Best Game - Cuphead



We got a winner by default here. As with Deltarune Chapter 2 in 2021, I'm not considering that for the "Best Game" ranking until the full game is out and even if I did consider Chapters 3 and 4, Cuphead would still come out on top. Everything else I played this year ranged from "it wasn't great but it could have been worse, I guess" (Clockwork Knight) to utterly boring (Final Fantasy Legend III).

Worst Game - Final Fantasy Legend III
1st Runner Up - Golden Sun
2nd Runner Up - Felix the Cat

I don't feel like making a "Biggest Disappointment" this year because I don't have a "Most Pleasant Surprise" but Golden Sun would get that award. And yes, Golden Sun might have more substance than Felix the Cat but that's a generic mascot platformer, who gives a shit that it isn't that good?

Prettiest Game - Cuphead

From the looks of it, the DLC bosses are even more impressive. Bit of a shame Cuphead's soundtrack is just... there.

Best Soundtrack - Deltarune Chapters 3 and 4



This is going to be a hot take, I wasn't blown away by these two chapters' soundtracks. Oh, they're good and I do like "From Now On" and "GUARDIAN" but nothing floored me like "A CYBER'S WORLD?", "BIG SHOT," or "Knock You Down!!," I already told you my story about how "Black Knife" pissed me off so badly I had to go into the game's sound files and replace it, and remember when I said "Hammer of Justice" didn't make me want to tear my hair out while listening to it? To be honest it doesn't sound like... anything to me.

But there might be more to it than the music itself. I'll talk about it later.

Best Game to Have Held Off on Completing - Scribblenauts: Unmasked

Looking back at what I said about this game in 2015, yeah, I still had the other problems with it - almost never being able to figure out what the game wanted from me before something exploded, most enemies being easily beaten by adding debilitating adjective to them - but I was able to appreciate the DC references more. It's odd I didn't say anything about the malfunctioning hard drive, though.

Most Satisfying to Finally Finish After Tormenting Me For Years - Golden Sun
1st Runner Up - Cuphead
2nd Runner Up - Final Fantasy Legend III

In the past "Most Satisfying to Finally Finish" has referred to games I played ages ago and got some ways into but, for whatever reason, gave up on and picked off. Cuphead is an outlier because I never really played it outside the tutorial, but it has been a game that's hovered over my head for years because I was always afraid I'd be too crap to ever beat it.

Game That I Put A Decent Amount of Effort Into, But Never Got Around to Finishing of the Year - Mega Man Battle Network 5: Double Team DS



This is the DS version that has both versions of Battle Network 5, and I went with Team Colonel because from what I gather Colonel plays a big role in Battle Network 6, but if you play Team Protoman he basically comes out of nowhere. I got up to the point where Nebula kidnaps Mega Man and you're given control of Colonel, and just sort of tapped out. Maybe it's because I still haven't gotten over the disappointment that was Battle Network 4, but I also really did not care for the liberation missions. They work fine for what they are, but I didn't fire up a Battle Network game to play Final Fantasy Tactics.

The game's pacing is also fucked. You go to a place where Nebula is causing trouble only to come to a dead end when you can't get past the defenses. Then you go on another mission where you run into a Navi who can overcome the defenses, then go back to liberate the terrorized zone. After the third time this happened with Shadowman, I was like "Is the whole game going to be this shit??"

And yes, the voice clips were getting on my nerves.

Game That I Put A Decent Amount of Effort Into, But Decided Could Go Fuck Itself of the Year - Gurumin 3D: A Monstrous Adventure



I was getting progressively more annoyed trying to platform in this game because of how low the camera is. Like, there was this boss fought on a series of small islands in an underground lake that would have been agony if not for the accessory that negates damage from falling in water. But at least most of the time if I screwed up a jump I just climbed up some stairs and tried again. Then I got to this mountain made of narrow paths and bottomless pits and that's when I said fuck this.

Best Movie - Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
1st Runner Up - Over the Garden Wall

Like Asterix and the Big Fight, I'm treating Over the Garden Wall like a movie that was cut up into ten parts.

Worst Movie - Batman Ninja
1st Runner Up - Home on the Range

Batman Ninja is also my biggest non-game disappointment of the year. Batman in feudal Japan could have been so cool, instead we got... whatever the fuck that was.

