Too Many Good Videogames

Gamespy has an interesting article by a guy begging the videogame industry to stop making games for a year because he has too many backlogged and can't catch up. It's written in jest, but it's a feeling to which I can relate.

Believe it or not, before the Wii was released in late 2006, Nintendo was in the 3rd place position for the past decade, beginning with the N64 and their decision to stick with cartridges when the medium was moving to optical discs. Today, the N64 is appreciated by my generation as the NES was by the generation prior, but the successor to the N64, Gamecube, has yet to be appreciated by anyone who wasn't a Nintendo fanboy. I was one of those fanboys, however, so while everyone was concerned with Grand Theft Auto and Halo, I was content in playing Super Smash Bros. Melee, Super Mario Sunshine, and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. The latter two still receive shit today by the casual gamers, more concerned with how the game looks as opposed to how it plays (SMS was better than Super Mario 64, and while Wind Waker could not match up to OoT, it was definitely a solid entry into the series). Despite how underrated the system is, there were dozens of high-quality titles released over the span of the GCN - games that I took upon myself to buy and eventually play.

Fast forward to early 2007 - I owned 65 Gamecube games, half of which I had yet to play. I didn't have the time to put 30 hours into each of these games, and while I had the majority of ownership-worthy Gamecube games by that time, I got a Wii for Christmas 2006, so I also had a dozen Wii titles that were sitting there, taunting me with their fun and time-consuming gameplay. As is the case for all of my hobbies, things reach a tipping point, and I had enough. I put everything up for sale on eBay, and in a week's time was shipping it to another part of the country for a tidy $2,000. I bought another Wii within a year due to Super Smash Bros. Brawl, but this time I figured out how to play pirated games, so I could have the ownership without the cost. Even today, I have about 50 Wii games, but I've only really played a handful of them. It's okay, though, because I didn't have to waste hundreds of dollars to do it.

I suppose that's the difference between me and the author of the article - whereas he is willing to plea for the industry to change, I'm willing to accept that I've reached a point where my hobby has consumed me, and move on. The feeling of wiping your hands of everything you've spent years collecting is pretty satisfying, too. (Something that I'm reaching with my DVD collection.)