[pixelation | weekly gaming & life column every wednesday or uh thursday]

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I came to a realization a couple of nights ago. It haunted me. It was one of those realizations that comes with something like “Oh, god, god no!” Not as fierce as the “Oh, god, god no!” that hit me once in my teenage years when I shit my pants in a Toys R Us. Not as nauseating as the “Oh god, god no!” that hit me when I realized last week that my Nana was naked behind her door as she told me that she was getting dressed, her loose turkey flesh clutching the door like a claw.

But a moment of realization that I didn’t want to face. I had to man up.

I realized that I should probably trade-in Red Dead Redemption. Give that shit up for adoption. Tip my cap and accept the obvious: I was never, ever, going to play it. And as I wasn’t playing it, its resale value was going to whiter on the vine, until it was eventually worthless. It would age on my video game rack, and at some point I would simply look at it, realize I was never going to play it, realize it was worth nothing, and send it into my trash barrel with my Chez-It boxes and fabric softeners.

As I type this, I’ve already done the deed. As I handed the son of a bitch over to the kid at Gamestop, it was with a sense of failure. I had failed as a gamer. I’m not really sure why I bought Red Dead Redemption, outside of the acclaim it got. I’m certain it’s a great game, that was obvious from the forty-four minutes of it that I’ve played since May. If it was simply a matter of measuring worth, I would have traded in my unfinished copy of Final Fantasy XIII back in March, about four minutes after I woke up from the Suck Coma the game put me into.

But I owe Final Fantasy sadly an allegiance that I do not owe RDR. I’mprobably a worse man for this.

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