OK, I’ve been a little late coming up with my holiday gift guide, as we’ve already passed both Black Friday and Cyber Monday. But here’s my guide just in case you’re running late on your gift buying and you need to get a holiday gift for the gamer or tech lover in your life.
I’ve tried out some things this year and here are my recommendations for a variety of gift types with products that I’ve actually used.
Let’s start with an actual holiday game.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
I highly recommend this game to people who aren’t hardcore shooter players, even though it comes from Machine Games, the makers of the ultra hardcore Wolfenstein games. This studio, owned by Bethesda (now part of Microsoft), took on the challenge of making an accessible game based on a beloved franchise. Troy Baker does a great job with voice acting for Indy, so much so that I can mistake him for a younger Harrison Ford.
You can turn up the difficulty on both fighting and puzzles to make the game more difficult for hardcore gamer tastes. But in my rush to play the game, I decided to play it on “moderate” difficulty for the fighting but “easy” mode for the puzzles. This gave me a navigation indicator for where I had to go to fulfill my mission, rather than spend a lot of my time looking for items in a random landscape.
The world of Indiana Jones feels like it is faithfully recreated, down to the 1930s look of Indy’s Marshall College. The missions are intriguing and they take you to exotic places like the Pyramids of Giza, the Vatican and Castel Santangelo, and the jungles of South America. The fist fighting is so-so, but the whip is great fun to use as a weapon or a tool to enable you to cross chasms or climb barriers. It’s got a sense of humor and gives you places to explore and mysteries to figure out besides shooting every Nazi soldier that you see. I think of it as a rare accessible shooter in that way.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024
I was fascinated to learn that Microsoft’s teams set out to create a “digital twin” of the Earth with this year’s Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 game, which has 4,000 times more ground detail than Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. That previous game generated a following of 15 million people, but it was a hybrid game with a ton of storage on your local PC and some data fed to your computer via the cloud from data centers.
Now, the storage requirement is minimal (around 50GB) and the game is hosted almost entirely in the cloud. That allows the team to beef up the detail, both inside the aircraft cabin and on the ground. There are many more things to do, like herding sheep on the ground with a helicopter, flying gliders, taking choppers to oil rig platforms, flying P51 Mustangs, or taking a F/A-18e fighter jet through the Grand Canyon.
Flight Simulator has been dinged as being boring, but those activities above will tell you there’s a reason it has been around for 42 years as a game franchise and entertained 45 million virtual pilots to date. You don’t have to be a serious pilot to enjoy this game. But the serious pilots love it. It may not have every plane in the world in the game yet but give it time. There are 2,077 glider airports from around the world, 952 oil rings where you can land a helicopter, 84,184 helipads and much more.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6
This is the year that Activision had been loading up for. Ten game studios came together under the leadership of Treyarch and Raven Software and took four years to make Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 with a team of thousands of game developers. They came up with the first Call of Duty that I’ve rated five out of five stars (after playing every single Call of Duty game ever) and one where my kill count is better than my death count.
The campaign is longer than some of the shorter ones and it tells a good story about grunts and spies who defy the mendacity of their leaders. It has some quality hallucinogenic moments that is a kind of crazy Black Ops tradition that makes you feel like you’re playing something different. The multiplayer is sweet and the weapons feel right.
I’ve kept my XM4 all the way up to Prestige 1 level and am leveling up my sniper rifle still. I have a k/d ratio of 1.14 and couldn’t understand why I’ve gotten better. But then I realized this is the first Call of Duty to show up on Xbox Game Pass, and all of those subscribers are trying it out because it’s free to them. And they’re cannon fodder for us veterans.
I’m still having a blast playing the game and trying out both Warzone and Zombies as well.
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2
I was not destined to be popular with Space Marine fans. Way back when the first game came out, I made the mistake of saying it looked like a copy of Gears of War. I knew that Gears of War came out after the lore of Warhammer 40,000 emerged with its huge armored soldiers who fought against swarms of monsters. But Gears of War came out as a game before Space Marine did, and it seemed like Space Marine just copied what Gears of War had copies.
It’s kind of how Indiana Jones is coming out as a quality game so late after Uncharted and Tomb Raider, even though the Indiana Jones movies inspired those games. Now it makes you feel like Indiana Jones copied those games. Anyway, fans did not like my analysis. But I’ve now fully played the entire campaign of Space Marine 2 in co-op mode with my friend Mark Chandler. And it was an excellent experience.
In solo play, it’s exceedingly hard to fend off enemies coming at you from all directions. But fighting back to back in co-op mode with other humans is a very satisfying experience. It uses the excellent World War Z game engine to pit well-armed humans against swarms of monsters, some easy to kill and some very difficult. You always get that feeling of being cornered (and yelling, “My kingdom for a horse!”) and just barely escaping with your life. This is really one of the best games of the year.
Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl
The story of the making of Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl, is heart rending. The team’s ordeal was so tough that Microsoft made a documentary about it, as GSC Game World was based in Ukraine, and it had to deal with the onset of the Russian invasion as it was trying to finish development of the game.
The team’s resilience in the face of war and other obstacles showed through in the emotional film, which is a kind of microcosm for the toil thousands of people working in games in Ukraine or in the Ukrainian diaspora — under the shadow of war where all of the odds are against them. Fortunately, they were finally able to ship the game last month. And their work paid off, with a million copies selling very quickly.
The game is a first-person shooter where you go into a radioactive zone that still persists around the Chornobyl nuclear reactor accident site in Ukraine. The original book that inspired the game was Roadside Picnic, where aliens created a dangerous zone where “stalkers” went into the area to retrieve artifacts. GSC Game World modernized this story in the wake of Chornobyl’s disaster, noting how the radioactive waste bred a generation of mutant creatures. There were valuable artifacts in this zone, but the stalkers had to risk their lives going into the zone to retrieve them.
And it turns out that this is a good game, heavy on horror and frightening to play, especially as some of the enemies are invisible and they stalk you, rather than the other way around. I was glad to see a positive reception for this game after so many years of toil and the horrors of a real war interrupting development.
Sony Electronics 4K 27-inch Inzone M10S monitor
Sony Electronics got pretty serious this year about targeting both casual hardcore gamers and esports starts with its Sony Inzone M10S display, which is a WOLED monitor with a 4K display that can display 480 frames in a second. I tried it out and appreciated the speed of the screen.
This display has a 27-inch OLED QHD screen with a refresh rate of 480Hz. It is focused on immersive images and responsive speed. And yes, this one is targeted at esports players and everyone else on down the pyramid.
It has Quad HD 1440p/480Hz refresh rate and an OLED screen with 0.03 milliseconds response time gray to gray. Recent console games have a refresh rate of 120Hz. Sony said that with a sub-2.0ms input lag in 480Hz, the display creates a distinct competitive advantage as it leads to more responsive on-screen interactivity using your mouse or other controller.
It has the variable refresh rate like the other monitor, meaning you can adjust the display refresh rate dynamically to match the variable frame rates of gaming device output and eliminate stuttering delay and screen tearing for smoother, more fluid gameplay. It also works with graphics cards and game consoles. It has the same color gamut of 1.07 billion colors. It is a brilliant screen no matter which game you play.
It’s got the same ergonomic footprint, and it targets pro players, core competitive gamers, core gamers and streamers, mainstream gamers and casual players. It also has the same 24.5-inch display mode on a 27-inch screen. And it can handle the same gaming modes as the other monitor.
The device is so fast that Sony has to cool it. It has an inner aluminum panel to diffuse the panel’s heat in a uniform way to prevent burn-in.
It also has a multilayer thermal structure (passive cooling system) for efficient and effective thermal radiation of the chipsets. It has a sandwich thermal structure for T-con chipset so it can radiate the heat to the top and bottom with a dual set of aluminum plate and thermal pad. And it has fanless airflow with a custom heatsink for the scaler chipset. It can radiate the heat with the custom heatsink and metallic cover plate.
It has a downscaled sister display targeted at gamers on a budget, dubbed the M9 II. The M9 II costs $800, while the M10S is $1,100. My only complaint is that even a 27-inch monitor is really too small if you’re a serious gamer. But it certainly has excellent performance.
Razer Iskur V2 gaming chair
I got this chair earlier this year and I’ve had plenty of time to get used to it. The Razer Iskur V2 is a solid chair. It’s got adapative and adjustable 6D lumbar support. It costs $600 at the moment on Razer’s site. It has pretty solid an comfortable adjustable arm rests and a firm head rest. It adjusts to any change in position as you lean back or sit up straight, supporting various postures for work or play.
I tend to shred my (Office Depot discount special) desk chairs pretty quickly. I spend so much time in them working that they fall apart in some way. But the Razer Iskur V2 gaming chair is well made, and it’s lasted. It’s also more comfortable than the other gaming chair I tried out this year for comparison. Razer has a good focus on quality, and its motto is “by gamers, for gamers.” It is made from premium EPU-grade leather, and it has a plush and spill-resistant fabric.
To date, I have done no damage to this chair, despite not being a careful sitter or gamer. If you can afford the sticker price, I highly recommend this chair.
OK, I’m cheating. The Dexcom Stelo consumer blood sugar monitor isn’t really something for gamers. But if you play on the couch too much and you don’t get enough exercise, the Stelo might be very relevant to your life.
