After two days of playing utter garbage (and one decent little romp) the idea of cramming all the crap into one month of the year is starting to seem like a decent idea... the sort of thing I could make into an annual event... I get to harvest a metric ****-tonne of Gamerscore each year and leave myself 11 months of the year to take my time over some quality titles.

So I plan to do the same thing again next year, and the collecting process will start anew... and I'm going to try and keep some of the dross out of it... Super Wiloo Demake broke me a little bit, certainly stripping away some of the joy that I'd experienced with Big Sister earlier in the day.

I started this whole thing on January 2nd, surpassed my 2019 total for Gamerscore by the end of January 3rd, and still had 18 games in a queue (well... noted on scraps of paper in a box from which to utilise the "lucky dip" method of selection) and the weekend ahead of me... when I'd be playing less than before as one of the weekend days is my better halves birthday.

However, while January 4th is going to be less hectic, I can still cram at least 1 or 2 games in before I have to go out... and we'll start with...

Planet RIX-13 which was one of the first games I bought with this in mind, a god send for those playing with a video guide as the game plays so slowly that it's very, very easy to keep up... normally if the video is 45 minutes long then I'm looking at just over double that with all the stopping/starting... this time the 22 minute video was worked through in 35 minutes.

It's simple enough, nothing too taxing (obviously with a guide) but I can imagine it would have been a little confusing without one, especially times were the game goes all odd when you pick up certain items... but the rest of it is standard fare, collect computer boards to repair broken computers, get radiation filters before you enter an irradiated area... but it scored a more than respectable 61% overall.

Knowing time is short due to other commitments later in the day I try and keep the games short, picking the game with the 1 hour 35 minutes video guide is a non starter, so for the second game I'm fairly happy to see "Fractured Minds" come up, a game which has won plaudits for its depiction of mental health.

Does it? Haven't a clue, what I found was a very simple first person puzzler with basic visuals and only 7 levels/puzzles to work through... a 20 minute completion still leaves me plenty of time to push onto another game, not that this helps the score here... but it doesn't need help, 48 out of 70 and a (currently) second place securing 69%

The quick completion streak continues as I end up with "Hexologic" which is a number based puzzle and consists of 111 levels of varying difficulty, 90 basic levels and 21 special levels that spring up when you complete a set number of other levels.

Here my guide is simple, and with no time limits on any of them I can take my time... 111 levels vanish in just 45 minutes... while it's good there is no story to speak of,, sounds are basic (which is still better than "Super Wiloo Demake" where the tune was so bad I turned it off and scored it 1 point) and the nature of the game means it's going to be fairly basic visually... but even with these handicaps the 39 points leave it with 56% which leaves it better off than a lot of the games in the first two days.

On a roll, breakfast over I keep going with "Sagebrush" which is... odd... while the story works out very well, with an Edith Finch style twist at the end the way it's been presented takes a lot away from it... first person viewpoint, with pixel art visuals.

It tells the tale of a religious cult and its downfall, told through notes and tape recordings, it deals with a vulnerable young woman's entry and experiences with the "church" and how it degenerated into something far darker that ended as many of these things are want to do.

As you work through the tapes and notes the story unfolds at a satisfactory pace and how it affects the girl, Lillian, as things get progressively worse... the climax is well done and puts the final piece of the jigsaw into place perfectly... it scores well, even though it took 80 minutes I found myself checking more of the background/story items in locations than I needed to so I could get more of the story itself.

But... what stopped it scoring higher were the appalling visuals, as the game is played out over one evening and night, the more tape recordings you find, the game moves forward to the next stage of the day, so what starts at dusk goes full on night time when you find the 10th of the 12 recordings, and had you not been advised to increase the contrast at the start of the guide, you'd be struggling come the end.

Even with a fairly poor graphics score we find it in the 60's percentage wise, I have checked to see if the developers have any other games out there and, according to TrueAchievements, there aren't which is a shame as I'd have happily played something similar for the story alone... 63% places it almost certainly in the top 4 or 5 games I'll work through.

