The 2009 end of year christmas season’s gaming boom is just around the corner and I find myself sitting with quite a dilemma.

You see, last year the line-up was huge as well and since then even more great games have come out. Having an obvious weakness for gaming I bought almost all of the good ones and now sit with a problem that I haven’t managed to finish all of them and even have a big one from the list that I haven’t even started.

Batman and Dirt 2 are nearly here and I want both of them, which makes me realise that once that ball gets rolling, there may be no going back.

Am I the only one with this dilemma?

So I am now still sitting with a ton of games that I have not finished, each for a different reason really.

I will kick things off by ashamedly stating that I have some unfinished games for no reason other than being a complete and utter pansy.

The two games in question are Condemned 2 and Dead Space. While Condemned wasn’t that bad, I generally find that if a game makes my skin crawl, I tend to want to play it less and so time went on and I realised that I had never gotten around to it.

Dead Space is a different story. I have finally come to the conclusion that I am just incapable of playing it, because it’s scarier than a line of woman outside a clothing sale… and I have come to the realisation that I must be a wuss. I try to play it, every now and then but I usually found that all I could handle was around an hour of game time before I cracked and put something else in. I finally reached a point in the game around Chapter 5 or so that proved too tense for poor little me and I truthfully can’t say that I want to put the game in anymore, which is a shame because it’s just so damn good. Solution: deactivate surround sound and only play it in the day, with friends around… and maybe a gun under my couch.

Being scared witless is one thing, but trudging along in a game can be equally as harmful to the likelihood of a gamer seeing the ending of a game.

I have still not finished Grand Theft Auto, not to mention that I have the Lost and Damned DLC as well. The reason mostly being that annoyances with taking people bowling every 5 minutes eventually caught up to me, so I took a break. Problem is, I don’t know if that break is ever going to end and with new games constantly coming along it becomes hard to want to go back.

Major issue with these longer games is that in most cases, you do actually want to play the game. Problem is that games like these usually demand lots of time and don’t cater to short bursts of gaming very well. I had the same issue with Fallout 3 and eventually had to really, really make time to finish the game and still have a decent experience that didn’t just feel rushed. Long games always bring that choice of experience versus time spent and for games like Fallout 3 there is just so much to do that rushing the story missions would be nothing short of a travesty.

At around the same time that I bought Fallout 3, I bought Fable 2. Since Fallout 3 demanded quite a lot of time, I decided that Fable 2 would be reserved for “a rainy day”. That rainy day never came and now I sit with an issue. I really wanted to play Fable 2 but feel like starting it now would just lead to another unfinished game. On the other hand, because time has gone by I already have to listen to Peter Molyneux announcing Fable 3 and stating that so many things were not achieved in Fable 2 and that the next one will be so much better.

It’s a really silly thing to do when late sales are concerned, mostly because I feel like I am waiting to play a game who’s own creator feels that it didn’t deliver on everything and is already making new promises. Still, I really want to play the game and the idea of not playing new games so that I can play older ones is one that not many gamers can deal with very easily. We crave new games, just because.

Continued on Page 2 – Playstation 3 Exclusives, Addictions and more