Last week I was away from the completionist.com HQ on business…non-gaming related business, that is.  Like anyone going away for a trip, I naturally packed up a couple of my favourite handhelds and overstuffed my carry-on luggage with portable games that had been sitting around on a shelf, waiting for such an opportunity.

The plane ride provided me a chance to spend some much needed time with my PSP.  I turned on God of War: Chains of Olympus for the first time in a couple of months and was immediately back into it.  During the cab ride to the hotel, out popped the DS for quick stint with New York Times Crosswords.  Once at the hotel, God of War came back out and Kratos and I finally took care of that pesky first boss.

I thought this was going to be a productive trip, at least in terms of gaming.  Oh man, was I wrong…

I ended up taking one of the hardest weeks of training in my life; a course full of memorization and studying.  Needless to say, this left precious little time to game.  Without experiencing the wonders of pandora.com for the first time, it might have been downright unbearable.

What the trip ended up leaving me with was a feeling of debt towards these often neglected games.  Rarely do I make a point of playing handheld games when I am at home.  My daily commute, luckily, consists of very short bus trips which are usually, and unluckily, spent standing up.  It’s an environment much better suited to listening to 1Up Yours than actually getting any time in with a handheld.

I am therefore stuck with a pretty hefty backlog.  We just bought a PSP a couple of months back and so we seem to be buying every game we ever said ‘Hey, that looks good’ about.  Too bad we haven’t been finishing games as quickly as we have been buying them.

How can I possibly begin to smash down this insurmountable tower of discs?  Where should I play these portables?  I guess the answer is ultimately: my couch.   Really, it’s the most comfortable place I can think of to play a game.  It just seems silly to me to be playing something on a two inch screen when there’s a plasma TV with consoles hooked up to it mere feet away.

Ah well, I guess I’ll just have to add ’em all into The Queue…

Oh, God, please don’t add all of those games to The Queue.  It’s daunting enough to just think of them, but if I had to look at them all written out, I would have some kind of mental breakdown.

I completely see where Chris is coming from on the handheld issue.  I never pick up a game for a portable, unless it’s an exclusive that I feel I just have to play, because I haven’t really had hours to fill with handheld gaming since I was in college.  Nowadays, I’m either at work or at home.  If I’m at work, I can’t be gaming (unfortunately), and when I’m at home, consoles have my attention.

The DS and I had a falling out awhile back.  I won’t get into all the messy details, but it basically boils down to this: Final Fantasy III is too hard, and I won’t let myself play anything else on that system until I finish it.  If you’ve ever played the game and not finished it, you understand what I’m talking about.  If you’ve ever played the game and finished it, then I hate you, and you are obviously a robot. I actually cheated just a little and started The World Ends With You, but I was consumed by guilt, and had to give it up and go back to FF3.  The job change system in that game leaves me constantly paralyzed with indecision.

On a slightly related note: Once, in a fit of boredom, I agreed to take a survey for 1Up.com.  The answers were obviously being compiled to give to different developers and gaming companies, and there were several questions gauging my reaction to an Xbox handheld.  My reaction: No thank you.  I wouldn’t be surprised at all to hear that Microsoft was launching a handheld.  I can almost guarantee that they’ve got one in development.  It would take a miracle of an exclusive title to prompt me to buy a system that will probably be overpriced, and too big.