City Crisis
© 2001 Take Two Interactive

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Gaming as a Job

I just got done playing MONSTERS INC. for the Playstation 2 (look for my review sometime this week). I can't say that this was the most enjoyable experience of my life - the game itself is lots of item collecting and backtracking. But, in general, gaming is something that has lost some of its pleasure for me.

Right now you're probably thinking, "Jeez, what an ungrateful bastard, you write for the best genre magazine and website around, get free videogames, and get to hang out with and interview cool people from the game companies. Gaming has lost its pleasure?"

Let me clarify: most of you guys get to play games for fun. While playing through the games as a job can be fun, it sometimes isn't. Imagine having to play CITY CRISIS for more than 5 hours... There are a lot of games that'd I'd never have picked up, much less played through to completion on my time. Even the games that I would want to play I have to rush through in order to meet a deadline.

I'm sure you might have noticed how our game reviews can be somewhat late: we usually get a bunch of games at once, and until this point, everything has been retail copies and we usually get it 2-3 days after the game's ship date. That also adds to the stress level as we want to have game reviews shortly after release. Fortunately, with our acquisition of debug units (Xbox this week, Playstation 2 in the paperwork phase) we'll soon begin to get stuff before it comes out, giving us the needed time to play through the game before its release.

The other aspect is that I have to be critical about games. Playing a game for fun is great, but I have to keep a critical ear on the sound, critique the graphics, look for slight flaws in the gameplay. Sometimes I wish I could one again just have the simple pleasure of being a fan... but there's no way that will happen.

I'm finally enjoying games a bit more right now, but as soon as Christmas rolls around with its 10 games a week... I think my controller may take quite a beating.

Enjoy gaming the way I wish I could.

TIDBITS

Sega has announced that Heisman Trophy winner Eric Crouch will be the spokesperson for NCAA COLLEGE FOOTBALL 2K3... GRAN TURISMO 4 will

The Huskers take on Ohio State in NCAA College Football 2K2

© 2001 Sega

ON SHELVES

Microsoft's DUNGEON SIEGE: while I never got a review copy of it, I did get a chance to play it a little in my free time and it's awesome. Definitely the best game to come out this week and worth checking out.

Gamers' Thumb is our weekly Videogame column.