Stage Select Start Lists: The Games of The Game Awards 2025

The Game Awards were last night, and since we tend to cover video games here, I'm going to go full-on list mode and just LIST all of the games that piqued (or de-piqued?) my interest, while keeping in mind that I only caught the tail end of the show and pulled the names from IGN's own website.  Also, keep in mind that most of these games, especially ones that aren't directly tied to an existing IP, are on the list because I liked the title or liked the font.  Being me, the order is simply going to be alphabetized because we're not playing favorites here.

So let's get to listing!

• 007 First Light
• This trailer did absolutely nothing for me.  Even the gameplay trailer from three months ago did nothing for me.  Maybe I'm not the target audience.
• Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve
• I have yet to play Ace Combat 7, and I really hope that Project Aces has dropped the whole dog-fight mechanic that permeated Ace Combat: Assault Horizon.  Is it bad that I still just want an Ace Combat X: Skies of Deception 2?
• Coven of the Chicken Foot
• The title alone sold me (although I probably won't be buying it on day 1), and even more so the trailer.  The only two things that have me concerned are when camera angles are facing the player and the player is running towards the camera, and if this is going to be a mandatory co-op game or if you just have a computer-controlled partner.
• Decrepit
• A first-person souls-like could be interesting.
• Diablo IV: Lord of Hatred
• On one hand, you could tell that the actions of the Paladin came straight from the game (I haven't played one in Diablo IV, but it really looked like the moveset from Diablo: Immortal), but on the other hand, it looked kind of cheesy because the moveset looked like it came straight from the game.  I do like Diablo visuals, though.
• Divinity
• Bloody fucking christ, that was an intense, Wickerman-inspired trailer.  I've yet to play the first Divinity: Original Sin, though.
• Lords of the Fallen 2
• I started the first game shortly after getting the Steam Deck, and even though the game is rated "Unsupported," it seemed to play fine.  I haven't played the 2023 reboot.
• Mega Man: Dual Override
• It's been a loooooooong time since I played a Mega Man game that wasn't recently released on the SNES.  It's hard to tell from the trailer what the "dual override" aspect of the game will be, though.  Maybe something about how Mega Man flashes the city at the end of the trailer?
• Ontos
• Honestly, anything from Frictional Games is going to get mentioned.
• Order of the Sinking Star 
• While I started Braid (never finished), I'm not actually sure about this title after watching the trailer.  I can't tell if all of the chatter is supposed to be from in-game characters or from playing online co-op.
• Phasmophobia
• Leave it to companies to release a five-year-old game on a Nintendo console like it's the newest thing.  That being said, the trailer rekindled my interest in this title.
• Resident Evil: Requiem
• Finding out that Leon is a playable character doesn't sell me on the game; the title already did that, but I'm honestly a little disappointed that he's back.  Not that I don't like him, just that I'm less interested in playing what kinda looked like Resident Evil 4-2.
• Saros
• I was already kind of sold with Rahul Kohli being involved, but I really like the look of the world, based on the trailer and I love the implications of "How long since the last time the sun died, mate?"
• Soulframe
• The usage of both "soul" and "frame" makes me think of Dark Souls and Warframe, and the fact that it's a free-to-play open world that's animal-heavy seems moderately interesting.
• Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic
• I swear they took one of the shots of the ship entering the planet from Prometheus.
• Star Wars: Galactic Racer
• Oddly, or perhaps not, kind of excited for this.  I also like that even though the voice-over talks about "massive engines," there only looked to be one pod racer with Sebulba-sized engines.
• The Free Shepherd
• The goodest of trailers.  I really hope that in this world, humans have gone extinct for some time, but this Australian shepherd-type dog is still shepherding a herd of sheep because that's what its ancestors were trained to do.  And it's just an environmental puzzle game about getting your sheep from point A to point B.
• Tomb Raider: Catalyst
• I've played the Tomb Raider reboot and liked the evolution of Lara Croft in that game, so I'm not sure how the other games in that series portrayed her compared to this iteration of Lara Croft.
• Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis
• Is this a remake. . .  It appears so.  A remake of the original Tomb Raider, especially with the now somewhat famous font used in the title.  Lara Croft's design also looks closer to her design from the pre-Square Enix days, and seems to be pandering to the people who are going to pause and slow-mo all of the camera focus shots on her ass and chest.
• Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons
• I've never played a Warlock in all my years playing D&D, so I don't know what Eldritch Blast looks like, and I'd be both surprised if that wasn't the spell that was cast at 0:53 and not surprised at the same time if it wasn't.  Just from the trailer, which looks to only be cinematics, I was getting Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance vibes (another game I admittedly haven't played), so a switch from the CRPG of the original Baldur's Gate series to a more Diablo-like action RPG title.  I'm really just D&D deprived right now (apart from reading the 20+ year-old novels) so anything is going to immediately interest me.

