Many Games! Handle It!

Last night was a bit of an odd one, in that I did not get out of work until after 6 pm and did not get home until almost 7 pm.  The series of meetings that I have been thrust into on Wednesday nights has been a thing, and there seems to be no end to them in the near future.  By the time I finally got home I was feeling fairly lousy, and after fixing dinner for wife and I didn’t really feel like doing much.  I sort of melted into the couch and attempted to do a little gaming on the laptop, but before I realized it I was falling asleep.  My wife seemed to be going through the same thing and by the time I headed to bed around 8 pm she was completely dead to the world on the couch and unwakeable without going through an excessive amount of effort.  So I left her sleeping there and crashed…  only to wake up just shy of 1 am due to the cats getting into a bit of a tussle.  I stumbled into the kitchen to take some meds because I was still feeling generally lousy, and around that point in my sleepy fumbling I dropped a pill blister on the floor that miraculously roused sleeping beauty.  So we attempted to head to bed while not waking up enough to make falling right back to sleep a chore.  Thankfully after about thirty minutes of “adjusting” I got right back to sleep and was not woken again until my watch “pre-alarm” started going off.  Generally speaking my smart watch makes me up by buzzing taps about a minute ahead of our insanely annoying alarm on the other side of the room…  giving me a bit of a gentle rousing before the crash of reality hits with the elder machination.

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The challenge I am struggling with right now is there are just too damned many games I want to play.  For starters thanks to a whole slew of reasons I have yet to be Final Fantasy XV.  As I said the other day I am between two decisions on this game… do I force myself to push ahead and play the game in a manner that I do not feel enjoyable, or do I keep piddling away at it in my own manner and make the most of it?  So far I am leaning towards option two, and I am still very much enjoying this game.  Were this my ONLY game I probably would be considerably further in it, because in every manner it feels like a single player MMO to me, and I am sort of piddling around in it like I do an MMO.

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Then there is of course Horizon Zero Dawn, the new hotness that I want to spend all my time playing.  I wrote at length about my feelings regarding this game and it bummed me out that I didn’t feel okay with hanging out upstairs and playing it last night.  I felt largely out of sorts and the game does in fact require a modicum of coordination to land shots in the appropriate sweet spots.  As a result I opted against playing, but I still have a super strong drive to do so… and am hoping I will be feeling generally grand this evening and can return to exploring the much more opened world.

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Then there is of course Zelda Breath of the Wild which should be arriving for my Wii U next Tuesday.  I am not really sure why the delay but in truth I am a bit thankful for it.  I’ve opted against getting a Switch on launch day, because really there is just this one title that I would want to play on it.  In theory I will be happy enough playing it on the Wii U because all I really want to do is explore the world and get my Zelda on once again.  That said the major problem is… it is once again another big game stacked on top of a pile of already big games.

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Another big game that is now sitting in my Steam Library waiting to be installed is Torment Tides of Numenera.  The funny thing about Kickstarter games is that when they finally release… they sort of sneak up on you.  I just looked it up in gmail, and my original backing of this game was on March 6th of 2013, and almost four years later it finally shows up.  The problem with Torment however is that it is also waiting in line behind another similar title… Tyranny which I also have yet to finish.  Spoiler alert, Tyranny will be the March AggroChat game club title, so one way or another I will be finishing that one off in the coming weeks.  However I really only want to have one classic PC RPG sitting waiting in the wings at a time, so for the moment Torment will sit there waiting.

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Then there is of course the next Mass Effect game which releases somewhere towards the end of March.  I am hoping and praying that this will not be another Dragon Age Inquisition, where it is a Bioware experience that I just could not get into for whatever reason.  Generally speaking I like the Mass Effect series way better than I do Dragon Age, because overall the games have been a much more even handed experience for me.  My favorite in the series is Mass Effect 2, but I still find it super easy to get enjoyment out of both the original and the third installment.  I’ve played through the entire sequence several times as well, and they still have lots of great replayability for me personally.  I am hoping that Andromeda just adds to that experience, but once again it is a HUGE game… landing at almost exactly the same time as everything else.

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Then in the summer we have Elder Scrolls Online Morrowind… which lands June 6th and looks awesome.  The only problem there however is that I know the experience is going to get overshadowed by the launch of another MMO expansion.  However this post is more a placeholder saying that I would absolutely LOVE to wrap up the other content, or at least make a dent in it before Morrowind officially lands.

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Finally we have Stormblood… the Final Fantasy XIV expansion that is certain to overshadow literally anything else that is going on at that time.  It launches June 20th and is going to ultimately spawn a feeding frenzy of leveling through both the new story and content and beginning all of the things that come with a proper expansion.  Essentially this is also a line in the sand…  that I basically need to have completed any of the games that I mentioned above before we reach this point in the year or I am simply not going to get around to it for several months.  I am certain that I have left some things off of the list, but it seems like there are just an awful lot of big gaming experiences landing next to each other that I really want to play.  What I mean by “big gaming” is that each of these is a massive game featuring more gameplay that a person could reasonably sit through in a day or two.  With a shooter for example, you have a linear story arc that follows a sequence of levels until you finally reach the crescendo in the final boss fight. Each of the games on my list however is an RPG with meandering and character progression… all of which for me at least can take hundreds of hours of gameplay rather than tens of hours.  For the moment however… I am going to keep juggling FFXV and Horizon and see where I can make it progress wise.  However I still feel like I am drowning in too many good games to play at once and the fear of missing out…  is tangible.