Niki Grayson's Top 11 Things of 2024

Oi. It’s game of the year time.

Another year has come and gone and I am here on GiantBomb.com (a website about video games) to tell you about my favorite things of the year. If you missed my list last year, then you should know that I think the idea of putting exclusively 10 video games on a year end list is washed behavior. We should all try to be bigger than that. I liked more than 10 things this year and a bunch of them weren’t video games, so I’m going to take some liberties with my “game of the year list” and bring you my “List of 11 Things, Most of Which Are Video Games But A Handful of Important Entries Are Not Video Games.”

I hope that all of you (people in the games industry + people who are connected to the games industry) get got less in 2025. I just watched you all rile yourselves up again over this dumbass yellow/white paint in video games argument. You did this at the beginning of the year! You don’t need to have the argument again. There's going to be some similar bullshit once GTA 6 releases. We don't have to do it. We waste so much time as a collective arguing about shit that fundamentally doesn’t matter. We grant these conversations legitimacy by providing them oxygen when we deeply do not need to. It is tired, hacky advice, but advice that continues to be helpful to me: if you had to explain the thing on the computer you were mad at to a regular person, would they understand what the fuck you were talking about? If the answer is no, then you probably don’t need to care about it! Go outside! Watch a movie! Listen to a song! Go watch highlights from the Pop-Tart Bowl! They killed a Pop Tart and ate him, did you see?

Honorable Mentions (no particular order)

• Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip
• Thank Goodness You’re Here
• Caves of Qud
• Fledgling Manor (available now on Steam)
• Fortnite
• Star Wars Outlaws
• Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth
• Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess
• Pokémon TCG Pocket

11. Content Warning

Content Warning’s an evolution of the proximity audio/spooky monster/group play formula popularized (perfected?) by Lethal Company, which was on my list last year. It intelligently plays with content creation tropes while providing a fleshed out enough toolset for people like me to Make Comedy. I only played the game a few times this year, but it stuck in my craw all year. The stream we did of it is one of my favorite work hours of my career.

10. Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door

I have nothing to say about this video game that was released in the midst of George W. Bush’s re-election campaign that has not already been said. It is timeless in its writing, mechanically sound, and so narratively varied that Nintendo hasn’t been able to make a game like it in 20 years. This rerelease/remaster/remake/whatever is perfect because it brings the game in line to what I remembered it being when I was playing it at the ripe old age of 9. If you somehow haven’t played this video game you should fix that and play it. You are not bigger than Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door.

9. Call of Duty 19*: Black Ops 6

They made a good Call of Duty. Every year when the most boring person you know says that the Call of Duty that came out that year was “good,” they’re thinking about the experience that BLOPS 6 gives. Call of Duty thinks that it’s this good every year. Millions of people think Call of Duty is this good every year. Those things aren’t true – it is very rare for Call of Duty to be this good. (There have been almost 20 of them.)

But when it is, hooboy, there’s nothing quite like it.

There is an all timer of a map (Stakeout), a map that people will remember fondly but forget the name of by this time next year (Rewind) and a new movement system that is so simple it’s kind of wild it took them so long to put it in one of these (what if you could run… backwards?). The sounds are great. The game feels good because you know the angles that the guys are gonna come at you at, even if they’re goofy. Call of Duty is great again.

* It’s fucked that they count Mobile and Warzone as separate, numbered Call of Dutys. That’s bullshit. No way. There are 19 mainline CoD games. I will list them now:

1. Call of Duty (2003)
2. Call of Duty 2 (2005)
3. Call of Duty 3 (2006)
4. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007)
5. Call of Duty: World at War (2008)
6. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009)
7. Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010)
8. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2011)
9. Call of Duty: Black Ops II (2012)
10. Call of Duty: Ghosts (2013)
11. Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (2014)
12. Call of Duty: Black Ops III (2015)
13. Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare (2016)
14. Call of Duty: WWII (2017)
15. Call of Duty: Black Ops - Cold War (2020)
16. Call of Duty: Vanguard (2021)
17. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (2022)
18. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III (2023)
19. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 (2024)

8. Sports

Rollin' down the Imperial Highway

With a big nasty redhead at my side

Santa Ana winds blowing hot from the north

And we as born to ride

Roll down the window, put down the top

Crank up the Beach Boys, baby

Don't let the music stop

We're gonna ride it till

We just can't ride it no more

From the South Bay to the Valley

From the West Side to the East Side

Everybody's very happy

'Cause the sun is shining all the time

Looks like another perfect day

I love L.A. (we love it)

I love L.A. (we love it)

We love it

I had a great sports year. The Dodgers won the World Series when nobody thought we could. A real underdog story. The Galaxy won MLS Cup, too. We beat two New York teams for championship gold this year, and it hit like no other drug. In a year where I deeply fell back in love with the City of Angels, having two of my childhood teams win The Big One felt great. Fuck da Yankees, fuck da Red Bulls, fuck da Mets, fuck New York City, Los Angeles forever, etc etc.

Angel City did not have a great year but I did get to walk the Pandemonium flag out on the field this year which was an incredible honor. Walking out into a stadium where 18,000+ people are yelling and shouting and also looking at you is a feeling that I’ll cherish and reach for forever, and I hope I get to do it again in the future. I also went to Kansas City in November for the NWSL Championship, which was a delight. Being along for the ride as women’s soccer grows exponentially is a delight, and I am so grateful to be as involved with the growth of the game as I am. Too late (and too early) to go to space, too late to buy a home, but just in time to watch soccer go over in the United States.

