A MOST AGREEABLE PASTIME

Mo’ Money. Mo’ Games. Mo’ Problems.

When I sit down and think about it, my gaming habits have been mostly shaped by option value – if by chance I decide I want to play something in the future I will pay a premium in order to do so. It’s absolutely non-sensical in this day and age, but it’s also a habit borne from growing up in a time where games were finite. Finite in production, finite in consumption.

Case in point: if I wanted to go back and legitimately play any games I missed from my formative years – Game Boy, Amiga 500, PlayStation – it would cost me an arm and a leg. During COVID-19 lockdown, I did in fact plug some of those gaps, and paid a pretty penny for games I was curious about because of something I’d read in the nineties, that for some reason had stuck in the old noggin’ for whatever reason. Felt good at the time – Po’ed welcome to the family.

“That sounds alright though, dunnit? I mean will all have a vice or sommut” I hear a voice from somewhere in the North of England say. And yeah. It is alright. If that wasn’t the tip of the iceberg.

The problem is that I don’t really consider myself a collector. But I do have a games collection. Some of them I care about, most of them I don’t. And realistically, with the odds we’ll all be dead within the decade increasing at a steady rate if not by drowning definitely by nuclear war, who has time to give a right royal about whether I ever get around to playing Clive Barker’s Jericho.

Not me. And the doozies don’t stop there. Ninety-Nine Nights and its rightly maligned sequel? Chorus? The Surge, which admittedly looks interesting, but enough to put into my console and actually play?

Sure, I don’t really play that many video games these days. But as someone who spent three hours last night taking Brutal Deluxe to the top of the Championship in Speedball II, sucked every possible hour out of the bonkers but seriously slow and grindy Yakuza: Like a Dragon, and has just played Devil May Cry 3 for the umpteenth time, I’m certainly not immune to playing a game or two at the expense of other life priorities.

But that threshold has moved and the reality is I am not likely to ever play Elden Ring let alone boot up the trusty PlayStation 3 to shoot shite in Painkiller: Hell and Damnation, which is by all accounts a less good version of the brainless PC game from the mid-noughties. If I were to spin the chair around and tell it to you straight, the odds are higher that I will buy an anniversary vinyl release of the first Spice Girls record, than play anything on the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 again.

So why keep them? There’s always going to be that part of my brain that says “mate, what if you want to play Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 one night?” And to that part of my brain, I say this: “What about tomorrow morning? Do you have any idea how hard that is for me? Do you care?”

The option to play? Get f**ked. It’s time to stop pretending physical video games are precious commodities, and time to start ridding the house of these unloved pieces of plastic. Because I’ll be damned in the choice-paralysis causing clutter stops me from throwing myself into Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth when the time comes

Check mate.