Journos especially feel my pain – when you’re reviewing several games a month – and let’s get this cleared up: most aren’t exactly AAA titles - making time to play for fun can be tough. After a few hours of furiously waggling my Wii arm and writing up the latest minigame collection/catastrophe that lands on Nintendo’s system, the last thing I want to do is sit down and play another game – I’d rather go outside and stare at the sun for awhile. Maybe dunk my aching wrist in a bucket of ice.

Really, the biggest problem with unfinished titles is a little something I like to call the cycle of shame. It goes like this: I play a game for a few hours, maybe a couple of days, and as enamored with it as I may be, something from another area of life takes me away. I return after some length of time to find that I have no idea what I was just doing in the game – what weapon did I just get? How do I get out of this maze? What the hell is the flood? And like a curmudgeonly old woman, I throw the controller down in frustration and go knit a sweater or something. Well, not really, but the buzz is sufficiently killed at that point. That, and shiny new games are always coming out.

To that end, I applaud designers who create games with my particular brand of commitment problem in mind. I’ve been obsessed with Boom Blox lately, because besides the fact that it’s a whole lot of visceral, puzzle-inspired fun; I can actually play it in tiny chunks and always know what I’m doing. I have a theory that designers are increasingly accommodating my demographic since most gamers (statistically speaking) are in their ‘20s and ‘30s (and well beyond) and have jobs, possibly kids, and a million other things that keep them from gaming all day.

I do yearn for the halcyon days of my youth when I could devote all day (or all evening on weeknights) to a game. I remember playing Goldeneye 007 for so long that I could literally navigate levels with my eyes closed. There was even a time when I could speed run Sonic levels with the best of them. Just thinking about it makes me want to go fire up Super Mario RPG again – and the cycle continues.

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