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Games

Hoarding All the Good Stuff for a Video Game's Rainy Day

In today's open thread, let's talk about the things we carried, and kept on carrying even though we really shouldn’t have.
Screenshot of ​System Shock 2 (and a weapon too precious to use) courtesy Nightdive Studios​​

I am working on an impressive collection of grenades in Prey. I don't even know how my character, Morgan Yu, is carrying them anymore. I just assume I've got a big burlap sack thrown over one shoulder and am creeping around the space station like the Grinch collecting every last explosive device in Whoville. But no matter what I encounter, I find myself beating it to death with a wrench or maybe, if things are desperate, a few shotgun blasts.

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The thing is, you see, I might need those grenades someday. I don't know when, but I can assure you it will be some kind of enemy I haven't met yet. A real bad-ass monster that can't be killed by mere hand-tools and buckshot alone. And on that day I will reach into my bounteous sack o' bombs and start tossing them out like T-shirts at a games convention. But I would feel like a fool if I spent these grenades foolishly and found myself without them at a key moment.

This is, by the way, how I ruin games for myself. I'm a resource hoarder. In the first two Witcher games my Geralt finished his adventure with so many potions that by the end I was just drinking them at random to cut-down on my encumbrance. "Geralt that's for night-vision!" someone probably told him as he slammed Cat's Eye in broad daylight, blinding himself for the next twenty minutes. But look—the sun's gotta go down sometime, and I've been carrying this since the first chapter.

Above all, I have a particular weakness for the big guns: the BFGs, the fusion cannons, the nukes, the Queens, the King Tigers. The tools that are so powerful they can tip the balance of a game, but whose value is so high that using them too early seems like a waste. I am forever Napoleon holding back his Guard, a deadly security blanket to be used in the last extremity—and often never used at all.

I can't be the only one playing these games who exhibits self-destructive hoarding behavior, can I? What do you always find yourself keeping in your back pocket, waiting for the perfect moment that never quite arrives.

Let's hear your answers in the forums!