So there we are.  A whole host of games that will be released in the next 1-13+ months.  I'll probably come back to this article as I sometimes do with my E3 article after I buy games when they're 86% off, five years after they're released, and remember that I listed them here.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Coming from the Sky Above

MIDI Week Singles: "Oversnow" - The Elder Scrolls: Arena (MSD)

 

"Oversnow" from The Elder Scrolls: Arena on MS-DOS (1994)
Composer: Eric Heberling
Album: No Official Release
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Developer: Bethesda Softworks

If you're thinking that we've accidentally reused a song for MIDI Week Singles, you'd be excused in your assumption.  Except that was "Snow" from The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, we used, and that was six years ago.  Most of what I had to say about "Snow" also applies to "Oversnow," which plays not just when it's snowing, but when it's overcast as well, hence the title.  What I like about "Oversnow" is the suddenness of the choir that comes in at 0:14, and you could say it's a bit overdramatic.  I don't know if I'd categorize overcast skies as warranting a choir compared to snow on a clear day, but then I've never been hiking in the snow in Skyrim or High Rock, so what do I know?

The song does cut off abruptly, but that's just a result of the game looping the song on its own once it's over, and I probably could've done the same, considering that there's no official soundtrack.  That's really all I've got to say about "Oversnow."  Just a really good track that evokes that (overdramatic) feeling of tromping through snow while it's snowing.  Overcast or not.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Take a Long Drive with Me

Demo Time: [HERROR] Gas Station Case (PC)

[Disclaimer:  I received a review key for [HERROR] Gas Station Case through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played, and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]

[HERROR] Gas Station Case

System: Windows, SteamOS, Linux,

Release Date:  Q2 2026

Publisher: [HERROR]

Developer: [HERROR]

Time Spent: 79 Minutes

Playthough Video on YouTube

Is it a cop out to say that I have mixed feelings about [HERROR] Gas Station Case right off the bat, mainly connected to historical, geographical, and economic anachronisms.  I know that's kind of a strange thing to fixate on, but that's where my brain went nearly half a dozen times each time I played the demo.

Before we start nitpicking, let's actually get to the game, assuming you haven't yet watched my playthrough video, linked above.

[HERROR] Gas Station Case is sort of a minimal story-driven gas station simulator.  You're filling in for a coworker, and you perform a few standard tasks such as filling gas, sweeping/mopping up dirt on the floor of the store, restocking shelves, and bagging up items people buy.  There's a bit of a side story going on around your playable character, Dan, that he seems to only have a passive role in.  During the two partial nights Dan works at the gas station, there are a couple of weird events that happen, including one jump scare that legitimately got me the first time I played, and a couple of unsettling, "what's that?" moments.

When I played the game on the Steam Deck, I was able to invert the y-axis manually in the controller settings, but on my (new) laptop, I was able to manage with an apparent industry standard uninverted y-axis.  This actually didn't bother me as much as I had feared, as there is no need to make quick turns, and the only targeting you're doing is when you literally throw bagged-up goods at customers.  Although yes, it did take me several tries to throw those bags of garbage into the dumpster behind the store.  There's no excuse for that.

As for the anachronisms, there were quite a few.

