These days, being a gamer means you have a backlog. Games can be in your backlog for any amount of reasons; 5 new titles came out on the same day, you picked things up on sale & haven’t unwrapped them, you found old games from 2 systems back that you still want to play through.

My stack of games keeps growing, partially due to the fact that I have since combined my library with that of my fiancee, and also in part to the fact that I am a sucker for a game on sale.

So, as I play through my stack of 360, PS2, PS3, DS and PSP games, I figured, why not let you all in on my journey to clear out some of my backlog?

Part One: Portal, Infinite Undiscovery and Last Remnant

Last week when I decided I was going to do this, I asked my Twitter followers to choose which of these three games I would test out first. Portal won. Well, more like Orange Box won, but the game I really wanted to play off the disc was Portal. I’ve seen the ending. I know all about the Cake. I have the song in English and Japanese on my iPod. I’m set!

I am proud to say I made it to test 16 (I believe) before I called it quits. Those damn turrets were annoying the hell out of me. I really enjoyed GLADoS’ humour though. Bring your daughter to work day – awesome. Promising not to lie to you anymore, which you knew she would anyway. What a devious little program she is. I will return to the Aperture Labs as I want to finish her off….. and have cake.

So when I gave up on trying to best the turrets, I switched gears and popped in Infinite Undiscovery. I figure this will be a safe bet. I can sit down for a week and blast through the story, gain as many of the achievements as I can manage and then shelve the game. Hell no! Don’t get me wrong. I love Square Enix to death. They make some awesome JRPGs, but IU just isn’t one of them. While I love some of the features, like connecting to other party members and using their abilities to shoot arrows or talk to mice, any game that has me looking for a walkthrough barely 2 hours in is toast. There was a severe lack of tutorial in the game, which really kills the experience. Don’t tell me to use Sunstone, only to find out I don’t even have the ability and even the walkthrough is assuming I have it already or know what it is. Ugh! So for now IU is back in the backlog until we decide what to do with it.

Finally I get into Last Remnant. Guess what? Another Square RPG! Hopefully we have better luck with this one. After a minor hiccup where the disc tried to tell me it was dirty and needed to be clean, I got it to load up. The story: You (Rush) and your sister Irina are the children of some very knowledgeable researchers who study Remnants. Remnants are these usually massive metal-magic objects that are sticking out of the ground. People with special abilities can bind themselves to these Remnants and use them for the good of the people. The reverse is also possible, and someone has kidnapped your sister and is getting her to mess around with the Remnants for their own dastardly purposes.

So far it’s been pretty good. Took me a while to get used to the Union system, but now that I have that figured out Rush doesn’t die as easily. I’m also learning about Aggro for the first time. I’m aware of the term thanks to all the WoW players I had on staff when I worked at EB. My one problem is the button mashing for the Trigger Chance that comes along in the middle of battle. Basically, if you hit whatever button it is that you are supposed to, the next hit your or your friendlies make can deal more damage. String enough of them together and you unlock an achievement and do great damage. My problem is that I find the way they randomly display the correct button is too quick most of the time and hard to follow. And then they went & threw pulling trigger buttons in there too. Ugh. That’s one achievement odds are I won’t get. Other than that, the story line is pretty decent so far. Maybe about 5 hours into the game, and its on two discs, so we’ll see how this goes.

Next Time in Yukino’s Backlog – A Journey

More on Last Remnant, hopefully I will have gotten over my anger towards turrets, and some thoughts on Beatles: Rock Band!