2024 Wrapped - Top 10 Games Played

It’s year number 2 of my Wrapped posts in which I call out the ten best games I played in the previous year. If you’d like to read the 2023 Wrapped post, here it is:

Here’s the full list of games I played in 2024, for comparisons sake. 43 games completed this past year, quite a milestone:

• Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (XBox 360)

• Mega Man (NES)

• Ninja Gaiden III: The Ancient Ship of Doom (NES)

• Spider-Man 2 (PS5)

• Metroid (NES)

• Mega Man 2 (NES)

• God of War: Ragnarök (PS5)

• Mega Man 3 (NES)

• Comix Zone (Genesis)

• Metroid: Zero Mission (GBA)

• Darksiders (XBox One)

• Mega Man 4 (NES)

• Golden Axe (Genesis)

• Metroid Prime (GameCube)

• Mega Man 5 (NES)

• Darksiders II (XBox One)

• Metal Gear (NES)

• Mega Man 6 (NES)

• Horizon: Forbidden West (PS5)

• Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (MSX/2)

• Mega Man 7 (SNES)

• Metroid Prime 2: Echoes (GameCube)

• Final Fantasy IX (PS1)

• Golden Axe II (Genesis)

• Mega Man 8 (PS1)

• Metroid Prime 3: Corruption (Wii)

• Golden Axe III (Genesis)

• Mega Man 9 (Switch)

• Darksiders III (XBox One)

• Metroid II: Return of Samus (Gameboy)

• Mega Man 10 (Switch)

• Final Fantasy VI (SNES)

• Mega Man 11 (Switch)

• Darksiders: Genesis (PS4)

• Batman Returns (SNES)

• Sea of Stars (Switch)

• Mega Man & Bass (GBA)

• Metroid: Samus Returns (3DS)

• The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom (Switch)

• Mega Man X (SNES)

• Super Metroid (SNES)

• Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes (PS5)

• Mega Man X2 (SNES)

• Metroid: Other M (Wii)

My Wrapped posts allow my readers to see a bit into the future of this newsletter. Because of my writing schedule, around the time that this “drops” I will still be releasing posts about the above games. So, what you will see is a bit of a teaser for the games I will be writing about in 2025 as well as which ones I really liked. Make sense? No? Okay, let’s move on.

Well, without further ado, here’s the list. I’ll be providing a short summary of what I thought of these games and why I thought they were special.

And hey, let me know what your top 10 was this year, I would love to compare notes.

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Nerd Central’s Top 10 2024 Games Played

10 - Horizon: Forbidden West (PlayStation 5)

image; Wired

Join Aloy as she braves a majestic but dangerous new frontier that holds mysterious new threats.

Explore distant lands, fight bigger and more awe-inspiring machines, and encounter astonishing new tribes as you return to the far-future, post-apocalyptic world of Horizon.

The land is dying. Vicious storms and an unstoppable blight ravage the scattered remnants of humanity while fearsome new machines prowl their borders, and life on Earth is hurtling toward another extinction.

I have a love/hate relationship with the Horizon series. On the one hand, it’s a AAA series with top notch graphics and a fully realized post-apocalyptic world with massive robot animals roaming around that can be hunted either stealthily or not. On the other hand, there’s so much to do it becomes overwhelming and I never really connected with any of the characters. And yet, it made my list for one of the best games I played in 2024.

Part of that could be that I played a lot, and I mean a lot, of Mega Man games in 2024 and none of those were ever going to break into my top 10 simply because they have a formula, and that formula is hardly ever tampered with. There is also minimal story, and I like a good narrative. But, to give some credit to Forbidden West, the game looks fantastic with actual human beings providing motion capture this time around. The world is bigger, and the stakes are higher. I also really enjoyed the underwater areas; they were beautifully rendered. But alas, Forbidden West has the same problems of its predecessor that I’ve already mentioned and so it only made it to number 10 on my list. I hope the third game, which is inevitable, really makes an effort to create some really memorable characters.