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posted: 2024-12-31

The 2024 Ohmies - Voltage's Superlatives for 2024

Hello! Hello!

Hello, yes, thank you.

Thank you, yes- yes.

Good evening and welcome to the first annual “Ohmies” 1 , a show to contextualize and celebrate the year 2024! My name is Voltage and I will be your host, subject, and entire academy voter base this evening. That’s right, it’s allll about meeeeeee!!!

We had one whirlwind of a year, huh folks? What with Twisters, and Glen Powell milking up any and all screen time 2 . I could tell he was going to be the good guy because he drove a big red truck, and didn’t go to school at MIT! The moral of the story, never trust anyone who claims their superiority using three letter acronyms.

I played a lot of games this year, beat about thirty-five of ’em! I also listened to a lot of new music! I watched some cool shows! I went to some cool places, and saw some cool things! Seeing that I am one of those freaks on the internet who wants to find some meaning in his ludicrous hobbies, I have devised this here pastiche of an award show! Tonight, we celebrate the facets and events of 2024 that will stand the test of time, and that will follow me into years beyond. I expect to think “hmmm 2024… that was a good year… for the most part”, and this piece is an elaboration. No, I will talk about about the actually bad stuff that happened this year. Go read any doomer post on the internet if you want that. I am not being a doomer here tonight, folks. And frankly, neither should you.

So yes, the Ohmies, the awards show or whatever we call it here. Let’s discuss some of the categories, shall we? The ten categories are presented below:

As you may have noticed, some of these categories are very cut and dry, while others are a bit more esoteric. I promise that you’ll “get it” as you read 3. I’m presenting the winners and the elaboration first so that you can read that, and then I’ll provide a list of like three or four runners-up because I don’t want to appear partial. I toooooootally didn’t design some of these award categories with a winner in mind before having any other contenders, nooooooooooo who would do that?????

But yes, I’m going to include a list of runner’s up, just because there’s a lot of other cool shit (tm) that happened this year that I’d like to share, but I don’t want to talk your internal monologue’s ear off. Think of it like the game awards, except even more self-serving! These categories are just what feels right at this stage in the game. I expect 2025’s award show (if it even exists) to feature new and different categories.

Okay without further ado, the opening musical number / standup bit / host monologue has wrapped up, let’s go and announce some superlatives.


favorite game of the year

winner: linda cube again

Linda Cube Again is my favorite game I played this year. There can be no debate of this opinion-based fact. I mean it. This game broke into my top ten favorite games of all time, which is no easy feat.

I’ve spent the entirety of 2024 trying to figure out how to talk about Linda Cube Again in a way that is as comprehensive and as loving as the game deserves. But damn it, that’s not an easy task by any stretch. I know that in order to eat a whole elephant you have to go one bite at a time, but damn, Linda Cube’s got elephants with like three giant trunks. It’s a huge undertaking that I plan to attempt one day as I continue refining my writing, research and literacy skills. It's something I'm practicing as I go. In that same sense, Linda Cube Again is the game that really made me realize I wanted to get better about writing as a whole, beyond the idea of "Writing About a Video Game I Played" (though I still love to do so, as evidenced).

Beyond that, I have spent this year evangelizing this game to anyone who will listen. I go bananas over anyone announcing that they’re starting up the game. I have to linger in my love, and request that they play Scenario A “even if it’s a ‘little weird’”. The cool kids understand while the zany, VHS-Horror anime OVA stories of Scenarios A and B might be the initial hook, the coolest part of Linda Cube again is the gameplay. Yes, the grinding, animal hunting, gameplay is the best part of this game, and it’s the “best part of this game” in the most subtle, understated way possible. Scenario C is the best Scenario because you’ve spent Scenarios A and B playing through these B-movie horror plots, and can appreciate just what’s really at stake on the planet of Neo Kenya. You being to understand the little tricks and traps of each season, and each cycle of gameplay slowly shows off a sense of a living, breathing world. It’s magical, the way that Linda Cube Again gets you to care about a set of otherwise unmemorable NPCs as you hunt for a single female Stag Beetle.

