Gaming resolutions 2024

I have a bit of a tradition where I make New Years resolutions around gaming every year. It's very stupid and I rarely keep them but why stop now?

This year I am going to keep them pretty simple.

1) Focus less on video games.

Games are probably always going to be my major hobby and consume a fair amount of my time and energy, but I'd like to continue scaling that back in 2024. I just want to focus more on enjoying the time I have with games and less on keeping up with the discourse or feeling I "have" to play things. This is certainly something that happened towards the end of 2023, where I was able to put more energy towards more productive things and I want to keep that momentum.

2) Stop caring about achievements/trophies at all.

I have never been a true achievement hunter but I like to maintain certain streaks of getting an achievement every day or hunting down specific cheevos even if I'm no longer enjoying a game. That's stupid and I want to stop. I do still like achievement and trophies because of how they create a record of when you played a game, and there's nothing wrong with chasing a platinum trophy if it's a rewarding experience (I had a good time finishing off the plat for The Pathless and using a plat to direct what I was doing made sense there) but trophies or achievements for their own sake? Dumb.

3) Play only games I am genuinely enjoying and excited to play

The time that I do spend on games should be spent on games that I'm actually enjoying and want to play. Too often last year I found myself playing stuff just to play it. I'm not saying that every game has to be 10/10, nor that games won't have boring or annoying spots, but I played too many games just to play them last year. I should have bailed on games like Planet of Lana and Trinity Trigger way before the end but I didn't. There is one exception to this:

4) Keep playing games on the treadmill

This goes along with resolution 1. Focusing on my physical health is important and to the extent that games can help motivate that, it's a good use of time and games.

5) Only buy games that I want to play immediately or if the deal is truly exceptional

I rarely regret buying games at 95% off, or if it's something I'm going to dive into right away, but I have come to regret a lot of those 50-75% off purchases. FOMO is real and I like having a big library, but I have bought so many games I never played over the years that it's ridiculous, and some of them I'm almost certainly never going to get around to (looking at you, Vita and 3DS libraries, even though they're still accessible.) Over the last couple months I've been better at focusing on buying stuff that I'm going to play immediately and I want to keep that up. Unless it's like a 99 cent copy of Mirror's Edge Catalyst, because how can you go wrong?

6) Write more interesting blogs

Another perennial for me but man did I write some very tame stuff last year. There's nothing wrong with sharing impressions or whining but I am capable of better. At this point on this site blogs are primarily written for myself and a few people who stop by to read, so there's no reason not to experiment and push myself.

Feel free to post your own resolutions below if you feel like it!

My resolutions are to play Sekiro and to play at least 1 major 2024 release that's not a Nintendo release.

A friend gifted me Sekiro on Steam for Christmas and it's been a White Whale of mine since I've never really played a From Software game all that far. I played a few hours of Bloodborne va PS+ and while I did play Sekiro on PS4 I bounced off after a couple hours cuz I had a backlog that needed attending to. This time I hope to get to it.

...After I beat FFVII:Remake/Intergrade.

2023 saw a lot of big releases from AAA to Indie and all I bought that wasn't Mario or Zelda was Street Fighter VI(not particularly a fighting game fanatic) and Dave the Diver(in December). In a year that's arguably one of the strongest I feel like I missed the boat. So this year I hope to splurge on a big release that I can play on my PC.

An addendum: Keep guessing games and build on my reputation as a #ProdigiousGameGuesser.

mine is simple as last years in that i want to keep finishing what i start , i did a good job last year mostly and i'd like to keep it up, sure in 2023 i beat 20 or so less games than in 2022 but theres were alot of longer titles and some replayes of older ones so thats ok.

on top of that i've been telling myself i want to chip away at alot of these larger rpgs that have been sitting on my backlog for ages . i started on a role last yr till the layoffs here put my mood in a funk partway into playing ryza 2 ... i should go back to that but its hard to pick rpgs up after putting them down .. we'll see

as for spending i think the past yr i did good on limiting impluse purchases but i'd still like to keep that up , its not fair to my backlog to keep adding to them or my fancee who has been supporting my ass for the last 3 years ... i need to loose more weight so i can go back to work, i had lost 10-15lbs down from about 300 since mid-summer so another 20 or so i might be able to fit into my pants .. till then i'm housebound with the winter here n only having shorts but hey thats fine it gives me time for yakuza 8 at the end of the month.

@chamurai: These seem like good and concrete resolutions, though I'm a bit confused about bouncing off Sekiro because you had a backlog of other games you needed to attend to. Were some of them going to expire? Was this like when you plan to make a recipe one night and then realize that your broccoli in the fridge is starting to turn so you need to cook something with that instead?

