How many of your games do you actually complete?

General purpose discussion about gaming and emulation.
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How many of your games do you actually complete?

Post by Specially Cork »

Looking through my games collection, I always feel I shouldn't bother buying anymore because there's so many I haven't beaten yet, but whenever I make a real effort to try and burn through my backlog I find myself just forcing my way through games without having any real fun.

When I come across a really excellent game I have no problem breezing through it, but there's a huge stack of good games I just get tired of around the 10-20 hour mark. Then, I never really know what to think. Should I call it quits and be happy with my 10-20 hours of fun, or should I consider it a waste of time and money because I never finished it?

I guess it seems weird because with every other medium (movies, books, tv etc.) your goal is to reach the end, but maybe you can enjoy and get your money's worth from a game without doing that?

I still love gaming, but the appeal is more from trying out an experiencing different videogames rather than sitting down and beating them one-by-one. :?

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Re: How many of your games do you actually complete?

Post by DaMadFiddler »

Overall, I'd say that I finish between half and two-thirds of the games I buy.

I've found that some games just absolutely hook me, and I can't put them down until they're done (Castlevania, Link Between Worlds, Steam World Dig, Donkey Kong Country), while others I either have to push myself to finish (most sandbox games, many RPGs) or they don't really rope me in, and I end up setting them down for so long that I forget what I was doing and don't have the patience to start over (most RPGs and FPSes, some adventure games).

The ones that really hook me are also the ones I'm most likely to come back in a year or two and replay. For example, I just finished replaying Aria and Dawn of Sorrow for GBA/DS, marking my fifth and third completions of those games, respectively. Meanwhile, pretty much all of the RPGs I've beaten have been completed exactly once (sometimes with an abandoned second playthrough, if I've had the game long enough), and pretty much the only FPSes on the shelf that I've actually completed are the Metroid Prime games (if you can even call them that) and the Timesplitters series.

It's not always about genre, though I am far more likely to get hooked on a Zelda-, Metroidvania-, or Mega Man-style game than I am a JRPG. (I also love puzzle games, but usually, you can't really "beat" those.) I also like games that successfully blend several genres, though there are LOTS of attempts at this that don't quite work for me.

Ultimately, I've learned to lump games into four rough categories in regard to how I feel about them:

1. Addictive. Once I pick it up, I'll play it until it's done. I might even go back for 100% completion. I'll definitely be replaying it multiple times in the coming years.

2. Highly enjoyable. I may not feel the drive to power through it, but I'll keep coming back to it, picking away bit by bit until it's complete. This category also includes games that are too difficult to power through all at once, such as Bit.Trip Runner and lots of classic ("NES-style") action games.

3. Enjoyable enough to feel obligated. Something drew me to the game--whether it's great art, an engaging story, a clever gameplay idea, or an intriguing premise--but it just didn't connect as fully for me as I thought it would. I still enjoy those aspects that drew me in to begin with, but I sort of run out of steam around the halfway point. I can either drop it and move on to other things, or push myself to finish it out of a sense of obligation. Which direction I go generally tends on how much free time I have to devote to gaming and whether I have any games of types 1 and 2 to finish. I probably won't replay it myself once it's complete, but I may still encourage others to play it so that I can watch/hear about it.

4. Just not that into it. Similar to 3, but either the thing that drew me in doesn't turn out to be that compelling, or something else is broken about the game, or the overall experience is just sort of mediocre and uninspiring. I'll generally give it a couple chances to make sure it really is a 4 instead of a 3, then it'll get traded in, sold off, or given away to make room on the shelf for other titles. These are the only games I don't keep.

Maybe one out of every five games I buy will be a 1. Most are 2s and 3s, and while it took me several years, I've *mostly* learned to spot the warning signs and avoid 4s these days. I ended up with a fair number of them during the DC/GC/PS2/Xbox generation, though, and even for the first 2-3 years of the Wii/PS3/360 generation. At first I was worried my tastes were narrowing, but then I realize that no, I was just learning to cut out the things that never really work for me anyway.
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Re: How many of your games do you actually complete?

Post by Yonke »

i stooped playing rpgs or games that take more than 20 hours to beat (took me around 3 years beat GTAIV that i got on launch :roll: ) i get easily distracted with arcade type games , my play time its about 5 hours a week. Well at least in this year i had beat megaman 2..
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Re: How many of your games do you actually complete?

Post by Matisfaction »

Not as many as i'd like..
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Re: How many of your games do you actually complete?

Post by pixel »

3 to 5 percent
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Re: How many of your games do you actually complete?

Post by cube_b3 »

80%... Aside from buying the DMC trilogy for PS2 5 years back I have finished every game I purchased for 360, PS2, and PS3.

This obviously excludes all the retro junk I collected in my crazy years.

Maybe it is because buying games is a big deal for me, I came from a world where pirate games were retailed along side original games, only difference was that the copies cost a fraction of what the originals did. So now when I invest in a game, I buy it to play it.

That said, I probably haven't played a current gen in 6 months... I am struggling to get my money's worth with Last Hope: Pink Bullets, that game sucks ass but I will beat it possible before Pier Solar is released :P
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