How BeefJack changed my gaming

FTL was my last article for BeefJack as an regular writer. No doubt the odd article will still appear there. I already had a conversation with an editor about pitch or two. But as a regular contributor I'm done. I thoroughly enjoyed my time there, and would like to thank those I worked alongside, and I've made some pretty good friends along the way. As well as really improve my writing style, my time at BeefJack has also effected the way I appreciate games.

I've already covered how I switched from Console back to PC. I honestly thought I was straddling the fence, because writing about games means playing everything, but as the new generation launched, I look at what's available, and what's coming up and there's barely anything that really gets me excited on either platform. My inner Halo Fan-boy seems to have died, and my reaction to Xbox One was pretty much “:( now I'll miss out on Halo 5.”

What might come as a shock to a lot of people is that I'm no longer that much of an achievement whore. My old rule of get at least fifty percent of the points available has long gone, and this quickly led to perhaps the most shifting of all my changes. I don't complete that many games any more.

Before I would always finish every single game I started. Okay there was the odd one that fell through the cracks, but I'd go out of my way to finish most games. Crackdown 2 was a god-awful sequel to a pretty fun little game that was mostly bought for its admittance to the Halo 3 Beta. Yet I finished it. It took ten months between start and finish, but I did finish it. Because it annoyed me that I hadn't. Now I just wouldn't bother.

Partly this is down to the fact that I know play a lot of shitty games. To give you people the knowledge that whether a game is worth buying someone has to play it. As a reviewer you need to give a game a fair shake. A lot of people think that this means play it from start to finish. But if a game is resoundingly shit before that then who cares how it ends? Obviously heavy narrative based games do, but for the most part they don't.

There was no way I'd have gone and finished Alien Spidy or Of Orcs and Men. The latter being so early in my reviewing career that I at least contemplated revisiting instead of discarding it. I just could never bring myself too. But a pile of crap built from the games that I didn't finish grew, and I just stopped caring.

Life is too short to worry about whether you've completed a game or not. If you enjoy it, keep playing, and completing it is a sign of a really good game. If it's shit, move on. And regret buying the Season Pass DLC (stupid AC3). I'm know much more likely likely to throw a game on and enjoy it for a short burst and not worry just where the end is. Which is probably normal and most people reading this are thinking I'm a bit weird.