Tis the Season for Surprises
It’s the holidays, and everyone loves surprises. The good kind, not the kind where you’re a kid thinking you’re getting an SNES, but open the box to find a rock tumbler your folks got at a yard sale. Or maybe that’s just me. Anyway, we’re lucky to be gamers. Fun surprises come at us all year round. Read on for the best surprise 2024.
10. Fate/stay Night Finally Gets a North American Release/Remaster
If you’re a fan of anime and visual novels, you’ve at least heard of 2004’s Fate/stay night. It is one of the most influential visual novels ever made, with a complex branching narrative, memorable characters, explicit content, and innovative magical reality themes. It’s amazing, then, that it took until 2024 for the game to appear in an English remastered edition for Nintendo Switch and PC. Review
9. Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore
The retro-Metroidvania genre gets a new release approximately every 4 minutes, so new ones have to be special to stand out. Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore has a colorful style, intentionally “bad” humor and story, and genuinely enjoyable platforming and combat. Review.
8. Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy Gets Updates
OK, no argument, the first three Grand Theft Auto games were freakin’ masterpieces, at least for their time. In 2021, the three games were remastered and collected in the Grand Theft Auto: Definitive Trilogy edition. Unfortunately, the only definitive part was how absolutely broken it was. After a lot of messy and hard-to-follow controversy over who did what, the game received a much-needed update in 2024.
7. Nintendo Alarmo
Raise your hand if you had “Nintendo releases a sleep-tracking alarm clock” on your bingo card. Yeah, me neither. But now we have the Nintendo Alarmo and it sits on your nightstand, creepily watching you sleep and waking you with increasingly insistent Nintendo game music.
6. Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Arcade Classics Collection
The Marvel vs Capcom franchise has about a gazillion fans, for good reason. This year, we were treated to the Marvel vs Capcom Arcade Collection, which packages seven formerly arcade machine classics into one awesome bundle. Review
