Your faves clockwise from top left: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Split Fiction, Death Stranding 2 and ARC Raiders. Your faves clockwise from top left: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Split Fiction, Death Stranding 2 and ARC Raiders. Once again, we are approaching the cherished time of year between Christmas and New Year when we might actually have the time to play some video games. I hope Santa brought you something new to play, instead of taking one look at all the unplayed games in your Steam library and putting you straight on the naughty list. Over the past few weeks you have been sending in your favourite games of the year.

Enshrouded is a beautiful combination of Minecraft, Skyrim and resource gathering that makes it at least three games in one. My daughter told me I would love it and I ignored her for too long. I've tackled Elden Ring, but much prefer the often gentler combat of Enshrouded. It sometimes makes me feel like an elite fighter, then other times kicks my arse in precisely the right measures. Its real joy is the flexibility to spend your time doing whatever tickles your fancy. I'll spend a few hours growing crops to make a cake or smelting metals for better armour, then knock off a few quests to unlock new materials and weapons.

Writing this newsletter and reading your correspondence remains my favourite part of my job. It means a lot that so many of you have written in to say that you look forward to Pushing Buttons landing in your inbox every week. Thank you also to the Guardian's brilliant newsletter team, who have worked hard all year to get these missives to you on time even when I've submitted them horribly late. Relatedly: if games publishers could stop dropping huge news right around my deadline in 2025, that would be amazing.) To cap the year off, we've got a bumper issue of readers' favourite games of 2024.

Not to make anyone feel old, but the Game Boy turned 35 at the weekend. That small grey box was millions of people's first introduction to video games. It was shared among families, played with equal enthusiasm by girls, boys, men and women. When I asked people for their most cherished Game Boy memories last week, almost a hundred people got in touch to share their reminiscences of playing it on the commute to work, on long car journeys, on family holidays and under the covers after bedtime (with a torch for the screen, naturally). The Game Boy liberated games from the TV and brought them into those pockets of free time in everyday life.

The gaming year used to follow a predictable rhythm: we'd have a flurry of announcements in the summer, around the gaming trade event E3, then a rush of releases between September and the end of November – and then absolutely nothing would happen until March at the earliest. But now E3 is gone for good, and the Game Awards – the industry's most glamorous and also most intensely commercial awards show – takes place in early December, so we suddenly have an eye-watering number of new trailers and debuts right as we're all preparing to hibernate. I didn't watch this year's show live (it started at 12.30am UK time last Saturday morning and was over three hours long) and I'm betting that most of you didn't watch it either, so here are the headlines: Baldur's Gate 3 won nearly everything; as ever the awards felt like something that had to be squeezed in around all the trailers; there was not very much time given to developers to speak, which rankled; The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Spider-Man 2 were snubbed in several categories (Zelda won best action adventure game, Spider-Man won nothing). In the interest of giving games and developers appropriate airtime, then, instead of going over the merits and problems of the Game Awards again, here are some of the announcements that stood out. If you're into unsettling vibes, ghost stories about haunted arcade machines, and having your expectations put into a blender and served back to you as a milkshake, Daniel Mullins' games should be on your radar.

Nick Bowman gestures to the old-fashioned gaming consoles littering his desk. "Whenever I am having kind of a crappy day, I pull out the Nintendo," he says, pointing. I also have a Raspberry Pi that I have all my emulators on. Bowman, an associate professor of journalism and creative media industries at Texas Tech University, has a vast collection of consoles and hundreds of cartridges and discs. Like me, he grew up in a time when video games were intimately tied to a physical device.

The UK's biggest video game event, EGX, took place this weekend, attracting around 75,000 people to the Birmingham NEC. As ever, the show floor saw both blockbuster mega-hits and offbeat independent titles jostling for space and attention, providing a varied and enjoyable browsing experience. Here are our favourite titles, excluding the games we've already highlighted from this year's E3 and Gamescom shows. If you went along, add your own highlights in the comments section. EGX attendees kept comparing this Metroidvania-syle platformer to cult classic VVVVVV, thanks to its gravity-free movement mechanic, but there are significant differences. It's more graphically detailed, with a recognisably human lead character (the eponymous Dandara), and her gravity-defying leaps from surface to surface are aimed, so can be diagonal.

It may have been a difficult year for the wider world, but 2016 did at least see a lot of excellent video games, from the glossy action movie thrills of Uncharted 4 to the agenda-setting multiplayer fun of Overwatch and the solemn dystopian vision of Inside. But we wanted to know what the industry itself thinks were the best games to come out in the past 12 months. To find out, we asked 50 of our favourite developers, including 30-year veterans, Bafta award winners and rising indie stars. We've split the list into categories, and at the end we have a list of the most popular titles of them all. Karla Zimonja (Fullbright) Known for: BioShock 2, Gone Home Working on: Tacoma My favorite game this year is Dishonored 2, which I am still in the midst of. I love stealth games, so I'm taking my time with this one! Emily's powers are super satisfying to combine in entertaining ways. Anne Lewis (Bethesda Softworks) Known for: Doom, Dishonored 2 Working on: Prey It might sound like I'm shilling for my company when I say this, but Dishonored 2 is my favorite game of 2016. Dishonored is one of the reasons I wanted to work for Bethesda.