Confessions of a Non-Gaming Gamer (k3nshi)

Firstly: Happy New Year.

The start of the new year of course means my holidays are drawing to a close and it'll soon be back to the grind of work. So a quick and self-indulgent time for a recap of my gaming year:

Games Bought (not an exhaustive list):

• Beyond Good & Evil (Xbox)


• Homeworld 2 (PC)


• Star Wars:KOTOR (Xbox)


• Red Dead Revolver (Xbox)


• Donkey Kong vs Mario (GBA)


• Singstar (PS2)


• Spiderman 2 (Xbox)


• War Craft 3 (PC)


• Viewtiful Joe (PS2)


• Psi-Ops


• Burnout 3


• Halo 2

I suspect there are also some I've forgotten too.

Games I Played to any Real Degree:

• Donkey Kong vs Mario


• Burnout 3


• Halo 2

I think the notable points of the games that managed to get my time:

• LIVE support. Halo 2 online rocks. BO3 rocks online, if you can get past the broken lobby code.


• Provide short, bursty gameplay.


• Brilliantly tuned difficulty curves.

Noteable ContenDAHS include: Psi-Ops, Spiderman 2 and Red Dead Revolver.

The amount of games I bought, compared to how much time I spent playing them makes me seriously question how many games I'll bother to buy in 2005. I'm aiming to not buy another game for at least 6 months (although Darwinia could blow this plan away if it will run on my underpowered laptop...). Of course, if games developers spent time smoothing that difficulty curve to pefection and provided a built in level skip feature (like scene selection on DVDs), I wouldn't look back at so many of my gaming purchases and think of so much wasted money.

It's not that I think any of the games I bought were poor (I just return the ones I don't like, such as GTA:VC) - most of them just failed to capture enough of my (precious) free time.