I’ve been taking some time lately to play through games I like. A strange concept, I know, but I tend to ignore games I really enjoy in favor of games I feel I should be playing. As though, as a serious gamer I should be playing games in the gaming canon (and oh, do I hate “canon,” but that’s a topic for another time). Really, this is a relatively recent problem of mine, and one I’m only starting to combat by playing games for fun rather than out of some twisted sense of gamer responsibility.

Paper Mario 2, for example, is a game I played for about an hour a couple of years ago and then never touched again. Playing through it over the last couple of weeks I realized what a colossal mistake that was. Similarly, I’ve now started playing Burnout 3 in earnest. Glancing at my profile, I saw I had only played the game for 42 minutes since picking it up as part of Toys ‘R Us’ much appreciated semi-annual buy-two-get-one-free sale two years ago. It’s uncanny just how much the game resembles an F-Zero title, and if Criterion weren’t so tightly locked to EA’s teat, it’d be great to see them tackle a Wii installment of the franchise (assuming AM2 wasn’t busy, of course).

Looking back over the collection of games I’ve acquired over the last generation, I realize many of them were purchased out of a sense of necessity rather than for actual entertainment. Granted, I ended up loving most of them – who could have predicted that Resident Evil 4 would be one of the best games of the generation – but there are still plenty of “great” games that I genuinely didn’t like.

Shadow of the Colossus, for example, is a boring, boring game. The narrative (what little there is of it) may be subtle and charming, but the actual meat of the gameplay, you know, those colossi things, devolves to a handful of the same repeated techniques. They may look fantastic, but they’re a repetitive bore to fight/reverse dungeon upon. And then that insanely difficult last boss feels like it’s from a different game entirely. After the first three colossi I ended up GameFAQing my way through to the end because I felt I should. I definitely didn’t have any fun doing so.

ICO is still tops though.

Metroid Prime 2 was a disorganized mess. I still have no idea how Breath of Fire 5 works. I’m stupid, Capcom, I don’t get it. Rygar sucks, and it sucked before I played God of War. I’d rather watch Space Channel 5 than play it. The annoying, reinforcement-free random dungeons and lack of tension from any sort of over-arching time limit ruined Pikmin 2. Ruined it straight to boring. Oh, and Super Mario Sunshine had massive pacing problems.

So… I’m done. Final Fantasy VII was honestly a pretty good game, I love the Monster Rancher series, and here’s hoping Google cachés us today.