Shameless Gaming: Week One

As you may be aware, July is Shameless Gaming month here at Kotaku. Since there seems to be a dearth of new, interesting releases we’re inviting you to join us as we attempt to make our own personal pile of shame a more manageable heap. I will be documenting my progress here, every Tuesday, but think of this as a place to discuss your own progress…

Shameless Gaming: Week One
Friday was a write-off. I had something I had to go to. Something I couldn’t avoid.

But I woke up on Saturday with a sense of poise and purpose. When you combine those two words together you get porpoise.

I was a purposeful porpoise.

I opened my drawer, bursting at the seams. I’ve always had more games that I legitimately have space for, meaning that I tend to loan my games out constantly to friends and family – plenty of my games were missing. Still, regardless, I had a tonne to get through. Metroid Prime Trilogy, Metroid: Other M, Punch Out!!, InFamous 2, Crysis 2, Bulletstorm, Dead Space 2, LA Noire, LittleBigPlanet 2, Homefront… etc – more than I could realistically get through in a month. It was clear that, in this case, priorities must be made.

I decided to focus my time on games I had come close to finishing. I call them the InBetweeners – titles that filled the gaps between the games I truly wanted to play; titles that got tossed when the games I was truly salivating after were released. Alan Wake got tossed for Red Dead Redemption, Batman: Arkham Asylum got tossed for Uncharted 2 – Castlevania: Lords of Shadow got tossed for… any game that wasn’t a frustrating mess of shit.

But I digress. I made, as my first target, Batman: Arkham Asylum. A game I got close to finishing, but stupidly abandoned in the latter stages.

Sliding in the game disc, slipping my buttcheeks into the increasingly comfortable grooves in my couch, I began to realise that Shameless Gaming would be more difficult than I anticipated. It would be a grind. It would be difficult. I had abandoned these games (mostly) with good reason. I hated them, they were frustrating, I had better games to play or – in Batman: Arkham Asylum’s case – I had gotten utterly, stupidly stuck.

I won’t go into details, but jumping headlong into a game, a good couple of years after you last touched it, requires a certain grace period. You’ve completely forgotten the basic controls for a start. With Batman: Arkham Asylum I couldn’t remember what button was counter, which was attack, let alone all the combat modifiers required for Batman to really start bouncing some criminal booty all up in this bitch.

And then there was the context required to play through such a game. In short – there was none. Where was I going? Where had I come from? Being perfect honest, I had no real idea what my next objective was, I had a vague understanding of what the weapons in my artillery did, but couldn’t remember what tool I had acquired last, and couldn’t quite grasp what situation required which ability, etc, etc, etc.

Etc into oblivion.

Being stuck was one of the reasons I stopped playing Batman: Arkham Asylum to begin with. Jumping straight to the end of the game amplifed the situation by, conservatively speaking, roughly 1 billion percent.

In short – I was boned. So I did what any reasonable man would do in this situation. I googled the shit out of it.

So yeah, for the first time since Goldeneye on the N64, I had to hit up the internet for the solution to a problem. I was ashamed. And so I should have been. This is Shameless Gaming after all.

But yes, thank you internet. After a solid hour of re-enacting Groundhog Day: Batman Edition, a quick Google search had me on my way.

And it was precisely at that moment that my wife returned with an entourage of our friends and family.

“Turn off the TV,” she said, “stop being so anti-social!”

Yep. Shameless Gaming had gotten off to a ripsnorter of a start…

How are you guys going with your pile of shame? Let us know in the comments below. We’re also discussing Shameless Gaming on Twitter under the hashtag #shamelessgaming. You can follow me @Serrels.


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