You'll NEVER Play Everything You Want... but is that a problem?

humble mud in 2023, so many great games came out and there were moments where it felt like they were all falling at the same time, this year alone we had tears from the remake Kingdom re4 Street Fighter 6 Baldor's Gate 3 Armor Core 6 Starfield sea of ​​​​star Super Mario Bros Wonder, the remake of Super Mario RPG, Pikmin 4 and many more, and nowadays it seems that every game that comes out promises to bring new unique experiences or an improved version of the game we remember and love, they always promise hours. of content so we can sink our teeth into it and if you do, don't worry because new content for said game is on the horizon, very conveniently, out of reach for now, for every release that was released, there were hundreds of incentives to convince us to try to stay in the world of that game and when it comes to some games, you are actively punished for not being an early adopter or for not always

play

ing.

We have Double XP Weekend Battle Passes for a limited time. Car character events. Hell, some games. They are not directly available for purchase after a certain period of time and even when we talk about games that do not try to carry out some viscous plan like Baldor's Gate 3 or Elden Ring, you know that the title is apparently not draining the bank account. Techniques that seem to plague much of AAA game design lately. What about those games that instead only focus on being a good game at launch? They also tend to reinforce a legitimately solid amount of content with multiple layers, multiple paths, and endings.

Enriched story moments guaranteed. to keep you hooked for hours on end, even the quote-unquote golden children of 2023 are the best titles of the year that are seemingly untouched by greedy executives, they will still require significant time on your part if you really

want

to experience

everything

these games have to offer. If you really

want

to complete a game, understand its history, and if you want to be able to argue on Internet forums and, without a doubt, irrefutably claim that you are a true fan of the game because you platinumed it, you have the XYZ McGuffin in your hands and you have was upgraded to the max and you beat the post-game Boss Rush, no

problem

, you'll need to invest a lot of the only currency you can't really get back and that's the time with the greatest means of access to a multitude of games thanks to the stores digital like Steam or Gog or similar services offered by the big three consoles like Xbox Game Pass, PlayStation Plus premium or Nintendo Switch online, there are many more games presented to the average consumer than ever before.

Even compared to the '90s, when gaming tribalism kept competition at an all-time high and it seemed like every year there was some game that defined a generation, and now that every person in the world can have a platform, it's easy be influenced in one way or another. to avoid a certain game only to realize later, after stumbling upon a passionate Reddit post or YouTube video, that you probably should have

play

ed it back then because you most likely would have loved it and then all these years Then, when you're finally sitting down with this game from a few years ago that you missed out on, a shiny, highly anticipated new game suddenly drops and you realize that every hour you spend with this quote-unquote old game you're currently playing is an hour. precious thing that they are taking from you. of the new game that is currently the main topic of global discourse and all of this is totally ignoring the fact that we also have streaming services YouTube Tik Tok Hobbies or passions family real life distractions and obligations all of these things are purchases and sometimes demanding for our attention on a daily basis, even if you had the miraculous opportunity to spend a year or two with yourself undisturbed in something like Dragon Ball Z's hyperbolic Time Chamber or something similar to just play whatever you wanted to play, there's still a good chance you'd have a delay for when you get out, once you finally get a chance to get out of that time chamber and finally back onto the internet, some random YouTuber will convince you within seconds that you really missed out. about this hidden gem of a game earlier this year and they included it in one of those 10 Underrated Push System Games here kind of videos and then you go down this crazy rabbit hole and now you realize that there's actually like six hidden gyms you missed this year, the point is that if you really want to experience every video game under the sun that you would probably enjoy, you'll probably need to live another life, at least the truth is that most people just don't have the luxury . of being able to do whatever they want whe

never

they want at any time of the day and even if they did, they are not immune to exhaustion or releasing fatigue or just sometimes wanting to do anything else besides video games with the way gaming is.

Coming out right now and with the amount of content each of them have, if your goal was to focus specifically on the 2023 or 2024 games for a year straight, there's still something you won't be able to access during that time period. and there's probably something that will bother you because you weren't there right when it happened, for many people the best time to experience a game is right when it comes out because that's when the excitement is contagious, there are a lot of discussions surrounding the game, so some People, when they miss that period of time, they just skip the game completely and wait for the next thing, but there are a lot of games coming out nowadays and a lot of them are great games.

