We’ve all got our own favourite games. Within the crack team that is Citizen Game, for example, there are those who (inexplicably) adore the likes of Sensible World of Soccer, Ocarina of Time and Championship Manager 2, or the perfectly acceptable Metal Gear Solid, GTA: Vice City and Half-Life 2. These are the titles we’ll always go back to at certain points in our lives, when we need a sure fire way to lift our spirits or fancy reliving a particular moment again, because that’s part of why they are our favourites.
For me, there are a couple of titles that go beyond mere favouritism. I have in my possession a select group of games that at least once a year, usually precipitated by the infamous summer lull in release schedules, I re-install and play to with no regard for anything else. And I’m not talking about a casual revisit to a particular saved game or some idle nostalgia trip. These games constitute my Annual Gaming Binges, where I ignore all but the most pressing outside concerns and play on day after day until I burn out.
These games are, paradoxically, ones I otherwise never really play or talk about. Take my number one binge game as an example: Oblivion. The fourth Elder Scrolls game from Bethesda is still one of the best regarded open-world role-playing games in history, but that’s not why I play it. Oblivion, together with its expansion packs and the right fan made modifications, is a near-perfect bottomless time sink. In my experience, it is a game with no real end, an Escher-like progression of merging and diverging quests that could occupy you for a lifetime. When there’s nothing else left to play in your collection, you can be damn sure there’s some part of Oblivion you won’t have yet played through.
So, in the summer months when my frustration at the lack of new games peaks, out it comes. Re-installed in minutes, tweaked to just the way I like it, I take all my annoyance and disappointment to do with future games I can’t yet play and use it as fuel to plow right back into Oblivion again. In this manner, I’ll usually spend about two weeks playing it to the exclusion of all else, pouring myself into it until one day, usually very suddenly, I can’t bear to boot it up again. I’ll have hit the wall, completely empty of that overriding desire that made me take the game off the shelf in the first place. And then I’ll move on, settling back into my normal, comfortable play habits until the next binge.
Oblivion. Still shiny.
This is not the only game I’ve developed this behaviour with. Deus Ex, great as it is, almost never sees the light of day in my home save for a yearly replay that crashes to a halt round about the time I hit the Gunther Hermann showdown. Freelancer, probably the best game to ever come out of Microsoft Game Studios, gets similar treatment. I pick them up, play them obsessively and then discard them abruptly. I’ve no interest in them beyond what enjoyment I can compulsively squeeze from them during that brief window when I actually want to play them.
And the strange thing is I’m still not exactly sure why I do this, or why I’ve settled on doing it with these games. There’s much in Oblivion I actively dislike, such as the use of four actors to voice four hundred of the game’s characters, and things in Deus Ex that make me want to scream with rage, such as super agent JC Denton’s complete inability to win a straight up gun fight. I’ve got a laundry list of personal reasons not to play any of these games and yet I can’t help coming back to them, year on year. They’ve got their hooks in me somehow and I can’t resist the curiosity and craving indefinitely.
Are any Citizens out there stuck in the same predicament? Is there some poor sod who sits down to replay the Halo campaign every November 15th? Anyone who dusts off the original Grand Theft Auto to commemorate the anniversary of the first time he mounted the curb in a taxi and ploughed through a procession of Hare Krishna (and in the game!)? Sound off in the comments with your own experiences and maybe we can figure out this strange compulsion.
Hear hear, on Oblivion. It seems to draw me back in every time.
@Danny
Yes, yes they are.
Also, IPC (Dave!), the Tex Murphy games are bloody legendary
wait… you guys are talking about two different games yea? X3 = space sim. XIII (13) = cell shaded, first person french book. yea?
Oblivion and Stalker SoC will always have their hooks in me. Creating a character form scratch and tackling missions in any order i chose is appealing style of gameplay for me.
After spending sometime with Dragon Age , I could see my self re-installing later down the road.
Sensible World of Soccer was amazing! Take it back!
Any of the Final Fantasy’s I will randomly pick up and just play away. In 7 I’ll just head to the Gold Saucer and play the mini games till I’m blue in the face. Metal Gear Solid, as you’ve said, I’ll grab and play through, and then want to play 2, 3 and 4 (which I’m pretty sure you could do in a day if you wanted to) because the story is just epic.
My personal favourites to go back to, however, are the Tex Murphy games. I have to leave it some considerable amount of time so I don’t remember a chunk of the puzzles, but the dry wit of Tex and the barrage of insults you can hurl at the supporting cast make them games I hope I’ll never stop playing.
X3. I hate it, I loathe the UI, the voice acting is shocking and the learning curve is a cliff, but every so often I get the niggling feeling of “Maybe I’ll work up to that capital ship”.
@johny66
Oh man, you must be the only other person I know who remembers XIII
What a game. The Duchovny voice acting is wonderfully bad.
Every november I celebrate the release of Half Life 2 by playing through it all over again. Reminds me, back in secondary school I spent one after school study session writing down the entire walkthrough of Half Life 1 from memory. I really like those games
And how dare you say SWOS isn’t worthy of such praise!
XIII was a game that I always have to go back to,not knowing to much about the certain secrets about the government conspiracies and the dreaded kkk people.