We've all been on a, summer holiday

The blog has been quiet over the last couple of weeks as I've been on a family holiday to rural Suffolk, where, by my calculations, it is about 1987.  There was no internet connection and precious little mobile phone coverage, making it a holiday from my blog, as well as my job.

Although there were no home consoles around, as a true geek family we brought along a couple of DSs, a PSP and an iPad.   My daughter worked hard trying to pay off her mortgage to the usurious Tom Nook in Animal Crossing: Wild World on DS, my wife exhibited a hitherto only suspected desire for world domination in Civilisation Revolution on the iPad (the iPhone version, but expanded to full-screen) and I, as I always do when going away,  took a bunch of unplayed DS and PSP games from my Pile of Shame.

On holiday, I usually try a few different games to get a feel for ones that I want to spend more time with (which is how I whittle down my home console Pile of Shame) but, other than a few games of Lego Battles on DS and a few hours with Professor Layton and Pandora's Box, I concentrated on one game only, Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon.  I love Fire Emblem games and, even though I returned home from my holiday yesterday, I still played the DS game in preference to my home consoles last night.  I'm about 16 hours into the game so far, which I think is about halfway and it is fantastic, as good as (indeed, not much different from) the GBA games.  I'll be reviewing it on here  when I've completed it, so I won't go into too much detail now.

I had a great holiday and aim to carry my post-holiday buzz as far into my first week back at work as I can (roll on the bank holiday next week).  Wish me luck :)

Half-an-hour heroes

As I've got older, the amount of time that I have to play games has gone down in inverse proportion to the amount of money that I have to spend on them. I remember paying, in pre-Internet shopping days, £45 each for Die Hard Trilogy and Warhammer Shadow of the Horned Rat, two of the first games that I owned on the original Playstation. At the time, the cost of each game amounted to nearly a third of my weekly take home pay and consequently I could not buy very many games. In those far off days though, I had far more time to play the games and played those that I had (even demos) to death finding gaming time was not a problem.

Jumping forward to the present day, a better job, a family, less gaming time, the Internet (and www.gamestracker.com) has led me to amass what CPC6128 on the www.nowgamer.com/forum  (feel free to pop in - we're friendly) has termed a 'Pile of Shame'. An embarrassingly large number of uncompleted, unstarted or even unopened games that I have not yet had the time to play.

To try to work down my 'PoS', I've taken to drastic action (well, not as drastic as quitting my job or not seeing my family but you know what I mean). When I play a game for the first time now, if it doesn't grab my attention in that first sitting I seldom persevere and go back for more but instead move on to the next game in the pile. It needn't only be the half an hour (of gaming time) of the title of this post (though it has been in the past) - that was just a nice piece of alliteration. But it does apply to the first long session on a game pulled from the pile.

This policy wasn't a conscious decision on my part. It happened for the first time following a reasonably long session on a game fresh from my PoS. The game was MadWorld on the Wii - OK-ish, highly stylised but ultimately shallow and empty. When I next came to play a game, I couldn't be bothered to continue with MadWorld but instead picked another game from my PoS, the more satisfying (but by no means great, though certainly fun) Mercenaries 2.

Since then, I've played three more half-an-hour heroes - Bionic Commando, where I couldn't get on with central mechanic of the game, the hook-arm thing; Street Fighter IV, which I fully appreciate is a great game but I just don't get on with beat 'em ups (other than Powerstone) and Eat Lead, which is just not very good*. I doubt that I will ever pick up any of these games again (feel free to plead on their behalf in my comments section though).

I suppose this might seem a bit harsh and I might even be missing out on some decent gaming experiences. However I only have a finite time to play games and if a game can't persuade me back for a second sitting after an hour or so, I don't want to 'risk' more of my gaming time on it.

*I appreciate that one man's meat is another man's PeTA direct action campaign, so I feel dutybound to point readers in the direction of 24 Hour Gamer's latest post, as he quite liked Eat Lead -
http://24hourgamer.blogspot.com  He's quite convincing - maybe I will try it again........