Towards the later part of last year, I finally started paying attention to Giant Bomb, watching their Quick Looks, listening to the podcasts, etc, enough that I actually upgraded to their premium subscription for more videos (I love watching Unprofessional Fridays!).

Apart from just being entertained, it has flooded my life with video games that look extremely cool and fun (I'm currently watching their Enter the Gungeon Quick Look, and it looks fantastic!). Combined with getting a Surface Pro 4, which can actually handle most games at least acceptably, and the problem is even worse! Obviously a large part of the job Giant Bomb does is playing games--most normal people will never play as many games as they do.

I think Enter the Gungeon looks extremely fun (and it's certainly cheap enough at $15). A few Steams sales means I have a decent games backlog. I just bought Dirt Rally. Dark Souls 3 comes out tomorrow night. I still have an unfinished Uncharted Collection and Bloodborne. I actually really want to play some more Destiny on the PS4. Etc, etc, etc. Having so many games currently in my catalog makes it seems stupid to buy new stuff so often, to the point that it almost makes me feel guilty. I passed on Hyper Light Drifter (although a large part of that is just deciding to wait until it hits PS4), and I'll be passing on Enter the Gungeon for now.

There's so many great games being released all the time now, and it feels like I have to miss out on some of them, and that sucks.

All of that is sort of a meandering way to ask: how do you consume games? Do you pass on games that look really fun, just on the basis of not having time? Do you feel bad about buying a game and then not finishing it before moving on? How do you reconcile spending so much time playing one game (Destiny) at perhaps the neglect of other cool games?

Credit goes to Paul Gelardi in 2003 for the video I took this clip from.

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Increase your standards. You will never have the problem of too many games to play unless you are insanely busy. I choose to pretty much play one game at a time these days.

Games are always coming out constantly, and you're just aware of them now because you're talking to people in the industry that plays anything they can get their hands on. I'm not hyper aware of most of these indie games, mostly just what people post on these forums. I'm not hurting for more time to play them.

I don't have a backlog of games to play. If I'm bored and I don't have a game I'm interested in, I listen to the radio to catch up on the dramas and comedies I may have missed through the week, or read a book.

EDIT: I actually do keep up with indie gaming at a casual level, so I get a cursory glance at the games and most of the time they're not for me. I don't just play anything that comes out. It had to hit a certain level of minimum interest for me to spend time on it.

Unfortunately, Destiny has grabbed me by the throat and forces a lot of gaming time out of me. Every time I say I'm gonna stop, there's a Nightfall with modifiers I like, or the reset provides promise from the Prison, or Xur finally sells something I want, etc.

I still grab and complete bounties daily, even though I have 2,987 motes of light! Destiny is like...play work!

But I try my best to reach out to other games. The saddest thing? I've downloaded over 30 Games With Gold and with the exception of Rayman Legends, I haven't started a single one.

But to answer your question, I try to play games one at a time--starting one and only moving on when I've beaten it.

Achievements make that so much harder nowadays. Back in the Sonic eras, you played from beginning to end, and that was it! I've "beaten" Halo 5 multiple times now, and I'm still only 46% done with the achievements. Don't even get me started on the MCC.

Right now if anyone's interested--the game I'm currently chipping away at is Saints Row IV: Re-Elected/Saint's Row: Gat out of Hell. Next on my list would be Dead or Alive 5: Last Round(someone please kill me) and then Titanfall.

I'll play with you.

Towards the later part of last year, I finally started paying attention to Giant Bomb, watching their Quick Looks, listening to the podcasts, etc, enough that I actually upgraded to their premium subscription for more videos (I love watching Unprofessional Fridays!).

Apart from just being entertained, it has flooded my life with video games that look extremely cool and fun (I'm currently watching their Enter the Gungeon Quick Look, and it looks fantastic!). Combined with getting a Surface Pro 4, which can actually handle most games at least acceptably, and the problem is even worse! Obviously a large part of the job Giant Bomb does is playing games--most normal people will never play as many games as they do.

I think Enter the Gungeon looks extremely fun (and it's certainly cheap enough at $15). A few Steams sales means I have a decent games backlog. I just bought Dirt Rally. Dark Souls 3 comes out tomorrow night. I still have an unfinished Uncharted Collection and Bloodborne. I actually really want to play some more Destiny on the PS4. Etc, etc, etc. Having so many games currently in my catalog makes it seems stupid to buy new stuff so often, to the point that it almost makes me feel guilty. I passed on Hyper Light Drifter (although a large part of that is just deciding to wait until it hits PS4), and I'll be passing on Enter the Gungeon for now.

