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Making 'Eventually' Happen: Operation Backlog Obliteration.

Alex

Alex

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Through a combination of bundles, sales, and times of poor impulse control, I've accumulated quite the large "stack"of unplayed PS4 and PS5 games. With my PS+ subscription expiring, and my financial situation reaching a point where purchasing games outright is not tenable, I've decided to go through some games that I have either never played or spent a very small amount of time with.

My first venture was Dead Rising, which I never really played at length despite owning as part of the Capcom and Sega Playstation Humble Bundle from 2018.
I stuck with this one long enough to get through a run that made it to the end of the 72 hours, then decided I had enough fun. I have the sequel, but I think I'll table that for now while I play some different games.

I also tried Alien Isolation for the same time from that same bundle, but it didn't click with me. I don't think I like that style of first-person survival game; either it's too hard and the creepy crawly kills you too easily, or you turn the difficulty down and turn the game into a walking sim. That might work for something like SOMA, but not here.

I previously have tried to play Resident Evil and didn't really enjoy it, so I'm forgoing Code: Veronica for that reason.

Next I finally finished the 20th Anniversary remake of Another World, one of the more revolutionary games of its time. I don't think I could have beaten this without a guide, even with a guide some of the sequences required a level of precision that seemed unfair.

This one I think was actually cross-buy with the Vita; games that fall under this umbrella I don't necessarily feel bad about skipping, since I've clearly already put some time into them. That's why I'm forgoing stuff like Rollers of the Realm, Super Meat Boy, Shovel Knight, and Saturday Morning RPG.

I did try the Wayforward Boy and his Blob, figuring that it would run and play better on the PS4, but I mostly found interacting with the blob to be kind of tedious. A lot of getting myself where I needed to be and then waiting around for the blob to come to me after calling for it a half-dozen times.
I thought my son would like it, but it's just a bit too hard for him. I don't know if that's because he doesn't have the patience to fail at a challenge a bunch of times without getting frustrating or because the textless cues are too hard to pick up on.

I thought Blood Bowl 2 was going to be a modern reimagining of Mutant Football League, and not a turn-based strategy with really itty-bitty text. This one was a quick one to throw on the "nope!" pile.

Now I am playing Doom (2016) and having a lovely time. I've decided that I'm going to play through the campaign and call it a day. Without PS+ I can't play multiplayer, and going through the levels with a guide to find all the collectables sounds tedious and un-fun, so I won't be aiming for getting the platinum trophy here.

I might need to look into some support though, because none of the character voices are audible despite showing up as subtitles.
 
Doom is infusing me with a triumphant feeling that I only ever get from video games; when you face a big scary demon head on and dodge all of its attacks while blasting it to pieces. I get a similar feeling second-hand from the prelude to the final boss fight with Fu from No More Heroes 3.

Travis: There we go! Those eyes, right there... the dumbass is turning into a beast!
FU: I'll kill you... I'll kill you... I'll KILL you...
Travis: Oooh, nice, scary eyes. That's what I wanna see! Come at me, KILL ME! Demons don't got SHIT on me!
FU: I'LL KILL YOU!!
Travis: You're getting real fucking crazy now. THAT'S WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT! AAAAAH!!!
 
That's credits on Doom! Since I don't have PS Plus, the multiplayer modes are sealed off for me. And since I am shut out from earning the platinum trophy by virtue of that, it means it's time to move on.

To Limbo which I'm not sure how I have a PS4 copy of! This is one I bought more than a decade ago to play on the PS3 and Vita, so I guess it was future cross-buy as well. Which is just swell of them.

This is a puzzle-platformer very much in the same trial by error vein as the aforementioned Another World.
 
Limbo is a very short game. What's the ending mean? I dunno!

Next up is Witcher 3: Wild Hunt! I bought this in 2018, but it comes with a free PS5 upgrade? Don't mind if I do.

Well, this is 80 GB so I'm not playing it tonight at any rate.
 
Oh, it's definitely not. I might be at this one a while. So much of what's on my list is games that I want to play, but get dissuaded at the longer runtimes.

