Fake Master Runs

This is, most of you will have guessed it, a Backloggery-specific rant. For those of you who don’t know: At the Backloggery, you basically list all your games and use some spiffy features to take notes on them and share your collection and gaming progress with others. One such feature allows you to assign a satus to each game, like unfinished, beaten orcompleted. Oh, and “mastered,” and that’s what this post is about. Or maybe I’d say it’s about people who don’t seem to be able to read.

 

New Year’s Resolutions: Gaming Version

Looking at the way I play games and at my Backloggery’s stats has made me think. (Oh noes, thinking Lym, run for cover, hide!) The – rather obvious – conclusion I’ve come to is that I put too many games on hold. But what does that mean?

See, I often play games for a while, then put them on hold because I can’t concentrate on more than a few at a time but want to start another one anyway, and when I come back half a year or more later, I want nothing more than to start them over because I’ve either forgotten what happened (if it’s an RPG with a more complex plot) or I just want to relive the beginning anyway. For as long as I’ve been playing videogames, that has led to me playing the beginning of games over and over again. (You do not want to know how often I’ve gone through the five Towers of Terranigma‘s underworld as a child.)

Not only does that (obviously) lead to me being bored with the beginning and thus more unlikely to get past it, it also doesn’t give me the gaming experience I’m usually looking for: To start a game, play it over the course of a couple of weeks (or months, for some of these 60h+ monsters) and finish it, without getting sidetracked too badly.
Paying attention to other stories as well is not the issue – not paying attention to that particular story is.

And so, my belated New Year’s Resolution for gaming is this: I want to concentrate on games I’m currently playing, finishing them before or instead of tackling several others and thus putting fewer games on hold and getting the most joy out of the time I spend gaming.

Tadaaa! There, I said it. (Wait, is this one of the “I’m telling the internet because that means I actually have to do it” things? Anyway, the same also goes for books, because I have just as many unread books that I want to experience on day, but let’s focus on games because as we all know, that’s what this little blog is all about. LibraryThing is for books.)
In more detail, that means:
a) Never have more than six games on my Now Playing list (I’ve been pretty good with that so far, five would probably more ideal once I’ve finished another game or two) and
b) Don’t put a game on the Now Playing list on hold, unless I really don’t like it right now but want to keep it in my backlog to give it another chance later (I’d probably start over anyway…)

There are two tiny little exceptions to the rules:
One are games that aren’t likely to appear on my Now Playing list anyway, because I play them for an hour or two, then put them away again for a few weeks, just to pick them up again where I left of or another few hours of gameplay. Etrian Odyssey is a good example of that.
The other is Suikoden Tierkreis, 2009′s only gaming release that I’m really excited about (unless Final Fantasy XIII actually gets a Western release this year, which I almost doubt) and which I’m allowed to pick up and play as soon as it’s released outside of Japan, no matter if that means breaking rule a) or not. It’s Suikoden. It’s allowed to do that.

Other than that, I’ll be trying my best to stick with my New Year’s resolution from now on and see what it does for my gaming experience. And if I find out that it works as well as I think it will, more power to me. ^__^