10: SONIC THE HEDGEHOG 2 (1992)

The blue blur is back! After toying with a dozen different low budget methods of getting emulators playable on The Big TV In The Living Room, a Steam Deck dock seems to be what I’m settling on. As is tradition when trying emulation setups, the first game I loaded up was Sonic 2. It still rules! As is also tradition, I made it to the level after Casino Nights and stopped because none of the levels after look or sound as cool as Casino Nights. We named it The Best Game of All Time on insert credit this year.

9: SID MEIER'S CIVILIZATION VII (2025)

I didn’t like Civ 6 as much as Civ 5, but I like Civ 5 a little too much. In my twenties I worked at a TV station, and after wrapping up the Brit-com block brought to you by viewers like you, thank you, I’d drive through Taco Bell then spend eight hours playing Civ 5 in my mom’s basement, blissfully unaware of when the sun would rise, only knowing it would be before I launched a rocket into space or guided my city-state barnacles to nominate me God-Emperor of All Time.

Civ 6 was a little different, so naturally, I didn’t like it as much. That’s a joke, I didn’t like Civ 6 because the district system was rarely intuitive and the civics system overhaul is still a little oblique to me. Civ 7 is better than Civ 6, but thus far, still not Civ 5.

8: VITAL SHELL (2026)

I haven’t played this yet, but it looks so good dude

7: FINAL FANTASY VII: REBIRTH (2024)

Assuming Cloud/Tifa/Aeris are an Archie/Betty/Veronica triad, is Final Fantasy VII the only instance where the Veronica actually has lighter hair color than the Betty? I sure hope so because otherwise I don’t have much interesting to say here. The characters of Final Fantasy VII are family members and friends of mine, the places they go and the places they come from are places I have been. I don’t say this to mean “I played a lot of this game as a kid,” I say it to mean Midgar and Detroit are the same city, and a million other cities. My buddy in middle school was a Cid. I had a crush on a Yuffie and knew a few Red XIIIs. My love of Final Fantasy VII is core deep and exploitable, and Square Enix has chosen to exploit me. I cannot blame them; I can only love.

6: SID MEIER'S CIVILIZATION V (2005)

In August of 2025 I moved across the country, but I took the same flight earlier that year from the Pacific Northwest (where I lived) to Ohio (where I was born) to help my mother during surgery on her back. She’s fine, it went great, we went out for dinner on Mother's Day together, but the surgery really had me on edge for a little bit and I needed the digital cigarette of using a Gatling gun against a horse-mounted army. Sid Meier rolled me one. Plays great on Steam Deck.

5: HOLLOW KNIGHT: SILKSONG (2025)

Just kidding! I don’t like Soulslikes.

5: DEMONSCHOOL (2025)

I talk about this game a lot. A great tactics RPG with a great soundtrack, great visuals, great characters, great minigames, great dialogue, great UI. Throwaway gags stick in the brain months later. Battles are satisfying without going long. Unimpeachable vibes. This game was directed by my friend and collaborator Brandon Sheffield at Necrosoft Games, who has said a major ethos of his work is making sure people can “see the fingerprints of the people who made it” and this game embodies that well. With every line of dialogue or funny sprite pose or crunchy hit or interesting lighting decision or wail of the perfect soundtrack, you can tell the people making this had fun. They love not only what they make, but the act of making it together, finding the thing deep within they’d like to share with each other. We get to share in that too, and we’re lucky for that.

4: MAGIC: THE GATHERING ARENA (2019)

3: CYBERPUNK 2077 (2020)

This is an obnoxious game. Within the first minute of playing as a street kid, presumably the most rebellious and progressive path, you see a vending machine featuring a woman’s visible cock bulge and a transphobic pun, as well as enough dayglo yellow to make you quit video games forever. Don’t worry though; there’s a few dozen other advertisements just like this, and you’ll be seeing them a few thousand times an hour. I’ve never gotten the hang of how non-motorcycle vehicles handle. The hacking minigame is more boring and frustrating than most hacking minigames, and that’s saying something. The blue and red UI is a disgusting choice. The quest names all being song titles is so, so corny, especially when you haven’t licensed any of that music.

