I don't even like cake that much.

So, not only is Dragon Age: Inquisition coming out sometime soon-ish, Arkham Knight has been announced, to be released just after my birthday. Now, since I’m not allowed to buy any new games under these stupid rules, if somebody doesn’t get me that as a present, I may die. Really. It’s a very serious concern for me at this point. I’m not one of those people who can sit back and wait for a game to depreciate before buying it. Did Harry Potter fans wait a few months before buying Deathly Hallows? Of course not, because that would have made them stupid.

I’ve been super slack for the last couple of weeks (read: months). I haven’t been playing any games. And it’s not because real life was getting in the way or anything – it just felt like even lifting up my hands was a massive difficulty. Instead I’ve been lying on the couch, surrounded by junk food, shoving away a dog that really wants to eat said junk food, and insisting that Bill play the first three Spyro games while I watch. I may have also started replaying Spyro 3 myself since the fourth one was eating my soul.

But I finally finished another game!

Portal

Status: Complete.

Reason for not finishing earlier: Got stuck on Test 18. And it wasn’t because I couldn’t figure out what to do, I just lacked the mouse coordination to make it happen.

Comments: I know, I was super late to the Portal party. Everybody played it before me, and I had the Internet, so I knew all the damn cake quotes. I started playing this one in 2011 or ’12, made a ton of progress despite constant flailing and no use of a walkthrough, and then just gave up because I couldn’t handle momentum-based puzzles. Probably because apart from TF2, I don’t actually play that many games on computer, having been raised almost solely on consoles. I’m not very good at computer controls. Using two hands on the one controller is easy, but one hand controlling the mouse and the other controlling the keyboard? That’s like patting your head and rubbing your stomach, only instead of patting, it’s reading a Fifty Shades sex scene without laughing.

That might sound stupid, because you think playing computer games is the most natural thing your hands do, but keep in mind I used to cry whenever I got behind the wheel of a manual car. And that wasn’t all that long ago. Doing multiple things with several hands and/or feet is hard for me.

Anyway, after getting stuck in Test Chamber 18, I quit for two or three years. Last year, on an evening I had to myself, I figured that I knew enough about how Portal went to enjoy Portal 2, and surely by that point my coordination would have improved a little. So I played that for about six hours until two in the morning, and I had a grand old time… until I got stuck on a puzzle involving the red speedy paint. So I didn’t play that for several months.

Today at lunchtime, with a rare spike in my motivation, I loaded up Portal 2 to get past that red speedy paint. I figured, my intelligence at two in the afternoon must surely outweigh my intelligence at two in the morning, so maybe I’d find it easy this time. Somehow, that turned out to be correct and I busted through two puzzles.

Unfortunately, Portal 2 seems to have made enemies with my computer while I’ve been avoiding it: the game crashed on me four times in the space of those two puzzles.

Bugger.

With a bit of resentment, I instead turned to original Portal. I hadn’t forgotten that stupid momentum puzzle I was stuck on, and I suspected that I’d rage quit after a few attempts.

Or… I’d get through it on the first attempt, and have only mild difficulty with the rest of the game.

It was a pleasant surprise, really. Apparently between the ages of twenty and twenty-three I’ve managed to get smarter or more dextrous. There were a couple of moments when I started wistfully fantasising about walkthroughs, but I resisted the urge. Granted, I can’t remember at all if I used a walkthrough in any of the first eighteen levels, but I consider this an independent victory with no one to thank or congratulate but me.

Don’t hold your applause. Please. I like being applauded.

Dark Souls - Part 1: Retracing My Steps. - Bill

The Game: Dark Souls

Why I never finished: By the time I had gotten around to playing Dark Souls, I only knew one thing about it - it was hard. The mention of Dark Souls always brought forth the same two responses: a group of people bonding over the powerful enemies and unforgiving bosses, and the ubiquitous smug one saying, "well, gosh! I didn't find it hard at all, I guess I'm just amazing" (while agreeing with everyone else in their head). So I played it, and yes, it was hard.

Funnily enough though, this isn't a game that I stopped because it was too hard, I stopped for a far more annoying reason - I lost my saved game. I think it was when I was trying to change the name on my Windows Live account, one second I had my hardened, black knight sword wielding warrior ready to go down to the depths of the world, and then I didn't. Well, not to worry, I thought, I'll just start a different type of character and play again. and so that's what I did.

