Cultured Individual's 2023 Recap And Plans For 2024

The year of 2023 is finally coming to an end, and it is time for me to reflect on the year I had in general, as well as what I wrote on this blog. I would say that 2023 was a memorable year for me, with my biggest highlight being my European mega-vacation touring Italy, Croatia, Greece, and Turkey. I was able to play my fair share of video games this year as well and wrote some good reviews. There were some events and stories this year and I want to talk about those as well.

"Sea Of Stars" Is An Excellent Tribute To SNES RPGs

By Sabotage - Giant Bomb, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72375507

I just finished playing Sea of Stars, which is a turn-based RPG from Sabotage Studio, which has had heavy influence from the Super Nintendo RPGs that came before it. There is so much influence from those SNES RPGs that Sea of Stars feels like a tribute game, or a love letter, to that genre on that system. Part of the fun of Sea of Stars is identifying which classic games influenced this game.

Looking Back On The "Gears Of War" Series

I had a trial for a month of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, and last month was the time for me to use it, because I had the craving of playing the Gears of War games all in one go. I have not played a Gears of War game since Gears of War 3 came out in 2011. I thought it would be as good of a time as ever to relive the original Gears trilogy, as well as play the newer Gears games (4 and 5) and give my brief thoughts on those games as well.

Around Athens In Three Hours

My voyage on-board the Celebrity Infinity came to an end, docking at the port of Piraeus, just southwest of the city of Athens. I have talked about the Celebrity Infinity in two previous blog posts but for this post, I am going to talk about our brief tour of Athens before we had to go to the airport to catch our flight. While on our city tour in Rhodes, our taxi driver connected us to a tour company in Athens who was able to show us around the city for a few hours before taking us to the airport (for a reasonable rate).

 

Grand Theft Auto VI Trailer Thoughts

If you have been living under a rock for the last little while, we finally got to see the first trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI. I did not think I was going to see a GTA VI in my lifetime, considering how long ago the initial release of GTA V was. I am so genuinely excited and hyped over this announcement and the trailer that 2025 cannot come soon enough. I just want to offer my brief thoughts on the trailer and offer my general thoughts on the Grand Theft Auto franchise to this point.

A Beach Day in Nafplio, Greece

Our last port that the Celebrity Infinity stopped at (before the end of our voyage) was the Greek city of Nafplio. We needed a day to just relax at the beach, and Nafplio did not look like there was much going on in terms of interesting things to see, so this was our designated beach day. This was another of those stops where we had to take a tender boat to get to the actual port of Nafplio, and the views from the ship and the tender boat were impressive. There was hilly terrain with the occasional fortified structure.