Sunday Thoughts: Time Warp

It’s Easter and Portal 2 just came out, so talking about Easter Eggs seems like the thing I should do. However, I really hate being timely with original articles so I sadly won’t be doing that. Surely you’ve had enough of their choclatey goodness anyway? No today I wanna talk about my ability to magically warp time backwards, or at least that’s how my flatmate has perceived it. Over this glorious long weekend I haven’t touched a game that’s even vaguely new, instead I’ve been playing three absolute gems on XBLA, none of which was released in 2011 (and only one of which was released in the last 12 months).

First up was Shadow Complex for Project 5, possibly my favourite game on XBLA. I’ll be honest, this article took me six hours to write because I kept getting distracted by actually playing Shadow Complex instead of writing about those first five minutes. In fact I probably played through the first five minutes ten or so times, because I kept going too far and forgetting what fit into those opening minutes; plus I really wanted to get the alternate ending that took me twenty minutes of mockery from friends due to my persistent failure before I grabbed it.

Next up was last year’s smash hit, Limbo. This was on sale recently, so I picked it up having played the opening half hour when it was new. Frankly, it’s brilliant and I played through the whole thing in pretty much one sitting, unable to tear myself away for anything other than lunch. I’d only intended to play it for ten minutes whilst my iPod charged, but I put off a nice walk through the woods to finish off this mono-chrome tale.

[drop]Finally Trials HD managed to prove nearly as addictive as Limbo, and appeals to the same need for perfection that annoyed people when I backtracked to collect every single flower in Flower. Restarting from a checkpoint in Trials just doesn’t feel right to me, I need to go back and restart the level for it to feel like I really completed it.

So what’s the point of me telling you about my rather lovely weekend of gaming? Well as I said it’s like I’ve jumped backwards, and that does tend to be how I play most of my games. Unless I get something for review I don’t really tend to play anything new, or even in the year it was released. Even games I get as a gift, like Assassin’s Creed 2, can sit in their wrapping for months before I actually decide to pop in the disk and play them.

It’s not like I’m even going back to games I’ve played before all that often. I did play Shadow Complex back at its release, mostly because it’s utterly fantastic, but for Limbo and Trials HD it was the first time I’d played them properly. It’s more like I’ve somehow let my backlog become permanently rolling so that I never play anything until everyone else has almost forgotten it and moved onto whatever’s new and shiny.

Is being stuck in this time warp the right way to play stuff? Is there even a right way to play things? Of course there is some value in playing things close to release if you want to have a discussion about them that goes beyond “Oh yeah, I remember that. It was great.” I mean playing games is meant to be fun, that’s pretty much the point. For me talking about them is part of the fun, pulling something apart with friends to find the chewy core that makes it oh so good is a lot of fun. From what I’ve seen of the Portal 2 discussion there are a lot of people who enjoy the same thing. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll actually manage to play things in a timely manner, but I doubt it.