Welcome one and all to a very Athena Veta season of good will! Athena’s a friend of the show, as it were, and general all-around cool person; she also happens to be extremely smart, so check out her blog at the AmbiGaming Corner for deep and well-considered thoughts on what we can learn from gaming as well as a whole bunch of other always-interesting stuff.

For the holiday season this year, Athena’s coordinated an event based on that classic Marmite of tunes (you love it or you hate it): The Twelve Days of Christmas. Each day from December 26th to January 6th, we’ll look at a gamified version of one of the song’s lines until eventually we have 364 gamey gifts!

On the first day of Blogmas, the gamers said to me: What are twelve favourite gaming memories?

On the second day of Blogmas, the gamers said to me: Tell us eleven games you love!

On the third day of Blogmas, the gamers said to me: What are ten reasons you would play a game?

On the fourth day of Blogmas, the gamers said to me: Give us nine games on your to-play list!

On the fifth day of Blogmas, the gamers said to me: Eight characters you love!

On the sixth day of Blogmas, the gamers said to me: Share seven of your favourite posts!

On the seventh day of Blogmas, the gamers said to me: Tell us your six gaming/ blogging resolutions!

On the eighth day of Blogmas, the gamers said to me: Five games you’ve played more than once!

Come to think of it there are actually relatively few games that I’ve played all the way through multiple times. There are some where I’ve completed them once, then sort of started again so that I can do optional content or replay things I enjoyed, but often I don’t end up getting all the way to the end on those ones.

So for these purposes, let’s take games I have started a new game on and got to the end more than once. That said, here are five games I’m pretty sure I have played from start to finish multiple times:

5. Just Cause 2

4. Kingdom Hearts 2

3. Pokémon Silver

2. Final Fantasy XII

1. Mirror’s Edge

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Of these, I’ve replayed for a few reasons. Just Cause 2 I decided to start again a while after playing it just because it was so much fun, although I’ve also done multiple plays of it which haven’t gone beginning-to-end because I’ve just ended up flying around blowing stuff up! KH2 I’ve replayed on different platforms and different difficulties as well as trying to do all the content; Pokémon games I just love and will habitually replay every couple of years.

FFXII is perhaps the longest single-playthrough game that I’ve played more than once, and that again was because it had been a long time since my first play and I wanted to go through the whole story again. As for Mirror’s Edge, it’s basically a speedrunning game for non-speedrunners. I mean, it can be – speed… runned? Speedran? – for sure, but it’s a game about going fast that can be played quickly even if you’re a casual player not using every trick in the book to go even faster than the game intends. So replaying it is a fairly short experience and allows you to just breeze through the levels, since you know them better, feeling like you’ve become as free and quick as Faith herself.

Of course, I’m writing this in advance, so I don’t know who else is taking part or what they’ll have written, but I bet there are a bunch of other awesome people writing incredibly cool things on this very topic today, so check out the AmbiGaming Corner and probably Twitter for some links! See you tomorrow for the next day of Blogmas…