An incredible blend of Sonic the Hedgehog, Kirby and Dragon Ball and, other than the music and some art, made by one very skilled Brazilian man. At a base level it simply feels wonderful to control (though it was surprisingly choppy at times on the Steam Deck) and the levels have a constant forward momentum that makes them a joy to run through.

The different powerups offer a broad range of playstyles and I respect the lack of care to balance offered by the gravity jester just straight up letting Spark fly. If the player wants to go through levels like that they can. The best is the edgy jester though, with it’s double jump, wall running, air dash, black and red colour scheme, knife and kunai attacks and chaos blast charged attack it is as delightful as it is funny. It’s also the closest of Spark’s powerups to Fark’s moveset from the game’s second, more combat-focused, story mode. I actually prefer Fark’s more diverse combat moveset and emphasis on parrying and healing for combat, which was carried over and elaborated on wonderfully in the sequel.

I previously posted lists I’ve made picking one game and one film per year since 1990. 1990 acted as a good arbitrary stopping point as it’s a nice round number, it’s the year I was born and the number of games I’ve played at all from before then is pretty small, and it would be be fairly difficult to pick out shows for each year before then for me too. I’ve made a dedicated page on the site for these picks, made a few substitutions, added a pick for each for 2025 and added one series of television per year as well. All put into one table with the ability to toggle off which media you want to see selections for as well as some dynamic rearrangement based on screenspace, all done with (a horrendous mess of) Cascading Style Sheets and no Javascript.

These are not necessarily my favourite from each year. I have tried to be deliberate to give a spread of different styles and series I like as well including some weirder picks. Especially with games I spent a lot of time weighing choices for particular years based on what series I wanted to include and some years are just packed with formative games for me. 2001 has Metal Gear Solid 2, Silent Hill 2, Commandos 2 and Halo (and Grand Theft Auto 3 and Advance Wars and Worms World Party…). I eventually gave the year to Metal Gear Solid 2 after weighing up that I could have Resident Evil 2 and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories covering some bases for Silent Hill 2, Shadow Tactics was spiritually taking up a place for the Commandos series and there’s already plenty of shooters there to justify dropping Halo.

Similarly Prey is spiritually covering for System Shock so that I can have a childhood favourite Soleil for 1994 and Half-Life would probably beat out Resident Evil 2 in a head-to-head but there’s already two Half-Life games on there and I wanted it to carry the survival horror water for both the aforementioned Silent Hill 2 and for the REmake that got booted out from the previous iteration to make room for Robot Alchemic Drive. And yes after going on about carefully spreading out my choices I did give three picks to Sonic games, one to another Sonic Team-developed game and two more to Sonic-inspired indie games (and four different series of Doctor Who for the TV list). I will not be taking feedback on this.

Again the page is here and the lists are also on my Letterboxd, Serializd and Backloggd accounts as well as a second Letterboxd list covering the years 1970-1989.

Steam Grid DB is a website that hosts artwork for customising game libraries. I learnt a little while ago that it has a tool called Boop that lets you apply art to Steam games much faster by clicking a button directly on the website.

This reminded me that I actually used to make quite a few custom banners for games on Steam myself and I decided to upload my old work to the website. You can find those on my Steam Grid DB profile and I will include a selection of them here:

Half-Life 2

Some of the first ones I made were a set of matching banners for Half-Life 2 and its episodes. I’m still pretty happy with these.

Some classics

I made some for a few classic games, usually from a still of the title screen, sometimes with some variants.

Megagames 6

At the time I had a Retrode and would dump my own game cartridges. Two of the old Mega Drive carts I had were two different 6-in-1 game packs, so I decided to make custom artwork for them too.

ROM hacks

And of course some ROM hacks.

And a few others

Games that weren’t even in the database

Some games I had to submit to Steam Grid myself because they didn’t have the games listed at all. These all have links if you click on the banners. The Monokuro: From Here and Back is actually new and I haven’t gotten around to playing it yet. The process of uploading these banners made me want to make a new one and I had the game added as a shortcut on Steam without any artwork. Somari 3D Blast 5 wasn’t accepted by Steam Grid DB, sadly.

One last joke

These are a pair of banners that I made for The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for the Gamecube and Wii versions, respectively. It was a little private joke and I didn’t bother submitting them to Steam Grid DB.