I suspect it won’t come as a massive shock to regular readers if I revealed that I too have succumbed to the recent Steam sale. Like Melmoth I bought the Complete THQ Pack, and in the competitive bargain-off stakes I lose out from already having more of the games (Company of Heroes and its first expansion, the platinum edition of Dawn of War that… oh yeah, I got from a previous Steam sale), but possibly edge ahead on the number of games I actually would like to play (as well as Red Faction: Guerilla and Dawn of War II, I quite fancy Saints Row II and the second Company of Heroes expansion, and never got around to Titan Quest before either).

Buying that full pack at least seemed to inoculate me against bargain fever for the rest of the weekend. I was sore tempted by other offers, notably Batman: Arkham Asylum and Borderlands, but apart from anything else on a 2Mb broadband connection it’s going to take about three weeks (and incur the wrath of ISP “fair use” limits) to download all the THQ games without adding another couple of multi-gigabyte behemoths to the list. Anyway, even before buying the THQ pack I had too many games. Charlie Brooker wrote about living in a stuff-a-lanche: “I’m fairly certain I recently passed a rather pathetic tipping point, and now own more unread books and unwatched DVDs than my remaining lifespan will be able to sustain.” I think I’ve got a similar thing with games, let alone books, DVDs, radio series, blogs, forums, podcasts… I’ve managed about three levels of Freedom Force since getting that six months ago, and fired up Civilisation III precisely once to verify that, yes, it does exist. I’ve hardly gone back to any of the indie games pack from the summer, nor got any further than the tutorial mission of Men of War. My attempted justification of “well, there’ll probably be a quiet time without many game releases, and I’ll be able to get around to things then” becomes increasingly like stockpiling canned food for the Christmas holidays because the shops might be shut when it would take a nuclear explosion to close a big supermarket for more than 20 minutes, and that would just be to restock the shelves with hazmat suits and really high factor suncream. That’s before even contemplating MMOGs, which in most cases can expand to fill any available free time like cavity insulation foam with levels and classes.

Still, never mind. It shouldn’t take too much to bludgeon the last remnant of the rational mind into submission. Another good Steam sale should do it: “if I already have more games than I could possibly play, adding another 15 to the pile results in ‘more games than I could possibly play’, which is exactly the same situation, so there’s no reason not to get them! Pass the credit card…”