The Rampant Coyote posted an excellent article on game size, which has prompted me to write a quick article on some things I have noticed with my recent gaming.

Games – Too Big, Too Hard?

For years I have been working full time, and going to college full time, while trying to spend time with my wife and four kids and working on games in my spare time, which left very little time for actually playing a game. During that period of time I almost completed Final Fantasy 3 on the DS making it to the final boss, and alas the world was left in peril due to my untimely death. So now that I am working one full time job putting my hard earned degree to work, I have had time to actually play games, like an hour every night!!!

The first game I pulled from the backlog of unfinished games was Chrono Trigger for the DS. I enjoyed almost every minute of this game, with exception to a lot of the add on quests that came with the DS version, but they were optional so I did what I wanted to do until I got bored with them. Then I got back onto the original side quests and beat all but a handful without having to reference a walkthrough. Each one was creative, and most came with good story bonuses. Then after many hours I took on the Black Omen and pretty much ran straight through from there to the final battle with Lavos.

It took me three nights to beat the final battle, putting the DS on suspend (love that feature) but slowly learned the what needed to be done and took it with patience. The battle felt epic, it was far from impossible, but seemed like it at times, and really challenged my nerves. After it was all over I was given an incredible game ending, and I might eventually play through this game again on the beaten mode.

After that I grabbed Suikoden for the DS, because I remembered the story line in that game to be quite good so far. I played on it for about a week or two, but the constant random battles just wore me out, Suikoden went back on the shelf, and now I am playing another game entirely.

For me Suikoden became more work than fun, and since it is wildly an amusing waste of time, I don’t find it necessary to explore the game further. But Chono Trigger had very little filler content, and I could explore without constantly being punished for doing so. And Chono Trigger is by far the harder of the two games, but it’s balance and intrigue kept me going, and I hardly noticed that it took me about four weeks of hour long play sessions to finish, I just couldn’t put it down.

So, that has been my recent experience, I like to jot this stuff down as I still do a bit of game development to break up the web development tedium.