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When 100% might not be enough. I've decided I should be a librarian. I'm not boring and I don't favour the quiet of a library, or the smell of musty old books, though bizarrely enough I do like cataloguing and lists of things. I'm talking about the fascination of completion. Be it volumes of books or items in a menu screen.
I'm not sure when it started, but you never are with these things. They creep up slowly. It must have been around about SNES time though, when games cost a small fortune so I really had to play them to completion to get the most pleasure for my pound. I remember sitting down for evenings and afternoons for weeks on end in the effort to complete F-Zero, Super Mario Kart and Pilotwings. In fact, for the first two I can even remember the shop I bought them in and the exact time of day and circumstances that lead up to the purchase - F-Zero was bought with my SNES from Liverpool's Lord Street branch of Electronics Boutique and Super Mario Kart was bought with hard earned pocket money from Our Price at Central Station. The necessity to explore every avenue of the game and every option of the menu screen mutated into what I now recognise as Obsessive Compulsive disorder amongst gamers. Old games like those, and still some games today, reward your playing efforts with progression of story line and additional game modes, items or characters. It's like a drug being fed to you on a drip in Alder Hey.
I noticed a few months ago, whilst playing quirky Japanese puzzler Guru Logi Champ (which by the way is possibly the best game ever in the world, but mine was stolen with my girlfriend's hand bag so I can't play it any longer) that I was playing it in a very strange way. Each puzzle is very short, in fact the first few can be done in a few seconds at most, and they get progressively more elaborate and, erm, puzzling as the stages go on. However, if I thought I could complete the puzzle faster than I had done, I would keep retrying it. Tens and tens of times. Now, as you might be thinking, this isn't normal behaviour. Still, I was having fun and within a couple of weeks of casual playing had completed around half or two thirds of the game - about 160 puzzles. Then I lent it to my girlfriend, who within a fraction of that time amassed just under 200 puzzles. It was at this point that it really hit home to me what a complete game playing freak I am. The thing is, I can't see my habit changing. I've recently been retrying stages of Yoshi's Island to get 100% completion, before progressing onto the freshly unlocked levels. My house mate and I (so I am not alone in this dreaded condition) have not progressed from driving licences in Gran Turismo 4 because we have yet to achieve a full compliment of gold medals at A-standard. Yes, I am that sick and my condition will only get worse.
Wipeout Pure, the best out of the two decent games for the PSP, has jacked straight into my nervous system by allowing downloadable content. So not only am I persevering with a bizarre systematic approach of Time Trail/Single Race/Tournament on my way to a full compliment of Gold Medals, but every month when new content is released I have a strange feeling in my head and have to rearrange and rethink my opinion of what is next in what I deem to be the proper order to play the game.
So, there we have it. Or at least we do until I decide I'd like to reorder some of these paragraphs or until I figure out I've not used one of the letters in the alphabet whilst writing this. Please, please, please, help me. August 2005
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