It occurs to me that I've been reviewing games in this blog while this fine site has a system in place to create a starred review so from here on in, anything I finish is getting the star treatment.  Tomb Raider Underworld is the first of these and you can expect reviews of ODST and Mass Effect any day now.
 
http://www.giantbomb.com/tomb-raider-underworld/61-20694/user_reviews/?review=11029
 
I've spent a little while putting the majority of my game collection (from PS2 to current day) into The Backloggery so I can keep track of exactly what I still need to play through.
 
 http://backloggery.com/main.php?user=shaunage
 
According to that I'm a little over a 50% completion rate which honestly is a little better than I'd expected. The site also includes a "Fortune Cookie" button which chooses a random unfinished game from your collection for you to beat next. I decided to start progress properly and to 100% definitely go with whatever game it picked for me first click. As if to mock me the site spits out a small slip of paper with the text "The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind"...  I said I'd go with it and go with it I have. I'm not a complete stranger to Morrowind. I spent the longest single game session of my life playing Morrowind about 5 years ago when I was only working on Saturdays. I came home from work, put the game in and started a new file and I played until I had to sleep again because I had work the next day. Six days and nights. By my maths that's a little over 150 hours. Surely I managed to finish Morrowind in that enormous amount of time? Well, no. I decided to do the faction quests before starting the quest proper. Fighter's Guild, Mage's, Thieve's Guild, Temple, Imperial Cult and so on and so forth until I had done pretty much everything except for the main quest. Unfortunately I'm playing the Xbox version of this game.
 
I'm not particularly familiar with the PC version of Morrowind but I can tell you that the Xbox version likes to crash if you make it think about too many things at once. If it has to remember where a lot of bodies are, a few too many crates have their contents changed, you've left a few too many doors open and (just for example) you happen to have finished all of the faction quests, the game will freeze up every half hour or so and becomes pretty well unplayable. Due to this ever so small bug I never went back to that 150 hour save and never completed the main storyline.
 
What I've done is I've started a clean file using the Xbox 360's backwards compatibility and so far I'm something like 6 hours into the game without a crash. Here's hoping that good luck continues through what I expect to be a relatively brief storyline run. More news and probably a review on that in the coming days. I haven't clicked the Fortune Cookie again since then because I do intend to see this thing through to the end before I start second guessing and switching out to other random games or even worse, going back to hours of guitar games every day. I do need to say this, though: If I complete Morrowind and click on the FOrtune Cookie again and it smugly sits there with something like "Lost Odyssey" on it I am probably going to break down and cry.
 
Starting this coming Thursday new releases begin to blow holes in these neatly laid backlog plans. Both Brutal Legend and Uncharted 2 are out that day and then before I can blink DJ Hero is due and  Dragon Age Origins and Borderlands and Ratchet and Clank and Modern Warfare 2 and Assassin's Creed 2 and TWO MORE easy guitar games and Left 5 Dead and GH Van Halen AND I've ordered in Demon's Souls from Play Asia which I am beginning to suspect is borderine unplayable. I might have missed something but that MIGHT be it for the rest of the year. And then in February it gets nuts again.
 
What this boils down to is that my backlog is unlikely to EVER be over a 75% completion rate but hey, I'm trying. If they'd stop releasing games and I didn;t have to work, eat or sleep for maybe two years THEN we might get somewhere near 90% complete. MIGHT. On the bright side - If I ever say "I have nothing to do" you are free to remind me that I am lying.