The Games Steam Says I've Played the Most (Total)

One of Valve's more interesting quirks isn't that it keeps tabs on how you play game -- it's that you can see much of this information, and it reveals rather unique things that you wouldn't expect to see otherwise.  Much like looking at heat maps of deaths while playing shooters, it shows what pits I've fallen into.  Today, I'm looking at one statistic in particular -- the top ten games Valve says I enjoyed based solely on time played.


10)  Deus Ex: Human Revolution - 37.5 hours

Despite the massive amount of complaining I saw on various web sites, Deus Ex: HR was perhaps the game I had the most fun with last year.  Yes, I played entirely using stealth, and yes, I did my best to not kill a single person.  The world was filled with so much character that moments similar to the one pictured kept you wanting to play even during lackluster content.  Sure, the boss fights were a chore and a move away from the game's unity of purpose, but the rest was pure joy.  If they had eliminated the boss fights completely, or made non-combat characters have ways of winning, the game would've been much better - but it was fun.


9) Sims 3 - 39.7 hours

This one surprised me, and I'm not entirely certain why.  I didn't intend to buy the game, until Steam had it available with all of the expansions for chump change.  Even then, I only bought it for the content of one expansion -- World Adventures.  In that expansion, players could build dungeons and explore them, and fight mummies.  That sold me, primarily because I was missing tabletop games quite a bit.  After fifteen hours, I found myself training a character to fight mummies, raid dungeons, and capture mad scientist super villains.  After twenty, my character decided he was a vampire hunter.  After twenty five, he had six vampires locked up in his basement.  At twenty-six, he decided he would be a vampire and see what the sunlight was.  Even without a plot, this game has quite a lot of depth - the same thing that kept me going in Deus Ex.

8) The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim  - 48.4 hours

The Elder Scrolls series is one I have not particularly been interested in.  Prior to Skyrim, I've never been able to tolerate the sheer open world or the first-person gameplay.  Where Human Revolution had a depth of the world that kept me interested, this series had empty shells of characters wandering through it, completely helpless and mindless.  Never have I felt so alone than running through a city in most ES games. Skyrim made significant strides in resolving this feeling.  The game's cities had purpose, and having to take sides in the civil war made this game so much more engaging.  While the rest of the world was fairly bland (if you can consider vikings punching dragons bland), the civil war kept me involved right 'til the end -- and then the game returned to telling me that I was the only person in the world that mattered, and it went crashing right back to emptiness.  The weird glitches did not help.  I don't think I'd have been nearly as engaged without the Battlegrounds mod, which made traveling engaging as I plowed through Imperial soldiers and hunted down scattered bands of enemies.

7) Mass Effect 2 - 51.4 hours
Mass Effect 2 was my favorite of the three, for various reasons.  I played the first on the 360, so it wouldn't show up on the list, but I found myself playing this one 4-5 times specifically to see what would unlock in the third game.  I stopped when the third game was announced for Origin, as I wouldn't be playing the third one.  It turns out, I'm glad I didn't -- those 4-5 playthroughs would have been effectively meaningless.

6) Fallout: New Vegas - 53.6 hours
While Fallout 3 was firmly in the "acceptable" category, it fell into many of the same pits Elder Scrolls games tend to.  The world felt fairly empty and unconnected, as if your actions in one area had no effect on actions in another.  New Vegas made a significant effort to fix that, and it showed -- likely, helped by the fact that there was a constant war going on, making each town much more connected to the actual plot.  The Fallout Series has been my baby, as the first game was one of the very first games I played.  I didn't feel like the world was just a series of stops on my way to finding the water chip, and that same feel was preserved in New Vegas.  It helped that New Vegas was made by people actually involved in the making of the original games.

5) Evil Genius - 99.6 hours

This game, while filled with game-stopping bugs and lying almost completely unsupported after launch, has been one of my absolute favorites.  Pulling from Dungeon Keeper roots and building a base in a comedic parody of spy movies, it has some of the most character of nearly any game I've played.  It also helps that, as a simulation, you could leave it running while browsing the web.  Of all the games on the list, this is the one I wish had a sequel the most.





4) Empire: Total War - 72.9 hours
I've been a huge fan of the Total War franchise.  After years of base-building RTSes, it was particularly refreshing to see a tactical wargame that not only valued historical accuracy, but made battles fun and challenging -- moreso than APM management.  This was the first Total War title that I purchased via Steam, and the first one that incorporated firearms as more than just an end-game superweapon.  Though I spent significantly more time playing Medieval: Total War, this is the one that wins out.  Of particular note, this is the first Total War title to have naval combat, which I found more interesting than the land combat precisely because I'd put so much time into other TW titles.

3) Dungeon Defenders - 140.2 hours

 

This one was a game I initially expected to hate after the lackluster Sanctuary.  My roommate roped me into it, and I'm glad he did.  The simple gameplay was surprisingly addictive, as it combined base-building tower defense with MMO aspects, making it one of the more fun games released last year.  The developers also continued releasing after-launch content, making it have a much longer lifespan than it would have otherwise.  Trendy continues to update it regularly long after I lost interest, and seem to be continually expanding the game with new content.

2) Dragon Age: Origins - 168 hours (between the two copies I bought)
This is perhaps the only traditional RPG on this list, and I played it as such.  I had concurrent playthroughs with each race/background combination, and reached the endgame with a very different experience.  Mods helped by eliminating the pain that was the Mage Tower, and made parts significantly easier.  Though this game did not have the richness of environment that kept me moving through Deus Ex, it did not fall into the trap of the empty, disconnected environment of Elder Scrolls titles, and I felt like every little action I did made a difference.  And then I played the sequel.  That was a serious letdown.


1) Football Manager 2012 - 363.6 hours

Football Manager is effectively a glorified, interactive spreadsheet cut from the same vein as the Baseball Mogul series -- extremely polished and comfortable.  Even without a background in soccer past the days of the entire team following the ball around like lemmings, I was able to slide right in and run a successful team.  To date, I have completed eight seasons at the helm of a club, and feel particularly accomplished.  This game thrives on the "just one more turn" addiction to simulation titles since Civilization, and can be played while browsing the web or just dinking around on the internet.  When I'm browsing, I pull it up and play a quick match.  The investment threshold is surprisingly lite -- these days, when I groan because I have so much further to go to make it to the next checkpoint in Diablo III, I find myself pulling up FM2012 and filling a quick trade while I blog.  At this very moment, I've got FM2012 running and I'm orchestrating my first go at the Olympics.  When I hear Eve referred to as a spreadsheet simulator, I laugh, because clearly, people haven't played enough sim titles to make that determination.

Of course, these are just games that Steam has logged.  This doesn't get into any of the MMOs I have sunk significant time into, console titles, or non-Steam games I have collected of time.  I wasn't particularly surprised with what took the top of the list, given that I can play it while doing other things, and that I've spent so many nights up hours later than I expected making sure that I accomplish what I'm intending to.