2025, at least in my country, was pretty much a shit show. Perhaps the less said, the better. But as messy as everything was, I will admit gaming wise, this was a really good year for me. Easily in the top top 3 years of my adult life, but games themselves were only part of the reason.

1. Finally joined the current generation and picked up a PS5

Honestly, I think I could have stuck with the PS4 for one more year. There's still so many titles that I want to pick up that I never got around to that. I don't feel like I'd be missing out on too much by not being in the current gen of games. But that said, I would have missed out on Astro Bot, and by God if that isn't the best damn 3D platformer I've played in a decade I don't know what is. I also used it as an excuse to play a few older games I hadn't gone around to like cuphead and Hades. Hades in particular is going to go down in my top 10 of all time I think. I spent over 90 hours with it, and really I think I could have easily put in another 10 or 20.

Aside from Hades I also played a few other notable games. Balatro was amazing and one of the best handheld games I've ever played. Final Fantasy 3 pixel remaster won't make any best of all time lists, but after 30 years of wondering about it, I'm glad I finally got to play it. And Visions of Mana was a game I waited almost as long on. It certainly wasn't the greatest game I've ever played, but visually at least, it was everything I have wanted from the series.

2. I started streaming, and miraculously people watch me

Thanks to TikTok, I guess I'm a game streamer now. I still don't entirely get why people will spend an hour or two watching, but they do. And it's actually been a lot of fun. To be completely fair, I only have about a dozen actual followers who tune in week after week. The rest is more dependent on what game I'm playing. And that's something I find fascinating, which games attract an audience and which games did not. Nintendo games from the 2000s to 2015 seem to be popular. Yoshi's Wooly World, Kirby's Epic Yarn and Rayman Legends brought in as many as 50 people to watch at a time. When I streamed cuphead, I had well over a hundred people watching concurrently, which shows you just how sadistic some people are. Duck Tales, Super Mario Land, Astro Bot and NiGHTS Into Dreams we're all pretty popular too.

On the other hand, no one gave two shits about Ghost Wire Tokyo, Wii Sports Resort, Dragon Quest 4 and most other Kirby games. It gets a little tough to figure out what works and what doesn't, but that is in a way part of the fun. Oh, and not to brag, but I have made literally dozens of dollars. In 2025 I made 40 bucks from tips. So yeah, at the rate I'm going I will be able to quit my job and do this full-time. Provided I don't really care about making house payments.

3. Dungeon Crawler Carl it's pretty goddamn amazing

A friend gave me the first audiobook in the series. I'm not really into audiobooks, but as a courtesy to him for the gift I figured I would at least give it a couple hours. About 3 hours in. I was ready to quit for good, but I'm glad I stuck with it. Once it got good, it got really good. In each of the next books were even better. I don't know if I'm totally sold on the concept of literary RPGs, but Dungeon Crawler Carl justifies it as A genre worth experimenting with. I ended up going through the seven current audiobooks three times over the course of this year. That's probably about 300 hours in total.

I really can't recommend the series enough. I honestly think everyone in this group would enjoy it. But if you're patient, it looks like it's being auctioned as a TV series by Seth MacFarland. Whether or not that's a good thing I'm still not quite sure of. But one way or another, I don't think this series will stay a book forever.