I love Linda Cube Again for many reasons that I’ll eventually share one day. However, today, I’d like top say that I love Linda Cube Again because it reminded me that taking chances on cool shit (tm) pays off every so often, maybe even more often than not. I do not think that I would have even remotely considered playing this game had it not been for some very reliable parties who know their stuff saying that the game “linda cube is The Mount Everest Of Video Game Localizations” 4. Much like its own gameplay loop, Linda Cube has shown me that it’s worth taking the time to explore underneath each stone for the cool critters that might be crawling about in the mud. It’s fun to play the big mainstream stuff, sure, but sometimes I gotta take some time to appreciate that weird little happening that caught my eye off on the side of the road. That’s something that I maybe already knew from years past, but that finally became tangible truth upon 100% completing Linda Cube Again this year.

Man, can you believe that some people think PALWORLD is 2024’s Game of the Year? I need to leave that Discord server already.

runners up:


game of the year

winner: balatro

I don’t really like talking about “games of the year”, because I’m a bit of an odd case. It is an oddity, a rarity even, for me to play a game in the same year in which it is released. I haven’t started playing Metaphor ReFantasio, and I don’t expect to until well into 2025, if at all. My options are thus very limited when it comes to deducing a “favorite game from this year that also released this year”. If I were even more bold here than I already am, I would say that the fan-translation of Linda Cube Again, which was released at the end of January, would be my game of the year. But I don’t want to write more about Linda Cube Again, and you probably don’t want to read more about it right now, so instead, let me consider an alternative. And when I say alternative, I suppose I need to emphasize that I did not have ANY trouble picking this game out as my “favorite game that came out this year”.

To probably no one’s surprise (except maybe my own) I played over one-hundred hours of Balatro this year. I honestly don’t know how it happened. Actually I do know how it happened, but I couldn’t tell you that I saw it coming. Okay, actually I can tell you that I saw this coming a mile away. Like every other special snowflake who plays and develops a personal relationship with video games, Balatro seems like it was tailor made to saturate the capacitors of my neurons to keep my monkey mind on the big number going up and catching fire. I grew up playing Hoyle Card games on Grandpa’s Macintosh. I was playing Hold ’Em at six year old with my Baptist Minister Uncle. Balatro is just the next step in my fascination of Poker variations.

Clearly I’m not alone, the entire world seems to have partaken in at least one round of 52-Pickup as well, and so I’m not surprised that Balatro has clung to the fabric of the 2024 gaming tapestry like a cocklebur. Is this game a weed? Maybe when it comes to my time. But then again, if I enjoyed the time I spent with this beneficial weed, was it really time wasted? Balatro stands tall as my go-to airplane game. I expect to play a similar amount of hours next year. And honestly, in terms of total play time, there is no other game that came out this year that even comes within a country mile of Balatro. It would be wrong of me to report anything other than Balatro as my game of the year, and so I will do my duty and report honestly.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have forty minutes to kill.

runners up:


favorite “discovery” of the year

winner: System Erasure

This category exists exclusively because I wanted to give myself an excuse to talk about System Erasure and their two games ZeroRanger and Void Stranger.

I have to thank #gamestower in the bunker for this one, I saw some screenshots of someone playing ZeroRanger and thought to myself “say, that looks like a pretty cool lookin’ game!” I bought it for 11 bucks on itch and then spent the next two and a half weeks grinding out runs to no avail. When I did finally attain enlightenment, I found myself craving a similar game, which is when I learned that these devs had made a second game that had only released half a year prior. If not for Linda Cube Again, Void Stranger would be my “favorite game of the year”, (this in a year where I also played Mother 3, Dragon Quest 5 and Maya the Bee: Sweet Gold). So congrats to Void Stranger on being this year’s honorary “Poor Things” to Linda Cube Again’s “Oppenheimer” for me.

