Over the past month or two, I’ve purchased a handful of video games that I’ve been dying to play for one reason or another. Often these are games that I just never had the time to get around to when they released but decided with this lull in the release calendar (at least in my eyes), I could finally see what all the fuss was about. The problem is, despite how much I enjoyed any single game that I purchased, I eventually bounced off of each of them and returned to doing nothing instead.

It started with me buying the “limited run” of Nintendo’s Super Mario 3D All Stars, a collection of classic 3D Mario games that has two really good 3D Mario games, and Super Mario Sunshine, a bad game included within. I started playing through Super Mario 64 and was having a blast. Aside from the camera control being shitty and some of the movement stuff not being as tight as I remember, Super Mario 64 is still one hell of a game.

Then I fell away from it when my copy of Luigi’s Mansion 3 showed up. Sorry “classic” 3D Mario games, but now it’s Luigi’s turn to shine… for a couple of levels before I dropped off of it. I don’t know why I bounced off of it so soon considering I was really enjoying the game itself. There’s way more dialogue and stuff that stops you from actually playing the game in Luigi’s Mansion 3 that I could’ve done without, but I still really had a good time with it and would like to see it through to its conclusion.

But how could I keep playing Luigi’s Mansion 3 when Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury just got released? Not only do I feel like I have to prioritize it because it came out this calendar year and it might be relevant to write something about it, but it also has one of my favorite 3D Mario games of all time inside of it along with this new open-world Mario game too. Sorry Luigi, but your brother won again. And to be fair, I annihilated the Bowser’s Fury portion of the package. Meanwhile, my partner and I are slowly working our way through 3D World itself, but I was also playing through 3D World on my own. But alas, that save file is just going to build up a thick film of digital dust from now on because I’ve finally decided to pull the trigger on a game I’ve desperately wanted to try for a while now.

That’s right, fuck off Mario, because Link is here in The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening remake, and boy does it look pretty. Also, and this is something I’ll probably have to go into at some other point in time, but I’ve never really played many Zelda games, especially a vast majority of the top-down ones. It’s a big hole in my gaming portfolio, something that I looked to fix with trying this adorable looking remake. And hot damn is it good. Well, minus the poor performance on the Switch. But outside of that, I’m having a really good time with it and… it’s been 3 weeks since I’ve touched it.

Well I need to figure something out soon because New Pokemon Snap, yes, it’s really called that, comes out at the end of April and I am very much interested in playing it. But there is a fear that comes along with desire, something you might have picked up on while reading this blog. I don’t know if it’s something about playing on a handheld that just doesn’t provide me with a lot of motivation to play through the entirety of a game or if there’s something else going on, but the idea of dropping another 60 bucks on something I’ll play 4 hours of doesn’t seem like the best choice for me. I think I have to make myself earn the right to buy a new game by forcing myself to play through something I already own. That definitely isn’t going to lead to me just hating video games altogether or anything, so I won’t even worry about it.