Too many games, too little time (and money)
I got my PlayStation 3 during launch week back in November of 2006. There were a couple of good launch titles which kept me occupied well enough during the 2006 holidays (Resistance: Fall Of Man and Call of Duty 3 come to mind), but if it wasn’t for Rainbow Six Vegas and Oblivion, much of 2007 would have left me longing for more decent PS3 games.
Before the PS3, I gamed on my Mac, so I’m no stranger to game dry spells. Typically, when I found a game I really liked on the Mac, I’d play it to death, mainly because there wasn’t much else to grab my attention. This was the case for games like F/A-18 Hornet, Quake III, Unreal Tournament, Ghost Recon and the Rainbow Six series. So it didn’t bother me that much, and there were already far more titles I wanted to play on the PS3 in it’s first year than I was used to on the Mac platform.
It’s somewhat ironic that having played games on the Mac for 16 years, it’s only after I finally make the switch to a console that Mac gaming starts to make a strong comeback thanks to strong Mac sales and the switch to Intel processors, which have made technology like Cider possible. But even though the Mac games industry is making a strong comeback, I don’t see myself leaving my PS3 to switch back…ever. Mainly because I don’t miss the time, hassle and expense of trying to keep my gaming rig current enough to maintain decent frame-rates. Not to mention having to hunt down and install the latest patches manually. I can play games just as graphically rich and complex as what I’m used to on a computer with next to zero hassle. I spend much more time just playing the games I like rather than messing around just to get the game to work well (or at all).
I remember complaining last October about how hard the 2007 holiday season was going to be on my wallet. The PS3’s third year started off with a bang and continued with a steady flow of blockbuster titles. With Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, The Orange Box, GTA IV and Metal Gear Solid 4, among a slew of other titles, the PS3 was finally coming into it’s own. Those four games alone were practically enough to sustain me through most of 2007. So much so that I found myself passing on plenty of games that I probably would have picked up had I had the time to play them.
This holiday season is making last year seem practically bare in comparison however. The list of new games I want to play is becoming overwhelming. Not just for the time I would need to devote to playing them, but cost as well. I can probably only justify picking up about 4-5 games this holiday season, and I’ve already hit that limit. To give you an idea of how discouraging that is, take a look at my holiday 2008 short list, of which I’ve already bought the first five:
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SOCOM: Confrontation
Dead Space
BioShock
Fallout 3
LittleBigPlanet
Far Cry 2
Resistance 2
Mirror’s Edge
Call of Duty 5: World At War
Need For Speed: Undercover
All of those games were either just released in the last three weeks, or are being released within the next three weeks. On top of that, there are 5 or so other promising games being released within the same six week window that I’d also be considering if there weren’t so many competing for my time and money. I gotta draw the line somewhere, after all.
While most games take nearly the same toll on my wallet ($60 plus tax), not all games are created equal with respect to the amount of time they will demand. Now don’t get me wrong, the longer a game captures my attention and interest the better. But the downside of long games, or games with a high replay value is they hold you up from being able to try other games, much to the satisfaction of my budget.
Thankfully, three of the five games I’ve already purchased will likely be an excellent value in respect to keeping me occupied for a lengthy amount of time, each for slightly different reasons. SOCOM: Confrontation is an online tactical squad-based shooter, so while it doesn’t have a lot of depth and variety, the nature of this type of game is that the variety and challenge comes from the online experience of playing against other human beings. There’s no end to this type of game, it’s really just a question of if you want to play it enough to make time for it.
Fallout 3 is just an enormous game with so much to explore and so many quests to do. If it’s anything like Oblivion, the previous game released by Bethesda, I can probably expect anywhere from 75 to 125 hours of game time. This is the type of game that I can get lost in and lose hours at a time exploring the rich world that has been created for me, and that I won’t want to put down until I’ve completed it, or at least the main quest, since you could play through a game like this 3 times and never experience everything the game has to offer.
LittleBigPlanet, with it’s user-generated levels and built-in level creator has the potential to keep me occupied forever. By the time I’ve completed the single-player story levels, I’m sure there will be an already enormous amount of user-generated levels to try out. So many that it will be pretty much impossible to play them all because new levels will be added faster than I could play them. On top of that, I can play with up to three friends (or strangers) in a sort of coopetitive manner that will provide no end of fun. The fact that it’s a game my wife actually wants to play means we’ll likely have to cut back on our TV time, which isn’t a bad thing at all in my books.
So somewhere in between those three games, I’ll be finishing Dead Space, a very good sci-fi thriller/horror and BioShock, one of the most highly acclaimed games of 2007 for XBox 360 and PC. Both of which offer a solid amount of game time for single-player story games. My plan is to try and get through both of them before all my time gets sucked up by the other three. Then I can trade them both in to help finance the acquisition of one more game on my list this holiday season. Deciding on which one is going to be tough though. Which one would you pick?
2 comments October 30th, 2008