There's so many great games being released all the time now, and it feels like I have to miss out on some of them, and that sucks.

All of that is sort of a meandering way to ask: how do you consume games? Do you pass on games that look really fun, just on the basis of not having time? Do you feel bad about buying a game and then not finishing it before moving on? How do you reconcile spending so much time playing one game (Destiny) at perhaps the neglect of other cool games?

I actually keep a backlog on Asana where I manage my work/personal task lists. I keep an eye on the games I'm playing socially (Rocket League, Destiny, The Division, and Halo 5) and most importantly keep track of which games I specifically want to play (even down to creating sub-tasks for what I do in them).

This way I'm always making progress on trying out/finishing all the games I intend on while avoiding choice paralysis.

It also helps to do what Cody mentioned, raise your standards. If you're ever playing a game that you're not enjoying, check it right off and move on.

If left completely to my own devices, I tend to be the kind of person who plays very few games each year, but puts loads of hours into the games I do play. I have the most fun with a game when I am really able to dig deeply into it, get better over time, see all that it has to offer. However, I do listen to a lot of gaming podcasts, and I follow a lot of game journalists on twitter, which can cause me to feel like I'm "missing out" from time to time. So I'll go through these phases where I'll buy loads of games over a 6 month period because 'everybody' is talking about them. But every time I do this, I end up feeling like I've wasted a whole bunch of time and money.

This whole process has caused me to re-evaluate the way I allow games coverage to effect me.

Besides differences in personal taste, I've come to realize that the nature of the job for those in games media puts them into a drastically different situation than the one I'm in. They have to play a ton of games. And because they have to play so many freaking games, they often see similar themes, stories, and gameplay mechanics over and over and over. Because of this, any game that stands out as being just a little bit "unique" or "different" is very exciting for them. But for me, that's just not the case. Most of the games media might not be excited about another Gears of War, for example, because they play a million 3rd person cover shooters every year. But I don't, and Gears is still the best 3rd person cover shooter (mechanically speaking), so I'm totally looking forward to the next one. I think that's why we see so much crying from the media for "new IP! new IP!" where as I personally am far more excited about the average sequel because I know that sequels are a) usually built on a great foundation (crappy games don't often get sequels), and b) sequels usually iterate and improve on the original, leading to a more refined final product.

Besides that, I've come to realize that the entire process of covering and reviewing games can completely change the way someone experiences it. I get review codes for a fair number of games these days, but I refuse to force myself into the typical review/embargo loop because it destroys the experience for me. For example, I played AC4 Black Flag that way, and it nearly ruined the game for me. Being in such a hurry to play through a game like that runs completely counter to the fun that it offers. I rushed through the "critical path" so I could finish the game in time to write a review before the embargo lifted, and came away feeling exhausted and off-put. A month later, I decided to replay the game at my own pace, and it became one of my all-time favorite games. I still had the same criticisms, but I was able to tap into the real joy of the game (pointing your ship in a random direction and exploring the open waters) in a way that simply wasn't possible during the crunch of the review cycle. It hit me: this is how every single video game gets reviewed. I basically stopped reading reviews at that point, and have not gone back to them.

I much prefer listening to podcasts like the Bombcast or Rebel FM because I find them to be far more natural. You get several people who are all in the middle of playing a game just talking about their experiences so far, without the pressure to put an authoritative stamp on it. If I hear enough people talking about a game in a way that makes it sound particularly interesting or exciting, then I might check it out (that's what lead me to play Journey and The Last of Us).

I rarely play on the 360--my controllers are still busted, and I'm close to just giving up and buying the new ones. They're all busted and they negatively impact the way I play. So I'm almost always on the XBone.

It's really interesting you see yourself as different from the gaming podcasts and game "journalists" out there. I wonder if you're unusual in the internet gaming media in that regard. It seems like most people talking about games online go through a game a week just to find something to talk about.

It's really interesting you see yourself as different from the gaming podcasts and game "journalists" out there. I wonder if you're unusual in the internet gaming media in that regard. It seems like most people talking about games online go through a game a week just to find something to talk about.

