am addicted. Should be pretty obvious considering my game collection (802 games and counting), and considering I'm writing on a blog that's dedicated to it. That being said, it is not necessarily gaming itself that is my addiction.
My addiction: Collecting.... everything!
Now, I know what you are thinking; If I'm addicted to collecting, then every game I have would be completed 100% because I wouldn't be able to stop myself from collecting everything. That is not what I mean by addicted to collecting.
While I do in fact have a huge collection of games, I have barely beat a quarter of them. Looking at my gaming backlog (which I shall link to at the bottom), only 200 out of my 802 have either a beat or complete checked off. (Interesting note: 12 of those games have been nulled, as they are either not really games, IE Brain Age, or doesn't really have a way to beat it, IE Ice Hockey on NES). Partially, this is because I have a full time job, and on top of that I try to write whenever I can, (I am an aspiring author after all), but lets face it: those are excuses. Excuses to hide the real problem.
I can't stop buying. I spend a lot of my breaks at work checking out the game store that's practically next door. Why do I do it? Because every once in a while I see a game for five bucks, and my mind tells me I need to get it. "It's only five dollars, it's really cheap! If you don't get it now, it'll go back up in price and you'll kick yourself for it". I have no real plans to play Rumble Roses on my 360, but it's in my collection because it was cheap. Red Steel is a terrible game by most standards, and barely tolerable for a launch title by my own, but it's in my collection because I got it cheap.
It gets worse, in the form of collectors editions. Sometimes, and let me stress the sometimes once more right here, they are actually worth it. Demon's Souls came with a guide that is practically required reading if you wish to stand a chance the first time through the game. Starcraft 2 is coming with a soundtrack, art book, and hell, blizzard is even throwing in the first game on a USB stick!
But then there is Batman. A Batarang that looks like it was keyed, and comes superglued to the stand so you can't even whip it at people. A big box, and a leather bound book chronicling The Bats villains. That would have been interesting if the info in said book wasn't already in the game, (and also in the strategy guide, which I also purchased on Day 1). I knew ahead of time that the collectors edition of Batman was not even close to being worth it, but I bought it anyways, because it was a collectors edition. There is just something inside my brain that tells me that if it has something extra, I have to buy it day 1. I have to buy it.
Gaming is not a necessity. Food, a place to stay, a job, clothing, those are things we all need to have, not gaming. Gaming is a luxury, one that has cost me dearly. But once your brain starts thinking it needs something, it's hard to unthink it.
Now, I bring up strategy guides, and there is something else of interest right there: I have bought the guide to a decent amount of games that I have bought. Not just checked out a GameFAQS guide, but actually went to the store and bought the guide. Sometimes on day 1 with the game. Sometimes it is worth it, and other times, it isn't. That's just something else I need to collect.
Now, like games, sometimes a guide will have a collectors edition. In the case of FF XII, a game I can honestly say is only in my collection to complete my collection of Final Fantasy games (more on this in another post), the guide came with an art book, and art books are usually worth the price of admission on it's own. This, I was not disappointed with. However, The Legend of Zelda, Phantom Hourglass also has a collectors edition. It is hardcover, comes with a leather bookmark, and the pages are shiny. That is it. For once, my insanity with collectors editions was able to be repressed as I did not in fact put my money down for that one. (not for lack of wanting that is...)
I wish that this was the end. As I'm sure you can see, a therapist would have a field day trying to dissect and analyze all of my different foibles and insecurities as it pertains to my addiction of gaming. And lets face it, how often does one have the opportunity to use the word "foibles" in any topic of conversation?
Alas, there is much more going on here. Video game collecting is not my only vice.
Anybody who has seen the inside of my place usually notices two things:
1) Wow, your place is messy, don't you ever clean?
2) How many freaking games do you have? This is nuts!
What they don't usually notice, is the other thing, the thing that probably kick started my collecting habit into full gear, right around the time I was in third grade. That kick start, was Magic.
I had seen the cards all over the place when I was a kid, and was always interested in learning how to play. However, I was... a loner in school, to put it quite mildly, and since games like those usually required at least one other person, I was relegated to not ever picking up cards.
However, one day when my father and I were going to a movie, we stopped off at a card store nearby. It was pretty small, but something on one of the tables caught my attention. "Magic, 10 black, 9 common, 1 uncommon, $1". I showed my dad, and since he liked to spoil me rotten, I walked away with a pack of those treasured cards in my hand. The guy behind the counter even gave me the rulebook to the new set that had come out, Tempest, and the rest was history.
