Clearing my backlog, I may be some time.

Yep, I dropped 1 Valve game just to pick up another, Portal 2. However, Portal 2 is a game I have played and loved before, when it originally came out on Xbox 360, I even completed the CoOp stuff with my son back in the day. This was going to be an easy win. With Stephen Merchant and J K Simmons urging me on, how could I not enjoy this puzzle fest. More flying through the air at ridiculous speed from insane heights just to land firmly on my feet without injury, what did they do to me in stasis? Throw in some ground up moon rocks and weird goo, and I'm bouncing, sprinting and teleporting my way to reinforce the idea that even the most intelligent AI is stupid. Now, Wheatley is having fun with his friends in space ("in space!!!") and GladOS has come to the realisation that keeping me around is dangerous to her health, I am once again free to pick what I can use to distract myself from the fact that I may be the only human left on the planet. OK, no I am not Chell, I am in t...

It's been over 3 weeks since my last update and my commitment to this journey has been a bit hit and miss. Games like Left 4 Dead, and by extension Left 4 Dead 2, don't really scratcxh and itch for me play wise. It falls in to a category similar to Dead By Daylight or COD Multiplayer. While fundamentally it does differ from the others I mention above in that there is something of a story progression going on throughout the individual missions, it is in subcontext, the primarily driver behind the game is repeatable maps played in co-op. The story may move every so slowly forward, but the gameplay itself does not. There is no character progression, no challenge to overcome. Every level is the same. Starts the same, ends the same, and other than the specific route taken, they journey is the same. This bores me, more than thought it would. I didn't really notice it in the first L4D as it is only a handful of maps, but L4D2 is much bigger, and after the 4th map, it hit me. A rea...

 As a general fan of the Borderlands series, well up until Borderlands 3 anyway, I was asked to help a friend get into 3 on Playstation and show them the ropes. As part of that I noticed that I had both the PS4 and PS5 versions in my library, and having completed it on PS4 on release, I decided to burn through it on PS5 too. So over the last couple of weeks, I boosted a mule character on a second account to level 55ish using the character migration tool, then used that to burn through the story for a new character. 36 hours later, that is done and done too. A bit of a side quest, and just redoing everything I had already done, but at least it is off my list.

So today marks the 1 year anniversary of my Backlog journey. So how's it going?  I have knocked out 55 Steam games I had never finished before, and nearly all of them I had never played before. I have failed to get through 25, most of which need kernel level anti cheat or a third party account, which is outlined as a no no in the completely arbitrary rules I set myself. I have covered off a lot of games I have already played on other platforms, such as Assassins Creed Odyssey, the Bioshock, Dead Space, Prototype and Dead Island games, as well as replaying the entire Half Life series because I had lost my save data. A Nice Surprise However, there have also been some genuine surprises with games I was wanting to play but actually really enjoyed, and now annoyed me I did not play them before. These include the Deus Ex, and Just Cause games. I did enjoy the Hitman series from 2 onwards, but that first one was a chore, as it had been every time I had tried to play it since buying it bac...

  OK, so Left 4 Dead took longer than expected, mainly due to real world stuff like birthdays and Fathers day, but I was indeed left for dead. Right the way through to sacrifice. Not sure I enjoyed the game enough to try for Red Mist, let alone Zombie Genocidest, but I may at least go back and do some of the more generic ones later. On to Left 4 Dead 2. Let's see who gets left this time.