Confessions of a backlog gamer
By Chris_Ihao 1 Comments
I grew up gaming, beginning my journey back in the 80's when my parents got an Atari 2600 where basically all the games we had were like arkanoid for 2 players (only dubbed hockey, soccer and so forth). Since then I have been avidly gaming on the Commodore 64, the Amiga 500, a 386 16 mhz pc, a ps2, two DS's and I also got a Wii a few years ago. At heart I would consider myself a PC gamer, now sporting a pretty good gaming rig.
Ok, so I suddenly find that I'm a few years past 30, still in love with gaming as ever, contrary to past popular belief that this is a kids hobby. Things have changed though. I have to go to work basically every day, I try to make some music, I have a long time relationship that needs tending and I have just completed 1/8's of a 4 year part-time masters degree. Now, while writing my "best of 2010" list I realized something, I barely have played any games that were released during 2010. Even worse I have barely been able to play any of the games I bought several years ago.
The problem is partly that I have no real preferences when it comes to genres. Adventure games have, and will always have a special place in my heart, the same with realistic simulators (Silent hunter III & IV, IL-2 Sturmovik, Live for speed etc.) played on full realism, FPS games, RTS's, platformers, RPG's and fighting games. The list is basically infinite. To mention an example I printed out the 600 page manual of Falcon 4.0 which filled two huge folders, ready to get into business with my complete hotas setup. Well, I did manage to learn how to successfully start the engine and take off after an hour or so, but the radar is still a mess of unknown buttons and abbreviations to me. I've later begun to realize that the hardcore flight simmers probably dont play much platformers to say the least, and that I will never as hardcore as any focused gamers out there due to my joy in experiencing different kinds of games throught the years.
I have probably 30-40 brilliant games for the DS that still need to be played, some tens for the Wii, even more for the PS2 (which obviously is seriously showing its age on 40+ lcd screens) but in the PC area things are just FUBAR. I have manically been hoarding for several years through Steam, Stardock and outlets, probably owning more than 250 titles (ok, some few of these are old ID games and popcap stuff, but still...) for the PC, and only a few of these games have been "completed" or played as much as I would have wanted to. This however does not mean that I have stopped buying, far from it. During the Steam holiday sales I purchased at least 6-7 new titles which will need my attention at some point.
Frankly this hoarding has caused me some anxiety and grief the past years as I slowly have begun to realize that I will never see the end credits of a large percent of these games, if I dont go watch them on Youtube or something that is. There is some sense of content in this acceptance, and while many dollars have been spent on potential duds I will not regret having had the luxury of getting an insight into some of the greatest games that have been programmed on planet Earth. The dilemma is if I should keep on buying stuff or press the pause button for a year or so, but then again "it doesnt work that way". I still want to see and experience all these new great games in full effect, to see how far things have developed since the years when 8-bit sprites adorned my monitor.I think I'll just consider myself lucky to have been along for the ride all these years. Additionally, that I have achieved a perfect score of zero days of boredom throught my life because of this.
I do wish I had more time, "but then again, who does" like a certain detective Gaff says?