Quake3:Arena and Unreal Tournament are out... but I'm playing through Half-Life again.

Not that I haven't gotten in my fair share of deathmatch (game of choice: Unreal Tournament, by far), because I have. But I like variety, and one of the things I'm constantly doing is going back through my library of games, resintalling, and replaying. Hell, I've played through games like Sin and Blood 2 more than once... let alone classics like Half-Life and Fallout.

Am I the only person who does this? It seems like most of my fellow GameSpy Industries employees buy a game, play around for awhile, and shelve it... never to be played again. The period of time varies from game to game, lasting much longer for extendable multiplayer games like Quake2 than for a dedicated single-player game like Nocturne, but invariably the game gets tossed somewhere and forgotten.

This seems weird to me...

I like replaying games. I'm not talking about some quick, one-shot doom match to bring back that "old-skool" feeling, or reinstalling a game because you bought an expansion pack. I'm talking about the fact that I'm now seriously considering putting together my old DOS box so I can play this week's Hall of Fame Entry, Star Control 2. I'm talking about pulling out my copy of Starcraft and running through the single player campaigns again, then maybe hopping online and looking around for a multiplayer game or two. I'm talking about real time investment in a game that, yes, I've already won.

The whole concept of "Shelf Games" is just ridiculous. How many times have you seen your favorite Sci-Fi movie? Five times? That's probably a conservative estimate, yet the price of watching that movie in the theatres twice, and then renting it three more times, is still well less than you paid for the copy of Jedi Knight that's currently sitting on your shelf.

Now granted, watching a movie requires only a two hour time commitment, whereas beating Half-Life's single player game requires (even for really good players) much longer. Still, it's not like you can't save the game... and you might be surprised how much of the cool stuff that's in the game you've forgotten. This is even more applicable with RPGs, which can literally be almost a brand new game each time you play them. I've beaten Fallout three times, each time using different stats.

Is it really as unusual as it feels to pull an old game down from the shelf and replay it, or am I just not noticing the fact that people do it? Send me Your Opinions.