2018 is over. It was an exhausting year, in a global sense, and hectic for me personally as I moved across the country and took a few months off from doing this project. I still got to play plenty of games, and on Christmas thought that it might be fun to do a game of the year list, but for the PlayStation games I played. Since I moved I gained access to a Switch and PS4 and have been able to do a wide variety of gaming this year, (special shout outs to Celeste, Slay the Spire and Donut County) but it was nice to have the PS1Try Project as a buoy, something consistent, something usual. Despite my appreciation for that consistency, something else I really appreciate about games is when they push away from the usual and decide on some attitude, viewpoint, approach, theme, motif, or whatever and lean into it hard and unapologetically. If a game does that and what it leans isn’t something completely objectionable like Nazism or tank controls, I’m gonna have a good time with it. I had that in mind when selecting my list. The game on screen now, Side by Side Special, is not on the list, because I played it in 2017, but it would have been on such a list had I had this idea then. It’s a great game. Anyway, these are the top ten PlayStation games I played as a part of the PS1Try Project in 2018.

10 – Brunswick Pro Bowling

Indeed, bowling games is the same. Place your bowler, choose the amount of curve, then manage a meter or timing bar or two. A game can do this part well or they can do it poorly. Brunswick does it well, but that isn’t why this game made the list. The ugly graphics aren’t why it made the list. This game made the list because it got a grip of real pro bowlers to record little hype videos for themselves like this was a wrestling game, creating a late 90s time capsule of normalcy so bland it’s aggressive. These polo-clad dads brag about their bags, but as you’ll see a stilted read breeds cue card catastrophe, as this Miller’s tale of two-fingered cranking has no Chaucer author, and what has Roth wrought but hard-thrown cranks and roots for the Yanks? In lieu of further commentary, here are those videos, in their entirety.

9 – Moritako Chisato – Safari Tokyo

Now that’s an intro. Coming in weird at number nine, this game is a commercial for a person. If Brunswick Pro Bowling was an elegy to the mundane, this is an ode to the magical. Chisato Moritaka is a Japanese pop idol and multi-instrumentalist. This game is a celebration of her, featuring plenty of interviews and music videos (which we won’t have here to keep this video on YouTube) and a pretty rough collection of minigames (though this drumming one plays better than some full-fledged rhythm games for the PlayStation). The whole thing is wrapped up in this weird safari bit of window dressing. Part game, part jukebox, part shameless advertisement, completely adorable, it’s KISS pinball without the whiskey stench, and there really isn’t much like it on consoles.

8 – The X-Files

My play-through of this game for PS1Try was remarkably short. Early in the game I went to live the dream and [USE] my [GUN] on my boss. Some adventure games won’t let you do most things that don’t work towards solving a puzzle. Tons of “I can’t do that”s. Sometimes they’ll recognize some actions as particularly foul or foolish and call them out but still prevent them. And sometimes they’ll just let you go for it. I tried to smoke Skinner, he admonished me very strongly, and my game ended. Kudos to the game for letting me do that, and for being more comprehensible before that point than Versailles 1685 – Verschwörung am Hof an adventure game presumably set in 17th Century France that I played in German for about 15 minutes until I used a note with a candle, hoping to reveal invisible ink, instead incinerating it idiotically.
Assonance aside, the actual adventure game here is… fine? It’s good enough. What’s great, for X-Files fans at least, is the amount of video content and actors from the show. There’s mytharc-relevant information abound and the game’s inconsequential enough to be considered canon. As the only Playstation game to also function as a completely servicable season 3 episode of The X-Files, it’s an easy inclusion on the list.

HONORABLE MENTION: Best Opening: Tsuridou – Umitsuri-hen

Part of the idea of the PS1Try project is that I see every PlayStation game. In practice, that doesn’t happen, as some games end dreadfully early. What I do get to see, is the intro to every PlayStation game. I thought of doing this GOTY video on Christmas and didn’t conceptualize this category until the day after, but Tsuridou – Umitsuri-hen sprung to mind immediately, so it’s gotta get the title. Just watch this shit.
Wow, I can’t wait until I get to run around on the rocks like that. Just gotta gear up, find a suitable location and…

7 – Running High

This is a racing game that isn’t too different from the usual ones. You can drift, boost, and attack to the left or the right. It’s got some fun music, including vocal tracks, which you don’t see very often. Also, you’re futuristic robot folk racing on foot. In this case, also on an asteroid. Or, once you unlock the goddamn baby, you’re crawling. Very fast. As a baby. Against other babies. In an intense race. Absolutely delightful.

