Summer: When girls unashamedly don their bikinis, guys unashamedly don their cameras and gamers shamefully load up Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball. It’s not fun and frolics for everyone, however because around summer’s mid-point, members of the mainstream press brace themselves for what they call the "silly season"-–a period of weeks when the news simply dries up because everyone is doing entirely nothing. Ridiculous articles are cooked up to try to retain a readership that just doesn’t care about who’s doing who (or what) in the Big Brother house. Whether it’s which actor’s face has been found in a constellation or which politician is wearing a wig, the summer stories are always full of frivolity. For tabloid writers and those who have to suffer their work, the silly season is a time of pain and regret.

Conversely, the videogame industry’s silly season is the absolute opposite. When Winter knocked on Autumn’s door this year, it had brought along a rowdy horde of beautifully nubile big-name titles all looking to tempt us into spending the night with them. October alone offered such alluring vixens as LittleBigPlanet, Fallout 3, Guitar Hero: World Tour, Rock Band II, Fable II, Dead Space, Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, Far Cry 2, Motorstorm: Pacific Rift, Quantum of Solace and, er, Wii Music. Six of those games came out in the space of five days. It doesn’t exactly get quieter in the next two months, either, with a colossal number of big-hitters just waiting to come out and play. If 2008’s Q4 is an Endless Ocean (sorry) then don’t bother calling the lifeguard, I’m long gone with the fishes.

It’s pertinent here to point out that I am British. So, as a British man with honed skills of moaning, I have no trouble finding the downside to the yuletide onslaught of pixelated joy. You see, even the most dedicated and life-lacking of gamers (myself included) are going to have trouble fitting in all the games they want to play this winter. Sure, maybe he or she is not interested in every triple-A title, but that’s not taking into account the bottomless well of other smaller coming out. Looking at the releases for October and the release schedule for November and December, I count no less than 17 beauties that I simply cannot resist. That’s 17 must-have, must-play games across three months. If I conservatively estimate the amount of time played per game at 20 hours, it works out to 340 hours, which equals just over 14 days. 14 full days of gaming just dedicated to titles I have to play in the next three months. Silly season? More like the scary season.

The thing is that for one of those games, 20 hours is an extremely conservative approximation. No, I’m not talking about Wii Music, I’m of course referring to Fallout 3, Bethesda’s huuuge post-apocalyptic RPG, which reportedly has over 100 hours of gameplay. Even just the one play-through with your blinders on, ignoring all side missions and only sticking to the main quest, will take up those 20 hours according to the developer. If you add in all the available side quests for that single run then double that. Just like its spiritual predecessor The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Fallout 3 is potentially one heckuva time drain.

For Oblivion’s legion of fans, a super mutant gun-toting version of that game is probably just what they wanted, and they’re more than willing to forgo a Dead Space here or a Midnight Club: Los Angeles there to get as much out of Fallout 3 as they possibly can. Personally, I’m not exactly keen on spending 100 hours with just one game when I’m already sacrificing other highly rated titles. So, surely the solution if I really want to play Fallout 3 this winter, or indeed ever, is to just ignore the scenery and stick to the main road. I can’t disagree with the logic but that just doesn’t sit right with me.

Firstly, like quite a lot of videogame devotees, I’m something of a completionist. I wouldn’t say I have to get every last drop out of a game but I wouldn’t feel right about ignoring so much of Fallout 3. Secondly, sticking to the main road in a game like Fallout 3 is like getting Guitar Hero: World Tour just to play guitar on your own. Sure, I could do that and it would probably be fun, but if it’s anything like Oblivion then doing that would be missing the point of the game entirely. Fallout 3 is almost defined by its size. In many ways that’s what sells it, what makes it stand apart from other shorter, linear RPGs.