Getting Started – The Hardest Thing About Games

As more and more great games hit the shelves, it’s becoming more and more apparent that getting around to them is the hardest thing about this hobby. Every year Autumn and Winter bring with them a whole host of Game of the Year contenders, and even the lesser quality titles seem to come by the barrel full.

Selecting which ones are worth your time, and how soon you should buy them, can be enough to put you off gaming for good. When even remasters and remakes – like the Uncharted Collection, Gravity Rush, Final Fantasy VII and Valkyria Chronicles – are vying for your time, what can you do to speed things along?

Prioritising your purchases is the cleverest thing to do. Games can quickly come down in price, even over a matter of months, and picking your moment is the best course of action. What games do you absolutely have to buy day one, and what will sit on your shelves for a few weeks? This question could save you hundreds of pounds each year, and it may even make you avoid disappointment. Anybody who bought Assassin’s Creed Unity at full price can attest to that one.

Other things, like hard achievements, poor reviews or even franchise fatigue can put you off starting an otherwise perfectly acceptable title.

Of course, sometimes there’s a good reason to go ahead and get involved. Getting started isn’t always super easy, but sometimes there’s something that’s so appealing that you just can’t avoid it.

Gears of War fans on Xbox One got the entire Xbox 360 franchise back catalogue for free so long as they played the original game’s remaster before the end of 2015, and other games give out DLC or other incentives for early adoptors. These can sometimes be of mixed value, but there’s other times it’s hard to resist.

Occasionally the incentive is accidental, as with the Halo Collection’s mixed launch. ODST was given out free to anybody who had struggled with poor connectivity and glitches in the early days.

With some online games, getting started is the easiest thing possible. Many gambling games online offer a massive incentive for putting your money into the system, often looking to double your money up to a certain point.

For some people that’ll just mean a short extension to a quick flutter or spot of experimentation, but for others that can be a huge amount of money. Royal Vegas offers a 100 per cent match on any first deposit up to $250, a 25 per cent match up on a second deposit up to $200 and a 50 per cent bonus on your third deposit up to $750. That’s an awful lot of extra attempts.

Going back, there’s a lot of games sitting unfinished or even unplayed from the last generation and beyond. Newer, flashier things became available and the dustier old titles got pushed the wayside.

But that doesn’t mean that it always has to be that way. With a little bit of effort and some clever prioritising – and even a little bit of waiting on the latest and greatest titles – you can get even your original PlayStation waiters done and dusted without any problem.