Day One Recap

Twenty-four games have been reviewed. Twenty-four hours have been played. One entire day of gaming.

One day of gaming may not seem like much, but when you break it up into twenty-four unique experiences, we have something different on our hands. So I would like to take this opportunity to recap the first twenty-four games and try to draw a few conclusions from them.

I started out playing mostly games I had already played before and enjoyed, but then I began branching out into games I had never played, some I had never even heard of until they were recommended to me. It was really great fun to go back and review some older games but also tough to set them up against brand new games where they generally wouldn't stand a chance in most categories. However, gameplay and fun factor are definitely the most important factors to me and even fifteen year old games like Star Control II can do well.

Now let's see the first day's worth of games ranked in order of best to worst in my opinion. Even though some games received the same score, the higher rank means I enjoyed that game's first hour more than the ones below it.

1. Portal (9)
2. God of War 2 (9)
3. Psychonauts (9)
4. Final Fantasy VII (9)
5. Bully (9)
6. Half-Life 2 (9)
7. Indigo Prophecy (8)
8. Eternal Darkness (8)
9. Beyond Good and Evil (8)
10. The Curse of Monkey Island (8)
11. Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters (8)
12. Kirby Super Star (7)
13. Halo: Combat Evolved (7)
14. Assassin's Creed (7)
15. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (7)
16. Streets of Rage 2 (7)
17. Diddy Kong Racing (6)
18. SimCity Societies (6)
19. Jet Force Gemini (5)
20. Skies of Arcadia Legends (5)
21. EarthBound (4)
22. Zombies Ate My Neighbors (4)
23. Okami (2)
24. Harvest Moon (2)

As you can see, Portal ranks the highest among the 24 games I reviewed and the original Harvest Moon ranks the lowest. This of course says nothing about the games as a whole but only of my opinion of their first hour.

The scores I assigned are also relatively high, with an average score of 6.8, and only six games right at average or below (average is 5). I'm pretty happy with the scores I handed out and I think the reason they're so high is that I'm more familiar with really good games and so I reviewed those first. Maybe the average score will go up or down in the future, but I rate each game according to its own merits. But really, the scores themselves are not that important, it's more about what I wrote down as that can describe a game so much better.

A few more things and then we're done, I'm going to be taking a break for a few weeks from reviewing games due to the holiday season, but I will be back on January 7th with game number 25 and the start of Day Two. I hope the next batch of 24 is even more entertaining for my faithful readers, but until then, I will continue to review completed games on my other site, Beyond the First Hour. I've actually beaten quite a few games lately so there's lots to read over there too. If anyone has any game suggestions or ideas for the site, please email me at greg@firsthour.net and let me know your thoughts.

Thanks for reading and see you in two weeks!