As many gamers know, the biggest and baddest boss in gaming is the dreaded game backlog. You buy games on sale, or the get airdropped to you via Humble Bundle and before you know it... you have about a 1000 or more games of which very few have been played to completion! Even worse, you start games and then quickly get distracted by the next new shiny... even if the game that you were already playing was really great anyway!

So, I'm a bit embarrassed to admit that I have about 1500 games in my Steam library. Not all of them are great games, but there are more than a few really great games that I just haven't finished to completion. And after leaving a game for a while, you come back to it and are really confused about the control scheme or the story, and you end up having to restart the whole thing from the beginning... at some point it feels like a chore instead of the relaxing pastime that it should be!

To try and combat this, I've made a little promise to myself to not purchase any games at launch... except a few times a year when I see a little gem that I JUST HAVE TO TREAT MYSELF TO! Even the famed wallet-emptying Steam sales get looked over! Of course, even with that... I get about 12 games dropped to me each month from Humble Bundle, which constantly keeps me on the losing side of the battle.

To make matters even worse, I'm quite attracted to long form games like RPGs or open-world games which often take hundreds of hours to complete... or will NEVER complete!

So, over this summer... I've made a pact to myself to just focus on completing games. This is in small part made necessary due to the fact that I've started to run out of space on both my gaming laptop and my gaming rig... both of which have multiple SSDs for holding my games library! So, I NEED to start completing games so that I can actually uninstall them!

So, this is my chore (kidding!) list of games that I want to have finished this summer:

LAPTOP

• Control (I love this game, I am so close to finishing!)
• Far Cry 5 (I stupidly started this recently, Far Cry isn't too bad for completion if you aren't trying to tackle a 100% completion and just following the game story!).
• Mafia 3 (sigh, this is a big game... and I'm nowhere close to finishing! But at least the story quests are well defined).
• Mechwarrior 5 (I've started to realise that the open world and the merc management part of the game isn't so crash hot on the vanilla game, so I'm going to try to just finish the story... but I might need to grind a bit to get enough strength!).
• Phoenix Point (a large XCOM style game by one of the original creators... I would almost argue that it is almost better than XCOM, but it is such a big and sprawling game, and I'm still mid way through my first playthrough where you make all the mistakes!)
• Shadow Tactics (a light Desperados style game, it is really old school... but promising, but finishing it won't free up much space!).
• Pathfinder (oh my gosh, why did I start this... I am near the start, and this is a HUGE CRPG... )
• We Happy Few (Oh, I had high hopes for this game... the story and setting are really interesting, but it is terrible from the game mechanics point of view... and buggy).
• The Outer Worlds (another game where I had high hopes from the story and setting point of view, but again was disappointed by the game mechanics... sigh, at least it isn't buggy!).
• Unstoppable Gorg (This is a light tower defence game with some pretty funny cutscenes and stories... I want to play it just to see the camp E grade Sci-Fi story to its completion!).
• Trouble Shooter (this is new game that I had started a few months back. A sort of XCOM style game in the Trouble Shooter universe. It wasn't quite what I expected it to be, less open and more in the JRPG style that I wanted... but still interesting if you follow the story missions, if you don't mind a bit of grinding).
• Divinity (another huge CRPG... I love the game, and I do want to progress to Divinity 2... but these games are a huge time sink!).
• Disco Elysium (I love this game, it is so quirky and you really have a great feeling of playing in a game setting that is somehow familiar and unfamiliar at the same time... unfortunately, it has been such a long time since I played it, and as with most huge CRPGs, I am afraid that I won't remember the story very well when I return, it might need to be restarted.)

GAMING RIG (in the attic... might get too hot up there to finish these...).

• Far Cry Primal (I'm not really finding this iteration of the Far Cry franchise very fun to play..)
• Pillars of Eternity (here is a familiar story... a huge CRPG... and I'm part way through, and I can't remember how the tactics work, how I've levelled the characters... and the intricacies of the story...)

First on the list, I'm going to finish Control. It is the most recent of the games that I've not completed, and it has the most engaging story! Seriously, if you haven't played this game... you have got to! It is awesome, and it is a black mark on me that I didn't finish it completely straight away! I'm nearing the finish anyway, and as I've been playing it quite a bit on my rotation of gaming sessions the game controls are still quick in my hands.... which is quite important as this is a really a game of fluid motion in combat! Last night, I finished the most awesome section (I will have to write more about that some other time)... this game it incredibly, crazily beautiful to play! It almost entices me to start Alan Wake (same universe and developers)... except I fear that I will be completely terrified!

In interesting news, I see that the developers are already planning two more games in this story universe! Those might have to be launch day purchases....

I'm trying to make sure that my kids aren't affected by this sort of game butterfly syndrome. When installing a game for them, I make sure that I only install one or two games on the computer that they use. No more... and nothing else gets installed until the game is finished. I probably should try to do that for myself as well, but it is harder to remain self-disciplined! I always think that if I don't install the game, I will forget about it in a month or two... lost in the sea of 1500 games in that horrible Steam library

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