Holy hell, where've I been?

Well, I've learned two things:

1) Not buying games is very hard when working at a company that produces them, and when your coworkers are all gamers (but really, I knew this).

2) I suck at keeping schedules (I knew this too).

So the not buying games thing is pretty much dead.  I ran over it several times with a truck.  I'd rather not talk about it, as it points to a rather alarming lack of self control on my part.

What I'm working on doing now is getting more out of the games I do buy than I have in the past.  Generally, that means playing them to completion, which I historically don't do.  I have had a decent amount of success at doing this so far this year, finishing about ten games thus far (and with another two at least that I'm planning on finishing before new year's).  

Now, you may think that's not a lot, and compared to some people I know, it isn't.  For example, in college, my friend Andrew would frequently borrow games from me, only to return them a day or two later, having finished them on the hardest setting.  But for me, that's probably triple the number of games I finished the year before.  

My main problem with finishing games is that I stop at the hard parts.  If I die several times, I turn it off for the night.  Then my last memory of the game is dying frequently, so when I have to decide what to play the next day, I choose not to play something where I die frequently.  The irony is that usually if I go back and retry the section that was stumping me after I've taken a break, I get through with no problem.  Amazingly, I've found that if I actually just keep chipping away at the game, I finish it.

The other thing I've been doing is focusing exclusively on one game until it's done.  If I try and play three games at once, I wind up finishing none of them, while if I tell myself "Okay, I'm going to play Game A, then Game B, then Game C", I can manage to finish them all.

In the end, I think what I was most unhappy about with my game buying was the feeling that I would get games only to have them sit on the shelf, creating the Backlog that this blog is named after.  If I can spend more time actually playing the games I own/buy to completion, I think I will feel much better about having them.  I will also feel much better about selling them after I've finished them.