Callum Brown: Bothersome backlogs
I need to start finishing games in 2021. I’m not talking about games that I decide to stop playing because I dislike them, that’s totally valid and I don’t fancy making myself suffer anytime soon. What I am talking about is starting a game, really liking it, playing for many hours, then getting distracted by something else and suddenly it’s six months later and I have lost the will to return to it.
I’ve done this with many games over my life, mostly with big games that last forever like The Witcher 3, Metal Gear Solid V and Dark Souls II (the latter I’ve started three bloody times). While this doesn’t seem like a huge problem, it turns into a vicious cycle.
It slowly builds up a big pile in my head; I am constantly aware of the many games I have never completed but do not have the motivation to touch, but I also know that I need to finish them to have any hope of eventually dying in peace. It’s never ending; I want to go back and beat these games, but I don’t want to restart a long game or jump back into an old save file for fear of not understanding anything that’s going on, so I just won’t play them, start another game, and then there’s yet another new game taunting me on the pile.
So, in 2021 I need to stop buying new games, and go back and finish my unfinished backlog for my own sanity.
Catherine Lewis: Item hoarding horrors
Picture this; you’re starting a huge new RPG adventure, you’ve had a few random encounters, had a mosey round your starting town, spoken to a few of the NPCs who are milling around. You know the drill.
Soon after, you come across a treasure chest containing a handy consumable item, like a potion or power booster. How handy, for the start of a new adventure! It would be a shame if…I never used it.
Look, hear me out. If you’ve never played that game before, you just never know when you might need your items most! I don’t want to be burning through all my health restoring items wandering around some random dungeon when for all I know there could be a really tough boss at the end who’ll have me using my entire inventory of items because I’m inevitably underleveled and haven’t saved the game in about an hour.
Has this ever actually happened? Admittedly, no. Will that stop me from doing this? Absolutely not. It’s this exact process that generally leaves me with an inventory full of consumables that I could quite easily have bought more of anyway.
I am well aware that I’m not playing the games as intended, but look, you’re saying this to someone who accidentally played the entirety of Fire Emblem: Awakening without promoting any of her units into their upgraded classes. That…was a low point, and to be fair wasn’t intentional, but either way, I clearly don’t learn from my mistakes. Please, dear reader, don’t be like me.
Image: Catherine Lewis
