With GTA IV coming out next week, Chris and I were forced to take a look at the list of games we’ve bought recently that we haven’t had a chance to play. As every completionist knows, your backlog of games can get pretty daunting. We’ll probably bump GTA up to the top of the list, but that just delays the other games for longer. We haven’t even played Condemned 2 yet, and we both feel very strongly about beating down zombie hobos with a wrench.
Part of the problem is that games are too long. I still haven’t played Oblivion, so that’s over a hundred hours of time I’ll have to free up one day. We’ve got Assassin’s Creed waiting in the wings. Why can’t every game be like Portal? Just because storage media allows it doesn’t mean everything has to be 50 hours long. With the backlog you have going after awhile, gaming starts to feel like a job. A job that you’re not very good at.
I know a lot of people rent games that they’re not interested in finishing and want to check out, but that just doesn’t work for me. I want to finish every game. Completely. If I don’t want to finish it, I probably don’t want to play it at all. Plus, renting games has gotten so expensive that if you’re going to rent it more than once, you might as well buy it anyways. (Okay, not quite, but I am totally material and like to own things).
If you’re like us and have a hard time keeping track of all the games you’ve yet to play (and also the ones you’ve started but never finished) check out the Backloggery. It lets you catalogue your whole vid collection, and assign every game an icon:
 |
New Game |  |
Unfinished |  |
Beaten |  |
Completed |  |
Mastered |
It’s actually a really neat idea. You can compare your stats to other members, and see what games are generally left unfinished. You can view the stats for your games by system, and see if there’s a certain console you tend to finish more games on than others, or view the stats for your whole collection. Which can be kind of depressing when you translate 16 games you’ve barely started into either $800+ of wasted money, or 800+ hours of time you’re going to have to wring out of an already full schedule.
Generally speaking, I find games to be on the long side as well. One of my all-time gaming beefs is having to redo any part of a game for any reason. Tracing back through a level or having to fight the same boss for a second time just feels cheap to me. Way to tack an hour on your game, my evening thanks you. The counter argument, I suppose, is that if I’m shelling out $60 for a game, I want it to last a little bit longer than, say, a $10 DVD. I just want that extra $50 to go toward quantity and quality.
It’s funny that Julie should complain about game length since she is a big fan of Japenese Role Playing Games, a genre which routinely demands grinding through an experience of 50+ hours. Then there’s Julie’s well documented love of WoW, an endless sinkhole around which other sinkholes gather and remark “Damn, that’s deep”. For me the sweet spot is somewhere in the 10 – 20 hour range. Enough that I love you, not so much that you smother me like my girlfriend back in grade 6.
In an effort to better track our efforts to reduce the backlog and to talk about games you want to hear about, we will be adding a page in the sidebar so you can keep track of what we’ve got scheduled. You can comment on our list and suggest games to be bumped up or down, added or deleted, or even tell us how much you love us. Just don’t smother me…
Maybe you just need to be more choosy when picking titles up to begin with. My personal 360 library is three legitimate titles, two Burger King advertisements and a collection of XBLA games that I only bought for the free month of Xbox Live Gold it contained. I’m making my way through those three titles depending on what I’m in the mood to play and when all three have been adequately dominated I’ll trade them for something else I want to play. Like Fallout 3 when it comes out. Or Too Human.
I certainly hope you have Sneak King.
Yes indeed. I am at the last quest in the lumberyard and have yet to venture out to the cul-de-sac level to start handing out Whopper Jrs, but rest assured the King and I will be poppin’ and lockin’ our way into the peoples hearts and stomachs soon. The other BK game I have is the Pocketbike Racer, which isn’t nearly as fun as it should be.
Hmmmm, seems like your post is kind of counter argumentative to the entire moral standing of your site. I really doubt you can 100% complete most of the mind shattering awesome games you have blogged about here in 10-20 hours. To me, going back to a level that you had not gotten that platinum destruction medal, that XS surgical rating, every last damn brawl trophy (I wonder how many there are THIS time…) is half the fun of gaming. To me, these are the timeless classics that you can complete to an absolute 100%, and wish you could forget it all just to do it again.
I don’t think Chris meant going back and doing something again for a completionist type achievement, ie doing a level over for more stars/gold medal, etc. I think he was referring to the last level of a game consisting of re-fighting every boss, or a level that is just a previous level over again but with a time limit. We for sure cannot 100% almost any game in 10-20 hours. Which is why pointless re-hash levels are not appreciated. The complaint, I think, was that game companies make you play the same level/fight the same boss over again just to pad game hours. Not cool. Original content takes long enough as it is, not to mention re-playing for completion.
You would rather pay $59.99 for a 5 hour game? No thank you. The video game industry makes more money than movies and music put together for a reason. Sure there are those games out there that recolour monsters, rename them, and beef up their stats as you progress but I find the majority to not do that.