The first one I noticed was the price of gas.  The game takes place in Ohio in 1998.  Now, I grew up in Central California and had just graduated high school during the summer of 1998, which had me filling up my parents' car to drive to the next town over to work a summer job, so I was buying gas every couple of weeks.  I remember being really excited when the cheap gas was $0.89/gallon because this was one of the last times I can recall ever buying more gas than what I was spending.  Even the gas at the marina in Lake Arrowhead, CA, was upwards of $2.50/gallon, which seemed ridiculously expensive, so seeing a sign with gas at over $4.00/gallon in Ohio in 1998 seemed very out of place.  Late in the game, you go inside the phone booth outside the store, and you can see a notice asking you to "use fewer coins to pay the initial minimum of 60p."  I remember that Pacific Bell phone booths in Northern California would cost $0.30 to make a call, because I was annoyed at having to carry more than just a quarter when I needed to get picked up after a tennis game, and I'm pretty certain that people in Ohio wouldn't refer to "sixty cents" as "sixty p;"  a little too British.

Price-related anachronisms were how much people pay you after you bag up their goods at the cash register and hand it (chuck it) to them.  The First customer you help pays you $7 to "fill up" their car, which is either historically accurate if they needed about 2/3rds a tank, or maybe they really only needed 1.74 gallons of gas.  Inside the store, a customer pays you $27.00 for two apples, a can of soda (maybe it's beer), and a can of beans.  Later, two women pay you $28.00 for a can of soda, a snack pack of Nutter Butters (as in the pack only has four cookies), and some kind of vanilla-flavored something-or-other.  The only potentially correctly priced object is a $12.00 flashlight that, after ordering it using the computer at the register, is delivered immediately right outside the door to the store; although the fact that the money you use is the money that you've been paid by customers comes across as a little suspect.

The demo ends on a bit of a cliffhanger, which is either the end of the whole Gas Station episode in this proposed Horror Anthology, or hopefully, the first third of this particular story.  There was a VHS grain filter that added to the feeling that this was a low-budget horror movie that you could have picked up on Friday night at a Blockbuster before the DVD boom of 2000 (all thanks to The Matrix).  It actually fits with the whole pre-2000s campy horror aesthetic, and it was pretty easy to find myself enjoying the actual gameplay once I stopped thinking about how the prices of everything were all over the place.  I think I also really enjoyed that this was a lite gas station sim implanted in a horror movie because I would be more likely to play this than Gas Station Simulator 2026.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
This Grevious Revelation is a New Beginning

P.S.  Spoilers below, so beware.

At the end of the game, your friend Michael makes a reappearance, and I can't quite tell whether his face is supposed to be mutilated to make him look like he has a mouth full of fangs, or something else.  Because the character model looks like they just have a bunch of face paint depicting a horrific mouth.  The look of the blood is fine, though.  I'm otherwise fine with the graphics, but this seemed a little off, and not in an unsettling way or uncanny valley way.

MIDI Week Singles: "Snowflake Mountain" - Diddy Kong Racing (N64)

 

"Snowflake Mountain" from Diddy Kong Racing on the Nintendo 64 (1997)
Composer: David Wise
Album: Diddy Kong Racing Soundtrack CD
Label: Nintendo of America
Publisher: Rare
Developer: Rare

Let's start things off strong this December with a track from one of my favorite kart racing games that I was never able to beat because WizPig is a cheap asshat.

But what's interesting about "Snowflake Mountain" is that this song only plays when you are flying from the main world hub up to the door that leads to Snowflake Mountain.  While you're mid-flight, the music that plays in the hub world, "Main Lobby Area," will transition to "Snowflake Mountain," which is still a new theme, but the likelihood that you're going to fly around in circles just to hear this song is not very likely.  So in-game, you'll probably only hear the first couple of seconds, maybe five, before barreling into the door that actually takes you to Snowflake Mountain.

All of that context aside, "Snowflake Mountain" has a lot of the stereotypical characteristics that make a song appropriately wintry.  There are the glass-like chimes, there are the sleigh bells, and there is the happy and constantly moving bass.  It's just a good, solid snow-themed song to bring us into December.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

We Were Ready for Adventures, and We Wanted Them All

Monthly Update: December, 2025

 

Two things.  First, how the hell is it already December!?  Second, how the hell is it already the end of 2025!?!?  Granted, the last 11 months have felt like a couple of years at this point, and while I would like a break from nearly daily embarrassments in the form of the entire Trump administration, I guess the one upside is: one down, three to go?  I dunno.  If I recapped every shit thing that the administration has done these last 11 months, we would have 11 long paragraphs before even getting to our usual discussion about video games.  Let's just say there'd be a lot to cover, and that's just one aspect of the current presidency.

