I played two new games in 2025. My GOTY ranking:
1. NASCAR 25. This game balances sim-sweatiness with console accessibility, but in doing so never compromises its core experience. You can tune many aspects of the game's difficulty to your abilities but will always be required to be patient and disciplined in order to succeed. And as a reward you will get some great NASCAR moments like you watch on TV.
2. Ghost of Yotei: excellent craft but I've only played a few hours.
Hard to document the results because it's just a bunch of tables with subtle errors but this was the response from the third and best attempt. Notably every value is one tenth of the value in the source and also the FAIR table ends with multiple as zero values that are not present in the data. A handful of the values are just wrong as well.
This wasn't a gotcha prompt or anything, I genuinely wanted the AI to copy these tables for me. I expected better results!
I asked chatgpt 5 to transcribe the four tables from this image into four C arrays to avoid doing the data entry myself.
On the first attempt it truncated the tables after only 25 rows (there are 33 in the source image). On the second attempt I asked it to include all data and it gave me 48 rows padded with nonsense. On the third attempt I asked for only the 33 rows present in the actual image and it did that but still with numerous errors/deletions etc. PhD level intelligence.
I played five new games in 2023. Here's the Sam Johnston GOTY Ranking, ordered from favorite to least favorite:
1. Lies of P - super polished, great use of dodge/block/parry abilities.
2. Final Fantasy XVI - the charm of FF is undeniable, anime boss fights are fun and combat is enjoyable once you get some eikon abilities.
3. Hogwarts Legacy - perfectly fine open world game, captures Hogwarts well.
4. Lords of the Fallen - good but very derivative.
5. Forspoken - felt clunky, didn't click.
