As mentioned previously, I mostly play sports games. How this happened, I really have no idea. I've always played sports games (the yearly Maddens, NCAA Footballs, whatever baseball game, etc.), even when I was a kid playing Joe Montana Football or Bulls vs. Blazers. However, I used to have time for the other games as well. Every Mario game, every Sonic game, pretty much everything that came out for Nintendo 64 (I saw the title screen for Wave Race 64 the other day and got very nostalgic). As my time shrank, I gave more importance to the sports games. Something about them being based in reality, I'm sure.
Anyway, the joke between myself and J4RMZ is that I only play sports games and Rockstar Games. No matter how far I got away from every non-sport, I still found time for each new version of Grand Theft Auto. Cut to last night, when I couldn't sleep and had officially grown tired of NCAA Football (it only took 10 days). I decided to look through the Playstation Store and found Red Dead Redemption. Two things crossed my mind when I saw it:
1. They sell entire games through the Playstation Store?!? Does Microsoft do this? As far I could remember, they didn't, but maybe it's something new. I had been without a gaming system for nearly two years, but the last thing I remember about XBox Live was that their downloadable games were cute mini-games. Kind of like ROMs, and some of them were simply old SNES games (the day Street Fighter came out on XBox Live was a good day). However, a full and gigantic game like RDR? No way. Why would anyone ever bother going to the video game store (those places are terrible, but that's a whole other post)? Or buying a CD that can get lost, broken or scratched? Also, and I have no idea if this is true or not, back in the day you could "download" your game from the CD to the XBox hard drive and the many sports games actually played a little faster/smoother when you did that. I see no downside in buying from the PS Store vs. going to some gaming store, except for limited selection (at the moment) and RDR probably came out on CD 6 months or so before being downloadable.
2. One of the last non-sports games that I bought, played and enjoyed was Red Dead Revolver. I remember thinking, after playing it, that the game was good but a little short and missing some things. From what I heard, this version was everything I wanted the first one to be.
So I bought it. It was going to take about 4 hours to download, so I fell asleep for 6. I woke up at about 7:30 and (looking at the clock) have played it pretty much nonstop for 10 hours. At one point I tried vacuuming my apartment, got through one room and decided "That's enough for now." and found myself turning the game back on without even realizing it. Even now, I have the game paused instead of turning the system off because I know I'm going right back to it after I finish writing this.
I forgot what this was like. I remembered what it was like to want to finish a season or play one last game in a sporting game, but I forgot what it's like to lose entire days to games and have no idea if you're anywhere near the end and not caring. I'm trying to figure out how functional I'll be at my job tomorrow if I get no sleep tonight. The answer is it doesn't matter and I don't care.
Thank you, Default Tester, for reminding me of all of the things I forgot I loved about video games. This project is already a rousing success.
