Pile of Shame Sunday - 9th January 2021


This post might be the very last Pile of Shame post on this blog, as I'm planning to make some changes to the format from now on. So, in reality, "Pile of Shame Sunday" will still exist in some form, it just won't be called that anymore nor will it be on a Sunday. There are a couple of reasons for this: firstly, sometimes people have taken the "Pile of Shame Sunday" name the wrong way and think I'm suggesting the games that feature in the article are terrible games when "pile of shame" actually refers to my backlog of games I haven't completed yet, and the shame is the shame I feel for not doing so. I mean, sometimes the games I play that feature in the Pile of Shame post are terrible, but usually this isn't the case. Secondly, nowadays I find by the end of the week I've often not played the games I've needed to play until the last minute so I'm starting to think Sunday is actually not a good day to pick to do the posts anymore. In the past I used to have a special post on Wednesdays so maybe I'll give that day a try again, maybe call it something like "Weekly Round-up Wednesday"? Another added benefit of having a "Weekly Round-up Wednesday" is that I don't need to feature just games I'm targeting on my Pile of Shame but any other games I've played during the week, whether that be funny anecdotes about old games or other games I somehow don't get to mention. There have been plenty times this has happened over the past few years. Recently, for example, I've been trying out a couple of games I gifted to my daughter for her birthday such as Townscaper and Mini Metro, and while these games will eventually get reviewed, readers won't realise I've been playing them until it's too late.

Another change I'll be adopting is the fact I simply can't be playing three games in parallel a week. It's just too much mental workload especially when I'm playing three narrative rich games (e.g. such as right now with Disco Elysium, Pillars of Eternity and Psychonauts 2) and some with complex mechanics (such as Pillars of Eternity). I'll also tend to forget how the controls work and where I'm at with the story every time I take a break from any of the games so I think a new rule has to be setup where I play only one "big" game (whether it's "big" because of the amount of time required to complete it, complex game mechanics you need to remember or a well-developed plot) at a time and I can play other smaller games on the side (i.e. arcade games, puzzle games, casual games, games you can play for a few minutes and forget about).

So with respect to Disco Elysium, Pillars of Eternity and Psychonauts 2 I'm going to focus on finishing Disco Elysium first as I'm apparently closest to finishing that than any of the other games. I'll then focus on Pillars of Eternity and then Psychonauts 2.


LINK: [ The Pile of Shame ]

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