It has taken five months but I’ve managed to come to some semblance of a conclusion to my New Year’s Resolution series. I actually finished twenty games and excommunicated another four.
I was going to share a brief write-up of two games about which I couldn’t pull together enough words to merit an article in their own right; those were Metal Slug XX and Spelunky HD. I swear I wrote three hundred words on these two, which were mostly glowing (in regards to Spelunky) and partly regretful (for arcade purists Metal Slug 2 and 4 are better whilst people looking for a good console experience should play Metal Slug First Mission). But I think those short summaries say it all.
Instead I’ll get on with what I came here to do.
It was a gratifying moment to see the number on my backloggery profile roll down to under a hundred. I even finished another game shortly after; it was Lost Planet if you’re interested.
The overall conclusion I drew was a little more sombre: it really wasn’t worth the trouble. I am sure that a few of you might have derived some enjoyment from my self-torture but if there was one thing I learnt from the experience it was that most of the games I played were not really worth playing beyond where I got to them in the first place, before abandoning them.
Certainly there were some good moments in there: finding out that Shadows of the Damned was actually okay, that ilomilo maintains a consistent level of adorableness and Miner Dig Deep is still awesome. Counterbalancing that were my experiences with El Shaddai, Yakuza 4, Trine 2 and a game that will remain nameless.
Apart from the misery it was also completely pointless.
For example, I was finishing up Virtual-On: Oratorio Tangram so I decided to take it off my list, only to discover that it had never been on my list in the first place.
This happened again when I started Nin2 Jump, a slightly broken platformer that gets really good after ten levels and transforms into a delightfully rendered, frenetic version of Bionic Commando. I was getting ready to write something about it before again realising that it wasn’t on the list, even though it had been in my collection for about two years.
I didn’t investigate further until the number decreased to ninety-eight. At that point I went to see if there were any more games that I may have ‘forgotten’ to put in there.
Here’s what my backlog looked like beforehand:
Sure it is blurry but the point still remains I had a positive rating for the first time in the three years since I joined the site.
Then I added Resident Evil 6, Fusion: Genesis, The Splatters, Rocket Riot, Darwinia+, Harm’s Way, Military Madness…Â twenty seven more games emerged and my backloggery ended up looking like this:
I am still fucked.
[AJ may be fucked, but you can still enjoy either his suffering or the occasional gems he turned up by checking out the NYR archives.]
Comments
10 responses to “NYR: Conclusion”
Sorry that this was more of a going out on a fizzle rather than a bang.
Also damn you Shaun for adding all those extra tags!
I appreciate this conclusion actually, and I think it – along with a post on Tap Repeatedly a few months back – may feed into a piece I'm writing.
As for the tags… you're welcome! :D
This is interesting in light of the Bundle Fatigue talk on at ED, because yeah, we all have way more games than we could ever play–hell, I'm about to get, what, a dozen games from the Bundle in a Box once I get paid, and while four of them are a series–come on. That's just one bundle (onedle).
I think it's definitely worth giving games a proper look–something like Starseed Pilgrim is frustratingly aimless if you just play a few minutes of it, something like Little Inferno hides its hand for a VERY long time before revealing what it's actually about–but at the same time, I mean, we've been playing games for most of our lives, and we *are* critics. Writing about games is suggesting that you understand the medium well enough that you have a pretty decent idea of what's going on.
It seems like this experiment gave you a different appreciation of where The Line is, though. There's some games you abandon because they're too hard or you're not in the right place for them, but there's some games you abandon because you realize they're genuinely bad. I guess the lesson for all of us is 1) figure out why you're bored and if it's legit you can give it up without regret and 2) Miner Dig Deep is goddamn awesome.
Yeah, I think there were some games that I am glad I went back to (this weekend I did a back-to-back session with Metro 2033 and Alan Wake – in a 20 hour gaming session over two days I finished them both) but yeah it has made me question whether I need to go back to others or not.
I am not sure I have found The Line yet. I want to go back to Dark Souls, Condemned: Bloodshot, Resonance of Fate and Record of Agarest War but I am not sure I can bring myself to commit.
Miner Dig Deep is awesome though, I started a second playthrough over the weekend in between playing God Mode. It is a bonafide classic, but you were right that drilling sound needs to be turned down a notch.
I've found The Line. It's a Spec Ops game.
YOU'RE WELCOME.
¬¬… Slow clap, that builds into a crescendo as you walk out of the room without looking back.
On a side note can someone kill the Biking Games poster? They are clearly not a real entity and it irritates my balls
I was unsure until their last comment, on an image page, appeared. The Resonance of Fate and Sniper Elite comments are pretty precisely focused on stuff that was written about in the articles they appeared on.
That's because they are copied from earlier comments on the articles. The bots are getting better.
[…] I’m talking about dealing with my backlog. Again. Apologies if you are sick of this topic – if I weren’t smack in the middle of it, I sure would […]