My, that's quite an achievement i must say given the no.of games u owned. I hv probably like less than 1/10th of urs & i already hv problem clearing my backlog, lol. Anyway, just here 2 congratulate u on ur feat. Guess it's time 4 u build up ur backlog again, haha. Oh, Not In of cos. :)

Congrats! Not in & +1! :D

Thank you :)

Congrats !
Finishing my backlog was far easier when owning a game required owning physical disks.
I'm in for Be Mine 2 Anniversary (first choice) and Retro 4 (second choice) .

Your reply is very insightful, thanks! Despite the circumstance that I most likely have considerably less brain power than you, I can make use of your mode switch principle if I learn to employ it the right way. It's not that this is new to me, I have often broken the 4th wall to think "ok, what could a turd game designer have thought of here" but the difference to your approach is that I usually don't actively switch into that mode, it happens more organically and doesn't always happen when it needs to happen or I can't sustain it for long enough even if it does happen. You see, immersion is the main goal why I play in the first place, it's mainly not about the challenge but about escapism and beating the game is only secondary at best. By switching into break 4th wall mode I destroy immersion and enter challenge mode which makes it a chore, even if I succeed. Because RL has enough challenges and actual rewards for its challenges whereas the sense of award or satisfaction from beating games isn't very big for me, highly secondary to the goal of immersion. But I still want to beat the games as a secondary goal, not because it makes me feel great but mainly because it prevents me from feeling stupid. Hence, I'm caught in a dilemma.
If I keep up immersion I won't find the solution as I'm limiting myself within the game's logic and my own sense of logic but if I break immersion and use "emulate game designer" logic then I automatically fail in my mission to do escapism properly which leads to quitting the game and then triggers the feeling stupid part due to not achieving the secondary goal of beating the game.

An ingenious self-defense mechanism. Blaming factors outside yourself: "Game is badly designed!"
Makes perfect sense but I'm having trouble doing that as I usually seek blame with myself first. Example: I gave up on trying to beat Crimsonland on hardcore difficulty because I got stuck in one level that is so aggravating that you need luck, first and foremost in the form of getting the right weapon from the first kill. No chance to succeed if that doesn't happen, regardless of your skill.
Now unfortunately, there are many players out there who did succeed not only in hardcore but even in grim difficulty. So while I have sufficient arguments to claim bad design on the game and win a design debate, I still have to blame myself for not succeeding because other players managed to beat the game on all difficulties. Perhaps I'm missing not just skill which is as I said not the only factor here but patience as well. Restarting a level 20 times in hopes of getting the right weapon and the right upgrade drops at the right time in the right places isn't fun to me and certainly not immersive. I can have immersion without fun but without immersion, I don't want to go on at all - even if I shift blame on the game at this point.
I could simply cheat to get past the difficulty spike but cheating here would result in me finding it pointless to continue because if I cheat once then I might as well cheat again at the next spike and that gives me an overall sense of pointlessness. So I simply abandon the game instead, in this case not a big problem as I beat Crimsonland on normal and achieved my secondary goal of completing the game. Unfortunately, there are games I abandon even before trying the harder difficulties so those games end up making me feel stupid even if I blame it on bad design, as explained above.

Ah...Discworld...I'm still working on that one. Haven't played it in months though, this gonna take years :'D
But I'm stuck in much easier adventures too so I can't blame it on the game.

Never heard about Anna so I looke dit up just now, ah one of those 1st person horror games, those are not at all my area of expertise, have hardly played any of those games.
But I had a similar experience with Bad Mojo which is a great classic but I only got 2 of the bad endings and simply couldn't achieve the good ending. I finally gave up and watched the good ending on Youtube and then got angry because I tried to do what one needs to do but the game didn't let me do it. No idea if I missed something and could therefor not perform the needed action or if it was a bug (no pun intended) or what. Either way, I did finish it so "case closed" even if I only got burned in the end - literally!

