I finally have some progress to report. I've completed a game from my backlog. (although I did purchase more games in the time it took to complete... oh well) The game is called Itta, by Glass Revolver. Itta is a bullet hell twin stick shooter about a little girl named Itta stuck in a hollow, haunting afterlife created by a self-serving deity.
To preface this post, it is important to know that I am bad at games. This is not merely a matter of lack of experience. I am very game literate. This is a matter of my reaction time. When I did an IQ test a number of years back, I scored a full 20 points lower (more than one standard deviation) in processing speed than in any other category of intelligence on the test, and almost 40 points lower than my total IQ.
All that being said, the conundrum is that I love playing hard games. I've played through super meat boy, celeste, hollow knight, the secret ending of cave story (twice), Dogworld, and now Itta. The main difference for me completing these games is how long I take. I sometimes like to check howlongtobeat before I buy a game to see whether it will be too much of a time commitment or too short to be worth the effort, but I've also used it to compare my speed at completing these games relative to others. For instance, it took me about 45 hours to complete the main story of hollow knight, where the expected time is 26 hours (although I swear I spent 20 hours on the watcher knights alone 😠). It took me 22 hours to beat Dogworld, where most people finished it in 6 or so. Itta took me more than 10 hours to beat every boss, compared to the expected 5.
I'm a little slower than everyone else, so maybe I shouldn't be too hard on myself for not working through my backlog. I think it's understandable to be loathe to start on a game when I might play hours without making progress. It's a strange twisted logic that makes me feel like I'm there to serve the games, and not the other way around. I should just be happy when I do enjoy playing them.
Speaking of which, I did enjoy Itta. It took a while before I could figure out strategies to aim and move at the same time. I know that might sound stupid, but it's actually very non-trivial. Not being able to aim and move at the same time in first person games is a common problem that first time gamers have. The reality is, it's not really possible at that point to think about doing both at the same time, they're both new experiences. Even now, having played lots of first person games, trying to do both at once tends to decrease my accuracy at both activities. What I found when I was playing Itta is that I developed little micro strategies to avoid having to focus on two things at once. For instance, I would aim my weapon roughly in the direction of the enemy, and hold it in that direction, I would then adjust my player position so that the weapon's ray lined up with the enemy, before firing. To this end, the cannon weapon was very useful. Apart from learning how the bullet patterns of each boss worked, it was also helpful to learn not to panic just cause there are bullets nearby. The hitboxes are very generously small.
My other greatest enemy was the controller. For the first bit of the game, I was playing on my Joy Cons. This was okay for the first bit, but after an hour or so my hands would start to hurt. When I was finally able to retrieve my Pro controller from my house (which is still being renovated), the hand pain wasn't an issue, and it was also slightly easier not to make slip-ups.
Anyway, I can cross one more game off the list (out of like three hundred).
