So, Trey regaled you with stories of “too many games, not enough time” recently. But he barely scratched the surface. I’m currently working on Ratchet & Clank Future, an amazing game, in-between sessions of Eye of Judgment and Tony Hawk’s Proving Grounds. I’m not a HUGE Tony Hawk fan, but I enjoy picking one up every 2-3 years or so, and this one has been a lot of fun so far. I have Folklore and Zack & Wiki waiting patiently for me on the shelf. And that’s not to mention some other “older” games in my backlog. I picked up a Wii around the time Metroid came out, and with it I got Zelda, Super Paper Mario and Resident Evil 4 – all of which have sat untouched.

Today I placed an order for Guitar Hero 3 (which is completely free, so no guilt there really). Later this month I’m getting Mass Effect (also free…), Uncharted and Mario Galaxy. Oh, and a little something called “Rock Band”. Unless you live under a rock, you’ve heard of it – it’s the $170 evolution of Guitar Hero – where you can not only play lead & bass guitar, but can also play the drums and sing. Of course, you can’t do all of that at once – which basically makes it the ultimate party game. Recently, at Trey’s b-day party, we broke out Karaoke Revolution and Guitar Hero. Problem was, the Karaoke people weren’t so keen on playing Guitar Hero, and vice-versa. This way, everyone will be involed at once, in a face-melting rock explosion. Party at *my* house.

I’m trying to ignore Assassin’s Creed next month, mainly because I don’t think I can add more hours to the day. If I’m successful, then the only other game for me this year will be Orange Box in December – and I think Trey will kill me if I don’t pick this one up.

Of course, then there’s the movie backlog I’ve built up thanks to recent blu-ray sales. And yet, I’m looking forward to picking up Ratatoille next week, and the Harry Potter collection in Dec. (all on blu-ray). Once you go blu, you never go back. I have a problem picking up movies on dvd now. TV sets I don’t mind so much, but I just can’t bring myself to buy movies on dvd. When Paramount went hd-dvd only, they may have thought they were forcing people like me to jump into the hd-dvd format. What actually occured, in my case at least, is that I passed over movies such as Transformers completely when I would have picked them up day one had they been released on the format I’m supporting. I have no desire to split my movie collection between 2 competing hd formats, and since all indications show blu-ray movie sales far out pacing hd-dvd (and this can be seen by most stores having much larger blu-ray sections than hd-dvd) then that’s what I’m sticking with.

Ah well – I think we have similar conversations to this every year. The spring will come, the release lists will dry up, and all of these things will be watched/played then. And we’ll do this again next year. Ah, consumerism!

Life as a gamer can get pretty overwhelming. Lately it seems as if there’s been a glut of games to play. And while this is not exactly a bad thing, it makes it hard to keep up, or even finish a game. Especially for me, as I tend to have the attention span of a gnat.

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