But, it turns out, some real human beings live in this world. Goro talks about when the city exterminated all the cats. Panam makes a silly pun you’ve never heard before. Judy shows you where she grew up. Even with an audibly bored performance from Keanu, you and an ex-military fashion idol Marxist super hacker anarcho-terrorist platinum selling rock star suicide bomber share a cigarette together as you’re both dying, and take as long as you both need. Night City sucks, unforgivably so, but in a visceral, interesting, and occasionally very honest way.

2: BLIPPO+ (2025)

Television was born a mutant. It’s hard to put a precise date on when it was first conceived, or developed, or widely available, but no one person could “invent” television. People had been making television for years before it was invented. Radio, cinema, vaudeville, stage, newspapers, all have obvious DNA in what we would call TV.

Immediately prior to the concept of widespread television, the technology that most closely mirrored its place in culture would be radio, holding that position for about fifty years. Before that, if you were very rich and fancy maybe you had a piano, and those have been around for about 300 years. Before that, the fireplace, bright light and sound and even warmth, held the spot for all ~250,000 years of human existence. A family orients itself around sound and light, from our earliest appearance to current day. Once we worshiped the hearth, then the songs of gods, and now The Big TV In The Living Room.

The great innovation of television, like all communication technology before it, was format. Radio existed, and film existed, but television was not quite either of these things, because radio had no motion or light, and film was not in the home. You have to have both to be as important as a fireplace. 

Before video game consoles hit the home market, television was a one-way street. You could change the channel as you could on radio, but signal came over the air, and you watched it, and that was that. It spoke, you paid attention, like church. But I remember a documentary once describing the Atari as “being able to go up and touch the mantle” of that church. All of the sudden you controlled what happened, you moved the little guy. (We will avoid discussion of ludonarrative dissonance at this time.)

On Planet Blip, the fictional world from which Blippo+ is broadcast, this equivalence of religion and television is more realized. “The best way to learn about us is by watching our television,” says Lisa Duo, the fictional CEO of the streaming company. The world she exists in seems to be culturally oriented around broadcast technology, with geographical features named OLED Archipelago and Starwipe Springs. They live in a 20th Century New Wave-flavored world seemingly without much in the way of conflict or suffering, enjoying more-or-less infinite leisure and resources to pursue their passions. The problem of death has been solved by manifesting one's "consciousness particles" into brain jars. The world is cushy enough that issues seem to only arise from interpersonal drama, or good ol’ 90’s slacker malaise and disaffected irony. No war, no devastation, maybe radioactive waste but only the kind that turns people into superheroes. Sounds nice.

Blippo+, in its own fiction, is a streaming service (think more satellite TV than Netflix) broadcast from their planet to ours, by way of something they call “the Bend,” or occasionally “the anomaly,” a strange something happening out in space that you and I are on the other side of. They can’t hear back from us (television is a one-way street), but they know we’re listening, and they wonder what we’re like. They have fun imagining who we are, and talking to each other about us.

—

You may be aware I worked at a television station in my twenties, a PBS affiliate. I remember setting up tripods in the studio, running cameras or audio for talking-heads-and-potted-plants interview shows with local journalists. I remember the smell of the media archive, some of the reels dating back to the 1940’s and photos as far as 1890. I remember editing documentaries. That was where my childhood crush on TV turned into love.

Working at a PBS station gets you pretty involved with your local community. You team up with other institutions aiming to enrich your city, you interview people on the street, you learn the history of the ground beneath you and structures around you. You learn how few people in your neighborhood are actually villainous. You learn what your home does well and what it does poorly. It makes you feel connected. When you make documentaries, you feel like you’re doing something helpful and useful.

But you aren’t!! Television is neither helpful nor useful!!

Television, my first and deepest love, ruined and is continuing to ruin the world. While its little sister Internet also ruined the world, and many presume television is dead and irrelevant, we’ve all heard the stories of Fox News airing some opinion that Trump passes into law twenty-two minutes later, to say nothing of all the other poor suckers manipulated by other sources. Television has reached its horrifying apotheosis, in literal control of the United States President, and there’s nothing we can do within the bounds of nonviolent law about it except boycott advertisers and Pokemon Go To The Polls.