6 – Matsumoto Reiji 999 – Story of Galaxy Express 999

This is maybe the most stylish PlayStation game I’ve ever seen. This Japanese exclusive is, perhaps obviously, based on an anime, I don’t know anything about it, but it looks and sounds great and really pushes the PS1 to its limit. This game is a fantastic example of a late-in-the-lifespan-of-a-console gem. It looks so nice I’m just going to blindly accept that it’s a faithful adaption of the anime, sure to please fans and newcomers alike. It’s not really an RPG, you don’t level up or change, it’d almost be an anime FMV game if not for parts where you walk around an overworld and talk to NPC. It more or less guides you directly through the story. It’s as focused on narrative as it is on its style, a sort of futuristic western that’s all too familiar now, but its age ironically lets it feel fresh. The part we’re seeing here is the actually first time in the game — 20 minutes in, mind you — where my inputs do anything other than move through dialogue boxes — which you don’t really want to do too fast because this game’s fully voice acted, I assume well. To be honest, I’ve always wondered if I’d be able to tell if voice acting in a language I don’t speak is actually bad or not, but this sure doesn’t seem it. I don’t have much more to say about it since my play-through ended pretty early, failing one of the few and sparse action sequences, but gosh it looks nice.

5- Hot Shots Golf 2

Much like bowling games is the same, the control schema of most golf games goes to back to biblical times, probably. Hot Shots Golf 2 really does live up to its European and Japanese name of Everyone’s Golf 2 by adopting this familiar setup, making it feel pretty smooth and playable (on a console that by and large can feel pretty sluggish and imprecise at times) and then wrapping everything up in a charming twee package. There’s lots of nice clothes and silly golfers to choose from and unlock. Who needs Mario Golf when you can play as Gex, drive down the fairway as Sweet Tooth, or hack and slash your way through the links as MediEvil’s Sir Daniel? (And for that matter, who needs Smash, when Cloud’s been fighting in Ergheiz for far longer?) If Wes Anderson made a video game, I’d want Clap Hanz developing it, as they are similar masters of warm color palates and memorable, 2-dimensional characters.

HONORABLE MENTION: Biggest Disappointment: Metal Gear Solid (Spanish)

4 – Juggernaut

The fourth game on the list is the first hardest for me to write about, I played it once, and have only revisited it in my memory, where it grows fuzzier and weirder,and I like it like that. As a point and click game, it doesn’t make for compelling video, so here’s a series of screenshots, with music from the title screen. Released on the same date as the X Files game, Juggernaut is also a long adventure game, spread over three discs. It gets off to a very slow start, and I remember wanting to throw in the towel out of boredom. But slowly but surely the game got weirder and weirder. I started investigating alternate dimensions, leaving the dreary gothic castle for tropical islands with dark secrets, prison islands with dark secrets, the Internet, and an item called Powered Child Finger S. This game grew continually bizarre, and I grew continually fond of it. Viewed objectively, it’s obviously not as good as some of its contemporaries — Grim Fandango released a year earlier, sadly never for the PlayStation but look at this shit. Double fine will do some fantastic stuff, but screenshots like this makes this game really remarkable.

3 – Boku no Natsuyasumi

I haven’t actually finished the PS1Try play-through of this game yet, as I’ve been doing every session with Cole where we’re putting in a sincere effort to try to understand the Japanese in the game, and it’s a decent tool for a certain sort of basic immersive study. the player character, Boku, is nine years old and on summer vacation at his aunt and uncle’s house in rural Japan in 1975, sent away while his mom is in the final month of pregnancy with a new baby. Every morning you wake up, do some calisthenics with your family, and the day is yours. You can run around the house, yard and a slowly expanding countryside with tank controls that I’m too charmed by the game to get actually aggravated by. You can catch bugs, go fishing, fight those bugs against the local ruffians, and look at parts of the map you can’t get to yet but know you’ll be exploring eventually, but eventually dinnertime comes. You eat a nice meal that your aunt will, every night, remind you what it was if you ask her. The evening phase is like the daytime one, but you can’t leave the property. You can watch TV like a real asshole, talk to your weird cousin who I think puts milk in strawberry jam?, but eventually if you don’t go to bed yourself, your uncle makes it happen, and you get to write in your journal about what that day’s adventures brought.
Boku no Natsuyasumi literally translates to My Summer Vacation, and that’s really all the game is, a kid on a summer break. Which, beyond being a stellar setting for a video game (which we’ll get into shortly) means that everyone talks — in fully voiced segments with no captions, which feels surprisingly modern — in words a nine-year-old can understand, and mostly about mundane domestic things. Situations like missing watermelons or broken pottery make for easier vocabulary to remember or look up than if this were most other games, talking about the force displacement potential of some battle mecha or a dank swamp home to a mollusk witch borne of ichor and eldritch curses. And indeed, there’s nary a mecha to be found in the Japanese countryside of 43 years ago. This game doesn’t need thousand-ton mecha. This game has 40 centimeter beetles you can fight with some weird friends you meet under a bridge.
From the beginning, the game is already framed as a grown man reminiscing about that summer, you’re playing as somebody’s memory of childhood, not as a child experiencing that summer for the first time, which cranks up the pastoral light this whole game bathes in. There’s no non-diegetic background music playing, just gentle nature noises. This game is serene to the extreme, wistful by the fistful, a calm-bomb that balms all. I’ve only played less than half of the month, but it seems clear that nothing truly bad will or even could happen. The most upsetting thing to happen to a character in the game was the collapse of my uncle’s pottery shelf, caused exclusively by my sneaking into his shed and fucking around with it after he asked me not to, something I still feel guilt over. This game is a wistful extoller of a simpler time long since past, but as a game it feels very ahead of its time. If Boku no Natsuyasumi came out today it’d be hailed as an indie darling. Meticulously moderated fan wikis would arise documenting fish and bug locations. Obnoxious content creators would make long videos where they start to explore the game’s reflections of transcendentalist philosophy until they remember they’re in the middle of a GOTY list.

