Over the last four months, I’ve bought a metric shit-ton of video games. Since March I’ve purchased Final Fantasy VI, ICO, Perfect Dark, Wave Race: Blue Storm, 1080: Avalanche, Mario Vs. Donkey Kong, Fire Emblem, Wario Ware, Earthbound, Mega Man Anniversary Collection, Panzer Dragoon, Panzer Dragoon Zwei, NiGHTS, and Final Fantasy Chronicles. That’s insane. That’s more games than purchased in all of 2003. That’s abso-fucking-ridiculous.

That’s insane!

And I’ve loved about half of them to death. But I haven’t really appreciated them. And I just realized how long this update is going to be and how many ideas I’ve had floating around in my head for the past couple of months are about to be compressed into one sprawling mess of an update. We’re blogging for justice, kids.

When I was younger (cuando era un nino), I appreciated each and every game I came across. Jurassic Park 2 for the SNES? Crap, but I played the hell out of it. I played the hell out of it by myself. I played the hell out of it with friends. I don’t even know how I came to own that waste of a cartridge from back in the days when an Ocean Platformer was a genre unto itself, but I played the hell out of it.

I played Super Mario World for three months straight. I played and replayed levels, found and refound secrets. For an entire summer that was the only video game I owned, and for an entire summer I played Super Mario World like the fate of the President depended on it. Then I bought Contra 3 with allowance money I had saved for several months and played the hell out of it too. I got to the point where I could push in the big purple SNES power switch and beat Contra 3 (The Alien Wars/Let’s Attack Aggressively) on Hard without breaking a sweat. I appreciated those games because they were all I had.

And in the days of the Nintendo 64, when those of us who had renewed our oath of loyalty with Nintendo grabbed at everything that came our way, busily insisting that our console of choice was vastly superior to the Playstation, all the while eagerly anticipating the day we could buy our own, I appreciated my games. I appreciated the Turok games. That’s right, all of them. I purchased every Turok game, finally learning my lesson after slogging through four of Acclaim’s turds and ignoring Turok Evolution. But I still played those games, terrible as they were. Sure, it had a lot to do with the fact that decent software, any software, in fact, was few and far between on Nintendo’s 64-bit failure. But today I wouldn’t even give the games the time of day, even if I had paid for them, plugged them into the console, and turned the damn thing on. Instead I’d turn around, opening up Internet Explorer, and see what IGN had to say about upcoming XBox releases.

I don’t even own an XBox.

Then, when Gamespot first started running its Gamespotting feature, long before I lost interest and the topics became stale (what was that, like two years ago? Two years already�) I would read Gamespot Editors declare that an entire week had passed and they were still playing the same game. “I’m still playing GTA 3! It’s two months old!” “I can’t stop playing Animal Crossing!” So what, I thought. I got mileage out of my purchases. I swore I would never be like them, that I would always appreciate every game I purchased. The good games I’d play to the end, loving every glorious instant, but not being so blind as to ignore the bad. The bad games I’d play too, though obviously not as much (or as h4rdc0r3), but I’d still play them. I’d make an effort to determine why they where bad. Where had they failed? How could they have been successful?

Now I place Billy Hatcher in my GameCube and turn it off fifteen minutes later. It’s not bad by any standard. But it’s average. I don’t hate it, but I don’t love it, and I file it back on the shelf between Rebel Strike and Eternal Darkness where it now sits, nearly seven months hence.

Now I play through piles of games without stopping to let any of it register. Earthbound? Fucking brilliant. A masterpiece. I finish it in four days and file it away. I doubt I’ll ever play it again. It’s fantastic, I know that. ICO was fantastic too, the kind of game I play games to play. And yet, I just don’t care, because there’s three more games coming out this month that look interesting and got average scores higher than 8.0. Mario Vs. Donkey is the best 2D platformer I’ve played since, I don’t know, Zero Mission. Maybe it’s better. I played through the first three worlds and will probably never touch it again. I saw it, I know what it’s about. I could follow a conversation on the topic. No problem. It’s fun as hell, but there’s other games to play.

And yet, I really don’t spend that much time playing games. I talk about how much fun playing games is. I read about it. I spend so many hours in any given day browsing sites and reading forums about how much fun games are that I don’t bother stopping to play any games.

I think I’m in love with the idea of gaming. The possibilities the medium offers, possibilities which no other medium offers. Possibilities which, for the most part, remain untapped. I play games, lots of games, hoping to rekindle that joy I found when I first plugged Street Fighter 2 into the SNES so many years ago. I play games looking for that game that I can really truly love, not because of its elegant design or stunning art direction, but because it is fun.

And that takes a lot.

Even the good games, the really, really good games that make most people stand up and dance from the sheer pleasure of playing, I am unable to truly enjoy. They’re good, I know that. They’re excellent, and I’ll tell you why. I’ll talk to you about pacing and game balance, the frame rates and polycounts, and why it all adds up to entertainment. And I’ll know it’s entertaining. I’ll know that I should be entertained, that I should be loving every moment, and on some purely intellectual level I am. But I’m not appreciating the game. I’m not playing it.

I played the shit out of Turok. I played the shit out of Final Fantasy VI. I know which is the better game, its sheer goodness transcends genre and generation. And yet, I’ve logged more hours playing Turok, though I realize hours logged is not an accurate measure of appreciation or enjoyment, and I’m trying to explain that it’s not and escape the definition of appreciation as time invested which I established so many paragraphs ago. But it’s hard. I played Turok. I played it with cheats and I played without cheats. I laughed with joy as I shot another raptor with a huge head or when I finally completed the chronoscepter. I played the T-Rex boss fight a dozen times in a row. Because it was a game, and it was meant to be played. And I played it.

But did I really play it? Did I really enjoy it as much as I remember doing, or are my eyes tinted by the rosy glow of nostalgia? Maybe, but for one summer all I had was Super Mario World. And for one summer I played.