Just to complete the set, this is a copy and paste from my non-pervy retro gaming site, Retro Arcadia, where I published my gaming top ten just before Christmas… Of all the hundred-plus regular features I’m now doing on here over the course of a year, this is the one I look forward to the most! It’s something I start to think about in January, when we look at game of the year predictions (which is coming on 4th January this time), then I spend the rest of the year tweaking it, worrying I won’t be able to fill it and just generally pondering what belongs where. And I love it all! Exactly the same format as last year’s countdown, where we’ll count down my top ten before finally arriving at the Retro Arcadia Game of the Year. Released this year is my only rule, although early access remains an occasional grey area – Xenotilt: Hostile Pinball is a nice example of that, where it’s in early access on Steam right now, but given its predecessor, Demon’s Tilt, is one of my favourite games of all time, I want the fully-finished experience on a console rather than half-baked on my crappy laptop, so watch out for that heading-up that list I just mentioned very shortly!

Which sounds like a good place to quickly recap my predictions from last January, and without spoiling anything to come, I didn’t do a bad job with what I knew about at the time, though there were plenty of surprises to follow! Obviously, Hollow Knight: Silksong is missing in action for yet another year, and Tekken 8 is now coming out in January 2024, but I suppose the highest profile non-inclusion is Street Fighter 6, where i just didn’t click with all that open-world community crap! The Dead Space remake recently came to Game Pass and it’s fine but not top ten stuff for me, and Octopath Traveller II is coming to Game Pass so I’ve held off on that too but from what I played of the very generous demo on Switch, that would have been in with a shout. I’ve also not got to Baldur’s Gate 3 yet, which only just arrived on Xbox and honestly I can wait for in a sale, or a physical copy I can then sell when I’m done! The only other thing that would probably have been here had I played it is Sonic Superstars, which I asked for for Christmas, so keep an eye on my Weekly Spotlights for that very soon!

I thought Mario Wonder might be here too but I really wasn’t fussed with that when it arrived, and same for Robocop: Rogue City, where I’ll gladly stick with my old Atari ST game instead! Just to finish off on my predictions from January, while I did say it wasn’t really a game but given the subject matter I couldn’t resist anyway, Silent Hill: Ascension was (predictably!) absolute garbage – barely interactive TV driven by an obnoxious community and even more obnoxious paywalls! As always at the end of June, I did do the annual Retro Arcadia Game of the Year 2023 Halfway Hotlist too, and of those ten games, there was a bit of moving and shaking in the top half, and we lost four, which I’ll give a quick honourable mention to now… There was the superb vampire platformer, Cursed Demons of Wallachia on the ZX Spectrum, no less; Star Gagnant is a fantastic (if a little pricey) vertical shoot ‘em up on Switch, where we also find the latest in my favourite logic-puzzler series, Picross S9, as well as Dredge, a Lovecraftian fishing RPG of all things! Quick shoutout to F-Zero 99 too, which did briefly come and go here as well! And now we’re all caught up with all that stuff, let’s start counting down the ten games that did make the cut!

10. Puzzle Bobble Everybubble! (Nintendo Switch)

I need to start with a confession because as much as I enjoyed this, every time I play it just makes me want to play Puzzle Bobble 2, all the way from 1995, but no shame in that, I guess – thing’s a masterpiece! This is plenty more of the same crazy addictive match-three bubble popping though, with all the 2023 super-polished cutesy Bubble Bobble-infused sheen you could ever wish for and probably a bit more on top! The main course is a massive story mode built on hundreds of stages that double in size if you can unlock their expert versions, and ends up with a competitive endless mode with online leaderboards. There’s multiplayer everywhere too, with up to four player co-op, versus modes and even a madcap Puzzle Bobble vs Space Invaders mode! Full review here.

9. Forza Motorsport (Xbox Series X)

This is superb! And that’s likely going to be the case whether you’re playing solo or multiplayer, as a car-nerd RPG or just pressing auto-upgrade when you remember it’s there, or as a full-on racing simulation or with whatever combination of stablisers make driving feel great for you… Or a bit of all of the above because absolutely everything has its own setting and you can change it all to your heart’s content whenever you want until it’s just right! Which includes opting for thirty frames per second with ray-tracing and all the other fancy graphical bells and whistles turned up to eleven because I’m not a pervert and want to enjoy all that glorious dynamic light and weather and dust to the max! It’s really looks and sounds stunning, and that’s just how it handles too – weighty but right on the edge of control, especially as your tyres start to go off but you need to go aggressive because you’ve gone high risk on your race targets and there’s only two laps left to recover that trip into a deep bit of gravel on the last one! Loads to keep you going too, however real it suits you.

8. Graze Counter GM (Nintendo Switch)

This is a vertically-scrolling bullet-hell shoot ‘em up with a graze mechanic that rewards getting close to the enemy bullets by filling up a gauge that lets you unleash a huge beam of destruction once it’s full. Shoot stuff with this, collect the stars dropped as a result, and you’ll in turn fill up a break gauge, and once that’s full you can go even more intense for some big scores. Loads of modes, ships, boosts and unlocks, and the presentation is great, with a super-cool modern 16-bit art style, tons going on and an energetic synth-prog soundtrack. And the whole thing just feels really special!