HONORABLE MENTION: Best Non-Game: [TIE] Simple 1500 Jitsuyou Series Vol. 16 – Neko no Kaikata – Sekai no Neko Catalog & Zen Super Robot Taisen Denshi Daihyakka.

There’s a few things I’ve been finding as I do this project that aren’t games at all. Safari Tokyo was a near contender for this category, but its sparse minigames disqualified it. These two discs are similar in form, and perhaps also in content, at least abstractly so. The first one, the CATalog, is mostly a bunch of cat videos — YouTube on a disc. Some of cat recreation, most about cat education. Addresses and phone numbers to different Japanese cat clinics can be found, as well as an encyclopedia of different cat breed information.
The other disc is an encyclopedia of mecha. I still don’t quite understand the structure of various mecha franchises re: “Super Robot Wars” and Gundams and what’s Voltron anyway? but if I wanted to know some minutiae about the weight of a particular model, this thing will have it. It also had a video file that seemed to be about 17 minutes of short commercials for different anime series voiced over by a man whose accent betrayed no unfamiliarity with the English language but whose grammar told the true tale.

2 – Chrono Trigger

Since we’re already making a 2018 Game of the Year list comprised exclusively of PlayStation games made before 2002, why not break another rule and throw in a Super Nintendo port? Originally released in Japan on March 11, 1995 for the Super Famicom, Chrono Trigger got ported to the PlayStation twice — First, just in Japan, on November 2nd, 1999. This is the version I played. Then on June 29th, 2001 North America got an exclusive port called Final Fantasy Chronicles where Chrono Trigger came bundled with a re-translated Final Fantasy IV (or Final Fantasy II. The one with Cecil). The Playstation version of Chrono Trigger adds some anime cutscenes that aren’t in the original, but the game itself stays the same, which is good because Chrono Trigger is an all-time great. This game set a standard for JRPGs that, 23 years later, precious few (some would say no) games live up to. Multiple endings, New Game + mode, genuinely compelling storytelling, satisfyingly deep turn-based combat, beautiful graphics that look better than many actual PlayStation games, and some really great music, this game has it all and better people than myself have sung its praises. With a genuine masterpiece coming in at #2, the top spot could only go to…

1 – Power Shovel

This is everything I like about video games. True, escapist paradise, imagining oneself getting to eat that giant bowl of curry rice. Spicy and warm. It’s a strange comfort, as this nation plunges deeper into various labor crises, to have a game emulating work as stable and reliable as construction. Many of my generation serve the dreaded gig economy, aimless non-employees with no supervisors, gods, or masters, save for their Postmates Driver Rating. And then here comes Power Shovel. You have a boss, yes, but he’s concerned with safety. Very OSHA-compliant. Hardhats abound. You can earn millions of dollars, but only spend it on the privilege of looking at more power shovels. Company scrip. It’s a game that begs for Marxist analysis, but also resists it because it’s just plain fun.
First released in Japan as Power Shovel ni Norou on September 21st 2000 and in America on July 19 2001 (and a few months later in Europe as Power Diggerz, with a zed) this game captures the cartoony manic arcadiness you might expect from legendary developers Taito, but throws in a surprisingly complex control scheme to wrestle with. The games’ tutorial slowly teaches you how to operate the power shovel, and they’re neccessary lessons, even basic tasks require the use of all 12 primary buttons on the controller . Learning to operate the machine is ultimately rewarding as you’re then treated to a fine selection of minigames and various jobs to do. My favorites, of course, are the wacky ones.
Power Shovel requires persistence. It asks for close attention, and calm but steady action. Give it these things, and accept whatever it gives back with open arms. Take the same approach into the new year. May 2019 bring you joy and strength.