New Year’s resolution: The Beginning

Every year people come up with New Year’s resolutions. Generally they are hoping to make themselves better people, trimming and refining their self-image. Self-improvement is the desire, with a possibly-secret but always more important secondary aim: to make themselves more amenable/attractive to others.

Sure, giving up smoking or going to the gym regularly is something that makes you feel better but at the same time it becomes a cross you can bear to present to other people in the hope that they will then want to see you naked (or continue to accept seeing you naked).

Having already cut off my smelly dreads and taken up rock climbing in an attempt to battle the inevitable slip of age, my receding hairline and the drooping expanse of flesh that teenagers call their stomachs I felt this year was time to do something mainly aimed at my inner self-esteem rather than the outer shell which is, frankly, a lost cause.*

At some point after I started writing about games on a regular basis my purchasing habits went into overdrive. Frequently I would go in to a shop and think ‘Ooh, Autobahn Polizei, that might be good for a laugh’ and then just buy it. In one year, 2010, I purchased 138 games.

To try and keep this in check I ‘gamified’ my gaming by setting up an account with The Backloggery. It was an attempt to shame myself into facing the fact that I purchased too much shit and really needed to calm down. However, all I did was lie to it and myself by ‘forgetting’ to update it until I had shuffled one piece of content off so as to make space for another.

It has been a failing battle with my collection of unfinished games gradually rising over the one hundred mark. And it is not like I have been slouching either; I finished 65 games last year. Sixty five.

This New Year’s resolution is an attempt to halt that process. Currently my unfinished backlog stands at 120 games, which I aim to cut them down to below 100 – and I want to do that before I buy another game in 2013.

I can already see the release schedule for this year and Ni No Kuni, Gears of War Judgement and Earth Defense Force 4 are all beckoning to me. I feel that, like the enchantment others may feel toward the exercise bike, this is a futile attempt at bolstering both myself and my feeble wallet, but we will see.

So: I am going to be randomly picking a different title every two weeks and finishing it. Join me over the coming weeks as I post diaries and pseudo-reviews of each title.

Next Week: El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron.

* All or some of that passage might be true.