Requiem - PC
10. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Hyperstone Heist - Genesis
11. Sins of a Solar Empire II - PC
12. Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War! - PC
13. Gauntlet Dark Legacy - GC
14. A Street Cat's Tale 2: Outside is Dangerous - Switch

A Street Cat's Tale was a well-crafted indie about the life of a recently orphaned cat left to fend for himself on the streets. It was heartwarming and sad all at once, as you followed the various potential storylines within the time constraints of a run. The sequel, instead, has a heavier narrative, giving every player the same emotional rollercoaster (no accidentally leaving a sad ending for the last one you get). However, it does suffer a bit from its expanded scope, as the devs seem to have overreached their technical abilities.

The game follows Cinnamon, a cat who accidentally gets out of his human's window and ends up lost on the street. He is picked up by a group of street cats who have carved out some territory and is taught vital survival skills. The game follows his story as he experiences life on the street and hopefully finds his human again.

Like the first game, an important part of the game loop is managing your health and hunger; if your hunger runs out you can't take important actions like defending yourself. You'll need to search trash cans and kill mice to find the food to keep you going. The game has a main questline that will take you through the story, as well as various sidequests available from other cats and from humans. Often, you'll need to build up the affection of other NPCs through talking to them and giving them gifts. You can only do it a limited number of times per day, but it resets when you sleep (which also refills your health and food).

Compared to the first game you have a much larger inventory, but this ends up being used by the devs to have the sidequests all require you to grab a bunch of copies of a given item. What makes this especially annoying is many of these items are random drops. Similarly, some quests require you to get very high affection with NPCs, and because of the action limited nature you end up having to effectively grind by talking/gifting and then sleeping, repeatedly, to move things forward.

The game also has a couple of segments where you have to go through a sokobon-style dungeon to unlock a new area to explore. They aren't too difficult, but they feel very tacked on, as you complete both before the midway point of the game. After that, it's entirely just talking to NPCs, collecting items, and raising their affection to move things forward.

The game only has one ending, but you can unlock additional scenes by building your affection with the various NPCs. Like the first, it's a mixture of heartwarming and sad. But it never quite stabs you in the heart as much as the first game. And since the various NPC cats are part of the extended endings, it overall generates a more positive feeling for the player.

All in all, it's a solid successor to the first game and its themes, but mechanically it is a weaker game. But neither game is one that you're playing for the raw gameplay; it's for how the gameplay helps convey the game's themes.

[PartridgeSenpai]

Partridge Senpai's 2026 Beaten Games:
Previously: 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025
* indicates a repeat

1. Final Fantasy XII (PS2)
2. We Were Here (Steam)
3. We Were Here Too (Steam)
4. Tales of Graces f (PS3) *
5. Retro Game Challenge (Switch) *
6. We Were Here Forever (Steam)
7. Tales of Hearts R (PSVita) *
8. Ghostbusters: The Video Game Remastered (PC)
9. Mega Man 11 (PC)
10. Gravity Circuit (PC)
11. Mario Party DS (DS)
12. Ghost of Tsushima (PS5)
13. Ghost of Tsushima: Iki Island (PS5)
14. Astro's Playroom (PS5)
15. Michael Jackson: The Experience (PSP)
16. Sackboy: A Big Adventure (PS5)
17. Control (PS4)
18. White Album (PS3)
19. Super Mario Advance 2: Super Mario World (GBA)

20. Kirby's Epic Yarn (Wii)

This is a game I dabbled with a little bit on my own more than a decade ago, but it never really grabbed me enough to stick with it. Fast forward to last year, and I managed to find this for super cheap out here in Japan. My wife loves Kirby, so this seemed like an obvious choice to play through together with her at some point. We didn't get to doing it last summer, but we finally got to playing through it this spring (even if it wasn't exactly worth the wait ^^; ). It ultimately took us about 7.5 hours to play through the Japanese version of the game getting 73% completion (doing all but 5 or 6 extra levels).

Epic Yarn starts with Kirby lounging around hungry as he often does. All of a sudden, he spots a delicious looking tomato and starts to suck it right up! Unfortunately for him, this tomato already has an owner. Yin-Yarn, the evil sorcerer is pretty peeved about Kirby stealing his snack, and he proceeds to suck Kirby into the magical sock he wears around his neck. Kirby soon finds himself in Patch Land, where everything is made of yarn (even Kirby!). He then meets Prince Fluff, who tells him about Yin-Yarn, and how he's been wreaking havoc on Patch Land, tearing it into pieces and giving his goons the run of the place. Kirby and Fluff set out to restore Patch Land and stop the evil Yin-Yarn before he can spread his destruction any further, like into Dream Land itself! It's a fairly light story, but that's typical for a Kirby game. It's got some cute characters, and the storybook presentation is really charming too. It's also fairly weird to have so much voice acting in a Kirby game, but it comes off as someone reading you a story, with narrator not just narrating, but voicing characters too. The vignettes between worlds aren't anything deep or important, but seeing Prince Fluff and Kirby get up to nonsense always managed to make me smile, so I never minded it~.

