The Jon Schneider Game of the Year awards: 2025

As has become my annual tradition, here's the list of my favorite computer and console video games that I played for the first time during 2025 (along with the platform(s) that I played them on)!

1. Hades 2 (Windows)

I really don't know how Supergiant Games does it. The original Hades was my personal 2020 Game of the Year, with its combination of tight top-down-view action combat, great voice-acted characters and character development, and excellent music. Hades 2 delivers more of the same, except with even more interesting combat and varied gameplay. I put in the time to 100% the Hades 2 Steam achievements, and enjoyed every run. 

There's certainly something special about a game where -- despite there being no gameplay benefit or purpose to it -- you can opt to spend some time having your character join in and beautifully harmonize with a song that another character visiting your home base is singing.

2. StarVaders (Windows, Steam Deck)

Like it says on the tin, StarVaders is a roguelike deckbuilder that takes place on a Space-Invaders-like battle map. Cards are used to make your upward-facing spaceship move and fire up at the alien invaders moving down to attack you. Game balance is solid; and lots of different character classes, character variants, difficulty levels, and missions provide lots of replayability. Recommended for fans of Slay the Spire and similar games! 

3. Metaphor ReFantazio (Windows, Steam Deck)

Although I'm not a big "AAA" game player, Metaphor ReFantazio hit a sweet spot for me with its "Persona, but in a unique swords and sorcery fantasy setting" gameplay. I played all the way through the ending during the first few months of 2025.

4. Mario Kart World (Switch 2)

I particularly like the new Knockout Tour mode (in single-player) -- it really takes advantage of Mario Kart World's interconnected world to delivery a fun continuous 15 minutes or so of racing. Mario Kart World is also 2025's Schneider Family Game of the Year, managing the rare feat of getting us playing a video game together in 4-player split-screen. 

5. Monster Train 2 (Windows, Steam Deck)

Just as with Hades 2: Monster Train 2 is like the original, but more and better! I had a good time discovering Monster Train 2's various synergies, both within the various factions, and in the intra-faction combination pairings. And I particularly enjoyed the major content unlock that occurs midway through the game. 

6. 8-Bit Adventures 2 (Steam Deck, Windows)

My favorite classic-style turn-based RPG of 2025! A wholesome save-the-world adventure with likeable characters. I haven't played the original (but plan to circle back to it soon, as the developer, Critical Games, added Steam Cloud saving to the Steam version, at my request!!) I played all the way through to the end. Recommended for fans of classic-style JRPG-like games! 

7. Donkey Kong Bananza (Switch 2)

Here begins the portion of this year's list of games that I was impressed by and enjoyed, but didn't yet make it all the way through to completion. Bananza certainly meets the "impressed me" criterion, with its preponderance of destructible terrain combined with solid 3D platforming level design. I like how powerful DK feels in this game: In Mario games, Mario generally needs to be pretty cautious of enemies; by contrast, DK can readily clobber just about anything he comes across! 

8. Tactical Breach Wizards (Windows)

First off: Tactical Breach Wizards features the wittiest writing in a video game that I've come across in my long history as a gamer, so it's got that going for it! Beyond that, the world imagined by Tactical Breach Wizards -- a modern world, but where magic is real, and thus is the primary tool employed by special-forces agents -- is a great playground for the turn-based tactical combat gameplay. I'm currently enjoying making my way through this game in short sessions of a mission or three each morning before work, mouse in my right hand, coffee in left.

9. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (Windows)

I probably needn't explain much about the game that has already featured so prominently on so many 2025 awards and Game of the Year lists. I feel like I should have liked the game's turn-based combat (but with dodges requiring real-time reflexes) more than I did -- Paper Mario (N64) and Thousand-Year Door are both on my all-time favorites list -- but I never was quite able to really get the hang of dodging terribly reliably, and 33 seems to want you to be pretty good at dodging in able to be successful in combat.  I made it a fair ways into the game, but didn't end up completing it. 

