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Birthday Swag and the Backlog


On 12/12/2011 at 02:43 PM by Jesse Miller

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Oh how the backlog continues to grow and grow.  This past weekend was my birthday and my girlfriend, wonderful woman that she is, gifted me with Super Mario 3D Land and the Wampa Lair Star Wars Lego Set.

Seriously, you’d think I was 13 with those gifts, but that just shows you how much my girl knows and loves me.  In addition I added a game or two to the backlog.  I’m now the proud owner of Enslaved, The Sly Collection and Borderlands: GOTY Edition.  Yup, I don’t know why I keep doing this to myself, especially when I just started a Mass Effect 2 playthrough.

By the way, I’m not sure how anyone can go through a game creating all sorts of save files so that they get some magical ‘complete’ experience.  I like playing my role playing games like I’m the one making those decisions – if I say something wrong I’ll deal with the consequences like I would in real life.  I understand using guides to find all the cool toys, but I prefer the organic experience of making conversation and other personal choices as I think my character would actually act.  To me, this means making a balance of “good” and “bad” choices.  It just seems more real that way.

Anyways, Mass Effect 2 is pretty damn awesome and I’m glad that I got it.  It reminds me of a serialized space opera and I can’t keep but wondering how awesome it would be if this was a series on HBO, Showtime or AMC.  It would require a monster budget, but wouldn’t it be awesome?  Much better to do it that way than to make a movie out of it as it would provide more opportunity to flesh out characters and plot.  Mass Effect has too much content to cram into 2 ½ hours, or even a trilogy of films. 

So the slow season is officially here and I plan on seizing the opportunity to take a sizable chunk out of my backlog.  Once I’m done with Mass Effect I’m going to blast through Bayonetta (Review Rewind will be forthcoming) before going down the list.  I’m glad Batman: Arkham City is out of the way (finished that last week) and I’m looking forward to Arkham City now. 

The next new game I’m looking forward to is Soul Caibur V on January 31st of next year.  After that things get tense again with the February launch of the Vita, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, Syndicate and others.

This is why the later years of a console cycle are great.  The games just get better and better.  There are few games that stand the test of time from the launch window because developers haven’t gotten comfortable with their new tools yet.

Anyways, that’s going to do it for me today.

Happy Gaming.


 

Comments

daRth_kiLL

12/12/2011 at 03:14 PM

the games also seem to drop in price much faster than they did a couple years ago. I'm no longer daunted by the prospect of waiting a couple months to obtain whatever title it is in question...matter of fact, more often than not Gamefly hits me with one of my top 5 consistantly. Plus there's excellent chances of getting AAA new releases via Redbox...hell, I sampled 6 of this year's AAA offerings via RedBox, which ended up saving me quite a bit of money. After all...if I can blast through Uncharted 3 on normal in a couple days for under 5 bucks, why not?

More and more, it seems like the games I actually purchase are either heavily, heavily discounted (thank you Gamefly!) or upwards of 50 hours of gameplay. Everything else usually ends up getting traded in, if I buy it.

Angelo Grant Staff Writer

12/12/2011 at 04:13 PM

On the topic of multiple saves:

I personally keep a minimum of 3 save files going in any RPG I play in case I get stuck. It's a habit from my 8bit days I think, but I've found it still applies to modern games. The most recent example was what got me so frustrated I quit playing Shin Megami Tense: Devil Survivor. I'm just gonna copy and paste from my blog entry over at 1up:

Not that anybody even looks at this crap, but I stopped playing Devil Survivor because the game screwed me over and didn't even pay me for the service. Seriously, one save slot? Who over at Atlas had that dumb ass idea! I was in a situation where I had to find Mari's bag of demon killing dust then meet her and do stuff. After doing all the legwork and other missions required to get the mission and find the dust, I tried to do the actual demon killing mission once, failed, then discovered a former party member that went rogue was around and figured I'd to that mission first, then come back to the hot teacher in need of help. I saved his stupid ass, then accidentally saved the game. Lo an behold, the mission I actually wanted to do was GONE, and since you get ONE BLOODY SAVE SPOT I'm stuck with a dumbass party member who I never even really liked and I can't find out more about the other character I was actually interested in. SCREW THIS. I couldn't go back to it, so now my DS has the Mega Man X collection inside it.

Jesse Miller Staff Writer

12/12/2011 at 04:22 PM

I can certainly see how that would be a major pain in the ass and don't understand why a game would restrict you to a single save - particularly in an RPG since that gaming community in particular loves to make multiple saves for the exact reason you mentioned above. Very odd.

Travis Hawks Senior Editor

12/12/2011 at 09:23 PM

Soooo many games just have a single save these days and it drives me crazy. Even three is a little ridiculous in my opinion.

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