But with PS+ not breathing down my neck saying "Here's a hundred games! Here's some new ones, but hurry some of these are going away!" the pressure to complete games quickly is gone. Now instead of trying to cram as much on my plate as possible, buffet-style, I'm free to enjoy something that takes a little longer.

Gwent seems fun.
 
Just updating to say that I am enjoying Witcher 3 more than my last attempt to play it; I've cranked the difficulty to the maximum due to there being a trophy for finishing the game that way, and it's led to some frustration in the early goings but also adds enough tension to the combat that I'm not bored.
 
Well this thread has inspired me to take some action towards whittling down my own backlog, using topsters to make a handy visual representation;

zrAO6Ii.png


Managed to whittle down everything actively on my Switch that I 1. have not beaten previous and 2. Have played enough of to know I love them.
 
Octopus Prime said:
Well this thread has inspired me to take some action towards whittling down my own backlog, using topsters to make a handy visual representation;

zrAO6Ii.png


Managed to whittle down everything actively on my Switch that I 1. have not beaten previous and 2. Have played enough of to know I love them.
Click to expand...

That's a good assortment of games, too! You'll have fun playing them!
 
See, I believe in one simple thing about humans, and that is that we do the things we want to do. So I'll tell you, my main driving question for whether to play something or mark it hidden from view is, "Do I want to play this?"

Have you ever been in a position where you've ordered something to eat that you don't want to have anymore? Maybe you ordered a size of ice cream too large, or the portions at a restaurant are too big to eat in a single sitting? Or maybe your milk went bad before you could finish the carton? It would be harmful to yourself to try and finish them anyway!

I think it's okay to take a similar viewpoint with games. I'm sure I thought I wanted to play the ports of the PS2 Star Ocean games when I bought them, and maybe when I get to them in my list I'll boot them up and actually enjoy them.

But if I don't, there's no shame in walking away.
 
Yeah I've DNF'd like 3-4 of the last 5 games I've played. I just get to a point where I'm like "I don't actually want to play this very much anymore," so I... don't!

I'm working through my backlog but not in a systematic or exhausting way, I'm just trying to play more games than I buy. DNFing something that didn't grab me is a pretty good way to get through the list, though! The longer it sat on the list before playing it, or if I got it for free, the less bad I feel for skipping it. One game I bought recently, even at half off, and still ended up DNFing, but I felt a lot worse about it.
 
My biggest problem is the point of actually "beating" a game is very vague for most of the games I play.
 
I usually use credits as a marker for that. If I hit credits and want to keep playing, I'll do that to clean up any loose achievements/side quests what have you.

Otherwise, I've borrowed a phrase from an gambling PSA: "When the fun stops, stop."
 
I was thinking about the concept of backlogs recently, and how my perspective on them has shifted in recent years. I used to feel like I had a big backlog - a list of games I skipped when they came out but I still wanted to go back to play. And it came with a lot of feelings of regret that I hadn't played XY and Z yet. And it is still the case that I want to play a lot of older games (more than ever), but I think of it less and less like a backlog.

I've been focusing almost totally on retro games in the last few years. At first I was replaying my favorites, but as time went on I started playing older games that were new to me. And for a lot of them I've been going back to the earliest games in series that I am only somewhat familiar with, and then playing through the series (or parts of it) in order. I'm also mixing in a lot of Pico-8 games and replaying older games that I previously started and abandoned part way through.

Because I haven't been focused on new games as much, and because I've been playing a lot of older and older feeling games and slowly progressing through series, it has a different feel. Instead of having a backlog where I feel like I've missed out on games or like I'm not keeping up, I feel like I'm starting from the roots and working forward. And because I'm not looking forward to new game releases or whatever game is popular now, I'm instead looking forward to playing the games I already have.

This wasn't an intentional change in perspective, it just came along with having more limited gaming time and trying to fit in shorter retro games where I could. But for whatever reason I feel like I've totally flipped my perspective on unplayed games. I'm now excited about having so many old but new-to-me games ahead of me.
 
