Look, it's not that confusing. I'm Rob Harvilla, host of the podcast 60 Songs That Explain the 90s, except we did 120 songs. And now we're back with the 2000s. I refuse to say aughts. 2000 to 2009. The Strokes, Rihanna, J-Lo, Kanye, sure. And now the show is called 60 Songs That Explain the 90s, colon the 2000s. Wow. That's too long a title for me to say anything else right now. Just trust me. That's 60 songs that explain the 90s colon the 2000s, preferably on Spotify. Hello and welcome into The Ringerverse, your Nexus feed for all things fandom. I am Ben Lindberg, Senior Editor for The Ringer and Button Mash host, welcoming you to yet another year of video game coverage on The Ringerverse. With me is the woman who was by my side when this show got off the ground, the great Jessica Clemens.

The great and late.

Yeah, it's been too long. Lovely to have you back.

Thank you. I resurrected just for this gaming podcast because I have so many anticipated games for 2025. It's too much. Me

too. Happy to hear that. We will talk about that. Also here is the Path of Exile addict himself, deputy art lead for The Ringer, Matt. James, Matt, have the holidays deepened your addiction or has it started to subside? Same

as it always was, Ben. Man, Path of Exile, too. It's good. You

got to kick that habit to make room for this year's new habits, though I guess Path of Exile is still technically an early access, right? That's right. It can be a 2025 and a 2024 release. Today is about hype and hope and positivity and maybe also some skepticism, but mostly sunny thoughts, because this is our annual rundown of our most anticipated games of the year. We did this last year. We're doing it now. That means it's officially an annual tradition. Twice makes a tradition. And just like last year, we're going to go through several categories and pick the games that each of us is most looking forward to, along with plenty of honorable mentions and speculations and predictions. But before we look forward, I figured we could look back briefly at last year's pod just to see how predictive this exercise actually is. Because the video game industry, notoriously secretive and unpredictable. We did our best last year. It was me, Matt, Justin Charity. Matt, how do you think we did when we tackled this task last time? Pretty good. I actually just reviewed it, so I'm cheating. We

did pretty well. I think, you know, we were trying to determine which would have a lower Metacritic score between Skull and Bones and Suicide Squad. I remember we were struggling mightily. And upon investigating it today, one of them was at a 59 and one of them was at a 60. Too close to call. I was going to say photo finish. Yeah. I

think we did decently at least six of our eventual joint top 10 that we published at the end of the year on TheRinger.com. what a great website, were mentioned at least on last year's What We're Looking Forward To episode. I think only three were technically picks that we made, games that we selected that we were super excited about. And there were some notable omissions. Bellatro, not mentioned. Helldivers 2, I believe, not mentioned. Astro Bot wasn't mentioned because it hadn't even been announced yet. So you can't blame us for that, I guess. But that just goes to show that there's only so much we can predict. Jess, you weren't with us on that one, but did you feel like you were taken by surprise by a lot of last year's big games or did you feel like you sort of saw them coming?