How familiar are you with this scenario? It's Christmas morning, and your ten year old self is running over to the Christmas tree to see what wonderful gifts you've gotten. You rip open your gifts to find that you've gotten a number of video games. You shriek in utter joy, run over to your console and pop one in to start playing it. After a bit, you pop in another one, and another, and another. After doing this for part of the morning, you settle on one game, and play that through to completion over the next few days/weeks/months. Then you start the second one and do the same. By the time the third one is started, it's your birthday and you receive more games. You're still working your way through the last two games you got for Christmas, but now you've got several more that you need to conquer, and by the time you get through them, it'll be past Christmas and you'll have even more games to play and finish.
As a kid, I ran into that problem. It didn't happen so much with the Atari 2600 as most of those games really weren't much for story and didn't have a definite end, but once the NES came out, we started seeing games that rewarded the gamers with an ending and made spending all that time playing worthwhile. As it stands, I still have several NES games that I've yet to finish, but none of them have gone unplayed.
This all changed when I reached adulthood. With stores going ahead and selling used games, I was able to go ahead and get some of those games I'd always wanted when I was younger. My SNES collection grew quite a bit, and because of this I'd started finding myself with games that were going with only a few hours spent on them before I'd get a new game that would distract me.
After that came my N64, the PSX, the GCN, the GBA, the PS2, the PSP, the DS, the Wii, and finally the Xbox 360. I noticed I had more and more games that I'd wanted to play, but less and less time as responsibilities grew. What made it even more challenging was with several games, data carried over from the first in the series over to the second, then the third (I'm looking at you, Suikoden series), and you wanted to make sure that you got all the items and characters in the first so you could kick some major ass in the following games. This all took a lot of time, which also meant that your game library went neglected for a bit as you were concentrating on this one game. But did that mean your library didn't grow? Oh no. That new Final Fantasy game came out, and you definitely needed that. And shortly after that? Oh man, you needed to get your hands on Soul Reaver. What's that? A new console? Let's go stand in line at midnight to get our hands on that!
It's a never ending battle, to be perfectly honest. I've got a number of games that I've yet to play just because they're part of some series, and I need to finish the preceding games in order to have the story make sense (the Legacy of Kain/Soul Reaver series, the Golden Sun series, the Suikoden series, Baten Kaitos and it's prequel, the Metroid Prime series, the Mass Effect games, and so on). Or I picked them up as part of a package deal and have yet to dedicate some time to them.
But is this truly a problem? Strangely enough, I really don't think it is. While I do have this ginormous backlog of games, it gives me the variety and change that could be needed to liven up my gaming activities after getting weary of the current game-of-choice.
Are you spock? Did we mind meld or something?
ReplyDeleteAnyways, exactly the same issue here, and I compound the issue by "needing" to re-play games in a series prior to playing the new one to "refresh" my memory.
With less and less time to game, and more and more games being thrown at me that I do in fact 'need' it's no wonder I have a massive backlog.
I'm in the same boat though, there are only a few games I actually regret buying, and never ever have I regretted buying a game that I haven't played, it's usually after I play it that the terrible ones give me regret on.
-caddad