Operation Finish all the Games, December 2013
Like many gamers, I have a backlog. I have a shelf worth... or several shelves' worths of unbeaten, sometimes even unplayed, games. It happens. Many games take a while to play through, some require specialized equipment (console, capable PC), and most just require blocks of time and attention that I just can't give. Or haven't been willing to give. For years I've always said I would get though it all eventually. I managed to do that much with my comics (I used to have an entire packing box of unread comics, which was cleared out in 2010 and has managed to stay pretty dead ever since, though of recent the pile is starting to build up again). And I did that with my books-it was only a few months ago where I had nothing but one or two titles, though post-NYCC it's built up a bit, though I foresee no difficulty in cutting it down over the next few months, so long as I don't go crazy at the library again.
But, those games. Those pesky games. I used to buy games right away assuming I would play them soon and then didn't. Sometimes I started a game, and just never got back to it. And sometimes I just played Pokémon instead. So now there's this tidy little backlog that's been haunting me for a while, and with a new console generation finally here in full force, it's particularly bothersome. I'm generally happy to say I don't have anything going back so far as the original PlayStation, but there's a few PS2 games on my shelf that mock me with their unplayed state. So I have finally decided to do something about it.
Hence...
OPERATION
Rules:
1) Beat/finish one game a month.
2) By "beat" it means, for most games, to undertake the story-ending actions that would prompt a credits scroll. Obviously, this doesn't apply to games that have no endings, like Animal Crossing.
3) "Finish" means to actually complete all the actions I would complete in said game, including side quests, post-ending sequences. For me, satisfaction is reached once all bits of story have been wrung out of the game. Collecting all the little flags in Assassin's Creed is not story. Fuck that.
4) Games don't need to be started that month, or even that year. Anything will suffice so long as it is NO LONGER MY PROBLEM.
5) Some games have not been beaten in the past, but I wrote them off years ago and as such, they will not be included in this project unless I go crazy or something.
Now, I've made New Year's resolutions before to finish as many games as I could, to varying degrees of success. Mostly none. So to start this off right, my first action, or rather, the first rule was
NO WAITING
So here we are, the December 2013 edition of "Operation Finish All the Games." How did it go?
Well, it seemed likely I would finish not one, but two games this month, so I'd be off to a good start.
I had already finished a good portion of Assassin's Creed. I believe I was in Memory Block 4 (of 6) at the start of the month, so I finished that up, then started on 5, which all things considered, wasn't that long. It was done within a day or two. I even tweeted about finishing it, which prompted a retweet from an AC-themed Twitter bot. Amusing. On Tuesday, the 10th, I sat down and just plowed through the last memory block and the ending, which I had a little trouble with, but nothing too serious. I defeated the final boss on the third try, which isn't too bad for an action game. However, I am glad I played this game now and not when it was originally released, because with that non-ending of an ending, I would have thrown my controller at the TV.
I think cliffhangers, especially rather non-suspenseful cliffhangers such as this, should not be utilized with such a long wait between installments. It's fine to make people wait a week, or a few months, but an entire year? I'm looking at you, The Hobbit.
After I finished AC I was feeling a bit cocky, so I popped in Final Fantasy XIII. And promptly got my ass handed to me, repeatedly. Clearly, finishing up that game was going to take a bit more thought. I put it away for the time being, though last week I took it back out, changed my party a bit and purchased some new stats, and did a bit better. Though I know the game is designed such that you shouldn't need to grind, each battle is enough of a struggle even with proper strategy that it's obvious I need to grind. So I'm probably going to finish up more missions on Gran Pulse before I make the push to the end. (On a side note, how frustrating is it that the game is designed to avoid grind and reward clever strategy, but basically punishes you for not finishing battles fast enough?)
In the same week, I decided to start up Pokémon X again. I had it with me in San Francisco earlier in the month and picked away at Reflection Cave, where I last left off. Caves in Pokémon are seriously the worst. They are dark, tedious, and distinctly not-fun. Stupid Zubat, or Zubat wannabes.
So, I was pleasantly surprised to discover I was actually at the end of the cave. So I proceeded to the next town. And the next, and the next.
I won five gym badges in one day.
Those who play Pokémon understand how crazy this is. Those who don't? Well, this is the general plot of every game:
Step 1: Get starter Pokémon.
Step 2: Get more Pokémon.
Step 3: Win eight gym badges.
Step 4: Defeat the Elite Four.
Step 5: Defeat the Pokémon League Champion.
Step 6: CREDITS
Ok, that's an oversimplification, as somewhere in there you have a few side quests that usually involve a missing Gym Leader, the bad guys taking over a warehouse/factory/power plant, and then the boss fight with the leader of said bad guys which usually culminates in you catching a Legendary Pokémon.
