2007-02-06

Stats Whore

[Originally posted on 1Up.com]


I'm a real statistics whore, I don't know why, I just like the feeling of speculating and drawing "educated" conclusions on what they tell you. If you frequent this page you'll know that I've been (and still am) keeping tabs on my gaming. The idea first came to me a year ago when the PSTwo along with the compact Atari 2600 system that you connect directly to your TV as well as the PSP where fairly new additions to my collection of gaming platforms. With so many systems now available to choose from, I thought it would be interesting to see how much I used the different platforms.

So I wrote a VB-scripted web application to keep track of and generate the bar graphs. Later this was replaced by a C# application that also keeps track of the latest games I've played (although the page only displays 10, the full list is currently 90-entries and that's just since after last summer).

Today is the one year anniversary of collecting these statistics, so I thought I'd save a snap-shot of the current state here and now and also take a moment to ponder what they say. Well, looking at the current values I can conclude that the PS2 is by far the most played system during this period, with 249 sessions, representing almost 2/5ths of my gaming. Thinking back on the countless sessions of Guitar Hero, the many SingStar parties with friends, family and colleagues, and the many exhilarating hours playing adventures like God of War, Ico, Psychonauts, Fahrenheit and Okami, as well as familiarizing myself with many of the classic names that I had hither to only hear about like Devil May Cry, Katamari Damacy, Rez and Gitaroo Man. Several of these along with many more lie still in my "Pile of Shame" and with that in mind I have no doubt that this coming year will see many more gaming sessions on the PS2.

Before buying the PS2, the GameCube was my primary system, if I had recorded statistics on it's usage during the years prior, it's bar would no doubt be more significant, as it stands though Nintendo left us out in the cold and the GameCube suffered for it.

I'm not going to drone on much longer, as much of my gaming history for the last year has already been recorded through out this blog, but I find it interesting to note that the PSP is not lagging all too far behind the DS in usage, despite the fact that I don't feel like I use it as much, if I had guessed I would have thought that the PSP usage would be at maybe a quarter of the DS:s, but as is it's 2/3rds, not too shabby really, this is no doubt due to the fact that it's easy to start playing whatever happens to be on the memory card whenever I've run out of TV-series to watch on it.

Well, as I am not feeling to well, I'm going to cut this short and let the rest of the stats speak for themselves.

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