Y'all, where did 2025 go? I remember sitting here at this same desk, telling everybody how I couldn't wait to get Grand Theft Auto 6 in my hands. That's just one indicator of how the year often unfolds way differently than we planned. In December, App Trigger is taking a look back at the stories that defined the year in gaming. Longtime readers will probably remember some of these, while others are hearing about them for the first time. Either way, join us as we walk down memory lane, won't you?
I have loved baseball and its various video game incarnations for as long I as I could count my way to a seventh-inning stretch. Every year, MLB The Show is one of the rituals that helps me enjoy the season to its fullest. I guess the cheaters were always there, they unfortunately exist in every game. But this year, they were especially impossible to ignore.
My most shocking cheater experience became one of our most popular stories back in April. A sad specimen of a human being tried to combine glitches and a steady barrage of racial slurs to force me into conceding. Dude had never met me before. I notoriously hate quitting, even if I'm down hopelessly. If my opponent is just that much better, I like to take the opportunity to learn something from them. If they're a savage cheater, then I need to expose the glitches for my readers. Either way, there's always something important to take away from the experience.
Weekend Classic, which was supposed to be a competitive mode, got brought to its knees pretty early because of cheaters, smurfs, and people happy to glitch the leaderboards for rewards. I know baseball history. Plenty of people cheat at the actual sport, but good lord, they're playing for contracts the size of a nation's gross national product.
I haven't played Weekend Classic in a while, so I'm hoping this mess has improved. I wonder how many other people bounced off this mode early like I did. Playing against cheaters is the polar opposite of fun.