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Editor’s note: I know where Lee’s coming from — I can spot four games on my permanently unfinished list in the picture below, and I’m OK with that. -Demian
Some people feel the need to finish every game they start; it’s a odd compulsion. Some also won’t walk out on a bad film because it’s been paid for, or put a book down when they fail to connect with it. But if a close personal friend didn’t make the game, take you to the cinema, or write the book, why care? Why put yourself through the slog of reaching the end of a game you stopped enjoying or caring about 20 hours ago?
I used to be like this. Until recently, I simply had to finish every game I played. More than that, I had to get at least 500 achievement points on each one. It was horrible. Like some kind of self-inflicted, life-sapping, terminal illness. It meant that not only did I have to slog my way through games I tired of quickly, or just lost interest in, I then had to go back again afterwards on a depressing fucking collection hunt.
The fact that F.E.A.R. 2, long since traded in, appears on my gamercard with a mere 380 achievement points used to keep me awake at night.
But now I’m free. I’m an inveterate unfinisher and I’m encouraging others to be the same. Now, once I cease to be interested, a game is usually over, no matter how much of it remains. So, for me, Assassin’s Creed will always be a beautifully rendered vision of the holy land, with one of the most fully realised environments I’ve yet encountered. Not the dull, repetitive snorefest I know it becomes. Similarly, Lost Odyssey was a gorgeous paean to a bygone era of JRPGs rather than a long, overly familiar trawl through outdated game mechanics.
In the arcade and early console era, my new attitude would not have been remarkable. Games just weren’t supposed to be completed. Indeed, they employed just about every tactic they could to make it hard as possible: infinite levels, super-spamming bosses, insane bullet hell, and even Ghouls and Ghosts‘ nasty trick of making you do it all over again upside down.
Now, as we find ourselves slaves to achievements points and game narratives, we are eased towards completion with infinite lives or even invulnerability. Anything to get us to the end. After all, the developers spent years making this crap, you damn well better appreciate it.
Was I being unfair to Rockstar by abandoning Grand Theft Auto 4 at around the midway point? I didn’t have the will to play it any more. Especially as the narrative, so engaging early on, was quickly beginning to derail. I’m sure they don’t care. After all, they were the ones that picked up all those awards, critical adulation, and an impossibly large truck full of cash.
Would the guys at Bethesda care that I never completed Oblivion, but spent about 20 glorious hours exploring and encountering a wonderfully diverse set of distractions instead? I doubt it.
So many titles drag on and on, and while the core of the game is compelling and fun, it wears a little thin after the 30th hour. Fallout 3 is a undeniable masterpiece. But it sits there on my shelf, untouched for months, after some other shiny thing diverted my attention.
Occasionally, friends are surprised and annoyed when I return a borrowed game and admit I couldn’t get through it. These might be the same people who don’t share my passion for the work of indie designers Petri Purho or Jason Rohrer, so it evens out in the end. There is, after all, no accounting for taste — as a friend who saw Mega Shark Vs. Giant Octopus on my recommendation will never let me forget.
So I toast all the half-finished, half-played games that have passed through my hands, saluting both the creativity of those who made them and the fortitude of those who completed them. And finally, I confess to having played every last second of Sonic Unleashed. I could have stopped after the first appearance of that damned Werehog, but I found it, like a gruesome highway accident, horrifying-yet-impossible to look away from — until I defeated the final boss, ripped the disc from the tray, and hurled it across the room in disgust.