10. Rift of the Necrodancer (Windows, Steam Deck) 

I'm a bit of a fan of Cadence (including her Hyrule appearance), and so was looking forward to Rift! I spent a fair bit of time with it when it came out, and did play all the way through the story. I'm (evidently) not super talented at this game, though, and topped out at Medium difficulty on most songs, and Hard on the easier ones. 

(However -- and since this is my blog, I'll just go right ahead and dad-brag a bit -- my 20-year-old son is the current #1 world record holder of multiple Rift songs in "Impossible" difficulty on the Switch platform, and also has a bunch of top-percentile scores on the Steam platform -- despite carrying an otherwise-full load as a Chemical Engineering major and marching band member at university!) 

(Aside: New game developers, consider resisting the temptation to include the word "Rift" in the name of your new game. There are quite a few such games out there already! 😅) 

Appendix: NOT-new-in-2025 Multiplayer GOTY

My continuing-favorite game of 2025 was once again Super Smash Bros. Ultimate on the Switch! The aforementioned 20-year-old son and I enjoy playing the online 2v2 mode and taking on all comers -- and, per the in-game stats, managing to win matches at a ~85% clip! I'm decent at Smash and generally hold up my end of the team with my Bowser Jr. and Samus; but "20" (who can skillfully play the entire roster(!), but probably likes best Lucina, Mii Brawler, and Pyra/Mythra) definitely does most of the heavy lifting! 

Appendix: Games in Progress

Fields of Mistria (Windows, Steam Deck)

Field of Mistria is essentially Stardew Valley, but different! I spent a solid few weeks with this game midway through the year, and enjoyed some of the changes and improvements it makes on Stardew Valley. I decided to put the game back on the shelf for now, though, pending the rest of the planned content (including the full implementation of PC-NPC relationships) being added to the game. Hopefully that'll be later on in 2026!

CrossCode (Windows, Steam Deck)

Although CrossCode is a somewhat older game -- having come out in 2018 -- I just discovered it in December 2025, it having been one of a few inexpensive games that I picked up in the Steam Winter Sale. (I think I may have tried but bounced off of a CrossCode demo back around the original release date.) Wow, there's a lot I'm liking here so far. A twin-stick action-adventure game (like my 2024 GOTY, Minishoot' Adventures)! A simulated MMORPG game, bringing back some fond memories of when I casually played World of Warcraft in its early days? Pixel art? Firm but fair puzzles? An intriguing story? There's a lot here so far that falls pretty squarely in my personal wheelhouse!

At times, CrossCode has felt like it may wind up earning a place among my favorite games of all time! At other times, it has been a little frustrating or obscure. I've managed to play through to what feels like it might be about the halfway mark without resorting to any hint guides, though, so far. I'm looking forward to continuing to play in 2026, forming a fuller opinion --  and maybe featuring CrossCode in my 2026 GOTY list post!

N+1 query problem? More like 1+N query problem!

Some years back, when I first learned about the N+1 query problem, I had a little bit of difficulty wrapping my mind around it -- or at least the naming of it. Inadvertently making lots of round trips to the database is bad, sure. And the problem gets a lot worse when you have record counts in the thousands (or more) instead of just a handful, sure. But why are we calling this "N+1"?

I eventually realized that the problem is that the nomenclature is backwards, chronologically! The order of operations happening when this problem gets triggered is:

1. The database is queried for a list of records. (1 query)
2. For each of those records, a follow-up query is made. (N queries)

I started thinking of the problem instead as the "1+N query problem." And for me, at least, the naming immediately became much more intuitive to grasp!

 

A quick perusal of search results makes it clear that this is a pretty #unpopularopinion. Almost all of the discussion of this problem out there exclusively uses the "N+1" terminology. 

I'm going to keep saying "1+N" in conversations with peers, though. I don't mind being one man standing against the tide on this specific issue! 🌊👨‍💻

TimeSnapper for Mac: Custom Directory Selection Now Available!

TimeSnapper for Mac has been updated to allow a custom directory to be selected for your captured screen images!