As I have a little time left I forego the usual selection method of lucky dip and jump straight into a supposed 15 minute completion and "Metagal" which I instantly regret as I hadn't really looked into what sort of game this was before I bought it... I may well have given it a pass if I had done so.

Metagal is a 2D shooter in the vein of Megaman, it may not be as hard, but then I'm nowhere near good enough to even contemplate playing the original... and while I manage to get 10 of the 11 Achievements for 900 points I didn't fancy my chances of hitting the next (and vital) checkpoint just before the boss battle that I need to win for the full 1,000 on offer.

I seriously considered calling it a day here and settling for the 900 points I've already amassed at this point, but I push on and hit the checkpoint with 3 small bars of health left, I venture in an make a half-hearted stab at the boss thoroughly expecting to die, and I do but not before I make a decent dent in the bosses health.

Inspired I keep going and finish them off on my third attempt and somehow, in a day where I have just a few hours time to spend whoring away, I've scored 5,000 points and have hit (more or less) the halfway mark in the whole event... Metagal, for the record, scored 40 out of 70 and 57% having lost a point for frustration when the game randomly respawning enemies on a death.

To this point I've scored 16,900 points (out of 17,000 possible) and spent 17.5 hours playing mostly garbage... but I'm going to see this through and start to tuck games away for next years effort... being careful not to put any Megaman or Mario clones in there.

Day Four:

Short time today due to a routine blood test and meeting my mother for a chat (and so she can pass on a birthday card for my significant other) so I don't start till late... only 3 played and only 2 completed as I discover that I've inadvertently picked a game that makes me want to punch my TV...

First up is a big budget title, "Transference" is a Ubisoft game that retails at £19.99 (not what I paid for it) and was originally a VR title... so the expectations were high... rightly so, it's a decent game (with a passable story) and, like Sagebrush, the first person view kicks in... but with better visuals.

The sound is reasonable, the puzzles potentially taxing (the video guide even mentions where he had been originally frustrated when playing) if you don't know music... the first puzzle is a musical one and requires you know which notes are which on a musical scale... but the Achievements are well thought out and you can see there was a bit of a bigger budget available.

An overall score of 47/70 means it's managed to scramble a 67% overall rating... and I realise, later, that this is as good as it gets today.

"The Path of Motus" is next up and can, in theory, be done in one play through... provided you don't kill anyone in the process... but this means some seriously pixel perfect jumping and split second timing to achieve and, as I've mentioned before, that is not me... not even close.

Frustration kicks in as I try to do this, and the level rises when I discover that one of the Achievements I'm going to miss for being incapable of the superhuman skills required, is a) for 200 Gamerscore, and b) the equivalent of the PlayStation Platinum so shouldn't even be there in the f**king first place.

I finish with 700 Gamerscore and award the game -4 for frustration as I just haven't got the patience... 33 points and 47% put this fairly low down the pecking order, in a massive clump of utterly average games.

With the number of titles that I'm looking forward to dropping drastically then I decide to take one on the chin and load up "Monopoly Plus" for a 6 player game with myself... I have to admit I was dreading this one, it all sounded complicated but works out pretty easy to complete in the end, some of the Achievements grind a little with too much luck involved.

There's one for collecting cash from Community Chest or Chance cards, and you have to get these with the named player so when another player landed on a good card, I'd have to back out and quit and then make sure my named piece landed on it before anyone else... if one of them did, quite out and go again.

Once the initial confusion cleared it was all relatively straight forward, decent graphics and sound, no story whatsoever... and an utterly average 53% final score... but I have to call it a day right here.

I have 10 titles left, most of 1 day to go so some are clearly going to get done in piecemeal fashion as I have to go back to work after the holidays soon... but they will be done, I can hammer through 3 or 4 tomorrow... leaving maybe half a dozen to complete later... bring it on, and start collecting games for Crapfest 2021.