One of the strange ‘problems’ of PC gaming is that due the wide variety of cheap bundles available, you often end up owning many games you never actually intended to purchase. When you also add in impulse buys from the many deep discount sales that PC gamers are frequently offered, most PC gamers have a significant backlog of games.
Recently, I’ve been browsing my collection on the Humble Bundle android app and I’ve found quite a few excellent games that I would have never known about had I not picked them up in a random bundle. This experience has, unsurprisingly, made me curious what other gems might be lurking in my backlog so I’ve decided that I am going to make an effort to play every game I own and do a brief write up here.
The List!
Every Game I Own
The Caveats!
I started with a full list of every game tied to one of my digital accounts, which may include some free games that I’ve downloaded in the past.
I removed any games designed for small children that seemed focused on recognition or aimless play, but kept any that seemed to require decision making.
I removed adult educational resources (like any translating dictionaries) but kept anything that referred to itself as a game.
I did not add online multiplayer only games whether or not I have spent money on them. (Hearthstone, World of Warcraft, Ingress, Chess Clients etc.)
I did not include any games that I no longer have the system for (I still have some unredeemed Wii U and 3DS games, but do not currently have either system).
I have not included any physical games I own (I probably have ~5 PS3 games and ~30-40 physical PC games). I did this for two reasons. First, there are very few, if any, games that I own physically that I haven’t either played, or will play in the near future. This is because of the second reason, which is I don’t end up with physical games incidentally. Physically games rarely come bundled except perhaps in the odd eBay auction, so there’s not a inherent backlog problem. Still, I very well may add my physical games at some point for completion’s sake.
The Rules!
I am not promising to ‘finish’ all of these games, only to give them enough time to determine whether or not I like them.
I don’t have a particular method for choosing the order. I’ll probably try to do a blend between choosing games that sound interesting and randomly choosing.
I’m not making any promises to stop buying new games, but my goal is to someday have played all of these, so I will do my best to outpace any new purchases so that my backlog can approach zero.
Since the list is meant to be exhaustive, there are a lot of games on this list that I’ve already played. I would still like to revisit all of them to do a write up as my secondary goal here is to use this to improve my article writing.
Wish me luck!