Tommy's GOTY 2024: The Final 5 | AI and Games Newsletter 18/12/24

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Announcements

Some final announcements of the year! Including hey, we ran a Kickstarter and it worked!

Goal State Kickstarter Ends 150% Funded!

We did it! It’s been months in the making, but the crowdfunding initiative for Goal State is concluded - but not quite over. We ended as mentioned above at 150% funded, meaning we have not just the base lecture material, but some of the additional stretch goals unlocked as well. Course backers will receive:

The complete lecture series of the Game AI 101 course.
The video tutorials in both the Unity and Unreal game engines.

Plus we will now also release for free to everyone:

The source code deep dive on DOOM (1993).
A dedicated episode of AI and Games on Quake III Arena.
Plus a bonus source code deep dive on Quake III as well.

A huge thank you to everyone who has supported the campaign. After I take some time off over the holidays, work on Goal State will begin in earnest - alongside everything else I have planned for 2025.

In the meantime, if you’re late to the party. I’m pleased to say we have Late Pledges enabled. Wait what? Late pledges are a new feature on Kickstarter that allow you to pledge to support after the campaign ends for a limited period of time - provided it was successfully funded. So yeah, if you’re only now learning about Goal State, or simply couldn’t justify the expense in the build-up to the holidays, then you can still back it over on Kickstarter now! We’ve already had new backers sign up since the official end date on Sunday.

Late Pledge on Kickstarter Now

Crucially, our next stretch goal, which is the source code deep dive on Half-Life, is only 16 backers away at the time of writing from being realised. We’re not at 152% funded, and have raised another £300 since the Kickstarter ended! So yeah, be sure to check it out if you haven’t already.

AI and Games Wrapped 2024

As is tradition over on the YouTube channel, I host an annual end of year review and QnA in December. Join me on Thursday, December 19th at 7pm GMT on YouTube via the link below. This will be the final update of the year in which I will discuss the performance of this here newsletter, the YouTube channel, the conference, the Kickstarter, and the highs and lows of what has been a busy, tiring, but ultimately very rewarding and exciting year for me and AI and Games as a whole. After this, you won’t be hearing from me until sometime in January 2025, promise!

Tommy’s Top 5 Game of the Year 2024

Here we are, we’ve reached the final five of my Game of the Year list for 2024. It’s been a funny year for my GOTY list, given I haven’t played as much as I would have liked (as you have might have noticed from this newsletter, it’s been a crazy year). And no doubt the games that I have in mind as the best will not align with many others, because the titles they’ve invested a lot of time into I either have missed completely, or simply haven’t had the time to indulge in yet! But hey, it’s my list! I write what I wanna write!

As a quick reminder, we’ve already listed five games in the list in previous weeks. Here they are, including links to my summary of each.

While I don’t necessarily believe in the total order of my GOTY lists, I do tend to separate the top five from the bottom five. So while I could on any one day argue with myself over whether #1 is truly #1, it’s certainly in that top echelon for sure.

Alrighty, let’s do this.

Thanks for reading AI and Games! This post is public so feel free to share it.

#05: RoboCop: Rogue City

Teyon, 2023

It’s funny to think that over the past 10-15 years we’ve gone through a whole cycle of business when it comes to creating games from intellectual properties in other media. Wind the clock back to the era of the PS3, Wii, and Xbox 360 and we were drowning in often terrible and rushed adaptations of films and TV shows all in an effort to cash in on the hype surrounding what’s occurring in those other mediums. While there is the odd game that succeeded despite these business trappings such as Treyarch’s Spider-Man 2 or Raven Software’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine (the only reason anyone should remember that film exists), it’s not an era I would look back on fondly.

But much like cinema and television, games have realised that if you take the time to understand what people love about a given IP, you can build something that will resonate not just with the more ardent fanbase, but the casual player as well. We’ve seen this not just with Insomniac’s modern Spider-Man titles, but the likes of the recent Star Wars: Jedi series by Respawn, and even just this month with MachineGames’ Indiana Jones and the Great Circle getting rave reviews.

