The Game of 2025

Posted on January 6, 2026 by JC

After last year’s generally bland offerings, I didn’t expect 2025 to be much better but it turned out to be an excellent year for releases. As I noted in the liked post, part of the reason was the expectations for what is now well-known as the Nintendo Switch 2. This was the expected name but it wasn’t confirmed until early 2025. I shared my thoughts on the console back in July partially in response to general criticisms about the launch and especially the pricing. Part of this was valid but most of it wasn’t and as of writing, I haven’t felt the need to adjust my opinion and I wrote this prior to the release of many of the titles covered below. 

I will be covering eleven games released this year (a record for me), and will begin with the new Nintendo releases followed by three other releases and the two remasters I played.

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Film Reviews and Articles

Posted on December 30, 2025 by JC

Similarly to my collected video game and book reviews and articles, I have now written enough about film and television series to create a separate catalogue of related posts. The way I’ve had to structure this is a little different as many of the films I’ve reviewed combine multiple genres and unlike video games, there are also no platforms or companies to easily divide them. I also often have different titles for various reviews and so will be just naming the film or television series below. Where I have covered multiple films, they will just be included in ‘Articles & Commentary’. Many of these articles are also rather old and so are not of the same quality as what I try to achieve in more recent years. Finally, I don’t always follow a conventional review structure as I cover a specific aspect or element of a specific film whether from a socio-political or other perspective.

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Foreigners Kill People: Australians to Blame

Posted on December 24, 2025 by JC

On the evening of Sunday the 14th of December, 2025, a father and son named Sajid and Naveed Akram killed fifteen people on Bondi Beach in Sydney Australia. The people targeted were people celebrating Hanukkah on the beach and most of the fifteen victims were Jewish and many of these were born overseas. Depending on where you count, this is about the tenth such attack since 2014 and certainly the deadliest so far this century. It is hard to argue that all these attacks were not motivated by Islam or an “extreme form of Islam” for the squeamish. That the targets have also generally been Jewish or connected to the state of Israel in some way is also hardly a coincidence.

A look through ‘Terrorism in Australia‘ on Wikipedia will demonstrate that most examples in Australian history have not been perpetrated by Australians and by “Australians”, I mean the people that would have been considered Australian by those present for Federation on January 1st 1901. This is Wikipedia of course but in this case, the bias helps because the editors have clearly included as many examples as they could that conform to their political biases. Despite this, most terrorism and all incidents in recent memory, were perpetrated by people professing Islamic beliefs and who have a paper-thin connection to Australia. The names alone should tell you these aren’t people with an ancestor brought here on a prison ship or even someone that freely immigrated from the United Kingdom in the early part of last century. 

Yet for all this, the response thus far of both the NSW state and our Federal government would suggest this attack was carried out by home-grown-neo-Nazis. Continue reading →

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Australia’s Social Media “Ban”

Posted on December 19, 2025 by JC

As of December 10th, Australia introduced it’s social media ban on certain websites for children under 16. I do not have accounts with any of the affected platforms and I had assumed that this effectively requires everyone who uses them to prove their identity going forward. So far at least, I have no noticed any change at all. The websites affected as of writing are:

Facebook
Instagram
Kick
Reddit
Snapchat
Threads
TikTok
Twitch
X (formerly Twitter)
YouTube

With many of these such as Reddit, YouTube and Kick, you can still access them and see much of the content but under-16s are restricted from creating accounts and account features such as commenting, private messaging etc. With many of the others, they would now not be able to access the platform at all. As for people over 16 with existing accounts who get caught up in the restriction: they will have to confirm their age. For Facebook, the instructions are:

Users aged 16 and older who mistakenly receive a notification or lose access to their accounts have the option to confirm their age through Meta’s third-party partner, Yoti, by providing a video selfie or government-issued ID. Yoti deletes this information once the age check is complete.

By “have the option to confirm their age”, it means they have to do this or will not have access to their account whether they are 17 of 50 year old. I am sure with Facebook at least, that it is not much of a problem. I haven’t used Facebook for almost a decade but given I was an early adopter and am now in my forties, they may as well be banning under 16s from MySpace. Others on the list like TikTok and Instagram will hurt a lot more.

Like many, I have no doubt that this ultimately is a trojan horse for forcing digital ID as Western governments continue to chip away at basic civil liberties. It certainly isn’t to protect children as I will quickly demonstrate with the platforms that have been exempted from the ban below. Though I certainly believe all of this, I don’t in principle have a problem with doing more to protect children online. 

