![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.controlpadblues.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/mic.jpg\")
<\/a>Sorry, Samson Meteor. Your shiny butt will have to wait.<\/p><\/div>\n
<\/p>\n
“Not the end of the world”, I thought.\u00a0 “I’ll just put it on the back-burner until Nathaniel’s old enough.\u00a0 Maybe it’ll even be something we can do together!\u00a0 Wouldn’t that be fun…”<\/p>\n
As time has gone on, Nathaniel has himself developed an obsession with video games – well, video game characters<\/em>, at least.\u00a0 He can easily name Mario (“Nindo”), Luigi (“Wihhi”), Goomba, Bob-Omb, 1-Up (“Umupp”), Toad, Koopa, Bullet Bill, Mega Man\u00a0and a handful of others if you show him an image and ask who they are.<\/p>\n He loves them and talks about them\u00a0so much that even I<\/em> am like “dude, let’s play with something else… look, here’s Peppa Pig.\u00a0 Dora’s over here all alone in her pickup truck.\u00a0 Vroom-vroom?”<\/p>\n One of the things he\u00a0LOVES to do is go into the room where all my games are.\u00a0 He’s not really allowed to go in there, but if he’s tired and\u00a0cranky (which happens, but not that often) or if he’s just been a well-behaved kid (which he is), I’ll\u00a0go in there with him on my lap and just\u00a0sit amongst my games and other\u00a0nerdy stuff.\u00a0 We chill out in there, breathe it all in…\u00a0 and he’s content.\u00a0 He hates leaving the room, but it’s nice and quiet while\u00a0we’re in there.<\/p>\n He particularly enjoys holding\u00a0the Amiibos which, very much to his credit, he knows are *not* normal toys to be played with.<\/p>\n Thank goodness for that, too.<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n As I was sitting in that room with him one day, I realized that this\u00a0collection held\u00a0pretty much every single game I had ever wanted and more.\u00a0\u00a0It also dawned on me that there’s a large amount of them that\u00a0I haven’t had a chance to play yet, and that needed to change.<\/p>\n How could I possibly shift my gaming-related\u00a0duties to a series of YouTube videos, re-playing games I’ve already played countless times to make these videos,\u00a0when I can’t even tell you\u00a0anything about 30-ish percent of my collection?<\/p>\n “Is Castlevania 3<\/em> any good?” I have to admit this particularly embarrassing fact about myself; every single\u00a0time I think “OK, I’m going to play\u00a0a game tonight” and go into my game room, I almost panic<\/em> when I’m trying to pick out a game.\u00a0 I have so damn many of them, and I worry that if I pick one, I’ll somehow make the wrong choice.<\/p>\n “Decidophobia”,\u00a0the fear of making decisions, is apparently a very real thing.\u00a0 That’s me every time I decide I want\u00a0to play a game.<\/p>\n But what if I didn’t have to make that choice?\u00a0 What if I took all the games in my collection and spread them out evenly by console – as evenly as I possibly could, taking into consideration that I could potentially buy more games relatively soon – and let\u00a0a\u00a0randomly-assembled list\u00a0determine what I played next?<\/p>\n First, I needed a “true up” of my collection.\u00a0 I track what games I own over at RFGeneration.com, and I needed to make sure that\u00a0truly contained everything<\/em>.\u00a0 Once that was done, I then exported that list to a CSV file… and then I started pruning.<\/p>\n – I took out the entries that were hardware, because… well, those aren’t games.<\/p>\n – I took out the portable games that weren’t playable on a television, and thus not recordable (sorry, DS and 3DS games – I have no way to play you on the big screen yet).\u00a0 Thankfully, I have DS games on my Wii U’s Virtual Console, and my Retron 5 plays all iterations of the Game Boy, so those made the list.<\/p>\n –\u00a0Compilations with relatively quick arcade-style games (i.e. Atari Anthology<\/em>, Capcom Classics\u00a0Collection Vol. 1<\/em> and Vol. 2<\/em>, Taito Legends<\/em>, etc.) would\u00a0count as a single game on my list due to the games on them\u00a0mostly being “distractions” that I wouldn’t be spending much time on.\u00a0“Full” games (such as the Genesis games on\u00a0Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection<\/em>) would be counted individually.\u00a0 Essentially, I wouldn’t consider 3D Tic-Tac-Toe<\/em>\u00a0on Atari Anthology<\/em>\u00a0to be a game I’d play for much more than a few moments, whereas Vectorman<\/em>\u00a0as part of Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection<\/em> would count as an actual, real\u00a0game… know what I’m saying?<\/p>\n – I took out duplicates, usually\u00a0leaving the higher-def versions (i.e. taking away Wind Waker<\/em> on GameCube, but leaving Wind Waker HD<\/em> on Wii U)…\u00a0 however, if a game was drastically different on a\u00a0different console, it stayed\u00a0on the list.\u00a0 I have a decent amount of early\u00a0Mortal Kombat<\/em> games to play as a result.<\/p>\n – I weeded out the RPG’s I didn’t want to play… for now.\u00a0 I have Final Fantasy<\/em> on the NES Classic and Final Fantasy III<\/em> on the Super NES Classic that I really feel the need to at least try, but the Phantasy Star<\/em> and Shining Force<\/em> series (that are part of the Sonic<\/em> compilation mentioned above) will have to wait.