I admire System Erasure on a very foundational level. The studio is comprised of “two finnish [sic] guys who like to make video games” 5. They have a vision when it comes to their games. I adore their ability to craft experiences that are absolutely not ones of mass-appeal. By the very definition of the genre, Shoot-em UPs (SHMUPs) are not going to be easy sells to former arcade-game-enthusiast John Everyman, nor his Minecraft-loving child Riley. SHMUPs require a certain level of “freak”, and their ability to tap into a emergency room surgeon’s level of precision amidst surrounding chaos. Similarly, mind-meltingly difficult Sokoban-styled puzzles games are not going to appeal to John nor Riley either. Maybe Riley had a taste of these kinds of games on their TI-84 during eighth grade geometry class when they should’ve been learning about sines and cosines, but this play choice was only out of general life-limitations. Maybe I’m dating myself with this and now kids just play games on their phones instead, whatever. The point being, it takes a certain level of masochism to choose to play eye-glazingly difficult Sokoban games. System Erasure seems to know this but don’t seem to care, and that’s what makes them so cool.

My one lamentation for both of System Erasure’s games is that I cannot revert to a state of “before”. There is a line in my gaming chronology, a before and after, with System Erasure. They have made two games that have created a new era in the fossil record, and I love it.

Something something games are art because there’s creative vision, etc. These two games both rule and I would encourage you to play ZeroRanger THEN Void Stranger so that you too can come out on the other side.

God I want to write more about Void Stranger… but not here. Not now. Go read my piece about Lax Lullaby for a starter. I’m sure I’ll write more about Void Stranger next year.

runners up:


sound coming out of my headphones of the year

winner: cibbo matto, stereotype A

In the process of looking at my notes on this album, I was struck at the date I had first listened to the album: March 28th. “surely,” I thought 6 , “I first listened to this in the summer”. No, in reality I had just listened to this album all summer. And all spring. And I wouldn’t skip any songs from it when they came on rotation in the fall. And now here I am, in winter listening to “Flowers” as I work.

I have spent too much of my life listening to video soundtracks, or listening to music that is exactly ONE step removed from video game music. In the goblin bunker they have a weekly album recommendations club, which has been a great way to not only listen to more music (especially music I don’t think I would’ve immediately pursued), but discuss it too. This actually how I found this album.

Imagine my stunned conflictedness when, on a flight home from Minneapolis for Thanksgiving, in researching my piece about Sonic Rush and Hideki Naganuma that Cibo Matto’s “Birthday Cake” was actually on the Jet Set radio soundtrack 7, and that I still hadn’t broken free from the shackles of the “listens to video game music and/or music exactly one step away from video game music” label. damn. maybe next year.

also i got owned by golok, which means that i have been officially baptized into the bunker, so that’s another fun happenstance. Thanks golok and thanks Cibo Matto

runners up:


favorite “TV moment”, that is, my favorite happening while watching TV shows of the year

winner: My partner reacts to the winner of Amazing Race 3

First and foremost, if you have never seen The Amazing Race before, I encourage you to watch Season 3 first. It’s 12 episodes, 42-ish minutes each, and is quite digestible given it’s a travel racing reality TV game show from 2001 8. Then go watch 5, which is objectively the best season. I don’t want to spoil the outcome of Amazing Race 3, beyond only this sentence: “it needs to be seen to be believed”.

I have been rewatching my CBS reality TV game shows with my partner/fiancée, and this year, among other seasons, we smoked up Amazing Race 3. By its third iteration, The Amazing Race had begun to find its episodic footing and pace that led to some fascinating character and location moments. It’s very commonly accepted by both the online “Reality TV Game Show Commentators and Columnists” and posters over at SurvivorSucks, ClubsThatSucks, and the RealityFanForums alike that Amazing Race 3 is one of the show’s best. It’s unpredictable in the both in the episode-to-episode sense (one team nearly gets kidnapped in Morocco), and in its design (that the producers thought it would be a good idea to cast a Vietnam War veteran on a season where they spend two end game legs in Vietnam). I think this guy generally kind of stinks, but I give him a pass because it’s so obvious that there is some serious lingering PTSD and all simmers right on the surface without ever boiling over.

So I don’t want to spoil the winners of Amazing Race 3, unless you want to know, or already know the outcome. I really think that Amazing Race 3 is an important season of Reality TV Game Shows that should be a “must watch” even if you only watch one season of the Amazing Race 9 . As such, I have hidden the key details of what led up to my fiancée reacting as previously shown in this extra page.

