It’s been two full months since I began the Backlog Bingo feature for the website, and it’s been two full months that I’ve been grinding away at trying to eliminate each game on the board. Some have come and gone with little effort, and some were begging me to give up on them. The rest are sitting there, waiting patiently for my attention. As of the time of this writing, there are eight tiles remaining.
I’ve scratched two-thirds of the games off of the list over the course of a very hot and miserable summer. The room in which my gaming takes place is in the corner of my home, at the end of the air ducts, and most often closed off to the pets. When you take 100+ degree weather, add in some heat sources like a PC, Xbox, and multiple monitors, and top it off with a closed up room, a lot of times my gaming sessions take place under pretty undesirable conditions.
This is all fine, I’m not complaining, nor am I apologizing for the unexpected length of time it is taking to completely clear the lovely image of Jessi that I used as a backdrop. But this is a gaming blog, and I like to document my struggles as well as my achievements. I doubt when all this is done there will be much celebration by anyone but myself, save for the Patreon members that will finally get their high resolution image I promised them.
The main reason I’m sitting to write this is that I feel like I’m hitting my proverbial wall right now! Gaming should be fun, and I’ve been so focused on these select few games, that I have completely neglected those that I’ve wanted to play all Summer. Games like Horizon: Zero Dawn are still sitting in the case on my shelf, while I’ve been forcing myself to grind through games like Lego Star Wars. No offense to the Lego games, but they’re not exactly what I’d describe as “exciting.” Even games that I enjoy get tedious when trying to get through them as fast as possible. It becomes about the destination, not the journey, and sometimes I ask myself if it’s worth that sacrifice.
It reminds me of a review I read once a while back, and while I cannot remember the exact title, I do remember it being a racing game. The reviewer admitted at the beginning of the review that they’re not really racing fans. I thought to myself, “Why are you reviewing a game in a genre you already don’t like?”
That reviewer then proceeded to criticize multiple aspects that are staples of racing games, that always have been, and that are understood by fans of the racing genre. He hated on a game that he was obviously not into, and would normally never play on his own time. He gave it a terrible review.
Having personally played the game, I knew how well it stacked up against its competition. Let’s say it did quite well. But this person was forced to play a game they did not enjoy, and they hated every minute of it. It showed in every word that author wrote.
Sometimes I feel that way as well. I feel that when a game is done, that I’m just glad it’s over. Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris was this way. It’s not that the game was technically a bad game, even though it wasn’t great either, but that the flaws it contained were further exacerbated by the fact that I just needed to get through it already. This could be true of most things. When you gotta go, you gotta go, and even the slightest inconveniences can be THE WORST THING EVER.
I started this little project, mainly for the website, but also in an honest bid to clear out some of these games that have been getting pushed to the side for quite a while. I intend to see it through. I just hope I don’t hate some of the games I’d normally enjoy as a result.
