My Problem.

So you're here and wondering "Why on Earth does this bloke have a 'backlog' of games and why does he need a blog to write about his experiences with them? Perhaps I should take a short post to explain.

Around the tender age of 6 I had a Sega Megadrive II on which I used to play Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Streets of Rage and Aliens religiously. I had no clue what was going on, but somewhere within that cacophony of pixelated colours and sound effects, an addiction was born.

A couple of years later, I was bought a Playsation by my parents for Christmas, who at the time did not realise the extent to my obsession. So bless them, they set up a scavenger hunt around the house where present by present I found Playstation game after Playstation game, shuddering with excitement and pure unadulterated glee.

The last present I remember very well; it was hidden behind one of the curtains next to my front door and was a large box wrapped in red Rudolph paper, slightly protruding from behind the fabric. Instantly I knew what it was, but from all the sweating and anticipation of running around the house, tearing open the smaller packages that were useless to me until I had the main machine, I didn't dare dream that I actually had the ticket to untold worlds of entertainment until the controller was in my hand and I heard the disc whirring around in the little grey box.

Of course when I opened it, the floodgates holding back my excitement exploded with such ferocity that any hope of repairing them were impossible. They might as well have given the job to all the king's horses and all the king's men. I'd imagine that my reaction was akin to this:

(Just replace the words with "Playstation" and you get the idea.)

Now although a nice but relatively boring story, I believe it had a great impact on my relationship with entertainment today. After experiencing such games as the Oddworld series, Final Fantasy VII, Croc and Rayman; not to name many, many others on the Playstation, I began to become amazed at how these 'games' were my portal to different worlds and experiences that weren't possible or desirable to occur in real life.

They were a constant source of amazement and escapism throughout my childhood, teenage years and still are today; a constant, an escape and a shelter when things are bad - giving me a sense of awe whenever I manage to pick up (and stick with) a great title.

But that is the problem.

I'm not sure when or why, but my habit got out of control. I became fickle, I'm not sure whether it started because of video gaming, or began elsewhere and leaked into my leisure time; but I started buying games en masse, picking them up, playing them for a few hours, declaring them the best games I've ever played and then never going back to them. Leaving them incomplete and me with a sense of emptiness due to thinking of the "should've, would've and could've"'s.

No matter what I did, I could never bring myself to go back and finish the games apart from on rare circumstances such as the Assassins Creed series and the Uncharted games; meaning my list of owned games and list of games I'd completed or merely played became severely imbalanced and in some cases affected my happiness.

My once proud shelf of games that I looked to for fond memories became a platform for self torment and a testament to my inability to see things through to the end, doing so for years until we come to 2 weeks ago when I decided that enough was enough.

I set up a database which you can find here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ApEcDxX7XYTEdGR3LU1URzkyZUNyZU52cjhmSXBfWEE&usp=sharing

This tracks my journey and allows me to stay organised and tangibly see how I'm doing.

I'm obsessed with progress and systems; so to me, it's a way of settling two vices and getting value for money whilst being able to enjoy all of the experiences that I have missed out on by neglecting my purchases.

This side of things in terms of a blog, is a way of keeping me committed. If I feel like (or pretend) that someone is actually reading this and keeping a check on my progress, I am far more likely to succeed as for some reason I have a pathetic character trait that makes me care far too much about what people think about me.

So hopefully you've been able to gain a small insight on why i'm having to do this. It's a way of dealing with a few personality flaws whilst enjoying myself in the first place.

Finally, a small note to make is that although there is a cop out category in the database (Red with a strike through), I ensure that I always give the games a fair chance before I make a judgement and will make a full write-up on why I couldn't finish it.

Thanks for reading.