7. MLB The Show 23 (Xbox Series X)

If you’d have told me this time last year that not only would a baseball game be in this list, but I’d have also played through the best (and more) of the entire history of the genre, seen a live MLB game and generally become obsessed with the sport, I’d have never believed you… I didn’t know the first thing about it and had no interest in finding out! Then I also didn’t fancy a planned deep-dive into a Nigel Mansell game on the Nintendo Game Boy and substituted it for Namco Gallery Vol. 2 on there at the last minute instead. And it had a baseball game on it. And the rest is history! Anyway, I’m sure this is probably more of the same but it’s new to me, it’s just like playing in a real game on your TV, and it’s accessible at the same time as having more features than I’ll ever know what to do with!

6. The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow (Nintendo Switch)

A point-and-click adventure in the style of classic LucasArts, but with an easy modern interface and marginally less obscure puzzling and exploration! The pixel art graphics, including authentically primitive cutscenes and animations, together with the soundtrack, form the perfectly authentic gothic atmosphere for your adventure across the bleak Yorkshire Moors as an antiquarian unravelling the very English folk-horror mysteries of the titular ancient burial ground. Great story, characters, puzzles and interactions make this a really enjoyable point-and-click, and you don’t see many of those nowadays!

5. Starfield (Xbox Series X)

I’ve not played one of those clicker games on my phone for years, but that’s not to say I’ve never enjoyed idly tapping away at the screen for hours on end to make the numbers get bigger… And while there’s certainly more to it than that, I’m increasingly of the opinion that’s where my fundamental enjoyment of Starfield also lies! It’s a compulsion I’ve been trying to fathom since I was just a few hours in – something intangible there, lying beyond the occasional sense of wonder or exhilaration, or simply enjoying the facade of being a space pilot, and also in spite of the jank, the glitches and – a couple of very late missions aside – the lack of real immersion or engagement with a lot of what it was trying to do. Just some nicely dressed mundanity making the numbers get bigger – both literally and figuratively – which turned out to be just as enjoyable as I remember!

4. Cocoon (Xbox Series X)

Cocoon is a top-tier indie puzzle-adventure from the brains behind Limbo and Inside that has you travelling between worlds within worlds, with each manifested as orbs you can carry around with you to provide unique abilities, but also swap and rearrange and manipulate to overcome imcreasingly intricate but punishingly logical puzzles, gradually unravelling the cosmic mystery connecting these diverse insect biomes and some lost but strangely futuristic civilisation. It sounds complicated because it is, but it’s also as organic and gradually natural as it is super-slick and polished, oozing mind-bending, head-scratching creativity.

3. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (Nintendo Switch)

I don’t even know where to begin with this! It takes Zelda’s greatest hits and then creates its own on top and then some – a vast, beautiful and mesmerising adventure that can be familiar but is always something new and often like nothing you’ve ever experienced before! Some of what you can pull off with Link’s new abilities, together with the game’s inherent no-right-way-to-do-it philosophy, leads to some real moments of exhilaration, not to mention anxiety, as you wonder if it’s really going to let you do what you probably shouldn’t be doing. But you should! The Switch might be starting to creak now but you’d never know it here, and you certainly won’t get anything like it anywhere else!

2. Diablo IV (Xbox Series X)

I had no intention of buying this, but it turned out that an open to all server stress test just before it launched was the best possible advert! It’s a total nerd-out, isometric, hack and slash fantasy RPG with endless evil to slaughter, dungeons to explore, abilities to master and not least loot to pick up and pore over and organise and customise and upgrade in almost equally endless but surprisingly intuitive screens full of lovely numbers! Tons to do across a vast map filled with some hauntingly atmospheric settings and a decent story to back it all up too, progressed both in-engine and through some very slick cutscenes, and that’s before you get to the season pass stuff. Might have caught me by surprise but once it did it never let go!

1. Resident Evil 4 Remake (Xbox Series X)

The GameCube original from 2005 wouldn’t just have been my game of the year at the time, but remains my number three favourite game period, and everything that made it so great is all lovingly present and correct here, and it doesn’t stop there! Even third time around as I write, its meandering take on the story remains compelling, the pacing relentless, the tension flawless, and the characters never more tolerable, and on top of all that it looks more stunning than ever before, and the sound design is truly terrifying! It even plays like a modern survival horror – running and shooting at the same time, crouching and sneaking… What a time to be alive! And what a remake this is, not only taking the original and running with it 2023-style but somehow also reinforcing why it was and still is one of the finest, most influential games of all time. Full review here.

Had Hollow Knight made an appearance, I like to think that top slot might have been slightly less predictable, but hopefully next year… I really didn’t see Diablo IV coming though, and Cocoon properly came out of nowhere too, so no complaints here! But I am sorry I didn’t quite get to the new Sonic the Hedgehog game and Baldur’s Gate in time. Can’t do everything though, especially when I’ve got all the regular retro stuff here to take care of, but I’ll definitely look forward to seeing you back here just before next Christmas with whatever 2024 has brought us. And again, don’t forget to check back in the New Year for my predictions, but there’s still plenty more to come before then at Retro Arcadia, with the annual Weekly Spotlight Christmas Special, The Big Retro Arcadia Rundown of Games Completed 2023, and the regular Weekly Spotlights and On the Retro Radar for January kicking off 2024, so I’ll see you around!