My Year in Video Games: 2025
I am extremely late in posting this, but I’ve been incredibly busy in 2026. In 2025 I ended up playing 2 days (48 hours) less than in 2024. It would have been way less if I hadn’t been playing Slay the Spire while exercising. More on that below.
Games Played in 2025
Slay the Spire (4 days, 22:42:57): You may remember that, a few years ago, I played a lot of Slay the Spire but eventually decided Monster Train was better. Before going on a flight I saw that this game was on sale in the Google Play store. It joined Gwent as the second game on my phone. Having it available for random moments of play made its play time rise up throughout the year. In fact, on the all-time charts it rose from the 39th position to the #4 position. I’ve been working, without success, on beating the final area of the game (essentially new game +).
Civilization VII First Impressions
Because I had to fix a bunch of posts on here due to the transition from Wordpress to Hugo, I was reminded that I wrote a bunch of posts when Civilization IV came out 20 years ago. With the massive changes to the game mechanics in Civilization VII I thought I would at least make a post about my initial impressions of Civilization VII.
2024 Game of the Year and Gaming Trends
Unlike last year I didn’t play any of my narrative games, despite my best intentions. Unlike with my end of the year music post I don’t usually make graphs for my end of the year video game posts, but if I did you would see that games 1-3 were played WAY more than any other other games I played this year. It was truly the year of Against the Storm, Cities: Skylines II, and Balatro. I don’t know too much about what 2025 will bring, but I am sure it’ll at least have a bit more of each of those three games. I would like to actually make a bigger effort to get through my narrative games this year, but I’m not sure how much that desire is worth when I consider that I didn’t play any at all in 2024. As usual, you can enjoy the YouTube video below that will have highlights of the games I played this year along with narration that matches the text below. After that are the images of my Steam Year in Review and, finally, my Top 20 overall games since 2011.
Cities: Skylines II Milford County Dec 2024 Tour
I’ve been working on Milford County for quite some time - nearly a year at this point. I was inspired by the way that City Planner Plays designs his “cities” in Cities: Skylines and Cities: Skylines II; he makes regions that eventually become a megalopolis rather than simply designing one city. While I did orignally start out trying to think of things in story terms as he does, I am not quite disciplined enough to do that. However, I do think that building regionally is one way to end up with more natural looking cities rather than just having a gridded city. Milford County is starting to reach the level of development where I will start merging areas, so I wanted to do a small tour of the region as-is. First off, here is the region from above. I couldn’t figure out how to get the camera to zoom out far enough, so this is from the normal game view with the tools cropped out. (In hindsight I think I could have probably played with the camera settings to zoom out)
Humble Bundle finally has a GOG bundle!
After all these years, there’s finally a Humble Bundle that redeems keys to GOG! I don’t have anything against Steam, per se, but I always hated the lack of diversity of locations to redeem your keys. I’m hoping this eventually means that games sold on Humble Bundle through their store (ie not part of a Bundle) will be redeemable on the user’s preferred store.
A History of Video Game Controllers
I came across this video that’s a pretty in-depth history of video game controller that taught me quite a bit I didn’t know and helped bridge some connections between the different companies throughout the industry’s history.
2023 Game of the Year
In my 2022 year-end blog post, I thought I was going to focus more on finishing up the narrative video games I started in the prior years. I definitely made some good progress on Disco Elysium, but not nearly as much as I wanted. I didn’t finish any of the narrative games. In January, I didn’t play any video games as I worked on my end of the year blog posts. In February I got re-obsessed with Monster Train and spent a good chunk of my free time trying to unlock all the boss characters. In March and April I tried to get a little more consistent about my gaming and also started trying to take advantage of all the extra buttons in the gaming mouse that Dan got me for Christmas. In June we took a bunch of family vacations and so I got back into Gwent, which I could play on my phone and my non-gaming laptop. In July I was back to Monster Train. In August, as the advertising hype started picking up on Cities: Skylines II, I started spending a lot of time playing the original game. Once the game came out in October, I spent nearly all of the next two months playing it. Then, out of nowhere, I heard just enough about Against the Storm to buy it and it was all I could do, almost to the exclusion of all else.
What 8bitDo can learn from the Competition (and also what 8bitDo is doing better!)
I’m all-in on 8bitDo. Prior to getting on the 8bitDo train, I was mainly focused on PC gaming, so I would get Xbox controllers (whatever the latest was at the time). But with 8bitDo supporting PC, Switch, Android, and (I think) the Xbox and PS4/5 with addaptors - it’s a no-brainer to go with 8bitDo, especially since you can choose the form factor most comfy to you - PS/Switch Style with the Pro or Xbox style with the Ultimate.
2022 in Video Games and 2022 Video Game of the Year
https://youtu.be/m_HIofD-nNA
A video version of a large chunk of this blog post
1. Gwent (1 day, 5:50:44): Around May I found out that CD Projekt Red had changed the rules around the Gwent Journey, so that journeys were no longer time-bound. This meant I no longer felt pressured to play every day in order to progress. Freed from feeling forced to play, I once again caught the Gwent bug and, as you can see, it became my most-played game. The addiction was also facilitated by playing on my phone (although that time is not captured here). Eventually, around September, I had to stop when the heft of the phone was giving me RSI issues. I had moved on to other games on my PC, so I took a break from Gwent. The developers announced that the game only has one more update coming, so we’ll see if the community around the game remains. That will dictate how much I continue to play Gwent because, after all, a multiplayer game is no fun if there isn’t anyone to play with. I expect I’ll get readdicted some time in 2023. ( Last year 23 minutes)
2021 Video Games and 2021 Game of the Year
This year I played a LOT less; partly because I wasn’t home as much as I was in 2020 due to the COVID mitigations. Also, it was partly because I focused on programming with older Advent of Code challenges. Last year I wanted to make a list of games and go in order, but that fell apart when I got stuck on The Witcher 2 and stopped following the list. First up, a video of the games I played this year. Second, the text version of what I said in the video. Right before my Game of the Year selection, a graph of this year’s gameplay.