At first I thought you meant I can't use your method because I'm more dumb and that you used "character" as cover to politely express that circumstance but I see that you meant character as in personal trait and that actually makes sense. Truly, I don't know if I can pull off your method as immersion is key to my will to continue. I don't care if a game is enjoyably hard and I often have to reload several times but if I must break immersion - which interestingly is called metagaming - then I'm not sure I can do this. You'll of course say that this popular term has nothing to do with meta and we'll be back in the "muggle meta vs the real scientist meta" discussions of your other thread :)

Anyway, there are games where I'm stuck regardless of whether I break the 4th wall or not, Prelogate being a good example which I got after reading your review. This is a game that I consider to be a very good game indeed, but I find it hard to immerse myself into it and at the level where I left it off, I could not proceed even in non-immersed mode. In this game, it's pure logic that's needed, no cheap shots from the designers so it appears that I'm in fact less capable of logic than e.g. you. I could try to make excuses and say I need a more spiffy presentation so as to be motivated but if my brain was more powerful I would ace those levels before lack of immersion became too noticeable. As a comparison to another puzzle game, I very much enjoyed Rush which is all about logic as well. The easy levels I aced (they're insultingly easy), the medium levels I enjoyed as just having the right kind of resistance. Some occasional cursing from me: "this is bullshit!" followed by "oh...well...that wasn't so hard after all".
Same for more than half of the hard levels but with the other less than half levels, things are starting to get iffy and I'm having great trouble to stay immersed. And therefor haven't played the game at all for a couple weeks now, despite being only half a dozen levels or so away from glorious victory. I so frustrate! I'm fairly sure you would complete this game without great trouble in your Christian Bale in Equilibrium mental mode.

To summarize: Your reply was very insightful and even helpful, although it was technically only insightful but not helpful to me due to my "must stay immersed" limitations. I would like to thank you again, mostly because maybe someone reads your reply and can use it for themselves so even if I can't do it maybe others will learn and profit from you. Which is why I asked this via forum and not PM. Anyway, thanks you. Always a pleasure!

Congratulations on defeating Mount Backlog. I am still on the lower slopes of my attempt, and going backwards every time I am chosen in a giveaway like this one. Haha I don't mind that though, as I am sure to enjoy much gaming goodness while I press onward.

I am in for Retro 4. Thank you! :D
I don't know if you only want advice from Ghorpm, but when I am absolutely at a loss, and even tips or a flippin' walk-through won't get me past the blockage, then the only remaining choices I can think of are:

1) ask a friend for a saved game beyond the insanity

2) watch a youtube video that demonstrates what should have happened (sometimes you'll find out it was a technical glitch that stopped you.)

3) quit for good

I'll feel to have failed in all 3 cases but number 3 allows me to keep some basic self-dignity :)

Thanks a lot for a very interesting discussion.

I had a feeling that immersion is important for you and it's a secondary objective for me. I must admit that I had to smile reading your answer because you said that you don't enjoy challenges in games that much because you have enough of them in real life. I would use the very same argument but... for immersion :D Yeah, I feel like I'm getting immersed in my real life so much that I don't need it in games. I get immersed in by discussions with people by going to an art galleries, theater (and I mean a theater not a cinema) and so on. And thus It's not a very important factor for me in games, I get my enjoyment from other factors like story, believable characters and of course - challenge. To tell the truth I rarely get really immersed in games and it would be hard for me even if I wanted to. That's the aforementioned character differences ;) It's amazing how we are all different and how we can enlighten each other by sharing our points of view, so thanks again! :)

Wow, congratulations on your achievement, I am in for Be Mine 2 Anniversary, thank you.

That makes a lot of sense. Perhaps I'm looking more for diversion than immersion in games. Even if I require immersion, the overarching umbrella is diversion so I should re-formulate my posts and use the word diversion and mention immersion as a main requirement to successfully sustain diversion.

So to summarize, real life = immersion requiring diversion and games = diversion requiring immersion.

As for happiness, that is arguably the one overarching common thing that everyone wants, though different people seek different subtypes of happiness. I mainly seek fulfillment in real life, and fulfillment to me is happiness with a purpose.

Me, too, and I HATE it when there is no logic involved in our tasks. My greatest pet peeve with gaming is when the devs expect us to do something that is literally impossible and/or is so stupid that it would immediately get us killed. Grrr...

I'm not into insultingly-easy, but when the devs expect us to do something that is so obtuse that there is absolutely no way to logically answer the question, it really bothers me. >_<

Backlog bump ;)

You're officially my new hero amongst Goglodytes. Bye, bye TinyE.

Joking aside, congratulations and thank you for the giveaway, not in though.

Congratulations, Ghorpm! Can I please be entered for SalarShushan to win the Retro 4 bundle? Thanks.

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