Last Week's Games: My Game Buying Analytics

This edition of the blog is going to take a decidedly Non-Gamey tone, since very little of it is to do with playing games. Most of it is the analytics I have been flagellating myself with all week. I will put some game bits in the start, but if you aren’t interested in anything I’ve got to say about my large and probably insurmountable game collection you can close the web page after the next paragraph.

I carried on with my usual games of The Horus Heresy: Legions and Rayman: Legends; games that I use mainly to pass time between jobs and things I need to be doing but are fun nonetheless, if better enjoyed in short bursts than extended gaming sessions! I also had a go with Chaos Gate, trying to beat one of the optional levels without losing any Space Marines. I didn’t get very far with that one. Finally, I continued playing Wolfenstein 3D and, for reasons that will become obvious in a moment, managed to drive myself to beat it. The review will be coming up on Friday, but I will say as one last snide remark that, brutally difficult though that last level was obviously designed to be, if I hadn’t looked up the map on a guide and found that secret area, I’d never have got past the second room.

Something to aspire to?
Or an addiction-based problem?

Watching far too many YouTube videos has made me aware of a vast multitude of games that I want to at least try. I’ve always owned too many video games, but that fact has been kicked into overdrive once I discovered Steam and its Wishlist system. To explain, if you find a game you are interested in on the Store page you can add it to your Wishlist. At some point, a game will usually go on sale and you can get it for a significantly reduced price. When this happens to a game on your Wishlist, Steam will send you an email telling you so, tempting you to buy the game. Being able to buy a lot of games for a relatively small amount of money tugs at my addictive nature, and this is how I’ve ended up with several hundred of the things – many of which I have never played. The fact that I now have the option to do this on GOG does nothing to help this issue.

At some point last week, I decided to count my games. I already keep track of what games I own on an excel document, so it was simply a case of working it out from the numbers in the margin. Having counted them, I then decided to total how many of them I’ve played, how many of them I’ve beaten and how many I’ve completed 100%.

At the time of writing, I own 834 video games, have played 415 of them, beaten 106 of them and completed 34 of them. And that’s if I haven’t missed any of them. Also keep in mind that this doesn’t consider all the video games I have ever owned, as many of them went to trade-ins at some point. Some of them I managed to beat, some I didn’t, but at some point, I decided I wasn’t going to play them again and traded them; that information isn’t displayed here.

I had originally intended to display the graphs I’d done as a result of this, but when I’d finished writing the first draft of the blog and read it back along with the graphs, I really didn’t come out of it well at all. Suffice to say, I own too many video games and should play some more of them at least to the end credits! I’m not saying I will never display that information, but I’d rather do it at a point where I have something more positive to say about it, e.g. if next year shows any significant improvement in my spending and gaming habits. The final chart, where I ran the number of games I’d bought and beaten throughout the years, was a particular eye-opener, and I’m hoping to see an improvement in what it’s telling us for next year.

So, back to it!

Last Week's Games: Wolfenstein 3D, Open TTD, Kingpin and Chaos Gate

I’ve been playing several different games over the last couple of weeks, so if this blog seems a little longer it is because these notes cover two weeks rather than one!

They’ve mainly been on my laptop. I played a bit of Wolfenstein 3D, killing Hitler at the end of the third chapter and playing through the prequel campaigns; I’m about half way through them now. It’s an odd experience; I’ve been playing WWII-related games for many years now, and this is the first time I’ve killed Hitler!

I’ve found that because the game requires a certain amount of timing and skill to complete, this isn’t the sort of game where you can play it for ten hours and beat the whole thing. After about an hour and a half, my concentration drops, and I make silly mistakes that get me killed; at that point I find it’s best to drop the game for a little while and come back to it another day. But it’s nice to have that option!

Not exactly historically accurate, but fun nonetheless!

I’ve also found that with a few exceptions, the level design of the game is generally very good. The graphics must have been impressive for the time but were hardly the photo-realistic polygons we’ve come to expect now, the sound was tinny and distorted, and while the presentation was thematic and did the job, it’s basic. The design team at ID software were aware of this and had to really concentrate on making the game playable – which they have, without a doubt. They might only have one level of view and and three guns to play with, but they designed the levels and challenges to really get the most out of their limited resources. So apart from a couple of clangers (one of the levels require you to find a secret in order to find the key, which when the secret areas are not telegraphed very well is a significant challenge, that you’ll only really achieve by luck rather than judgement. Or read a guide, like I did. It’s not fun to press the activate button on every wall on a huge stage on the off chance you’ll get the right one!) the game is designed very well.

I carried on with my game of Open TTD and I’ve realised some of the problems you can run in to when running a transport network consisting mainly of road vehicles – they get old and need replacing. I’m playing on a large map and I have a lot of road vehicles; it takes time and it is a massive faff. It’s part of the game, I suppose, and it gives you the option to replace those vehicles with improved versions, but I wish there was some way to automate the replacement! I’ve also reached a point in the game where some of the supplying businesses start to close; I’ve noticed it mainly with oil: there comes a point where the primary business doesn’t operate anymore, and a lot of the transport designed around it becomes redundant. Rerouting your entire network to compensate is a challenge!

Of course, as Kingpin was released in 1999, the
character models are absolutely hideous.

There were some other games as well. A while ago I bought Kingpin: Life of Crime, plus a couple of older Games Workshop games, Final Liberation and Chaos Gate. I’ll go in to specifics in a minute but for now let me say that as I downloaded these games from GOG, all three of them required fiddling around with the game files to run. This involved looking for advice from the community, finding out what patches I need, and making sure they were in the game files. Kingpin wouldn’t boot at all until I’d installed a patch, and Chaos Gate wouldn’t proceed past the point where I’d launched the mission because apparently it can’t handle particularly long file paths, so I had to make a new directory for it. Final Liberation was a little easier to fix; for some reason it doesn’t want to play the videos, so I had to go into the configuration file to disable them. This is a little sad as some of those videos were brilliant; not technically wonderful but the actors and producers were clearly in to what they were doing! I got them all working eventually but this is not something I expect to have to do with a product I’ve bought from a game distributor on the understanding that it will work.

I wasn’t too impressed with Kingpin, actually. From the marketing, I was expecting a kind of Grand Theft Auto without the cars, where you build up your criminal empire and take on the people who betrayed you. In fact, it’s a difficult shooter with some shopping and recruiting. I didn’t get far in to it; maybe it gets better at some point but starting a game like this with no weapons and being surrounded by enemies who are at least on par with you and often much tougher made the game frustratingly difficult.

The rest of the squad are in the Thunderhawk...

Chaos Gate was a lot of fun, though. It’s a Warhammer 40K squad-based tactics game, and I’m a lot better at them now than I was when I originally bought the game in 1999 so I set it on the middle difficulty rather than the easy mode I would usually look for back then! The graphics look a bit “Second Edition,”[1] and while the weapons make the right noises, I’m not sure how I feel about firing the rocket launcher and seeing the impact of it with absolutely nothing in between, but the game itself is pretty good if a little clunky. It must be one of the first games I played with a Permadeath function; if your squad members get killed, there’s no replacing them at all in the campaign. It even has an Iron Man mode, which I haven’t touched yet. I’ve got to the second mission, but I can’t seem to get through it without at least one squad member dying; I’ll keep trying though!

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[1] If you know, you know.