It Begins

Three days ago, when my husband suggested the idea for 271 Games to me, my first thought was (embarrassingly?) of the currently-last book in the Shopaholic series. Becky's husband is sick of her buying clothes and never wearing them, so he issues her a challenge: she is not allowed to buy any new outfits until she has worn every single item of clothing she owns. From floor-length dresses to skiing outfits to shoes that don't fit her anymore. And apart from one incident where her two-year-old daughter gets her hands on eBay, she succeeds.

That's what 271 Games is. Only... y'know, for games. Not clothes.

We, Bill and Dani, by no means consider two hundred and seventy-one to be too many games. It's actually a pitiful total, by some standards. But we do wonder if it should set off some alarm bells if, out of those two hundred and seventy-one, we have completed an average of only seventy games each. And that includes things like Mario Kart, where the definition of 'complete' is really kind of hazy. To us, that seventy represents our failures as gamers, and hell, as people.

Game gets too hard? Put it back in the cupboard, we'll try again later. Maybe tomorrow. But we'll start something else in the meantime.

Too boring? Cupboard. I'm sure it'll seem interesting again tomorrow.

No problem with the game, but I have real-world stuff to deal with? Cupboard. Tomorrow.

We procrastinate so we don't have to finish games. It's ridiculous - games are supposed to be part of procrastinating, not its enemy! But the further you get in a game, and the more brand new games you have to start, the more gaming starts to feel like work. And when it gets hard, your brain insists that it's not fun anymore and you should abandon it. Only temporarily, of course. You'll bounce back soon. But then you realise it's been sixteen years and you've still never made it to the end of Banjo Kazooie because goddamnit, those later levels got annoying and WHY IS THIS OLD CONTROLLER SO DIFFICULT TO USE NOW? And suddenly you have close to three hundred games, the majority of which not only have you not finished, but you haven't even gotten past the first level.

For instance, we own two Commander Keen games. Has anyone actually finished those? Or do they just get the wetsuit and call it a day like I do?

So Bill decided that we had to fix this. We needed to start everything and finish everything, or else we would just be lazy, procrastinating failures. If we can work up the courage to finish every single game that we own - our twelve gaming devices ranging in age from Gameboy Pocket to Nintendo 3DS, our games released any time between the '80s and 2013 - then we can complete any Herculean task ahead of us. Like, getting a full-time job or something.

So, Bill and Dani present...

THE 271 GAMES CHALLENGE

Aim: To complete the main storyline, campaign or similar in every game we own.

Rules: We each have to do this. No sharing of victories - apart from a select couple of Point-and-Clicks that we've already started together. Also, we are not aiming for 100% in each game, just the main single-player, or whatever other mode is most applicable (so, for something like TF2, we call it complete if we've won on all the major maps). And finally, until we finish all two hundred and seventy-one games, we cannot buy any new ones. 

Good God, I hope we finish it before Dragon Age 3 comes out.

And as for this blog... well, we're going to record our horrible, horrible struggles. Believe me, there will be a lot of them. I haven't even finished either of the Portal games yet, and I hear Devil May Cry is actually considered kind of difficult.

But if we finish it...

(when we finish it?)

... I can only conjecture that we will transmutate into some kinds of mystical gaming gods. And I am very interested in seeing that happen.