On top of that, there are tons of great games from the past that you've probably

never

experienced. Even if you ignore anything pre-Nintendo Entertainment System, you still have almost 40 years of games to sift through if you're interested in retro videos. games or the history of video games, so when Baldor's Gate 3 Armored Core 6 and Starfield come out within a few weeks of each other, it's understandable to feel behind or even guilty about playing an old game during that time when you have these new ones , fresh and exciting. The ones that were in the back of your mind when the tears of the kingdom came.

I was still working on Breath of the Wild. I stopped progressing in that game after beating some of the divine beasts because someone convinced me I should try Shinu and I was done. After I played that game to completion, Super Mario Brothers Wonder was announced, so I thought, you know, I never finished Mario Odyssey, so I went back and completed that one too, so here I was still without the legendary master sword in my hand and the breath of The Wild during the year of Our Lord 2023, while the Tears of the Kingdom sat patiently on my shelf watching in discontent as I was distracted over and over again, then Mario Wonder came and I got over it and I still haven't been immersed in tears, I HE.

I'd probably love Baldor's Gate 3, but I still have Breath of the Wild and, by extension, Tears of the Kingdom to get through first, so I shouldn't pick up that game yet, but I'm also 85% of the way through Skies. of Arcadia legends on GameCube and I wanted to get back to that and the fist of Northstar Lost Paradise on PlayStation 4 is not going to complete itself. I also randomly saw a screenshot of a cut scene from an obscure NES game called Dino Wars. apparently a lot of people hated it even back then when it was released, but that screenshot looks so good for an old Nintendo game, so I just had to try it out and play it.

After researching, I discovered that the game was very short, so I gave it a try. So even a game that was given a 5 out of 10 in the '80s was my priority at one point, not to mention that most of these slightly more modern games I've been talking about completing already had at least 5 years. When I finally played them and worked my way through them for the first time, I was behind and as you know from my other videos, I've been behind my whole life, that's when I was trying to get my thoughts out. For me, is there a correct way to play video games?

I started to think about this topic quite a bit and started to realize that it's practically impossible to play

everything

you want to play in your life and even though that's a bit difficult. pill to swallow in realizing and accepting this, there is also a kind of comfort that develops from having that knowledge and speaking of my YouTube videos and my channel, it was sometime during 2023 that I decided it was time to make my dream come true of starting a YouTube channel and talking about my favorite games and how they've impacted me as a person, but I started thinking a little bit in my head, I should probably be a little more qualified before I start making a gaming channel properly.

I have many what I would consider major gaps in my video game playing history, for example, until recently I never owned a Final Fantasy Mainline game, the only Final Fantasy games I grew up with were Final Fantasy Adventure on the Game Boy, which It's not even really a Final Fantasy game, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance Crystal Chronicles and the world of Final Fantasy Maxima never felt like it was very close to a mainline Final Fantasy game and a lot of my friends apparently weren't interested in it. . series either, so there wasn't much of an incentive for me to pick it up as a kid.

I had a Super Nintendo when I was a kid that my uncle gave me, but it wasn't related to the past or the hell of Final Fantasy 6. I missed the entire PlayStation 2 era and am only now enjoying that period of edgy action and platforming. 3D that I was very jealous of others for having as a kid, so I started to wonder. My opinion doesn't matter at all if I'm not an expert on all the classics, at least not some of the games that people consider essential. I started trying to play all these games so I could fight some made up internal arguments with myself. on whether my own opinions were valid and valuable enough to start a YouTube channel because I've only spent time with a few classics over the years versus all of them, but every hour was spent wandering the hallways of Devil May Cry's Dark Castle exploring past-bound grasslands and caves sneaking around like Solid Snake or wielding this great sword as a handsome, spiky-haired anime man in Final Fantasy 7, this was an hour when I wasn't tearfully wandering around the Kingdom or the gate of Balor like many of my friends did. kind to remind me and for another hour I was putting off creating this channel and it was during these moments that I realized all the effort invested in trying to keep up with all the great games currently on the market, not just read about them. but getting to know the games through experience of their gameplay was useless, the math just didn't add up when I thought about the number of games I was interested in, the completion time required for each one, and the ever-decreasing amount of free time I had. in my life. play said games and again, if we take into account all those series of prerequisites that I just mentioned, as well as many others that I have not mentioned, it is likely that I would not have started doing what I am doing now until 2030, even if I was being generous with myself in acknowledging that I have a tendency to get sick of a game after about 10-25 hours and then move on to another;