I really like FFVII:Remake/Intergrade. The DLC part starts a little weak but gets much better in the second half (and it's only 5 hours so it's not a huge commitment.)

And if you're going to only play one non Nintendo big release this year it's got to be Suicide Squad. Ignore the buckets of flop sweat around that game and the fact that everyone following it is counting literally dozens of red flags, this one's going to be a keeper. I mean a live service game about a bunch of superheroes, how could that possibly go wrong...again? Plus you don't have to use their dumb "powers" you get to use guns. I have always said that the ideal game character is Captain Boomerang with a gun. If Hawkeye had used a gun instead of a dumb bow in Avengers it would have been a hit. And Hulk! Why didn't Hulk have a gun? The whole fantasy of superhero games is having a bunch of guns!

The game guessing goes without saying. Even though you said it.

@bigsocrates: In regards to Sekiro I recall getting to, like, maybe the second boss and it taking me a few tries and not making any progress. I hadn't figured out how to parry at all and thought "I could bang my head against this wall in futility or I could take the easy way out and quit." So I did. I ran to other easy games like a scared baby that is scared. But I was 37 then. Young and naive. Now, I'm 39 and I feel like I can take on the world! My reflexes are the quickest they've ever been! No armor clad demons can stand in my way! This is the year!

I had actually gotten to very near the end of FFVII:Remake on my PS4 and was about to start the quest to go to the Shinra building when Intergrade was announced...for the PS5 only. So all my motivation for finishing Remake just evaporated and it's taken a new PC and Rebirth's upcoming release to finally get me to go through the whole slog all over again. I know it's gonna be released only on PS5 for now but I want to at least finish Remake before I hear anything about Rebirth's story.

Well, number one for me is needing to finish writing my GOTY list and post it. I assumed I would have time to do so during the break, and that sure was naive of me.

The other one is basically ignore hype cycle for AAA games. I was underwhelmed by the so-called murderer's row of AAAs this past year, with a few exceptions. I tend to like indies and semi-janky European games more, so I'll give priority to games outside the main discourse. This is not to say I don't want any AAAs (LAD: Infinite Wealth comes out in a few weeks!!!) but I would probably be better served ignoring all of EA's and Ubisoft's offerings.

@allthedinos: I don't want to scare you too much, but if you actually follow through on this you're going to miss Skull & Bones! It's been in development since before the reveal of the Magnavox Odyssey 2 so you know it's going to be great!

@bigsocrates: Great list, way better than mine, which for the past ten years has simply been "win the lotto." You would think I have had ten years to do one thing, and yet I keep failing, oh well.. but I do want to highlight your #2.

When I gave up achievement hunting it changed my video game hobby for the better by miles.. I was also in the 100% club that would get every dumb achievement, spoil games for myself so I knew when achievements were going to pop well before I got there, and suffer needless extra hours to play games multiple times just to get those difficulty based achievements or anything else that required multiple playthroughs. And for what? Achievements can be fun to get, or set a goal towards, but don't get them just to get them. It sounds like you are already there, but it was so freeing playing on switch or playstation (as a long time Xbox user) and realizing that I didn't care about trophies and switch didn't care about achievements at all.. take care of yourself.

@imunbeatable80: Wait, the greatest game turned out to be THE LOTTO? NOT BILLY HATCHER?

SPOILERS, BRO!

I have never been a 100% guy but I have definitely banged my head against stuff that wasn't good just to try and get an achievement, or not replayed something because there were no achievements left to earn. Neither is good. Achievements and trophies are good in that they create a record of your gaming and they can incentivize optional challenges and extend the value of a game, but it's just so easy to focus on them in an unproductive way.

I have a couple.

1. Finishing the games I started. I don't know when I picked it up, but I've grown a habit of intentionally not finish games I started, especially if they are single player, campaign story driven games. This is especially true if I really like the game, because I don't want to just breeze through it. So I end up putting it down. Other games come out. And before I realize it, months and sometimes years go by before I remember to get back to it.

2. I know this is cliché, but getting back on track with working out and eating right. I kind of fell off the wagon towards the end of the year and it shows. I was still working out, but not as much, and my eating game definitely tanked. But I know I have the disciple to get back on track, so it won't be hard. Remember Duders, you can work out until you fall over, but if your diet sucks, it won't make much of a difference.

3. Setting a new goal and achieving it. Life is about setting goals and achieving them to better improves oneself. I intend to do just that this year. I don't know what this goal will be, but I will when I see it.

@av_gamer: I just want to say that while it's true you can't outwork a truly heinous diet, exercise has benefits outside of weight loss and somewhat independent of diet. You can certainly get physically stronger without going on a diet, but you can also improve your cardiovascular health without losing weight.

If your goal is to lose weight then most of that is done by diet, but exercise has independent benefits and everyone should do it.