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The Twelve Winners of the Game Awards 2014-2025

Posted on December 12, 2025 by JC

A few years ago I wrote a post about on the Best Sim/Strategy category of the Game Awards, where it was clear that little diligence had been put into the nomination process. A few years have passed and little has changed with a remaster of the original 1997 PlayStation title Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles taking out that category at the 2025 Awards; the very day I began writing this post.

In reality, nobody really cares about the categories outside of overall ‘Game of the Year’ and many winners continue to be announced in the pre-show with very little fanfare. This year it was the French “JRPG” Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 that was the big winner; receiving the award in almost every category the game was nominated.

This included the two categories for Independent or “Indie” games which is questionable give the developers had a reasonably big publisher and a number of the developers formerly worked for Ubisoft. These two categories probably need to be more clearly defined as a smaller publisher than say Electronic Arts, Ubisoft or Activision — is still a publisher. In any case, I haven’t actually played this game so I can’t speak to its quality but it had a lot of buzz leading up to the show and the result is not a surprise.

UPDATE: (13/12/25) I’m far from the only one that was suspicious. This great article at Fandom Pulse is well worth your time.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance II was hilariously snubbed in every category though being nominated for three. As expected, the significant compromises they made to their original vision didn’t win them any “official” praise.

What was also noticed is that Sony Interactive Entertainment received nineteen nominations across the categories with Kepler Interactive (the publisher of Clair Obscur), receiving fourteen. There is a big drop between these two alone but it drops further and Nintendo received only four though it had a big year for new (and well-received) releases and did win in two of the categories it was nominated in. 

This year was the twelfth Game Awards and so there are now twelve games of the year since 2014. I thought it would be worth going over these and offering some analysis. Though not for the winners for the last few years, hindsight has been quite instructive. Continue reading →

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Familiarity Breeds Contempt

Posted on November 30, 2025 by JC

Adam Piggott wrote an article on his new Substack about the Indian concept of “izzat”. This is from a post on Kiwi Farms which has spread through X as that is where I first read about it. Rather than try to put the concept in my own words, I will just quote from the Kiwi Farms thread as it is a good summary:

Izzat conflicts are not about who is right and who is wrong. It’s about who wins and who loses. This means it’s a zero-sum game where just about any action is justified (including murder) to restore the lost Izzat. Izzat is a limited social currency and the easiest way to get it is to take it from someone else. Winning is righteous in Izzat. Losing is unrighteous. This means that if someone plays the game of izzat well enough, they can get away with just about anything (murder, rape, scamming, cheating, stealing). The only morality in Izzat is the protection of your group’s collective ego. The only appropriate response when your Izzat is attacked is the complete destruction of whoever insulted it.

The first thing that came to mind when reading this was the less defined concept of ‘keeping it real’ among American blacks which I was introduced to on Chappelle’s Show around twenty years ago. The latter might not be as intensely ingrained as ‘izzat’ but it is similarly destructive and certainly irrational to the Western mind.

Before seeing this, I was thinking of writing something about it myself and his article has prompted me to do so.

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The Gamma of Melniboné

Posted on November 25, 2025 by JC

Last month I wrote a general review of The Witcher series of short stories and the novels up to The Lady of the Lake (two prequel novels have been published since). Like most, I was more familiar with the character through the computer games which were the main vehicle for the series’ popularity outside of Poland and Eastern Europe. I mentioned in passing some claims of plagiarism due to a number of similarities The Witcher has with Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné series. As I had only read the first novel (by internal chronology), in this series, I didn’t know enough to offer an opinion. I decided soon after that post to seek out the books and was able to find an omnibus of the first four novels (again by internal chronology), which I quickly read through over the last month. 

Although I wouldn’t describe myself a “fan”, I certainly found them far more engaging and absolutely better-written than The Witcher novels and may read the rest of the series in the future. I can also add based on these four novels that The Witcher novels are different enough that Andrzej Sapkowski can’t be considered a plagiarist in the strict definition of the word. I do think that because of his career translating English novels into Polish before becoming an author, that he was aware of and influenced by Moorcock and probably did knowingly copy a number of Elric’s attributes for Geralt. I don’t think being derivative in your writing is necessarily a literary sin but I do think it is unprofessional not to acknowledge your influences and especially the direct ones.