But yeah, I finished half the game in a day. That's cray-cray. And further proof of what some people have been saying, that this game is too easy, too kiddish, and too fan service. None of that makes it a bad game, but damn.
Later that week I got back to it and thought, "oh, let's do the whole plot battle stuff with Team Flare" and that took an evening, which is about what I expected. But still, I was making good progress. Then, that Saturday, I was like, "ok, let's battle the last Gym Leader" and that was over in like, twelve seconds. I figured I'd stop there and do something else with my evening, but I thought, "Oh, let's see what Victory Road is like, I hate Victory Road because it's a cave and caves are the WORST... oh, this isn't that bad. Hey, there's an outside! Sunlight! Things and stuff! Oh, it's over!" and since I was clearly on a roll already I said, "Hey, I wonder what the Elite Four is like, it won't hurt just to peep in and see what I'm up against... oh look I defeated all of them and there's barely a scratch on my Pokémon ok fine I'll battle the Champion, oh, that's over and look, I get a medal! And... credits."
So yeah, I'm pretty sure you can beat Pokémon X in probably three days. Four days tops.
Now, technically there's a lot of post-game stuff, and it's actually pretty long. From my recollection, post-game story content can add another 1/3 to the game, maybe even more. But I've decided to take a break from Pokémon for now, and will get back to it in a month or two.
When I beat Pokémon X I got cocky again, but I wasn't in the mood to say, fire up an RPG on my Nintendo DS, so I pulled out my iPad instead and played through The Room, which had been a free download that week due to the release of the sequel. I played through all the chapters that night, and finished the epilogue in the morning. It was a bit tricky, but not impossibly so. A problem I have with puzzle games sometimes is that I will figure out what I think is the solution, but it just won't work, and I end up looking at a walkthrough to see what the solution is actually meant to be, and it turns out I'm right, but I'm just doing something wrong, like not lining up the key with the keyhole properly. Usually something ridiculously stupid. I'm basically an idiot savant with these things: I always get the hard things but can't manage basic tasks.
Rather than say, "well, I finished two games... well, three, guess I don't have to worry about anything else this month," I kept going. Because when you think you've filled a quota and don't need to do more, that's when you start slacking off. Like, if you tell yourself you want to write one page of your novel a day and it's okay if you miss a day because you'll just write two tomorrow, and before you know it it's a month later and you need 30 pages of text. Slacking off means I could say, "Well, I don't need to play games for three more months" and then four months goes by and I'm behind, and then five months, and so on. It's a dangerous train of thought. I'd rather just get more done than think of myself ahead of the game (ha ha).
At a San Diego Comic-Con whenever ago, but probably 2009, I purchased Sam & Max: Season One for the PC. I started that one up, figuring that the length of each episode was probably about two hours, just like The Walking Dead. And I was roughly correct, though episode 1 took me three hours instead, probably due to getting re-acclimated to point-and-click adventure games and learning where everything was in the world. After episode 1 I averaged two hours per episode. I rarely needed to consult a walkthrough, except for those times as in what I said earlier about knowing the answer but missing some vital, obvious piece of info. Starting with episode 3 I hooked it up to the TV because it was easier and because I could, and around the end of that Ian started playing with me, which was nice, but frustrating since I now had to wait for him to be around to finish the game. So it was a delay. We finished the game yesterday and I liked it, though Ian got a bit mad when I pulled out the walkthrough, rather than let the two of us argue over a particular puzzle. Playing adventure games as a group can be... frustrating.
Over the weekend a friend/co-worker/employee of mine gifted me Papers, Please, so I installed that on Saturday and generally burned through it quickly. It looks like it will take most people four hours to complete. I made a lot of mistakes and was not the fastest, but I'll cut myself some slack since I was playing it for the first time, and on a touchpad. Touchpads are terrible for gaming, obviously, but sometimes I do it anyway because I'm too lazy to get off the couch and use a mouse. I played Portal with a touchpad, and got through 12 boards before I had to surrender and find a mouse and set up on an actual table. Papers, Please isn't actually fun. But it is interesting, and addicting. I got a "bad" ending when I ran out of money and they sent me to prison. Then I backed up a few days (the game is great in how it lets you pick up the game from any day you've already completed, so you have a little more wiggle room to rectify mistakes and get certain achievements). Checking a FAQ I saw I was almost at the end of the game anyway, so when it became obvious I was not going to get the magical "please join the revolution" ending, I took the "flee the country" ending with my remaining family. I've decided to play it from the very beginning again, to try and do a little better, especially after reading a FAQ that had some useful tips on how to scan documents and spot forgeries and which people prompt certain actions/rewards.