Okay, I think I'm gonna get more serious about this, and it's because there's just too many new games that keep coming out while I still have other games I'm enjoying and haven't finished. I think I'm gonna try for a low-tech option to manage it and use like a paper planner with some sticky notes or index cards or something like that.

But, importantly I have to come up with some categories to manage the different "buckets" of games I've got going on. Here's what I've thought of so far:
  • Active games
    • Long length
    • Medium length
    • Short length
    • Low commitment games
  • Future games
    • want to play eventually
    • comes out soon
  • Unfinished but want to continue
  • Unfinished but not going back
"Low commitment games" is probably my biggest question mark here, because in my mind I'm thinking of that as like, arcade-y games or roguelites. But then, something like Streets of Rage 4 or Hades II also doesn't seem like it fits there, either. So maybe I need to be more precise in my mind for how I think about these kinds of games and how I'm wanting to engage with them. Like... what does it mean to me for a game like SoR4 to be finished?
 
I'm thinking something like Balatro would fit into that category well, in terms of games that you might not necessarily sit down and play until you've reached a state of "completion" (such as unlocking all the Playstation trophies) but rather as something that you would keep around until the mood strikes you to play it. Like an arcade game!
 
Ah geeze, so, initially I said I wanted to do a physical paper planner thing for this, but once I started writing out a list on my phone, it became apparent there were Too Many Games to track this easily without getting like, a white board, and that's a bit absurd. So! Either I a) Marie Kondo this list and really try to reduce it down to like 10 games at a time, or b) try a digital software option that has an infinite canvas kind of thing. I do truly want this to be like, a visual planner/organizer just because I think my brain would grasp it better as something more visual compared to the text list I wrote on my phone.
 
I would personally put games in a Google Docs spreadsheet and then you can have columns for your categorizations (length, future games, unfinished, etc). If the list is long then you can filter by category.

Until very recently, I was a stick with a game until its done person. But I've become if its not fun, stop playing it and move on person. Life is too short and there are too many great games in a variety of genres to try out.
 
It's true! As far as Witcher 3 goes, it's going. This is a biiiig game though.
 
How did you like Ace Combat? That's a series I've always been interested in, but never taken the plunge on.
 
I liked it a lot.

The plot is damn near incomprehensible unless you're deep in the weeds with the series (the two primary forces have nearly identical names and most of the radio chatter is hard to make out, even if you're playing with headphones and the characters in most cutscenes do not actually have any connection to your missions), but as far as being a video game about a plane that blows up the red dots on a radar screen is concerned, it's exceptional. Even on the Switch, it runs buttery smooth, missions are really varied and it looks fantastic.

Most versions of the game now includes the DLC, which gives you immediate access to planes that completely ruin the difficulty curve, but you can just... not use them. My only real complaint was that I was hoping for more battles against bonkers sci-fi super machines. There's *some*, but it's more of three different missions having you fight the same kind of gigantic super plane in wildly different circumstances.
 
I've taken to calling it a "library" these days as opposed to a backlog, although I do occasionally slip into the old terminology. But the point is that I shouldn't view the giant stack of games as things that I need to finish, but as options that I can take when the whim for a particular game hits.

Also, there's so many games that I love the idea of playing, but end up just not cottoning to them in the way that I'd hoped. I'd say most CRPGs fall into this category for me. I want to beat an actual Infinity Engine game, but don't stick with it long enough. Ironically, Pillars of Eternity is the only one of that style I've finished, but it's still not an actual IE game. (It was fun, though.)

Occasionally, though, I'll get through a game I bounced off of for years. Brave Fencer Musashi is a recent example. I also managed to push all the way through The Granstream Saga and enjoyed it as well. And that's to say nothing of games that I felt like absolutely sucked until they clicked, like King's Field IV.
 
Sarge said:
I've taken to calling it a "library" these days as opposed to a backlog, although I do occasionally slip into the old terminology. But the point is that I shouldn't view the giant stack of games as things that I need to finish, but as options that I can take when the whim for a particular game hits.
Click to expand...
That's helpful terminology.
 
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