Maybe you're a little... too different...

But from this point on, I found that Dark Souls no longer held the same fascination that it did to me on my first play through. Most of the fun of the game rests in two elements - difficulty and exploration. But by starting the game again, I had no new things to explore. By having worked out how to kill each of the tough enemies, the game was much less of a challenge. And so I spent a while making a new character every few weeks until I eventually just stopped playing.


Coming Back the the Game: Taking a long break from this game was just the thing to get me interested again. While I had been trying out different characters and styles of play, I realised that I still got the most enjoyment from the first character I had ever played with, and decided that on this playthrough I would go back to what I am comfortable with. So I created Bella: a lovely gal who won't take "no" for an answer, especially if the question is "is this sword too big?"

And on this playthrough, I actually did really start enjoying myself. I no longer had the thrill of discovering the best tactics for killing the large armoured knights, or the large armoured boar, or the much larger but far less armoured demons, but I still enjoyed getting through them as fast as I could, armed with the hard earned skill from the previous game, as well as an array of wonderful weapons. The difficulty was gone, and things that had taken me dozens of tries with my first character went by far too quickly, but it had been long enough that I was still excited by it. And of course, I wasted much less time being a nervous idiot.

In my first run, I spent hours working up the courage to fight this intimidating green knight... who turned out to be a friendly and important NPC.

This "friendly" and important NPC was just as scary, but I was a little more confidant at the time... so I straight up murdered him.

After climbing up to the top of the world and ringing the first of two bells (that sounds far less impressive than it could) I was entering territory that, while I had played through it, began to become less familiar. I knew that in the very near future I would be dealing with forests, hydras and other terrors, and I was looking forward to trying out new ways to stay alive, and hopefully, finding new ways to die. The difficulty was coming back.

My children's children's children. -Bill

The Game: Rogue Legacy

Why I never finished: The final boss. After about a dozen failed attempts, I just put my controller down and said I'd get it done tomorrow. Tomorrow became next week. That week became a month. And so here I am, with a list of unfinished games and a little pixelated knight staring contemptuously at me from the desktop of my computer.

Getting it done: Now, unlike some of the other games I'll need to slog through as this endeavor goes on, I actually really like this game. As the sharpest of you may have worked out, Rogue Legacy is a rogue-like game, in which you explore a randomly generated castle, fighting for you life and grabbing loot until you inevitably get killed. But fear not! For during their life of adventure, your character has fathered (or mothered... that really doesn't sound right...) an heir, who learns nothing from their parent's demise, but will happily take their belongings and savings to lead their own quest. This continues on, as you collect money and become more powerful, unlocking new classes of heroes and finding an assortment of powerups and items (all the while dealing with your progeny's shortsightedness, or irritable bowel syndrome, or hypochondria) until you have cleared the castle of its most feared denizens.

After playing this game for hours and loving it, I managed to finally drag my insufficiently skillful self to the final boss, which as I said earlier, proved a little more than I could handle. Coming back to the game though, I found this battle to be... annoyingly easy? With the right items equipped, I managed to get the boss done in about 4 tries, with most of my problems being with relearning how to control my little avatar of death.

That's not to say I wasn't satisfied with the ending of the game. The final boss, though easier than I remembered, was still a great boss to fight against, and the ending credits of the game - showing all the enemies I had killed, and all the children who had lost their lives in this meaningless and unending struggle - were really satisfying to watch.

So now I can cross off the first game on this list (which is already growing past the original 271 as I dig up old games I had forgotten) and set my sights to loftier goals... I never did get around to finishing Dark Souls...

Dragon Week - Dani

Already I’m having a lot of trouble sticking to a single game long enough to actually finish it. It’s only been a couple of days, but already I’m starting to realise that the reason I have so many unfinished games is because I know my limits. I know exactly when a game has gotten too hard or too tedious for me to continue, and I shelve it accordingly. It has nothing to do with weakness or laziness at all; there just happens to be a lot of games that suddenly, spontaneously, turn terrible about 80% of the way through.

