Down, but not out.

It’s been over six months since I started my yearlong mission to clear my 50-game-tall Pile of Shame. 28 weeks and 25 games later, and I’m feeling a bit down in the dumps.

Generally I’ve been getting my head down and hammering away. The weird thing is that when I take a moment to lift my head and take a glance at what’s going on in the gaming world I find that it’s not exactly how I imagined it would look when I started this journey.

Imposing a twelve month ban on purchasing any games is bound to be hard on a gamer who clearly loves to amass new titles. I had visions of new games coming out during this time, and me sitting there desperate to play them, champing at the bit to be enjoying them at the same time as everyone else. But it seems that every game I had kept an eye on hasn’t really made me that desperate to play it at all.

There are a couple that seem to have been received quite well, but they didn’t exactly set the world alight. Hitman: Absolution, Need for Speed: Most Wanted, Crysis 3, and Dead Space 3 all came and went without much fanfare in regards to either greatness or calamity.

Then there were the failures. From the extremely mixed reviews of Assassin’s Creed 3, to the disastrous catastrophe of Aliens: Colonial Marines, right through to the laughably unplayable Sim City, I find myself sitting there not really feeling like I’m missing out on anything. Even GTAV got pushed back, how good is that!

So why am I feeling in a funk? I’m not really missing out on anything. I can play my way through my pile. I can have fun, and I can achieve my goal. I should be happy. So why am I so glum?

Oh yeah, that’s right. Because I’ve been playing Dirt3.

I know I’ve previously gone on about how annoying this game is, but honestly, this game makes me so mad. The loading screens, the endless fucking loading screens, oh my god, enough already. I must have put twenty hours into this game, and I swear I’ve only actually been driving for about eight of them. I know that sounds like a total exaggeration, but I played for an hour and twenty minutes this morning and I tallied up the total amount of time I spent on the track.

It was a mighty 37 minutes.

That’s how long I was actually playing the game for. Even though I sat there for 80 minutes, for 43 of those minutes I was resigned to watching dozens of loading screens, and listening to those bastard douchebags carrying on. And the worst thing is that this is a good game, the driving is really enjoyable. It’s so infuriating that it’s buried under so much ugly trash.

It’s like going out on a date with someone you know is attractive, good looking, and fun to be with. You wait for them to turn up at the arranged location (they’re late, of course), but when they arrive they’re wearing really shit clothes, and they’ve done something weird with their hair. It’s just so off-putting. You know that underneath there’s something you really want to get your teeth into, but you just can’t get past their abysmal presentation.

Then they keep disappearing off to the toilet every five minutes, and each time they come back they’re talking in a different obnoxious, stereotyped accent, spouting bullshit catchphrases and trying to give you high fives, before fucking off to the toilet again for another ten minutes. Utterly infuriating.

So the date with Dirt3 ended, and I settled the bill. I left it at its doorstep with a polite peck on the cheek. There won’t be any future dates unless it gets an extreme makeover.

One game that I did successfully take out to dinner this week, and enjoyed copping a feel of its afterburners, was Tom Clancy’s Hawx. This fighter jet action game stood out as being utterly unique within my pile, so I decided that this would be a nice companion to Dirge3, and the combination of two vehicle games was actually a great start to the second half of my journey. Hawx was a standard military affair, blow up this, attack this, defend that, but it was fast paced and I enjoyed its company. I’m struggling to find much to say about this one. Complaining about Dirt3 has thoroughly worn me out.

27 down, 23 to go.