Well, now that February is over, I've put my controller down and it's time to see how I did. Not particularly well, as it turns out. I had my four games in mind, I thought finishing them up would be achievable, and I was excited to give it a try. But I guess it just wasn't in the cards this time. Here's what happened.
Super Mario 3D World (Wii U)
Three levels. Three measly levels were all that stood between me and checking one of the 4 off my list. Unfortunately, those three levels are the last three of the game and, as such, are three of the hardest levels known to Mario. I am happy to say that I did get past one of the levels, but ultimately, the other two were just too difficult to overcome, even with the help of my son. We made some decent progress in both of them and I was able to learn a few tricks along the way. It's probably only a matter of time now, but alas, my time in February is ended.
Burnout Revenge (Xbox 360)
Never even touched it. I know, I know. For shame, right? To be honest I was saving this one until I had completed at least one of the other three. Suffice it to say, this one was never attempted.
Split/Second (Xbox 360, Steam)
Barely touched it. (Though I did touch it.) I actually started this one early on in the month and then I took a break, thinking I would come back to it later. I ended up getting sucked into some other games, so it didn't really turn out that way. It's a shame too, because I really wanted to spend some more time with this one.
Battleblock Theater (Steam)
This one, I did end up playing quite a bit. My son and I rolled our sleeves up and decided to see just how far we could go in this game. Unfortunately, he's at school most of the day and then he has to go to bed kind of early. While we did get enough playtime in to make a pretty respectable dent, it just wasn't enough to allow us to finish the game outright.
So what's the score so far, 0 for 4? Yeah, that's not good. Oh, but wait! It just so happens that my #4iF had a couple of bonus rounds this year.
New Super Luigi U (Wii U)
One of the reasons my son and I weren't able to close out Super Mario 3D World was because he started to get bored of having to retry the same three levels over and over and over again. I helped to break up the monotony of the task by allowing us to take the occasional break with New Super Luigi U. We had been playing this off and on for the past year or so and had no intention of beating it. But lo and behold, we accidentally did anyway. That's #1 in February!
Street Fighter V (PlayStation 4)
Another reason (probably the main reason) I wasn't able to make much progress in my February games list is because Capcom decided to go ahead and drop a Street Fighter bomb right in the middle of the month. The game hit my play schedule like a 5-megaton TNT-equivalent blast. I also took some time out to write a review. You can check it out here.
While the game surprisingly doesn't feature any kind of standard arcade mode (much to my dismay), it does have a story mode of sorts. Each character gets there own 2-3 minute story which consists of some very brief dialogue and 2-4 incredibly easy single-round fights. Normally, I don't think I would consider completing anything less than a 2-round, 6-or-more-fight, moderately difficult arcade mode as "beating the game". However, given that there is no arcade mode, nor setting adjustment for the story mode, and given that I am incredibly lacking on completed games for my #4iF, I'm going to go ahead and count this one. And I did beat the story mode with nearly all of the characters, by the way (though it really didn't take very long).
So, there you have it. At the end of the month, I am 0 for 4 in the games I set out to play, but 2 for 6 when you add in the two I did beat. And since it's supposed to be 4 in February, let's just go ahead and completely disregard those two racing games, shall we? So, I'm actually going to call it 2 for 4 as the final result. It still may be going down as an incomplete, but that doesn't make it look quite so bad.
[Images: Mike Suszek, Nintendo, EA, Disney, The Behemoth, Capcom]