Happy New Year! No resolutions for 2017, at least for now

Happy New Year everyone! May your 2017 be full of peace and joy and God’s grace and as few celebrity deaths as possible!

I think the way you ring in the New Year sets the tone for the first month at least. I spent New Year’s Eve trying out the 7th Dragon III Code: VFD demo (it works great) so we’re off to a good start. This is where I’d want to jump right in and start planning all the other games I’d like to play in 2017, but I’m going to hold back for a number of reasons:

1. I still haven’t played most of the games that were on my list last year. They get priority this year where possible.

2. There isn’t much I want to play that isn’t on the 3DS, which isn’t working right now, and the VITA, which I haven’t bought yet but totally will. When I do get one later in the year (God willing) I’ll make a mountain of resolutions for that alone.

3. The few other games are on aged consoles and handhelds and there’s no telling how long any of them will hold up. My PS2 has been threatening to die for years, my DS has been half-broken for almost as long and even the buttons on my formerly strong PSP are starting to feel a little soft and mushy. I don’t want to make a long list of games and then come back all like “Whoops, can’t play this. Can’t play that either.”

4. I’d like to try harder to finish what I start. After I wrote my Legend of Legacy post a few days ago, a new reader asked me “Do you ever finish a game?”
“Of course I do,” I protested, innocent tears filling my girlish eyes.* “How could you say that, haven’t you seen my track record?” Then I went back and actually looked at my record for this year and… it’s pretty bad. I only finished 7 games in 2016 as opposed to 15 in 2015 and 25 (!!) in 2014.
*Parts of this account may have been slightly embellished.

On one hand it’s not my fault if a game isn’t worth finishing. And it’s only to be expected that my completion rate will drop as I hit the dregs of the gaming selection on my aging systems. And since I’ve been busy IRL these days, I played far fewer games to begin with and thus naturally completed far fewer.

But still! All those excuses aside, there’s plenty of room for improvement in 2017. I need to make better use of my time by picking better games to play in the first place. For example, even if the mountain of bad reviews didn’t give it away, it was obvious within the first hour that Mind Zero was a useless game. I should have quit sooner and started something else. This policy will likely lead to more dropped games, not fewer, but with any luck it allow me to clear out the dreck quicker, leaving more time for the stuff I really enjoy.

That’s the theory, anyway. In practice I’ll probably still end up playing anything that looks good and regretting it, just hopefully at a faster rate than before. I’ll also try to work a little harder at finishing one game before starting a newer, shinier one. That means my goal for January is FFXIII + Summon Night 5 + 7th Dragon III = No looking elsewhere until those are done!! I’ll take the rest of the year on a game by game basis.

Have a fun 2017, everyone!

4 thoughts on “Happy New Year! No resolutions for 2017, at least for now

  1. Spoopy says:

    Happy New Year! 😀

  2. Rokuso3 says:

    Wow, 3 long RPGs just for January! Good luck with that one and I hope to see your opinions about them (specially 7th Dragon) on the next weeks. It’s a little too late, but happy new year! I hope to read your blog for a long, long time. It’s good to see you still love Summon Night!!!

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