Shameless Gaming Has Taught Me I Am Horrible

What a weird month!

I wasn’t even very ambitious when I set out on this. Just a brief list of games I wanted to finish, and even that didn’t end well. Everything that I finished has been given a reflection on this blog. You might be thinking ‘Pants, you handsome devil, you, you didn’t get much done in the end!’, and you’d be very right.

I think everyone knows the villain behind this halted progress. The dreaded, yet sacred, Steam sales.

‘Alex, you are setting yourself a budget for this,’ I told myself, naive as I was on July 12^th, ‘you will not spend more than $30.’ But $30 became $50, and later $70. I emerged from the wreckage some 12 days later with 20 or so new games. My tiny pile of shame basically tripled in size.

On the one hand, it allowed me to complete a few games I otherwise never would have played (see: LIMBO and Dear Esther), but then maybe that’s not how Shameless Gaming Month should be done. I wasn’t clearing out my old pile of games. I was buying new ones and finishing them ahead of the pile. This is actually quite serious; bar Halo Anniversary, every game I completed (or wrote a reflection on) was something I had bought during the month.

Fortunately Shameless Gaming Month is a bit fluid in its requirements. What determines ‘complete’ is entirely up to the individual, and what games you attribute to being another bite of the pineapple is also at your own discretion. So I’m happy to include both of these games on my completion list. It just feels a bit sad to realise that an attempt to knock some games off the pile of shame has ultimately had the reverse effect.

At the same time, it’s a little bit exciting. I managed to grab some great games at bargain prices in the sales (some of which were gifted to me by some of the most awesome people around) which I’m looking forward to playing; Borderlands, Left 4 Dead 2, Payday, Bastion, and, well, quite a few more.

I think the next few months are going to be a bit quiet for me in terms of purchasing new games. There’s not a lot coming out that really interests me, at least until Assassin’s Creed 3 at the very end of October. So I’ve got a backlog of games to keep me entertained until then. My wallet might be a bit happier about that, too, the poor thing.

The other big problem I faced along the way this month was simply wanting to play other games. I’d look at Red Dead Redemption and think that yeah, I could play that, but I don’t really want to at the moment. And to me, Shameless Gaming Month is above all else about the fun of gaming, so I wasn’t going to force myself to play something when I didn’t really feel like it. The problem is that this then lead to me replaying games I’ve finished a few times over, like Saints Row the Third, which I picked up dirt cheap in those pesky Steam sales, but also Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, because I love that game way too much (more on that another day). It’s good that I was having fun, but I spent a lot of time in these games that could have been devoted to making progress in my shame pile.

That’s not saying I’m not happy with what I accomplished. The games that I did play or finish were all immensely enjoyable in their own ways, and I think I captured a lot of variety between them. On a side note, you may have noticed that I’m mostly positive in all of my reflections, which was largely unintentional, but says a lot about how I write. I could bring up a lot more complaints about each of them, but a lot of them are simply minor things that don’t ruin the overall enjoyment of the game. If the game was fun, and I had a blast with it, I want to focus on what made it great, rather than what dragged it down a little. Maybe I have weird standards. A little positivity never hurt anyone, right?

So my final count is five completed games and one partially completed Zelda. It’s wildly different from where I thought I’d be when I set out at the beginning of the month, scarily so, but damn if I didn’t have a lot of fun on the way.