Also, I’m not approaching this very efficiently. I’m not starting with the most enjoyable games and working my way down the fun list like Bill is. I leapt right into the deep end of the ocean. Not the deep end of the pool, but the entire goddamn ocean. Already, I have seen things I would not wish upon anybody, let alone someone with my particular game-orientated rage issues.

But every entry must contain some sort of happy ending, so here I shall present the three games I’ve been playing so far this week, one of which I actually managed to finish, and I’ve decided that the common link between them is ‘dragons’. We have…

•           Fire Emblem: Awakening;
•           Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly; and
•           Mario & Luigi Dream Team.

Okay, I get that Bowser isn’t a dragon and therefore my dragon theme was so tenuous that it couldn’t even survive three dot points, but he’s big, spiky and fire-breathing, so CLOSE ENOUGH. Anyway, let’s go into a bit more detail about these games – and I’m sure I don’t need to give this warning, but you should anticipate any and all games to be spoiled here.

Fire Emblem: Awakening

Status: Complete.

Reason for not finishing earlier: Bill destroyed my quicksave.

Comments: Even if my quicksave hadn't ‘mysteriously disappeared’ while Bill was playing, I probably would have abandoned this game anyway. I was pretty close to the conclusion, but by the time I reached Chapter 25, I was getting bored. I like long games, so I wasn't begging for it to end or anything, but I’d begun to hate all the characters and all their stupid children and the Risen could just eat them for all I cared. Everything was so repetitive and enemies did zero damage unless I acted like a complete idiot.

So, when I picked it up again over the weekend, I of course acted like a complete idiot.

This led to my son Morgan dying – not just ‘retiring’, like so many other characters, but fully dying. That hadn’t happened to me in this game since that idiot Donnel. As a result of this grizzly death at the hands of an unimportant zombie, Noire was left a lonely widow living with her ‘retired’ witch of a mother. Lucina was left without a brother and a parent. My entire party’s morale was shattered.

Anyway, life goes on, yadda yadda yadda, and I ended up beating the final boss in a single hit. I spent about ten times longer getting through the final credits. Truthfully, the epilogue material and statistics during the credits were more interesting than the whole second half of the game.

In total, I think finishing the last one and a half chapters of Fire Emblem: Awakening took about half an hour. I probably should have done it earlier.

Mario & Luigi Dream Team

Status: Incomplete.

Reason for not finishing earlier: Because it should have been over already. Like, ten hours ago.

Reason for not finishing right now: Because screw Bowser. Screw him hard.

Comments: Again, I abandoned this one pretty close to the end. But, like when I attempted to read Eclipse, the repetitiveness and unnecessary exposition meant I had to put it down after every ten minutes, which meant I kept forgetting what I was doing and how to do all the strong attacks. And every boss battle is so freaking long that when I inevitably lose the first time, after having just figured out the tricks to it, I just can’t be arsed starting all over again. This is especially the case with any of the ridiculously slow Big Luigi battles.

My big problem with the fights in this game – and a lot of games – is that I hate not being able to see my enemies’ health. It made me hate Final Fantasy, Lost Odyssey, and almost every turn-based Mario I’ve played. It’s just a weird personal issue I have; how am I supposed to adequately prepare for battle if I don’t know how long it’s going to take? What if I’m on really low health and tossing up between a last-ditch attack and retreating? I should know how close I am to victory before I have to make that kind of decision.

Especially if that goddamn arsehole craphead wankerface Bowser can heal. I have a right to know. And don’t tell me this is done in the name of realism: if the game wanted realism, I’d be able to see his crushed ribs sticking out of his sternum from how many times I’ve hammered them. His stupid arms wouldn’t magically regain their use every few turns, but would hang their limply, ineffectually, as he realises his impending quadriplegia. And I would enjoy it. I would enjoy his screams of mutant turtle pain.

Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly

Status: Incomplete.

Reason for not finishing earlier: It’s a stupid game.

Reason for not finishing right now: It’s a stupid game.

Comments: Okay. Deep breaths. I need to take several deep breaths before talking about this game because otherwise my brain turns into a garbled mush of hatred. To sum up my experience, I will tell you that whenever I turn this game on, I end up yelling at my TV so hard that my puppy runs out of the room, scared. It is so rage-inducing that I estimate that my blood pressure has just about doubled since attempting it.

