@$$hole!: Phone Call 1

So this short arc stems from a conversation I had with myself, really. Basically, I’m one of the few people I know who likes to play a game until it’s beaten completely. They call us “completists,” apparently. IGN did a survey of gamers and found that something under 50% of players actually beat the games they buy. The game with the highest completion rate, in fact, is Heavy Rain.

In any case, until very recently I was still playing Fallout 3 – even though I’ve since gone out and purchased additional games, and started playing some of them. This game has been out for years, and I still haven’t gotten through my first play through.

Part of that is because of the game’s open-world, which is vast and begging to be explored…and I wanted to see every digital square inch of the Capital Wasteland, and all of the hidden nooks and crannies it contained. I was having so much fun exploring the world that I forgot to play the game. For about 30 hours. I found myself around level 18 (the game maxes you out at level 20, unless you buy the DLC that extends it to 30) and I hadn’t actually done anything story-wise.

But I hadn’t given the story a chance to draw me in. Instead I gave into the seductive nature of the desolate world Bethesda had created, and I wanted to save it…my way! Which meant finding every single bandit hideout, killing everything that moved, stealing all their crap, and then slowly walking back to a town and bankrupting it by selling everything I had and didn’t need.

I did this a lot in Fallout 3. And I loved every second of it.

But the purpose here is that I finally beat the game years after it came out. I sat down and told myself I was going to play any other games until this one was done and off my plate. Meanwhile, my friends are all playing Borderlands online co-op, and they want me to join.

Difficult to keep to my “don’t play any other games until this one’s done” when your friends are sending you the peer-pressure vibes.

So how do you over-come? Stay tuned to find out.