Its This Last Point That Often Destroys Any Hope

By Author: Guild Black
Total Articles: 197
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As someone who writes about videogames, I have a confession to make: I haven’t bought a ‘new’ videogame (as in purchased it within a week or two of release) since Skyrim back in November last year. Mass Effect 3 has so far passed me by, as have each and every one of 2012’s new releases. Sure, I’ve played games for review, experienced plenty of demos, and I still avidly keep up with the latest gaming news – I just haven’t parted with my hard earned cash for anything to call my own in over nine months.This isn’t due to a lack of passion for gaming, as I still play videogames 2-3 hours a night on workdays, and more on days off.

I’m excited for the release of Assassin’s Creed III, and, like every year, I’m eagerly awaiting the next iterations of the NHL and FIFA series, which I will play for a good few months. In fact, the main reason I haven’t purchased any new game recently is due to an issue I suspect many of us have encountered, or are suffering from at this very moment: backlog.Sitting on my bookshelf right now, I have over fifty games waiting to be played, most with saves sitting on my consoles ...
... in various states of completion. Some I have finished and am meaning to go back to; others I have played for a mere hour or two after purchase to get a basic idea of what I have just bought.

Skyrim is presently residing in my Xbox, and has been for the past two months, and I imagine it will still be sitting there when Fall comes around, as it is so ridiculously huge. I haven’t even picked up Dawnguard for it yet, as I know that even if I do, it will take me a while to get around to experiencing it, so I might as well wait.As a kid, particularly during the summer holidays, I had a near infinite amount of time to play videogames, yet no financial ability to purchase new ones, meaning that I could frequently visit videogame stores and be able to mentally pick out ten or more games that I, at some distant point in the future, wanted to experience. Looking back through ‘Best Game Ever’ lists now, there are plenty of titles through the 90s and early 2000s that passed me by, such as Pikmin and Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem.

With that amount of time on my hands, I could have (much like that deaf, dumb and blind kid) played them all.These days, the opposite is true. I have enough financial ability to buy most (not all, I’m not Bruce Wayne) of the videogames that I have an interest in, yet not enough time to actually play them all, and certainly not enough time to lovingly experience every inch of each title. Therefore, at the start of the year, I made myself a promise: to not purchase any games until I’d at least completed those that were waiting for me at home. Sure, I made a couple of loopholes, such as for Assassin’s Creed, and I did make a couple of impulse ultimate team coins purchases that broke my promise, but these were only for games on sale at ten bucks.

It’s this last point that often destroys any hope I have of spending time with the games I already own. Last year, for example, Gamestop (yes, I know, corporations, “Boo, Hiss”) up here in the Great White North ran a promotion on a couple of occasions entitled Daily Doorcrashers. The title is fairly self-explanatory, but for those with a slow pick-up, each day Gamestop would offer one game, or more, at a fairly substantial knockdown, often selling fairly recent titles for five or ten dollars. Sure, there were some stinkers that were obviously designed to trick unknowing parents into purchasing awful games for their beloved children, but on the other hand, there were also some pretty good deals.