In other news, I replaced my laptop as the one I had was just over five years old and started showing significant signs of wear.  Such as the charger not reliably connecting to the laptop, as in I could plug it in, but it required a bit of finagling to get it to actually begin to charge.  I also ran into an issue where the hard drive was experiencing errors, not related to its paltry size of 256 GB being at 95% capacity.  Then, in a moment of coincidental frustration, while in the process of transferring data (blog files, video clips from the last 5 years on the Switch, and the Steam Deck, 20+ years of music, PDFs of D&D modules and sourcebooks, and countless other documents/files I've had backed up) my external hard drive (which was also five years old) decided to wig out in ways that have caused me grief.  

I first noticed the external hard drive issue when iTunes was having problems pulling music from my two primary music folders, both located on the external hard drive (see above, the 256 GB storage on my previous laptop).  Essentially, something bad is happening with the external hard drive: both the prior and current laptops are having difficulty or are unable to read it.  Recently, my new computer semi-froze while trying to read the old external drive, and when it does connect (shows up in my File Explorer window, I will either not be able to see any of the folders, or I can see the folders, but I get an error when I try to open any folders or click on the parent folders.  Or what's been happening the last two days, is that the computer just doesn't recognize that there's another external drive connected, even though the light on it's flashing and receiving power.

I think the biggest gut punch is losing access to music that I've downloaded over the last five years, as I was able to pull music off my first external hard drive that I'd kept from when I first bought it 12 years ago.  That one's still working fine for the time being.  Thankfully, I still have access to (most) of the albums I've bought on Bandcamp over the years (the ones that didn't magically disappear when an artist released a new version of the album and the original album up and disappeared) and (most) of the albums I've bought through Amazon.  But a lot of it is a matter of remembering what I no longer have access to that's still on the prior external hard drive; I think a lot of the potentially lost music are video game soundtracks, but at least I still have all of the Draconian demo albums and the "Kefka's Domain" album.  Phew!

Oh, and to a significantly lesser degree, I also replaced my old Pixel 7A phone because, despite it having a USB-C charging port, I'm only able to use certain USB-C plugs because the port is beyond finicky.  I didn't have any of the same issues with file transfer when I booted up and connected the new phone (the economic Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge if you're wondering).

So that's kind of where my head is at the beginning of this new month, at the end of the year.

But hey!  I did finish a couple of video games last month, Final Fantasy II, and Mouthole so I don't feel too bad.  I've also made some progress in Fire Emblem: Awakening and in Romancing Saga: Minstrel Song Re-Mastered on the Switch, for which I'll have an article out, likely a First Impressions late in the month, or possibly in early January.

We'll return in January with my now annual List of Games from the previous year, because we all love lists, right?

Right?

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

I'll Keep Them Still

P.S.  My Downloads folder currently looks atrocious, clogged with zipped folders, but it's what I do to keep my brain just a little bit more sane.  And the music helps to keep the tinnitus at bay just a little bit.

P.P.S.  Oh, and I purchased a Mechanism gaming pillow because I was diagnosed with carpal tunnel, and I'll be damned if I'm going to let a debilitating long-term wrist problem affect my ability to work or play video games.  Except I am getting medical treatment, so no worries on that front.  Bouldering is still a bit painful, though, which we recently got back into, so it's Bs, 0s, 1s, and 2s for me for now.  Slopers suck extra hard now.

P.P.P.S.  I guess I should be thankful that I still have a good chunk of my music already backed up and that I, surprisingly enough, didn't buy any physical music from going to shows when I got my prior external hard drive in September 2020, because not a lot of people weren't going to shows in late 2020.

P.P.P.P.S.  I guess this article was also to let y'all know that if any of our high-class graphics and images change in the coming weeks, it's because I wasn't able to fully recover My Documents folder off of the external hard drive.

