As Todd pointed out earlier, the Steam Summer Sale is upon us, and it’s a thing of beauty. For someone who now plays primarily on her Mac (and PC/sorta through Wine), Steam Sales are my new drug of choice. Portal 2 — which I missed, is 5 bucks today. SpaceChem (which I’ve wanted to play forever) is $5. I could be in gamer heaven, If only I didn’t have such a staggering backlog.
Like all gamers with jobs and life responsibilities, my stack of games is almost as thick as my shame for not having played half of them. It’s worse on my home machine – almost the entire Indie Bundle from May/June has sat untouched, just begging for me to play. I want to sink my time into Amnesia: Dark Descent. I want to finally (yes, finally) play Braid and Super Meat Boy on their own terms. I want to actually finish at least a decent portion of the 30+ games in my XBLA library, and good lord, do I want to open my copy of Mass Effect 3.
It’s such a rare occasion that I actually play a non-review game to the finish that I often feel like celebrating. Last week, Teresa and I finally beat LA Noire (after going through 3 copies of the game and a cross-country move), and I damn near threw a party.
What’s sad is that even though I tend towards “smaller” games these days, I still seem to have a tough go if it finding time to play. Not that I’m complaining – there is so much variety in gaming now, and I genuinely love that all of my various gaming tastes are being catered to. It’s also wonderful to be able to shamelessly check out games so long after the hype has faded, and enjoy them for what they are. I firmly believe my aforementioned LA Noire experience was made better by my severely tempered expectations (and detective/noir obsessed girlfriend to pass the controller to).
I just wish I could retroactively send some of these experiences to my childhood or teen self – the one without multiple jobs and enough time to find every secret in every last friggin game – and look back on them fondly.
Dishonored in Review
XCOM: Enemy Unknown in Review
Borderlands 2 in Review
I know what you mean. I just bought the Paradox and Sega packs. Europa Univeralis 3, Crusader Kings 2, the newer Total War games, many others. I am now paralyzed with choice, trying to figure out where to start or what to play. These are probably enough games to last a decade at my playthrough rate.
My backlog is postively shameful. 30 titles at least, and growing.
The crappy part of being a multi-system owner. Unless it’s a series I cannot wait to play, which is down to pretty much Phoenix Wright, Professor Layton, or Uncharted, it gets tossed to the ‘eventually’ pile.
And they are games I want to play! I have Max Payne 3, Witcher 2, Driver:SF all partly started, an enormous backlog of XBLA, Virtual Console, and PSN titles, now the steam sale.
Plus wanting to replay old games (dying to replay Dead Space 2 and Alan Wake), and my unending love of JRPGs (which devour time like nothing else)… It’s rough. Great problem to have, but I literally have at least 5-10 years of games here untouched I could play.
The backlog issue is problematic. I’m trying to control my purchases, but so for I’ve picked up Legend of Grimrock as well as Gemini Rue (on GoG.com) and that’s it. Hopefully the sale doesn’t draw me any further into its clutches, as I still have Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP and Bastion to finish, and that’s not counting the Sam & Max games from Telltale I’ve been meaning to finish for about two years now.
Oh, and The Witcher 2.
New plan: become a hermit, finish games, devise a method to derive nutrients from video game endings.
SpaceChem is so amazing. But it’s also really depressing. You will spend hours accomplishing absolutely nothing. But, speaking as an engineer, the desire to optimize your designs is sometimes, quite simply, overwhelming. I loved it, but only got to the second-to-last world before stopping.
No offense, but I recommend against sending games back in time, even to yourself. Temporally displaced objects are notoriously chaotic strange attractors.
For example, you once mentioned on JtS that The Legend of Zelda taught you how to read a map. With a shiny new X-Box 360 to distract her, Young Danielle might instead grow up on a steady diet of explosive first-person shooters, enroll in the marines straight out of high school, and wind up getting lost on a training exercise because she can’t make heads or tails of the rendezvous coordinates.
Would Breaking Bad still exist if Private Riendeau had to bum a ride back to her base from erstwhile motorist Vince Gilligan? Let’s not find out.
You certainly have a point there… and even if I were to “strategically” send back only certain games or certain types of games, there’s no telling whether my younger self would’ve actually gotten them or just went back to collecting every single note in Banjo-Kazooie (oh, youth!)
I made this site my homepage to remind me that I shouldn’t be spending a cent this week on steam …
http://www.steamcalculator.com/id/cirreus
But instead it’s been nothing but Pavlov’s bell, ringing, sales, sales ! Backlog be damned, if the Twilight episode “Time Enough at Last” comes to pass, I’ll be ready (solar panels, backup laptops, extra hard drives with steam game backups, and of course spare glasses).
Man, you people are worried about having 30+ unfinished games? Try having almost 60.
http://backloggery.com/zaranell
Goddamn Steam sales, I swear. It doesn’t help that Lone Survivor is on sale, and I’ve been itching to play that for a while now.
It’s not even just the number of games or me, it’s the type. I play largely strategy games, with some Batman type action games mixed in. I may only have 30-40 games, but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t feel like 100. Heck I picked up all the Total War games for $60 last year as a prepurchase for Shogun 2. I’ve dug 170 hours into Medieval, and have yet to do more than run through a turn or two on any of the others.
Not to mention all the Paradox games, Distant Worlds, and Sins of a Solar Empire. Between wedding planning and work I’m getting maybe 2 hours a week of game time. At this rate I’ll never get anywhere.
60 unfinished games? You lot are rank amateurs, utter mortals before me, I’ve a backlog closer to 300 on the pc, 100+ on mobile devices and a barely touched yet respectable PSP library, you cannot begin to fathom the depths of my procrastination, and if any of you see my steam profile, it makes people shrivel and feel inferior.
Right now I can’t even access my pc, which means I’m building a whole new backlog and library on the iPad, fear that.
I *was* feeling pretty terrible, knowing I’ll only be increasing my backlog to seven dozen instead of six due to this infernal Steam sale.
Then I saw that picture, and suddenly I don’t feel so bad.
I’ve had to be really firm with myself this year, considering a backlog of at least 20 games. Only buy games that are already on my wishlist, no adding, and only if the discount is 60% or higher. Damn these Steam sales:P
To me just owning a game doesn’t mean its in the backlog. If I buy a game for $7 on Steam I don’t consider it backlog. It’s more like “if I get a few hours and nothing else appeals to me more.” Which means it is unlikely I’ll ever play it.
My biggest problem is that I’ll start a new game play it obsessively for a while then something will happen and I’ll have to stop for a while and I won’t get back to it.
I’ve got games that I’ve been working my way through for years. I bought Titan Quest when the Immortal Throne expansion came out in 2007 and I’ve played it on and off and never finished it.
I’ve even got games I’ve never even played because my PC can’t run them, they’re sitting there waiting until I can afford to upgrade eventually.
Let’s face it.
The real fun is buying the game and putting it in your backlog. Playing the thing is not necessary, and sometimes not even enjoyable…
And, sad but true, this is valid not only for games but for many aspects of life too.