Dexcom got on my radar back in 2020 when I wrote about the Dexcom 6 sensor. Back then, it was bigger and had a shorter battery life. The march of Moore’s Law and other design updates has now made Stelo into a more useful product. But as I noted in 2020, let’s talk a bit about why this matters.
Back in 2020, you had to get permission from a doctor to use a Dexcom product, as it was approved by the Food and Drug Administration only for use by Type 1 diabetes patients who need to monitor their glucose levels to figure out their insulin shots and control their diabetes symptoms.
As a tech narcissist, I’ve been interested for years in how technology can deliver a “quantified self,” or data about myself and how I live. Back then, I couldn’t say that the data I had collected so far, from step counters to sleep monitors, had really taught me anything really useful — until I tried out Dexcom’s monitor as a product test, even though I did not have Type 1 diabetes. It turned out not only to be a good health care story but also a great data story.
This kind of insight that we both got from data is something I would expect to learn from a Star Trek Tricorder.
Glucose monitors measure the level of sugar in your blood. For diabetic patients, this is critical. Diabetes affects tens of millions of Americans and at the time it was the seventh leading cause of death in the United States. The traditional standard of care for glucose monitoring was a fingerstick meter, which was painful as some patients had to test their blood by pricking their fingers up to 12 times a day.
I wore the Stelo, which you stick on your arm for 15 days, for three separate cycles. That gave me 45 days of data about what I ate and its immediate impact on my glucose levels. I barely noticed it was there most of the time, underneath my upper arm.
Thomas Grace, a specialist, looked at my monitor results and was impressed. He noted how about 90% of the time the food I ate kept me within the recommended band of blood sugar levels. Once in a while, when I cheated on my low-carb diet and ate pasta, the sugar level would spike. If you’re in a pre-diabetes state, you want to avoid it. Many of those people that Grace monitors are only in their good zone about 70% of the time. Those people can graduate to diabetes and have serious health problems. Dexcom got approval to sell these to consumers; you don’t need a doctor’s sign-off to get these monitors now. But I highly recommend that you get someone like Grace to tell you what the results mean.
The good thing about the Stelo is that it gives you immediate results (say, within 45 minutes of eating something) to tell you what that food does to your body. Over time, your body can be under so much pressure that it can lose the ability to take the sugar out of your blood. That’s bad. If you want to reduce those sugar spikes, you will stop eating that food. At least that was the effect it had on me.
Grace believes we’re headed for an epidemic of obesity in the U.S., and we have to take action. The Stelo got me to pay attention to what I’m eating and made me adjust. Together with some cardio (swimming and stairclimbing) and weightlifting, it has helped keep me in a healthy shape despite my age.
Play Nice: The Rise, Fall and Future of Blizzard Entertainment
(non-fiction book by Jason Schreier).
Since I wrote the first story about Blizzard (then Chaos Studios) back in 1994, I was very invested in the idea of this book and wanted to compare perspectives with Jason Schreier, who writes for Bloomberg about the game industry. He also wrote two other books I’ve read: Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made, and Press Reset: Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry.
Schreier has great access to both the C-suite and the ground floor of gaming and the reporting here is top notch. I laughed when he reported that Andy Weir was let go from the notoriously hardcore Blizzard workplace because he wasn’t dedicated enough to his job as a game tester. Weir went on to write the bestselling novels The Martian and Project Hail Mary. What a sloth!
The journey of the founders like Mike Morhaime and Allen Adham (and Frank Pearce) was an epic one, and their clash with Activision over become a more corporate and predictable operation is a story for the ages. There was one origin story that Schreier left out that I wished he had included, but I have very few quibbles with the quality of this tale, which spans more than 30 years of game history.
To his credit, Schreier doesn’t vilify many of the players. Not even Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision Blizzard, who had a reputation of only caring about money. Kotick actually comes off as a business guy who had a creative side and a willingness to gamble on talent. For the fall of a big MMO project called Titan, Rob Pardo gets blame for not paying enough attention to the details and ordering too many redos. But Titan’s downfall led to the creation of Overwatch, one of the unexpected hits of that made Blizzard into a company with an uncanny ability to figure out what fans want. Schreier also covers Blizzard’s sexual harassment scandal and its clash with California regulators, but the book treats the subject in a fair way and it doesn’t include the most salacious details for the sake of titillation.
There is plenty of rise and fall of games and teams and leaders in this book. It makes me realize just how hard it is to make games. It’s easy to judge Blizzard for its failures from the sidelines, but it’s worth remembering the unlikely miracles that it pulled off with so many magical hits in the game industry, from World of Warcraft to StarCraft and Diablo. For a long story told in the right way, with plenty of perspective from multiple sides, this is a great work of journalism.
Disclosure: The makers of these products sent me their products for the purpose of reviews.
