A complete satisfying gaming experience in one hour?

[MengJiao]

If I have any turn based games I usually try to get in a couple of turns.

Right now I have a Panzer Corps campaign going and I'll sit down and take one or two turns.  It helps keep me from getting burned out on a game.


The downside to just playing a game for small amount of time is I go through the day thinking through my strategy until the next time I can play it.

A routine PBEM turn of WitPAE takes me about 30 minutes.  It's always satisfying when you have some hopes of inflicting some
damage and not getting too blown up...though of course you don't know for a while.

I just started playing Operation Star and a quick battle can be pretty quick.

[Toonces]

There are a ton of games that I can play for "just one hour" but I think the question is, what game can you pick up, play, and have a complete experience in an hour.

It's funny you pose this question now because it is something I have spent some time thinking about over the last couple of months.  I can't tell you how many times I have sit down to play a game with an hour or so available and I just can't find anything worth booting up because I can't get a whole lot done in an hour.  Could it be that as games have gotten better and more complex we've moved away from the one-hour experience?

This is sort of apples and oranges, but I remember when I was a kid that we played a lot of games on the Atari 2600 and those games could all be finished in a few minutes...30 minutes for something like Adventure was probably the exeption.  Even C64 games, when I moved into those, could be finished in a reasonable amount of time- certainly no more than an afternoon.  I remember playing some D&D game (the one where you pressed a button and it clicked once for each arrow you had left) on Intellivision and you could finish that game in an hour or so.

I definitely don't want to go back to those days, I love my modern games, but it is hard to find many games in my collection that are meant to be finished in an hour.  About the only one that comes to mind right away is Carriers at War, in which a scenario can be completed in an hour.  I suppose I could extrapolate that to a mission in Rise of Flight or Falcon, or a quick combat in Medieval Total War 2...but I don't know.  Does playing one mission of a campaign count as a complete experience?  You don't finish with that feeling of closure, like "the game is over!" that you get from CaW where once the scenario is done, it's done.

Lately, when I really don't have a lot of time to play, but I want to play something without thinking too hard, I've been booting up multiplayer FPS games- Mount and Blade, Red Orchestra 2, etc.  I don't know if I get a really strategic satisfaction from those games, but I find that they're filling that niche of not a lot of time to play, but I don't want to play the middle of a campaign with my limited time.  I wonder if there is a market for the one-hour strategy game out there?