Five Great Games I'll Never Play

So many video games have been made over the past few decades that no single person could ever hope to play them all from beginning to end. This isn't an exaggeration; it's pretty clear that there just aren't enough hours in a lifetime, especially when you consider that a third of a life is spent sleeping while another third is typically spent on other irritating obligations such as a full time job. I'll let you do the rest of the math, since I'm not exactly sure how to estimate the average length of a video game or the total number of video games ever published, but I'm certain that you'd have to dedicate your life to video games in order to experience everything this medium has to offer.

Of course, no single person would really want to play all these games, either, since no one likes every genre and a lot of games are just crap. The list gets a lot shorter when you limit yourself to games which are generally considered to be worth playing, and there's an even shorter list of games that are so highly regarded and well known that they're almost considered mandatory.

I have to admit, however, that I've missed out on a lot of supposedly great classics. I grew up with Super Mario Bros. and Doom, and I've played my fair share of Zelda games, but there are a number of immensely popular games that I've never played, and most likely never will. For your reading pleasure, I present the first five such video game franchises that came to mind, listed in reverse order for dramatic effect.

5: Metal Gear Solid

I grew up with two brothers, and at some point my mother must have lost her mind, because by the time the Sega Dreamcast came out, we each had our own console. Of course, though we weren't sharing them like we did with the old SNES, it would have been silly to keep more than one of the same console in the house, so after my older brother got his own PlayStation, I got a Nintendo 64. He got Metal Gear Solid, and I got Ocarina of Time. Fair enough, right?

I watched him play the game for a while. It was pretty entertaining to watch, although I couldn't tell if it was really fun to play because he was the kind of person who would constantly get mad as hell at any game that presented any sort of challenge, which is probably why he hardly plays video games at all anymore. (That, and having a life.) I was really only interested in the story, even if it was hard to follow, but I never had a chance to play through the game myself.

Every time a new Metal Gear game is released, I think, "wow, that looks pretty cool, I should play it." But with a story-driven series like Metal Gear, I could never bring myself to play the latest installment without playing through all the ones that came before it (useless non-canonical spin-offs, if any exist, excluded). At this point, I'm so many games behind that I don't think I could possibly catch up. Even if I wanted to try, doing so would be quite an investment, since I don't even own a PlayStation 3. (The alternative is to watch a few dozen hours of "Let's Play" videos on YouTube, which would be fine, since the later Metal Gear games have such a high cutscene-to-gameplay ratio that they're practically movies anyway.)

Update: I must have psychic powers or something, because a new Metal Gear game was announced just after I wrote this stupid post. Too spooky.

4: Final Fantasy

I have my doubts about whether it's possible to enjoy Final Fantasy without liking anime, and my history with anime was short and complicated. I thought Japanese animation was awesome when I watched Princess Mononoke and Cowboy Bebop and Fullmetal Alchemist, but when I saw what typical modern anime was like, I was filled with shame and disgust.

Okay, so maybe it isn't quite fair to say that this has anything to do with Final Fantasy, but there's also the fact that I'm sickened by turn-based combat.

The Final Fantasy franchise is so famous and influential that I almost feel like I can't call myself a gamer without having played at least a couple of games in the series. Then again, I don't call myself a gamer because "gamer" is a stupid word, and on the few occasions when I actually watched my Playstation-owning older brother play Final Fantasy VII, I was bored to tears.

And don't get me started on the character design.

3: World of Warcraft

I never liked MMORPGs, and I've always refused to play anything that requires a monthly subscription fee (which is why I don't own an Xbox 360). It's probably no surprise, therefore, that I never bothered to play World of Warcraft, and that I fully intend to die without ever having played it, especially now that the newest expansion looks like an homage to Kung Fu Panda, or a strange attempt to grab the attention of the furry crowd, or both. (Okay, so the Warcraft franchise never took itself that seriously, but really, this is too much.)

I wouldn't say that World of Warcraft is a classic; it's not quite old enough for that. But it is — or was, during the height of its popularity — extremely important in the gaming world. I am, though, a bit surprised that the game ever became as popular as it did, considering its connection to a series of RTS games that the vast majority of WoW subscribers have almost certainly never played. Brand recognition wasn't a factor, for them; the game must have earned its popularity by being fun, or something. I can't say I understand it, but WoW just managed to nail the perfect combination of whatever things make MMORPGs fun for those who don't despise them.

2: Counter-Strike

Counter-Strike, the popular Half-Life modification turned stand-alone game, seems like a pretty big deal. However, at the time of its release, I hadn't graduated from console games to PC games, and the only "modern" shooters I can remember having played at length are GoldenEye 007 and its spiritual successor Perfect Dark. I never even played a first-person shooter online until my brother bought an Xbox and a copy of Halo and needed a fourth player to beat some racist kids at CTF via GameSpy Arcade.

