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.

When he was a schoolboy, Derek Yu, one of the first indie game superstars of the 2000s, designed games on graph paper with his friend Jon Perry. After Yu's first major game, Spelunky, became a hit, he and Perry agreed to collaborate again, no longer as classmates but as men in their 40s. This sweet backstory infuses UFO 50, a dizzyingly ambitious collection of 50 games that, so the narrative framing goes, were created by a fictional games company during the eight-year period from 1982 to 1989. Each game has the aesthetic of an Atari 2600 or NES classic – chunky sprites, a warbling chiptune soundtrack – but uses current design trends and understanding to inject old-looking games with modern freshness. But it's a sufficiently high number that Yu and Perry (and some supportive developer friends) have been able to flex their design talent across an electrifying range of genres, some of which are familiar, others of which are entirely new.

The past is a big deal in the video games industry right now. Hardly a month goes by when we're not being tempted by a new retro mini console, whether that's a cutesy Nintendo or a demure ZX Spectrum (a new version of which is arriving in November, complete with rubbery keys and 48 legendary games). And this year's release schedule is absolutely crammed with remasters of classic titles. In April, the video game news site Kotaku listed 30 old timers being exhumed and revived for 2024, including The Last of Us Part II, Tomb Raider 1-3 and Star Wars: Dark Forces. And the article missed a few! October alone will see updated versions of horror adventures Until Dawn, Silent Hill 2 and Clock Tower, as well as Lego Harry Potter.

When it comes to video games, one thing is universal: releasing one is tough. This is the challenge for the team behind UFO 50. This much anticipated 8-bit anthology of retro-styled games is finally due to release this September, seven years after its announcement. With 50 games included, the wait is justified. UFO 50 is a jumbo variety pack of complete video games, each with its own title, genre and story. "They're not minigames," asserts developer Derek Yu and creator of 2008 platformer Spelunky, named one of the greatest games ever made.