What I did end up minding more was the gameplay. This game is a sidescrolling platformer just like most Kirby games, but it's also pretty infamous for being a "baby game" due to one of the fundamental aspects of its design is that you cannot die. You have no health bar, and even falling into an abyss doesn't do anything but put you back a little bit. Each stage has various collectibles to find to decorate your apartment back at Prince Fluff's castle as well as tons of beads to collect. These beads can be collected to earn higher tier medals on each stage, and losing these beads is the only actual penalty for taking damage or falling into pits. It makes for an awkward reward and punishment system. You naturally want to platform well and not get hit, but there's no *real* punishment in terms of gameplay for getting hit outside of not getting 100% completion on a stage. The only time this really matters is on boss stages, because getting enough beads on those unlocks an extra two stages per world, so it's a pretty significant amount of game locked behind playing well enough. Stage design is generally quite solid, spread between normal platforming and Yoshi's Island-like vehicle transformation sections, and it can even get awfully challenging too in those unlockable stages.

However, how engaging you find that "challenge" is ultimately going to hinge pretty strongly on how well you gel with that punishment system. If you're someone who just wants to see the end of the game, you're probably going to be woefully bored by this game. If you're someone who wants full completion, then you're going to have a heck of a time doing it. The penalty for getting hit is losing a LOT of beads proportional to your current total held, and it's very easy for one or two mistakes (particularly if they happen later on in a stage) to make you replay the stage over again from the start if you want any hope of getting that gold medal. That goes double for if you happen to be playing with a buddy, because despite the game's premise pretty strongly encouraging co-op, this is a surprisingly poor co-op experience.

The long and short of it is that the stages are designed for a single-player game first and foremost, and that only gets more and more apparent as you get farther and farther into the game. Culprit #1 for what makes it so obvious is the camera and how it is *way* too zoomed in for 2 players. It's not a huge problem in the earlier easier stages, but it quickly becomes one in later stages. Platforming challenges demand such speed (especially with very fast-moving transformations like the dolphin) that they very frequently become incredibly awkward to do with two people simultaneously. Then someone gets hit or dies, and then you've gotta play the stage allll over again if you can't get back to where you were and get all those beads back. There were even several times where we both got killed because the stage split into two sections but didn't expect you to take both, so we both got sandwiched by the edges of the screen and fell into pits where we lost boat loads of beads. It doesn't do anything but breed frustration in the players if you're going for any kind of completionism, and even if you're not, it still makes for a crappy play experience when you're so heavily discouraged from doing anything but a very direct follow the leader. Sure, you do have the same "press A to bubble" safety feature that New Super Mario Bros. Wii had, but that game's more wide-open stages just made it a far better experience for multiple people than this game ever did for us.

The presentation is a really mixed bag, but it's still pretty clearly cut where the winners and losers are. On the winning side, we have the graphics. On the higher Wii graphical settings, the yarn and craft textures look really beautiful (even if the game does experience some slowdown when things get really hectic, especially with two players). On the losing side, you've got most of the music. It's not incompetently made or anything, but the softer piano-focused tunes really do not pep you up for a higher speed or engaging platforming experience for me. It really hit home with me when the game started doing Kirby's Epic Yarn versions of older classic Kirby tracks just how little punch these songs have to them, and the whole thing ended up being really forgettable background noise for me.

Verdict: Not Recommended. While it's far from the worst game in the world, but compared to the previous year's New Super Mario Bros. Wii or especially the following year's Rayman Origins, it's very hard for me to look at Kirby's Epic Yarn and call it anything remotely close to a compelling or contemporaneously competitive co-op platformer. With just how many better and newbie-friendly co-op platformers have come out since (like the Nabbit mode in NSMBU on Switch), it's really hard for me to recommend this game at all, even as something to get very new/young players into the genre. I'd think that unless someone were *very* young or not very engaged by the challenge of it all, they'd become either bored or frustrated with the lack of deaths or punishing bead loss feature to the point where you would've been better off picking a different game in the first place rather than this.

[ElkinFencer10]

Gotta disagree with your verdict on Epic Yarn, Pidge. I absolutely adored the game. It's a super chill, relaxed experience and oozes cute charm, in my opinion.