I'll give you a hint: FUCK YOU HP AND YOUR FUCKING SHIT COMPUTERS!!!
If Friday's page looks a bit weird at all, you'll know why.
P.S. - Dear Steve Gibson, please make your broken, overpriced software take less than 100 years to do anything.
Wait, what was I writing about again?
The Bman - August 8th, 2006 - 12:30 AM
I've been a listener of Short Attention Gamer for quite a while now, and although I always appreciated the concept, I didn't have a gut understanding of what it truly meant.
Then yesterday, I was looking at my copy of Spellforce 2, and it clicked. The front of the box proclaims, "Seamless blend of RTS & RPG action with over 60 hours of gameplay" (emphasis mine).
60 hours?!
I don't have 60 hours to spend on a single game. Maybe if I weren't doing Falcon Twin and had nothing else to do all summer long, I could swing that. But there are too many other games to play, to devote 60 hours to each of them. I put a grand total of about 85 hours into Oblivion, and that was a highly exceptional case. It's not really practical for me to do that for game after game.
Some people complain about how short games are these days, but I've come to realize that I'm actually quite happy with that. I probably won't be spending more than 8-10 hours on most of them anyway, so if it takes longer than that to get to the payoff, why even start? That's why it took me so long to fire up Dreamfall after I bought it (and that wasn't even a very long game), and why I still haven't started The Longest Journey yet. Those boxes staring at me from my shelf make me feel guilty for spending money on them but not having the time to play through them. No wonder renting has started to seem like a really good idea; I'm rarely spending more than a couple hours with any one game anyway.
That's why I like games like Burnout Revenge. The payoff comes right away, from playing the game. What do you get when you finally get a perfect score on every race? Some achievement points and maybe a little movie? Big deal. You don't play a game like that to get to the ending; you just play it because it's fun right away. And if you lose interest, you just set it down and move on. No guilt, no shame that you didn't get to see the ending.
Same with (believe it or not) MMOs: get on, play a bit, and if you want to keep going, do so. If not, no biggie. But if you play Final Fantasy MCMXCVII and only play through the first 20 (of 40) hours before you get bored, you have a choice: stop playing and miss out on the payoff for that game, or force yourself to keep playing something you're not enjoying. If I'm going to spend 60 hours on a game, I want it to be because it's blowing my mind and I just can't stop, not because I don't have a choice if I don't want to let $50 go to waste.
I was on Skype with Brent from VirginWorlds and mentioned that I must have MMO ADD: I jump from game to game pretty rapidly, and rarely spend more than a few weeks in any one. But that's just what being a short attention gamer is all about, and open-ended games like MMOs, The Sims, Burnout, UT2004, etc are exactly what I need.
This is why I bought it
The Bman - August 11th, 2006 - 12:10 AM
Hey, guess what happened today?
I'll give you a hint:
FUCK YOU HP AND YOUR FUCKING SHIT COMPUTERS!!!
If Friday's page looks a bit weird at all, you'll know why.
P.S. - Dear Steve Gibson, please make your broken, overpriced software take less than 100 years to do anything.
Wait, what was I writing about again?
The Bman - August 8th, 2006 - 12:30 AM
I've been a listener of Short Attention Gamer for quite a while now, and although I always appreciated the concept, I didn't have a gut understanding of what it truly meant.
Then yesterday, I was looking at my copy of Spellforce 2, and it clicked. The front of the box proclaims, "Seamless blend of RTS & RPG action with over 60 hours of gameplay" (emphasis mine).
60 hours?!
I don't have 60 hours to spend on a single game. Maybe if I weren't doing Falcon Twin and had nothing else to do all summer long, I could swing that. But there are too many other games to play, to devote 60 hours to each of them. I put a grand total of about 85 hours into Oblivion, and that was a highly exceptional case. It's not really practical for me to do that for game after game.
Some people complain about how short games are these days, but I've come to realize that I'm actually quite happy with that. I probably won't be spending more than 8-10 hours on most of them anyway, so if it takes longer than that to get to the payoff, why even start? That's why it took me so long to fire up Dreamfall after I bought it (and that wasn't even a very long game), and why I still haven't started The Longest Journey yet. Those boxes staring at me from my shelf make me feel guilty for spending money on them but not having the time to play through them. No wonder renting has started to seem like a really good idea; I'm rarely spending more than a couple hours with any one game anyway.
That's why I like games like Burnout Revenge. The payoff comes right away, from playing the game. What do you get when you finally get a perfect score on every race? Some achievement points and maybe a little movie? Big deal. You don't play a game like that to get to the ending; you just play it because it's fun right away. And if you lose interest, you just set it down and move on. No guilt, no shame that you didn't get to see the ending.
Same with (believe it or not) MMOs: get on, play a bit, and if you want to keep going, do so. If not, no biggie. But if you play Final Fantasy MCMXCVII and only play through the first 20 (of 40) hours before you get bored, you have a choice: stop playing and miss out on the payoff for that game, or force yourself to keep playing something you're not enjoying. If I'm going to spend 60 hours on a game, I want it to be because it's blowing my mind and I just can't stop, not because I don't have a choice if I don't want to let $50 go to waste.
I was on Skype with Brent from VirginWorlds and mentioned that I must have MMO ADD: I jump from game to game pretty rapidly, and rarely spend more than a few weeks in any one. But that's just what being a short attention gamer is all about, and open-ended games like MMOs, The Sims, Burnout, UT2004, etc are exactly what I need.
Meanwhile, if you're looking for a copy of Spellforce 2, I know where you can get one cheap.