Best Book/Comic - Gate of the Feral Gods: Dungeon Crawler Carl IV
1st Runner Up - The Cat Who Saved Books
2nd Runner Up - Seven Soldiers of Victory

Books and comics were by far the most popular media of the year so there was a lot to pick from. And while this is the list I'd make anyway, if the best books had all been Dungeon Crawler Carl I would have picked one to stand in for the whole series.

Worst Book/Comic - A Very DC Halloween

This would have been The Invisibles but I didn't do a quickie for that. So the worst book of the year is merely unimpressive instead of impenetrable gibberish.

Best TV Show - The Cuphead Show
1st Runner Up - Ultraman Season 1 and 2

Some time after I finished The Cuphead Show I learned the producer, Dave Wasson, directed those demented Mickey Mouse shorts from a few years back. That makes a horrifying amount of sense.

Stuff I Didn't Do Quickies About For One Reason or Another



Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy - I really only watched this to see the context behind that "Boy, that escalated quickly" meme and while that entire scene was amazing, the rest of the movie was too reliant on sex jokes and just not my cup of tea.

We'll Prescribe You a Cat - After my March quickies were held up by me trying to figure out how to approach this, I finally decided to cut it and move on. Take one of those "What Cats Teach Us About Life" calendars, expand it into five short stories, and that gives you a good idea of what We'll Prescribe You a Cat is.

Grant Morrison: The Early Years - Like with The British Invasion last year, I'm not doing non-fiction unless it really gives me something to talk about.

The Invisibles and The Filth - How would I review these? They're both complete nonsense. If you want to read The Invisibles I can't stop you, but the only way I would recommend it is if you liked Doom Patrol but thought it was too coherent and needed more slurs.

Final Thoughts

This is the third year in a row where I've lost a cat, this time it was Gabbee. She was very close to Red, the cat we had put to sleep last year after he developed a tumor that prevented him from eating. Hell, the two were so close I had to really dig to find a picture of her without Red. After Red died Gabbee got mopey and eventually developed breathing problems. We had her on medications and thought she was getting better, then she stopped eating and died. I think she finally mourned herself to death over Red.

Then we thought we'd lost another, Bandy, the diabetic cat. I know it's not a good idea to be letting a diabetic cat go outside, but she likes to go outside and chill on the porch. She always stayed close by, often sitting on the wood rack, but one day she up and vanished. She'd been in remission for either a few months or over a year depending on if you count her hematoma briefly throwing her blood sugar out of whack, but she still needed to eat or she'd become hypoglycemic. After three days passed I got to thinking about how cats like to hide when they're about to die and concluded she'd gotten really sick and hid herself somewhere to die and we were never going to find her body. Another three days passed and as mysteriously as she disappeared, she showed up again. Unfortunately the ordeal didn't make her stop pissing on my floor.

And that flea infestation from last year was still lingering until we finally bit the bullet and bought some Credelio from the vet. Within hours I was combing dead fleas out of the cats and within a few days our flea infestation was finally over. I'm serious, if you have pets and are dealing with a flea infestation, ask your vet for this stuff. Yeah, it's expensive at $25 a dose but holy shit, as far as I'm concerned it's worth it.

Oh and this year World of Warcraft released a Legion Remix. Did I hop back to check it out? It was tempting but I put my foot down and reminded myself that I vowed to only play the game again if they released a Warlord of Draenor Remix because I wanted to see the raids, and this ain't Warlords, so fuck it. And most of the new mounts on offer being dogshit made it that much easier to ignore.

2025 also marked the 10th anniversary of Undertale. When Undertale came out I was going to back to school for a degree in Computer Informations, and I remember one day a classmate came in barely able to speak. I thought he had a cold, but it turns out he had screamed himself hoarse trying to beat Sans the night before. 2018 saw the announcement of its successor Deltarune, and 2021 brought us Chapter 2 and Spamton brainrot.

Everything changed when I saw that "The player is the true villain of Toby Fox's games" comment in that Spamton meme video, leading me down a rabbit hole of theories and Reddit posts saying the same thing. Where the hell is this coming from? Why would anyone take it seriously? Has Fox been taking me for a ride all this time? And, well, I went on that tirade at the end of page 3 of the Deltarune/Grant Morrison project. It didn't help that my Computer Informations degree didn't work out as I'd hoped (I ran into the problem of everyone wanting five years experience for entry level jobs), and I had to go back into retail, turning my life into, well, this.

