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!

On the ninth day of Blogmas, the gamers said to me: Share four dramatic or memorable game moments!

On the tenth day of Blogmas, the gamers said to me: What are three things you want gamers to know about games for the new year?

On the eleventh day of Blogmas, the gamers said to me: List two games you’d improve!

Coincidentally, I recently did a sort of in-depth-ish bit of thinking about almost exactly this, so check out my Charming & Open post on Shadow the Hedgehog courtesy of a good question from Adventure Rules! (And while you’re at it, check out his own post in response to my question. It’s a good read!)

Let’s take a slightly less in-depth-ish look at two other games I’d maybe give a bit of a tweaking, though.

2. WWE 2K17

I like wrestling. So you’d think I would like wrestling games, and to some extent that’s true. WWE 2K17, though… just got boring quickly. It had perhaps the most content, by some quantifiable measurement, of any WWE game to date, including a huge roster, a load of match types, new customisable features… but the meat of the actual game aside from ‘quick-play’ matches was MyCareer mode, which sounded pretty cool but basically just amounts to creating a wrestler and having them do the same few matches with occasional trappings of a narrative showing up.

I can see what they were going for: being able to play a scenario in which you get to start at the bottom and work your way up to become a champion is a really good idea, but the execution’s so lacking because there’s really very little unique content other than just repeating matches until you get a championship opportunity. I much preferred earlier WWE games’ approach to this, with their inclusions of actual story modes involving the player recreating historical matches. Also, the loading screens were atrociously long.

So basically I’d give it a good story mode and make the loading better. Maybe 2K18 has already done this; I’ve not played it, so I don’t know.

1. Civilisation V

Here’s the thing. I’m so bad at not enjoying things that I found it really hard to come up with another game I’d improve – pretty much every game I’ve played, I liked! So here’s a dumb one: in Civ V, I’d create an extra civilisation. It would be called ‘The Blogfenders’ and its leader would be Athena.

Somebody mod that.

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A slightly lacklustre answer this time, I fear. Only one more of these to go!

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…