Going and Going and Going…

Some games never seem to end. In the case of the wildly popular World of Warcraft or any other MMO, this is by design; it keeps the money flowing and the subscribers owing. An informal poll of three of my own WoW guildmates turned up the following times played: 75 Days, 22 Hours, 12 Minutes, 36 Seconds. 111 Days, 11 Hours, 56 Minutes, 31 Seconds. 35 Days, 6 Hours, 57 Minutes, 31 Seconds. Yikes. But what about those games that go on and on but promise an ending in sight? Which non-MMO games flat-out consume the most time without seeming to get the player anywhere near an ending? Here’s a look at mine.

Sid Meier’s Pirates!: If Sid Meier’s name is in it made it, it’s almost a given the player will spend massive amounts of time playing it without getting anywhere closer to a resolution that culminates in your character retiring or your civilization thriving. I was no exception. I still fondly recall the summer of Pirates!, in which Captain Cremonese proceeded to sail the ocean blue… for three straight months of what had to be four-to-six hour sessions almost every day. During that summer, Pirates! even trumped WoW as the game I frittered my life away on.

Aside from going to class and social gatherings, and occasionally throwing down with some Halo, I must have traversed the Caribbean at least a hundred times, with fervent, badly-accented cries of “MONTALBAAAAAAN! GIVE ME BACK MY WOMAN!” echoing through my apartment at all hours. Sadly, no ladies sensed my devotion to my pirate-girlfriend meant I’d be a loving, devoted, Italian stud of a boyfriend. And in the end, I only made Merchant. Still, burning my summer in front of a computer screen never felt so awesome. Thanks, Sid!

You haven't quested until you've killed five-hundred of these. Freedom!

Any Elder Scrolls Game: Bethesda’s games are renowned for having that time-wasting quality known as openness: you can literally spend tons of hours running around, performing quests, and collecting loot without any consideration for the game’s main quest line. I was no exception, having never actually gotten around to doing the main quests that led to an ending.

Instead I found myself creating my own quests, like the time my William Wallace wannabe took it upon himself to rid Morrowind of Imperial tyranny… one fort at a time. Though all Bethesda games have something constituting an ending to the main plot-line, they also have a tendency to go on… and on… and on… And if beating around medieval style bushes isn’t your thing, there’s always Fallout 3.

Tales of Symphonia: This is another game that never seemed to end; but unlike the others, this wasn’t never-ending in the good way. Though not as epic in scope as Bethesda’s first person RPGs, my time spent on this one did approach triple-digit hours, an eternity for a linear, story-driven party-based RPG. My time spent playing this Nintendo Gamecube exclusive trumped the amount of time I usually spend on Final Fantasy titles, and yet… Tales of Symphonia was a drag.

Long plotlines have kind of become a staple for Namco-Bandai’s Tales of… RPGs, and though they tend to be excellent games, they have a frustrating tendency to throw insane plot twists that seem to have no purpose other than to extend the game without feeling quite natural. In this case, I gotta go with what I know. What I know is that Lloyd and company’s adventure dragged on for more hours than the number of times Symphonia co-star Colette apologized for something.

At any rate, those are three time-destroying games (besides WoW, whose 73 Days, 7 Hours, 54 minutes, and 23 seconds of my life I’ll curse even while I go back for more) that I’ll curse on my deathbed while I speculate how many great American novels I would’ve completed without these games. Thus, I ask the readership: what never-ending games will you be cursing on your deathbed?