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I wanted to come in and be all like "nooo don't convert to gems, the exchange rate is awful", but honestly the rate of return even selling on the marketplace makes expending any effort in the whole system pointless. The odd card will sell for $0.30, maybe $1+ for foils, but $0.03 is normal and to discover the outliers you have to click through every last card. A single button to sell everything at once at a fair price would be the only way to make it all remotely worthwhile.

Congrats Ben! People talk about wanting to get through backlogs but I've never seen anyone actually plan it out, let alone stick with the plan for so long without getting side-tracked. Thanks for the years of entertaining write-ups!

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Your hints were a great help, Henke: 35 42 63 Since nobody else has been guessing I'm going to approach the rest as mysteries to be solved by any means (except trawling people's Steam screenshot collections). 5 32 40 43 57 It's interesting how much trouble image search has with dark images, none of those really turned up anything. This game is also much harder than it would have been a few years ago. Exhaustively going through all horror games on Steam is totally impractical, for example.

Thanks everyone above for mentioning the daily challenges. They brought me back to the game after I'd stopped (not wanting to burn out before the full release), and playing each one for a couple of hours after work has become a very enjoyable ritual. Today's was the wildest I've ever seen. Silent, Draft (a new mod, pick your entire starting deck), Lethal Enemies (everyone starts with 3 strength), and Vintage (normal enemies drop relics) synergised perfectly. I drafted almost entirely 0-cost cards and could always play my entire opening hand, which soon reached 10 cards. After a few relics I was dealing 2 poison (plus 4 damage for each debuff, including poison) with every hit from the start, just in case anyone survived turn one. Only the final boss survived past turn two, and only because it was Time Eater. I normally play very slowly, so this was my first win under an hour. That brought me to everything unlocked, so I might take another break here until more content is added. I think I'd play this game forever if enough they could design enough cards. It's everything I loved about the MTG Duels games but so much nicer to actually play, with less downtime and more interesting decisions.

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Correct.

I knew I was tempting fate by making that claim at the same time as a bunch of guesses. Sorry, everybody. 22 must be

#17 was correct. Still 100% success so far! 21. 22. 25. 29.

Ahh, then that must make #1 At first I thought the water was ice and considered something like This is a really fun thread, thanks! I don't have many screenshots that aren't immediately obvious, but I'll post a few: 17. 18. 19. 20.

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I really love it, but I've played enough now that I want to wait until it's done so I don't totally exhaust what's there already.

I too played this a lot as a kid but never beat Wario. I went back a few years ago and finally did, and in retrospect it feels so small and simple. I'm not saying I could finish it in under 30 minutes, but I would guess no more than two or three hours. I've just been playing the DX colour hack on my GBA, which is an odd experience for a game I have such old memories of. The lag removal has a huge effect on the way it feels. The later Wario Land games are my current project. II is amazingly inventive and exists in this weird space between what feels like old and modern design, but the missing nostalgia factor makes it harder for me to stick with it.

Heh. I just finished the B-side of level 3 in a little over 700 deaths. They're definitely far harder than the main game, but I haven't yet found anything that felt outright unfair. Gradually learning the rhythm of a screen, and knowing on a physical level exactly what you did wrong on each death, is so satisfying. I'm still afraid to imagine the level 6 B-side, though.

Celeste! I reached the summit with 2077 deaths in just under 10 hours, glued to my Switch for most of release day. I've been looking forward to this game for a long time, but I'm actually blown away by how well it turned out. Every piece - the music (especially), sound, pixel art, characters, writing, level design, and game feel - is individually brilliant, but the game is far more than the sum of those pieces. Comparing this with the original PICO-8 jam version feels like the perfect execution on Chris Hecker's exhortation to fully explore a game's mechanic. The story also tackles some fairly serious themes, and while I could see this not working for everyone it felt meaningful for me. It's a very human game. I was worried the challenge would become overwhelming or too much of a focus, but ultimately I think it's quite well balanced. I did make 100+ attempts on some screens, but those were all chasing optional objectives and always my decision. If it gets too much there's an assist system that can be turned on or off at any time. As with TowerFall, reaching the end of the game is just the start. There are much harder B-sides of each level to find and complete, fastest time and fewest death leaderboards, hundreds of challenge strawberries, and at least two layers of mystery to solve. I'm looking forward to making my way through these at a more relaxed pace. We're only a month in but this will easily make my GOTYs of 2018. Highly recommended.

The only trailers I remember watching repeatedly date from around 1999, when playing video files from magazine cover disks or even downloading them was still a novelty. The Perfect Dark trailer sticks strongest in my mind because I was so looking forward to the game: Wow, terrible. I don't recall if I ever thought this was cool, but I'm sure glad times have changed. System Shock 2's trailer is mostly just the intro cinematic, but I think that part at least holds up pretty well. There's something about the constant background hum in this and the Thief games that really makes them stick in my mind as places, and that sound design carries over to the cinematics: This is more of a gameplay preview, but I remember watching the Commandos 2 trailer with a friend and getting very excited by the seemingly endless possibilities it promised:

Not to get off topic, but I'm not quite sure what you mean here. If you're referring to the Deathstorm campaign, they seem to be charging ~$30 (for the season pass or just the three individual missions).

