PaigeFTW: How To Finish All Your Games, Part Two
When you’re behind on a TV show, all you need is time to binge your way through it. But it’s not that simple for video games. A few people offered me advice as to how to reduce the backlog faster …
- 1. Play only one game at a time.
When I was bouncing between Dragon Age and The Witcher recently, I almost died quite a few times remembering which buttons did what. The idea is that if you play only one game at a time, you won’t have to waste time readjusting to new control schemes or trying to remember what happened in the story. A solid, albeit tedious strategy.
- 2. Play on the easiest difficulty.
“Life’s short,” a friend told me. “I don’t have time to die 80 times because I can’t beat a boss on the hardcore difficulty.” That depends entirely on your priorities: are you playing for the experience or the competition or just to kill time? There’s no shame in easy mode if all you want is to enjoy the story. (It’s fine in Mass Effect, but not Kingdom Hearts, in my view.)
- 3. Skip the side quests.
This may help some people, but I would probably sooner pull out my own fingernails with a pliers than knowingly skip story content of any kind. I make an exception for truly insane feats like collecting all the Riddler trophies in the Batman: Arkham games, but that’s about it.
- 4. Cheat.
I don’t mean gaming the system, per say, but utilizing sanctioned cheat codes or mods to help smooth the way certainly isn’t the worst thing you can do. My sister likes to use my New Game+ files to skip the grinding in quite a few RPGs (like Persona 3 or The World Ends With You).
There is one other option to consider: buying and playing fewer games so that there isn’t as much of a backlog. But where’s the fun in that?