While I don’t think it equates to the highs of those other IPs, Robocop: Rogue City by Teyon is a game that delivers on the experience of Paul Verhoeven’s vision of the wartorn streets of Detroit, while retaining much of the black humour and satire that is laced throughout those films. It’s a game that not only shows a love for the original IP, but it also does what many of these more contemporary success stories also achieve: rather than attempting to fit an existing game template to the IP in ways that prove to be a disservice to both, it allows the property to dictate how the games’ design should evolve.

In an era with fast paced and slick first-person shooter combat, largely summarised by the recent success of Call of Duty: Black Ops VI, Teyon take RoboCop in the other direction. The player is slow, your movements limited, but it embraces the power fantasy of being the cyborg law enforcer, with abilities lifted directly from the source ranging from smashing through walls to wipe out enemies in slow motion, or using the neon-green targeting systems reflective of Murphy’s point of view. A lot of this attention to detail, be it in the mechanics, the rendering, or the writing shows not just an understanding of what people love about Robocop, but how to make it feel satisfying as a videogame adaptation.

There’s a ‘weight’ to Rogue City that I really enjoy, be it the details hidden in the world, the narrative pulling on the core themes of the original movies, the side quests that still carry substance, to the controls of the titular character. Combine all of this with the return of original cast members from the movies, it feels like the adaptation that the franchise has long deserved, albeit a generation or two later than it should have been.

It’s not perfect by any stretch, and I suspect your enthusiasm for the game will also be driven by your relationship with the original IP. Though I have to say I’ve never been a particularly big fan of the franchise - I was always more fond of The Terminator - but I’ve always respected the series for its pointed and satirical take on American politics: an idea that sadly still carries weight in 2024. Funnily enough, Teyon have previously explored that other popular 80s cyborg franchise with Terminator: NAME HERE, which I have avoided for fear of it being subpar - I think most Terminator fans will agree it’s been a rough 30 years if you’re a fan of that IP. And so I suspect I will be checking that out in 2025.

#4: Balatro

LocalThunk, 2024

A game that will no doubt appear in many a top 10 list of 2024, LocalThunk’s card-playing roguelike is a rather delightful spin on Poker that uses traditional card decks merely as a framework within which to explore its own game ambitions.

For the uninitiated, the game challenges players to score points by using common ‘hands’ found in poker games: pairs, three of a kind, straight, flush, full house etc. But the real trick comes from the Joker cards you can unlock through a run that influences how and where you can gain multipliers or chip bonuses as you face off against increasingly demanding score thresholds (blinds) that often carry constraints upon them. You might have built a deck that relies heavily on building flushes using hearts or diamonds, only for the next round to add a temporary rule that negates the use of one of those suits.

Each round can be surprisingly short, but a complete run can easily take up 30 minutes of your time. The more you play, the more jokers, special cards, and even custom decks with modifiers are unlocked that can change your strategy in a given run. It’s a game that encourages experimentation in ways that will reward sometimes bizarre practices or reinforce an existing habit. Without a doubt its greatest success is building a lot of depth in a common and well-established framework, alongside a punchy and satisfying UI and UX that makes that ‘just one more round’ mentality kick in for players all too often.

Despite the near universal acclaim that it’s had, I’ll concede I haven’t played it as much as many of my peers who I’ve talked about this game with. In fact I’ve actually spent more time playing #6 in the list, Shogun Showdown, than I have Balatro. However, it places in this list at #4 less from my overall enjoyment, but rather the novelty and creativity that it exhibits. I do have some issues with it, namely in that some of the boss blinds are often ridiculous and the stochastic nature of it can spoil what may seem like a good run 15-20 minutes into it. That failure can be brought on less by my own mistakes, but more from the game springing something on you that makes it nigh impossible to progress. But it is still a fun and rewarding game to play, that is also highly portable, and for a time became my go-to game to kill 30 minutes on a flight, replacing Vampire Survivors in that category.

#3 Helldivers 2

Arrowhead Game Studios, 2024

Helldivers II has had a hell of a year. Arrowhead’s long in development sequel to a cult classic top-down Diablo-like exploded onto the scene in the spring of this year being one of 2024’s early hits: with the developers struggling to keep apace with the community that rushed to get on board with Super Earth’s mission of delivering democracy across the galaxy. Since then it’s had a pretty hectic year of developments. From publisher Sony committing self-harm by first enforcing - and later backtracking - on the use of PSN accounts for a game that doesn’t need it. To the game facing the challenge that all live-service titles face of ensuring it continues to deliver with new content that maintains the interest of its player base.

