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It's a new year, and you know what that means: a look back at last year and how my gaming habits have or haven't changed. They haven't. Or ... have they?

Well, I did glog about more games in 2024 (32) than I did in 2023 (20):

Though as the next chart shows, replays accounted for a sizeable chunk of that -- 14 games, 44%! I sampled so many remasters and multi-game collections (of remasters) last year that I felt the need to make glog code changes to better-organize posts about them.

(Fun Glog Facts: I replayed even more - 15 - back in 2020 in Review: Interesting Times, and my "record" of 18 replays in 2017: Remastered still stands.)

Several of those replays were specifically PS4-to-PC deals: Uncharted 4: A Thief's End - Remastered and Uncharted: The Lost Legacy - Remastered (as parts of the Legacy of Thieves Collection), Horizon Forbidden West, and God of War (2018).

All of them were enthralling adventures, and they all played great on my hardware, Forbidden West in particular happily eating up tons of my playtime. Silly PSN logins aside, Sony is doing pretty great by their PC releases. I'll probably never need a PS5 after all.

I also replayed some less-recent titles last year -- originally from 3DS, NDS, and even GBA.

Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy was a great high-resolution remaster of 2007's Apollo Justice, 2013's Dual Destinies, and 2016's Spirit of Justice. And while my 2017 take on the last one was down on its lack of creative gameplay, my 2024 re-take appreciated its focus on a strong narrative.

The Castlevania re-bundles Castlevania Advance Collection and Castlevania Dominus Collection were both really-well-made packages, for their part, especially Dominus's solution to the DS games' multi-screen gameplay. The games themselves though, well, most of them haven't held up.

2001's Circle of the Moon and 2002's Harmony of Dissonance were, I think, fine at the time (though even in 2006 I lamented Dissonance's poor audio). 2006's Portrait of Ruin was better remembered than re-played; in retrospect I think I appreciated its amount of content, more than the quality of that content. 2008's Order of Ecclesia ... well, even at the time, I was pretty Meh about it.

But! But, revisiting Soma Cruz's castle-dives, 2003's Aria of Sorrow and 2005's Dawn of Sorrow, struck the right mechanical notes and still felt fun to play two decades later. Though they do show their age, in terms of stilted storytelling and missing quality-of-life features -- stoking my desire for the next 'vania that I can only assume IGA is working on.

Those remaster collections accounted for most of my 2024 replays, but for one outlier: Voxelgram, which I re-installed for the sake of some new DLC. And I was pleasantly surprised to find post-release updates added puzzles to the base game, too.

Which is a great segue to the DLCs I played in 2024:

That Voxelgram DLC was a treat, but most notable was surely Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores. Even though its story couldn't top Forbidden West's (just like Frozen Wilds and Zero Dawn before it), Burning Shores nevertheless added some worthwhile side-missions and Jurassic Park references to Aloy's SoCal adventure.

Other expansions and DLCs I played in 2024 weren't very remarkable: Chloe and Nadine's Lost Legacy still counts as an expansion to Uncharted 4 (sort-of a technicality), and there were two Meh DLCs to the Meh Saints Row reboot. Let's talk more about that Meh-ness.

Saints Row (2022) was, I mean, playable and even kinda fun! in parts. It's just shocking to me how similar to, and technologically inferior to 2011's Saints Row 3 it ended up. (Yeah, I considered glibly counting SR2022 as a "remaster" of The Third. But The Third's actual remaster was better!) Dinky little side-story DLCs The Heist & The Hazardous and A Song of Ice & Dust didn't help, despite how entertaining the LARPing missions were.

Other Meh let-downs of 2024 included NieR: Automata, which I think has an interesting plot, but was a slog to get through; and No Man's Sky, whose post-release redemption arc just couldn't make up for boring, chore-ish gameplay.

There were even more Good bright spots last year, though, like Dave the Diver's amusing series of fish-related diversions; Palworld's impressive (if rough) monster-wrangling-base-building hybrid; Cat Quest III's light-hearted cat and pirate puns; and Logiart Grimoire's hours and hours of soothing puzzle grids.

And though most of my Awesome highlights in 2024 were replays of games that I already loved, there were a couple new stand-outs:

The Talos Principle II expertly expanded on its predecessor's gameplay and storytelling, I mean, I can't commend Croteam enough for taking the risk of populating their post-apocalypse with NPC personalities. And they did it! The madmen, they managed to build some genuinely compelling characters here, characters who take this sequel's philosophy-informed narrative beyond the brilliant original.

And Baldur's Gate 3 - speaking of compelling characters - delighted the hell out of me with its intensely charming cast. BG3's world is so richly detailed, so dense with enchanting content, that I played for 30 hours without realizing I was still in the first act!

BG3 was such a great journey, and has so many choice-driven nooks and crannies to explore, I'm even considering a replay ... in a few years.

For 2025, though: what's on deck? (Aside from God of War Ragnarök, which I'm already pretty deep into.)

Probably Talos 2's recent DLC, Road to Elysium, which I hope is less difficult for me to stumble through than Road to Gehenna was. And yet another bundle of remasters, Ace Attorney Investigations Collection, which I hope holds up better than my Meh memory of the 2009 original.

I still haven't taken the plunge back into Cyberpunk 2077 for its Phantom Liberty DLC, so, there's another replay on my docket. Plus yet more kinda-recent remasters that may tickle my "replay" fancy, like Resident Evil 4 (2023) and Ghost of Tsushima: Director's Cut.

And Satisfactory has finally hit its 1.0 release; if it at all resembles my experience with Factorio, that's likely to become an unhealthy obsession for some time.

Here's to another year of getting lost in exotic digital worlds, meeting eccentric characters, and writing flippant blog posts about them.