I guess that Nintendo is going to shame me annually about how much time I waste playing video games. I like statistical data, but I was kind of hoping that it was just going to be a fun thing they did in 2019. Nope!
Here’s the breakdown from the email they sent me:
10 fewer hours than last year. Not bad. Still… yikes.
59 total games played seems reasonable – but going back through my month end wrap-ups, I only count 41. I must have messed up somehow. After all, how could a robot possibly be wrong?
Aww, only two Mario games? Paper Mario: The Origami King and Super Mario 3D All-Stars. I guess they didn’t presume that you’d be using NES/SNES Online to play Marios. Interestingly, Origami King’s release date was July 17, so… I guess I went pretty hard on that one. (I did take a vacation day specifically for it.)
Xenoblade Chronicles is absolutely the king here. I mean, the data says so, but it’s not like there was ever any question about it. That’s where all the June, July, and November hours came from. At least 120 hours of that 689 belong to Xenoblade.
I’m a little surprised -but also proud- that Ring Fit Adventure came in second place. If you asked me, I would have told you that I didn’t spend enough time with it. That still probably has a little truth to it, because exercise is important, but at least I know that I was devoted enough to it that it ranked second in my most-played games of the year.
The games I played via the SNES Online app in 2020 were:
– Breath of Fire
– The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
– Donkey Kong Country
– Mario’s Super Picross
Fewer than expected, actually. This suggests that there’s a pretty sizable difference in play-hours between my top 3 games. Breath of Fire and Mario’s Super Picross absolutely account for a lot of time between them, but I can’t imagine they’d still get anywhere near Xenoblade.
Note that clicking through to the website expands the Most-Played Games section to five titles, with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild placing fourth (see the spike in March) and Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity coming in fifth. My in-game timer for Age of Calamity shows 45 hours, which suggests that I spent way more time playing Breath of Fire than I’d thought. I’m very surprised that Fitness Boxing didn’t make the top five.
The conclusion that I’ve drawn from this analysis is: holy crap I play a lot of video games. And this breakdown doesn’t even include any of the playtime on games machines that are not my Switch… Yikes. At least for 2020 I can blame some of it on COVID lockdowns.