Operation Finish All the Games: April 2016
After a bit of a squeaker back in March, I'm happy to say I'm back on track with my quest to reduce my backlog by completing one game a month for the entire year of 2016. Unfortunately, my "currently playing" list seems to be growing quite a bit on its own, occupied by various titles that I have very little hope of finishing any time soon. But, that's an issue for next month's post. How did I do in April?
First, a recap of the rules:
To finish one game a month means to complete the basic story mode and get the credits sequence (or equivalent thereof).
I can play and finish as many games as I want in a month, but extra games don't count toward future months.
Games do not have to be started and finished in the same month. Which is why I'm currently juggling five games in the first place.
I don't have to play every game in my backlog, or play them in a specific order. That would suck.
Single installments of an episodic game do not count. Just the entire season/series.
If I buy a new game I have to finish another game to make up for it. Games given to me don't count, though.
April was a bit busy for me, as I was out of town two weekends in a row. One of those weekends was PAX East, which I've been attending every year since it started. Sure, I'd get to play a lot of games, but that wouldn't do my backlog any good. So I installed a short game I knew I could knock out in a few hours: The Novelist.
The Novelist is about, well, a novelist who's spending the summer with his family in a house in the middle of nowhere while he works on his next book. You know, like The Shining, except it's warm instead of cold and no one tries to murder anyone with an ax. And whether there are ghosts is sort of questionable, as you are sort of a spirit who can possess lamps and infiltrate memories. The game has a stealth mode where you need to stay hidden as you explore the house, but I had very little patience for that and just went for the standard story mode.
The compromise system was a little vague to me at first, but even once I got it working I found the compromises unsatisfactory. Yes, they're meant to be a little unsatisfying as that is the nature of compromise, but there were so many times I just thought, "That's crap. That's a crap choice." I also thought Dan was a bit of jerk, which got me thinking: Novelists are always portrayed as dysfunctional in some way. It's like we can't picture a healthy human being writing fiction.
I asked a friend about this while at PAX, and even he had to struggle to come up with a single name who wasn't a hot mess of a human. Eventually we settled on Jessica Fletcher from Murder She Wrote as a perfectly pleasant, rational person. Even if she does bring death with her wherever she goes.
By the end of the game Dan wrote a bad novel and gave up a promising professorial job to make his wife and kid happy. And it just struck me as such a stupid ending, because if the man can't even take the time to tutor his son without his novel suffering for it, how the hell was he going to instruct an entire class of college students?
I might try the game at some distant point in the future, if only to see what happens if I screw my family over and pursue Dan's dreams. For for the immediate future, I'm going to focus on those five games sitting in my "currently playing" queue. Fire Emblem looks promising for a finish.
As for PAX, I got to play a game where I ran a police station. I got several of my officers killed because we were stretched so thin. This job is hard! So yes, I'm totally playing it when it comes out this summer because I know I can do better.
Other games I checked out:
The Indie Megabooth and other indie games are really my favorite part of PAX because there's just so many different ideas on display it just makes me excited about games in a way that yet another Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed can't. Where else could you be a bartender in a cyberpunk dystopia?
Games finished: 1
Novels written: 1
Good novels written: 0
Officers killed in the line of duty: 4
StreetPasses: Too many
