Archives for October 2007

Have you played Portal? After exactly one hour and thirty-seven minutes I finished it. I feel inspired. Motivated.

What I’m about to do may be the most difficult thing I will ever do when it comes to playing video games. I’m not going to increase the difficulty, not going to play blindfolded, and not even play with the controller upside down.

I’m going to finish a game. I’m going to finish a couple of games. Actually, it’s a slew of games. A list.

A plethora.

You see, I think most gamers harbor a deep, dark secret. One that’s hardly mentioned in everyday conversation, internet chatter, or even done for video game reviews: gamers don’t finish games. The video game industry itself has created this festering monster. Too many games, too many systems, and too much street cred is at stake for a gamer to fall behind the times. Everybody has to be playing the latest and greatest.

At the time of this writing Bioshock was released just over a month ago. It’s old news. Halo 3? Two weeks. Are you still playing? Regularly? Like most 13 year olds on Live? Gamers jump from one game to another riding the waves of one release after another. In 2007, I was no different. Or 2006, 2005, 2004…

This fall…this next year it will be different for this gamer. I’m going to finish every game I own that I have not finished. Every last one. Tony’s “playing now” post a couple of days ago really struck a cord with me. I have too many games that I spend too much money on that I hardly ever finish. All to often I fall prey to the current fad. I’ve tried this once before and I failed after only 2/3 of a game. One game.

The games I’m going to list cover every game I own that I have not finished. Now, some of these games don’t have an endgame and others have various difficulty settings. I’ll list what I consider to be game finishing requirements for each title. There’s now a moratorium on new games and the battle with old begins. On to the list.

[Read more…] about All Good Things…

Just a quick note that I’m currently in the process of upgrading all the blogs I maintain and host for friends, so things around here may get goofy, but I think it should be pretty painless.

If you run a WordPress blog, I cannot sing enough praise for the WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plug-in. Instead of manually downloading the new files, unzipping them and FTP’ing them to my server, this plug-in handles it all. This is very, very cool.

I know we’ve been a little lax in the blogging department around these parts, but with Halo 3 dropping on us and everything else going on, we’ve been busy. Busy playing games, that is. This is not necessarily a bad thing. For me personally, I’ve been spending a little more time back in Norrath with Everquest 2. I joined a guild, but haven’t done a ton with them yet. I’ve mostly been working on my tradeskills. That’s always fun, especially if you like mindless button clicking. We’ve been enjoying Halo 3 a bunch around these parts, co-op’ing and multiplaying whenever we can. There are a bunch of good games on the horizon. I think the Orange Box and Puzzle Quest are in my near future.

What about you guys and gals? What are you playing?