You’ve done it! You sit back, the controller lies where it fell, hot to the touch and lightly filmed with perspiration. You mouth is dry and you’ve spent just a little bit too long with your eyes wide open, but you’ve done it.

The text scrolls gently up the screen as the music plays in the background. You don’t know these people, you’ll like as much never meet them, ever. But they have touched your life and now this is their time. Graphics Designers, Sound Designers, Texture Designers, Modelers of various varieties, Engineers in hard, soft and middleware, Writers, Dialogue Designers and Editors, Production Editors, Pre-Production Editors…. the list goes on and on and on and on.

A feeling of smugness upon you if you can identify the game!?

The feeling you have though is that it’s finished, your experience is done. The journey you have been on, the adventures you’ve had, the people you’ve met, loved and lost. All of this is finished. Congratulations you have reached THE END.

The exhilaration you felt then subsides and is been replaced with both a quiet sense of satisfaction and a subtle feeling of loss. The challenge has gone there is no more. It’s strange what emotions reaching the end of a game can bring, for me there’s the immediate feeling of “YES! I did it!” I also like the little ‘Plink’ of the additional Gamerpoints being added for my achievement, but this then kicks off the “what did I miss?” phase.
The big X button is pressed and the achievement list is scanned and broken down roughly into two camps:

1. “Dammit, I could have done that!”
2. “Yeah right, like THAT was ever going to happen!”

A lot of time it’s simply too late and, to be honest, it is a rare the game that would invoke a complete re-play simply for this end. Sometimes though it’s possible to glean those extra few points, that extra ‘plink’ or two but the feeling is a little hollow. An Achievement it may be, but the process is too contrived, too artificial to have any emotional value and most of the time I just don’t do it.

So the button is pressed, the DVD slides out and is put safely back into it’s case. It’s then placed on the “Games I have completed”
shelf and the next title is selected, from the “Games I haven’t started shelf” of course.

The cycle of loss is therefore complete, I have denied the end – “I can’t believe it’s finished!”, mourned the loss – “GodsDammit, there’s 400GP I could have had there!!” and moved on with my life “OOOH! Still in the shrink warp, let’s have a look at YOUR title sequence!”.

“Pure” was great fun nothing more, nothing less but now it’s done and I’ve moved on to “FUEL” (I think it has to be in capitals!). There are some cycles in life that you can’t get away from, this is one I’m happy to be stuck in. See you in there!