Thursday, January 17, 2008

Too many games

I've been playing video games since the arcade days of Space Invaders and Asteroids. I spent hundreds of dollars in quarters and tokens. I had the Atari 2600 and finished every game I owned. I'll never forget my finest moment: completing Raiders of the Lost Ark where you had to use BOTH joysticks to win. On my Commodore 64, I finished most of the classic Infocom text adventures: Zork I, II, III, Planetfall, Deadline, etc. And, like everyone else, I patiently waited for the next game to come out so I could play and finish it.
Today, I'm convinced that you can never really FINISH a game. I finished the single player campaign on Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4, but with multiplayer and achievements, I'll never complete everything. And as I make a list of all my 360 and DS games, I get depressed because there are so few that I'll ever finish. But then I remember when I played those old games I was a teenager and had a lot of free time to play. Today, I work and have a family, so time is limited. Sure I have the money for tons of games, but little time to play them. So it seems that I'm more of a game collector than a game player. Today, it's not a question of IF there are any good games out. It's a question of which ones do you play and which ones do you, as my friend Darrell says, "Let slide on by."
It's the cruel joke that applies to so many things: when you have to the time, you don't have the money; when you have the money, you don't have the time.

1 comment:

Darrell said...

You make the time for what's important to you. i finish mine, fool.