I’ll concede that my playtime with Helldivers II has diminished drastically in the last couple of months - largely in part due to work obligations - but I can safely say it was one of only two online games I played with any frequency in 2024 (my beloved Dead by Daylight being the other one). There are two big reasons for this, the first being the underlying design of the game itself, and the other being the community that sprung up around it.

What helps Helldivers II continue to stand out in the sea of other online shooters on the market, is that it’s a game that avoids holding the player’s hand in so many aspects. In truth it’s rather unforgiving, and is built such that every decision made in the game is a choice of resource and of survival. For example:

Reloading a gun will waste the remaining ammunition in the clip.
- Plus you only have a certain number of clips at any one time.
Stamina and health constantly need to be monitored and replenished.
Calling in support units (strategems) from orbit requires you to stop fighting to enter the complex code of symbols to trigger it.
Friendly fire is not a thing, and you can easily kill teammates (or yourself) by throwing a grenade in the wrong place, deploying a stratagem prematurely, or simply failing to communicate your turrent is now active.
Many weapons or items of equipment require two players working in unison to operate successfully.

All of these, and more, are simple ideas in theory, but add to the overall complexity in execution. It takes so many aspects from other shooters you wouldn’t even think about, and foregrounds them as key decision points. Often leading to many a gunfight being laced with these decisions one after the other. Failure can often emerge quite quickly as you, and/or your teammates made the wrong move in a critical moment. While it can be frustrating, it is - more often than not - simply hilarious, and adds to the appeal of the game as a social experience.

This hilarity comes from the framing of the experience itself: a satirical take on the military industrial complex that anyone who recalls Starship Troopers will know well. What makes this all the more entertaining is how the community that formed around the game embraced both the language of Helldivers, but also its underlying design philosophy so enthusiastically. Players will succeed if they work together in pursuit of ‘democracy’, and support one another when they’re in a bind - even if sometimes supporting each other leads to one of you hilariously killing the other because that napalm airstrike just dropped a little closer than you had planned for.

It’s also a game where your rank is more often than not a reflection of your experience and persistence. Meaning you can quite often welcome a higher-ranked player to your mission who is simply that one step better than anyone else on the team, and will carry you as you fight your way through everything that comes your way. They’re using the same weapons, the same armour, the same gadgets as you, but their experience is what defines them. I have been this player in many matches over the past year, deploying in response to an SOS call to help a team of grunts survive the latest wave of alien horrors that seeks to grind them down. Meanwhile, I have cheered as my friends and I are pinned down by waves of Automatons only to hear from command that a fellow Helldiver has responded to our SOS, and is deploying into the combat zone.

While it’s only #3 in the list, it’s probably the game that has the most memories attached to it. I still recall my first deployment into the Automaton territories, realising that my weaponry and experience was simply not prepared for the armies of robotic monstrosities that attacked us on that mission. The sight of robots march through the flames, completely unfazed by my napalm strikes, is seared into my memory.

While I’ve been travelling this week, the team has announced a major expansion to the game including new weapons, biomes and enemies. I can’t wait to band my friends together once more, and deploy democracy once again in 2025.

#2: Cocoon

Geometric Interactive 2023

Earlier this year I sat at the Game Developer’s Choice awards during the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, and watched as Cocoon lost out on so many awards across the evening. A true shame given I’d seen, read, and heard many a positive comment about Geometric Interactive’s world-within-worlds puzzle game.

So it wasn’t long after that I took the plunge to see what it was all about: a simple process of navigating a character from one world to the next as they seek to progress through a series of futuristic worlds. The trick to the game is that each world exists more or less within one another, and the player has the ability to enter and exit each world via orbs. Much of the puzzle solving comes from moving these orbs around a given world, or carrying it into another one. Hence the challenge comes from an ability to traverse a variety of hazards and other phenomena, knowing that the ‘path’ you take may well mean traversing multiple worlds in sequence, and carrying one world into another given there are often key/lock puzzles that require the use of a given world’s orb.