[CLICK ME TO GO TO THE SPOILER PAGE]

runners up:


favorite new experience of the year

winner: going to mass of the fermenting dregs in person the same day i was operated on

I am not someone who defines themselves on the quantity and quality of the live music shows they have attended in their lifetime. Actually, I’m really not someone who’s gone to small live music shows at all. Maybe this is a character fault, but I’m still in my 20s, I have time to course correct if it feels appropriate. With that out of the way, this year I went to the Detroit show of Mass of the Fermenting Dregs’ North America tour.

“How did you find music when you were younger, dad?”, “Oh the YouTube algorithm recommended it to me”. Sucks to say aloud, but it’s the truth. But MotFD has been blasting through my headphone speakers since 2019. I run to them. I work to them. I listen to them when I’m playing Balatro. I listen to them while I’m driving. I listen to them when I feel like need to take a sledgehammer to my refrigerator. I like their music an “average” amount. So of course when I found out that they were doing a show in Detroit, at the same venue that fiancée had considered using for our wedding venue no less, I couldn’t say no. I had to be there.

Exactly six hours prior to arriving at the Eastern, I was laying on an operating table at the University of Michigan hospital with my chest sliced open. At time of writing I have a funny little lump on my chest, the doctors all think it’s a kind of cyst. Given my use of present tense, you might be able to correctly infer that while I was on the operating table, the doctors did not, in fact, remove this silly little growth from my chest because it was “intimately associated with surrounding vasculature”. It’s still in me, by the way. After an MRI and a visit to a second specialist, it’s now scheduled for removal in January 2025.

Even if they had taken it out, however, I still would’ve been doped up on 800mg of ibuprofen (and absolutely nothing else!) doing my very best to not move more than necessary, let alone trying to avoid finding myself stuck in a mosh pit. Imagine trying to explain that one to someone working in the emergency room on a Wednesday night.

The combo of these two events led to a fascinating, hardcore experience. I was in pain, but it was unlike any kind of pain I felt before. It almost felt… good… People often say that they can feel the sound of the music and instrumentation in their bodies, well buddy, I had to make sure I didn’t feel it so hard my chest burst. Would I do it again? Yes, kind of. I would not go to a live music show like this six-hours post surgery in tandem, but I WOULD do them both again on their own!

runners up:


coolest fucking thing that happened this year of the year

winner: the eclipse, going to it, being in the path, living, getting sent to draculars castle, etc.

dude, you ever just been sitting in a grassy field, minding your own business, when suddenly the entire world goes dark, and the sun’s covered up and you can see nothing but this black milky pearl up in the sky and it stays that way for like three minutes and then everything goes back to normal?

My partner and I kicked off the day with the joy of having bosses excuse everyone from work so that they too could go see the eclipse. We left from Ann Arbor early in the morning and made our way south. We could’ve stopped in Toledo, but we opted to go a little further South to Bowling Green, OH. Maybe we could’ve gone even further South, but a series of inconveniences at a gas station were our sign to hang out there. There were pre-eclipse fair booths set up at the Bowling Green football stadium, and plenty of other food vendors and distractions to keep people occupied for the hours leading up to the exact three minutes. I saw fellow Michigan nuclear engineering graduate students walking into a panera bread for lunch, likely to get some additional work done given the nature of finals not yielding to a celestial coincidence.

We camped out on the campus lawn on a rolled out blanket. We sat, and we waited, and we watched as other people began to do the same. And slowly but surely, it got a little darker. And people got a little more antsy. And I was sitting there, just laying against my partner’s back, looking up at the sky with my eclipse-approved sunglasses. And then, it got dark. And people started cheering. And then we took off our glasses and looked up at the sky. And we snapped some photos of it, and ourselves. And then we kissed each other. And then I was transported to a strange castle courtyard, I didn’t recognize the space. And then I walked into the entrance to the building and was met with a GIANT SKELETON!?!!?!!

The eclipse was cool, you gotta go see a total eclipse in person, dude. It’s so good dude.

runners up:


winner: the series of LINAC Measurements, and then presenting that in tampa

There's like 50 lead bricks here. I'll let you imagine how long this took to set up.