2017 really has been an incredible year (in games, if not the world). I'm "only" 40 hours in, but Zelda: BoTW is my GOTY for so easily blowing every other open-world (and Zelda) game out of the water. It's so charming and understated, the perfect mix of human-authored and systems-driven. I feel like spreading the enjoyment out over the next few years, jumping in for a month or two at a time. Looking back I'm surprised that nearly all my favs were on Switch, including some older games that were new to me. While I end up getting into most major consoles eventually, often that's years after release. This is the first I've ever owned from day one and it's been brilliant. GOTY runners-up: PUBG SteamWorld Dig 2 Stardew Valley Honorable mentions: Super Mario Odyssey Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle Golf Story Thumper Sniper Elite 4 Most wanted: Horizon Zero Dawn Dishonored 2 Hollow Knight

The amount of ✨content✨ in this game is unbelievable. I've invested 118 hours and I'm nowhere near completing all of the challenges and feats in the main missions, let alone all the side missions, masteries, pro mode, escalations, contracts... it's crazy. In that sense the new GOTY stuff isn't great value but I was more than happy to buy it just because I love the game so much and want IOI to succeed as an indie. Without spoiling anything, two of the four new campaign missions substantially change some basic game rules. One is sort of throwaway fun, the other I really enjoyed and could see being very hard to play well. While none of them feel as deep as the main missions they mix up the spaces in interesting ways and are worth playing.

Welcome, Kyle Burke! Your beautiful Alcohol Separation puts mine to shame: I'm really enjoying this (16 hours played in under two days - oops!). I have a handful of friends who go completely crazy for each new Zachtronics game, which makes it great fun competing on leaderboards and discussing solutions around release time. The gif generator is perfect for this. Before release I was worried it would play too similar to SpaceChem, which I liked but found impossible beyond a certain point. Thankfully so far it's closer to Infinifactory in difficulty curve. The essentially unlimited working space means solving a puzzle only really requires logical thinking and some trial and error. Much of the challenge and fun comes from optimising your solutions, and in this game more than any previous I think the three categories (cost, cycles, area) generate really interesting challenges. In Shenzhen I/O optimising for cost usually meant saving maybe one chip, but here the component costs are very granular. The large possibility space means it's totally possible to solve a puzzle using, say, just one arm, or one arm on a track.

I've played a few hours of FX3. Overall I think it's cool they released a new game for free with 90% of existing tables carried over (a few are missing due to licensing). The tables look and feel pretty much the same as I remember, with some visual upgrades. The new multiplayer modes look nice if I can convince any friends to join in. The interface is better but still a bit unwieldy. If you set a local high score with a controller you still have to switch to keyboard to enter your name, every single time. Given the focus on competition I think the game splits player attention too widely; 68 is already a lot of tables, and with 5 modes each that's 340+ leaderboards in the game. Worse is that the default mode lets you level up upgrades like "bumpers score 20% extra" for future runs on a table. That's a huge score advantage for experienced players, when pinball is already hard enough for beginners to get into. It was presumably intended to incentivise replaying but to me doesn't make the game feel any different, just artificially inflates scores once you've played a table a few times and makes leaderboards fairly meaningless. I wish classic mode was the default. Superscore is confusing now too, instead of just being the sum of your high scores across all tables it's based on how many times you've ranked on a leaderboard (?) Still, I intend to keep playing and find a few tables to get really familiar with. Anyone else playing this?

I have a spare copy of Zeno Clash if you want to further extend your backlog, Ben. I remember quite enjoying the first once I got into it, but never played 2 so I can't compare them.

Steam has only tracked playtime since early 2009: http://skaery.blogspot.com.au/2009/11/new-steam-community-feature-total.html. Many games have also changed ID over the years (as @TychoCelchuuu noted) thanks to special editions, including Fallout 3. That suggests another guessing game: which games would be in your top 10 if they'd been tracked properly? Mine would include TF2 and maybe Max Payne 2, I must have played through the latter at least 4 times.

This is a fun idea. My guesses: 1. Hitman 2016 2. Magic Duels 2012 3. Spelunky 4. Magic 2014 5. Big Pharma 6. XCOM 7. Skyrim 8. Mass Effect 9. GTA V 10. Mad Max The real list: 80% accurate on contents if not order. I actually check my list on occasion so I was confident about the first three. Hitman, Spelunky, and Invisible, Inc. all well deserve their places, and I'm pleasantly surprised to see Mad Max so high; I adored that game and have no regrets about time spent. Mass Effect doesn't count (half was an ex's playthrough) so my real #10 is Dark Souls. Overall I'm happy with the list except maybe Magic, but for a long time it was the game I played to occupy my hands while listening to podcasts. Across the series I have 185 hours