This is a weird one for me. I’ve been meaning to play Area 51 for at about 12 years. Now that I finally have, for this column no less, I really don’t have much to say. I guess that says more about the game that it says about me. But I must admit that I am at least part of the problem here.

You see I have no life. I am either writing something, editing something, recording a podcast, editing a podcast, watching a movie or playing a video game. Too many video games. There are too many video games. Specifically, there are too many video games that I want to play so I often juggle playing multiple games at once. More games at once than I recommend any normal person to play at once. It’s hard enough to finish one video game when you have so many other things to do, let alone multiple games.

So far, all the other Backlog Busting columns I’ve done were games that I played along with a handful of others and maybe I need to change that. I won’t but maybe I should because with Area 51 I did not prioritize it at all. Every game I’ve done for this column has been the third or fourth game in my rotation but I always kept at it at a decent pace. Not this time. I started playing Area 51 just under two months ago. I’m the first to admit that I play games slowly but this is by all accounts an 8 hour game, it shouldn’t take me that long.

The problem, is that I’ve taken weeks long breaks in between sessions of this game. Perhaps that’s the game’s fault, but I got to bear some responsibility here, after all I’ve been meaning to play this for over 10 years, I should have given it more attention.

I had a PS2 as a kid and like most kids, when I finally got a PS3 I said goodbye to the PS2. When the PS4 came out I said goodbye to the PS3. But when I was in the 10th grade I discovered something. A couple doors down from the pizza place me and my friends went to for lunch almost every day was a retro game store. It was the coolest thing a theater kid who hadn’t yet seen a pair of boobs could see. In that retro game store was an N64 for $50.

The N64 was my first ever console but our house was burgled when I was in first grade and the bastards stole the N64 and all the games. By then it was continued so we could never replace it. So naturally I bought that $50 N64 and some games. Then I caught the retro game bug. Before long I was saving up my allowance and my lunch money to buy various retro games and consoles. I would scour the internet to figure which games I should get for which systems. And there was a first-person shooter starring David Duchovny that would always pop up on every “Hidden Gems” lists. XIII.

But there was a second first-person shooter starring David Duchovny that would turn up on a lot of “Hidden Gems” lists. Area 51. So it was always on my list to eventually buy and play. But I never did. Other games were a higher priority and then eventually I was priced out of retro collecting by rich asshats who overpay for everything because they don’t understand what they’re buying, they just want to own something so all the prices went up.

Fast forward to me deciding to do Backlog Busting and make my backlog everyone else’s problem. I figured the David Duchovny first-person shooter would be perfect and since I’ve played XIII and it’s remake, it would be Area 51.

This game really didn’t want me to play it. I tried to emulate the PS2 version but the controls are weird and the sensitivity never felt good on any settings. It was also full of visual glitches no matter what I did. I’m talking just completely black, missing textures.

Luckily for me there was a PC version and I’m getting better with keyboard & mouse controls. Unluckily for me Midway Games decided to go bankrupt some time ago so there is no official version you can get. It’s abandonware. Easy enough to find and download, not so easy to get running on a modern computer and even less easy to figure out what the problem is.

Even when I finally got this thing playable on my computer the cutscenes never worked. The in-game ones did but all the pre-rendered ones would lock up in a never ending loop. I wanted to understand what was happening and most importantly, hear the sweet sultry tones of David Duchovny’s semi-bored voice work. I resorted to having a YouTube compilation of all the cutscenes up on my second monitor so I could watch them at the end of each level. But even that came with a hassle because Area 51 has no windowed mode, only fullscreen so I could only switch to the cutscene compilation by Alt-Tabbing which had the effect of replacing my game screen with a blinding blank white screen.

So far, so annoying. But at least I could finally play and enjoy this game after all this time.

That’s really all I can say. It’s like if Michael Bay made Half-Life. That’s all the description I can really muster. The shooting is fine, fun even but the whole game never amounts to much. You fight the same enemy types most of the way through. The weapon selection is small as is but it never gives you a reason to use anything other than the SMGs other than the occasionally Sniper to pick off. You get a mutant transformation that lets you kill enemies in one hit but it never felt like it gave you an advantage over just spraying bullets everywhere.

I played it. Then I didn’t. Then weeks went by and I finally remembered it and played it again. Then weeks went by. Then I remembered it again. And so on. Until the other day I just decided to get it over with and play through the rest so I can write this damn column.

I’m in the middle of playing Avowed, Xenoblade Chronicles, WWE 2K25 and Split Fiction. All the while Steam keeps throwing more wishlist discounts at me than that one girl had hot dogs thrown at her, you know the one. I had to just finish this. So I trudged my way through more corridors spraying bullets at enemies until I reached a section where the checkpoint was further back than it should have been and I decided I had enough. It’s not bad but it’s not good enough for me to care. It’s not good enough for me to want to spend more time on it when I have all those other games to spend time with. It’s not good enough for me to put other Backlog Busting games on hold until I finish. It’s not bad, I just don’t care.

I mean, I made a blog out of me working my way through my backlog because I often can’t contain my thoughts in 240 characters or less. But I sat in front of this screen for an hour and a half before I could think of what to say about my time with this game. Marilyn Manson voices a telekinetic Gray Alien in this and I don’t even have anything to say about it. It’s there. I just don’t care.

I fully realize that I am just as much to blame for this as the game is. If I wasn’t juggling so much at once, I probably would have played through this whole game, thought it was a decent 3/5 and moved one. But that’s unfortunately not the conditions in which me and this game met and as it stands I just don’t care.