It’s a difficult concept to sufficiently express in writing, and it’s one that is best experienced rather than observed or commented upon. To play Cocoon means managing your spatial knowledge of multiple realities where their points of interaction and inflection become a mechanic for you to exploit. It’s certainly one of the most unique games I’ve ever played, and one that needs time to sit in the back of your mind as you process through not just what you’re doing but how you’re going to do it. In fact one of the biggest problems I faced when playing Cocoon was I liked to carve out a solid hour or so to experience it, and then finding that time would often prove challenging. If work took me on the road or gave me insufficient time to play, then my first return visit would sometimes prove difficult. In the end, I wound up burning through the latter third of the game over a quiet weekend, knowing my upcoming schedule would distract me once again.

Cocoon is a real feat of both design and technical merit, and often left me thinking not just about how to beat the challenge in front of me, but how the development team even pulled it off in the first place. A fantastic game.

#1: Earth Defense Force 6

Sandlot, 2024

I mean, yeah… if you know me personally, then you knew EDF 6 was going to appear in this list somewhere.

Earth Defense Force is the great video game franchise that almost nobody has ever heard of, nevermind played. A series of budget 3rd person shooters developed by Japanese games studio Sandlot, in which players face off against seemingly unstoppable waves of enemies who seek to take over the earth. From the outside in, there’s little about it that may seem appealing in the contemporary games market: the physics borders on stupid, the mechanics are often clunky, the art feels 15 years out of date, and yes even on contemporary hardware you will get frame rate drops. But EDF isn’t interested in your contemporary notions of hi-definition graphics, of consistent frame rates, of making new art assets (even levels) to play in future iterations, or of legible and sensible dialogue, EDF is about having fun.

Since being introduced to the third main game of the franchise, Earth Defense Force 2017 - which came out on the Xbox 360 in 2007 - I have happily devoured every entry of the series with great enthusiasm. EDF from the outside may appear like the dumbed down version of Helldivers 2, in that it also tasks players (either solo or in co-op) to fight off aliens using the limited tools at their disposal. But in truth it carries much of the same DNA as Arrowhead’s live service shooter. There’s a level of complexity and challenge that hides underneath, and mastering each game takes dozens if not hundreds of hours. Earlier I mentioned how Helldivers II foregrounds a lot of interesting strategic decisions in its gameplay such that something as simple as reloading your gun can have consequences. EDF shares in this philosophy, but it’s only something that I feel becomes more readily apparent as you continue to play on the more challenging difficulty settings, or on specific levels.

But it equally, like Helldivers, revels in the absurdity of its premise and its design, such that players will find themselves in circumstances ranging from the nail-biting to the laughably ridiculous. Sure, the the game definitely suffers from padding at times (there’s around 150 levels in the EDF6 campaign), and it’s something of an acquired taste, but I still can’t think of a better series of games to play in couch co-op to this day. I have spent over 100 hours playing EDF games with a friend by my side in the almost 20 years since my first introduction to the series, and there is many a fond memory laced throughout them.

I’ve been waiting for EDF 6 for a long time, given the game actually launched in Japan in August of 2022. It plays markedly similar to its predecessor, Earth Defense Force 5 from 2017, but it adds a large collection of new weapons, enemy types and level designs that help distinguish it from previous entries. In truth, I’ve long felt that EDF5 was the best entry of the series after finding the two versions of EDF4 not quite as satisfying. And so with this 6th main entry, the bar had been set very high.

But the real genius of this entry, is how it plays with the expectations of its most ardent fans. You see, each entry of EDF is prone to doing one of the following things:

Retelling an existing story in the series.
1. EDF 2017 and 2025 (games #3 and #4) retell the story of the first 2 games.
2. EDF 5 is also a reboot of the first Earth Defense Force in a new continuity.
Add new enemy types or replace/enhance existing ones.
Add more biomes for level designs to exist within.

So imagine my surprise, in that EDF6 does all of these things - but in a weird and very satisfying way by building a narrative around it such that it becomes something of a meta-analysis of the franchise as a whole. The tropes of Earth Defense Force are quite well established at this point - the spin off series EDF: World Brothers often plays on them for comedic effect. But here EDF6 takes all of those tropes, and weaves it into a framing device for what is arguably the ultimate rendition of the series. It’s not some horrendously new or clever concept, but it’s a wonderful bit of fan service: building a game where the entire story is the tropes around which EDF has been running for the past 20+ years.

