2009 Year-End Recap

It's New Year's Eve, and time to take a look back at 2009. This year, I finished 19 games or stand-alone campaigns within games, which I also count:

Diablo II: Lord of Destruction

Metroid Fusion

Killzone

Gears of War (Hardcore)

Portal

Peggle Extreme

Starcraft (Terran)

Grand Theft Auto IV

Half-Life: Source

Peggle Deluxe

Underworlds

Oblivion (Dark Brotherhood)

Oblivion (Knights of the Nine)

Ico

Red Faction: Guerilla

Mass Effect

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune

Halo 3: ODST

Borderlands

While hardly anything to sneeze at, this is down from my total of 26 for 2008 (15 for 2007), and I should really pick up the pace to keep up with the obscene amount of games I've purchased (or received as gifts) over 2009.

It's been a crazy, insane year for games, adding a couple of platforms and the huge amount of awesome deals available over Steam, in particular. Just today I bought 3 more games for well under $10 each. This brings my purchased list to a grand total of 59! As I move most of them to the newly updated Pile of Shame, I can see I have quite a year ahead of me for 2010. To help thinning out the pile, I've instituted my new one-in, one-out policy. That is, if I want to buy a new game that costs more than $10, I need to have finished a game recently. This should help save money, too. So as it stands right now, I need to finish something before my next purchase, likely Mass Effect 2.

I'm in the middle of about 20 different games right now, so it shouldn't be too much of a stretch. Since coming to Arkansas and New Mexico for the holidays, I've played a little bit of Torment, just trying to get it to work on my parents' PC. It kept crashing anytime I'd enter any place where it was possible to rest, so I didn't get far. I'll have to pick it up from where I left off at home.

I brought along my Mac and DS, but oddly enough I've only been using the latter. I started on Metroid: Zero Mission and Final Fantasy IV (the DS remake). Both are (relatively) modernized versions of classics that I loved growing up. Metroid is made easier by the inclusion of a wider move set and an auto-map, while FF IV is substantially more challenging than the neutered version us Americans originally got as Final Fantasy II on the SNES. It's apparently even harder than the original, putting it more in the realm of something like Etrian Odyssey or Shin Megami Tensei.

Yeah, it's going to be a busy 2010. Happy New Year!