Backlog

Having two kids, a desire to create games, and random days where I just want to zone out after work, finding time to play games has really become an issue. You can also see it hasn’t given me a lot of time to write in this blog.

My wife and I took a vacation this past week and it gave me a bit extra free time. In practice that just means more time goes to children and Grandma gets a bit of a break. But I did manage to sneak in some hours here and there to play some games (and write about it)!

I finished Battle Chef Brigade on the Switch. The gameplay bits are rather engaging and surprisingly demanding. Trying to optimize the time you have in the battle by balancing cooking and hunting strategies kept me constantly on my toes. Not to mention the story is quite charming and left me with some good feelings.

I also managed to finish Full Throttle, for the first time in 20 years or so, albeit this time in the remastered form. I’m surprised how well it holds up and how well realized that world is. And flipping back and forth between the art, not much is changed with some of the big full screen scenes. The only bad I really have to say is the Old Mine Road is as tedious as ever.

I have a bit more time before vacation officially ends. And of course, it’s the Steam Winter Sale. Like most people with a Steam account, I have a problem. I have bought far too many games. I put a stop to that a couple years ago by instead adding everything I wanted to my wishlist. Now with 100+ items on there, I’ve successfully not bought a bunch of really neat games.

My library has been neatly categorized and I’ve created a “_Haven’t Played” category. This is my backlog, my pile of shame. Right now there’s 179 games in there from impulse buys, Humble Bundles and weird schemes GOG and Green Man Gaming had for ditching lesser known game keys.

Some games are games I’ve played but do not have any play time recorded on Steam; like Counter-Strike or Half-Life which I’ve sunk many hours into but before Steam started tracking time. Do I still consider this as “Haven’t Played”? I might call an audible on this and skip some of those but for now, yes I want to get a play time on every one of the games in my library. Even if it’s for a few minutes.

It’s a daunting even knowing where to start. Some of these games are so long that even starting to engage with them feels like I’m signing my life away. The current strategy is to install all the games in that list that are under 1 GB and go down the list. If something grabs me, cool. If not, onward! Not promising anything but I might chronicle this stupid and probably misguided journey on this very site.