Well, Nintendo finally released their Year in Review this week, which is the reason why this article was pushed back an additional week, but I'm kind of okay with that. So many companies that collect data on their customers (Steam, Spotify, FitBit, Reddit, etc) and a lot of those, possibly thanks to Spotify, are released around the beginning of December, so it was nice that Nintendo actually waited until the beginning of the new year to post our collective data on the previous year.
That being said, let's start off this year with Steam's RePlay for 2025:
No real surprises here, although I probably would have the first Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster as coming in fourth after Final Fantasy II Pixel Remaster; although I'm still a little surprised that I clocked 64.9 hours in FFIIPR; maybe I left the Steam Deck on? But 23.5 hours in Final Fantasy is still very respectable for a 38-year-old video game that I've beaten just over half a dozen times. Resident Evil 6, it turns out, I spent 36 hours on.
The breakdown between Classic Games, Recent Games, and New Games seems pretty accurate as far as play time goes. Although I wonder if Fallout 4 and The Elder Scrolls Online are considered Classic Games, as they were released 11 and 10 years ago, respectively. Regarding the genres, JPRGs at the top felt pretty accurate, although apart from Resident Evil 6 and some early dabbling in The Walking Dead: The Telltale Definitive Series that I started (and have yet to finish) might've been the only Zombie-related games....oh wait. I did play/The Squire played quite a bit of Plants vs. Zombies, so there's that too. And I guess you could say that there were zombie-adjacent demon-like creatures in HELLBREAK. I don't know, who am I to argue with the data that Steam's collected?
And then there was Nintendo.
Yeah, no surprise there with Super Mario Bros. Wonder taking the top spot. The Squire received that game for Christmas 2024, and we play it at least once a week. Or we did until a couple of weeks ago, and now LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is on heavy, almost daily rotation. The Squire loves to choose different characters to play as, so be prepared for multi-hundreds of hours going into that game in order to unlock as many of the characters as we can get.
But that's this year, so let's go back to last year.
There were a lot of games I played on both the Switch 1 and the Switch 2, partly to try and beat Triangle Strategy, and while I did make a huge chunk through that game, I do feel that I ended up making so many bad choices that that game felt like a huge tragedy.
Oh, by the way, purchased a Switch 2 last year. I'll preface that I 100% don't regret this decision. The system feels and plays great. I'm still a little annoyed about the whole game card only being playable by one system at a time, even when it's only being used by one account. You know, this whole article. I guess the only other thing is that the only dedicated Switch 2 game I've purchased over the last six months was Mario Kart World, although I did recently purchase Star Wars: Outlaws because it was on sale for only $5 more than the lowest price it's ever been on Steam, and the port does look really good. And lastly, we don't have a camera for the Switch 2 and have never used that dedicated C-Button to chat up our other friend(s) who also have a Switch 2. I think Duke has one.
Okay, we're getting away from our original mission.
I felt pretty good about some of the progress I made through previously purchased games like Car Quest, Lords of Exile, and (partly) happy with 9 Years of Shadow, except I did hit a skill wall about 75% of the way through, so I might need to put that game on perpetual hold.
Jumping down to the genres, I'm guessing Action was from Super Mario Bros. Wonder, Lords of Exile (need to write about that one), 9 Years of Shadow, and I did start Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus back in February, although that didn't go too far for reasons I can't remember. The RPGs I think were from several games I received from Keymailer that didn't quite stick, although I did put a fair amount of time in Collection of SaGa: Final Fantasy Legend to get in the right headspace for Romancing SaGa - Minstrel Song - Remastered International, which again, was another Keymailer game that I thought was going to be better than it was, at least for me.
The last thing I want to talk briefly about is selecting LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga as my favorite game of 2025 (that was released in 2022). I feel like it's just been a really fun game for The Squire to play, and the couch co-op aspect has been a lot of fun too. One thing that I hadn't anticipated was that it's helped develop his navigation of menus, as within a few seconds, I'll see our stud count (in-game currency in LEGO games) drop by roughly 25,000 because The Squire has purchased an in-game rumor on how to unlock any given character he wants to play as. And I really think that playing this game will get him used to playing a game in a 3D space with dual joysticks (one for moving, one for camera; and yes, the y-axis is inverted). So we're teaching skills over here too. So that's good.
Let's finish things here. It's getting late on Thursday night, and I would like a few hours of sleep before waking up at 6:30 AM. So thanks for sticking in there with us through a few thousand words and 10 minutes of non-doom phone on my part (see above videos if you haven't already) set to some groovy tunes. Here's hoping 2026 is a good one.*
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
This is a Cobra Bar*Before our shit-stain of a President and his administration really gets everyone else in some deep(er) shit.
No comments:
Post a Comment