PLAY BY PLAY – 2025 GAMING PLAYLIST CATCH-UP – LIVE GAMING BLOG

SETTING THE TABLE

The Hot Hand Cools

As of September 17th, the restart and revival of this thread, I know that I’m in a pretty solid place with my gaming habits and ability to complete a video game. As of September 3rd, however… I was panicking.

I was just coming off of an anemic 2 completions that were both at the end of the month. One of those was Mafia III, which I had started back in May (Which I thought I had started it in February or March, for some reason, so that explains part of the unwarranted panic.) The other was Eidos Montreal’s Guardians of the Galaxy, which kicks ass, but it seemed I only beat it because it was a brand new addition to the rotation and I only finished it due to the novelty factor. The rest of my Playing tab was riddled with 30-50% completions and nothing was sticking.

You may be thinking something totally rational along the lines of: You beat two games in a short period of time, and each of them were like 20+ hours, what’s the problem?

That’s a fair question, and a past version of me would’ve killed for even one completion per month, especially of a game more than 10-12 hours. But I wasn’t in my right mind.

I was coming off the gaming high of a lifetime.

After a slow start to the year of a lot of dropped games and barely finishing 1-2 games per month in the first half of the year, I was on a Mark McGuire/Sammy Sosa Summer of Home Runs ’98 hot streak, but without the steroids.

As you can see in the chart above, I was out of my mind. As I look at the chart initially, I assume that at least a couple of these games are 1-2 sitting indie games, but you can look below at my year-to-date list and see that the roster is wild:

JUNE

  • Clair Obscur: 27 Hours, 5/5 Rating
  • Yakuza 0: 32 Hours, 4.5/5 Rating
  • Evil West: 13 Hours, 4.25/5 Rating
  • Enslaved: Odyssey to the West: 12 hours, 3.5/5 Rating
  • Knack: 15 Hours for some reason, 3.25/5 Rating

Front loaded by story-heavy and attention demanding RPGs of the brutal and dense Expedition 33 and the Japanese language dramatic Yakuza title. Then you may argue that three action games are light work, but Knack and Evil West were pretty damn difficult in some spots and Enslaved had its own exploration quirks that drove them all above my old threshold of 12 hours. All well and good, but I was getting married the following month. Too much going on for video games. July would surely be less, right?

JULY

  • Star Wars Jedi: Survivor: 20 Hours, 4/5 Rating
  • The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom: 22 Hours, 4.5/5 Rating
  • Astral Chain: Probably 16-18 Hours, 4/5 Rating
  • Contrast: 4 Hours, 4/5 Rating
  • inFamous 2: Probably 14 Hours, Rating under review

It’s worth noting that I rolled credits on the last three games all in the same day to match my previous record, so I was a bit on my 2017 Russell Westbrook MVP Campaign with the stat padding there. Other than arguing Contrast is a short game, which still proved to be a very dense 4 hours, this was yet another legitimately insane month. I made sure to beat Jedi Survivor right before the wedding. I stayed on track by not letting Zelda fall by the wayside so I’d avoid a restart in the future, and I beat it in Hawaii. I played most of Astral Chain on vacation and it only took me so long because it took me 4 different sittings to beat the final boss. inFamous was one of those weird ones, much like Guardians of the Galaxy later, that I picked up and beat within mere days of one another because I needed a clean slate.

ANALYZING THE PATTERNS

I’m confirming now that the problem that I run into after many credit rolls in a row is that I run into the same problem as anyone that’s finished a series on Netflix and found themselves unsure what to do next. No show hits the same for the next couple days, if not longer, and you look to your unfinished series to at least bridge the gap. I was doing this with games: Chipping away at Mafia III while I waited for the next bolt of inspiration to strike me. I had so many games like Jedi Survivor and Echoes of Wisdom in the backlog that I wanted to tackle next, but I found myself just unenthused with my offerings and I kept starting new games with no success or momentum. I didn’t care about my installed Steam games or the Switch games I packed in my travel case for the vacation.

Apart from this, there was the looming shadow of Donkey Kong Bananza on the horizon. It took out all my easy options. It felt too early for Knack II after the first game and while Donkey Kong Banaza was on the cusp. It felt too soon for inFamous. It didn’t feel like the right time for the next Assassin’s Creed game. I was still pushing myself to play the Switch 2 since I had just gotten it, but I figured that my best bet for beating Switch games was sticking to one game on the system, which is more or less how I prioritized and beat Zelda and then Astral Chain instead of juggling those two with Xenoblade Chronicles X and three other smaller games.

So Bananza was simultateously my most anticipated game but also one I didn’t want to rush through. I had so much success during these months because I started a spreadsheet with all of each game’s chapters and set a daily and weekly goal of progress in each respective game. I found it easier to maintain momentum and incredibly rewarding to “get ahead” by playing 3 or 4 chapters instead of my minimum of 2. This gave me more freedom during the week if I had a date night planned with Sarah or things to do out of the house, and made it feel less like work and more like a fun project. This is all crazy, I know, but there’s always a part of my brain that is working towards “chipping away at the backlog” and “making progress on some of my blind spot series” and I just need to give that part less consideration.

Long story short: I had just beaten a shit ton of big games, I probably needed a break, Bananza was invalidating my tracking system, and I was being far too hard on myself for a hobbyist gamer with other shit going on.

Revisiting August Through A New Lens

In hindsight, this all makes sense why there was such a gap between clearing the chamber during the triple completion of July 28th and the hard earned near-double completion of Mafia and Guardians back to back at the end of August. And I’m proud of myself for bouncing back. Not for this imaginary contest with myself or for bragging rights (not that I blabber about this to anyone in my life anyways). It’s just cool to see the patterns of me getting back on the horse and restarting the spreadsheet for these two larger games. Mafia was a slightly annoying game that was sometimes cinematic but also very mindless at other times, and I paced that well without burning out again. Guardians could’ve been an easy rush and burnout game because it feels like a 10-12 hour game that’s 18-22 for some reason. But I paced it well. I didn’t just choose three small games just to pad these useless stats (though I may or may not have unsuccessfully started Onimusha and Devil May Cry during this time for that exact reason). I tackled these big games and proved that I can play a game longer than 10 hours or take longer than a week and still follow through with what I set out to do.

It’s seemingly a very ADHD thing to always want to change something or tweak a process or say “This is the thing that’s happening now and evermore, and it will change my life and revolutionize-” and then 7-10 days later that has been left by the wayside and the needless worrying and catastrophizing has resurfaced. But I’m happy to say that I’m still playing games at a good clip. I’m much more confident in my ability to stick to things and beat games. But most importantly: I’m having a lot of fun doing it. I fully acknowledge that some of these games are best experienced in a completely blacked out room with rich premium audio and uninterrupted hours of play, and those games will still be played with one headphone in on the Portal during Sunday Night Football while my wife plays TikToks on full volume next to me. And I’m finally at peace with that. Would I have gotten the full experience with inFamous 2 if I did every side mission and immediately went back and played the fully Evil route the second credits had rolled? I’m sure, yes, but also I’m missing out on the full experience by not having played the damn thing in 2009 when it came out to truly understand how revolutionary it was at the time. Right now, I’m just swearing at how unbalanced the fucking enemy rocket launches are 12 minutes before I have to call an Uber for date night with the wife downtown, so I’m just trying my best to enjoy the process and look back on the times I’ve spent gaming fondly. If my family has to sell a few dozen unplayed PS4 RPGs with the rest of my estate, so be it.

Now that I’ve addressed my own mortality, as one does in a damn video game backlog article, I’m going to get to writing the September 2025 Playlist. Thanks so much and catch you in the next one!