Time for (Gaming)Summer

I can’t wait for the summer season to arrive. I am yearning for the day when I can finally switch my car heaters over from red to blue, press that elusive air conditioning button or tan one side of my body as I drive along in my t-shirt with the window down. Bright mornings and long evenings will bring the whole nation out the house and into the garden to enjoy the latest offerings in the form of supermarket barbecue packs. A late evening pint of ale can be enjoyed in beer gardens up and down the country; cigarette in hand and sunglasses resting on top of heads. Pure bliss!

I am beginning to get the feeling though that these welcome extra hours of daylight will have a different affect on me. While the children play outside from dusk till dawn I will be a little more relaxed; perched in front of the television which will amazingly become available for prolonged periods. While the rest of the family empty the garden shed of everything that gets stored away when the first autumn leaf falls, I will be emptying a magazine of virtual bullets into a well deserving alien. The wife will quite happily lounge, feet up, magazine in one hand, chilled drink in the other, basking in the suns glorious rays while I will be scurrying through rat infested ventilation shafts, eavesdropping for plot lines and clues. Usually noisy children will no longer be terrorising each other in their rooms, instead they will be terrorising each other with water pistols in the safety of someone else’s garden. I meanwhile will have peace and quiet, pure bliss!

Don’t get me wrong; I do not intend to spend every waking hour locked away. Holidays and days with the family will put paid to that. Living closer to Edinburgh rather than my own capital, London, means that my ever whitening body does need to catch a few rays to stop me becoming see-through. If the sun didn’t interfere with the glare on my television screen then my Xbox would live outside in the summer months.

These summer days and nights may be the only chance I get to catch up with the huge backlog of games gathering dust on my shelf. It has become a standard joke between my friends that my inability to complete games is causing me to constantly be 6 months behind the times, and that is a generous estimate. I have games on my shelf that were bought on launch day, span in my Xbox disc drive on launch day only never to be played again adding to my to-do list of games. What is even worse is these games are now less than half price in stores. Hindsight is a wonderfully horrible thing.

Currently on my list of games I want to complete are, Battlefield Bad Company 2 which I am only a couple of levels in on the single player campaign. Mass Effect 2, i dread to think how many more hours I am away from nearing the end on that. Fallout: New Vegas, I have put 5/6 hours into that and judging by Fallout 3’s game time I expect another 80/90 hours playtime from that. Test Drive Unlimited 2, I know this is a game that has no end but the single player championships is my aim on this game. Finally I have purchased Undead Nightmare for Red Dead Redemption as it was cheap; to date I have spent around 35 minutes playing it. As you may notice, none of these are brand new releases; this has been an on-going problem.

I have promised myself that under no circumstances am I allowing myself to purchase a new game until that list is complete. Although Fallout: New Vegas may be excluded from that list due to the fact that I can dip in and out of that. Also games for review purposes can make it onto my now playing list and depending on timing the new Deus Ex game will be a launch purchase. I am already starting to see flaws in my plan.

With the summer time release schedule relatively quiet I am hoping this lull will give me time to complete the games I have on my radar. Dead Space 2, Crysis 2 and Mafia 2 are some of the games I have missed already and intend to play through the single player campaigns. I have already thought ahead to some of the titles released this month and in the upcoming months that will no doubt head onto my to-do list. By a simple piece of mathematical calculations I predict I will have completed all my games by sometime in 2017.

I know if I can do it if I assert myself to the task at hand. Rigidly refusing to play another single player campaign, at least until I have completed my current one is a good start. My main problem is time in front of the television. Life has annoyingly took over my gaming time to an extent that when I do manage to sit down to play I am having a glass of wine and feel the need to shoot annoying people online, not really aiding my single player cause at all. While it may be a little late for a new year’s resolution it may not be too late to change my gaming habits and ‘get stuck in’, so to speak.

This is why I am looking forward to every new day when the sun shines a little brighter. With every degree of temperature increase my front room becomes emptier for that little longer each day. Let them enjoy the sun; I have the television all to myself, more time to complete my Xbox quest.

As long as my list of unwatched programs on Sky Plus doesn’t slow me down…

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