The following is the beginning of a three-part series reflecting on some of my ([WittySciFiPun]’s) gaming tastes and habits.
I have a confession to make: I rarely finish video games.
Now, when I say “finish”, I don’t mean in the “get everything 100% done” sense. No, my deep, dark geek secret is that eight or nine times out of ten, I will simply not see a video game to its end, either by playing through it at an incredibly sluggish rate or just outright walking away from it altogether. But before any fellow gamers start to take out their torches and pitchforks, allow me to explain myself.
Maybe the biggest factor that prevents me from finishing a game lies not within the game itself, but is rather the compounding of everything that interrupts my playtime of that particular game. As I have mentioned in my introductory post on this blog, I am a college student. This means that my time is often taken up by classes, homework, various clubs, and various other activities that occur during campus life. But even with this busy schedule, I still manage to have quite of bit of time to myself. However, these are not the only things I consider as “interruptions”. For example, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the terrible effect that the internet has on my productivity. There have been several occasions where I tell myself “OK, just gonna check out a few sites, and then play [a video game],” only to then lose an hour or two just by surfing the web. Additionally, I will often stop playing a particular game due to other games. For instance, I have a habit of buying and playing new games even if I have yet to finish others, simply due to their novelty. Also, there is always the allure of multiplayer games, such as my favorite game of all time, Team Fortress 2. Multiplayer games appeal to me due to the human element involved, which has the potential to make a game more varied than any particular game mechanic. Of course, the more time I spend playing games that I can’t“finish” (since they don’t really have “endings” the way single player/co-op campaigns do), the less time I have to complete games that I can. Finally, while it may seem obvious, I can’t forget the 400-pound elephant in the room that is sleep. I am not one to pull all-night marathons to plow through a game- I enjoy sleeping a great deal, and I don’t get enough of it already. (I am, however, willing to take part in all-night gaming sessions with friends, but that’s a whole different story, as half the fun of those is the social interactions between the participants.)
Now, the games themselves (that is, the games that I have yet to finish) are obviously not blameless in this scenario, because while the aforementioned interruptions can be used as an excuse for taking an extremely long time to finish these games, they cannot really be used as an excuse as to why I stop playing some of them for an extended period of time (such as weeks, months or longer), or why I quit others cold turkey. No, these interruptions work in tandem with the fact that the games simply don’t hold my interest for long enough. Now, this may seem like an obvious conclusion to make, but I myself did not realize how hard it was for a game to hold my attention through its finale until I looked at some of games that I still haven’t completed: Metroid Prime and Metroid Prime 2, The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, the Bioshock series, etc. Heck, even Half–Life 2 took over three years for me to actually finish- started that game in the March of 2008 and did not see its conclusion until April 2011. (On the other hand, I then managed to get through Episode 1 and 2 within the next three months.) I’m not saying that these games are bad, or even that I didn’t enjoy (at least to some extent) the time that I spent with them. Still, there was something or other about each of those games (and other games that I did not complete) that has kept me from playing them. Things like:
- Unpleasant mid/late-game mechanics: I appreciate variety in my games, and a game’s initial mechanics can only take it so far. Fortunately, developers realize this, and thus mix things up via level design, set pieces, and new mechanics, among other things. However, sometimes these things end up hindering the game for me rather than enticing me to play it further. For example, escort missions- I find it annoying to keep track of an AI character that can at times have a mind of its own. For as fun as I find Saints Row the Third, there was this one mission in that game which I had stalled on for quite some time. In it, you are tasked with protecting a plot-related vehicle from enemy vehicles by shooting an RPG from inside a helicopter hovering above the action. While in this escort mission the AI of the vehicle I was escorting was fairly straightforward, its health would be affected by the rockets I shot- a problem when I had to use these rockets to blow up the nearby enemy vehicles. Half the time, I would fail the mission by blowing up the vehicle that I was supposed to protect myself. Fortunately, I managed to get past that one mission, and thus the chances of me completing Saints Row the Third have improved considerably. (On a related note, I also get annoyed by important game mechanics being withheld from a game until a fair amount of progress has been made- for example, I would like to give a stern talking to whoever decided that the ability to doge roll in Dead Rising 2should be kept away from the player until they had already played the game for a good couple of hours. Yeah, not like that could have been useful earlier on or anything.)
- Ridiculous difficulty spikes and/or inordinately frustrating sequences: Before I get any flak for this, let me just say that I do like challenge in my games- I loved Super Meat Boy, for example, and managed to complete most of its stages (just need to finish the Dark World end boss, which I will….eventually). I just need to know what I’m getting into first. I like my games to have reasonable increases in difficulty, starting out relatively easy once I’m just learning the ropes and then reaching a more challenging level once I’ve mastered its concepts. What frustrates me is when I come across a part of the game that is much more difficult than anything up to that point and even for some time after that point. For example, I originally stopped playing Darksiders due to one miniboss early on in the game which took a lot of damage to kill and could kill me in just a few hits. This in itself wouldn’t have been too bad, except for the fact that each time I died I would be set back a ways away from my foe. So before I could try the battle again, I would have to traverse a barren landscape (there really wasn’t anything for me to do from this point except get to the miniboss) for a few minutes before waiting another minute or so for the miniboss itself to reach me. While this happening once or twice wouldn’t get on my nerves, those few minutes added up as I kept on dying and thus I stopped playing Darksiders for a couple of months. Eventually I came back to it, though, and beat that miniboss. And then I didn’t face anything that difficult until a good hour or so afterwards. I understand the concept of bosses being harder than other parts of the game and all that, but I still think that that one miniboss in particular was poorly timed. I’d like to note that this particular factor by itself does not turn me off from playing a particular game ever again, but just encourages me to take a break from it for a little while. If other factors are at play, however, this sometimes acts as the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
- Technical issues: This doesn’t crop up too much, but I still want to mention it. I play most of my games on the PC, and while most of the time the games I play are pretty stable, crashes and other bugs do occur from time to time. While this doesn’t keep me from playing a game if I am interested in it enough otherwise (all the crazy bugs in Skyrim don’t stop me from coming back to that game, for example), for games that I have become disinterested in this can act like a death blow. A good example of this: a month or two back, I tried to get back into Resident Evil 5, after having not played it for a while; unfortunately, the game kept crashing on startup, thwarting my efforts. After trying a few fixes, all to no avail, I eventually gave up and moved on to different games.
The above list doesn’t account for all the games that I haven’t finished; a lot of the time, I don’t get around to finishing a game simply because it isn’t as good (or rather, attention-grabbing) as another game that I’m playing within the same timeframe. I can’t really further extrapolate on this point, as this greatly depends on my personal taste in games, as well as my current gaming “mood” at the time (something I will talk more about later).
Well, now that I have written so many words about not finishing stuff, how do I finish this article? Why, with a cliffhanger, of course. Stay tuned for next week, when I will talk about the games that I do finish, and how they succeed in holding my interest when so many others have failed to do so.
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