Skip ahead to today where I realize that yes, games can be too long... especially when you have too many quality titles vying for your attention along with a myriad of adult activities. As individual titles they are not problematic, and given the right amount of attention, their challenges can be met and bested, but much like a fistfight, the more games you try to tackle at once, the less effective you are in all of them, so none of them get finished.
And when I say finished, I don't mean get 100% of everything done in the game... I mean, at least finish the main story arc in a satisfactory way. I mean, who has the time to get 100% in Gran Turismo 4 and 3 Grand Theft Autos and still have a life? I have too much of a good thing and it is just bringing down the quality of my play experience in general... Madden and Kratos and Katamari, oh my.
I think Clive Thompson at Wired and I are in the same book at least when it comes to this matter. He is also having trouble completing a lot of games as an adult, though I think our problems diverge somewhat so we occupy different pages of that book. He is having problems with individual titles and I am having problem with the whole library. Sometimes it feels like I am Burgess Meredith in "Time Enough at Last"... with such an abundance to play but not enough time to do anything.
When I think back, I used to buy the bargain bin games near the end of the production life of my other systems, well, most of them were, to put it mildly, crap and truly deserving of being in those bins, so the quality titles were able to command more of my limited resources. But now, with the internet allowing me to be a much smarter consumer and the Greatest Hits collection keeping high quality titles in circulation, well, it is increasingly difficult to buy those outright clunkers... at least to me. I owned one game which I felt was subpar (Celebrity Deathmatch), out of about 40 purchases, only a few, were at worst, disappointing. I think that is a problem most people would like to have... owning too many enjoyable books, movies or what have you.
Of course, there are some ridiculously-long games if you played them through all the way to the end... like, for instance if you played every game of a single baseball team in a single level of competition until the functional end of the timeline in MVP Baseball 2005, you would end up playing around 19440 regular season games over a 120-year dynasty, and if you chose to play every game at every level of your organization, that total would be somewhere in the neighborhood of probably 60-70 thousand games. At an average of 45 minutes per game, that would work out to... about 5 and a half years of constant play to complete them all. And of course, that isn't including the post-season, spring training, all-star games, the draft etc. Of course, no reasonable person would be expected to complete such a herculean task, would they? Especially in an annual sports title.
In retrospect, games do seem like they were a lot shorter back on the older consoles, and it was Jess's post at Apropos to Something on Punchout that made me think about that, as I do remember getting stung really bad on a few titles based on their length, and playing quite a few long role-playing games (thank you Square) as well, so maybe long games aren't such a bad thing after all. I think just have to follow the golden rule... enjoy in moderation, and if that means I have to put a freeze on new acquisitions for the time being while I clear a little of the backlog, than I guess that is what I am going to have to do.
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