Enhancement: Artificial game unlocking to help with playing through your backlog

[Mitchell Strom]

Hello,

I have been a premium Launchbox user for about 5 years now. I absolutely love the product, and it has caused me to go on a journey of discovery for games for all different systems. I’ve discovered and am constantly following the best roms hacks, fan-translations, Japan and European only titles, hidden gems, and more. This product has taken up literally hundreds of hours of my life curating my collection, and showing it off to other people.

The issue I have though… is actually playing a game. It’s such a ridiculous concept. I spend hours upon hours getting everything I want for my collection. I meticulously research and adjust all settings to get everything running EXACTLY how I want it. Then I just… don’t actually truly play anything. I just start games up and don’t finish them. I’m always thinking “Well, this is cool and all, but what if there’s something EVEN BETTER to play? After all, I have SO MANY GAMES” And then I just get analysis paralysis and just scroll forever, never actually deciding on anything.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking on this and watched a lot of videos on YouTube about people in this same scenario/mindset. People who just can’t play anything because they can’t decide on anything. There are too many options to feel like you are making the right choice. I have come away with some interesting conclusions and ideas on solving this very prominent problem in my life. However, far and away the most standout idea to me was artificially limiting the number of games I have to play. To just write down the top 5 games I want to play right now without looking at my collection (as to not overwhelm myself) and then just limit myself to those 5 games to myself and only play 1 or maybe 2 at a time.

This idea made me realize that games that I have always hooked me are ones where I have lots of things to unlock. It gives me a reason to keep playing. It’s something to strive for. Character unlocks. Stage unlocks. Weapon unlocks. it just feels good when you have something new to look forward to by simply playing a game. I remember back in the day, there were games like Sonic Mega Collection on the GCN/PS2/Xbox where you had to beat games to unlock more games. I would play those games because I was incentivized. I got the reward of a new game at the end of that tunnel.

If you can see where I am going with this, my idea is this: I think that it would be absolutely incredible if there was a feature in Big Box that allowed you to artificially unlock your games. This could be in the same place as switching between the Normal, Kiosk, and Kid modes. It just starts off by allowing you to pick 5 games from your collection you want to play more than anything else. After you select those games, that’s all you get to see. Then once you beat a game, you get to unlock a new game, and all games you've beaten go into the COMPLETED section to show you the progress you’ve made. Unfortunately, I would imagine that in order to tell a user has beaten a game, you would have to go off an honor system (unless you could do some black magic with Retro achievements where it tracks if you’ve gotten the achievement for beating the game). But once the user claims the game is beaten, they get to add a new game to their list.

Of course, a user could artificially do this themselves and keep track of what they’ve beaten for themselves. But I love the idea that Big Box does this for you. It turns playing games into a game in and of itself. And you get to witness yourself tackling your backlog. It puts focus on the games you HAVE played, instead of the games you HAVEN’T.

Thanks for reading!