If you're not already familiar with TimeSnapper, it's a utility that runs in the background on your Mac or PC and saves an image of your screen(s) (or just the active application window) every few seconds. This can be highly useful when, to take a few examples: 

• A piece of text you were composing got lost because your browser crashed, or because a web form submit failed. (Retrieve the text out of your screenshot history!) 
• You want to search up information about a specific error message that you encountered a few minutes ago, for which you don't remember the exact wording. (Again, it'll be waiting for you in your screenshot history!) 
• You want to remember what all you were working on the afternoon of two days ago. (Click and drag across the TimeSnapper timeline UI to pan through your screenshot history!)  

Previously, the Mac version of TimeSnapper saved your screen images to subfolders of a particular "sandboxed" directory that the TimeSnapper app was by default permitted to access. This worked, but the target folder was in a fairly deep location on the MacOS filesystem, and thus was inconvenient to access by any means other than the "View in Finder" button in TimeSnapper's Preferences window.

Now, starting in version 1.1.0, TimeSnapper for Mac has been enhanced to use security-scoped bookmarks to allow you to choose any folder on your local computer for TimeSnapper to use to save its screen images. 

To use the new feature, after updating your copy of TimeSnapper to the latest version via the Mac App Store, click on the TimeSnapper icon in your Mac's top menu bar, then select Preferences, then the Auto Cleanup tab in the Preferences window. You'll see a "Change folder..." button in that window. 

 

If you aren't already using TimeSnapper, take a look at the reviews and ratings (4.8 out of 5 stars as of today!) of TimeSnapper on the Mac App Store, and treat your personal productivity to a lifetime license for a quite reasonably low price!

Fix: Large file upload tests in a Rails app start failing after bumping rack to 3.0.16

Problem: After bumping the Rack gem in a Rails app from 3.0.14 to 3.0.16, a couple of tests which tested an HTTP POST of a large-ish (~30 MB) PDF file to a controller started failing. Other similar tests, which did not upload a large file, continued passing.

The failure symptom was the POST returning an HTTP 400 Bad Request error. The error was returned before the request made it to any of our application code (as evidenced by none of our breakpoints being hit, or debug statements appearing in the output log).  

For our particular test, the specific error message was: Minitest::Assertion: Expected response to be a <413: payload_too_large>, but was a <400: Bad Request>

Fortunately, there were no other gem dependencies that came with the bump of Rack to 3.0.16. So we knew the problem must be caused by some change in Rack 3.0.15 or 3.0.16. 

Solution: The single item in the rack 3.0.16 release notes did turn out to be the pertinent change:

Security: CVE-2025-46727 Unbounded parameter parsing in Rack::QueryParser can lead to memory exhaustion.

As that linked advisory mentions, a new check is added in rack 3.0.16 that turns away "extremely large" application/x-www-form-urlencoded bodies. From this nist.gov page on CVE-2025-46727, links were available to the fix's specific code changes. From the first linked change, we can see that a "BYTESIZE_LIMIT" of 4194304 (a little over 4 MB) is now imposed on application/x-www-form-urlencoded request bodies. 

Per the mozilla.org page on HTTP POST, application/x-www-form-urlencoded is only one possible form Content-Type HTTP header value -- and not the one that is supposed to be used with binary data, such as PDF file uploads! Instead, multipart/form-data should be used.

Our original unit test code was actually not specifying any Content-Type HTTP header value in our test POST request. Changing the test's POST request to additionally send the HTTP header Content-Type: multipart/form-data fixed the problem, and got our test passing once again.

Aside: When I spent a minute during the investigation to ask ChatGPT about this problem -- a POST request failure introduced as of Rack 3.0.16, possibly due to a large request payload -- ChatGPT obligingly hallucinated up a plausible-sounding (but 100% fictional) response about Rack introducing a default limit in POST request payload size, and a corresponding plausible-sounding (but 100% fictional) response about a configuration line to be added to config/applicaiton.rb to override the supposed new behavior. 😂🙄

Yet another use case for LIFO stacks (humor)

This is like what happens while I'm working on a coding project at my job on an unfortunately-often basis. Anyone else? 😂

The Jon Schneider Game of the Year awards: 2024

There were my favorite games that I played for the first time during 2024 (along with the platforms that I played them on)!

