2017 in Video Games


It was a pretty busy year for me in 2017 as I got more into cooking as the twins got older and I didn’t have as much time to myself. I felt I hadn’t nearly played as many games in 2016. But when I started gathering the stats, that’s when I realized just how much less I’d played. In 1016 I’d played 132 hours of video games compared to only 42 hours in 2017. And over half of that was in Civilization VI – once again proving to me that it’s the one game that’s worth spending my money on as I’ll always go back to it. Just writing this makes me itch to get back to the game.

Youtube seems to have removed the ability to embed playlists – or maybe they’ve just moved it somewhere I can’t find it. So this year I’ll just discuss a bit about each game. If you want to watch any of them, just follow this link and then go to the right playlist.

Civilization VI (26 hours 26 min) – Some of this came from playing solo games and some from playing multi-player games. The game continued to evolve throughout the year and so each game was slightly different.

Human Resource Machine (3 hours 37 min) – AKA Assembly Programming the Video Game. I had a lot of fun trying to remember how to do assembly. Stopped when it got a little too hard and I just didn’t have the time to devote to it.

Vertical Drop Heroes HD (3 hr 13 min) – Last year this was my game of the year as I said it was the one I was most enthused to get back into. I did indeed spend a good chunk of early 2017 working to beat the game.

Team Fortress 2 (2 hours 42 min) – I played a bit around Halloween and had a blast. If I had enough time, I’d cycle back and forth between this game and Civ VI.

Rocket League (1 hour 31 minutes) – Vinny’s kid is about Scarlett’s age and he was talking about how much Vinny loved Rocket League. Scarlett had some fun with it, but also didn’t enjoy losing so we haven’t played much since the third time we played.

Contraption Maker (58 min) – Scarlett hasn’t asked me to get this game going in months, I think she forgot about it.

Double Dragon Neon (33 min) – I wanted to see how much this game was like the one I remembered – it was…a little too much. Still, it was fun to live that nostalgia trip.

LA Noire (30 min) – I can’t remember for the life of me what was going on with this game. I’m sure in an alternate world where I got it before the kids and played it continuously I would have loved it.

Dirt3 (28 min) – As a kid I always loved racing sims. But back them most of them were arcade ports that required the player to finish in a certain time or lose. I had fun mucking about in Dirt3 and would probably play it if someone payed me to play video games full-time, giving me lots of video game playtime.

Cook, Serve, Delicious! (26 minutes) – Scarlett wanted me to play the game again.

KickBeat (26 min) – I like rhythm games, but this one got too complex too quickly. Most likely won’t be playing again.

BEEP (17 min) – the game that didn’t want to be played. It just wanted to crash all the time, especially if I was trying to record my time in the game.

Game of the Year

It’s kind of silly to think of a game of the year when I barely played games this year. But I really did like the charm of Human Resource Machine – from the minds behind Little Inferno and World of Goo. If I didn’t play that in 2017 I would have just given it to Civ VI again.