I've always had a passing interest in this series, but a late 2024 sale price of $3.99 pushed me to finally buy it. Fingers crossed that it turns out to be what I hope it is: a less "edgelordy" version of Dark Souls, in Star Wars wrapping paper!

I've made a few false starts with this game over the past few years. Open-world Spider-Man games are my jam, from the top-tier (Spider-Man 2) to the narratively-mid-but-mechanically-excellent (Spider-Man: Web of Shadows), so it's almost a crime that I've spent so little time with this game to date.

Four years after beating the original Castlevania, and having beaten that game four times in total, it's high time that I play the sequel!

Despite spending a lot of time with later entries in the series, for some reason I've never managed to stick with the original Metroid all the way through.

It's probably been 25 years since I completed Super Mario 64, and if I'm going to continue to proclaim this game the greatest 3D platformer of all time, I really need to refresh my memory! Especially when it comes to the later stages, which I can't say I remember in much detail.

Same deal as Super Mario 64. It's been so long since I beat this game originally that my memories are fuzzy around the edges. Maybe this will lead into a replay of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door as well?

My friends and I must have spent hundreds of hours playing this in the early 2000s, but it was refreshing to start a new file in 2024 and start working my way through this game again from the ground up. In 2025, I'll complete that new save!

This game has the dubious distinction of being the only game that I've played across three console generations (Xbox 360, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X), all on the same save file, and still not beaten. It's not that the game is hard -- it's that it's honestly kind of annoying, with its infinitely spawning enemies who can magically shoot through walls, and I guess playing one or two levels every three or so years has been as much as I could stand since beginning the game in 2015. Still, it's not a BAD game per se, and 2025 is the year I'll finish however many levels I have left to finally finish it.

Another shooter, even older than Call of Duty 2, but which I started playing much more recently... and also, naturally, didn't finish. This game is certifiably not great, but late sixth-generation game design tends to interest me for its own sake, and it shouldn't take more than a few hours to see this one to the end.

The only game on this list that I don't yet own at the time of writing (though I'll likely buy it in the next few days, I just need to decide whether it's for PS5 or XSX). As a lifelong Marvel Comics reader who doesn't care much for the movies, I'm always intrigued by superhero games with giant rosters (see also Marvel: Ultimate Alliance... and, to my chagrin, the likes of Marvel Future Fight, Marvel Strike Force, etc.). This one's also a card/tactics game, which seems right up my alley. Plus, unlike free-to-play junk like Strike Force, there's no recurring cost to play all the characters and access all the content. I'm in!

This one is a bonus pick because, knowing myself, I just shouldn't commit to finishing a game this long. However, with that said, I'd like to make 2025 the year that I finally give it some dedicated playtime and figure out if it's the kind of thing I do want to commit to... whether in 2025 or beyond.