List of Shame 2018: "Self-Hateteen", or "Oops, All 2017 Games"
You know what this is. You know its name. It calls out to you from the darkness in a thousand long-forgotten tongues, speaking of inevitabilities and the relentless passage of time, and that while all things are possible in our infinite future, only the thinnest sliver of eventualities can ever come to pass. At the end of everything, all we have are the choices we made, scattered across the path stretching out behind us like so many breadcrumbs torn from the loaf of regret.
Which is my cheery way of saying that this is the list of games I'm intending to play in 2018. It's once again a 50/50 split (or 25/25 if we're being pedantic) of acquired games sitting in the backlog and as-yet unpurchased games from 2017 that I'll be keeping an eye out for, after some compelling acclamations from the many fine community, staff and guest GOTY lists generated on this site over the past few weeks. I've been paying close attention to this year's releases, even if I couldn't get to a whole lot of what 2017 had to offer in the year in question.
Whatever new horrors await us in 2018, we can take some small solace from the return of the familiar "BWC" system:
- [B]acklog games are those I own but have yet to play, which take top priority in the year ahead. I buy a lot of games I don't play. I blame millennials.
- [W]ishlist games are those I don't yet own, but have been sufficiently coerced into buying. They're all from 2017, and it was surprisingly easy to find 25 games from this year I want to check out. It was a busy twelve months.
- [C]ompleted games are those on this list that I've since started playing and finished since 2018 began. The date of completion is included. If I fill the whole list with these, then I've won. I can retire from gaming forever with my head held high. (I won't win.)
And hey, because I still want to be optimistic about 2018 despite everything above about voids and inevitability, I'm going to sign each one of these list entries with a gleeful one word answer to the question, "What I looking forward to most about playing this game?".
Here is the last half-decade of these odes to procrastination: 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014 and 2013. (I also want to point out that while perennial wallflowers No More Heroes 2 and Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together are not on this year's list, they're here in spirit.)