Also, I'm ashamed to admit it, but it wasn't until 2005 (when I bought the PC version of F.E.A.R.) that I realized how much easier it is to play first-person shooters with a keyboard and mouse. The downside is that I haven't been able to go back to console shooters ever since. Awkwardly aiming with my thumbs just feels so wrong, and I don't understand how I ever managed to enjoy it.

The result of all this is that I missed out on a lot of competitive online shooters, Counter-Strike included. After the most recent winter sale on Steam, I did end up with a free copy of Counter-Strike: Source in my inventory, but I'm probably going to send it to someone else instead of playing it myself. I'm sure the game is fun, and that it rightfully earned its place in gaming history, but it's... well, it's old.

Don't get me wrong; I can appreciate old games. But Counter-Strike is a competitive and exclusively online multiplayer game. Forget the fact that I prefer single-player games and care little for competitive FPS — when I say that Counter-Strike is old, I mean that its online community, while still active, is almost entirely composed of people who have been playing for hundreds (if not thousands) of hours and already know exactly what they're doing. Considering this and the game's competitive nature, I suspect the players in the average Counter-Strike server would be less welcoming to newcomers than the other guys playing another game that came out last month.

Starting Counter-Strike or Counter-Strike: Source now would probably be like joining a random DotA server with no prior knowledge of how the ARTS genre works. (In case you're not getting the joke here, I'll just point out that ARTS players are widely known for being obnoxious jerks who talk trash more than they actually play and who frequently ban people from their servers not for cheating but simply for being insufficiently skilled at the game in question. I even considered putting DotA on this list, as well, since I have no interest in ever playing a game in which being a newbie is a bannable offense, but then I'd have to admit that DotA is "great" in some way, and I cannot.)

If I wanted to break into the Counter-Strike scene, I'd probably be better off buying Global Offensive... but, again, I still prefer single-player games and care little for competitive FPS. Haters gonna hate, I guess.

1: Sonic the Hedgehog

My first video game console was a Nintendo Entertainment System. (I was actually born just a few years after the console came out and, by the time I played it, the Super Nintendo had already been released in North America, but my parents were thrifty. I'm sure they saved some money by getting an old console, and I was too young to know I was playing with outdated technology, so everyone was happy.) Although I did, eventually, inherit a Sega Genesis from a member of my extended family, this wasn't until years later, and I only ever played the games that I got with the console. Sonic the Hedgehog wasn't one of them.

At this point, I could have gone and bought the game or one of its sequels, but I wasn't interested in collecting old games at the time, and I had no feelings of nostalgia for the spiky Sega mascot. Running fast never seemed like a very cool super-power anyway. To this day, I've never played a Sonic game, with the exception of Sonic Adventure, and that was only for a few dull minutes.

I can't really say I have anything against the Sonic games, since I've never played them. I am, though, a little freaked out by the fanbase with which I'd be associating myself if I actually decided to put the Sonic series on my to-do list. At some point over the past 21 years, the Sonic franchise began to accumulate one of the worst followings in all of video game history.

It's almost difficult to describe what makes Sonic fans so horrifying. While the most hardcore fans of any video game series tend to be a bit kooky, Sonic fans set themselves apart from the rest with some of the worst fan-art and fan-fiction ever created — loads of it — complete with innumerable attempts at "original characters" which essentially amount to badly drawn re-colorings of the original Sonic design. I learned to avoid sites like deviantART because of this stuff.

Almost all fan-art is horrible, and fan-fiction of all kinds is so uniformly bad that I wish copyright holders (particularly of Twilight, Harry Potter, Sonic and every anime) would try a bit harder to crack down on unauthorized use of their intellectual property. At the very least, perhaps this would put an end to the delusion that fan-art is actual art and that a work of fan-fiction will ever be recognized as actual literature. (Please don't use Fifty Shades of Grey as a counter-example; erotic fiction is trash, and by the time it was published, the novel had no doubt shed all connection to Twilight, which is also trash.) Anyone who uploads poorly drawn cartoons of "[insert name here] the Hedgehog" to deviantART, or writes erotic fan-fiction based on Sonic or any other video game involving anthropomorphic animals, deserves to be sued into bankruptcy.

I know that playing the game would not mean participating in this foolishness, but I just can't do it. Playing Sonic the Hedgehog after witnessing what goes on in the terrifying underworld of Sonic fandom would be like watching Signs after seeing a video of Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix viciously beating a small child to death with a couple of crowbars. (Disclaimer: this never actually happened.)