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Splinter Cell: Kola edition? |
I'm going to be moving to a new house in a few weeks, so, in between gaming sessions, I've made a tentative start on trying to box or bin all the crap that I've accumulated since I moved into my current apartment about a year ago. Since I've spent the past year living in a relatively small room, I can honestly say that I've not been able to buy an awful lot of stuff during my time here, but somehow I've still managed to accrue enough stuff to make moving around the room an exercise in caution. I've never been someone who likes to throw stuff away, but, since I'm hoping to have the new place look more like a home than a hovel, I'm trying to be really strict with myself--even waving goodbye to such prized possessions as the remote control for a VCR that hasn't worked in years, a collection of never-used AA batteries dated "Best before June 2001," an invite to a Sony Computer Entertainment Europe party held last year, and enough ill-fitting promotional T-shirts from games companies to clothe half of the attendees at an average E3.
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Substance--the shape of things to come? |
A lot of the stuff I'm getting rid of won't be missed, to be honest, particularly since most of it has moved between numerous dwellings with me without ever being unpacked. The stuff I'm really in two minds about right now are the games I never play and the games I have multiple versions of. I have, for example, copies of the excellent Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2003 for the PlayStation 2, GameCube, and Xbox. I've played the Xbox version almost to completion, and have decided to donate the PS2 copy to a friend of mine, but what should I do with the still-sealed GameCube copy? On the one hand, the games collector in me is reluctant to get rid of it, but then it's so unlikely I'll ever play the game that I almost feel guilty keeping it. Since the PS2 and Xbox versions of Splinter Cell have different features, I'll definitely be hanging on to them both, but other games in my room-consuming collection, such as Conflict: Desert Storm, Spider-Man, Pac-Man World 2, Big Mutha Truckers, and FreekStyle (to name but a few that I can see from my desk right now), are hard to justify hanging onto multiple versions of, either because they're all so similar or because one of the versions is so clearly superior to the others. I know that sounds like a wonderful problem to have, but for a guy with limited living space and a penchant for buying far too many old games in online auctions, it really is a headache.
I guess the other thing that's worrying me right now isn't the current state of my games collection, but what the future holds for it. My concern is that games companies might decide to exploit gamers in the same way that a lot of movie companies do nowadays when they release multiple DVD versions of the same movie, often only a few months apart. There have been isolated incidents of games being reissued with extras in the past, but these have rarely seemed premeditated, and there's no denying that the likes of Resident Evil: Director's Cut and Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance are worth a look even for those of us who have already completed the original games. What would happen if, in the future, games publishers actively looked to release special editions of games--even if they're not really warranted?
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A different version of every game for each member of the Red Dwarf crew? |
I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I own both the regular and "Special Extended DVD" versions of The Fellowship of the Ring, and I'm not particularly proud of the fact that on the same shelf are multiple versions of Blade Runner, Aliens, Se7en, and Planet of the Apes--not to mention numerous regular and special-edition episodes of the BBC's sci-fi comedy show Red Dwarf. Should games companies decide to release enhanced versions of their games, I'm thinking that I'm exactly the kind of sucker who would end up buying both and, to make matters worse, wouldn't even want to trade in the regular versions. In my apocalyptic vision of the future, Xbox Live downloadable content will be made available to nonsubscribers in special editions of games, Konami will release Metal Gear Solid: Essence for the PlayStation, and Rockstar will invite us to revisit Liberty City with bikes and helicopters. Actually, none of those things sound so bad, but I for one have neither the shelf space nor the wallet to support my gaming habit if special editions of any description become the norm.
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