In a lot of ways, I'm in a very unusual situation. I don't have deadlines, and we do a podcast whenever we have stuff we want to talk about. So I have almost zero pressure to find ways to fill time. I don't know if anyone who listens to our show cares, but I personally feel very strongly about approaching the show as a gamer, rather than someone who's job it is to cover games. By which I mean I never want to talk about something because it's my job to talk about it.

This way I'm always making progress on trying out/finishing all the games I intend on while avoiding choice paralysis.

I guess that works, but I just can't look at gaming in that way. That makes it seem like work, almost.

It also helps to do what Cody mentioned, raise your standards. If you're ever playing a game that you're not enjoying, check it right off and move on.

Enjoyment has always been my only standard. I don't care as much as some people seem to about whether a game is actually "good," so long as I am enjoying the experience overall, whether from gameplay or story or just interesting art design, whatever. For as many games as I do play and try to make time for, I don't give games all that much of a grace period to pull me in. Most games are lucky to get an hour of play time if it's not pretty immediately appealing.

In a lot of ways, I'm in a very unusual situation. I don't have deadlines, and we do a podcast whenever we have stuff we want to talk about. So I have almost zero pressure to find ways to fill time. I don't know if anyone who listens to our show cares, but I personally feel very strongly about approaching the show as a gamer, rather than someone who's job it is to cover games. By which I mean I never want to talk about something because it's my job to talk about it.

I actually do care about and appreciate that quite a bit. I mean, there's a million gaming podcasts out there from every review site on the planet. I don't listen to IGN's podcasts because it's just another opinion from someone paid to review games. I guess at the end of the day, the folks at Giant Bomb are paid to play and review games, too, but they approach it much better, and they don't seem to rush to hit deadlines for reviews like the major review sites do. And they're podcasts are definitely more laid back, let's just talk about games affairs, and that's why I like them.

I also don't give much attention to written reviews--I still skim through them, but it's honestly much easier, and much, much more beneficial in judging whether I'd enjoy playing a certain game, to just watch a Giant Bomb Quick Look (or one of the million Let's Plays on YouTube of that game).

I get in about three or four games a year, depending on my wallet, but that's actually a comfortable number for me as I tend to pour many hours into those I do buy. I'm currently losing my life to Fallout 4, one of my favorite games in recent years and a game that makes me excited just thinking about. A 100 hours in and I'm STILL impressed by the color palette mastery! Destiny got most of my game-hours last year. Arkham Knight was second I think.

There was a sweet spot on the 360 a few years back when there were a variety of game demos consistently being released. I could try a heap of games and then invest in one for the next three months. Sadly, that frequency dropped off and I feel like there's a lot less demos on the One (just free games that want your wallet). Since I find modern game journalism irritating (my subscription to EGM growing up is a sweet memory now), and I hate watching people play games on Twitch, all I really have is trailers and word-of-mouth. But thankfully that's still enough to fulfill the time and money I have for games right now. Because of Raga and others on this board, I got Life Is Strange for Christmas and really enjoyed the first hour I played (when I couldn't ever really get into the Telltale Games). I'm excited to play the rest of that and Tomb Raider 2-2 later this year when Fallout 4 finally causes me to lose my house/girlfriend/etc. Even my dog has started growling at Dogmeat, lately...

(Oops, forgot to explain the 'out of order' bit. I played Republic Commander LAST year for example, still got Shadow of Colossus that needs to be played, and I have a few PS1 games I'm eyeing for the future. I only wish I could buy The Misadventures of Tron Bonne for less than a $175 and finish my MegaMan Legends collection...but alas...)

I have a copy of Tron Bonne back in Michigan I think. If I find it you can borrow it.

I have a copy of Tron Bonne back in Michigan I think. If I find it you can borrow it.

Let me know. :)

I'll let you borrow this... ruler?

The only time I've ever even seen it in person:

And all the artwork had been printed out on crappy paper and stuck in it.

Nope it's the real deal. Soonest I go back to Michigan would be the summer though. Remind me about this in July.

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Was talking about it very recently with stabbim (I think). Much like you, I used to gorge on metric tonnes of 360 demos, most very high quality and quite representative of the actual games.

The heck happened to those days?

The heck happened to those days?

The cynical side of me says that publishers/developers decided it cost to much money and resources to make a demo, and ripping people off with half-completed, messes of games keeps working, so why would they bother?

Extra Credits on demos from 2012

TLDR: It takes resources and it may encourage people to not buy the game.