So yeah, it’s going to be my GOTY, and I suspect nobody else will agree with that.

The Games That Almost Made It

There are actually several games that almost made it into the top 10, and while I should have mentioned them beforehand, I figured why not quickly list them here.

Evil West: A 3rd person action game that revels in being a game that feels like it should have came out 15 years ago. A fun and satisfying cowboy vampire adventure that knows exactly who its target audience is, and I am in certainly it.
Humanity: Mentioned earlier in the year in an issue of the Digest. Humanity is a puzzle game that rewards experimentation and forward planning, and does so in a quirky and bizarre narrative framing.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6: Perhaps the first entry in Call of Duty history that I enjoyed that isn’t developed my series creators Infinity Ward. In fact it’s safe to say that I’ve generally disliked most of the Black Ops sub-series due to its clunky gameplay and emphasis on the zombie modes that I don’t find particularly compelling. In fact prior to know the one entry that I did enjoy was Black Ops III, which was essentially an attempt to riff on my beloved Titanfall. But the omni-movement system in ‘Blops 6’, combined with a stripped-down back to basics approach - combined with its 90s themes - seems to have worked for me.
Dead by Daylight: I guess I should bring up the game that I’ve played the most in 2025 (around 250 hours). The 4v1 horror title continues to appeal to me as a complex series of cat and mouse interactions within an ever increasing meta of perks, items, and character abilities. It’s had a fun year with developers Behaviour Interactive exploring new approaches for killer design, with the likes of Dracula of Castlevania fame and the more recent Houndmaster pushing it into weird and quirky territory to varying degrees of success. Meanwhile the much requested ‘2vs8’ mode is ridiculous fun, and arguably the only time you’ll ever see me enjoy playing as the Trapper.

That said, it’s also had a year in which the game has proven to be a victim of its ongoing success. Bugs have crept in far more often into the game, with items, perks, maps, and even characters, being disabled frequently through the year as issues made it into the live build. Meanwhile new features and DLC are prioritised often at the expense of outstanding issues. There are many killers whose mechanic design is no longer in balance with the meta of recent years, and it’s meaning most players will lean towards those that thrive in the current market. The development team do have many of these issues in the roadmap for 2025, but it remains to be seen whether these efforts work as intended.

My Most Anticipated Games of 2025

So with this year coming to a close, what’s on the horizon? What do I want to play next? I’ll concede I seldom place too much emphasis on upcoming games, given I often like to go out and find titles that I’ve missed, or are not the kind of game I’d usually play - it’s always nice to expand your horizons.

So I break this down into two categories: the games that are actually coming out next calendar year, and the games that are sitting in my backlog undisturbed.

Games Coming Out in 2025

So what games are actually coming out that I’m excited about? Spoiler alert: while I recognise it is arguably ‘the’ game on the horzon, GTA 6 is not my thing.

Monster Hunter Wilds

It took until the COVID lockdowns for me to properly sit down and experience Monster Hunter World and the end result was it becoming arguably one of my favourite franchises of recent years. A series that takes the bombastic nature of big boss battles and powerful weaponry and makes it the primary focus. What has helped in recent years is that Capcom have worked hard to streamline these games without removing the more interesting and esoteric elements of it, thus opening it up to a broader and more international audience. What has been revealed to date looks fantastic, with both new features and quality of life improvements. But good lord I hope the issues of crossplay and matchmaking have been addressed.

Metroid Prime 4: Beyond

We’re close to the point that Nintendo has released three consoles since the last entry of the Metroid Prime series. 17 years since our last foray into first-person exploration as Samus Aran, and I am very excited to see where it goes next. Meanwhile I better drag Metroid Prime: Remastered out of my backlog, and hope that Nintendo have the HD remasters of 2&3 just lying around waiting to go.

