Perhaps a dirty secret?
While I’d love to offer you my hours-count in Pokemon Some Such Color or Final Fantasy Some Such Roman Numeral, that would require much too much digging through boxes. Beyond that, plenty of games like Super Smash Bros. or Street Fighter II or Super Mario World or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Hyperstone Heist et al don’t have any easy way to track time played.
But what we do have in the modern age of DSL and personal computers is Steam. And if you go to your Steam profile, there’s a neat section that orders your games by hours-played. Or at least hours-open. Maybe some of you have ruined the sanctity of the statistic farming trading cards. I personally know I didn’t play 38 hours of Hitman: Blood Money as the service suggests. Still imperfect metrics, but at least it’s all on one easy page.
I’m looking at:
1. Invisible, Inc.: 68 hours. I played it to death in Early Access, then played it some more for review when it launched, then…kept…playing it. And I might play it some more tonight, but only because I am just one hour short the sex numbers (69, nice).
2. XCOM 2: 54 hours. That’s 54 hours of stuttering, buggy-ass XCOM 2, because I don’t care if my troops keep getting stuck in the strangled-by-a-giant-alien-snake animation for the entire level, or if I have to press caps lock on the load screens to make them load instantly, because, for the most part, the game still worked. And XCOM is great. I don’t have a problem.
3. Downwell: 53 hours. In the two months my hand was in a cast post thumb dislocation/UCL tear, I almost exclusively played Downwell (and MLB 16: The Show, lol) because there’s only one button and I could push it with my index finger. I’d been playing it pretty consistently since release anyhow, though, occasionally muttering “Levitate, levitate, levitate” in an extremely Kendrick voice, because that’s still the best style. It’s a ‘lil masterpiece that game and I would buy a dedicated Downwell handheld.
4. XCOM: Enemy Unknown: 52 hours. Yeah, I have a problem.
5. Valkyria Chronicles: 42 hours. Come for the delicious strategy gameplay, stay for the weeby-treatise on genocide and racism being overcome by the power of friendship. I bought this for PS3 at launch originally, but it’s always like $4 on Steam, so I ran through it again early this year. It gets mad ups for every level being distinctly-designed and often including unique objectives.
