Every year I make the grand declaration that this will be the best year ever in gaming. This will be greatest year ever. The year that defines all other years.

Laughter of the mad surrounds you as the blood moon rises over the top of a damned city. You tighten your grip on the controller and your stress level rises as a terrifying visage approaches in the distance, unearthly aberrations sprouting from its squirming limbs.

Play a few “Rocket League” matches and you see more than a few similarities between the game’s RC-car action and pre-K level soccer. A mass of players follows the ball wherever it rolls, teammates steal from each other, and accidental own-goal shots are almost expected.

Many people — kind, well-intentioned people — want to buy me something video game-related when Christmas comes around. Inevitably this is a failure, because as a general rule, if it’s a game that I’m interested in, I’ve already bought it.

“Xenoblade Chronicles X’s” premise is nothing that video game players haven’t heard before. The Earth is no more, so it’s time for humanity to explore a new planet.

You know the ones I mean: stuff like 2048 and Flappy Bird, the simply but sleekly designed games that entice players with score rather than story — the games you play when you need to kill five minutes but you’ve already looked through your Instagram feed twice.

The Death Star hangs ominously over a war erupting on the forest moon of Endor. A cacophony of laser fire lights up the darkened tree canopy, drowned out by the clanking of an Imperial All-Terrain-Scout Transport on the march.

Japan is the motherland of modern video games, in many ways. As such, it’s an ideal travel destination for gaming enthusiasts of all stripes. This week, I’d like to share a little bit of real talk about my own vacation experiences there.

One of the things I love about speculative fiction is diving headlong into a new world and figuring out the details as the story unfolds. “The Order: 1886” is a triumph of world building, ripe to be explored by players who enjoy that sensation of confusion and discovery as the pieces of the fiction fall into place.

“Well, how much space could I possibly need?” I ask myself, mulling the difference between one terabyte and 500 gigs. I honestly can’t tell you offhand how many gigabytes a terabyte even is (I just googled it. It’s 100 gigs).