There was just no way I could do it. I approach all of these games with the depth and attention that I would like and I realized that it would probably be more interesting to take everyone with me on this journey of discovery rather than trying to pass myself off as some kind of expert anyway. So it can be a fruitless endeavor to try to play every game out there that is considered essential by gaming journalists much more experienced and well-spoken than me, but choosing to follow my own path through my specific selection of games and play them. . at various levels of completion I feel like I'm creating my own experience that will inevitably guide me toward new adventures that I'm sure to enjoy and that will catch me off guard in the best way, so what did I do right with this new philosophy?

At this point I was about 75% of the way through Fist of the Northstar Lost Paradise and I was thinking about all the people telling me I should play and beat Breath of the Wild so I could join all the cool kids out there. flying through the sky. heavens and tears of the Kingdom I sat there with this thought and then looked a little further inward to simply ask myself what do you want to do and, interestingly, I was much less familiar with the character of Kiniro than with Link, even though I had no nostalgia for the Fist of the Northstar series, since I'd never actually seen the anime or read the Manga before and, although I was much less familiar with the Yakuza style of gameplay compared to the dungeon puzzle platformer, that's Zelda, my answer.

From the inside was that I wanted to see Kiro's story through me. I wanted to know what secrets are importantin the city of Eden and this was a somewhat surprising decision for some of my friends, but they respected the decision because it was clearly mine and mine alone. Fist of the Northstar Lost Paradise was my first Yakuza Style game and it's also the first Yakuza game I've ever won. I plan to one day go to Yakuza zero or yakusa as a dragon, but I may make a stop in the land of Hyrule. first or maybe I won't and that's when the real weight left my shoulders.

There is a certain freedom in letting go of a completionist mentality, letting go of the desire to keep up with the latest and greatest and returning to I just enjoy games simply because they are fun, intriguing or engaging when I was young and received my first gaming console. , an old Super Nintendo that my uncle gave me, with about 20 games in it. He didn't tell me that you should play Super Mario World first or something like "I think you're really going to like that game called Earthbound." No, what happened was that I looked at all the illustrations on each cartridge and, being a Batman fan, time through dumb kid logic I swore by Arrow that Acrobat must be the best game of all time because the bats and Batman is a Batman, right? and the brilliant logic of Batman's child.

Now I know that in that small collection alone there were tons of games better than Arrow the Acrobat, but I'm ashamed to say that for a brief moment I chose Arrow over FZ Street Fighter 2, Super Mario RPG and other classics, of course, not because I eventually played them all anyway and it didn't take me long. Realizing that Earthbound was the best game of all time, of course, I made an ill-informed decision. I was a kid and that was part of the fun today as adult players, although our decision-making process goes far beyond the simple art of the box. or the blurb on the store page, we have a wealth of knowledge at our fingertips, we can find a written tutorial with screenshots or instructional videos on how to perform a certain combo and in a matter of seconds, when we have all this information in our fingertips, what we can do very well very quickly if we're not careful is optimize things so much that we actually optimize the fun from the beginning and I think chasing the dragon of trying to experience all the latest and greatest games and, at the same time I was trying to make up for the lost player credit I felt I didn't have by beating classic retro games, it really took the fun out of gaming in general for a while, that's when I took the pressure off.

Myself and I just played what I wanted to play where I really felt like the shackles had been loosened and it makes sense at any given moment, your needs and wants are different depending on the situation or time in life you're currently in. You're out spending the night with friends and you've had a few beers and the night is winding down. Sometimes the best thing you can think of to eat at the moment is just this big greasy burger, however if you're going out with your significant other for your anniversary you'll probably want something a little more luxurious, it's the same here, sometimes I really want experience something I know as a 6 out of 10 game because it's still stupidly fun or I might enjoy the characters or the Jank. and other times I want to watch something that really surprises and inspires me, ironically, even though I realize I don't have enough time for all the games I could enjoy.