MIDI Week Singles: "Braving the Battle [Metal Zone Theme] - Terra Battle (And/iOS)

 

"Braving the Battle [Metal Zone Theme] from Terra Battle on Android and iOS (2014)
Composer: Nobuo Uematsu
Album: No Official Release*
Publisher: Mistwalker
Developer: Mistwalker

I had considered using a song from Rad Racer, but I didn't want to use two songs in a row from the same album, so I jumped ahead 27 years and picked a song from the mobile game Terra Battle.  This is a game that Conklederp and I played quite a bit when it was released 11 years ago.  We went through a shortish phase playing a couple of co-op games in the days before Pokémon GO, and I think Terra Battle was one of the last ones.

Deciding on a song was a little difficult, but it was a toss-up between several battle songs; this one, for me, hit the nostalgia buttons the hardest.  I apparently spent a lot of time doing the Metal Zone because it was the easiest and fastest way to level up newly acquired characters quickly, so that everyone was roughly in the same ballpark of the same level.  It's just a fun, high-energy song from Nobuo Uematsu in the years since he left Square and seemed to be doing his own thing, although going back to work with Hironobu Sakaguchi was nice.  

And I thought this would be a fun way to go out on our accidental month of featuring tracks form less popular games in Nobuo Uematsu's career.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Click-Clock

You Must Be A Poseur

With the announcement of the nominations for "Best Score and Music" from the Jeff Keighley Awards, sorry, The Game Awards, I had considered listening to and featuring a track from each game as an upcoming MIDI Week Single.  Then, while listening through the soundtrack to Hades II by Darren Korb, who we've featured in the past, I began to feel like a poseur.

I haven't played any of the games that were nominated, mainly because I haven't played a lot of games that were released this year (2025) that I didn't receive from developers/publishers through Keymailer.  Not because the games didn't interest me, just that I'm finding it hard to buy new games at new game prices.  So here I am listening to the soundtracks to Silksong and Hades II, and while there've been quite a few songs that have piqued my interest, I don't really know what to say about them because I have no context for the song itself.  I could go by the title, be it "Fourth Chorus" or "Moonlight Guide Us," and then look up a playthrough to see how the song fits contextually with the game, but that just doesn't feel quite right.

Yes, I have done this exact same thing with older games, like recently with Apple Town Story and Metal Masters, and I think the main difference is that those are significantly older games or games that I am less likely to get around to playing because they're difficult to find, or out of print, or they're just not compatible with modern hardware.

So then why do I feel a smidgen of shame featuring music from Silksong or Clair Obsure: Expedition 33 or Ghost of Yotei?"  As best as I can explain it, I think it's because it feels like each of these games (along with Death Stranding 2) have fervent fan bases that if I talk about the music in the games, I'll be asked what my three favorite tracks are from the game, and what my three favorite moments are from the game, and what's my least favorite element from the last third of the game, and how come I haven't played Hollow Knight yet if I'm talking about Silksong, and that I'm not a real fan because I haven't had to wait eight years between releases.  You know, shit that I went through in Jr. High because god forbid I wear a Grateful Dead or a Megadeth shirt without being grilled about what my five favorite Dave Mustain solos were and why can't I play them on guitar, and why "Countdown to Extinction" is an inferior album compared to "Rust in Peace"?  Because every album released after "Rust in Peace" is an inferior album is the easy answer.

The short answer is that it's easier to talk about music from older games that fewer people are likely to have played than music from modern games (games released in the last 15-20 years, apparently) without fear of online harassment.  I've also found that with some older games like Ace Combat Advance, Dragon Spirit, or Amida, that people are simply happy to hear from a nostalgic favorite than care deeply if I've played the game or not; and I'm always upfront in the articles on that point.  I am a moderately soft-spoken introvert after all, which is why I still write on the Internet.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Instrumental

P.S.  I kid you not, while listening to the Hades II soundtrack, specifically "Coral Crown", a coworker walked by my office and said something along the lines of, "Hades II, nice track!"  I sheepishly said, "Oh, yeah," as if I knew exactly the context of the song.  But then he continued walking to the bathroom, so that was the end of our conversation.