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"Cure for Boredom"

Played all your games to death? Can't face another race in Grand Turismo 3? Fed up of collecting Precursor Orbs in Jak and Daxter? Bored of collecting those Dog Tags in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty? Starting to grind your teeth on the last couple of GTA3 missions?

Help is at hand.

I find that by completely wiping my memory cards of saved games, the challenge of each game reawakens. I stumbled across this idea after a mate deleted my Gran Turismo 3 save game file from one of my memory cards by accident. I had all the F1 cars, all the Golds in the Licence Tests, and it was 98.5% game complete. At first I was gutted. Then I discovered the joys of pottering around an oval track in a Trueno Sprinter again.

So I'm kinda happy, and my mate is kinda happy too because I'm on speaking terms with him again.

I then decided a clean sweep was in order and completely wiped my other save game files. Then I restarted Final Fantasy X, and relived the joys of the opening levels. Then I played Frequency and took just a few goes to unlock the first few levels (it had taken me hours to get that far previously, now it's kinda easy). And I've now acquired my first baseball bat in Grand Theft Auto 3, and a world of hurt awaits.

Now I've got 30+ other games to relive, including Burnout, Wipeout Fusion, Half Life, TOCA, Baldur's Gate...the list of gaming to be done seems endless.

I figure in total I wiped about 800 hours of gaming from my 3 PS2 memory cards. For me that's around 5 months of gameplay. Whether or not I'll do it again in another 6 months' time is debatable, I doubt it. I know a guy who sells PS2 memory cards with complete games saved on them (how much would you pay for a 100% complete Gran Turismo saved game file with all the cars already in the garage? or a memory card with Sons of Liberty completely unlocked on it?), so maybe that's something to aim for.

Either way, I've found that having to do all those early levels again in my games really is a joy. I've noticed that some of the best gameplay is to be found right at the start of many games. Timesplitters 2 is also said to be notable for this very reason, the best level is right at the start by all accounts (The dam section, Free Radical Design's homage to their GoldenEye days).

So that's my tip: if you're bored, start playing games again :)

Don't forget the spudgun...

I like GC

Sometimes I have no choice but to start again when my exploder mucks up silver

I would't delete them - I often regret it 5 minutes later - but rather atke the memory card it is saved on out of the computer and save my '2nd game' on a new one - you know, just incase.

And a tip FM - play some Gamecube.

Buy a spudgun.

Hours of fun.






Oh, and you will need a fresh spud...

Yeah, despite having to get rid of my over half-completed Deus Ex game, I managed to complete it a few days back a year after purchase.

I'd say for waiting fr the gamecube to come out I played "The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time" about 3 times over in about 5 months. Trying to collect every item as possible by me.
Another game that I haven't given up on is Golden Sun, I'm on the 6th time now and i've got a reason to do it this time for the sequel in the next few months.

I've had that happen before, I like replaying old games, Zelda is a classic to repeat.

Wiping memory cards though, hmmmm, don't think I would want to replay through all my FF games again, maybe I'm not brave enough or maybe I don't have enough spare time :)

Bah, Jak and Daxter, brilliant but long. 40% through so far, trying to complete that and Jedi Outcast before the next flourish of games is released in a month or so...

I went too far. I wiped all my games and now I have no games left.

:D

I figure completing 32 PS2 games would take about 2 lifetimes, so that's a long way off. Maybe I'll just do one at a time :)