Working Title 08.21.09: Working Backlog

Posted by Jordan Williams on 08.21.2009

Ever had too many games to play at once? Ever let some just fall by the wayside? Ever write a column about it? I did.

Welcome to the #1 Column to try to finish up its epic backlog of games in one month, WORKING TITLE. After reading Rod Oracheski's column last week I have noticed that this (severely delayed) holiday season is coming up, but I realize I have so many games in my collection that I have not finished. I really don't want to start doing any new games. So this week I am focusing on what I am playing...what I ditched it to play for...and the likelihood of me going back and finishing the game.

Seeing as there is a good chance this column might go up on the weekend (might be late due to some Maury Povich type shit going on in my life) this column will be a shorter easier to digest version. Unlike the overly bloated, Trans fat filled, empty calorie version that you would normally get from me during the week.

Oh, and for those of you that care. I won my match this weekend. I have worked in the Indies, and won a match. I am officially licensed to be a snobby douche about not only video games, but WRESTLING, too! All I need to do is start/get in a band and frequent dive shows at bars and I can become the ultimate internet triple threat!


...Anyone need a kickass tuba player?


Working Title: Working Backlog

Castlevania: SOTN

This game was actually my first legit XBLA purchase. Believe it or not I actually missed out on this game when it was originally released and never had played it up until this point. I have played every Castlevania game before and after SOTN, just not SOTN. Yes, that even means the N64 ones which I actually love to death.

So when I saw this on XBLA and noticed I had the points for it, I figured I would grab it and get into it. For a good solid week or two this game became my life. I played the hell out of it. I got stuck on a few occasions but with any game like this part of the fun AM getting stuck. But then like always something else came around and I never came back to the game. It's still sitting on my HDD with a paltry 42.9 Percent complete. Maybe one day I will have the drive to go in and finally finish the damn thing.


What I still Need to Do : Finish the game (I abandoned it right at the part where you e. Finish the Inverted Castle. I also still need to get all of the achievements as well.
What Distracted Me: Left 4 Dead. I got the game on Christmas and never looked back. More on that later.
How likely am I to finish it? Not very. I keep trying to come back to SOTN and do bits and pieces here, but there is just so much that it keeps getting pushed back and back. I think this will be one of those games that I come back to during a huge draught or when I just get sick of all my new releases.


Fallout 3

The game that keeps on giving. I am really big into those open world/open ended/do a whole lot of nothing but still doing something games. So when Fallout 3 finally saw a price drop I figured I would pick it up and get into it. For a good 3 months this game had stolen my soul. I would have giant marathon 7 hour long (with breaks) game sessions in which I would honestly get nothing done. But be damned if I wasn't having fun. I beat the game the first time with a neutral character and that is right around when Operation Anchorage game out. So I went back and beat AO. Then I decided to start the game over with a purely evil character right around the time The Pitt game out. I did The Pitt, and started on my second play through when Broken Steel came out...and then tragedy struck.

In an effort to clear out some HD space I started erasing my Fallout 3 saves. The thing is I am a habitual saver; I easily had over 150 saves from ONE CHARACTER. So as I was having a mass genocide I accidently erased my save with my "Finished" character...the one that was primed and ready to go onto Broken Steel. So now I HAD to play the game through with my new evil character just to get to the Broken Steel Content.

Woe is me.


What I still Need to Do: Get all Bobbleheads, Finish Wasteland Survival Guide. Start and finish Broken Steel, Buy Mothership Zeta, Buy Point Lookout, Kill all Super Behemoths. And other misc achievements.
What Distracted Me: Not any game in particular, just found the task of playing through the game all over again just too daunting to do at one time. Had a bit of Fallout Burnout and decided to move onto some other shorter/smaller games.
How likely am I to finish it? Likely. Considering I JUST started playing it again, I have the feeling that I will probably come back and finish the game and the DLC packs I haven't gotten yet. I don't think I'll get all of the achievements unless I cheat and do the "three saves" trick to get the achievements for getting to level X with a certain alignment.



Mercenaries II

I loved Mercs 1, and I had never got around to playing Mercs 2 until almost a full year after it came out. I saw it in the bargain bin at Blockbuster and decided to pick it up for a spin. It wasn't as the first one but I was pretty determined to go ahead and just power my way through the game even if it was just for the achievements. Sadly, I never even got that far.

I got up to the point where I had to kill/capture Blanco. I played that level about 8 different times but no matter what I did he always ended up getting killed by some random act of luck. Something would explode next to him or an enemy would shoot him. I could never keep him alive and I WANTED to keep him alive because it counts as a cheevo to keep all HVTs alive.

Eventually another game had showed up in the bargain bin which I picked up and Mercs 2 started to slowly fade away into obscurity.


What I still Need to Do: ...A lot. Let's just leave it at that.
What Distracted Me: Too Human
How likely am I to finish it? Not very likely considering that a few weeks back I lent the game to a friend in a "Keep it for how long you want" type basis. This means I am probably never going to see it again, or if I do see it will be well after the point of bothering to finish it. Definitely was a let down considering how awesome Mercs 1 was.


Too Human

Also known as The Game That Made Me Eat My Words. I badmouthed the FFFFFFFUCK out of this game back when my friend bought it and I played it. I was just like "I hate this; I hate that, blah blah." One day I found the game in the same bargain bin for about 10 bucks so I picked it up, and after watching the cut scenes and building my own character from scratch. I fell in fucking love with this game. The combat flows pretty damn well for such an awkward control scheme. And once you really get going it really does feel like you are a god among men.

I once strung together a 200 hit/kill combo and then went on to call my sword to go beat up some more motherfuckers. This game is what the next evolution of a BEU should be, even with the Diablo-Lite collection elements.

