There's always an akward anxiety for me in between gamefly games. The excitement of playing something new, the worry that it will suck, the fear that some titanic mail screw up will leave me liable for money. The last few games its been particularly brutal as things have seemed to take a little longer than when I first signed up, but how much of that can be laid on the holiday season or my natural impatience is open for debate. Either way, I'm in the lull right now, and that means frequently, often compulsively, I'll log onto gamefly.com and shuffle around a few titles in my queue like i can somehow predict when the mail will get there or what will be "now available" when that happens. Its maddening. Right now it says I have a shot at Borderlands, but failing that I fall nearly 10 games down my queue to Condemned or Rise of the Argonauts. I'm not really in the mood for a garbage game, but there's really no way to guarantee the gamefly game selection machine won't send one along short of taking all the garbage out of my queue and waiting even longer. And how do I feel about waiting longer? Well, see this entire paragraph.
I suppose its just. I'm sure there was some poor soul going through the same rigamarole during the three or four months Prototype sat patiently on my stack of games while I played through Batman and god knows what else. The solution is of course is to upgrade my account to allow more games at a time. A two game rotation would guarantee I always had something not mine to play, but that would also guarantee I had more games lying around my house not being played, which is the habit I'd hoped to skewer in joining gamefly in the first place.
Last time I had a break like this I had Shadow Complex. A gem of a game that turned out to be less of a Super Metroid homage and more of Super Metroid itself, not that there's anything wrong such a thing. Complex's only sin is that it vainly assumes bgm is optional, a demonic trend in gaming I wish I could exorcise. I will agree there are a few situations if not entire genres where the concept of ambient noise as music is passable, but it certainly isn't the 2d adventure genre. Imagine what a game like SOTN, or, in this case Super Metroid would be like without that rich soundtrack lighting the way for you. Kind of loses something, doesn't it? Thankfully, the xbox / zune tag team is adequately equipped to custom soundtrack any game with such an affliction, but that's a crutch not a feature.
This time around I have Mass Effect, which I will freely admit I am finally getting around to soley because of all the ME2 hysteria. Not that I'm much for the gaming "scene" anymore, I just don't want to be so far out of date when people start talking ME3. Nothing against ME of course, I've heard how good it is, first hand from trusted sources in fact. I'm just tired to death of RPGs. RPGs require a mental and often physical commitment I just can't make, not without dragging it out over 100 hours. I don't think there's a script in the world that I could feel good about 100 hours of digestion later. We shall say. Mass Effect makes the bold claim that it is worth not two but THREE playthroughs with its achievements, each time with increasing difficulty. I'm certainly not going to even try, but their hubris says a lot about how good my initial play through oughta be.
In closing, the more I listen to the Afro Samurai Soundtrack, the more I want to say about it. Find a way to defend it, maybe. Sadly, I can't. It's really a bad game. If I had anything interesting to say on the subject, it would be to somehow explain how I can play through Afro twice in pursuit of a 1k, but couldn't even do Mirror's Edge once. Puzzling moreso that when I tried Mirror's Edge, not only was my social circle's gamerscore competition much tighter, I even had a friend who stuck through it for 700 or so points. Maybe I was just in the wrong mood at the time for a crappy game. It was pre baby, and pre a lot of other personal life stresses, so maybe I just had a more discerning mood for what I did with my evenings. Now, burning the 1-2 hours on a crummy game seems perfectly acceptable, the exhaustion of the other 22 somehow numbing the crap.
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