This is only one of a dozen huge shits television has dropped into the wellspring of humanity, including active and passive racism, xenophobia as cultural bedrock, normalized homophobia and transphobia, misogyny and rape culture, misinformation, unrealistic beauty standards, “shock and awe,” reinforcement of patriarchy, financial enrichment of the heinous, shaming of an unfathomable number of harmless behaviors or traits, propaganda, paparazzi, fearmongering, lionizing of evil, man I could just keep going.

TV is bad. Bad enough that you never need to forgive it.

But, for many of us, TV is also in our blood, and has been for far too long to get out. It was a parent that raised me when my own could or would not. Television was a friend when I was alone. If the home of my preteen years didn’t have the light and motion and sound of cartoons on cable, I would have been eaten by the stifling ghosts of silence and depression from 3:30 after school to 6-ish when mom got in the door. 

You can excuse, justify, and even get excited about a lot of things when they’re your only option. When that option shows you a world where good guys win, where friendship is literal power, where you’re special just because you’re you, it feels more real than the world around you.

You get to know the people in there. They become family members and friends, the places they go are places I feel I have been. Seeing a happy family in a sitcom, even one that surreptitiously suggests wrong or harmful ideas of what family happiness is, at least shows you that there is such a thing as a happy family.

For many years when I would go online, I’d set my profile picture to the SD ECR-1-1978 color bars. Television was, and always will be, a home I am loyal to. That loyalty gets exploited, and the exploitation benefits the worst souls imaginable, but I cannot blame them; I can only love.

—

This is all to say I knew I would like Blippo+ going in. It’s an FMV game (hang on) developed by the band Yacht, Telefantasy Studios, Noble Robot and published by Panic. Through an interface designed to look like a cable/satellite box from the early 00’s, you select a channel and watch shows, each of which are about a minute long. Each channel has about five shows, then it loops. Watch through a channel, move to the next one, and after a few minutes you’ll unlock the “next week’s” update, of which there are ten. 

This system, plus a text-based message board, allow you to slowly unravel not only the events playing out across time and culture, but what daily life is like for the people of Planet Blip. Giovanni Colantonio described it as "the fascinating cultural experience" of going to another country and watching their local TV, the way you might while traveling. 

This is a video game About television. It’s about other things too, but the thing it is About is television.

In an interview for the game’s launch, two members of the team decided it wasn’t a video game, that they were “just going to get out in front of” that particular criticism (which I haven’t seen anyone actually bring up, because I don’t see enough people talk Blippo+). Is it a game, though? It’s certainly a story presented in the fashion of many other FMV games where the fun (and gameplay) is discerning what’s actually happening by going through the video footage. I think it’s a video game. I felt like I won by the time I hit credits.

—

At the very end of August 2025 my partner and I moved from the Pacific Northwest to Ohio and that took a lot out of me. I had no choice but to get rid of everything I and my partner owned that wouldn’t fit in a Honda CR-V. Lining up housing, money, travel, healthcare, cleaning, packing, pet transfer, and the dozen other constant emergencies of everyday life as a poor trans person for a few months in a row stripped me of humanity more than I’d like to admit. Every day was about pushing myself to limits or past them, just to not be too far behind when I did the same thing the next day. I don’t recommend it.

 Once we were moved in, the first things we set up were beds, so we could sleep. Then, we got a couch, and a big TV in the living room. After another month or two, we had finally developed some kind of routine, and plugged the Steam Deck into a dock and that dock into the television. I pitched my partner on the idea of Blippo+, we split an edible, and we started watching.

I had watched the first loop of shows for each channel about a week earlier, so I already had some favorite segments I was excited to see my partner’s reaction to. Boredome. Wake Up, Universe. The Fighting Trillions. I had that “are they gonna like this?” anxiety you get when you show someone something you like a lot. But every sketch hit exactly the way it did for me. Realms Beyond. The Exquisite Telethon. It confirmed for me that it wasn’t just personal attachment to the medium and the era I was appreciating; this was something of real quality.

The next morning, sitting across from each other at a diner we like, I murmur “I’m dead without my murk” as I put a packet and a half of sugar and two little half-and-halfs into my coffee. We spend the 15 minutes or so before food arrives talking about where the story is going, what characters we like, what the narrator from Snacks Come Alive! might order here. It’s nice. It’s the nicest moment I’ve had in months. The warmth and light and sound of the fireplace is hypnotic, and sustaining, but the best part is talking to someone you love about something new.

