I Went Back Into My Backlog.
Backlogs can be awful, you know you want to play them, but it is so hard to start the games… You won’t ever know if the game were good until you played it for some solid amount of time, something most of us can’t be arsed to.
Hi, my nick is ToAks, and I am a game addict.
It’s a sentence I’ve thought about many times, and it applies to both the positive and negative sides of gaming. Over the last 35 years of my life, I’ve played and experienced more than 10,000 games — and probably double that number if you include everything I’ve read about, heard discussed, and written myself.
I’m not one of those “I must collect everything” types, but I do have a tendency to buy far too many games at the same time. The result? A growing backlog filled with titles I haven’t even started yet, and plenty more that I have started but abandoned somewhere around the 10% completion mark.
Assassin’s Creed III is a game I never intended to buy. Revelations completely destroyed what little coolness the series had left for me, so I was done. However, ACIII was given away for free via the PlayStation Plus service, so naturally I grabbed it and gave it a try.
I hated it.
There are very few games where I dislike the protagonist as much as I did here. The first character you play as must be one of the most boring and slow characters I’ve controlled in many years — and that was months ago. Since then, the game has been sitting firmly on my back burner… until yesterday.
I have a close friend who is so into the Assassin’s Creed series it’s almost his religion. He’s always told me that I had to push through the Kenway part for the sake of the story, because after that you finally get to play the real ACIII when you take control of Connor.
I tried. I honestly did.
But I flat-out refused to spend more time playing Kenway.
So I asked my friend to play through that boring section for me. Thirty minutes later, he was done — I only had one mission left. About ten minutes after Kenway disappeared from the game, everything changed.
Suddenly, it was fun.
Playing as young Connor felt fantastic, and before I knew it I had already sunk six hours into the game and was genuinely enjoying myself.
So, 24 hours ago it looked like I’d never touch this game again. All of that changed thanks to a few minutes of my friend’s time.
God, I love good friends.
Really looking forward to playing it again soon.
Now this is a strange one.
I quit playing this game two years ago. And while Darksiders II was — and still is — insanely cool, it also had some serious problems. Game-breaking problems.
Two years ago, I got completely stuck. The map showed a route I simply couldn’t reach. I was trapped, and of course my save locked in the moment I entered the area, thanks to the game’s “save all the bloody time” system.
Fast forward to last night.
The same friend I mentioned earlier took a look at this one too. He had completed the game years ago, so I figured maybe he knew how to escape the glitch hole I’d been stuck in. We loaded the game up (which takes forever), and while it was loading I explained exactly where and how I’d been trapped.
Then he told me about his own glitched save game.
A few years later — okay, a few minutes — the game finally finished loading, and he started playing on my supposedly “glitched” save.
And just like that… the glitch was gone.
The area where I’d been stuck for two years had somehow fixed itself. Seamlessly. Like it had never happened.
So now I’m left wondering:
What the hell happened?
Did my sister help me at some point? (She had the same problem on her save but managed to figure it out somehow.)
Did someone else fix it?
Or did I fix it myself back when I was on sick leave and heavily medicated?
Who knows.
My friend played for about an hour, took down a few bosses, and had a jolly good time. From the looks of things, the glitch is gone for good — hopefully.
Of course, I’ll be continuing the game now. I’m close to the end, playing on the highest difficulty, and I’m hoping to go for the platinum. Only time will tell, but one thing’s for sure: it won’t take me another two years before I play it again.
Now the big question is… what will we play tonight?
I’ve got several games in my backlog that he’s already completed, so let’s see what happens. Maybe Invizimals. Maybe Asura’s Wrath.
Anything can happen.
