Backlog Madness

The image does not necessarily go with today’s post, but it happened to be in the recently uploaded images that I have not used on my blog so it is seeing some duty here.  I had one of those nights where I attempted to go to bed early… and just wound up waking up every few hours leading to very fragmented sleep.  However coffee heals all wounds and in the grand scheme of things I seem relatively cognizant and “mostly functional”.  As a result I don’t really have much that is pressing to talk about this morning so I thought I would venture off into the arena of things I want to do but may not actually ever do.  I am really great at coming up with ideas…  I am pretty horrible at actually following through with half of them.  I only really feel guilty about this… when money was spent to “prepare” for doing the thing.

One of those long reaching goals is to actually utilize this website that I was introduced called Grouvee.   It seems to have been designed as a way of tracking the games you have beaten… which in truth is not a thing I give a shit about in the least.  I am bad at finishing games.  I will often times get to within a few hours of finishing and then just lose all desire to continue playing it, because I know that when I actually finish…  the experience will be over.  What the site does that I am interested in however is that it has the functionality to import all of the games in your steam library and track weather or not you have spent any time playing it.  It also has the ability to create shelves to divide up your games, and do manual data entry for the services that aren’t steam.

The challenge is that right now because of circumstance more than desire…  I have a collection of games spread out among multiple storefront platforms.  The vast majority of my games are on Steam and have an exceedingly bloated number thanks to the fact that I tend to be a habitual purchaser of Humble Bundles.  In second place is Playstation Network because I have been a Plus member for several years now and use the website to claim all of the games at once…  regardless if I actually intend on playing them.  In third place would be Microsoft Xbox Live or whatever the hell they are calling that platform these days…  in which I have been similarly nabbing the games with gold titles every month.  Then we drop down to probably Good Ole Games or GOG as they prefer to be called these days…  which used to be the only place to buy a bunch of classic titles I wanted to revisit… and also is the home of my Witcher 3 copy due to a video card promotion.  Lastly we have Origin… the network no one actually wants to use but has to if they care about Bioware games.

There are two main reasons why I care about this website at all.  The first is… if I can ever get everything imported into the system I think it might be really cool to start using the [Tell Me What to Play] button when I am feeling lost and uncertain of what sounds good that day.  I have 300 MBps internet, so can download pretty much any game within a few minutes and it might be interesting to force myself to play some of that backlog.  The second reason why I care about this site…  is I am wondering if maybe just maybe I could figure out a way to retrieve my now playing list on my blog from the playing shelf on Grouvee.  I’ve not sorted out how I plan on going about that, but if I do… I will be sure to post a how to.

The site as a whole has been described as a “Goodreads” for games, and that seems pretty apt.  I know I originally was introduced to the site through Jasyla who I believe actually uses this site for its intended purpose of tracking what she has finished.  For me…  it might just be useful to let me realize that I already have a game through PS+ or Games with Gold and I really should not buy it when it is being sold for $4 on steam.  In theory since I left it off the list… I should add in my physical game libraries and the digital games I have on the Switch and 3DS.  Mostly I have tried to move away from physical games, in part because I just like having whatever I want available and on tap without having to swap a cartridge or disc.  If Grouvee seems like a useful site you might check it out… and feel free to friend me.