An Explanation

Over the years, I have accumulated a great many games. Actually, this is a lie; since August 2009 I have accumulated a great many games. August 2009 was the month I started working at a store of one of the national videogame chains. I loved it. I got to chat to people about games all day, I got to borrow used games that we had more than two in stock, but most importantly, there was a not-insignificant discount. This was to be my downfall.

Most of the non-downloadable games on my Backloggery come from that store. With the discount, a lot of games fell into the "this looks interesting, it's fairly cheap, lets give it a go" category. A few were even free; a lot of PC games that people traded in were on the stock file as overstock - we couldn't sell them, we just had to throw them away. Not on my watch.

Steam has also been instrumental in increasing my videogame collection to the point of ridiculousness. I joined that in mid-2009 too. Between Thanksgiving, Christmas, weekend, midweek and for-the-hell-of-it sales, I have just shy of 298 games - and that's not including various compilations. I am embarrassed to admit that I have not played even a quarter of them. It's all Steam's fault for having an entire publisher's catalogue on sale for the same price as an individual game that I want from it. Buying the full pack was a no-brainer, free time be damned!

Currently, on my Backloggery, no games have a beaten status. This isn't true, I have played through quite a few games of mine, however putting all my games online was enough of a daunting task without progress notes as well. It will be updated in due course, as I browse through the list to figure out what I want to play next.

The rules of this little challenge I have set myself are to the right, and also below to give you an idea as to how this works.

• Must play every game for at least 5 hours unless the credits roll before then. After 5 hours, if the game has no end, it sucks, it's too hard or it's excessively long (a la Monster Hunter), I can mark it as beaten.

• If I give it 5 stars, it has to be played to completion.

• No nulls, unless I can't get the game to work, or I don't have that console currently.

• Games from compilations are only added as and when I play them.

• Free games are only kept on the page after they are beaten if they gain a 4 or 5 stars.

So there we have it. Welcome aboard! Oh, and do wish me luck.