Horrifically Spoilt

I am extraordinarily spoilt when it comes to my gaming. I was bought five games for Christmas last year and not one of them is yet out of its cellophane wrapper. This seems to be a most heinous crime but there is method behind my madness: they’re all sequels to games I either haven’t played or haven’t yet finished:

In the interests of honesty, I confess: I don’t own Bioshock. Despite many recommendations, I’ll repeat my admission from the Ready Up podcast – I’m a huge jesse when it comes to scary games and consequently, I may never be able to play it. This begs the question of why I was bought the sequel if I fear I may never play the original; the answer is that I sincerely hope one day I will. My taste in games has shifted over the years and whilst I accept the fact I’ll never play Resident Evil, I’m a huge fan of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead; enough to eventually pluck up my courage for Bioshock. If I own the sequel in which you play an arguably much less vulnerable character, my chances of making it through the campaign are higher.

Whilst that explains my Amazon Christmas wishlist fulfilment of Bioshock 2, the rest can be explained away by my practical obsession with order. Some people may well have at least opened the box, perhaps read a page or two of the manual for games they’ve had for two months. Not I. I started playing Assassin’s Creed when I swapped Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare with a colleague at work sometime in July 2009. Not one but two sequels have been released since the original and I stopped playing a few weeks later after my inept fighting technique left me floundering in Memory Cell 3. Up until a few weeks ago, I hadn’t touched the game in over 18 months and yet at the time of writing, I teeter on the brink of Memory Cell 7 and consequently the point at which I can break open the first game in my Christmas bounty.

I’m unsure what the record for the oldest Xbox 360 save game that’s been reloaded is but I’m sure I stand a good chance of holding it. My religious zealotry of experiencing things in order stems from my relationship with books and seems to have stepped across media boundaries. I have books purchased over a decade ago that are still awaiting a broken back because they sit at a point in a chronology I haven’t yet reached.

It’s a testament to the myriad creators of these unfinished games, especially in this industry, that they can hold my attention for so much time that I’m actively seeking their sequels after so many years.

Spoilt obsessive compulsive or not, I’m enjoying Assassin’s Creed more than I did two years ago and it still looks and sounds excellent alongside recent releases. Who knows, perhaps I’ll even finish Need for Speed: Underground before the next version of the console is released or at the very least swap back my colleague’s forgotten Assassin’s Creed for CoD4, originally released in November 2007.