Amanda's Blog

What I Won’t Finish

At Tap we have been cataloging our backlogs all year. I’ve discovered, much like the rest of the crew, that I buy more games than I actually play, let alone finish.

Then there comes the problem of games that you buy, and play, but that can’t actually be finished, in any real sense.

I am still a few cubes shy of the “real” ending in Fez.

I’ve picked up Civilization V, which I owned for a while, but hadn’t actually gotten around to playing. A friend wrote a fairly nice Beginners’ Primer this year that I finally got around to checking out this month. I think I’ll count it as “beaten” if I win a round even once against the computer, because, that’s something, right?

I got stuck in Batman: Arkham City. Not because the game itself is hard, but because the Riddler makes me crazy to find all his hidden stuff. At some point I want to write at greater length about this frustration. For now, I’ve sort of tabled the game.

I also now have A Valley Without Wind, which many of my friends are playing, but which I am assuming can also not be finished in any real sense.

I am going to do quite poorly in the Log of Shame this month. But really, what’s “done” mean anyway?

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2 responses to “What I Won’t Finish”

  1. Quinn Avatar
    Quinn

    One of my favorite rules for finishing books (well, the only one I can think of, actually) is the 50-page rule: you should give every book 50 pages to hook you before you give up on it. But once you turn 50, you start taking away a page for each year that you age. So 40 pages at 60, 30 pages at 70, etc.

    I wonder if games wouldn’t benefit from a system like that. But it’s hard to quantify games the same way. I guess you could go by hours, but I still think that’s an iffy way to measure a game experience. I find 10 minutes of a crazy top-down shooter way more draining than 10 hours of a meandering game like Skyrim, for example.

    Lately I just stop playing games when I get bored of them; as much as I find Fez endearing, for example, its gameplay really isn’t hooking me. Maybe you need other people to give you milestones – you might tell me to at least wait until X point before I give up on the game, since clearly you enjoyed it. Does Fez have anything like that? And if not, how would you measure it?

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  2. Amanda Lange Avatar
    Amanda Lange

    I “finished” Fez in the sense that I got the standard ending, not just the best ending. So that’s a perfectly serviceable milestone.

    I “finished” Civ 5 in the sense that I got a domination victory versus the AI opponents, but I’d like to see the other victory types also. But that also is a milestone. Perhaps less of one. There’s a lot more game in there.

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