The pleasure and pain of owning too many games... It's great to have a ridiculous selection of games to choose from but at the same time, I am only one person who has to split up his time playing all of these games that I am definitely interested in. Though there are no real personal ramifications to this dilemma, there are some truly terrible impacts it has on the fabric of video gaming timeline and spatial continuity.
It's all about shifting your perspectives for the sake of self-accommodation.
You see, the video gaming experience can be time-restrictive for it to be current and relevant within the scope of its collective existence as a whole. I am specifically talking about popular games and online-heavy games. Let me use Final Fantasy XIII as the example of popular games. This game is one of the hottest releases this year and though it is heavily discussed currently, its popularity will wain over the next couple of months until it becomes just a mark of history in gaming. At that point in the future, the discussion about the game is more referentially historical and there is definitely something lost in the relevancy and details due to the ebb and flow of time. Thus playing the game outside of the frame of its current wake takes away some of the chrono-social cohesiveness of the experience but it never takes away its meaning in the individual, self-discovery sense no matter how limited that may or may not be.
This brings me to the second point that has more impact on a more catastrophic level and that is the implications of time-restraints in online-heavy games. I am not talking about massively-multiplayer online role playing games here though they can fit within this discussion at their eventual ends. I am mainly talking about non-MMO games that rely on a thriving online community to retain its gameplay longevity. A good example of this is Chromehounds on the X-Box 360. If one is not fast enough to jump on the glorious mech-battle bandwagon when the game first came out in 2006, there is absolutely no reason to play the game anymore these days because there is no no one playing the game online these days... Unless you have a friend who is craving for a match, the game became obsolete with the passing of time. This means that the impacted game has no meaning anymore in its true contextual nature even though at an individual level, a function can still be placed upon it no matter how frail the definition of that may or may not be.
"What was the start of all this?"
Though the game has somewhat of an active online community, Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars for the Personal Computer was what brought me into this whole discussion in the first place. Here's a game that I was thrilled about when it first arrived on the gaming scene back in 2007 and I purchased it soon after its release but I never had it installed nor played until... 2 weeks ago! For someone who has an actively growing Game Library, this is bound to happen. As a matter of fact, I noticed several unwrapped PC games yesterday while I was just looking over my game collection. Though I made sure that I test out my every single one of my console games when I get them home, apparently, that has not been the case with my PC games - something that I definitely need to improve on. After I installed CC3, I was able to play the campaign just fine but the online portion of it is locked because I have never registered the game since I have just started to play it recently. Just my luck though, the registration server for the game is down! Apparently, it has been like that for the past month with Electronic Arts being very slow to fix it. I am sure the recently released Command & Conquer 4 had a lot to do with the sudden inability to get new people to jump on the CC3 online server. I have contacted the support team in regards to the matter and they claim that they are currently working on it and that it should be up and running in the next several days. I will update this article by then and hopefully, the result will be a positive one. [Update Note: The problem was solved!]
"When did the cogs of fate begin to turn?"
For someone who wants to experience the many wonders of video gaming, especially in its currently over-saturated form, it has always been a challenge to keep myself from drowning underneath its increasingly fluctuating current. For every game I wanted to experience, another game is left untouched indefinitely and with every game missing from the Game Library, its another potentially enriching experience lost. I am able to maintain a personal balance of it all but if there is anything I wish I have at this point in my gaming life is not more time to go through them all but rather, someone else to share these riches with sitting right here next to me while I do my best to make video gaming a big part of my life.
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