I already write about my work enough as is, so forgive me if I sound a little bored in this part of the write up. It’s highly likely that I’ll end up repeating words I’ve already written. But like, doesn’t everyone do that in some capacity? Either way, it’s my work. For as much as knowing the physics of photons is my work, so too is writing about it. Of course, I am the rare engineer who actually doesn’t really mind “doing all that writing”, but boy it sure sucks to have to write in the passive voice all the time. You might be wondering why I take such excessive liberties in my choice of voice on this here spoice, but buddy, if you had to write shit like “a series of measurements were conducted using the Varian M9 Linear Accelerator in order to demonstrate the transmission imaging capabilities of a 40 × 40 × 10 mm3 3D-CdZnTe radiation detector.” every couple of days, you’d go crazy too.

Yes, you read this award winner title right. At the start of 2024, I DID put a tungsten block in front of a 3D-CZT radiation detector, and put both in the line of a linear accelerator (LINAC), to see what would happen. I mean, I kind of knew what would happen, that’s what a “physics-informed hypothesis” is, after all. Listen, I did three whole sets of measurements because in the first one, I failed to account for the fact that the LINAC photons might actually bounce off the back wall, instead of absorbing them, introducing a much higher count rate than expected, thus flooding the detector and rendering any signals useless. That’s how we learn. I simulated the setup of the lab space, saw, “oh shit, yeah uh, that’s pretty significant, oops.”, and corrected myself. Then the next experiments, we didn’t have enough shielding on the front and sides, so the photon flux was still too large. The third experiment was a success though! After moving nearly a ton of lead bricks (not an exaggeration, we needed 1,400 lbs of lead bricks!), we managed to attenuate the flux of the LINAC beam just enough to actually have useable waveform data! You have NO idea how fucking satisfying that was. No one had done this before. Not like this.

This isn’t earth shattering, it’s little more than a demonstration. It’s not like I created something new, rather I’m just the first person to demonstrate that, yes, “3D-CdZnTe radiation detectors are promising candidates for transmission radiography”. Still, because it was a phsyical experiment, I wrote up a poster, and it was accepted by a very big a special conference, meaning I now have a second conference publication under my belt.

I’m not sure about the distribution rights, but you can find the abstract here, and the folder with all the relevant figures here 10. This shit’s really cool and I’m so lucky that I get to do cool shit (tm) for my doctoral studies.

I’m a 4th year PhD student, and I’m going along as best as I can.

Also I probably have something I will write about games related to this experiment in the coming months to explain just what the hell I actually mean here.

runners up:


best purchase of the year

winner: a MiSTer FPGA

You can look at the runners up list and scoff at the notion that a new eyeglass prescription is NOT at the top of this list. I know, how can you play video games if you can’t see? You’re right, yeah, you’re right. Look at yourself. Do you feel like you’ve outwitted me? Do you think that you’re better at life than I am because you would choose the new eyeglass prescription and not a MiSTer FPGA as the “best purchase of 2024”?

The MiSTer is so good dude. It’s a field-programmable gate array build that’s designed to emulate the hardware of old arcade machines and consoles, which means it’s a perfect little box to play video games. I bought it in the MiSTer Add-Ons father’s Day sale and never looked back. It has served me well over these past six months and I expect it to continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

I haven’t done any kind of statistical analysis of how acquiring a MiSTer has changed how I play games yet. I don’t think I have enough data. That said, if we look at the trend of what my gaming habits looked like before and after getting a MiSTer FPGA, I notice a big change in the amount of games listed.

I think this has to do with a more “ROM surfing” style of gameplay. Play a game for fifteen minutes to a half hour, see if I dig it, and then return to it if so. That’s how I managed to find Maya the Bee: Sweet Gold, actually. I have been able to try out tons of games I never would’ve dreamed of playing as a kid. I only grew up with the handheld Nintendo consoles, I didn’t have a Sega Saturn. So now, here in my mid-twenties, I get to start filling in the gaps. Yeah, sure, I could’ve emulated them on my PC, but like, where’s the fun in that? You can’t play the Pokemon Stadium 2 minigames nd rounds of Mario Party 3 with your partner on the couch in your room at a boutique hotel in Traverse City, MI celebrating your anniversary on a PC. I did that with a MiSTer though! That was a nice weekend :]

runners up:


favorite creation of the year

winner: “FireRed Hasn’t Aged a Day”