1. Minishoot' Adventures (Steam Deck / Windows) 

I picked up Minishoot' Adventures on Steam when looking for a twin-stick shooter game to play without knowing anything about it beforehand, and am so glad I did! This game is an exploration / combat game a little bit reminiscent of the original Legend of Zelda; except that it's a twin-stick shooter, and more of a sci-fi theme. The exploration, combat, and upgrade systems are all really nicely designed. I immediately started a second playthrough on the "Hard" difficulty after completing my "Normal" playthrough, which for me is a rarity, and indicative of a really good game. Highly recommended!

2. Slice & Dice (iPhone)

This is the best new strategy game I've played on my phone in years. (Also available on other mobile and desktop platforms.) Slice & Dice is a really tight turn-based combat-only game where your party of 5 heroes takes on a series of 20 increasingly difficult battles. There's a free demo with the first 12 fights so you can try before you buy. The base game is plenty replayable, but Slice & Dice also comes with a plethora of different game modes if you want to change things up. Stands out even further from the crowd by being seamlessly playable in both Portrait and Landscape modes!

3. dotAGE (Mac / Windows)

dotAGE is a turn-based village builder where disasters periodically befall your town -- but you are able to see them coming some time in advance! If you successfully forestall a disaster -- for example, having enough heat sources to counteract a freezing weather event -- then the event becomes a blessing instead. Features quirky humor and pixel art, both of which are right up my alley. 

4. Unicorn Overlord (Switch)

Unicorn Overlord is a very polished small-squad battlefield combat game. A bit like the Fire Emblem games, except that instead of controlling individual heroes, you're controlling several squads of 3-5 characters, with movement across the battlefield happening in pausable real-time. Individual battles play out automatically according to if-then rules that you assign to each unit in advance. A simple set of tactics for a healer hero might be "If any ally is at less than 75% HP, heal them; otherwise, attack the lowest % HP enemy with holy magic." As a programmer, I had a lot of fun setting up those rulesets and then watching them play out!

5. Star Trek Resurgence (Windows) 

Although I'm a big fan of the TNG-era Star Trek shows, I haven't played many Star Trek computer games. Resurgence, though, did come pretty close to making me feel like I was playing through a short series of TNG-era Star Trek episodes! Although some of the action/combat sequences in the game were a little rough, the interesting nature of the "command decisions" in the game more than made up for that.

6. Sea of Stars (Steam Deck / Windows)

Sea of Stars in a fun turn-based, small-party RPG that is a bit reminiscent of classics from that era like Chrono Trigger. The combat system features the heroes having small mana pools -- but mana can be restored via "normal attacks," a little like in Diablo 3. Although the story was a bit uneven in places, I enjoyed the combat, graphics, and music enough to play Sea of Stars through to completion!

7. Lil' Guardsman (Steam Deck / Windows)

It's Papers, Please, except that rather than dystopian, it's fantasy-cartoony; and the protagonist is a 12-year-old girl! Despite the silly premise, there are some serious-ish enough plot elements that I (as an adult guy gamer) found Lil' Guardsman engaging enough to play through to completion. It was also fun to pair-play a bit with my own real-life 12-year-old daughter!

8. Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remake (Steam Deck / Windows) 

Ask a kid, I had somehow missed out on all of the NES Dragon Quest (née Dragon Warrior) games beyond the first. Nevertheless, I had a good time checking out this game for the first time, with its early implementation of a job system, and anachronisms such as individual non-combatant NPC characters hanging out by themselves deep in monster-filled dungeons. I progressed fairly deep into the game, but the combat system was a little too old-school for me with regard to the lack of interesting decision-making to be had in most combats, and I didn't quite make it through to completion.

