I wrote recently about how we should try to app💃reciate great gaming years like 2023 while we’re living through them. In that piece, I reminisced on the halcyon days of 2017, and how the best gaming year in recent memory gave way to the comparatively barren 2018, where big releases 🎃were few and far between and the acclaimed indies that other critics loved largely didn’t connect for me.

2023 is up there with 2017, and may even surpass it when all is said and done. The developers of two of 2017’s best games, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Legend of Zel🐷da: Breath of the Wild and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Divinity: Original Sin 2, returned with bigger, bolder follow-ups in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tears of the Kingdom and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Baldur’s Gate 3. The first all-new Mario platformer since 2017 is set to release this October. And outside of those temporal connections, the year is absolutely stuffed with acclaimed games. I can&ꦺrsquo;t play everything, but I try to make time for the games my colleagues emphasize are truly special. The problem is, in 2023, it feels like there’♚s at least one or more games like that every month.

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Sounds like a good problem to have, and it is. But the problem is, a lot of them are really long! I’ve put about 20 hours into 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Baldur’s Gate 3 and am still firmly in the first act. I played roughly 100 hours of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tears of the Kingdom before rolling credits (and still have plenty to see). I feel like I’ve played a lot of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Octopath Traveler 2, but still have at least 45 hours left (per ). Even the shorter games like Pikmin 4 and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dead Space feel long when you have a dozen other things you want to play. And that's before 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Starfield releases and singlehandedly gobbles up the rest of m🀅y 2023.

Lae'zal from Baldur's Gate 3

As a result, my gaming hobby is gobbling up the free time I typically reserve for my other interests. I tend to watch a movie every few days during the week, and multiple over the course of a weekend. But if I check my Letterboxd, I’ve only watched seven so far in August, and just one in the past 11 days. The last movie I saw in theaters was 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Talk to Me, and that was back in July, so there are four or five movies currently playing that I want to see but haven’t had time for. Some of that is because of how my work schedule has shaken out. After all, I cover🧔 games for a living, not just for fun, and I’ve had two reviews for 20-30 hour games hit in the past two weeks. I’ve been writing about games for almost seven year𝔍s now, so it’s hard for me to untangle my hobby habits from my content-creation compulsions.

If it seems strange to you that I feel like I’m falling behind on movies because there are four or five that I haven’t had time to see, I think that highlights a big difference between movies and games. Keeping up in movies isn’t easy — if you want to see all the notable new releases, you’re watching several movies a week, and sometimes more than one a day. But it is possible. You can do it, especially if you make time for a weekend marathon. A movie is usually two hours long, give or take. But keeping up with everything that’s happening in games is impossible. I’ve tried. In 2020, I beat 94 games and started about 100 others, and I still didn’t feel like I was really getting to all the good stuff.

I won’t play that many games in 2023, and I know that means I’m leaving great stuff on the table. But gaming ⭕feels like an all or nothing hobby right now and I love it too much for nothing to be an option.

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