If you track video games at all, you will know three things: first, as my GearGames Weekly indicates, we had a typically anemic summer release schedule; second, the release of Madden NFL Football signals the start of the Fall game season; and finally, the last few months have seen a virtual defection of games into early 2010 for a variety of reasons, including the most honest assessment that the economy is lousy and they don’t want to risk lousy sales. History is a good teacher in this regard – video game sales are dominated by fourth quarter performance, and the first half of the year was dismal. So the easy assumption is that publishers want the economy to pick up more before trotting out their biggest potential sellers.

So far we have heard delays for games such as Splinter Cell: Conviction (PS3, X360), Red Steel 2 (Wii), Bioshock 2 (PC, PS3, X360), Singularity (X360, PS3), Bayonetta (PS3, X360), and Dark Void (PS3, X360), and StarCraft II. The latest delay notice came from Sega regarding their highly anticipated multi-platform stealth-RPG Alpha-Protocol, developed by Obsidian.

So … with all of these delays, how can I possibly be complaining about an ‘onslaught’? Here are just some of the ‘major releases’ still planned for the rest last few months (September – December) of 2009:
- Modern Warfare 2 ( (PC, PS3, X360)
- Wolfenstein (PC, PS3, X360)
- Assassin’s Creed 2 (PS3, X360)
- Batman: Arkham Asylum (PC, PS3, X360)
- Risen (PC)
- Guitar Hero 5 (Wii, PS3, PS2, X360)
- The Beatles Rock Band (Wii, PS3, PS2, X360)
- Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 (Wii, PS3, PS2, X360)
- Uncharted 2 (PS3)
- Left 4 Dead 2 (PC, PS3, X360)
- Metroid Prime Trilogy (Wii)
- Dragon Age Origins (PC, PS3, X360)
- Borderlands (PC, PS3, X360)
- Dissidia Final Fantasy (PSP)
- Halo 3 ODST (X360)
- Magna Carta 2 (X360)
- DreamKiller (X360, PC)
- Demon’s Souls (PS3)
- Torchlight (PC)
- Tales of Monkey Islands Episodes (PC, Wii)

… and more and more and more! I barely scratched the surface – there is LEGO: Rock Band, more Ninja Gaiden, Tekken, and more on consoles; the reboot of Star Wars The Force Unleashed for PC & Mac ; and loads of handheld games like Disgaea 2 and the long awaited Gran Turismo for PSP, and Scribblenauts and Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days for the DS. Oh, and the launch of the PSP Go hardware!

The reality of this finally sank in last week as I looked at my list of ‘in progress’ reviews in Google Docs and saw it had grown to 25! And that doesn’t even count the fact that I have 5 ‘Netbook Gamer’ articles contained in one document, and 3 PSP Go Minis reviews in another, nor the nearly-done reviews I have in process here and other places! By the time we changed the clocks I finally had to admit – Fall has arrived and the onslaught is in full swing!

A few things are complicating stuff even further: Risen, Borderlands and Dragon Age. Risen came out October 2nd and is from the makers of the Gothic game franchise (Gothic 2 is in my ‘top 5 ever’ games). The game will take a minimum of 60 hours of gameplay to complete based on the content and my play-style. Assuming I can get that completed, just over two weeks later comes the stylish shooter-RPG Borderlands that will also take many hours to complete. And two weeks after that sees the release of Dragon Age Origins, the so-called ’spiritual successor to Baldur’s Gate’. Considering that Baldur’s Gate II took me more than 120 hours to complete, this will become a very crowded fall and winter just based no those four games.

I lined up my pre-orders at my local GameStop. Since I am primarily a PC gamer and favor RPG games that aren’t always guaranteed in-stick items, I depend heavily on pre-orders from retail sources such as Amazon and Gamestop, and digital download sources like Steam, Direct2Drive, GamersGate and Impulse. If the only choice is a physical copy – or if there are significant pre-order bonuses – I will typically order through GameStop as they are unreliable at obtaining PC games.

But those four are only part of the picture – there are plenty of smaller RPGs made by ‘indie’ developers (Eschalon Book 2, Age of Decadence), some European games with unknown North American releases (Divinity 2, Venetica), hybrid strategy RPG games (King’s Bounty: Armored Princess), and so on. So I predict that I will once again enter the new year with a massive backlog of games I want to play … but 2010 will deliver an unprecedented spring release schedule if all goes as planned. Perhaps if those games sell well they will learn that a balanced release schedule is a better idea than dumping everything into the last three months leading up to Christmas.

Then again, probably not.

So to return to the subject of the article, how can one person possibly deal with the onslaught of multiple desirous games released per week, each of which takes at least a dozen hours to complete? You can’t, plain and simple. So what SHOULD you do?

Well, a few years ago I had written an article called ‘Resolutions for the Gaming New Year’ – and my original idea was to release it in September since that is really the start of the new year and the time for resolutions. If you look through the article there is a common theme – avoid playing stuff you know you shouldn’t.

That seems pretty simple, but for many gamers there are too many good deals that come along, or interest spawned out of a discussion, and so on. These will sometimes lead to discovering a gem – that is how I ended up playing Divine Divinity, Arcanum, Nox, and other classics. But is it also how I would up losing precious hours of my life playing Pool of Radiance 2, Mistmare, Kreed and other terrible games.

Of course, being someone who does loads of game reviews means playing games I wouldn’t otherwise buy – sometimes that is a great opportunity to find some new type of game I would have missed, but too often it is just more time spent playing stuff that is NOT what you want to play.

Here are some suggestions from that article:

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