[originally posted at Total PlayStation]
My 2011 tale is one filled with regret and shame. I’d love to regale you with a long list of magnificent titles like everyone else preceding me, but the sad fact is that I hardly beat any games last year. And the list of games I even bothered to play at all is not much longer. Sure, I was busy with work, writing, and other mandatory components of life, but I don’t want to make excuses.
I did beat and immensely enjoy Uncharted 3, and I think I might be the TPS staff member who liked it the most – or at least was most forgiving of its few flaws. I probably spent more time with Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker HD than any other game in 2011, and I still haven’t completed everything yet, which is something I intend to do eventually. I also completed both campaigns of Portal 2, though I played it on my computer and did not think it as memorable as the first. It’s still a great game, but it felt designed and constructed, in contrast to the rawer anarchy of the original.
Other than that, the terse list of games that found their way into my PlayStation 3 is comprised of titles that would have filled out the rest of this passage had I but the perseverance to see them all the way through: inFamous 2, Deus Ex: Human Revolution (again on PC), Dark Souls, Batman: Arkham City, Rayman Origins, Yakuza 4. I could go on but I’d rather not embarrass myself further.
It’s this weakness for buying games and not finishing them that led me and a friend to make a New Year’s Resolution pact together, that we will consummate the games we already own rather than add more casualties to our ever-burgeoning backlogs. We each selected 12 games for a fairly reasonable and attainable one game per month before the end of yet another year. The idea soon spread to several other friends, and now we are a coven of gamers who wish to better ourselves through mutual encouragement and action.
Perhaps you too could benefit from such an idea. Don’t end up like me, sitting alone at the end of a year surrounded by unbeaten and unopened games, each shiny soulless husk another admonition against my haughty indiscretion. This time next year, I swear, I will have done better.