Games are to be played in alphabetical order by title. The "title" is whatever the game's box or library entry says it is. Exceptions are made for preceding articles; e.g. "The Witcher" is found under 'w' rather than 't.' Alphabetical order is whatever Google spreadsheet says it is.
Cutoff Date of 10/1/2012: Any game acquired after October 1 2012 will not be included in the catalog. Mostly because I've already played the HELL out of XCOM.
Beginning State: Games will be started from the beginning of their story/campaign etc, UNLESS I have an active-but-incomplete savegame that has a 2012 date on it. There are only about four or five of these that I'm currently aware of, so I'll note them when they come up.
Expansions will be considered part of the core game: If I come up with any exceptions, I'll note them in the appropriate posts.
Difficulty Setting: Hard. This translates into "the mode harder than normal/default."
Saves: Re-loading saves is not allowed. One active save per game, and saving requires exiting the game.
Fail States: For most games, the fail state is death. However, there are some notable exceptions:
- Point-and-Click Adventures: Since the player can't actually die in most PaCA games, the fail state shall be defined as "being stuck." More specifically, I'll have a 15-minute countdown that resets every time I progress. If the timer runs out, I've failed.
- Round-based shooters: Since death is a fixture of the game mechanic, the fail state occurs when a round is lost.
- Management Simulators and God Games: Assuming that a given game in this genre doesn't have fail-able mission objective, the fail state occurs when the I can no longer continue because my people have been wiped out, I've run out of resources, etc.
- Case-by-Case: Some games have weird or nebulous fail states. If necessary, I'll define the fail state at the top of the initial blog post for each of those.
- Loser Friendly: If i can't figure out how to shoe-horn a game into having some kind of fail state, it'll get removed from the play catalog
Peripherals: I have a lot of Space and Mech sims, where a joystick is required. I will also be doing much of this experiment on a laptop while traveling for work. Therefore, if I get to a game that requires a peripheral to reasonably play, it will be set aside until I return to my desktop.
