Hate to say it but uh...Assassin's Creed 2 is eating up all my gaming time.

For all the hype I did about Arcade Appreciation April I gotta say I haven't been following up on it nearly as well as I should have. Rather than spending my free time playing and reviewing these games I've been spending it all with Assassin's Creed 2.

One of the reasons I started this blog is to seek out an explanation as to why I play and enjoy videogames. Somewhere in between all of the bad jokes and ending every other sentence with "whatever" I'm trying to discover something significant about myself. This may sound weird but my very first memory was of a videogame that I played when I was three or four. In fact it seems like a lot of my memories are tied to videogames in some form or another.

Cause really I can't say that I'm enjoying Assassin's Creed 2 because it's a great game. I think I'm most of the way through it and have already noticed enough flaws to keep it from approaching greatness. All of that is irrelevant however because in the end I'm still enjoying myself and at the moment I'd rather play this than some classic Arcade game. I guess I've always had a soft spot for conspiracy theories and mysteries. There's nothing like this in the average arcade game. There's nothing that isn't already known and there's hardly any time to think about the events that transpire. While AC2 is very repetitive it offers enough of the unknown to keep me interested, which I guess says more about having the proper formula than inspired game design.

Could be that the only reason I continue to work on this blog is because it serves as a meta-game. While some gamers have their achievements, their trophies, collections, and what we used to call "playing for a high-score", I play games so that I can write about them. It's kind of funny because this is where the separation between games I enjoy and games I think are great comes in. The games I think are great get recommended on this blog while the games I enjoy are the ones I continue to play. When I stop enjoying a game that's usually when I post a write-up and more than likely indefinitely shelve or sell off said game.

What I probably should be doing is writing about why I no longer enjoy to play these games. If they're so great why do I quit them? Okay yeah it's hard to believe anyone could continue to enjoy a game for such a long period of time but with a number of games even today I still play them. Take Super Mario Brothers 3 for example. I've been playing that game off and on for close to twenty years. I still don't have a write-up posted for it. I'm so familiar with the game that certainly I could come up with something to say about it. If I write something about this game maybe it would compel me to never play it again. On that same note take something like Diablo 2. I'm both disgusted and horrified by the amount of hours I've put into that game and if I ever got around to it I'd say nothing but nasty things about it. By not completing a piece it's possible I'm leaving myself open so that one day I'll get sucked in again and lose another couple hundred hours.

I know that eventually I will stop enjoying Assassin's Creed 2 because after I complete I will have an understanding of many of its mysteries though I'm well aware that more questions will pop up to be answered by the inevitable sequel. Still when this time comes I will say my piece and give the game to my brother or whatever, and that'll be the end of that. Tomorrow Afterburner Climax will hit XBLA and before long I'll have played through it, written about it, and then left it to gather virtual cobwebs while I move on to the next game.

At this point I'm not looking for justification for all the time I've spent with videogames. Any regrets I've had are all in the past now so at this point I'm just looking to do a little self-discovery. I'm pushing 30 now and I really have no idea what causes me to enjoy games. By doing this I can move forward and hopefully produce something worth writing about. No worries though I'm not going to turn this blog into some pretentious fifth-wall nonsense. I'll still play games, give my honest thoughts about them, and that's the end of that. There will be those times where there's a certain title that goes just a bit deeper than "hey this game is good, play it". We'll just see how that goes.