Sinking 773 Hours Into a Nintendo DS Game? It's Been Done

[Rob Williams]

Having been an MMO game player for a number of years, registering 1,000 hours to a single title in a year isn't exactly a foreign thought to me. In fact, I've been playing my primary MMO since 2002, Asheron's Call, and I'm sure my total accrued playtime is at least four times that. Ugh, that's a little rough to think about... let's carry on.

Read the rest of our post and then discuss it here!

 

[marfig]

That's indeed quite a feat. But a bit worrying too. 773 hours would be the equivalent of 32 days of non-stop playing. That level of commitment to a game in the course of a single year is remarkable. But not healthy. And... I can attest for that.

A (very) special breed of online games are the ones I've spent most time playing in my life; MUDs, back when. But for single-player games, these are the champions on hours played, correctly ordered I would think:

Civilization series (if you consider the series as one game)
Doom (still play the occasional DM with friends to this day)
X-Com, Enemy Unknown (still play it sometimes to this day)
Master of Orion (this game pretty much consumed me for nearly 2 years)

These are for sure games where I have spent more than a few hundreds of hours. The Civilization series in particular must amount to thousands of hours. Of those, I think Civilization III was the one where I spent most time.

Incidentally, this brings us to a topic I would like one day have the opportunity to discuss. No modern game (in the last 10 years or so) ever captivated me so much as games from the late 80s and 90s. Maybe because I'm older and have a different mindset for games (which I'm sure is true). But I think also because there nothing to be hooked to. Maybe Nintendo is doing to games today what the PC used to, but not anymore.

 

[Optix]

Lord of the Rings Online ate up about 4 hours a day before my son was born. About 3 or 4 months after his birth I canceled my membership and resigned as an officer in the kinship I belonged to. My playing style is all about raiding "end game" content and there simply is not enough time to do that the way I like.

It would be nothing for me to join an afternoon raid for 5 hours or join one in the evening. Back then I had the luxury of being the boss of my own time. Not now.

This isn't quite as bad as you all may think though (and I'm actually editing this post after figuring this out). This only works out to just over 2.1 hours a day. If you want to look at it this way, I was twice as addicted to LotRO back in the day than this guy is to DQ and I played it for 3 years!

 

[TheCrimsonStar]

Heh. I don't play MMO's. The most hours I've sunk into an online game was Half Life 2 Deathmatch, and I currently have 746.7 hours on record there in the past 2 years.

 

[Tharic-Nar]

I was addicted to Phantasy Star Online... i had over 700 hours in one character alone. There have been MMOs too, latest being Rift with my main coming up to 20 days game time... sheesh, it gets bad, and nothing to be terribly proud of.

Heh, Marfig, apart from doom, those games were pretty close to what i played too. I played Civ 2 more than the others though. But I was into SimCity 2000 as well, Master of Orion 1 and 2, Master of Magic, Realms of the Haunting and of course, all 3 X-Com games, still love Apocalypse. Actually, I have played all the x-com games, and i can safely say, Interceptor and *shudder* Enforcer were the worst. The Czech reboot series, Aftermath, Aftershock and Afterlight were decent though, especially Afterlight - colonize Mars.

 

[Optix]

With that many hours into PSO, I'm surprised you didn't get PK'ed like I did. Some douche joins the game, does whatever his GameShark will allow, my system locks up, reboot and my end level force with pimp gear is replaced by a level 7 with crap.

I'm not sure if they got my character or not but about a year later Sega puts out version 2.0 that requires you to pay but locks out the PK possibility.

 

[Tharic-Nar]

When PSO went pay4, it was only in the US and JP, EU didn't have to pay the hunters license, and we could still connect to US servers. And i know what you mean with that shitty PK, nolling and all sorts going around. A friend was hit with it, screen goes black, messages appear, dude starts laughing and the savegame was toasted. If you knew what to do, it could be undone, you just pull the mem card and turn the system off to prevent the autosave kicking in (one of the big BIG reasons i despise autosave is because of events like that).

 

[Doomsday]

I'm waiting for Star Wars The Old Republic to put my hours into a Twi'lek Sith!

 

[Kougar]

Putting those kinds of hours into a PC game might seem like a ton of time but nothing out of the unusual... but putting them into a handheld game system? That makes me cringe!

Also reminds me of some article awhile back about doctors seeing a new generation of physical repetitive stress injuries related to decidedly un-ergonomic handheld gaming on all sorts of devices...