I didn't go into this in the main quickie, but I played Chapters 3 and 4 in a fog (well, until the final boss of Chapter 4 opened its wings and revealed itself as the Candlemaker, and I bust out laughing). Every time I started to feel anything, it's like a voice would whisper "You know the whole point of this game is you're an asshole for playing it, right?" into my ear and I'd go numb. And to be honest, this is what really caused me to give up on the Knight, even more than the screwed up hitboxes on the sword tunnels or the irritating music even though those two things certainly played a part. Every time I lost to the Knight, that voice got a little louder until it became unbearable. There were two moments in Chapter 4 that were supposed to be gutpunches, Kris playing the piano and the path to the final encounter with the Knight, but I felt alienated, like the game was telling me "This is between these characters, you stay out of this." Even during the fight with Jackenstein which everyone hails as one of the funniest things in the game, I felt nothing.

In the leadup to the 10th anniversary event, a form was put out where people could submit their stories with Undertale, the best of which would be showcased during the stream. I didn't submit anything. Why bother? The page was getting so many entries it kept crashing, what chance did my comment have of getting seen, much less chosen? And what the hell was I going to write? "Undertale and Deltarune brought me joy until I found out the whole point of both games is I'm a piece of shit for playing them and Toby Fox is just one more person in my life who's been lying to me"? I also did not watch the stream. Whatever game Fox was playing, I didn't want to be a part of it.

Once the stream was over and Twitter lit up with screenshots of Fox telling everyone to draw all the skeletons they wanted, I started to realize something; I'm tired of being angry. Being angry at something that was cooked up by ragebaiters for clicks. One day I was recommended a video essay about how much of an existential nightmare Deltarune is for Kris, only to realize it was from the same assclown featured in this video. This fucker praising MatPat's video because telling kids that if they truly care about their friends and loved ones they'll agree to have nothing to do with them is fine as long as you get Kris' pronouns right when you do it was outed as a predator a couple months ago, so why should I care what they think? And realizing what a brat the creator of the Oblivion Theory is, getting told by more than one person that I was "making shit up" when I mentioned Deltarune pulling from DC comics, and interacting with one particular dipshit who really didn't do anything to debunk my "to most of Fox's fanbase any comic that predates Homestuck might as well be the Nazca Lines" comment made me further realize how fucking stupid I was being about this theory.

Seriously, this kid kept arguing that Jevil can't be based on the Joker because he's based on Gamzee from Homestuck since they're both clowns with purple color schemes who were locked away after going on killing sprees. So, uh, can anyone else name another clown with a purple color scheme who was locked away after going on a killing spree? Who's based on the Joker card, is obsessed with chaos, uses projectiles based on playing cards, and is the most famous comic book villain of all time? By this kid's logic, the Fact in Flex Mentallo can't be based on the Question because he's based on Rorschach, as if he can't pull from both and Rorschach isn't based on the Question anyway. I eventually figured out what their problem was: this kid had tied their own identity so tightly to Homestuck that they were taking any perceived slight against it, such as the suggestion that Toby Fox pulled inspiration from something other than Homestuck, that Homestuck wasn't as original and unique as they'd thought it was, and that Homestuck itself may have been inspired by *gasp* capeshit as a personal attack.

Then there was the whole kerfuffle over the rose in Chapter 4, which is another sign I should take Deltarune theorists' judgment with an entire salt lick (for you kids who don't know what a salt lick is, it's a large brick of salt you put out for deer to lick. Now get off my lawn).

No, these theorists and the stream of kids sucking MatPat's dick in the comments aren't thinking about the themes or moral of the story or how unfathomably cruel and catastrophically stupid it would be for Fox to bang on about friendship for years only to end his game by effectively having his characters gang up on the player and let them know how much they hate them (for somebody out there battling depression, bipolar disorder, or any other number of mental health problems, that would be the straw that breaks the camel's back followed by the noose that breaks the camel's neck). They're dumbass kids raised on the Game Theory School of Media Analysis, where metaphor and subtext are for stupid babies who believe a fat man in a red coat comes down the chimney to deliver presents during the winter, and smart people like them only care about the hard facts.