I now have more cards than I can count, from more games than I can possibly play. I've got cards for Pokemon, Magic, a few Yugioh, World of Warcraft, dot hack Enemy (a game that only about six people on the planet have ever heard about, and even less play), I even have almost the full first set of Tomb Raider cards. If it has a cool piece of artwork, and text written underneath, you can bet your sweet ass that I'm going to want it in my hands.
To be fair, Tomb Raider was something that had a separate set of rules for those who weren't playing with other people, and at once point I did try playing all of those games WITH other people, usually around the time I picked up my first set of cards, but everything after that was just feeding my addiction.
Now, you'll notice that pokemon was written, and lets face it, there are two games that when talking about addiction really feed well into the topic: pokemon and World of Warcraft.
Now to me, World of Warcraft wasn't overly appealing. To me, it was just a really pretty Diablo 2 with more options, massively multiplayer online, but Diablo never hooked me in the way that it did almost everyone I knew, so Warcraft almost didn't stand a chance.
Pokemon however.... there is a story and a half. No joke, when Soul Silver was released, I took a 1 week vacation just to play the game. A vacation... for a video game. Granted, that is slightly better than blowing off work just because a new game came out, but still. On top of that, over the course of that weekend, I played over 70 hours. That's 10 hours a day! My longest stretch of time playing in a row spanned two days, staying up all night just to try beat the main storyline. I deprived my self of sleep, and even pushed away friends, just to play the game longer.
The pull of pokemon gripped me at a far younger age than now. When it was first released, I was far from a perfect kid. I was grounded a lot when I was younger, and was unable to play my games for a good portion of the time. That didn't stop me from playing this one though. I knew where my parents had hidden my Gameboy, took it out of its hiding place, and would play it in my room, with no sound, at all times of the day. My hiding place? Underneath the guide for the game. I merely said that since I couldn't play the game, I wanted to read up on it so that it would be easier to play when I finally had a chance. My parents didn't fight it much, (they felt that as long as I was reading, it was alright), but I think they knew all along that I had the game. After all, how hard is it to hide a giant brick of the original, 4 battery game boy? The guide barely covered it.
Pokemon feeds into my addiction fairly easily, as with every new installment comes a new set of at least one hundred new pokemon to collect. Plus, I've always loved games with a leveling system. Hell, that was the only thing that kept me interested in Forza as long as I was.
Now, you may be asking yourself, what the hell triggered this long winded (and long worded) speech about gaming addiction? Well, it was a letter from my old cell phone company.
See, up until now I knew, for the most part, that I was addicted, but as long as I felt that I had it under control, as long as everything was still being payed, and I had a roof over my head and groceries in the fridge, everything was fine. It wasn't a problem. Kind of like how DR. House uses his pain pills: He functions with them, it helps him do his job, and me having games helped me with this job (as well as the game review thing, something I need to get back into).
The letter pretty much said that I hadn't payed the cancellation fee for my cell phone. It wasn't overly serious, and it isn't even all that expensive. It's not going to stop me from paying rent, and I still have food to eat so there aren't any worries there. But the fact that they needed to send a letter forced me into accepting what was really happening.
My priorities weren't in order. I was thinking of games first, spending first and foremost, and necessities second. I was becoming the very thing I couldn't stand, someone who only thought of what he could spend money on, and not on important things.
This jolt of reality is really a wake up call of sorts, that I really need to stop worrying about getting a game day 1, or wasting my money on cards that I never use, and barely even look at. At the very least, I need to play the games I have (correction, BEAT the games I have) before picking up new ones. I must get this collecting addiction under control, NOW, before it's a letter from the rental office telling me that I need to pay up.
I, Chris Taylor, am addicted to buying stuff I don't need, when I shouldn't really be buying that stuff in the first place... right away anyways.
Now, the real question you've all been asking this whole time: Why the hell didn't I talk about any new releases? Answer: Because there weren't any. Next week should be bigger however, with Starcraft 2 coming out. And yes, I'm getting it on launch day, in collectors edition form.
Some people will never, ever change.
This is Chris Taylor, signing out, and hoping that his next fix doesn't come from a strange man in a dark alley with a Virtual Boy hidden in his trench coat. Happy Gammage to All!!
My collection of games can be found here: www.backloggery.com/Assclown_King
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