DOOM: The Dark Ages

While the 2016 reboot of DOOM was one of my favourite games of that generation, I found the 2020 sequel DOOM Eternal to be something of a misstep. While it still delivered the bone-crunching, heavy-metal-blazing intensity of its predecessor, it was so focussed on building layers of systems that make you play the game in such specific ways that it often robbed it of the joy of its predecessor. It’s hard to tell how DOOM: The Dark Ages will fare at this time, given much of this initial trailer is selling the absurd new weaponry of the Doomslayer. Plus it’s going into very different territory, as it tells the story of the Slayer’s escapades as a weapon of the gods, tearing through space and time to destroy the demonic hordes wherever they surface. But I suspect there will be ripping, and tearing, and some banging tunes. That’s as good a starting point as any.

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach

I’m surprised that I’m excited for a game by Kojima Productions. When Hideo Kojima parted ways with Konami some years back I realised that last thing I wanted the ever popular game designer to have was less oversight. While Kojima is a talented game designer and director, his works often suffer from bloated mechanics, systems, narrative, and presentation that if anything he needs more people to say ‘no’ to him at key inflexion points. Death Stranding is a great example of this: a game that only starts to shape up into something interesting and fun about 20 hours in. Like many of the Metal Gear Solid games there’s maybe a solid 30-hour experience in there if it was refined down. But I can’t deny that Stranding is fun at its core, and while I haven’t finished the first game yet, I am both interested and dreading to see where it has gone next.

Aliens: Rogue Incursion

Another year, another game based on the Alien franchise, but this time around it’s a first-person VR title! Perhaps this is the game that makes me scared to go back into the vents again? This game actually comes out in December (tomorrow if I recall correctly) on the Valve Index and PSVR2, but I’ll be playing it on the Quest 3, and that’s been delayed until early 2025!

Games From My Backlog

Also, here’s some games sitting in the backlog that I need to get on with when time permits. This is commonly referred to as the ‘how on Earth has Tommy not played this?’ list.

Yakuza Kiwami: Having declared Yakuza 0 as a 2023 GOTY, I want to start playing the part remake, part remaster of the original.
Dark Souls 3: After finally completing Bloodborne this year, it’s high time I got around to completing the trilogy, and allow the flame to die.
Final Fantasy XV: What I have played of this game in previous years was really satisfying. I enjoy the quirky ‘boys on a road trip’ premise of the story, and keen to see where it goes next.
Astro Bot: Declared in many corners as the GOTY of 2024 - and also Sony’s saving grace after a lacklustre year of single-player releases - I’m looking forward to trying this out.
Warhammer 40k Space Marine 2: Rather than lets this heresy continue, I’ve already started playing this, and I am loving it.
Alan Wake 2: I’m a fan of the original, and loved Control, I just need time to dedicate to this.
The Witcher 3: Yeah, I’ve not played it outside of maybe 2 hours of the start. No, I won’t be taking questions on why.
Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon: I started playing this game after release in 2023 and struggled to dedicate time to it - but I absolutely loved what I had tried already. I’m going to be the beginning to give it the time and energy it deserves.
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown: A game that received tremendous praise upon release, that sadly hasn’t captured a large enough audience for Ubisoft to continue with it. But the cartridge is sitting in my Switch right now, waiting for the moment the holiday season begins
Pacific Drive: It got away from me this year, but the more I see of this roguelite car-driving survival game, the more intrigued I am by it.

Wrapping Up for 2024

So here we are, at the end of the first complete year of the AI and Games Newsletter, and we’re 9 months into the 10-year anniversary of everything I do under this banner. It’s been a fantastic year, and I am very much indebted to you, the reader, for you enthusiasm and interest in my work. A huge thank you one and all, for reading the newsletter, watching the videos, attending the talks, sponsoring our projects, and working with us directly.

I am very excited for what next year has in store for us, but for now I need some time to recharge my batteries. While I’ve had a lot of fun, and I’m proud of what we’ve achieved across various axes, it’s also been the most physically and mentally demanding year of my career - and I really need a break.

But hey, once the dust settles, the newsletter will return to deliver insight, report on the events and news stories, and I will continue to use this platform in my aim to be a trusted voice and advocate for this wee corner of the games industry.

Thank you all once again, and I wish you all a fun, and rewarding holiday season.
Stay safe, take care, and I’ll be back.