Word. What a season, what a season.

I have to remind myself of this whenever I am dismayed at the increasing expansion rate of my backlog. You are so right.

The mid-90s were pretty awesome though. It is a great time for games right now, better than it's been in 20+ years. Games today are consistently well made, and there's no doubt that we're entering another period of gameplay innovation when you have a series like Zelda taking creative risks, and new genres like Battle Royale emerging. But I don't think it's just nostalgia talking when I say that for me, there was never a more exciting time to play video games than 1992 to 1995-ish. New genres were seemingly cropping up every single month, old genres were reaching their creative zenith, and gaming emerged from that period with a heap of honest-to-goodness masterpieces whose innovations are still being felt today.

You've got your console classics like A Link to the Past or Super Metroid, you've got the peak of the adventure game genre with Full Throttle, Day of the Tentacle and Myst, the explosion of entirely new genres that we now take for granted such as fighting games (Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat), real-time strategy (Warcraft, Warcraft II, Command & Conquer), and first-person shooters (Wolfenstein 3D, Doom), you have Squaresoft's creative peak (Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger) before their games became bloated parodies of themselves, the height of the space sim (X-Wing, TIE Fighter, Wing Commander 3), Sports games that were actually fun to play and not trying to be a rote simulation of the real thing (NBA Jam, NHL '94), the brief but influential turn-based tactics boom (X-COM, Jagged Alliance 2, Syndicate), and you even had the dumb-but-fun emergence of FMV games (Mad Dog McCree, Night Trap, Sewer Shark).

What was amazing about that time was that literally nobody knew what video games would even be like 3, 5, 10 years down the road. It felt like the possibilities were completely limitless. There was so much innovation and experimentation going on, it really did feel like games had advanced 10 years in that short span. Maybe we're entering another period like that, it's hard to say but I do think it's very possible. Only time will tell, but for now I'd say we're in the second-greatest time to play video games. But that's just me.

I had a whole bunch of great new games I was working through... and then Zelda happened. And honestly, there were easily at least 5 more I could've bought this year but skipped for the sake of time management.

This is absolutely an amazing time in video games. It is also happening right on schedule. The third year of any console generation is generally its creative peak, and we're definitely seeing that now. the difference is that the last time we were in this position (2008/2009) there was a lot of other stuff going on that undermined it. The PC was struggling, with piracy and bad ports, the Wii was in full swing and the Wii was both extremely popular and not very good. Finally the financial crisis did a lot to torpedo that generation and delay this one.

Right now the PC is firing on all cylinders. The indie revolution sparked (in part) by Xbox Live Arcade is roaring, with amazing games released almost every week, and while the PS4 and Xbox One have reached maturity we are also seeing new stuff hit with the Switch and VR. It's an amazing confluence of events and it is, as OP said, totally overwhelming. There's just no way to play all this stuff, even if that was your full time job.

What I'm wondering is...will it ever let up? With the console cycle seemingly changing (so that it's more incremental) and the convergence of console and PC, this could be the new normal. Video games could be a mature medium (like film) and while we'll have good years and bad years we might not see the same tech driven cycles that have defined video gaming for the last 30 years.

It's bananas. I put Zelda and Yakuza on hold when Persona came out. I still have Nioh, Nier, Trails in the Sky 3 and Caligula Effect to get to. Not to mention all the random games of NBA 2K17, Mario Kart and Puyo/Tetris that will sandwiched around those bigger games. It's come to point to where I've started a list just so I don't forget anything. They could stop making games tomorrow and everything released in the last six months that I really want to play would keep me busy well into next year.

I need to quit my job and leave my family until I get this back-log wrangled down.

Still early and probably need some separation before I make a declaration like this but so far this might be my favorite year since 98

I only play on pc, I don't play multiplayer games and I have no desire to play all the Japanese gems that are coming out, but still my backlog is growing. Granted, I don't have as much time to play videogames as I used to, but it's still good to know I don't have to worry about my entertainment.

Also, good games mean good content on GB. For instance, I would never actually play Yakuza 0 myself, but I'm really enjoying Beast in the East. And those Battlegrounds streams are also a lot of fun to watch.

been too busy playing mass effect andromeda to bother with these lesser games :F

seriously though i think the natural conclusion we should have seen all along is we all need to become streamers playing 12 hours a day 6 days a week to handle our backlogs while being not friends to all our viewers for a pittance.