In a review of the 2005 box office bomb Bewitched, Roger Ebert off-handedly mentions that he watches over 500 movies a year. The admission was by way of explanation for Ebert's lack of knowledge of the TV sitcom of the same name. When you spend hundreds of hours in front of a movie screen in the course of your work, Ebert explains, you devote your free time to "more human pursuits" rather than TV sitcoms or sports teams and the like.

This throwaway quote in a throwaway movie review has stuck with me because it made me realize the utter futility of trying to have a truly comprehensive grip on video gaming. While a movie critic can keep up with the major releases by watching 500 movies a year, a video game critic that played through 500 games in a year would have little time for any other pursuits (human or otherwise).

While a new movie, CD, or TV episode usually takes only an hour or two to complete, video games can routinely eat up dozens of hours before the player reaches "the end" (if there even is a "the end"). Assuming a very conservative average of five hours each, completing 500 games would take up a full 108 days of your life, assuming you didn't stop to eat or sleep. What's more, you'd still have barely made a dent in the thousand or so games released in a given year nowadays.

Given the near impossible task of playing everything, practically any video game journalist is bound to have some major gaps in their play experience. Wired columnist Clive Thompson put this issue front and center when he recently admitted to never having played a single Final Fantasy game before picking up FFXII. Thompson's mea culpa made me wonder – what other major games or series have other game journalists neglected, and how did they deal with the gaps in the course of their jobs?

In an informal poll of a large group of game journalists, I found only a few who were cocky enough to declare that they had no significant gaming gaps whatsoever. Game Informer Editor-in-Chief Andy McNamara said he didn't feel like he missed anything in gaming because he "spends most of my waking hours in some video game or another... If anything, I need to spend more time with my wife and dog." GameDaily's own PC Editor Steven Wong came close to the same declaration, saying he had "played just about every big PC title out there to a reasonable degree ... I'm not sure what the amount of time I spend gaming actually says about me as a person, but I like being informed about what's out there." Other journalists may have shared these sentiments, but they were probably too busy playing games to get back to me by press time.

Many journalists that responded to my inquiry found they just didn't have the time to really get into certain epic games. CMP's Simon Carless lamented that he'd probably "have to take a holiday" to put aside his current pile of games and finally get through Twilight Princess. GameDaily's Robert Workman is waiting for "a lazy summer day" to finally give Oblivion another go.

Others find deadline and life pressures prevent them from finishing many games. "Doing game reviews on a weekly basis usually means not finishing a game," said Harrisburg (Pa.) Patriot News game reviewer Chris Mautner, adding that free-time game playing "often competes with things like family, housework, getting drunk, etc."

World of Warcraft was a surprisingly common omission from many journalist's playlists, given its popularity among millions of registered players. St. Petersburg Times game reviewer and blogger Josh Korr resisted the game's immense popularity because "for everything I've read about WoW, nobody has satisfactorily explained what's so great about it." Denver Post game columnist Dave Thomas was put off by "the bleary eyes of WoW players as they try to turn their endless hours of grind into some interesting conversation." But some are not so strong -- Gamasutra podcast host Tom Kim finally decided to stop being "that guy who doesn't play World of Warcraft" among his friends because, as he puts it, "there comes a point where, due to critical mass, certain things become nigh unavoidable."