MAKING THE MOST OF IT
Scott White
This month we filmed a video with our good pal Andy Cuthbertson and he took us through the main story of the Kingdom Hearts series. It’s a series of games that even the biggest fans can find hard to keep straight, with multiple entries spinning off the story into almost infinite directions. I loved making the video, but I’d be lying if I said I knew a lot more about the series after we finished filming.
I went home and loaded up Kingdom Hearts 1.5 and while it installed and updated, I checked my favourite video game site to see how long it would take me complete the 1.5 and 2.5 collections.
168 hours.
I’ve never seen a number so high on that website before. It might as well have been a million or just a picture of a snake eating its tail.
But Scott, I hear you wail into the wind and rain, you play a lot of RPGs, so how can you claim to having no time? Firstly, please get back inside, you’ll catch a chill. Secondly, while I do play RPGs, I don’t fucking complete as many of them now as I used to. Just ask the third disc of Final Fantasy IX about how incomplete it feels, or my browsing history for guides to whatever game I’m currently playing. As my time becomes tighter, I, like many others, just want a concentrated experience.
Games like Tales of Vesperia are ideal; little to no side-quests and the map is easy to understand.Octopath Traveller? It’s a lovely looking game, but there’s like a hundred characters and a new mission appears every 30 seconds; it’s hellish when you only have 20 minutes to play it on a train.
In this month’s podcast, we asked what would you tell your younger self about video games (like series to avoid or try etc) and again and again people talked about being sucked into new games, getting caught up in the hype and so on and I’m one of those people too. Even today, I’ve been looking up videos of Bioware’s latest game Anthem, a big co-op action RPG. Where the fuck am I going to find time to play that?!
This year, with God and you all as my witnesses (all three of you), I’m going to endeavour to be more sensible with the games I play and really think about whether or not the time I need to invest is worth it. I think about my practically unplayed copy of Red Dead Redemption 2 and I hope that it gives me the resolve to resist the big flashy games this year and play the games that I know will be worth it (and less than maybe 10 hours a piece maybe? Please?).
