Requiem for my video games

Hmm...I wonder if this qualifies as "fair use"...

I doubt very much that I will ever permanently put aside all of the stupid, addictive, time-wasting, mind-sucking video games I have wasted my life on over the past three decades. Childhood indoctrination is just too difficult to overcome, and, damn but it feels good to crush a Goomba after a long day.  That said, my wife's patience with me sitting on my ass and asking for "just one more level" before I load the dishwasher or change our daughter's diaper is likely to wear thin in the very near future. Probably that lack of sleep thing. Whatever.

In any case, for reasons that might once have been somewhat in my control but are no longer, most of my time wasting addictions have to be largely set aside for the next ten or twenty years. Maybe only four if I can get Olivia interested in a two-player game. ("Sweetie, that is the chainsaw. It's the weakest weapon.You'll want to find a shotgun quick before Daddy snipes you from behind. M'kay pumpkin?")

It felt appropriate to pay a brief tribute to some of the greater offenders with which I have wasted a measurable fraction of my life. I should note before posting this list that, where video games (...and music...and movies....hell, pop culture in general) are concerned, I more or less stopped paying attention in the mid-2000s. There are no current-gen console games on this list. But here they are, in all their outdated splendor, starting with...

Final Fantasy VII - I could easily just say FFVII-XII, excluding XXI (monthly fee for FF? Yeah, right). VII was the first I ever played, and I've played it through several times. Arguably one of the top five RPGs of all time, VII was a soul-sucking time vacuum. How many hours did I spend breeding chocobos so I could get a golden chocobo, so I could get Knights of the Round, so I could defeat all of the Weapons, none of which actually contributed to resolving the principal storyline of the game. Damn you sidequests! And I still never fought enough battles in the early game to see Aeris final Limit Break (has anyone outside of Japan actually had the patience for that?). Between the various incarnations of Final Fantasy and the replays I've done, I'd estimate anywhere from 600 to 1000 hours of my life were stolen by Square Enix. In terms of my current profession, that's half a working year. Damn. That's just depressing.

Heroes of Might and Magic III - One, two, and three were all fantastic games. Four is better off forgotten, and I hear great things about five, but my current computer is not what one would call "fast" or "good," so I can't speak directly to the merits of the latest game, or the sixth version due out shortly. These are great strategy/tactics titles, where you accumulate resources, build castles, recruit creatures borrowed from various mythological and fantasy traditions, and try to accomplish different goals (or just kill the other guys if you aren't into the campaign games). Maps come in various sizes, and the length of any given game corresponds roughly to the size of the map. Excellent in both one player and multi-player modes. I can't even estimate the hours I have lost to this game. Probably a few hundred just waiting for Dave to finish his turn so I could whoop his ass.

Civilization - I probably lost more time to III than any of the other titles, but the Sid Meier gaming franchise is pretty solid all the way around. This is a world-building strategy game in which the player, appropriately, plays the leader of a civilization from 5000 B.C. until the modern era, or until a competing civilization wipes him from the globe. Really great game. The only real downside is the mid-game lag, where if you are not actively engaged in military conflict you are really just pressing Enter about three hundred times per turn. That, and the sheer length of any given game. Playing for an hour or two a day, a single game can take days.

Bloons 4 - Damn, dirty apes. Bloons is my modern Tetris, or Snood if you prefer. A fairly simple tower defense game where monkeys throw darts at "bloons." I don't know why the target balloons are called "bloons," but they are. This is a stupid game. I admit that. The only saving grace I can argue for it is that it isn't a Facebook game.

Unreal Tournament - Haven't actually played this in a while (again, see my lamentations regarding my current computer), but I did lose many nights in college to LAN battles on Unreal Tournament. It's a first-person shooter, much like Doom before it and Modern Warfare since, but with aliens, space age weapons, low-gravity battle arenas, and a pretty sick multi-player mode. The updated Unreal Tournament (I believe it was out in 2004...yeah, I know how out-of-date that is) added vehicles into the mix for larger boards and absolutely devastating weaponry. The Goliath was a beast. That is all.

I kind of expect by the time I have the free time to enjoy video games on a regular basis again I will (a) have other hobbies, or something more pressing to do, and (b) none of my favorite games will be easily available anymore on any platform I have access to. Much like King's Quest from the stone-age of the computer era, technology will leave these obsolete favorites in the dust. What games have cost a chunk of your life?