june gloom on 13/6/2011 at 21:55
I think what pushes me to finish games is twofold: one, I tend to plan these things out weeks, if not months in advance, and two, if I quit a game in disgust, it throws me into a loop of wanting to play something else but the disconnect was so sudden that I'm still tied to the game I quit until I can push past that somehow and move on.
Malleus on 13/6/2011 at 22:10
Quote Posted by Kuuso
I tend to get games that I will finish...
Yeah, same here. I'm careful about what I buy (or even what I start playing), and I usually complete everything I started. If it's the second or nth playthrough, then it's okay to have it sitting around though.
Nameless Voice on 13/6/2011 at 22:21
I almost always finish the games I start playing, but lately I have a bad habit of getting games and never starting to play them, especially since I got into Steam, and even more especially since I started playing a lot of online/team multiplayer games which just suck up a lot of gaming time without giving any progress towards playing through the backlog.
jtr7 on 13/6/2011 at 22:41
I don't buy games unless I intend to finish them, and only after I've gotten as decent an idea as I can about them first. I finish every game I buy, I just don't buy very many games, and don't see many that appeal beyond one or two aspects, which usually aren't general gameplay. I've played more demos for PC games than purchased them, some multiple times, but since their appeal for me is only a couple of notches above Solitaire, and I only play them to kill some time or switch mental gears during heavy projects, the demos suffice, and I have no reason to get the full games.
Aerothorn on 14/6/2011 at 03:18
I hate leaving decent games unfinished. If a game is actively bad I'll ditch it, but a much more common issue is a game that's good but simply is longer than it should be (see: every decent console RPG). In that case I'll try to power through and usually give up 90% of the way through the game.
It's pretty stupid, so I've made a deal with myself that I will finish an already owned game (either one unfinished or one never started) for each new game I get, though that's merely a restriction: right now I'm hitting the backlog as much as I can before I have to GET A JOB.
Renzatic on 14/6/2011 at 03:49
Quote Posted by Sulphur
Searching for some elusive something that never quite seemed to come as often as it should have done, be it a Zork Nemesis...
And I thought I was practically the only person in the world who had played Zork Nemesis. Everyone I knew who played PC games back when (which was, like, two), belived the series ended with Return, and they never heard of any titles that came afterwards.
Which was a shame, because Nemesis was an awesome, awesome game.
And finishing games? That happens only for a rare few these days. Like Sulphur said, back when we were kids, you only got four new games a year, and only that if we were really good. But now? Hell, I've got so much to play, I don't even know where to begin. I don't even know if I am gonna begin. Now, I usually play a game up til I start getting a little bored with it, then put it on the shelf for later. If later ever comes, that is. By the time I'd usually get back around to playing something else, I've already picked up and not beat a half dozen other games.
Off the top of my head, The Witcher 2 and Super Meat Boy are the only two games I've finished in the past year or so. Everything else? Well, it's all on Steam. I guess can download and replay something whenever one particular title tickles my fancy.
Koki on 14/6/2011 at 05:33
Quote Posted by Sulphur
Back when I was a kid, and times were tough, and I had to copy Ultima VII on eight floppies from my friend's Sound Blaster CD which came with complimentary editions of Shadowcaster, Worlds of Ultima: Savage Empire/Martian Dreams and Wing Commander 2, and then get back home only to howl at the error message the screen spat at me at disk 5 that went 'Read error on drive A: Abort/retry/fail', and then went back and copied the whole damn thing again using MSBACKUP with its data-eating CRC error correction confabulation option, and then finally installed the game to find I had to juggle through five hundred variations of CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to get the right memory configuration loaded...
...once I had leaped those hurdles, I used to play the fucking game
obsessively until I finished it so thoroughly and exhaustively, it was a miniature achievement in its own right. Either that or I gave up in disgust and moved on. The fact that I had a game so amazing, so excellent, so fucking brilliant meant I devoted all my spare time to it - even if it was
just Wing Commander,
just Ultima Underworld,
just Diablo, or even
just fucking Mortal Kombat. Each game was special, because each successful title screen intro meant I had battled risk and chance to get it on my hard drive, and I had
won.
This didn't change with Windows 3.1/11/95/98/Me, until I stumbled upon a game vendor who whispered in my ear in a back room, 'Hey, I can give you a copy of Starcraft for 50 bucks*' and caused my face to lighten up with all the unrealised possibilities this meant. CDs and DVDs -- more resilient than floppies! Storage capacity more than a hundred fold than that of floppies! It meant...
...yeah, I was a hardcore pirate in school and college. Even then, though, with a veritable cornucopia of titles, I still persevered through each one and then moved on to the next.
But slowly I started to amass a large collection of dreck, of cardboard boxes and jewel cases of games I'd tried, was enthused about for two days, then consigned to the scrap heap of the not-quite-interesting in gaming history in favour of the next unopened shiny. Searching for some elusive something that never quite seemed to come as often as it should have done, be it a Zork Nemesis or an Icewind Dale or an MDK 2.
This has been building for the past decade and a half, and leads to where I am currently.
Currently: Steam. 172 games at the moment - impulse buys, summer and Christmas sales, gifts. How many have I played? Most. For how long? Ha ha. Better question - how many have I finished? Maybe about 7%.
I can't be arsed to finish 75% of the games I own right after purchasing them. I'm working on it, but it's a Sisyphean task. Part of the reason is there's always a new shiny around the corner. Part of the reason is I'm searching for that elusive something that I found, all the way back, in Homeworld, and Ultima VII, and Wing Commander 2, and Psychonauts, and Silent Hill 2... and not quite finding it, so very often. Part of it is I'm wiser, wearier, more cynical, and can see through half of the games I play for the soulless dull time traps they are regardless of Metacritic rating.
Part of it is because I fucking can. It's trivial to get a game now. A single click, and it's packed, parcelled, and piped in millions of pulses of light directly to my hard drive. I'm not 9 years old any more and praying that the next disk doesn't give me a General Failure error, or hoping that the scratch on that CD can be remedied with a little toothpaste and some wiping. Part of it is I'm not a wide-eyed child bursting with pride at meeting the challenge of just getting a game to
run and being rewarded with the title screen and the sounds of Swan Lake lilting from the speakers as Loom booted up for the first time.
Most of it is because I grew up.
Optimal situation? Somehow, neither option seems like it any more.
*Back then, this was the equivalent of one [1] [uno] American dollar and some change.
You mean the longest text you'll read today
Not a sentence
Sulphur on 14/6/2011 at 16:41
Longest sentence first, THEN text as far as you're concerned. If only you'd pay attention to anything at all. :mad:
Renz: Heh, Zork ended way, way before Return to Zork for most people. Zork Nemesis was a pretty damn good adventure game as long as you forgot it ever had the word 'Zork' in the title, and played it without any expectations of there being even the tiniest, teensy weensiest connection to the franchise.
Jason Moyer on 16/6/2011 at 01:34
Other than sports/racing games, I try to play one game at a time to completion. Maybe with a break if a demo comes out I want to try, but for the most part I just don't have the time/energy to play a pile of games at one time.
Digital Nightfall on 16/6/2011 at 05:17
I had already decided to try to attack the backlog and get some of them finished. In the past month or so I've managed to wrap up: Red Faction Guerrilla, NightSky, Front Mission Evolved, Shadowgrounds, Amnesia. I also completed Portal 2, Minerva's Den, Dead Space 2, and Hydraphobia, but these weren't backlog items.
Next up: Alpha Protocol.
The real milestone will be finishing these: Anachronox, Psychonaughts, Call of Cthulhu, and Shivering Isles.
(I may as well add Zork Nemesis to that list, too.)
