At long last, Playstation has released personalized statistics for the year on 2020. (See yours here, through March 2, 2021!) They had done so at the end of 2019, so I was curious as to whether they'd do it again. After a month of wondering, my prayers were answered this morning.
Listen, 2020 featured a global pandemic, my shifting to working from home, as well as six weeks of paternity leave, so I was stuck at home most of the year and I spent quite a bit of time playing video games. I would be ashamed, but hey - I was stuck at home like the rest of you. It's not like I could go outside and do anything. Being the stat freak that I am, I love crap like this. No regrets.
More than anything else, I'm just blogging about this so I have the information in writing somewhere where it's not going to expire. Join me, if you will, for a look back on my year in gaming.
Games Played:
One of the first games I played in 2020 was the remastered PS4 version of "Ghostbusters: The Video Game." That, coincidentally was one of the first games I ever played on the Playstation 3, years ago. Over the past year, I played a wide array of games, from sports games to third-person, all the way to farming and city-building simulators, there was certainly a lot of variety in my entertainment. Playstation officially reports that I played 59 different games last year, but here are 20 of my favorites:
- Stardew Valley (PS4)
- Far Cry Primal (PS4)
- Mass Effect 3 (PS3)
- LEGO Marvel Super Heroes 2 (PS4)
- Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance (PS4 remaster)
- NBA 2K20 (PS4)
- Kingdom Hearts III (PS4)
- MLB The Show 20 (PS4)
- Back to the Future: The Game (PS4)
- Mass Effect: Andromeda (PS4)
- Cities: Skylines (PS4)
- The Outer Worlds (PS4)
- Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2 (PS4 remaster)
- Marvel's Avengers (PS4)
- Red Dead Redemption 2 (PS4)
- Fallout 3 (PS3)
- Star Wars: Squadrons (PS4)
- Astro's Playroom (PS5)
- Marvel's Spider-man: Miles Morales (PS5)
- Planet Coaster (PS5)
Top Games:
Unsurprisingly, MLB The Show 20 topped my list of most frequently played games, just like MLB The Show 19 did the year prior. I have a tendency to put a ton of time into my baseball games, and 2020 was no different.
2020 was also the year where I went through on the promise I made to play through the entire Kingdom Hearts franchise, as I've blogged about several times in the past (you can find all of my previous posts on that subject by clicking here). It comes as no surprise, then, that "Kingdom Hearts - HD 1.5+2.5 Remix" is listed as my second most-played game; I believe that disc had like three games on it, so it spent plenty of time nestled into my PS4 disc drive.
NBA 2K20 rounds out my top three, which is not totally unexpected, as the game's "daily check-in" feature kept me coming back most days for free login rewards - plus, I played the game a ton during NBA season to get my Utah Jazz fix.
Other games that clocked a ton of hours but didn't crack Playstation's "Wrap-up" list likely would have included the following:
- Stardew Valley
- LEGO Marvel Super Heroes 2
- Kingdom Hearts III
- Assassin's Creed Syndicate (PS4)
- Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2
- Batman: Arkham City (PS4 remaster)
- Red Dead Redemption 2
Total Hours Played:
Wow. 2,419 hours... That's, um, like 100 days of having the Playstation systems booted up. I'll justify it by saying this: Playstation likely logged just that - the number of hours that I had a game running, not the actual amount of time I was physically playing. That means that if I paused a game to eat dinner or turned off the TV to run to the store without logging out of the game, the clock kept ticking.
As far as the number of days played, I can chalk that one up to the aforementioned daily check-ins on NBA 2K. Often times, I would hop on for literally like two minutes to get my login reward, then power the system back down, so I find this stat to be somewhat misleading.
Regardless, if that's the quantity of time I'm spending with my consoles, I'm getting a pretty good return on investment. Thanks, quarantine!
Games like Red Dead Redemption 2, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (PS4 remaster), Far Cry 3: Classic Edition (PS4) and The Outer Worlds would have been games in the "Action-Adventure" genre, so I spent my fair share of hours shooting 'em up and slashing 'em down, as it were. That's a lot of hours.
