Game One – Battlefield: Bad Company 2

A quick Google brings up a random number generator, and with my Steam library set to display “installed” with a grid view, 2 random numbers give me a row and a column… and Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is what comes up.

Purchased in the Steam winter sale of 2010, it was a casualty of being bought along with Mass Effect 2, and has never been played. At the time I was in the mood for a multiplayer FPS and this came up cheap, so was an impulse buy. Unfortunately ME2 was far more enticing, and then my WoW addiction blinded me to all, so Bad Company 2 joined the other unloved games. Now Fate has decreed it’s time to play. I’ll skip the multiplayer for now, and give the single player campaign a try on easy. Here goes…

…

OK, so it’s yet another derivative man-shooter with a nonsensical storyline, but I like it. It has a certain charm, the guns feel good and I'm warming to the characters in my squad, even if they are clichéd character types (nervous geeky one, swearing grumpy one etc...)

The last game of this ilk I played was Modern Warfare 2, and that was hard work. I only got through the single player portion because I wanted to start MW3…. But that remains un-played too! Hopefully the electronic dice will give me a chance to play sometime.

For now, Bad Company 2 is playfully tickling the testosterone fuelled part of my brain quite nicely. I shall continue to play, hopefully to the conclusion of its campaign.

Thanks Fate! What game will you let me play next?

Introduction

Like many PC gamer's, I use Steam to buy games digitally. Steam regularly has awesome sales, with temptingly low discounts on all sorts of games. Too tempting sometimes… Often I can’t help myself when I see a game I've been curious about with a 75% discount. It may be a chance to explore a genre I've not tried before, or to find out what all the fuss was about a few months/years ago.

Then I’ll either have a brief paddle in its digital shoreline before returning to my current main game, or never even start it up, leaving it to whimper quietly in a dusty corner of my Steam library.

This results in a massive backlog of un-played or barely played games just sitting there unloved. I know I'm not the only one in this situation, and it’s not exactly the end of the world, but I've decided to do something about it.

Throughout 2013 I’ll endeavour to play as many of these in an attempt to broaden my gaming horizons, and hopefully reduce the backlog a smidge.

The rules (which I may arbitrarily break at any time) are:-

•         Use a random number generator to choose which game to play.
•         The chosen game must've been played for 5 hours or less.
•         Play as many games to completion as possible (this’ll be the first rule to be broken!)
•          To help with the above, play on “easy” if appropriate.
•          I can give up on a game if I'm just not enjoying it – this is supposed to be fun after all.
• 
  

 I won’t slavishly stick to playing just games picked at random as I still have my favourites I’ll want to continue with, plus any new additions to the collection will want some attention too. There are also the games on other game services too… but I’ll worry about those later!

Onwards! I wonder what the first choice will be…