But alas, another game I picked up in that very same bargain bin ended up stealing my time away from it. Unlike most of these games I still actually pop in Too Human and do a quick run, the main problem I am having is that after you beat a level you have this long stretch of nothing but cut scenes, wandering, and cyberspace crawling that bores me to tears. If it found a way to make that a bit faster or give me a skip option I think I would be a lot more into the game overall.

What I still Need to Do: Beat the game. Period. This is one of those games where I am not interested in getting every achievement. Especially because most of them mean playing through the game more than twice.
What Distracted Me: The Orange Box
How likely am I to finish it? Very likely. I am sure if I keep picking away at it like I am I will finish it up soon. I just finished the third level, so I think I only have two more to go.


Half Life 2 Eps 1 and 2

Damn you, Orange Box. It was for 10 bucks, too on the same day. I managed to juggle this and Too Human for a good little while up until I beat Portal and then I started on Half Life 2 and it went all down hill.

For a bit of gaming SHOCKING NEWS. Up until this point I had never actually played Half-Life 2. It was sort of like Monty Python of the gaming world to me. I had never actually played it but I had heard so much about it from everyone else that I pretty much already knew everything that had happened and what to do and where to go. But this was honestly my first time actually playing the game.

Needless to say I promptly slapped myself for what I had been missing, but I continued on anyway. Making my way through HL2, I actually started to get bored...Yes, BORED.

I loved the game, but it just seems like there were too many puzzles or moments or SOMETHING that would just stop you DEAD. Not to say I don't like the puzzles, I really do. But leaping from an awesome air boat fire fight into a spot where I need to do nothing but turn some wenches and run around was boring. Ditto for riding around on an epic dunebuggy. The most fun I have had in the game is going through Ravenholme using only the Gravity Gun (a lot more fun that it sounds), but sadly I started to drift away from the game after that. Right now I am at the section where I am on/under the bridge and fighting a gunship.

What I still Need to Do: Beat the game, beat Ep1, Beat ep2. I have no interest in playing TF2 because it sucks on XBL and no one actually plays it on XBL anyway.
What Distracted Me:A combination of getting bored with the puzzle parts, and partly my own idiocy in saving my game in a tight situation. I am hilariously low on ammo and health yet I need to kill this Gunship to move on. If I try to run past it I just meet my doom thanks to the zombies and Antlions. This is what I get for tempting fate.
How likely am I to finish it? Eventually. I am pegging this one under "Draught Game" again. Since it's really three full games I have no intention of lending this one of trading it in. So I will get around to it eventually. I already finished Portal.


Splosion Man

This game. Man, I love this game. It was one of the few games I knew I was going to flat out buy without even playing the trial and it was fun for the week or two I sunk into it. I loved the Multiplayer to death (until the lag kills it) but the game was a game that is best served played in short bursts. The thing is those bursts just kept getting shorter and shorter until it came to the point where I just had stopped playing the game outright.

I think I am on level 2-10 right now. As for Multiplayer I am pretty much not going to touch that ever again until they either fix the lag or I manage to get someone in here to play with me locally. As for the single player, I suspect that eventually the completist streak in my will kick in and I will start to clear out by backlog of XBLA games. In one weekend I got pissed at having Watchmen and The Maw on my HDD that I powered through them in a day. I figure I could do the same with Splosion Man.

What I still Need to Do: Beat the game. Get all the Singleplayer Cakes. Find Maw
What Distracted Me: General lack of time.
How likely am I to finish it? Very likely, especially if I just set aside a day and power through it.



Left 4 Dead

This game. God I love this game. And no, a full year later and I have not completed the game 100%. I have beaten the campaigns, I am a fucking BEAST on Versus (although it is fastly becoming unplayable due to the rampant amount of power shooters, crab walkers, ghost slashers, and general "Need to win at any cost, even if it's cheating" players). But I still haven't truly finished the game

This is the one entry on the backlog that I am currently still ongoing with. It's just that those last few things on it are going to take a good little while to do.

So...really. Uh...that's about all there is to it there.


What I still Need to Do: Kill 51k zombies. (Currently at 43k at the time of this writing), finish a campaign on Expert. Finish ALL campaigns on expert. Finish a campaign without getting damaged by special infected. I have resigned myself to the fact that the latter two I will probably never do/get.

What Distracted Me: Nothing. Just working these last four out take a while.
How likely am I to finish it? I set a goal that I want to finish this up before L4D2 drops. So that roughly gives me about two and a half months to put a button on this game once and for all.

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So there you have it. A little list there into my backlog to see just what the hell I am doing when I am not typing this column.

Working Question

Man, for as much as I don't care about Halo. It seems like my Working Questions always revolve around it. But this week I am asking two questions...so...


Now that District 9 turned out to be a huge success, and seeing as it was directed by the man who was set to do the Halo movie. Have we missed out at our first (and possibly only) chance at a legit GOOD (that means critically and box office wise, MK fans) video game adaptation movie?

And...

Now that the PS3 Slim (and the price cut) has finally be announced as official, do you think this is the PS3's chance to finally start it's meteoric rise to the top or do you think the price cut is too little too late?

On the last one, I personally think that it helps me out. I really am not a big Sony fan and admittedly most of the games I want to play in the future are either multi-console releases or Xbox 360 exclusives. But it's good to know that if there is that MUST HAVE game that's only on PS3 or if I ever decide to get one that now it's at a reasonable price. I think we might see a spike simply because a lot of people were holding out for the price cut before they dropped down all of those duckets on a PS3.

As for the first question...I dunno if I should answer that. I actually liked the DOA, Mario Bros, Hitman, Wing Commander, MK, AND Street Fighter movies. It's obvious I have no taste.


Until next time, I'm Jordan Williams...and I am serious, does anyone need a kickass tuba player?