No, I don’t feel burned out or pressured to play lots of stuff.. it’s more like I always feel the urge to be playing SOMEthing new, and when nothing highly-anticipated is on my plate, I like to fill the space with lesser-known titles I might have missed first time around. When you cast your net wide enough there’s always something interesting to be trying out.

Peter: Well, that’s certainly an approach to replayability that I’d never considered. Well done! :)

It’s interesting to see why people replay games, because the reasons rarely seem to match up with the purported “replay value” additions. I sure as hell won’t replay No More Heroes to collect the trading cards, and I didn’t go through Ocarina of Time to hunt down Gold Skulltulas. It’s almost as though designers will just add in any time-consuming activity they can think of to make a game longer, regardless of whether it’s fun or not.

I don’t speak or understand any of these languages particularly well, but it’s a fun way to learn, and you get some out-of-the-way vocabulary. Subtitles help, when they’re available. Little Big Adventure 2, on its own, taught me enough French to test out of a year of undergraduate coursework!

I have the same problem with comic books. I HATE getting tiny snippets of story and having to wait a few weeks for the next morsel. For this reason I’ve been more or less exclusively buying the bundled comic compilations that contain an entire story arc. I have to wait much longer, of course, but I find myself enjoying the story much more without the jarring breaks. That, of course, or entirely self-contained graphic novels.

I’m intrigued by your binge/downtime pattern. I don’t play nearly enough games to sustain a cycle like that, but it seems like you’re putting a lot of pressure on yourself to keep abreast of the industry. Do you find that playing those second-string games feels like work? Maybe that’s not a foreign idea to you anyway, given your job, but if I were in your shoes I’d be worried about burning out.

Ben: I’m not big on episodic games either, as outlined above, but I actually can’t think of any episodic titles that are eminently replayable. It seems to me that the very purpose of breaking a game up is to prevent you from being satisfied with one section; that way they ensure that you buy the next one. The business model relies on the game being fundamentally incomplete.

A few days after I finished Precipice, I figured I’d go through it again to see if I missed anything important really funny, and maybe collect the rest of those robot pieces. I got about twenty minutes in and gave up — there’s just not enough there to sustain multiple playthroughs. Meanwhile, I bet I could replay Chrono Trigger annually until I die and enjoy it every time.

My pattern though is to binge heavily on an anticipated title, then spend the ‘down-time’ until the next one is released by checking out old or second-string games that I’ve heard good things about. So I finished GTA4 recently, and now I’m going through a stack of games that includes Front Mission 3, Haunting Ground, Graffiti Kingdom, Mario RPG: Thousand Year Door, Eternal Darkness, Urban Chaos Riot Response and more. I usually don’t see these interim games all the way through, but at least it gives me a broad base of titles to draw from.