Games

My wife was in law school in 2007 and I needed to get her a change of scenery cause she was studying 70 hours a day. I rented a trashy little house on a canal in Galveston, TX, grabbed my laptop to bring along, and bought a copy of The Orange Box to keep me busy while she studied and looked out the window at something different.

Years later, when I hit 6k hours played in TF2, I decided it was time to do something else.

My son's most played game in his replay this year was TF2 and told me a few weeks ago he thinks he could beat me. I haven't played in years.

Son, Imma wreck your shit.

also i played a lot of fantasy life this year

It was a good year. Played some nice games.

Nice.

Well damn I played a lot more than I realized!

And I moved to Linux back in October.

Guess it's better than last year where it was like 96% BG3.

Played Baldur's Gate with the wife (finally) and been playing Ember Knights with my kid.

Currently playing Wrath of The Righteous, 84 hours in and it doesn't look like it's going to end soon.

For the most part, my stats were what I was expecting but I didn't realize how many games I'd played. Exactly 100 different games played, 49 of which were new for me (part of me really wishes I'd gotten 50/100 exactly lol).

I was happy to see Stationeers cracked my top 3. I only started playing it during the last couple days of September but it's been my most consistent game outside of Factorio since picking it up.

Every single year my top games list is dominated by Hearts of Iron IV and Stellaris -_-

I did play 61 different games though and I did enjoy a lot of the variety.

GOTY for games played this year for me would be Tunic and Caves of Qud. Very much recommend checking them out.

Some highlights:

• I thought I would have the most fun with FF7 rebirth and FFT . But I kinda stopped playing both after **Ball x Pit ** came out. Woops. Very addicting gameplay loop.
• Finished a vast majority of Hades 2 . The story, gameplay, and amount of things to do was excellent. And of course the music was fantastic.
• Im still a C reeper World addict specifically 4. Theres maps that the community made where you play as the creeper, so ill put that on and read my audio books at the same time.
• Deltarune was fun to play though again and get to the current end. Im looking forward to playing the next installment. Toby has so much personality in his games :)
• Eartheon came out. It reminded me of Lightning force. I got the game working on the miyoo mini plus after buying it on steam.
• I didnt think I would like it but Ballionaire and peglin were both games I loved. Both had a somewhat similar game loop (like pagle but with objectives).

There were a couple of flops too:

• Rivals of Aether II - I loved the first version of hte game. But the newest version is just smash with less features if im honest. I hope they improve the game. I loved the other games in the Aether games, even the side ones.
• FF7 rebirth had moments that were really fun....but the game is a VERY big time slog to do anything worth doing. Its like they had FF7 and just threw Assassins Creed on top with more side missions. I really didnt like that. The music was FANTASTIC though. I really tried for a whole month, but the bugs in some boss fights + the slog made me stop playing.
• Defender's Quest 2 was a letdown. I played the first game YEARS ago and payed for it when it came out on steam. The first game was fun and had a lot of depth. This latest edition didnt have any of that. VERY short game with not the greatest premise. Story was very bad. Its too bad.
• Baldur's Gate 3 - yeah this is a controversial one. It was a fantastic game starting out, but there is an area that didnt load correctly and removed one of the 3 doohickeys you need to get to get out of a dungeon. And could not progress. So I had to reload the game, go through another 40+ hours of gameplay to get stuck again and glitch though the floor for my entire party. Im thinking this will be a better game to play on a normal PC rather than a steam deck. It looked as good and played as good as everyone said, but the bugs made it unplayable. (This is without mods). Ill give it a try some other time, but for now, its a bit broken.

My top five are Persona 4 Golden, Divinity Original Sin II, Divinity Original Sin, Hollowknight Silksong and Balatro. I was expecting Helldivers 2 in my top this yeae so was a little surprised by its absence.