The 2010 Video Game Challenge

I've been wanting to write a video game blog from some time now, but could never figure out what to write about.

I considered writing video game reviews but I rarely play anything brand new and how many other video game review blogs are there? A search on Google for "video game review blog" reveals about one hundred and eleven million results... didn't really want to throw my hat in that ring.

Then I considered writing articles on various video game subjects, the only problem being is while I had several ideas I didn't know if I had enough of them to flesh out an entire blog.

So I was back at square one, wanting to write a video game blog but having no idea what to write about. I kept it on the back burner for about three months and hoped that something would pop into my head, an "aha!" moment.

About three weeks ago I was talking to my brother about video games, mostly about all of the video games we had played over the course of our lives. Which ones were good, which ones were bad... just kind of general video game talk. The subject went to older video games and some of the awesome ones that we had played as kids, and I noticed that while we’re talking about them I kept finding myself saying "Yeah, I still have that in a box downstairs." See, I never really got rid of any of my video games. I don't know why, it's been years since I've played anything on my Saturn or my SNES, but I think it's the thought that if I ever really want to play those games I have the ability to.

I didn't think much about the conversation, until a few days later. I was sitting at work when I thought to myself "I should really break out the old systems and play them, I own a lot of really awesome games that I haven't played in a long time." So with that I had decided to go back to my roots, to play some of my long lost forgotten games. Then another thought popped into my head... "I wonder how long it would take me to play and beat every video game I own?" I thought about it for a second, and then kind of tried to tally up a rough guess of how many video games I owned, but I still couldn't think up a number of how long it would take. For every Final Fantasy III that could take sixty plus hours there's probably four platformers that would take me four hours. I IM'd my brother and asked him the question "How long do you think it would take me to beat all the video games I owned?" His helpful answer? "A long time.

Over the next few days the question kind of rolled through my head, it had intrigued me. I've often wondered how long it would take me to sit down and want every single movie I own, but I had never done it. Could I do this? I mean, I love video games but this could take a long time... do I have the fortitude to complete something like this? It's a pretty big undertaking; I mean this is something that could easily take a year or more. Then another question popped into my head "Why the hell would you want to?" It was a good question, and one I probably get asked if I actually told someone I was going to do it. I didn't have an answer. The best I could think of was that I really enjoy video games, I haven't played some of these in a decade or more, and curiosity.

Also pretty much until the last two or so years I almost never beat any video games. Most times some other game would catch my attention and I could start playing that, leaving the other game unfinished. Crystalis for the NES if easily my favorite NES RPG and probably in the top ten of my favorite RPGs of all time... and yet I've never beaten it. I swear that I've probably played 75% of that game at least five or six times, and yet never beaten it. I would say that 85% of all the video games I own I've never finished… and now, I kind of want to. I'd like to see what happens at the end of Crystalis, I'd like to say that I've beaten The Legend of Zelda. There's so many games that I have that I've probably never played more than an hour or two. I want to play them now.

Then I put two and two together. What if I made a blog about that? What if I finished every game I owned and blogged about it? I could still write reviews, I could still write about games, and it might be interesting enough to catch and keep people’s attention. I mean how many reviews are there out there for Linus Spacehead's Cosmic Crusade? (329 according to Google). But this will also allow me a forum to do some of the other things I wanted to do.

So what happens once I've beaten every game I own? Good question. Maybe I'll come up with a new project. Though I'm guessing that won’t happen for a while, and since I just got two new games in the mail. I'm thinking that it's now going to take me even longer than I expected.

-Squid.