How do you decide what games to play?

If you are like me, then you have a lot of games in your collection that you have yet to play. How do you go about deciding which games to play? Do you just play what you feel like playing? or do you have a set order that you play games in?

I try to play series of games in chronological order. As in I won't play a more recent game in a series until I have played its predecessors first. When I decide to play a series of games, I will try to throw in a random game or two in between each entry of the series to break up the monotony. This way I won't get too tired of the series I'm trying to play through.

Sometimes I get hooked on just playing PC games, or handhelds, but for the most part I like to vary the platforms that I'm playing my games on.

When I'm at a loss and I have no idea what to play next, I use a program called "The Hat". It's a random generator program. I have the names of all of my unplayed games in a text file, and I just copy it over to the program and it picks a game for me. I've found that doing it random like this kind of makes it a little more interesting since I never know what I'm going to end up playing next. I actually haven't used it in a while though.

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If you decide to check "The Hat" out just be careful since it installs some additional software as well, but it can easily be removed.

I do like to play games in chronological order. Not a hard and fast rule, but I mean, I would love to play all the prior Breath of Fire games before trying out the upcoming Breath of Fire 6. The games aren't even really sequels in the true sense of the word, but I just kind of like knowing what went on before.

I also like to save games I know I'm gonna love for later, oddly enough. Like, if there's some slightly more monotonous but somewhat interesting game, I'll try to do it first and save the good one as a kind of reward.

I don't really have a system that I've given a lot of thought. I do like to play a series in chronological order if the games are related well - it helps me get used to changes in the series' gameplay as they evolve. I hate to play a game, then go back to an older installment in the series and find myself thinking, "Man I really miss (feature) from (sequel title)."

That said, I broke this pattern with Skyrim; I bought both it and Oblivion off Steam, but decided to play Skyrim first because I kept hearing more about it. I might be disappointed with Oblivion if I play it later, but hopefully mods can spice it up for me.

Other than that, for my backlog I just pick out a title I think I might feel like playing. There's no real system to it, it just depends on what kind of mood I'm in.

I don't really have a system for what I play. For the most part it's pretty spontaneous. Mind you, if it is in a series, I will try to go in order. I do have a major backlog, as for that it depends on my mood. Once I get into a game though I can usually beat it within a week.

Sometimes though, I'll be really into a game then just stop for no reason, until I play it again a couple of months later needing to restart so I can refresh the story in my mind. It's an annoying habit I have, which is why I haven't beat any RPG's in awhile.

Okay, everyone's responses makes me feel like I put way too much thought into this.

There's nothing wrong with thinking it through. If I did that more, I'd probably have a smaller backlog or at least feel like I made more progress on it.

That's exactly the same boat I'd probably be in. My Steam backlog is huge, but as for my PS3, I have at least a dozen games I bought that I haven't even played yet. Mind you, quite a few are Assassin's Creed titles, but that's because I had to replay Assassin's Creed II twice.

The reason for that was because I was almost finished my game, then someone stole my PS3. I was discouraged and put the game off for two years and haven't touched Brotherhood, or any of the later series that I own yet.

S4, nothing wrong with putting thought into it. In fact, I kind of like the idea of making it completely random on some level.

I choose games based on what kind of game I feel like playing. Before I spend money and/or hard drive space on a game, I take the time to research it just a little bit to be sure I have a reasonable chance of liking it, thus making it worth my while once I play it, and making it worth the money spent and/or hard drive space taken up (I'm like to keep my PS3 hard drive and Vita memory cards neat and tidy). When I finish a game and choose something new, I just go with my gut of what sort of game I feel like playing next and go with that. Since I generally have around 3 games at a time in progress, I try to make sure each one is different from the others. I am, however, pretty hard and fast about playing games in order should there be multiple games in a series.

I rarely keep games on my hard drives/memory cards unless I'm currently playing them. I keep certain fighting games on my Xbox 360/PS3 hard drives since I sometimes get sudden itches to play certain fighting games, and it's nice to have them installed and updated already. I also currently have 3 MMOs installed on my PC since I'm kind of jumping back and forth between them, and re-downloading MMOs typically sucks since they are so large.

With digital games, I tend to download them and install them when I purchase them, and keep them there until I've played it, sort of as a reminder of what I still have waiting for me. Once I've played it, I delete it, unless I think it's something I'll be coming back to regularly. As a PS Plus subscriber, I can re-download things basically as much as I want, so it works really well from that standpoint.