With that out of the way, this is not a post written to compare the two series. It is about what I found most irritating in the otherwise entertaining Elric novels I read which were Elric of Melniboné, The Fortress of the Pearl, The Sailor on the Seas of Fate and The Weird of the White Wolf. These are all collected in a 2022 publication by Saga Press. 

As the title of this post makes clear, Elric is yet another gamma protagonist in the Fantasy genre though one that is saved by the quality prose and imaginative ideas of his creator. Having covered a number of notorious examples including the especially egregious The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, I felt it my duty to add some commentary on Elric too. 

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An American Hero

Posted on November 19, 2025 by JC

Jefferson Davis, American by William J. Cooper Jr., Knopf, November 1st, 2001

Though I’ve long had an interest in the American Civil War, I’ve never written a dedicated post about it on the blog. On my one and only trip to the United States almost twenty years ago, I remember going out of my way to seeing some famous sites. I was on a university student exchange at the time and the college I studied at was located in the Shenandoah Valley in the state of Virginia where Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson’s brilliant military exploits took place. At that time, I was also able to have a visit to Richmond, Virginia where I could see the monuments to Confederate war heroes and after some further searching, to see the Confederate ‘White House’ which is not white but was the home of the president for most of the war. These statues were all taken down and destroyed five years ago in one of the most disgraceful acts of cultural iconoclasm in the nation’s history; following orchestrated rioting across the country after the death of violent criminal, George Floyd. This death, although entirely a result of Floyd’s own actions, was used to justify a range of attacks on the American people which as I write has merely abated. It was fortunate then that I was able to see these statues and something of what was still a proud South before yet another attack on these people was perpetuated from the malignant powers above. 

Although, I’m generally well-read on the Civil War (at least for an Australian), I had not read much about Jefferson Davis, the first and only president of the Confederate States of America. I knew him mostly by name but the history books do tend to focus a lot more on the battles and/or Lincoln. A few years ago, I sought out a biography and found this lengthy and comprehensive one by William J. Cooper Jr. which I finally got around to read this year. I thoroughly enjoyed it but naturally, I have further thoughts to share below.  

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The Punisher (2004) Review

Posted on November 2, 2025 by JC

I never regularly collected superhero comic books growing up. I read them here and there but only acquired them from others, in show bags or in other ways that… weren’t regular. I assume this was true for many in my circle as I didn’t have any friends that did either and the only comics I had readily available were Tintin and Asterix which were available in my school library. I mostly knew about superhero characters through the Batman and Superman films and television series’ such as the X-Men and Spider-Man: The Animated Series. It was the latter where I was first introduced to Frank Castle ‘The Punisher’ and also around the same time period I played the home port of the Capcom arcade game also titled The Punisher.

I was immediately attracted to the character though he was (from memory), portrayed antagonistically in the series which was also how he was first introduced to Spider-Man fans in the 1970s. I don’t remember whether I consciously sympathised with his more ruthless methods of dealing with criminals in contrast with Spider-Man but I know I did immediately like him. Years went by following this until my early adulthood when I saw the 2004 The Punisher film adaptation starring Thomas Jane and John Travolta. Continue reading →

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Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition Review

Posted on October 19, 2025 by JC

A while back I wrote a post discussing the differences between Japanese and Western RPGs which I concluded by stating my firm preference for the latter. Though I have not changed my opinion, this does not mean I won’t play JRPGs and occasionally one comes along that I am interested in. For example, I played the Super Mario RPG remake that released in 2023 and Mario & Luigi: Brothership which was released late last year. Earlier this year, a remastered version of Xenoblade Chronicles X which was originally released on Wii U, was released on Nintendo Switch. Though there are now two numbered sequels to the original, Xenoblade Chronicles X was the first chronological release. I did play the Japanese Wii U version back in 2015 but had a hard time as it was all in Japanese which for such a text heavy game, certainly limited enjoyment; not being able to understand much outside the basics. I got about a third or so through the main story before giving up and moving on. 

I did however remain interested in the game’s concept including the Skell mechs which are a significant part of the game as indicated on the awesome front cover. Never having got far enough in to experience one of the game’s biggest selling points, I was still interested in giving the game another go. With the announcement of a remaster, that not only allowed me to play the game in my native language but with a number of quality improvements, I was keen to revisit it.

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