And that's pretty much where I am now. Given that we're now in the last two days of the year I don't foresee finishing any new games, thus I make this post. I'm thinking of making next month a Final Fantasy month, finishing XIII and also Revenant Wings, which I also played this month but neglected to mention in this post. I'll talk about that one next time, I have words for it.
December 2013
Games finished: 5
Worlds saved: 2
Regimes toppled: 0
Pokémon caught: Fuck all if I know
But, those games. Those pesky games. I used to buy games right away assuming I would play them soon and then didn't. Sometimes I started a game, and just never got back to it. And sometimes I just played Pokémon instead. So now there's this tidy little backlog that's been haunting me for a while, and with a new console generation finally here in full force, it's particularly bothersome. I'm generally happy to say I don't have anything going back so far as the original PlayStation, but there's a few PS2 games on my shelf that mock me with their unplayed state. So I have finally decided to do something about it.
Hence...
OPERATION
Rules:
1) Beat/finish one game a month.
2) By "beat" it means, for most games, to undertake the story-ending actions that would prompt a credits scroll. Obviously, this doesn't apply to games that have no endings, like Animal Crossing.
3) "Finish" means to actually complete all the actions I would complete in said game, including side quests, post-ending sequences. For me, satisfaction is reached once all bits of story have been wrung out of the game. Collecting all the little flags in Assassin's Creed is not story. Fuck that.
4) Games don't need to be started that month, or even that year. Anything will suffice so long as it is NO LONGER MY PROBLEM.
5) Some games have not been beaten in the past, but I wrote them off years ago and as such, they will not be included in this project unless I go crazy or something.
Now, I've made New Year's resolutions before to finish as many games as I could, to varying degrees of success. Mostly none. So to start this off right, my first action, or rather, the first rule was
NO WAITING
So here we are, the December 2013 edition of "Operation Finish All the Games." How did it go?
Well, it seemed likely I would finish not one, but two games this month, so I'd be off to a good start.
I had already finished a good portion of Assassin's Creed. I believe I was in Memory Block 4 (of 6) at the start of the month, so I finished that up, then started on 5, which all things considered, wasn't that long. It was done within a day or two. I even tweeted about finishing it, which prompted a retweet from an AC-themed Twitter bot. Amusing. On Tuesday, the 10th, I sat down and just plowed through the last memory block and the ending, which I had a little trouble with, but nothing too serious. I defeated the final boss on the third try, which isn't too bad for an action game. However, I am glad I played this game now and not when it was originally released, because with that non-ending of an ending, I would have thrown my controller at the TV.
I think cliffhangers, especially rather non-suspenseful cliffhangers such as this, should not be utilized with such a long wait between installments. It's fine to make people wait a week, or a few months, but an entire year? I'm looking at you, The Hobbit.
After I finished AC I was feeling a bit cocky, so I popped in Final Fantasy XIII. And promptly got my ass handed to me, repeatedly. Clearly, finishing up that game was going to take a bit more thought. I put it away for the time being, though last week I took it back out, changed my party a bit and purchased some new stats, and did a bit better. Though I know the game is designed such that you shouldn't need to grind, each battle is enough of a struggle even with proper strategy that it's obvious I need to grind. So I'm probably going to finish up more missions on Gran Pulse before I make the push to the end. (On a side note, how frustrating is it that the game is designed to avoid grind and reward clever strategy, but basically punishes you for not finishing battles fast enough?)
In the same week, I decided to start up Pokémon X again. I had it with me in San Francisco earlier in the month and picked away at Reflection Cave, where I last left off. Caves in Pokémon are seriously the worst. They are dark, tedious, and distinctly not-fun. Stupid Zubat, or Zubat wannabes.
So, I was pleasantly surprised to discover I was actually at the end of the cave. So I proceeded to the next town. And the next, and the next.
I won five gym badges in one day.
Those who play Pokémon understand how crazy this is. Those who don't? Well, this is the general plot of every game:
Step 1: Get starter Pokémon.
Step 2: Get more Pokémon.
Step 3: Win eight gym badges.
Step 4: Defeat the Elite Four.
Step 5: Defeat the Pokémon League Champion.
Step 6: CREDITS
Ok, that's an oversimplification, as somewhere in there you have a few side quests that usually involve a missing Gym Leader, the bad guys taking over a warehouse/factory/power plant, and then the boss fight with the leader of said bad guys which usually culminates in you catching a Legendary Pokémon.
But yeah, I finished half the game in a day. That's cray-cray. And further proof of what some people have been saying, that this game is too easy, too kiddish, and too fan service. None of that makes it a bad game, but damn.