In a year where I decided to stop streaming full-time and also grew weary of making videos, I actually didn’t really ever stop making things. Despite what my brain keeps telling me, I actually made a lot of things to be proud of this year. Of them, the piece I just posted to the website here has to be my favorite. I didn’t set out to write a piece on FireRed and my nostalgia for it, and what it means to have the moment in life where you know you’re an “俺” and no longer a “僕”, but here I am, six months after the fact. Replaying FireRed was always on my radar, and it was a lovely time, but I cannot think of that playthrough now without this additional reflection of myself. I’m so glad I attempted to capture the feeling through my own words. I would’ve hated losing the feeling to the uncaring eroding winds of time.

I wish this were a video. I know what it looks like if it were a video. I can see the whole thing in my head. I can hear my narration, I can see the visual effects on screen, I can hear the backing music. I have that vision. But I know my limits and what really brings me creative joy. I think this turned out really well in the HTML multimedia format. I don’t want to congratulate myself too much, but also I really struggle championing myself and my creations and so damn it, I am going to self-aggrandize a little bit here. I’m proud of this. It’s pretty good for what my training is and what my goals are. It’s not the Pulitzer. I don’t care. It’s something I needed to make for myself, and if you don’t like that then, whatever. I guess you’re allowed to feel that way in the same way that I like what I’ve made. I don’t like a lot of things I make. I don’t like most things I make, in fact. So to be able to even say “I like this thing I made”, is a miracle to me. How lucky I am to be here. How lucky I am that I know it’s not going to be the last thing too.

I also played Red Rescue Team this year, and I’ve made little fanfare of it. I’ve got a lot to say about Red Rescue Team too, but more than what I could put into words right now. Though I HAVE started on it. It’s a dangerous thing to claim you’ve started work on a project when it’s nowhere close to being finished, but I still want to emphasize its importance. Someday,. maybe in 2025, maybe beyond, I’ll finish writing about Red Rescue Team, and how it is inexorably my anchor to my youth even moreso than FireRed, but that day will come in time, now that I’ve ben able to finish the FireRed project.

But that’s for another day. For all of the things I’ve made this year, there’s hundreds of words that never saw the light of day. I keep a lot of notes. Maybe I’ll cobble together more of them as we go along here. It’s pretty fun.

runners up:


Concluding Remarks

That’s all. Thanks for reading. No quippy outlude. What were your favorite things from this year? What self–serving awards would you apply to 2024? Do you think that game of the year is a stupid category? Tell me about it on bluesky (@voltage.neocities.org) and on discord at .voltage .

Next year I will actually play outer wilds or something like that.


  1. yes, i chose the name “ohmies” because it sounded funny. elephant in the room out of the way.↩︎

  2. this will be the only mention of Glen Powell in this piece.↩︎

  3. and by “it”, haha, well. let’s justr say. My peanits↩︎

  4. “(and oreshika is the K2)”↩︎

  5. https://se-made.com/about.html↩︎

  6. actually I didn’t think “surely”, I thought “what the hell?”, but it wasn’t exactly “what the hell” it was more of a sensation in my brain that exhibited the same feeling I would feel had i said “what the hell”, but that’s not really an effective way to immediately communicate a surprised confusion, so where we are.↩︎

  7. i then proceeded to smoke “Birthday Cake” for the next three hours until it came on the rotation at 11:45 PM as I was driving home from DTW and i realized how much i didn’t want to listen to the song anymore. all the same, “birthday cake” is such a great song, i love it, i laugh at it all the time, i love it so dearly. “EXTRA SUGAR, EXTRA SALT, EXTRA OIL AND MSG! SHUT UP AND EAT!”↩︎

  8. the premier of TAR3 aired literally September 5, 2001.↩︎

  9. if you want two seasons, again, watch Amazing Race 5, it’s better than 3 on an episode to episode basis imo, but with a bit less long-lasting impact in its outcome.↩︎

  10. yeah sure these should be on github instead, yeah you’re right okay, whatever, sorry.↩︎