Guessed by @drbunnig

The mandatory "this was my life during the pandemic" game. Think everyone has one. Anyway, it was probably a few thousands of hours playing this, getting a fictional team from the 6th tier of English football to a handful of Champions League trophies and all that... you know, the usual stuff. I wrote quite a lot about the history I created within this game in the previous years, but those posts aren't exactly readable now, which sucks. I'll spare you all a repeat of it, though, but in the end it's this power to create a story within the game that makes Football Manager so special. It's what any sports game should strive to do in my opinion, but most just don't. Maybe it's better like that. That way I don't get to lose another few thousands of hours to a game like this again.

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I mean, Championship Manager and Football Manager are essentially the same, so it counts in my book.

Going into #43, with a rather peculiar song:

Continuing the write-ups on my top 10 favorite video games of all time.

Other entries in this series:

10. Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams
8. Uncharted: The Lost Legacy
7. Chop Suey
6. Knights and Bikes
5. Super Metroid
4. Gone Home
3. Butterfly Soup
2. The Last of Us Part I
1. The Last of Us Part II

9. PERFECT TIDES

This one's actually from 2022. My favorite new game this year so far is Perfect Tides, and since you've never heard of it, let me just introduce you by saying that it's easily one of the best point-and-click games I've ever played before. I've got a number of reasons for feeling this way:

1) This is a game about life. And that's it. More specifically, it's about the life of a particular teenage girl named Mara Whitefish lived out over the course of the year 2000. And that's more than enough. Seriously, I actually think games recourse to supernatural or sci-fi plot devices far too often, or else are just straightforward simulation games that may be mechanically sound and entertaining to a point, but, for lack of a better way of putting it, lack the feels. Perfect Tides is among only the tiniest handful of games I've ever played that have been something else, and I wish there were more like it.

2) The relationship between the player and Mara is perfect. There are many dialogue choices in this game and they make a difference, but while many games with substantial choose-your-own-adventure elements wind up reducing their protagonist to simply a shell -- but a stand-in for the player's own personality, often complete with a title instead of a name -- Mara remains very much her own person throughout, and this fact kept me emotionally attached to her. Like for example, the Mara who writes an intimate, yearning letter to internet friend-turned-love-interest Staggle is the same person as the Mara who writes that friend a friendly-but-guarded letter instead, but once the letter is sent, Mara’s response to Staggle’s reply letter is her response, not the player’s. You have control over her movements and over many of her narrative choices, but not just all of them, and this balance makes the difference in terms of rendering both Mara herself and her journey through love and friendship and school, work, home life, scorn and conflict, something truly involving and special. The relationship between the player and the game's narrator is also one I find interesting in its nuances.

3) The story this game tells. If you want a remarkably accurate snapshot of what American culture was like back at the turn of century, you will find it here, carefully preserved in loving detail. But more than nostalgia for this infrequently-revisited point in time, the setting also stands out. Perfect Tides is the name of the island that Mara lives on; a place that's known first and foremost as a vacation spot, but one that maintains a small year-round community, each of whom handles their relative isolation in different ways. The island is in the process of being gentrified in a fact that Mara develops wildly different feelings about as she herself develops. You'll play through a few key, formative days of each season of the year on the island, and the set pieces for each are ambient and inspired. Although not intended primarily as a social commentary, the game's themes feels especially pertinent this year, especially in as far as Mara happens to loosely qualify as what we today might term a kind of proto-femcel. (2022 having been dubbed "the year of the femcel" by some in the press, owing to an exponential surge in usage of the hashtag on various social medias like TikTok and the recent revival of Tumblr.) The dialogue, what's more, is witty, honest, and immersive to a degree that's almost unique in this medium. Seriously, I cannot do justice in words here to how well this game is written! Mara's struggles for attention, trust, friendship, love, meaning, self-improvement, peace within her family, and peace within herself are not only memorable, but something special in their specificity, complexity, and accuracy. Her chats on the online fan-fiction community she logs onto via AOL dial-up (you get the full experience, complete with the scrambled dial tone, word that the song you found finished downloading overnight, etc. ) feel very much like the real deal and effectively convey how moving and important one's online life could be even in those early days of popular internet and rank among the game's many highlights for me, along with its distinctive art style that strikes a wonderfully delicate balance between true-to-life, nostalgic, and endearingly cartoony.

4) This game about a the coming of age of a teenage was actually directed by a woman (Meredith Gran). I really, really feel like that's a huge factor in why Mara's personality and decisions come across as this exceptionally believable, frankly. I seriously can't help wondering how much of the game might even autobiographical; it's that raw and real! Unlike so many other "multi-dimensional" game characters, Mara is not simply two-dimensional. She's instead an extremely complicated mess: depressed, sweet, dramatic, flawed, witty, fun, and more, not just reduced to a couple defining characteristics. It's so thematically appropriate that the whole experience is so unfocused, lacking clear guidance or objectives...much like Mara! Most likely not a coincidental design choice.

5) Okay, this one's just a special bonus with meaning to me, but...toward the end, Perfect Tides also includes what sure the hell to me looks like an extended, loving homage to the oft-forgotten 1995 point-and-click adventure Chop Suey that always makes my all-time top 10 list every year and it's the most joyous thing I've ever experienced in a video game before, period! Nobody remembers Chop Suey. Or so I thought! I couldn't believe it. I couldn't..fucking..believe it! Knowing that the creators of this game were influenced by Chop Suey specifically was the proverbial icing on the cake for me. Just made me feel seen, and loved.

Perfect Tides certainly won't win any Game of the Year awards (it's much too obscure; in fact, it's probably like the most obscure game that I own, save only Chop Suey), but it greatly deserves to be seen, and played, and I want to help make it just that much more visible here.

Well Football Manager was my next logical guess, so you've cut out the middle man and saved me a post there.

For 43 I was going to say Pac Man but then remembered he's yellow. Maybe a Crash game? He's got a big mouth and he's orange.

Was surprised I didn't come across this while looking for Adventure games to put in the voting list for GOTY, but then I looked on OpenCritic and Meta for it and it only has two critic reviews across both of them, which explains why I missed it!

This line of dialogue did make me laugh:

45: Smash Bros. Ultimate

43: I thought of this;

Though this is a Pac-Man clone, and in-game you're blue if I recall correctly.

Yeah, neither Pacman nor Crash. I should add hints.

No, to both. And what even is the second? A Magnavox game on the competitors Atari console? And looks like a Pacman clone judging from the cover? Game history is so full of surprises.

Yes, it is exactly that.

I should have the Magnavox version somewhere.

I'll take a second stab at #45; maybe GoldenEye (Wii version).

43 - This game features a couple minor vehicles, which you'll use in a supporting role next to the primary vehicles, which are sometimes based off cars and vans from real-life TV shows.
Hint 2: They look like how they look in the shows too, like the orange car from "The Dukes of Hazard" and the black van with a red stripe from "The A-Team".
Hint 3: There's more of those secondary vehicles, which you'll have to use to get yourself from place to place, from construction vehicle to construction vehicle, too though, like trains and cranes.
Hint 4: Those construction vehicles (you know, a bulldozer, a dump truck) however are actually used for destruction instead. Guessed by Veknoid_Outcast - Blast Corps

41 - There's an easter-egg in a sound clip in this game, where a traffic report comes from something from another, related (but different), game. It usually reports heavy traffic.
Hint 2: The name of it even uses the same three letter prefix as everything else in this series.