I’m a gamer. And so as a gamer I tend to buy games on a regular basis. Looking back at 2013 I personally think I overdid it a bit… The first six months of 2013 weren’t too bad actually. I bought maybe 4 games or something. In went downhill the second half of 2013 though…
At the beginning of the year I had decided not to buy any new games because my backlog was too big – how I manage my backlog will be covered in another post. But hey, who can resist a good bargain?
In March I bought a used PlayStation Vita. I bought it because it was really cheap and since I already have PS Plus for PlayStation 3 it would mean ‘free’ games every month. The moment Sony started with PS Plus for PS Vita I have added the games to my list so I already had quite a few games for that device. For the Vita the year wasn’t too bad when it comes to buying games. So far I’ve only bought ModNation Racers: Road Trip and Killzone: Mercenary. The rest of my PS Vita games come from PS Plus.
But a few months later I bought a Wii U for a really nice price at that time. I really like the console and think Nintendo should receive a lot more credit for it and for the games as well. So with the Wii U as a new console some more games started coming in.
Somewhere starting September till the end of the year games are put on offer a lot and for ridiculous low pricing sometimes as well. And thus the power to resist gets to an all time low level. I’ve mostly focused on getting some Wii U games, only bought 4 PlayStation 3 games (which 3 of I’ve yet to play) and a number of Xbox 360 games. Then come the bundles for PC. You know, those where you pay a few bucks and get like 6 games. I mostly buy these only because there are one or two games I’d like, but it does add to the backlog. Oh yeah, I also bought a Nintendo 3DS XL for a really low price. And what’s a console without games? Boring, so I got 2 games for that as well.
During 2013 I made use of a GoalTracker app that would let me track positive and negative goals. Positive goals are things like going to the gym, negative for me would be buying a game. Because that app has a bug which causes it to stay stuck in the year I started it I no longer keep track of these things (I do for some, but with another app). Total amount of new games in 2013: about 41. And that doesn’t even include those gotten for ‘free’ through PlayStation Plus and Xbox version Games With Gold.
My backlog currently consists of 135 games I’ve got yet to play. I’m busy playing about 22 different games – not at the same time, they’re in Doing list for as long as I’m interested in finishing them. And my wishlist has about 93 games on it… I blame the length of these lists on PlayStation Plus, Xbox’s Games With Gold and the Steam Summer Sale in 2012. And my own weakness of course :-).
For 2014 I plan on not buying a game for a console unless I’m all done with the games I’ve got for it. I will make a couple of exceptions though! A game like Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster and Final Fantasy XIII-3: Lightning Returns will be bought regardless of how many games I’ve got left to play. But that’s about it. I swear!
The positive part about all this is that I did actually finish quite a bunch of games in 2013. I just bought more than I could handle :-P. But this year will be different, just like 2013 was supposed to be!