Year in Review 2019
2019 was a great year of gaming for me. I played a lot of awesome games, both old and new, and I wrote about them on this blog all year long! Now, I’ll take a look back on my year in gaming as a whole, and make a few 2020 gaming resolutions that may or may not come to fruition.
Looking Back: 2019 Goals
One of the 2019 goals I mentioned in my 2018 post (which was the actually the very first post on this blog!) was to play through Earthbound. I didn’t remember that goal when I played Earthbound this year, but I played it nevertheless, and now I’m doubly glad that I did because it means I fulfilled part of the goals I set for 2019!
In that post, I also said one of my 2019 goals would be to work on my DS and 3DS backlog. I only played one DS game this year, but I made decent progress on my 3DS backlog!
Also, in my post on 2018 I mentioned a few of my favorite games I played that year. For this post, I won’t be doing that, since I already wrote a whole post on the topic for 2019! You can find that post here if you’re so inclined.
Nintendo Switch
Another notable event in my gaming experience this year was purchasing a Switch! The impetus for this was when PatronusLight and I heard that Joker, from Persona 5, would be the first DLC fighter in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. We didn’t get the Switch right away after the announcement, but that was definitely the first thing that planted the idea in our minds. So, with the Switch added to our collection, I now have an entirely new console backlog! The Switch has so many good games already, and I’m so glad to have been able to play some of them this year! And 2020 is shaping up to be a very good year for new Switch releases too!
2020 Goals
One thing I should really do in 2020 is comb through my Backlog category on HowLongToBeat and remove any games that no longer sound very interesting to me. I’m sure there’s a number of them in there. I usually add games to my Backlog category before buying them, so I’ve probably added a number just because they sounded vaguely interesting at the time.
Another 2020 goal I have is to get into the Trails series more. I played Trails of Cold Steel back in 2018, and really enjoyed it, but haven’t gone back to play its direct sequel yet. So I at least intend to play Trails of Cold Steel II in 2020, but ideally I would play Trails in the Sky afterward. Trails in the Sky is another trilogy arc in The Legend of Heroes franchise, and unlike Trails of Cold Steel, all the games in that arc are already localized. Trails of Cold Steel III may have received a localization in 2019, but we’re still waiting on Trails of Cold Steel IV!
I try not to focus on the numbers too much, but it would be cool to finish more games in 2020 as well. I don’t want to get too hung up on the number of games I finish in 2020 though, as long as I enjoy the ones I play.
Edit: I realized I didn’t mention it right after posting the article, but I also want to check off every game on at least one of the Top 10 Games in my Backlog lists that I made in 2019. It will probably be my Top 10 3DS Games in my Backlog list, or my Top 10 Games in my Steam Backlog list, since I’m about halfway through each of those already. Then I can make new Top 10 lists for those platforms!
The Breakdown
Looking at all the games in my Backlog as tracked on my HowLongToBeat account, I was interested to see how the total games and games by platform compared between the end of 2018 to the end of 2019. Below, you can see those total numbers, as well as the totals for a few platforms I thought saw interesting changes between 2018 and 2019.
- 2018: 1108 total backlogged games
- 715 PC
- 79 3DS
- 51 DS
- 27 PS1
- 50 PS Vita
- 2019: 1128 (+20) total backlogged games
- 782 PC (+67)
- 70 3DS (-9)
- 52 DS (+1)
- 23 PS1 (-4)
- 6 PS Vita (-44)
As you can see, the number of total games in my backlog saw a net increase of 20 games over the course of this year! That’s probably largely due to the games I get each month from my Humble Monthly subscription (changed and renamed to Humble Choice now). Most of the 67 game increase in the PC category came from that. The reason the total number of games only increased by 20 though is because I went through my backlog a few months ago and removed a ton of PS Vita games that either no longer sounded interesting or because I already had the game in my backlog for a different platform.
Despite the increase in total games, I did actually play games and make an attempt to decrease the size of the backlog this year. In 2019, I completed:
- 1 Game Boy Advance game
- 10 Nintendo 3DS games
- 1 Nintendo DS game
- 5 Nintendo Switch games
- 7 PC games
- 2 PlayStation Portable games
- 2 PlayStation games
- 1 PlayStation 4 game
- 1 Super Nintendo game
That’s 30 games overall. Another good year, I’d say! There’s more variety in the platforms than in 2018, as I reached further back into my backlog to tackle some PS1, SNES, and GBA titles.
Over the course of the year, or perhaps earlier, I developed a habit of taking a lot of screenshots while playing games. I thought it would be enlightening to come up with a rough total of how many screenshots I took, by counting through the image totals of all my imgur albums for the year. By my count, in 2019 I took 10,110 screenshots during my video game playthroughs! Of course, I ended up using very few of those! Maybe I have some sort of problem…
To wrap things up, just as in my 2018 year summary post, below is a visualization of those completion numbers by platform. My 3DS and PC/Steam backlogs received the most attention, although Switch isn’t far behind PC!
Thanks again for visiting the blog, whether it’s your first visit or you’ve been here all year. Let’s all have a great 2020!