—

I played Blippo+ on PC at first, which I would recommend to anyone, but it wasn't quite right. Blippo+ spends so much effort, so much attention to detail on creating a simulacrum of television. While releasing on PC is pretty close to essential for a video game release these days, it feels strange to use a mouse with this interface. The early days of computing (well; my early days of computing, which is to say AOL era) were just so structurally different from television. Even something like WebTV couldn’t sell the idea of clicking on a channel in a programming guide.

More recently, I watched a friend of mine stream Blippo+ on Twitch (hi Leah). Streaming is a newer form of television, interesting to me on a lot of levels for a lot of reasons. However, I’m not sure Blippo+’s texture is compatible with the medium. Whereas in the living room I am riffing with someone as a show plays, streaming features a kind of intermediary between you and the content: the streamer. It creates (interesting, not inherently negative) friction. There’s latency, and a power imbalance between the audience (colloquially known as “chat”) and the streamer. You can perhaps influence the jokes the streamer tells, but you are watching the streamer’s jokes.

With a video game like Dark Souls this is riveting. The streamer is more in conversation with the game than the audience, serving as a laugh track (or wailing chorus, whatever) amplifying the emotions they want a viewer to feel. And while MST3K proves you can have commentary on a work in tandem with the work, MST3K also proves this is really hard to do as improv. So, I can’t recommend watching someone stream Blippo+ (but I will recommend my friend Leah’s streams.)

The right way to play Blippo+, of course, is on The Big TV In The Living Room. This creates the illusion that you aren't playing, you're watching, and this is a new service you have access to. Get as stoned as you can handle, sit next to someone you love, and let the vocabulary and odd setups and lived-in performances wash over you. Turn off all the lights other than The Big TV. Remember being six years old, staying awake later than you ever had, seeing Talk Soup or ancient sitcoms or the weird cartoons they don’t show during the day. In the hours after prime time, things feel funnier, less painful, more comfortable. You go to a world that doesn’t hold quite as much back, or care quite as much about appearances.

That late at night, nobody rubs the fingerprints away. In the talk shows I’d watch even when I was very small, all the glam and big band and fancy desks and audience melt away, to unpredictability. Jokes bomb, you can see the microphones in the shot, you see the production crew, you see the guest settling in. In the shine of daytime we make great effort to hide these things, because we want the audience to focus on the story, or the spectacle, or even just some vague sense of professionalism and tradition, but late at night, we are sitting around the fire together. You have come to the television channel the way you go to a bar, not a theater. You want the fingerprints because that’s how you know who you’re hanging out with.

Blippo+ has real fingerprints. Every performance in every episode of each channel feels genuine and lived-in, every actor really understands not only the world of Planet Blip but what their character does in it. Every outfit, every musical cue, every graphic, every proper noun and many improper ones are the result of somebody saying “I love this” about something. Some real human beings live in this world, a point made very clear by the “Week 11” ending. You can tell everyone involved in the making of this had fun. 

—

My most recent time watching Blippo+ was on my Steam Deck, in bed, with airpods in. I kept the screen less than a foot from my face, the only light in the cool darkness. I’m supposed to be asleep right now, but I can’t get there. I turn to my friend and family member television, and here it is. I might as well be six years old again, or twenty, or a thousand. Debbie Diner offers me some gelbread and a seat at the counter. It’s good to be home.

So much of what we love, the things that define us, are products of circumstance and coincidence. Maybe your dad works nights when you are very young, so you stay up late to see him, and late night television imbues itself in the still-molten, slowly forming core of your being for the next thirty plus years. Maybe a one-week job shadowing turns into ten years of education and career making something people in your community really appreciate and respect. Maybe you uproot yourself after five years, and in the three-month panic of planning and emptying and grieving and choosing and flying and landing and setting in new roots, a video game gets released that feels like it’s speaking to you in a way only you could possibly ever understand, but it turns out the person sitting right next to you, who has been sitting next to you this whole time, understands it too. For me, that game was Blippo+.

AND THE #1 HOTTEST GAME OF 2025: CLAIR OBSCUR: EXPEDITION 33

They told me they’d kill my family if I didn’t put this here