OH ALSO THE FREAKIN’ OLYMPICS WERE THIS YEAR, DUDE. REMEMBER WHEN STEPH HIT THE DAMN NIGHT NIGHT ON FRANCE. REMEMBER WHEN WE ALL KNEW A LOT ABOUT GYMNASTICS FOR A SECOND? RAYGUN. REMEMBER RAYGUN? Great sports year. I cannot wait for 2028. A home Olympics? Are you kidding me?

7. Hades II

The only reason Hades 2 is this low on the list is because the game’s not done yet, but I got so much out of it this year it might as well be a complete experience. Supergiant had/has an impossible task – make a follow up to a game that was basically perfect. And somehow? They did it? It’s unbelievable. Melinoe is a great follow up to Zag, the combat feels just as good if not better than it did in the first game, and the gameplay/narrative loop sings. I can’t wait for this game to be finished so I can put it on my list again in 2025.

6. Working in Video Games

I completed another year of working in the video game industry, a privilege that I am immensely grateful for. I get to work alongside unbelievably talented and funny people every day and I want to keep doing it for as long as I can, in any way that I can. Doing GB’s Game of the Year is a buckwild turn of events for me, and having had a hand in our TGA coverage was a bucket list item checked off in a time where I kinda felt like I didn’t have anything on the list to check off. I also was easily the best dressed at the TGAs this year. I will carry that with me until I die.

5. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is an all time licensed game. While it is an enormous bummer that we are losing so many original recipes to The Big Churn™ of media homogeneity, it is delightful that we live in a world where Disney let MachineGames invent new ways to let the player hit a Nazi in the dick with a hammer. The game is a delight, the performances are dazzling, and the puzzles all make me feel smart. A lovely experience, top to bottom.

4. GNX by Kendrick Lamar

Eagle eyed readers will realize that this entry is actually not a video game, but a "music album". Los Angeles – the city – had an incredible year. I alluded to it in the sports section but no city in the country had a year as emblematic of its beauty and cultural cachet as Los Angeles did in 2024. It is a privilege and a blessing to be from and live in a city that Matters™, and GNX understands this explicitly and implicitly. Kendrick had an unbelievable 2024, having killed a Canadian man for sport over the course of a few weeks, doing a show that will go down in the history of the city, before announcing that he was going to do the Super Bowl and then do a national tour right after. GNX is a distillation of that achievement, of love of home. I’m happy that Kendrick gifted this city this album.

3. Astro Bot

Nintendo had a bad year but there was still a great Nintendo game this year. It just so happened to be made by Sony Computer Entertainment. I loved Astro Bot. It is joyous. It is a technically perfect video game. You can play Locoroco and Ape Escape in it. I hope they make another one just like it in a few years.

2. Balatro

Balatro is the best video game released in the year 2024. It’s not even close. It is increasingly rare for a video game to take up my time the way this game did, but it is the game I played the most this year. My idle moments I was thinking about the cards, hearing the music loop in my head, and feeling the card vibrations in my hands. I do not like math but I like math when it is in the video game Balatro. A perfect experience, one that I have tried to share with as many people as I can. I am happy that Jan Ochoa was the first person to ever play the video game and that he told the world about it earlier this year. Thank you for inventing Balatro, Jan.

1. The Fujifilm X-T50

I used to be such a tech optimist. I was convinced that these little (and big) rectangles of light would save us. That the miracle of an interconnected web of silicon would bring us together in a way that would be mostly generative. I don’t believe this anymore, obviously. Our computers are worse at providing the same experiences year over year. Our phones are worse at basically every task they were invented for. Most of the phone calls you get are from robots or people being paid pennies to try to scam you. Texting is busted – I’m in multiple “group chats” that have me and one other person in them because iMessage can’t figure out that one contact can have an email address and a phone number. And the thing that I think is potentially the most transformative – that we all carry a high resolution camera in our pockets at all times – is actively being turned into a tool that Google and Samsung and Apple want to be intentionally misrepresentative of the reality they are built to capture.

Not content to just make the photos look like they are lit by the Sun we all know exists, Big Tech is cramming AI horseshit into your phone camera so you can make it look like your kid jumped 10 feet in the air for some reason, or so that everyone’s face is in focus. That is not what these cameras are for. They do not exist to capture perfection, they exist to capture moments, which are inherently imperfect. If you want to capture perfection then go into a studio. If we want to revel in the ability to capture the joy of the shared human experience by using this miracle device in our pockets, then we must accept and understand that those captures will be imperfect.

And honestly, gang, I might feel better about all of the AI stuff in our phone cameras if the photos looked good, but they don’t! They all look like shit! If I had infinite ink to spill I would submit an argument that we no longer are carrying cameras, but relative computational imaging devices that take images that some egghead in Cupertino or Mountain View thinks you want. It’s infuriating.

This moment has been coming for a while, and I think normal people have some of the understanding they need (i.e. they know that their iPhone photos look wack now) but because our tech/media literacy is collectively so low, they don’t know why it’s happening. A lot of people my age (and a bit younger, and maybe even older, idk) are just going out and buying real cameras from real camera companies who know what a picture is. And that’s what I did. And it's probably what you should do too.

I bought a Fujifilm X-T50, which is basically a shrunken down version of the XT5 (a camera for nerds) and an interchangeable lens version of the X100IV (a camera for the most annoying person you know on Instagram). I love this hunk of metal a lot. I have taken some of my favorite pictures in my whole life on this camera, and I’ve only had it for 8 months. It has film simulations that allow me to get the aesthetic joys of shooting film stock without the hassle of actually shooting film. I feel empowered and confident in my ability to capture something that will be stunning, additive, and representative of the memory I set out to capture. It is a tool that I am grateful to have, one that I cannot wait to continue to grow with, and one that I am excited to share with my loved ones. And that's what's going to save us – not the silly rectangles in our pockets. Cameras are forever, and so are the moments they capture.

See y'all next year!