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It’s that awkward period of time in the summer again where no new video games have released in what feels like an eternity, and barely any new announcements have been made to tide you over with excitement until something good does come out.
You’d think that by now publishers and developers would’ve wrapped their heads around the fact that there are always barely any releases during exactly the same months each and every year, causing them to contemplate that maybe releasing their games without the threat of competition would be a good business decision, but no. Here we are again, looking longingly at our PS4, Xbox Ones, PCs and whatever other hardware we use to shoot fictional men on, growing increasingly impatient as we eye up release calendars online and scream at September to hurry up so we can play Metal Gear Solid V.
But there are ways to cope with the lack of new video games and, surprisingly, other things that you can be doing with your life to make the days go by a little quicker. Here are 5 things you can do during video game drought season:
1. Go Outside.
The outdoors is weird. Everyone is always telling you to embrace it for all of its magnificence, so much so that it is commonly referred to as “the GREAT outdoors,” but most of the nasty shit in the world seems to take place in it. Let’s face it; just by leaving your house, you drastically increase your chances of dying. You could get hit by a bus, for instance, or fall over a curb, graze your leg, get an infection and then be forced to have your leg amputated due to you having unfortunately developed gangrene.
There are things to do outside, though. Things that are almost like video games, but not quite, such as riding on public transport, which is quite like the beginning of a JRPG if you strike up a conversation with a stranger. They’ll ask who you are, and you’ll reply with your chosen name of your player-character (i.e. you), then they’ll ask what you do for a living, and your response will give an indication of your stats. Work in a hospital? Boost your health! Served in the army? +3 Strength! It’s fun if you ignore the fact that this stranger probably doesn’t want to actually speak to you, as everyone on public transport is miserable and would likely rather wish you a slow death before they wanted you to engage them in polite conversation.
2. Go Through Your Backlog.
In your collection there are likely a variety of games that you haven’t completed for various reasons, and now is the perfect opportunity to get through them before the next big release rears its head. What about Batman: Arkham Knight, for instance? Have you completed that yet? Or did you give up on it after you kept being forced back into the fucking Batmobile and told to blow up stupid drone tanks every 10 minutes? Or maybe you could invest some more time into The Witcher III: Wild Hunt, and find yourself losing a grasp on your social life once again? Or maybe you could do none of those things, and instead take a long, hard look at all the money you’ve spent on games that you haven’t really played over the years, before thinking of the good uses that money could have gone to.
You could have been saving up for a mortgage, or putting that money away for your future wedding or other such milestone. Or maybe you could have given it to charity to help out some sick kids, but instead that sick kid money has gone towards you being able to prance around a virtual world pretending to be Batman for a couple of hours. There are kids dying out there, and look at you complaining that the Batmobile doesn’t feel right, and that you preferred the older Arkham games because they didn’t confine Batman’s Rogues Gallery to side-missions.
Boo-fucking-hoo.
3. Buy a Wii U.
Remember when you joked that the Wii U didn’t have any games? Remember that roaring belly-laugh you emitted from your mouth-hole about Nintendo’s dwindling third-party support? Well, look at you now, with your PS4 and/or your Xbox One, still struggling for games to play. Sure, you might get the odd multi-platform game thrown in your direction every now and again, or an exclusive like Bloodborne, but the point still remains: all consoles this generation have thus far dwindled in terms of software. And that’s fine, for now. Both systems have bright futures ahead of them. But right now?
So why not swallow your pride and purchase a Wii U before Nintendo themselves give up all hope on it, replacing it with the NX before everyone starts up with the whole “Nintendo should move on to making multi-platform games discussion again,” completely ignoring that Nintendo remain a company with incredible profits and could probably survive another 3 failed consoles before they’d have to file for bankruptcy.
Buy a Wii U, invest in its extensive back catalog from Super Mario 3D World to Mario Kart 8, and remember what it’s like to have fun again.
4. Wait.
Now that we can practically manage our entire lives through a handful of swift presses of a smartphone touchscreen, we’ve grown impatient. So impatient, in fact, that we find ourselves becoming frustrated about not having new shit to throw our money at for a month or two. We need to consume, and staring at the big blocks of futuristic technology we own and not having any new games to shove into them makes us annoyed.
“We want new stuff!” we bellow, to which developers reply: “We’re making it!” But that’s not good enough. Why can’t they make it now? Why can’t they just hurry up and do that thing we don’t understand how to do? Why is taking them so long? And then they’ll delay a game, so we’ll take to a comments section and shout “Jeez, how hard is it to make a game?!?!” to which they’ll reply: “Quite difficult, actually!” But we won’t listen. We’ll instead complain about how that game we wanted to play in late 2015 now arriving in mid-2016 is interfering with our own personal plans. We based a week around playing that game, we tell them, and we expected to have it in our grasp when they told us that they would.
But here’s a novel idea: why don’t we just wait? Sure, there are no new games to play for a little while, but we could just – and bear with me on this one – quietly get on with our lives until one is released? That sounds good, right? Yeah, it sounds good. Almost too good. Nah, let’s just stick to getting exorbitantly angry about not having shiny things to spend our money on . That’s much easier.