When MatPat slaps together a video the question on his mind isn't "What's the creator trying to say with their story?" it's "What's going to make me look the smartest and get me the most clicks?" And to do that he'll pull bullshit about All Might having a secret, shape-shifting Quirk out of his ass, steal the most popular theory on Jon Snow's parents from Reddit, and throw out facts that don't support the narrative he's trying to push. When Ann Reardon called him out on his milk video he admitted to knowing about phytates and oxylates, compounds present in beans and cabbage that interfere with calcium absorption, but omitted them from the video because they made it less clickbaity interesting. He ignored lore in Hollow Knight that directly countered a theory he made up about it, then when Hollow Knight fans rightfully tore him a new one for it he refused to ever do a video about the game again (I haven't gotten around to Hollow Knight yet and have no intention of ever watching his video when I do, so I don't know the specifics of this). And then there's whatever the hell you call his For Honor video. You could watch Senator Armstrong saying "my source is that I made it the fuck up" on loop for fifteen minutes and get the same experience.

Toby Fox wants to make people happy, and it's the edgy teenagers trying to come up with the most mind-blowing, sensationalist, and clickbaity theory they can who think otherwise. That, or he's so committed to his massive "fuck you" that he's willing to put on a charity show while sick with covid to feed into it. Fox even seems to be trying to nudge people away from this theory. Susie promising Ralsei nobody's going to get thrown away. Gerson repeatedly dismissing the prophecy as a fairy tale that's open to interpretation. Ralsei's breakdown after the statue encounter in Chapter 4, and asking Kris to hold out hope until they all see their fate with their own eyes. Pippins Mike's comment in the September 2025 newsletter suggesting that just because a theory is "cool" that doesn't mean it's right (maybe this wasn't a fistbump but a middle finger). I'm getting the feeling Fox hates this theory as much as if not more than anyone, but can't say anything about it. Not only would it set the precedent that he'll comment on theories and if he doesn't deny the next theory that becomes the most popular everyone's going to take it to mean that one is true, but he could end up painting a target on some kid's back. When Fox shut down "Sans is Ness" MatPat got clowned on for it, but MatPat is an arrogant prick with an ego big enough to tank that and a massive fanbase ready to kiss his ass if he gets really butthurt about something. The people pushing the "player evil and we'll be thrown out of the game because we're shit" theory are random kids and Fox already has the needle cookies hovering over Undertale, he doesn't need a Rose Quartz fanart situation on his hands.

And if Deltarune does end with Fox dropping the biggest "fuck you, got mine, thanks, suckers" in the history of video games, then I can say "Well, fuck you, too."

I still wish Fox would take five goddamned minutes to address MatPat using his game to promote suicide, but the video is two years old, I'm the only person who gave it a second thought after watching it (yes, of course that includes MatPat himself), the "don't ask questions, just consume product, then get excited for next product" mentality of Game Theory means it very unlikely anyone took his suggestion to heart much less followed through on it, and MatPat's sycophantic fanboys would circle the wagons and accuse Fox of shit-stirring. There's no point in starting a fight over it now, I guess.

I picked up bits and pieces of the stream secondhand, such as a scene of Spamton in Grillby's, inhaling a giant french fry after being given a choice between it and a burger. And I thought, wait, did Fox find my essay about how Kris as the player's puppet doesn't work unless Fox himself is the big bad, where I made the comment about taking Spamton to a burger joint? I'm also a bit weirded out by the reference to an adult booster seat (in my closing discussion about fanon here, I said "Talk about canon all you want, half the playerbase is always going to want to put Spamton in a high seat and give him a smash cake") and Spamton talking about a cat in response to picking "catsup" over "ketchup." And was there a point where Fox asked somebody to join him "behind the curtain," as if to suggest he's "the man behind the curtain"?

But come on, of course this is coincidence. Spamton and the Addisons used to go to a grill after work, Baby Salesman is an entire genre of Spamton fanart, cats are the lifeblood of the Internet (also, one of the Mikes is a cat whose eyes are colored like Spamton's glasses, and there are cats with pink and yellow eyes all over the Mike fight and minigames), and Fox was literally behind a curtain, plus I'm not even sure he said "behind the curtain" or "off-stage," "back here," or any other number of similar phrases. I'd buy it if there was something very specific like Spamton having a penguin blanket and dinosaur pajamas, or Sans romancing a lawyer, a senator, and a Gaul, but unless Toby Fucking Fox has been secretly following me since Mario Busters, occasionally checks to see if anyone has caught on to Grant Morrison's influence on him (which I'm still the only person who has said anything about), or saw one of my responses in the sea of them he gets when he Tweets, he has no idea who I am.

In Loving Memory of Gabbee
2012 - 2025