A few weeks ago, I nicely coerced the staff here at Games are Evil to confess what’s in their stacks of shame. While I was compiling my own stack of shame, I looked very closely at what games I’ve bought this year alone, particularly those that released this year. This selection consists of Darksiders, Red Dead Redemption, Mass Effect 2, Enslaved, Fable III, Final Fantasy XIII, Dragon Quest IX, and Transformers War for Cybertron. That’s a huge chunk of future gaming time, and well, I just bought Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood and I have Epic Mickey preordered. Thank God there is nothing releasing (that I’m aware of at this point in time) in December, so hopefully I can finish ACB and FFXIII. First quarter of 2011 looks to be just as packed as this year’s first quarter was, and if that wasn’t bad enough, ALL of 2011 looks to be jam-packed full of games I won’t be able to live without.
Skyward Sword. InFamous 2. Dragon Age 2. Sorcery. And this is just what I remember off the top of my head from E3. I’m sure I’m forgetting several that have been announced since then.
This led to thinking about when did we start to have this kind of problem. When games released in the 80s and 90s, they were often few and far between, but that didn’t matter because they took roughly 100 hours to complete anyway. We could take our time with games and really play the hell out of them. For example, if you talk to anyone who played Final Fantasy VI or Final Fantasy VII when they released over here, they will tell you how they spent triple digit hours on each. So there were hundreds of sidequests that took several hours to complete, what did you care? What else were you going to play?
This isn’t to say that games didn’t release often; they just weren’t always great games. (Shovelware has always been in existence.) Since there wasn’t some massive title releasing every month, or even every other month, players usually didn’t have stacks of shame. Fast forward to the PS2/Xbox/GameCube generation, where we start having a sudden boom in fantastic games, and suddenly there are a lot more stacks of forgotten games. We no longer have hundreds of hours to spend on a Final Fantasy game, especially since practically every month has at least one major release.
So what happens now? Well, we either make ourselves focus on just one game at a time, while hoping that the game isn’t too long so you can quickly burn through it and get to the next release quickly (yet you don’t want it to be too short since after all, you did just spend $60 on it), or experience massive gamer ADD. I’ve fallen into the latter, hence the size of my stack of shame, and I doubt I’m alone.
I try to combat this by picking at least two games a year that I must finish by December’s end. In 2008 it was Kingdom Hearts 2 and Twilight Princess. Only KH2 was checked off the list. I think I forgot to make myself do this in 2009, because I don’t remember what I was supposed to finish. This year it is Final Fantasy XIII and Final Fantasy III. I’m close to finishing both, and my plan was to dedicate December to them, but…well…Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood just has so much to offer in terms of sidequests and exploration. Plus, what if Epic Mickey is great? How can I tear myself away from that? I know I don’t have the discipline or even the sensibility to NOT buy these games.
So here’s to looking forward to building a new stack of shame in 2011.
Popularity: unranked [?]
