I won’t be buying any more games this year, so now is as good a time as any for my annual review of my game-buying habits.
The news isn’t good. In 2012 my game buying dropped to a fifteen-year low, with only 64 games purchased during the year. Dollars spent on gaming dropped to a twenty-year low, with those 64 games costing me just a few pennies over $1k in total. Have I lost the gaming spark?
Here are the much beloved plots:
^ The above shows purchases by % of totals. With 34 games bought, iOS leads the pack by far.
^ The above shows % by dollars spent. Mac is a surprising contender here, mostly due to World of Warcraft.
Here are some observations I can make from my game buying this past year:
1) The PSP and DS are very much on the way out. Only three years ago I bought an average of 1.25 DS games per week. In 2012 I only bought four in total.
2) Although I still buy a lot of iOS games, I bought much less in 2012 than I did in 2011.
3) The 3DS has taken off nicely. I expect to see strong growth in my purchasing of 3DS games in the next few years.
4) The Ps3 fell off a cliff, as far as I am concerned.
So what happened? Well I theorize a few things, foremost among them being work. As my job takes up more and more of my time, I obviously have less free time. In addition, I do a great deal of work at home, often spending at least a couple of hours working on email and various administrative tasks almost every single day during the semester. Add to this the fact I taught a summer class and I simply ended up with less free time in 2012.
Secondly, I went on two vacations over the summer (Florida, and NM/CA).
Thirdly, even though I am buying fewer games, I find myself spending more time on average playing those that I purchased this past year. Warcraft counts in this category.
The fact remains that gaming is still by far my favourite hobby, and I still play games essentially every single day, it’s just that I don’t seem to be buying as many!
So what were the highlights this year? Well, let’s start with the years biggest disappointments in reverse order:
3) Bug Princess 2 Black Label (iOS) – A massive ripoff from Cave, in which they add a difficulty level to an existing game and deceptively repackage it as a brand new game. I bought this on the strength of all their other titles, and couldn’t believe I’d paid $15 for basically nothing I didn’t already have (even the achievements are identical!)
2) New Super Mario Brothers 2 (3DS) – Don’t get me wrong, this is a great game. But it’s too familiar, too identical to the Wii game. Nintendo did this once before (compare the DS and Wii Animal Crossing games), and I wish they hadn’t done it again.
1) Diablo 3 (Mac) – Not just the biggest disappointment of 2012, once of the biggest game disappointments of all time. I played Diablo 2 for hundreds and hundreds of hours. This one, I could barely manage a hundred. Upon release it was full of mind-bogglingly unusual design decisions that stymied fun at every turn. Patch after patch failed to remedy the situation, and I eventually turned my back on it forever I suspect.
For every bad game there must be a good one, and here’s the best of the year in my opinion:
3) World Of Warcraft: Mists Of Pandaria (Mac) – How do you breath new life into an 8 year old game? Release an expansion as good as this one. WoW feels as fresh as it ever does, and I’ve enjoyed every minute I’ve spent running around Pandaria (especially with Fyrenze the bear!)
2) Kid Icarus Uprising (3DS) – Nintendo has been slight on brand new games in many years, and I’ll admit I had few expectations for this on-rails 3DS shooter based on a 30 year old NES game. But holy cow, this one ate me up and just wouldn’t spit me out. In some ways, it was Monsterhunterian in it’s addictiveness, and I reckon many years from now I’ll still be pointing to this one as amongst the very best 3DS games. The online modes are awesome as well 🙂
1) Xenoblade Chronicles (Wii)
This one isn’t just the best of 2012. It’s not even just the best Wii RPG, or even Wii game. This one goes beyond all that, and I don’t hesitate when I label it as one of the very best RPGs I have ever played. It was crafted by a team that included people that had worked on various legendary RPGs (Xenosaga, Baiten Kaitos, others) and uses an MMO-style exploration and combat system to tell a truly amazing story involving two gargantuan warring robot-continents and the races that live on them. With twists and turns aplenty, and a genuinely likeable cast of characters, I could barely put this one down and when I finally put the controller down after the final boss battle almost 125 hours had passed. I only wish it has lasted longer. If you have a Wii and like RPGs, this game is a no brainer.
