Incidentally, Happy Birthday to me! Now on with the show...
Free time was at a premium, the games industry itself was shifting into the live service online-only time sink model we see everywhere now and indie development was producing some soon to be big-names. Between reviews, articles, tweets and streams, the intrigue for established titles and new names swiftly took shape. All channeled through online sales and price-cuts which combined to form a hulking hybrid hell bent on eating up my free time.
Thus begun the infinite backlog I'm still trying to catch up with to this very day. Oh sure there was always a backlog to my gaming habits in adulthood but up until this point I could see maybe 2 or 3 games ahead and then that list exploded. The classic inversion, where once I had the time but not the money, now I had the money to buy the games and rarely the time to play all the games that were coming at me.
Oh I know it's the classic woe is me dilemma but it's one I've given serious thought to in recent years. Job, parenthood and a move across the country put things in perspective for me and I what little free time I had went elsewhere. At some point I looked at all those games going unplayed and decided that desperate times needed desperate measures. I needed... a list.
It's wasn't even a conscious effort at first. In increments the idea took shape that it was a fools errand to keep up with it all and some sense of priority and preference was needed here. After a few relatively game-free years around said parenthood, I was playing Batman: Arkham Knight. Great game, super fun for sure. It was upon completion however when I found myself devoting more than the required thought to what should be next.
Enter 2020. Enter Covid-19 and the shutdown of much of the world. Enter an increase of free time not spent waiting on public transport for the daily commute and a few dozen other small time savings that accumalated quicky, snowballing into a rampaging metaphor of more free time.
Suddenly it wasn't the odd game, it was games plural. Focusing first on my unfortunate recent trend of buying AAA games on Day 1 and then hardly playing them. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, you're done. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, bang you're done. Mass Effect: Andromeda, dear god why? Nevertheless, done!
The 'AAA game bought on Day 1 but didn't play' backlog, the 'not Day 1 but hell I should really play this sometime' backlog. The random 'I saw it in a sale and it looks neat' backlog. The 'I read an interesting article that alluded to this game' backlog. Suddenly it all became possible and some of them got played, some even got finished by darn.
Good or bad, acclaimed or derided, come one and all. I made a nebulous commitment to playing them and by cracky I was going to make good on it. DOOM (2016) off you go, Ruiner? Hell why not, it looked cool. Those last few seasons of Telltale Games' Walking Dead, throw in their two Batman seasons as well why don't you? Done, done and done.
Rez Infinite, I finally got around to playing a game somewhere on its third or fourth HD all bells and whistles re-release. 2002 called, it wants it's game back so I sent it on its way. XCOM 2... wait no I haven't finished it on a War of the Chosen playthrough yet, let's not get too carried away...
Where was I going with this? Basically I'm climbing a mountain shaped like a stack of games. It's a vertical climb, they are boxes after all that occasionally shift into the ephemeral shape of downloadable content. It's a long, hard climb and quite possibly a neverending one. Point is, there is a foothold where once there was a rockslide, I'm getting there. Now if that isn't the stuff of inspirational feel-good happy endings then I don't know what is.
Now to gently sleep off the food coma.
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