\u00a0 Maybe if I *really* like the FF<\/em> games, I’ll give them a go.<\/p>\n – Since buying my elgato Game Capture device three years ago, I’ve played and recorded 32 games of varying\u00a0lengths – from Super Mario Land<\/em> to Conker’s Bad Fur Day<\/em> to Metal Gear Solid 2<\/em>\u00a0to the Xbox One version of Halo<\/em>, and everything in between.\u00a0 I’m done with those for now, so I took them off the list.<\/p>\n – I had recorded some games in those three years where, for one reason or another (usually laptop performance issues) the recording had messed up.\u00a0 There weren’t many, so I put them at the top of the list to play through first and get out of the way.<\/p>\n – For series\u00a0that I hadn’t played all the games yet, I made sure to put them in order of release.\u00a0 For example, I don’t particularly care what order I go through all the Mario<\/em> or Star Wars<\/em> games I have left to play, but I made sure my God of Wars<\/em>, Gears of Wars<\/em>, Medal of Honors of Wars<\/em>\u00a0and Metal Gear Solids of Wars<\/em> were all played\u00a0in the order in which they were released.<\/p>\n – There are three genres I spread out evenly throughout my list (instead of\u00a0including them among the games I spread by console) – sports games, music games and racing games.\u00a0 I wanted to\u00a0parse them out in\u00a0a way that it would break up whatever monotony I might be experiencing from playing everything else.<\/p>\n In the end, I had a number – 857.\u00a0 That was the number of games that I absolutely had to get through.\u00a0 No excuses.<\/p>\n Then I had to compile\u00a0the list – how would I\u00a0get that\u00a0“randomness”\u00a0I wanted\u00a0so that I wouldn’t have to decide\u00a0what I was going to play next?<\/p>\n Well, like this – take the Xbox 360, for example.\u00a0 I have 72 Xbox 360 games, the most on any individual\u00a0console I own.\u00a0\u00a0If I have 857 games, that means one Xbox 360 game every 12 games.\u00a0 It’s not a perfect method, but after\u00a0adding each console’s games to the list in that fashion, it actually mixed them up pretty well!<\/p>\n The consoles are color-coded, because *of course* they are.<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n *Note – if we’re counting the games on my compilation discs that were all lumped into a single title, then the actual number of games I have to play is 1222.*<\/p>\n So yeah, that’s pretty much it.\u00a0 My intent is to play through all of them and update the blog every few games or so with quick thoughts about what I’ve played.<\/p>\n I’m extremely excited about this, and very interested to see how long it’ll take me to go through the entire thing.\u00a0 My guess would have to be… 15 years, give or take.\u00a0 Maybe more if life gets hectic, maybe less if Nat ends up helping me (my\u00a0hope is that he will).<\/p>\n Good times lie ahead.<\/p>\n My body is ready.<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A\u00a0few years\u00a0ago, I got the\u00a0idea to\u00a0turn some\u00a0of my\u00a0past\u00a0CPB blog posts into videos that I’d\u00a0upload to\u00a0my YouTube channel.\u00a0 Certain\u00a0users I watch on\u00a0a regular basis\u00a0were quite inspiring to me creativity-wise, so I\u00a0turned\u00a0a handful of older\u00a0posts into video-friendly scripts and even… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[115,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-collecting","category-nathaniel"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.controlpadblues.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.controlpadblues.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.controlpadblues.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.controlpadblues.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.controlpadblues.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3682"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"http:\/\/www.controlpadblues.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3682\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3698,"href":"http:\/\/www.controlpadblues.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3682\/revisions\/3698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.controlpadblues.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.controlpadblues.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.controlpadblues.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.controlpadblues.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/arms.jpg\")
<\/a>
\n“I have that on Wii U Virtual Console!”
\n“Yes, but is it any good?”
\n“…I also have Halo: Reach<\/em>, Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars<\/em>, Ufouria: The Saga<\/em>, Ico\/Shadow of the Colossus<\/em> on PS3, Star Fox Assault<\/em>, Silent Hill<\/em>, Metal Gear Solid 4<\/em>, Syphon Filter 2<\/em>, The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks<\/em>, Uncharted 4<\/em>…”
\n“And are any of those any good?”
\n“…I’ve… never played any of them…”<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.controlpadblues.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/list.jpg\")
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