Total Trophies:
"Trophies" are in-game achievements and goals, such as "Defeat [X Number] of Enemies," "Beat the Game on Hard Difficulty," "Hit a Home Run with a Player from Each Side of the Plate in the Same Game," and so on and so forth. To say that, in the past several years, I've become more focused on what gamers call "trophy hunting" would be accurate.
Platinum trophies are an indicator that one has completed all the goals for a given game - 100% completion, so to speak. Here are the 15 games for which I obtained the elusive platinum trophy during 2020:
- Star Wars - Jedi: Fallen Order (PS4)
- Far Cry Primal
- The Sims 4 (PS4)
- WWE SmackDown vs RAW 2010 (PS3)
- LEGO Marvel Super Heroes 2
- Monster Jam: Battlegrounds (PS3)
- Kingdom Hearts III
- Assassin's Creed Syndicate
- Far Cry 3: Classic Edition
- MLB The Show 20
- WWE 2K20
- Back to the Future: The Game
- Fallout 3
- Need for Speed (PS4)
- Astro's Playroom
In addition, I also got 100% completion on the following games, which did not have an associated platinum trophy:
- Kingdom Hearts 0.2 Birth by Sleep: A Fragmentary Passage
- AdVenture Capitalist
Hooray for me.
Playstation 5:
As if it were a literal Christmas miracle, I beat the odds and somehow, some way was lucky enough to get my hands on a Playstation 5; it was delivered to me on Christmas Eve. Once it was delivered, I got a chance to play it a handful of times in the final week of 2020, so the sample size is quite small. Nevertheless, Sony provided me some insight, as follows:
Editor's note: There is no way that I got 141 PS5 trophies between December 24 - 31. Not a chance. Not sure where that number came from.
Playstation Plus and Online Gaming:
Playstation Plus is a subscription service that not only allows users to play online against other gamers but also provides several free games each month. In 2020, I took advantage of downloading 19 of those games. Thanks for the savings!
I very rarely play games online (cooperatively or competitively) with others because I don't like getting my butt handed to me by children. However, it looks like I spent seven hours playing the highly divisive, online-only Fallout 76, likely with my brother. It didn't happen often, which is a shame. We had pretty high hopes for that game - hopes that were not entirely fulfilled.
Analysis and Conclusion:
After chatting with some, apparently, judgmental co-workers about these stats, one of them ran my numbers and accused me of playing an average of six and a half hours of Playstation per day last year. He told me not to tell my wife. I subsequently pulled out my calculators and verified his math. It is inconceivable that those numbers are accurate. Granted, there are definitely some days when I play multiple hours of video games, but I definitely did not play an average of six hours per day, every single day of the year - not unless the "hours played" is also counting the number of hours my console was running Netflix and Hulu because I totally got my money's worth out of my streaming service subscriptions during the quarantine.
In conclusion, I'm not sure that one stat is completely accurate, but other than that, at least I feel like I'm getting some good entertainment value out of my Playstations. Everybody has a hobby, right? Nobody would judge me if I said that I read 40 books last year. Reading books, watching shows, playing games... It's all pretty much the same thing, right? My family comes first, but I see nothing wrong with having a little digital entertainment on the side. Judge away, haters.
My video gaming in 2020 took me to outer space, through plenty of classic Disney locations, to the Old West, through a re-imagined continuation of my favorite movie trilogy, to sports arenas across the country (even when COVID wouldn't allow me to watch games in real life) and beyond. I played some incredible games that told fantastic stories and spent a few nights playing others that I wish I wouldn't have. All in all, 2020 will probably go down as the year in which I spent more time playing video games in my entire life. I'd never wish another pandemic upon us, but, during the one that we got last year, at least I made a pretty sizeable dent in my ever-growing backlog of games.
*****
What are your gaming memories from 2020? Which games did you enjoy? Which didn't you care for? Which games are you playing (or looking forward to playing) in 2021? I'd love to get your thoughts in the comments section below, on Twitter (here and here) or, as always, on Facebook.
Until next time.
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