Another year, another ‘Year in Games’ blog post. It’s still my #1 hobby, and in some ways I’m more invested in it than ever. But it’s interesting to see how my spending (and playing) has changed over the years, moving ever-so-slowly more toward replaying old stuff than buying new.
In 2019 the numbers dipped upwards slightly this year, with 57 games bought for 10 systems at an average cost of about $25. The PS4 led in terms of games purchased and total dollars spent, but much like last year a decent amount of my spending was for retired (and in some cases distinctly retro) systems. Here are the charts, in another new format to please my critics:
The above is a proportional plot of games purchased by system. Yes your eyes don’t deceive you: I bought one game each for the Commodore 64 and PC-Engine in 2019. I can’t play either since I don’t own either system, but both were Wizardry games and I collect them so how could I pass them up? In fact more than a third of all my game purchases this year were for retired systems, and even more if you include the 3DS which is very much on the borderline these days.
And that is the breakdown of dollars spent. The 3DS has a large block since I bought an actual new 3DS system this year (which was my sixth…), and you’ll note that even though I bought more GBA games I spent more on the C64 and PCE games. This is because one of the GBA games was a mere ¥65, which is about US$0.60! The average game price remains low since I very rarely buy any new releases these days, instead waiting 6+ months until they inevitably drop in price. On Black Friday I bought nine PS4 games – all released within the last year – at an average cost of $18!
Despite the retro gaming (I’m not mentioning here the hours spent with the NES, SNES, C64 and Genesis Mini) I sunk a massive amount of hours into some extremely high quality new games as well. The following three were amongst my favorites of the year:
Monster Hunter World: Iceborne (PS4)
What can I say? Will there ever be a year a new Monster Hunter game doesn’t make this list? Iceborne – the expansion to world – added a higher difficulty, oodles of new monsters and lots and lots of fun. It was even better than World, and given they’re still adding content I doubt I’m done with it yet!
Nioh (PS4)
Imagine a hybrid of Dark Souls and Monster Hunter and this is what you get. An absolutely fantastic mission-based fuedal Japanese monster hunt, that has incredible amounts of content and oozes flavour. A wonderful, wonderful game and I look very much forward to the upcoming sequel.
Hollow Knight (PS4)
A ‘metroidvania’ set in a world of bugs. At times very difficult, but with a gigantic map and lots to see and do. I got lost in this one for weeks, which wasn’t bad for a digital game that cost me only $5!
I can’t end the year without a final farewell to the 150+ games and consoles that I parted with back in June. I ‘ve not regretted it and don’t miss them, and I very much hope they’ve gone on to new owners and are now featured on someone else’s “2019 in Games” list :