9. Spider-Man Remastered (Windows)

I've never owned nor played a Playstation 4, but I'd heard a lot of positive buzz around the Spider-Man games, so when I finally hooked up a decent gaming PC to my family's main big screen TV, this was one of the first games I fired up. My favorite part was the amazing feeling of just web-swinging around New York City -- what a rush! As a (mostly) old-school gamer, I never quite felt like I had mastery of Spider-Man's abilities in combat, resulting in Spider-Man getting beat up by non-super-powered goons a little more than it felt reasonable than he should; perhaps at some point I'll put in the effort to come back to this game and "get good" at it.

10. Balatro (iPhone, Steam Deck)

I actually originally bounced off this game on its original release. My two main criticisms at that time were that (1) it seemed too easy (just a matter of getting some "good" jokers, after which it hardly mattered which cards you even played; and  (2) it seemed unbalanced (certain jokers just seemed terrible, e.g. increasing the score multiplier in tiny increments of 0.1). I gave Balatro another try when it came out later in the year on iOS at which time I figured out that my two criticisms were met by (1) the built-in higher difficulty levels, and (2) the jokers that had seemed terrible generally actually were quite good because they multiplied the score multiplier, rather than just adding to it. Balatro hasn't dominated my gaming time as it has for some, but it's been an occasional fun diversion!

Other games I played for the first time, and enjoyed, in 2024 (in descending order of where they would have been appended onto the top 10) included: Shogun Showdown; Ara Fell; Dungeons of Aether; Paperback Adventures; No Man’s Sky; Tangledeep.

Bypassing Google "URL Swapping" in Firefox on Mac

Problem: Users on my wifi network can't click on ad links in Google Search results because those links redirect to the ad.doubleclick.net domain, which is blocked by my Pi-hole. The user ends up on a page with this error message:

Unable to connect. An error occurred during a connection to ad.doubleclick.net. 

This happens on Firefox (as of the time of this post, January 2025) because Google is doing something a little bit sneaky: If you mouse over a hyperlink in a sponsored ad in a set of Google search results, it appears to be a normal hyperlink. However, as soon as you click on that link, Google swaps out the target of that link to be a different one than the one that was displayed -- and that's where the link ends up taking you.

(In more technical terms: Google appears to be using JavaScript's onClick event to cancel the navigation to the original href; then replaces the original href with the new href; and then proceeds to navigate to that new destination.)

For example, one of the results when I searched Google just now for "new wireless service" was https://www.verizon.com/plans/unlimited. However, clicking on that link actually navigated me to an URL starting with https://ad.doubleclick.net/searchads/link/click?lid=... . 

You can actually see the swapped-in hyperlink by using the browser's back button to return to the Google search results page, and mousing over the clicked hyperlink again. You'll see that preview of the destination URL for that same link has now changed! (The same happens if you right-click on the target link, then cancel the right-click context menu, and hover over the link again.)

My family members from time to time actually want to click on a sponsored Google search result, and have the navigation work properly. However, I don't want to whitelist the entire "ad.doubleclick.net" domain at my Pi-hole, since that would likely result in a lot more distracting ads being rendered as we use the web. 

I searched for a Firefox add-on which would prevent hyperlink URL destinations being changed from the preview URL that was shown prior to clicking on them, but couldn't find one that seemed trustworthy. 

(I do already run EFF's Privacy Badger add-on, which purports to include this particular functionality; but for whatever reason, it isn't working for me in Firefox as of the time of this post. Possibly Google has recently updated the mechanism that they use to perform their URL-swapping in Firefox; and Privacy Badger hasn't yet been correspondingly updated.)

Workaround / Solution

To my surprise, Google doesn't seem to perform their URL replacement when the search link is activated by the Return key, instead of by a click! Therefore, a crude-but-effective workaround is as follows, when looking at a page of Google search results:

1. Hit the Tab key until the desired link has the focus. 
• (Alternatively, double-click a word of text near the target link to select it; then press Tab and/or Shift-Tab from there until the desired link has the focus.)
2. Press Return to activate the link.

This workaround does have the advantage of not needing any browser add-on to work!

When doing this, Google (apparently) doesn't have any JavaScript in place to hijack the link destination; the client browser navigates directly to the actual URL shown in the browser's preview, without being redirected through ad.doubleclick.net (or any other domain).