Look, I’ve played the first three Spyro games, the ones on PS1, more times than I can count. I can do various segments with my eyes closed. When Bill plays them and fails at something, and I sympathetically say, “Yeah, this bit’s really hard,” I’m lying. That bit is easy. Those are my games. So although I remembered Enter the Dragonfly as a piece of crap that controlled about as well as a car with marshmallow wheels, I figured it wouldn’t take that much effort to make it to the end.

Good God, I had no idea.

It’s like the game itself realises how bad it is, and therefore is trying to forcibly stop me from progressing and figuring out that it only gets worse. I have nothing good to say about it except that the Amazon reviews page for it is a satisfying read. At least one person has called it ‘an unplayable trainwreck’, and most of the others instruct you to rent it, not buy it (hey, video stores still existed back in the early ‘00s). The more recent reviews, from 2013, are actually much more forgiving; I can only assume they approached this game with the attitude of, “Bad graphics and bad gameplay? Well, all old games were like that, right? Five stars!” But no. All old games were nothing like this.

A lesson that anyone whose favourite franchise has been destroyed is able to tell you is, DON’T SELL. Don’t sell, because it screws everything up. Don’t screw with Rareware, don’t screw with Naughty Dog, and absolutely for crying out loud don’t screw with Insomniac. I didn’t want this humble rant of mine to turn into a full-on review and finger-pointing session, but from what I can tell, the new company who produced the fourth Spyro game has only done one other project apart from this game, and it got cancelled.

I haven’t yet finished this game because I need to catch something like thirty more dragonflies until I can progress to the next level. Also, there are only nine levels in this entire game, compared to around thirty-six in the original. Also, catching those dragonflies is nearly impossible because the controls don’t work, you can fall through every second platform, and the game shuts itself down whenever it feels like it.

Seriously. I tried to enter a level for the first time, and this is what I saw:

Obviously, that’s just a stock photo of a TV, but that’s exactly what my screen looked like. Some of the game’s sound effects were still working – like, I could hear wind blowing – but I certainly couldn’t move, or pause, or quit. So I had to reset. Thus far, I’ve had to reset three times, and all for slightly different reasons:

1.      Inexplicable black screen instead of level.
2.      I tried to skip through dialogue and got trapped in the cutscene.
3.      I died while catching a dragonfly, so it tried to respawn me but this somehow broke the camera and it refused to follow me.

On top of this, here are my complaints from the first level – the first level only – of this game:

•          I turned off tutorials, but I see no evidence that the tutorials have stopped.
•       My normal flame accidentally got stuck on superflame, somehow. I don’t think I’ve even seen a superflame yet in this game.
•         The noises the bad guys make have been ripped exactly from different bad guys in the third game. (I later discovered the same is true for good guys, too.)
•          Huh. This level started out Japanese, now it’s turning Chinese, and now Vietnamese. I’m not very quick to pull the racism card, but this just screams of some director shrugging, “Eh. Close enough.”
•          The frame rate. If you so much as move, the whole game slows down.
•          Some people praised the graphics, like the water rippling as you swim or the grass bending as you walk through it. Well, those things also happen if I’m nowhere near the water or grass.
•          There are portals that lead to mini-games, and also a portal that leads to the exit. In Spyro 3, the mini-game portals were black and the exit portals were, like, purple. In this, they’re both purple and the only difference is a slight shape redesign of the exit portal.
•          You can’t catch some dragonflies. The ability you’re meant to use just straight-up doesn’t work sometimes.
•          Also, why are the dragonflies taunting me? They’re meant to be my friends.
•         Now I’m in a tank. The aim appears to sometimes be heat-seeking, and sometimes ground-seeking. It varies.
•          Oops, glitched out. Reset time.
•          Oops, the background glitched and now the whole level is purple space.

·         Incidentally, the whole storyline of this game makes absolutely no sense. This isn’t a complaint about the level specifically, but it really needs to be mentioned. They brought a bad guy back from the dead, he tried to capture the dragonflies but failed and scattered them around the world instead, my ally tried to give me superpowers but failed and scattered them around the world instead, and these sentient dragonflies can’t get home without me, yet they run away from me and taunt me when I try to catch them.

And THAT is why I haven’t finished Enter the Dragonfly.

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.