Today I'm gonna ramble about the problem with backlogs. Well my backlog specifically, but hopefully some of what I have to say might be insightful or helpful to someone else so they maybe don't make a similar mistake. Cause I've just kind of realized recently that my Steam library alone is so big that I'm not sure I could complete every game I have if I lived to be 100. The short version of how this happened is that when you know you'll never make enough money to buy your own house but rent leaves you extra spending money you can do stupid things with that money. But the long version and a better explanation of why my backlog got so big...
When I was a kid obviously I just played what I could. I would occasionally save up my allowance but aside from that I would usually get like 1 game for Christmas and 1 game for my birthday. So throughout the NES, SNES, and PlayStation 1 I got to play a lot of great games but there were also always those games I didn't get to play which years down the road would make me feel I needed to play those games even though there were tons of new games to play.
But the amount of games I missed as a kid was nothing compared to what I skipped during the PS2 era because from the year 2000 to probably about 2007 or 2008 I was addicted to MMOs. Most notably Everquest and City of Heroes. I played many others briefly but would never stick with them in the long run. This caused me to skip a lot of PS2 era games with the exceptions of Disgaea 1, anime games, wrestling games, and Dynasty Warriors.
Then the Xbox 360 came out and gave me a new addiction instead of MMOs. Achievements. There were so many mediocre or crap games I bought just because I knew I could get achievements out of the game. Overall wasn't that bad at first cause it mostly just made me play games I already liked a bit longer. Back in the day I'd never do an optional dungeon in an RPG because in my opinion what was the point if it's harder than the boss you have to beat to complete the game? Achievements made it so there was a point. This didn't make me build a massive backlog yet but it gave me another reason to own games.
The real kicker was when I started my original path to content creation around 2009 or 2010. I can't really check the exact year because Blip tv and my old Youtube channel don't exist anymore for me to check dates. But at this time I got in the stupid mindset of buy all these games because you can review them eventually. Also I would now be seeing other people praising games as masterpieces. So achievements, the possibility of reviewing a game, and a game being a big thing among people online... caused me to start buying a bunch of games that were outside of my wheelhouse that I otherwise would not even touch. My thing was basically fighting games (which I treat like single player games), Dynasty Warriors, Turn Based RPGs, and a licensed game here and there based on an IP I really like such as Dragon Ball or back in the day wrestling.
But the thing that really blew up my backlog was getting into PC gaming a bit before 2010. Steam sales are still big now but back then things were crazy because you had the flash sales which would put something at an extremely marked down price. Would buy all kinds of games just because they were insanely cheap. Oh this indie game is only one dollar. Oh this Triple A game that is normally 60 dollars is 5. I bought all kinds of random crap just because it was cheap.
I did this crap for over a decade and hype around Nintendo games also caused me to get a Wii U and Switch in spite of me REALLY not being into platformers. I can honestly say with Nintendo IPs and also Sonic the Hedgehog, I actually like the characters more than I like the games themselves. But all these games I got on hype from other people, I didn't hate Bioshock but I definitely wouldn't have bought it if I was just buying games that really fell into my general realm of interest. Because conversely I tried Dishonored and something about the gameplay just was meh to me really early on and I stopped within like the fist half hour.
There was a point before I completely snapped out of this that I did slow down. I realized that I had to at the very least stop buying games from genres that weren't my cup of tea with rare exceptions where the concept got me the right way like Nefarious being a platformer where you play as the princess kidnapping super villain. I'd massively go out of my way to clear out my wishlist of everything I didn't absolutely want.
But what finally snapped me out of this completely is the past couple years I played Baldur's Gate 3, Dragon Ball Sparking Zero, Mortal Kombat 1, Street Fighter 6, and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. For once I bought all of these games when they came out and if I didn't play them immediately, I played them soon after release. They weren't games I just let sit in my backlog until I just randomly decided I was in the mood to play them and I realized why... these are games I would have played before all the things that caused me to buy random games left and right. Baldur's Gate 3 and Expedition 33 both gave me flashbacks to how some older games used to make me feel. Street Fighter 6 was an excellent fighter and while Sparking Zero and Mortal Kombat 1 had issues with them, I at least didn't buy them because of achievements or something someone else said about them... though I did get every single achievement in all these games except BG3.
But also late last year I had some random health issues that kind of reminded me, Oh yeah, I'm mortal. Nothing super serious, so don't worry. Just some false alarm scenarios that made me think about the fact that I'm 45 and got way too many games. Not that I don't still love games but this caused me to pretty much immediately sell off my Nintendo stuff. I already kind of hated the Switch's hardware and I really only had it because of the Bayonetta games where I ended up hating Bayonetta 3. I still have an Xbox but I mainly use that for backwards compatibility of games that never made it to PC as well as my blu rays and streaming video.
So a lot of my game purchases have kind of come to a halt. Only things I care too much about this year are a couple fighting games and that new Scott Pilgrim game because I'll play that with friends. And now I'm trying to clean up my backlog and decide what I do and don't actually care about playing. I got a few series that are in my to do list. Yakuza, some of the pre-Shadows Assassin's Creed games, also Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest because while I loved both of those as a kid there are still a lot of random entries I've never played for one reason or another.
Granted a lot of this has room to change if something crazy happened like I won the lottery. But overall I'm gonna try to be more... sane with my game purchasing choices going forward. Because I also have a movie and tv show backlog of blu rays and stuff to watch. But let's be honest, that stuff can go faster then a lengthy game. But it is also ironic that me getting the Black Clover video game super cheap on a Steam sale, prompted me to force myself to watch the anime and now it's one of my favorite animes... only to go back and consider starting the game and realize it was basically a multiplayer hero shooter just without all the microtransactions and you can play against bots.
In any case it's been a weird trek for me lately. Hopefully I said something helpful in there somewhere and until next time, happy gaming.
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