The Video Game Revue

My Gaming Habits

I received some fairly disparaging comments about my blog from a good friend of mine yesterday, although it should be understood that the comments were taken as disparaging and not necessarily intended as such. Today, I'm going to address them.

First off, I've been telling everyone that I know about Company of Heroes and how great it is. Obviously, Sunny isn't into it--she doesn't even play WarCraft III in spite of her 500+ hours of World of WarCraft game time, and if she was going to play any RTS at all, WarCraft III would certainly be it. You can add to that the fact that she is known to actively be disinterested in all things regarding World War II, including (but not limited to) documentaries, movies, books, and games. As for two of my buddies who actually do enjoy war games--Matt with whom I play The Operational Art of War, and Bumby with whom I used to play Korsun Pocket--I told them about how much I was loving Company of Heroes and they both picked it up immediately. They now love it as much as I do.

Anyway, so this one guy I told about Company of Heroes waved it off saying something to the effect that "but you say that about every game." Whaaaaat? Since when?

It is true that I rant about a lot of games that don't appeal to many of my friends. I'm in love with Street Fighter Anthology, for instance, and not many of my friends are. I love Tourist Trophy and the only other friend of mine who plays it is Matt. And my love for Disgaea and Digital Devil Saga is really only shared by Fritzkrieg. By and large, however, I don't think that I hype up that many games. Perhaps I sound more positive than I intend to, but when I talk about Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney or Suikoden V, I mean to give the distinct impression that these are interesting games rather than great ones. They are worth checking out if you have the time and there is a distinct possibility that you would make a personal connection with them and they would become favourites of yours, but I don't mean to say that they're instant classics or anything.

Perhaps that doesn't cover exactly what makes it sound like I say that "every" game is great. The only other explanation I can come up with is that most of the games I bother to mention to people happen to be the really worthwhile ones. Here on the blog, I make an effort to cover a wider base--to talk about most of the games that I'm playing whether they're very good or not (hey, that reminds me, I should write about SiN: Episodes)--but I'm a far cry from a professional game critic. I tend to talk about the games that I like the most because those are the ones that I spend the most time playing.

This brings me to point #2 that my good friend brought up, which has to do with RPG games. Console RPGs are pretty much my all-time favourite game genre, but it is true that I don't have the kind of single-minded dedication to them as I once had. I draw your attention to exhibit A:

Joystiq's "Picture It": The First Paradox of Gaming

Like the above article suggests, when I was a kid I had tons of time for gaming and relatively little money. Now I'm 26 with a solid career, a wife, and no kids. I have tons of money for gaming and relatively little time.

When I was 14 or so, I played Mario Kart for hundreds of hours. The reasoning behind this is two-fold: Mario Kart was the only new game that I was able to afford for the better part of a year, and I had at least 20 hours per week to spare on video games.

Last year I picked up Mario Kart DS and immediately loved it; I even went so far as to call it the best Mario Kart game ever made. To this day I don't think I've played the game for more than 10 hours total. The reasoning behind that is similarly two-fold: since getting Mario Kart DS, I've easily purchased two dozen other gaming titles, many of which are as deserving of my attention, and I no longer have hours and hours every week to spare for gaming. I have to fight hard to make time for gaming, and the games that I own fight similarly hard to get attention from me.

Now I have to ask the question, did I necessarily love video games more as a kid than I do now? In some ways, perhaps I did. But I don't think that it's entirely reasonable to argue that the fact that I was more fanatically devoted to a smaller subset of games back then is proof that I was a more hardcore gamer. If I had had access to as many video games as a kid as I do now, I would certainly have spread my time too thin on them in much the same way that I currently do (except that I would have had more time to go around at least.) An important thing to realise is that no reasonable amount of time could cover all of the new games that I've tried my hand at in the last few years.

This brings me right back to my friend's comment, which was something along the lines of how ridiculous it is that I buy so many RPGs that I know I don't have the time to play. He said that I remind him of a shop-a-holic who repeatedly buys clothes that never get worn. Ouch!

I will say this: my impulse spending problem is well known, and it is linked to my stressful career. It's generally been the case that I've been the most vulnerable to impulse purchases during the times that I've been under the most pressure at work and have had the least amount of time and energy to myself, and at times the problem has definitely gotten out of hand. This means that, paradoxially, I often end up doing the most game shopping during times in my life when I have the least amount of time to spend actually playing games. I realise that this is a problem for me, and it has been difficult to cope with.


(pictured above is a subset of my rampant game collection)

I understand perfectly that one could easily get the impression of me as being somebody who buys a lot of games and calls himself "hardcore" without actually taking the time to play games a whole lot. I have to argue against that accusation most strongly. My time may be spread around such that many of the games that I own don't get the kind of attention that they should, and I really could benefit from making a habit out of renting most games before I make a frenzied decision to buy them, but I do play a lot of games, and not just in passing.

For example, yes I did purchase Dragon Quest VIII a while back and have come nowhere near finishing that game (barely even scratching the surface of it, in fact), but I would easily have finished it if it weren't for the following:


(from a screencap taken this morning)

Five days on WoW! That 120 hours right there. I probably could have finished Dragon Quest VIII and Disgaea 2 in that amount of time--or pretty darned close. The vast majority of that time, by the way, was within the last month. So my good friend who seems to question my love for RPGs may be able to hold the fact that he finished Dragon Quest VIII recently and I didn't, but consider that he doesn't even have a World of WarCraft account. Given that, I don't think it's reasonable to say that I'm not an RPG lover... or at the very least, it's not reasonable for him to say it.

I spend quite a bit of doing "extra-curricular" gaming. Counter-Strike is an old staple that I still partake of with Matt, and I also fire up Day of Defeat once in a while too. Just last night, Matt and I were playing Instagib CTF on Unreal Tournament 2004.


(screen cap of "slutbucket" Matt making the winning cap on CTF-ElecFields)

And yet in spite of the amount of time that I put into games like the aforementioned FPSes, RTSes, fighting games, etc., I still manage to finish some very major titles. In the 18 months or so, I did polish off Resident Evil 4, Metal Gear Solid 3, Katamari Damashi, and Shadow of the Colossus very rapidly. I also very slowly slogged my way through Disgaea, and I'm very close to the end of the first Digital Devil Saga. I won't deny that there are many games that I stall on and will seemingly never manage to finish (I'm _still_ waiting on Zelda 64 and Xenogears), but there are plenty of examples of games that I whip straight through in spite of stress from work and the wild distractions of always having so many games on the side.

I know that I'm being awfully over-sensitive to this topic, but it's something that has come up before and something that I feel will continue to come up if I don't speak out against it. And if you're going to criticize me for buying too many games and subtly suggest that I'm not as hardcore of a gamer as I make claims to be, then maybe you should at least brush up on your Tetris skills before bringing that on. Boo-yah!

posted by Parappa @ 10:24 AM