The Gaming Experiment

It's been a long week at work, with long night. I don't think that I have played all that much this week.

I did play some Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars but not too much else. For the experiment, I'll need to play a lot this weekend. But I'm sure I'll be able to finish up at least one game.

The big news this week was E3 in LA. This was one of the most exciting E3's I can remember in a long time. Here are some of the games that I am really excited about.

Assassin's Creed 2
M.A.G.
New Super Mario Bros. Wii
Modern Warfare 2
Mass Effect 2
Left 4 Dead 2
Brutal Legend
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack In Time

Those are just a few of the games that I am really excited for that are coming out in '09. My wallet will definitely cry this year.

A couple game that I am excited for that are a bit farther out are

Final Fantasy XIII
God of War 3
Heavy Rain
Alan Wake
Super Mario Galaxy 2

As you can see, these games look amazing, hopefully they play as well as they look. It's a great time to be a gamer.

I like videogames. Let me rephrase that, I love videogames. Some might argue that I love them too much. I would argue against that, but it could be argued. A couple weeks ago, I was looking at my game collection. It’s quite extensive and if I were to focus on this generation’s console offerings, it’s still quite impressive. But one thing struck me while I was scoping out the games… I haven’t beaten or even played a considerable amount of some of these games that I own. I buy buy buy, but rarely sit and play games to completion. This is probably a common problem among this generation of gamers. It certainly is among many of my friends. But I want to change that. I want to be able to look at a shelf of games that I spent full price for, and see games that I have triumphantly completed!

I have set myself a goal for this gaming experiment: Complete 1 game per week.

For somebody like me, who has a fulltime job, an hour commute, and a quasi-regular social life finishing a game a week will be tough. But I will continue to push forward.

Some of the games I choose to play in this experiment, I will be starting right from the beginning (Uncharted) while others I will be chipping away at as this experiment continues. I may not only play one game the entire week, so for example, I might play a game like the new Bionic Commando while also interspersing some huge RPG like Infinite Undiscovery. IU is a long JRPG that will definitely take me longer than just one week to finish, however, in a couple weeks of chipping away at it, that might be the game I finish to completion that week.

So what systems is fair game for this experiment? Well, in a word, everything! I have just about every console however I will be focusing on the last two system generations and the handhelds. So, PS3/PS2, Xbox 360, Wii/Gamecube, DS/GBA, and the PC. I think my backlog of games that I would like to have in this experiment run across all of those platforms.
Another question that I posed to myself was what constitutes a game? Is it only a full retail release? Or do downloadable games count too? I think that anybody with some interest in videogames over the last year or so would see a definite move to more hearty and full games coming to gamers via the series of tubes called the internet. I have decided for this experiment, I will be allowing all new downloadable games like Flower for the PS3 or a game like World of Goo for the Wii and PC. However, I will not be including old downloadable titles from the Wii Virtual console such as previously released older titles such as 8-bit through 64-bit games.

I think that this will be a fun and challenging experiment that I hope will rekindle that ‘je ne sais quoi’ that made me fall in love with videogames in the first place.