Flowers in the Attic

I can’t carry on like this. The thrill has gone. I’m drowning in a sea of half finished / not started games / will never play games; the product of which is that gaming currently feels more like a vocation (albeit one where net income figure is a negative) rather than something to do to get away from the usual day-to-day worries of a middle age man living in living in Broken Britain ™ where there’s a mad knife wielding hoodie on every street and an economy that’s as stable as an 80 ft jenga tower constructed by Shakin’ Stevens.

I come home from another sole destroying day as the office and get my other obligations out of the way (a.k.a domestic chours: walking dog, spending time with wife, spending time with kids etc) and then have my free time which usually equals “game time”.

The first problem is I’ve got so many games to choose from that I don’t know where to start – In case I’ve not mentioned this before I have an extremely limited amount of free time and to waste even a minute of it deciding which game to play is a royal pain in the arse.

But then I look at my decision making process and it’s a conversation with my inner voice that’s all, “I need to get this finished” and “I should really play this game as it was critically acclaimed by a load of games journalist (average age 25, average number of kids 0). Hang on a second.. what am I doing? This was supposed to be about fun now it’s just like work – get this game finished, unlock some more achievements on that so I don’t move further down the rankings, spend some more time levelling up character in WoW… I lost my way some where down the line.

I’ve been toying with the idea of downsizing my games collection as a way of getting some focus back and hopefully some more rewarding gaming experiences. Rather than fliting from one game to another. I feel that with so many games and so little time there isn’t much point in having 10s titles sitting on a shelf. I’m the sort of person that struggles to find a parking space in empty car park as there is too much choice. For me personally too much choice is a bad thing and leads to only to the dark side, namely: procrastination. The theory is, remove the choice and cut down on dilema time – either play game X or game Y or go and do something else.

Last week I did manage to offload the some of the real dregs from my collection. The likes of the original XBOX 360 launch title: Need For Speed Most Wanted – a decent game back in 2005 but playing it again recently made me feel sick – not due to motion sickness just because the on scream image was so bad it made me want to vomit. The screen looked all orange, like someone had poured kiora all over the TV and the steering felt more like sailing as you tack you’re way around the corners. Not a game to hold on to for nostalgic reasons. The games trade in value was probably less than a quid f but I’m convinced I got the better side of the deal.

So I took a bag from the kitchen and marched off to see those big, sweaty nu-metal fans at CEX (surely they could spruce up these shops and make them feel less like a the toilets at a second rate Glastonbury festival).

[It was going to be a Sainsbury's bag but the wife informed me walking around Nottingham with a supermarket carrier bag was on the same social faux paux scale as letting your children eat toast on the way to school. I quickly swapped it for a much plusher bag, constructed from better quality plastic, from John Lewis.]

I digress – back on message.

Other games that bit the dust .. let me think… it shows you how good they were as I’m struggling to remember.. there was Call of Jurez: Bound in Blood – the most average game I’ve ever played.. if Steve Davis ever got into game development and was asked to make a cowboy themed FPS the result would be Call of Jurez. Not a bad game just so inoffensively middle of the road. The very definition of a 7 out 10 game.

I also offloaded FIFA 09 (which was probably worth less than the shoe leather I used to get to the shop) and Crackdown, which was a great game but I’d finished it so there seemed little point in holding on to it.

The CEX exercise was not about making money. If you want to get a good price for old games then trading them in for cash at CEX is the last thing you should do.

It was about de-cluttering and then focusing my efforts on the good stuff. I must have got rid of 10 games at CEX – stuff I’d finished or was no longer interested in but even after that I still feel like I have too many games on the go so it’s time get austere and slash and burn the excesses of my gaming collection, like a Greek politician trying to tackle a massive deficit.

My headache inducing brainwave this time is to stick some games in the loft. The advantage of this approach, apart from avoiding another trip to CEX, is to restrict choice and bring back some focus and get more out of a smaller selection of games.

I plan a small selection of games in rotation in the following categories: a racing game, a fighting game, a shooting game and an adventure game.

Plucked out of thin air I’ve decided to keep the following games down stairs

• - Forza 3 (360)
• - Street Fighter IV (PS3)
• - Crysis (PC)
• - Demon Souls (PS3)

I’ll also keep the Lego games for my son and New Super Mario Wii as I love playing this with my daughter.

Everything else is going to be boxed up and transported up to steel ladders loftland. I’m not sure for how long but I envisage anything less than a month would be pointless.

I’m hoping that by narrowing my choice down to a few games I’ll stop worrying about all these other games that are now out of sight and out of mind. Instead I’ll get back to basics – like I used to do in the old days when there’s weren’t lots of new games coming out week in – week out and I didn’t own 3 consoles. The days when you had limited options so carved out as much fun as possible from each game.

At the moment I’m hitting diminishing returns with each new purchase. I’m casting my gaming net to wide. And each new game brings less enjoyment and less fun. If this doesn’t work then maybe I need to take the next step (put games on the roof?) which will probably be to find a new hobby.

Anyone for tennis?