I’m not one bit faithful when it comes to games and movies. I enjoy something and then toss it behind me like a piece of meat that has done its job. I don’t usually go back to an old favorite or the like to visit again. It has become even worse in adulthood when time is short but the wallet is full, now you don’t have time to relive experiences. Despite this, there are many games that made me spend a lot of time on them, many at a young age.
Halo 3
I don’t know how many hours have been put into this game but it’s a lot. Halo 2 was the game me and all my friends played with four controllers 50cm from the TV. When the Xbox 360 was out and Halo 3 was released, people were more than excited. The campaign was played through on all difficulty levels, all bugs would be tested, all achievements would be captured and people would be teabaged online. When I started playing I did so well that I got kicked out of the beginner group, I got all the non-DLC achievements except for that damn Overkill in ranked Free For All and I ran homemade game modes with Swedes I didn’t know.
Almost every afternoon and evening was spent with friends and Halo 3. One day you sat in the Forge and created masterpieces and the other you played Snorboll3000 at CPSTADEN222222. Because in those days nobody knew how the hell to name things sensibly. But didn’t stop us from having a full lobby and having so much fun. EVERY match was ill-conceived and unbalanced but that didn’t stop us. We were too young and shouting into our mics too much to think about that.
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World of Warcraft
My friend showed me the command to see how much time was spent on the game. Over 30 days he had. I laughed at him and said that he wasted like a whole month, while I only had around 12 days. One expansion later I was gating for an epic flying mount and had crossed that line with flying colours. World of Warcraft was my childhood. When you stopped playing in the forest, we all met to play in Azeroth. I was the undead warrior Quansainar, a name I made up because my pal had come up with the cool name Condemned. When I started playing WoW I didn’t know English on any practical level, so for example I didn’t realize that he had just taken the name from the game Condemned which actually meant damned.
But English was not needed. You could test yourself. Strategy and the like did not exist. Use your new attack enough times and you’ll eventually get the hang of what it does, and when they got into gear it was just about having as many numbers as possible. It’s probably the closest I’ll get to an adventure in an unknown world. I didn’t have to spend two months in a ship to find America, I just had to spend two months in front of the computer to have the same experience. However, with less scurvy.
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Stellaris
703 hours Steam says I’ve played this game, that feels right. Like other games from the Grand Strategy genre such as Civilization, it takes a long time to complete a match. And in Stellaris I’ve run a lot of games. I’ve conquered the galaxy time and time again in every possible way, forcing strange limitations on myself. Every time a new expansion is released I fall back and start all over again, how handicapped can you make your empire but still trip up the universe’s food chain? With enough planning, you can get further than you think. Can you complete the game without building a single research building? Without having any fleet? Be someone else’s vassal? The answer to all those questions is yes. Soon it will be time for a new expansion and with it there will be even more nonsense. Only two things are infinite, the universe and stupidity, and we are not sure about the first.
Gears 5
323 hours Xbox claims I’ve put into Gears 5. It was a weird time in my life playing Gears 5. My job gave me a lot of free time, my partner was busy with studies and the pandemic made it feel wrong to keep going other activities. It wasn’t depression but I had no energy to be productive or try new things. So I fall back to Gears 5 all the time. It was a hell of a Horde with strangers and slowly but surely I leveled up all the classes.
It wasn’t entertainment, it was just to kill time. It was a comfortable routine. Sit down and literally go through everything new that was to be done as soon as the job was done and the wife was sitting in front of the computer. A few hours each day becomes many hours over a longer period. In the end, though, the wife was on summer vacation and the pandemic took a much-needed break, so I lost Gears 5 and when I came back to Xbox I felt like I wanted something new.
Fire Emblem Heroes
Average 90 minutes daily for almost five and a half years. More than 125 days of active play. That would be a very conservative guess as to how much time I spent on that game. Mobile is far too accessible. Playing on the computer or in front of the TV requires a certain amount of planning. The mobile phone can only be taken out of the pocket. Like Pavlov’s dog, I was hooked. At 09:00 every day the game got new content and at 09:01 I was playing through it. Of all my routines in life, this was undoubtedly the one I kept the best. I don’t eat breakfast every day, sometimes I forget to brush my teeth and I start work sometime between 06:00 and 10:00. But this game was spot on.
Today I quit that game for many different reasons. But the routines are there. At 09:00 I usually take out my mobile phone and try to open an app that is no longer there. I miss the game today. The game itself was boring towards the end but it felt great to have a loyal friend who was always there for you. But like a smoker, you have to smoke your last cigarette one day and move on in life. Lonelier but probably happier. There are other things I can spend that time on.
Slay the Spire
I guessed five hours every weekday for three weeks. Xbox says 79 hours so I was close. This is not among my most played but without a doubt the game I played most intensively as an adult. I had lived in Finland for about two months. I had just worked my ass off to get my degree and look for a job. I got my job and signed the contract. It would take three weeks before employment began.
My fiancee at the time was studying full time and the pandemic hadn’t started yet so she was on campus. I was alone at home, in a foreign country, knew no one, didn’t know the language, had officially finished all my studies and was no longer looking for a job. I had almost no money and tried to be good, cleaned, cooked and stuff but you can only cook dinner so many times. Someone had written about Slay the Spire and that it was so good. I had no interest in such card games before but I gave it a try. Every day after I got up late I sat and played that game until my partner came home.
Almost every day I forgot to eat both breakfast and lunch. Time and time again without any understanding I started a new run trying to understand how to beat that game. In the end I managed a whole run with the help of a lot of poison cards. Now I was manically trying to get better and understand the other two characters. My partner didn’t understand the game, I had gone from cinematic action games with realistic graphics to the same cartoon games every day where you played cards. Finally it was time to start work, three weeks had flown by. Maybe just as well, think what would happen if I started being active on the Slay the Spire forum and getting into it even deeper.
Dragon Age: Origins
What can a playthrough of this game take if you try to do everything. 50 hours maybe? Three races, six origins, ten potential companions and a hell of a lot of choices. Everything I tried to do. I played through the game over and over and over. Every thing one could do. All would be romanticized, all the good choices, all the bad choices, and all the endings that each scenario could have. Sometimes elves were slaughtered and sometimes the werewolves died instead, but in most cases they became friends. Almost every major mission had obvious and less obvious choices.
Probably every combination of shady exploration I did. All the companions had to meet all their fates, poor Alistair was everything from mortgage to execution. This is because Dragan Age Origins had, in my opinion, one of the best endings ever. The ending was cliche, kill the dragon and save the day. But afterwards you got an epilogue about almost every person you met and every community you visited. All the choices felt like they had a lot of weight behind them and all the loose ends felt resolved. The epilogues were cheaply made. A box of text with a narrator if I remember correctly. But there was no need for epic cutscenes, just that the game remembered all the little details and made little stories out of it that made my jaw drop as a kid. To this day, I miss games that do this. Ties everything together nicely, makes your choices feel relevant and doesn’t leave everything hanging in a final cliffhanger.
