The above image is of my stats from The Backloggery which I was introduced to at the start of the weekend and those numbers scare me. The Backloggery is a site were you enter all the details of all the games you own and then assign them the following criteria:

• Unfinished
• Beaten
• Completed
• Null
• Mastered

You can also add an Unplayed tag to any unfinished game (represented by the green bar that overlaps the red unfinished bar). So after you have put in all the game details you can think of it compiles it all for you and presents you with your stats. The data I put in to came to the shocking results of 373 games owned with 268 games unfinished (with 164 unplayed!). The data came from the following:

• All the physical boxed games I own, so that’s PS3, Xbox 360 and a few original Xbox games (I’ve not included PS2 and Dreamcast games because they’re currently in storage)
• All digital Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network games. This includes the few full games I now have digitally thanks to things like PlayStation Plus
• All my PS Vita games and downloads
• All the games attached to my Steam Account

The only things I’ve left off are games I’ve previously owned that have either been sold or traded in for other games. All this took me most of the weekend, sifting through account histories and my various game collections but the results speak for themselves….

I am terrible at finishing games.

Also at starting them to a certain extent too!

To try and defend my actions and the extent of my “Pile of Shame”, the reason behind the large number of unplayed games is because of me being unable to pass up a bargin and getting freebies. I have so many free games obtained through things like PS+ or as parts of bundles in Steam Sales. Also there lots of solo games bought in things like Steam Sales (which I have finally come to realise are the work of the bearded devil, Gabe). If I see a game I’m mildly interested in on the cheap or discounted in a store I will grab it with the full intention to play it at some point in the future, where presumably I have an infinite amount of time to play an infinite amount of games. The worst part is that in the next couple of months more games will be added to this gargantuan list as we enter Christmas Chaos 2012 which for me this year is as follows:

Buying:

• Dishonored
• Assassin’s Creed III (for the wife)
• Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation (for me!)
• Halo 4
• PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale

Hoping for as a gift:

• Ratchet & Clank: Q-Force
• Little Big Planet Karting

Stuck in-between

• Zone of Enders HD Collection

Waiting until January:

• X-Com: Enemy Unkown
• Resident Evil 6

Then you have to take into account all the games coming out in the New Year that have decided to skip Christmas to avoid the spectres of Call of Duty: Black Ops II and the Wii U. I look on not in anticipation but in trepidation that the list will keep on growing. Growing until it is completely unmanageable, although you could argue that it has already reached that stage.

So a change in tactics is needed because the amount of games I own is completely disproportional to the number of games I have actually played until completion. Although if you go off the global statistics I am still above the curve. This is because only 10% of players will finish a game. So my 20% beaten (getting to the end credits or equivalent) rate looks….ok…I guess. Entering all my games into the Backloggery, which makes you enter them manually. No scanning of your Xbox Live Gamercard or PSN-ID here, it is all manual for a reason. It makes you realise how many games you actually own and how stupid you have been in your purchasing decisions.

So here’s the plan!

I keep buying games as per usual until the New Year because you know Christmas Chaos 2012 is unavoidable. But as soon as 2013 rolls around things are changing. I’m going to start simple and see how it goes then maybe ramp things up if I can/need to. The core ruling of the new plan is as simple as this,

For every single game bought at least two games of equal standing need to be beaten first.

So that means if I want to buy Bioshock: Infinite in February that means I need to finish at least two AA or AAA games that can be bought in retail stores. If I want to buy LocoCycle when that comes out next year I will need to sit down and finish two unfinished XBLA/PSN games first. You get the picture. If there is a game I really want on release day I’m going to have to get busy or trade in played-unfinished games that I know I will never complete due to not liking them or losing interest. I can never trade-in or sell an unplayed-unfinished game. All my unplayed games will need to be played for a minimum amount of time (I’m thinking 2-4 hours) to pass judgment. Usually when I start playing a game I will try and finish it or aim to hit the halfway mark. So the general idea is that I will end up playing more but paying less. The only exception is grabbing the games that are part of my PlayStation Plus subscription because they are only available for limited amounts of time. So they can be “bought” and added to the list as and when Sony make them available.

I’m going to have the games I will be playing picked for me too by using The Backloggery’s Fortune Cookie menu. Which lets you apply various filters such as platform and completion status then throws a random game from your backlog to play. A simple, effective and elegant solution to my problem. The hope is that by the end of 2013 the green Unplayed bar will be totally gone and the red Unfinished bar will have had a large chunk taken out of it. That’s the hope but we will see how well that works out in reality as it happens.

This is my current Now Playing list. This is the amount of games I am just about comfortable having on the go at once. So expect a few subtractions and additions to this list as time goes on. If it gets too big then something has gone terribly and horribly wrong! I will be updating the details and comments on the games as I play them and expect me to write about them on here too. You can follow all of this over on my Personal Backloggery. But for now,

My name is Callum Langstroth and I have a game buying problem…