I have learned that I do have time to play. exactly the type of game I want at any given time within the collection I have and you may have already been thinking about this, but by taking the time to play the games you want to play and not playing a game as soon as you release, you will You set yourself up for a lot of potential benefits when you get to a game you've had on your radar a year or two later, the launch day bugs are most likely fixed balance patches, have been managed, and a lot of the issues in the game. release day have generally been fixed somewhat if there was a DLC release for the game and you wait long enough, there's also a good chance that when you get to play it for the first time, the pre-compiled definitive edition with all the DLC content is out. , you're likely to get the game at a significant discount and even when it comes to games like Nintendo's first-party titles that don't typically sell as much in price, there are sites like Deu Deals that will let you know any time there's a deal for the game you want outside of recent Mario title, like Mario RPG and Mario.

I wonder if I felt like I had to do it. I have not paid the full amount. price for a game of its own change since the final release of Super Smash br and that actually includes titles like Tears of the Kingdom Metroid Dread Kirby in the Forgotten Land and so on, you just have to know where to look and be patient. I keep a rough list of the games I want to complete, knowing that this list is just a suggestion, not a demand. I look at this list of games the same way you would look at the main quests in an RPG when it comes to The other games that pop up and distract me from time to time, which this year were titles like Ryar, the Battle of Vargus on the Wii, the original Death Span from Fantasy Star and many others, are sort of like the side quests you'll find. throughout your journey and anyone who has experienced a solid RPG knows that sometimes those side quests are the best part of the entire game.

There are a lot of really great games that I dropped one day and haven't gone back to for some reason, but I would. Like, there are some games that I know are great, that I know I would really enjoy, and are usually easy to access, but life gets busy and I haven't tried them yet. There are a lot of games, people. they're surprised they haven't played and there are a lot of games that people are surprised that I'm very familiar with, there are a lot of games that I enjoyed a lot more than I ever thought they would, games that I'm really glad I stumbled upon and you know what I don't think I would have it any other way, I'm sure I won't be able to experience every possible game out there, but I can try and most importantly I can do it at my own pace why try.

Rushing through every game out there and trying to take them all in at once is just going to sap the fun of video games in the first place, which is why we play well, and so for those curious, this is a timeline of what I would consider the main games I played during the year 2023 in the middle we have the full timeline highlighted in green, which are the games I set out to complete from the beginning and did what I could Look, it was a year very intense Mario for me. I got Bowser's Fury for Christmas and then I wanted to go back and complete Mario Odyssey and then Super Mario Wonder and Super Mario RPG dropped and I felt like I had to play them too.

I got into a lot of Dreamcast titles, so Shin Mu and Skies of Arcadia came out at that time and then at the top we have side quests that are highlighted in white, the unexpected endings, these are the games that just stuck out to me. They sneaked up on me very quickly just because I know I'm going to get some questions about this. I consider Link to the Past a side quest game for me, not because it's a lesser game than these other titles, but simply because I wasn't planning on playing this. I was on a flight and my PlayStation vaita died and I had a Link to the Past ROM on my phone, so since my phone was the only thing I had to entertain myself, I started playing Link to the Past and while I'm sure you know that It was such a good game that I kept playing and playing and playing and finally beat it, so it's not that I consider a link to the past any less than any of these titles, in fact, it was one of my favorite experiences of the year it just wasn't something that I necessarily had in the books and finally, next, these were some of the games that I spent a substantial amount of time on and I want to go back and finish the one I have.

I'll probably go back to First, Mega Man Legends, since I'm almost done with that game, so I hope that gives you a little more insight into my personal gaming journey this year, like I said before. I'm going to take this all at my own pace, so if I don't beat Elden Ring this year it's not a big deal, but I know I will eventually. I wish you the best of luck on your gaming journey and if you're still here, thank you very much for watching and as always stay humble