DISPATCHES DIALOGUE
DISPATCHES MARCH
Issue 367
Dialogue
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QUEST
It’s seven years ago to the month I sent in a letter, for which I was handsomely rewarded with a pair of SteelSeries headphones – which I still happily use to this day. I wrote in at the start of what was then the new console generation lamenting the twin opposing forces of increasingly padded games and the length of time it took to complete them, against the increasingly reduced available time to play due to general adulting and growing up.
During the years since I’ve observed with interest the ongoing trend of other letters on the same theme, most recently with Phil Galloway and Daniel Sherwood in E366. I thought it timely, perhaps, now to come back at the start of the supposed ‘new gen’, this time with a two-part PSA for all my fellow gamers hiding in grown-up clothes.
“After a year of PS5, I haven’t felt that step-change wonder at all. The Quest made my jaw drop”
The first part is for anyone who, like me, has a very finite gaming timeframe available to them during the year and need to be clear on what to pick. My advice is to make friends with HLTB.com: it is easily my most visited gaming site. My redlines are 15 hours or less for interesting-looking games, or 15–22 hours for must-plays. It also helps with backlog overwhelm as it automatically rules out anything I realistically will never complete. A recent example is Little Devil Inside –I was interested until I saw devs quoting 20–100 hours in E366’s write-up. That’s too much risk for me; unless HLTB validates playtime as sub-22 hours when it comes out, it’s not on the list.