We hope you’ve found the time to join us in the sands of Dubai in the November TA Playlist feature, Spec Ops: The Line, but now that the month is drawing to a close, it’s time to announce the winner of the December 2024 TA Playlist poll.For December, we took a look back at all the Playlists of 2024, and each member of the team selected a game or two that they felt deserved another shot at Playlist glory. ManicMetalhead selected the 2017 run-and-gun platformer Cuphead and the open world “ShARk-PG” Maneater, while BetaSigX20 picked the 2023 survival horror sequel Alan Wake 2, and ChewieOnIce selected the 2021 action-adventure Psychonauts 2. It was a close poll, going right down to the wire, but the winner and final TA Playlist game of 2024 is… Psychonauts 2!Psychonauts 2 was developed by Double Fine and published by Xbox Game Studios in 2021, a full 16 years after the original Psychonauts released in 2005.Razputin “Raz” Aquato, a trained acrobat and powerful young psychic, has realized his lifelong dream of joining the international psychic espionage organization known as the Psychonauts! But these psychic super spies are in trouble. Their leader hasn’t been the same since he was rescued from a kidnapping, and what’s worse, there’s a mole hiding in headquarters. Psychonauts 2 serves up danger, excitement, and laughs in equal measure as players guide Raz on a journey through the minds of friends and foes on a quest to defeat a murderous psychic villain.The TA Community has given Psychonauts 2 an impressive 4.48/5.00 rating, with almost 178,000 tracked gamers starting the game and around 9% (just over 16,000 players) going on to get the full completion. It’s estimated that it will take 25-30 hours to unlock all 57 of the game’s achievements, but the Psychonauts 2 Walkthrough from CitrineWorm138 could shave a few hours off that estimate. Psychonauts 2 is currently available on all tiers of Xbox Game Pass.From the very beginning, this was one of the tightest polls we’ve had in quite a while. Psychonauts 2 and Alan Wake 2 were neck-and-neck the entire time, trading the lead back and forth, but neither managed to pull ahead by more than a vote or two at any point. Maneater and Cuphead stayed close but ran a steady third and fourth, respectively, and never challenged the leaders:As always, you can earn your TA Playlist badge by unlocking any achievement in Psychonauts 2 during the month of December or by posting a substantive comment in the Spoiler and Spoiler-Free threads that will be posted on December 1. A note about the forums: We’ve made a bit of a change in the background as to how forum participation badges are awarded. This used to be an automatic process that occurred on a regular schedule, but it didn’t allow the forum moderators enough time to go through and check for any non-substantive “badge only” type of posts. From now on, the process will not run automatically but will be manually processed periodically after we’ve removed any non-substantive posts. So, if you’re participating by forum post only, it may take a little longer for your badge to show up, but rest assured, as long as you haven’t been notified that your post isn’t substantive enough, the badge will be awarded within a day or two.Since we’ve started to crack down on the “badge only” posts, the number has declined significantly, so we’d like to thank everyone who has participated for putting in that extra effort to provide substantive posts relating to the game of the month. TA Playlist really is all about the discussion, and we appreciate all of you joining along each month!
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