Later that week I got back to it and thought, "oh, let's do the whole plot battle stuff with Team Flare" and that took an evening, which is about what I expected. But still, I was making good progress. Then, that Saturday, I was like, "ok, let's battle the last Gym Leader" and that was over in like, twelve seconds. I figured I'd stop there and do something else with my evening, but I thought, "Oh, let's see what Victory Road is like, I hate Victory Road because it's a cave and caves are the WORST... oh, this isn't that bad. Hey, there's an outside! Sunlight! Things and stuff! Oh, it's over!" and since I was clearly on a roll already I said, "Hey, I wonder what the Elite Four is like, it won't hurt just to peep in and see what I'm up against... oh look I defeated all of them and there's barely a scratch on my Pokémon ok fine I'll battle the Champion, oh, that's over and look, I get a medal! And... credits."
So yeah, I'm pretty sure you can beat Pokémon X in probably three days. Four days tops.
Now, technically there's a lot of post-game stuff, and it's actually pretty long. From my recollection, post-game story content can add another 1/3 to the game, maybe even more. But I've decided to take a break from Pokémon for now, and will get back to it in a month or two.
When I beat Pokémon X I got cocky again, but I wasn't in the mood to say, fire up an RPG on my Nintendo DS, so I pulled out my iPad instead and played through The Room, which had been a free download that week due to the release of the sequel. I played through all the chapters that night, and finished the epilogue in the morning. It was a bit tricky, but not impossibly so. A problem I have with puzzle games sometimes is that I will figure out what I think is the solution, but it just won't work, and I end up looking at a walkthrough to see what the solution is actually meant to be, and it turns out I'm right, but I'm just doing something wrong, like not lining up the key with the keyhole properly. Usually something ridiculously stupid. I'm basically an idiot savant with these things: I always get the hard things but can't manage basic tasks.
Rather than say, "well, I finished two games... well, three, guess I don't have to worry about anything else this month," I kept going. Because when you think you've filled a quota and don't need to do more, that's when you start slacking off. Like, if you tell yourself you want to write one page of your novel a day and it's okay if you miss a day because you'll just write two tomorrow, and before you know it it's a month later and you need 30 pages of text. Slacking off means I could say, "Well, I don't need to play games for three more months" and then four months goes by and I'm behind, and then five months, and so on. It's a dangerous train of thought. I'd rather just get more done than think of myself ahead of the game (ha ha).
At a San Diego Comic-Con whenever ago, but probably 2009, I purchased Sam & Max: Season One for the PC. I started that one up, figuring that the length of each episode was probably about two hours, just like The Walking Dead. And I was roughly correct, though episode 1 took me three hours instead, probably due to getting re-acclimated to point-and-click adventure games and learning where everything was in the world. After episode 1 I averaged two hours per episode. I rarely needed to consult a walkthrough, except for those times as in what I said earlier about knowing the answer but missing some vital, obvious piece of info. Starting with episode 3 I hooked it up to the TV because it was easier and because I could, and around the end of that Ian started playing with me, which was nice, but frustrating since I now had to wait for him to be around to finish the game. So it was a delay. We finished the game yesterday and I liked it, though Ian got a bit mad when I pulled out the walkthrough, rather than let the two of us argue over a particular puzzle. Playing adventure games as a group can be... frustrating.
Over the weekend a friend/co-worker/employee of mine gifted me Papers, Please, so I installed that on Saturday and generally burned through it quickly. It looks like it will take most people four hours to complete. I made a lot of mistakes and was not the fastest, but I'll cut myself some slack since I was playing it for the first time, and on a touchpad. Touchpads are terrible for gaming, obviously, but sometimes I do it anyway because I'm too lazy to get off the couch and use a mouse. I played Portal with a touchpad, and got through 12 boards before I had to surrender and find a mouse and set up on an actual table. Papers, Please isn't actually fun. But it is interesting, and addicting. I got a "bad" ending when I ran out of money and they sent me to prison. Then I backed up a few days (the game is great in how it lets you pick up the game from any day you've already completed, so you have a little more wiggle room to rectify mistakes and get certain achievements). Checking a FAQ I saw I was almost at the end of the game anyway, so when it became obvious I was not going to get the magical "please join the revolution" ending, I took the "flee the country" ending with my remaining family. I've decided to play it from the very beginning again, to try and do a little better, especially after reading a FAQ that had some useful tips on how to scan documents and spot forgeries and which people prompt certain actions/rewards.
And that's pretty much where I am now. Given that we're now in the last two days of the year I don't foresee finishing any new games, thus I make this post. I'm thinking of making next month a Final Fantasy month, finishing XIII and also Revenant Wings, which I also played this month but neglected to mention in this post. I'll talk about that one next time, I have words for it.
December 2013
Games finished: 5
Worlds saved: 2
Regimes toppled: 0
Pokémon caught: Fuck all if I know