Saturnalian wrote:
Y'see, I don't necessarily understand that mentality. Why buy all the games and then just spend a few hours on each until you find a gem that catches your eye? You might miss out on something great that you've only played for an hour because you weren't in the mood at the time.
That's a bit of a strawman there though because that's not what I do, and I would totally join you in your bemusement at anyone who does. ITSP is a good example because I've genuinely played at least three quarters of it so it's not like I've not given it a chance. Indeed I have enjoyed it up to a point so I've really already got my money's worth out of it even if I drop it now because it's no longer holding my attention. The other side of this coin though is that I, like everyone, have a finite amount of time to spend on games and a metric fucktonne of stuff I like the look of so grinding away at something you're not massively enjoying is just a really weird way to spend your leisure time if you think about it and I'm determined not to fall into that trap any more.
Saturnalian wrote:
I'm not saying that's you, of course, but if I brought a load of games in bulk at any one time I might just be inclined to play a little bit of each and then put them down forever. It's like when I got MAME. There's just so much choice that I never found myself sitting down with a single game more than 10 minutes. And there are some amazing "classics" in there, but I'll never play them because of the lure of the next 1 of a thousand games.
Not that I'm terribly selective, mind. I've played my share of terrible games just because there was a sale on (especially now I've got the Steams as well).
Yeah, that doesn't really describe me I don't think. When I talk about my (bought) backlog it's currently sitting at about six games on the PS4 and ten on the PC so it's not like I'm buying millions of the things on a whim and only giving them each five minutes to 'grab me' before they get discarded. If I start a game it gets it's due no matter what and I don't give up on them all that lightly. What I have been massively guilty of in the past though is buying stuff
almost entirely because it was cheap. I say 'almost entirely' because it's still always things I was genuinely interested in; I was never at the stage of genuinely buying random things I knew nothing about just because they were cheap or anything.
The problem with that approach is that I then feel compelled to play the stuff sitting on my shelf/hard drive rather than looking at all the games I'm interested in (i.e. bought
and unbought) and playing whatever I honestly fancy the most. The thing is that I'll never, ever, ever be able to play
all the games I have my eye on so choosing what I do play using the utterly arbitrary criteria of 'whatever Lewie posted for cheap on Savygamer six months ago' is just bloody stupid. Not least because I'm relatively well off and games are cheap so the price thing is actually the least important of my criteria.
Things aren't as bad as they were a few years ago when I realised my PS3/360 backlog was completely out of control and I traded in about fifteen(!) unplayed games just to artificially whittle it down a bit. I'm determined to be even more brutal from now on in and not buy anything at all unless I intend to start playing it right there and then (e.g. Fallout 4 and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture). I want to get to the stage, with PC games at least, where I'm actually looking at my unbought wishlist to decide what to play next rather than feeling compelled to play something off the currently installed list. I'm closer to that than I've ever been but it'll still likely take at least this year and a chunk of the next.