Is This Thing On?
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Um. Hello. I’d just like to thank Tony & Nat for giving me yet ANOTHER place on the web for me to go and blather about games. I guess I’ll do a quick introduction.
I’ve been a gamer as long as I can remember. I recall going over to my neighbour’s house and staring in envy at his shiny PONG console and sneaking over to friends’ houses to tinker with their awesome C64s and robust Colecovision consoles.
My first computer was a Texas Intstruments TI99/4a. Alpiner rocks.
I’ve been a console player, a PC gamer, a handheld junkie and even played the odd board game. I don’t do benchmarks, I could care less if a game is pushing 3 million polygons on the character’s left moustache hair if I’m bored to tears when I play it and I can utter the statement, “This JRPGs story is awesome AND generic” and not feel like a hypocrite.
If you poke around on the net, you’ll most likely find me going by the name Spigot on the inimitable Evil Avatar, where I write a weekly post about obscure and overlooked games (which is now going into it’s 19th week).
I plan on talking up some of the lesser known games and/or JRPGs more than anything else. I’m absolutely burnt out on first person shooters right now and even most 3rd person action games are starting to wear on me.
I also spend far too much money on comics and books. Somehow I am able to raise two kids and keep my wife from throwing all of my games into the garbage, though it’s an ongoing battle.
And one last thing…
I AM CANADIAN! Just don’t hold that against me.
HDTV incoming!
I did it! After hemming and hawing for the better part of six months, I have finally taken the plunge and decided to enter the High-Definition TV era. I had my eye on a few TVs, but I kept coming back to the Samsung brand. The cost of LCD and Plasma were a little out of my price for the size I wanted, so I went with a DLP television. After reading various home theater forums, magazines, reviews, and talking with friends, I decided on the Samsung HL-S5088W, a 50 inch DLP.
She’s a beauty, ain’t she?
We belong to a “wholesale club” (not Sam’s or Costco) so I got a tremendous price on it. Problem is, it could take up to six weeks to arrive. A bit of a pain, but, for the price, I can wait. I’m secretly hoping it shows up before January 8th, as there’s a little college football game that I’d love to see in high-def. Plus, I’ve heard 24, Lost and a host of other programming looks pretty good in HD. Not to mention the 360 in glorious, glorious 1080p.
I’m a little worried about having the little buttonMashers running around, abusing it. My Sony TV has been covered with little fingerprints for about three years now, so I’m not hopeful. We’ll just have to teach them to respect daddy’s new toy. I don’t break their stuff, they don’t break mine. Seems simple enough.
So I’m excited about joining the HD generation. I’d love to hear what kind of set-ups you guys have (HD or not). If you have any experiences (good or bad) with Samsung DLPs, I’d love to hear them. I’ll definitely be posting the unboxing, whenever it arrives. I’m as giddy as a ten year old on Christmas eve.
This is some cool stuff
I know I’m late to the game-o-sphere with this one, but it’s too amazing to not post. Be sure and check out the video, too:
The boy, a 14-year-old who suffers from epilepsy, is the first teenager to play a two-dimensional video game, Space Invaders, using only the signals from his brain to make movements.
I am free!!
I was in need of help. I had subscribed to every RSS feed I found - blogs, news sites, Yahoo Search results. You name it, I subscribed to it. I suffered under an avalanche of new posts/items on a daily basis. I had close to 300 subscribed feeds. It was out of hand. But I couldn’t resist! I read them religiously, afraid that I’d miss something. Most of the time, it wasn’t even enjoyable — I was looking for “material” to blog about. A post here or there that others might have missed would be my next “big post.” But I realized my posting activity (and just about all other activity) was suffering because I was too busy “cleaning out my unreads.” I was so worried I’d miss something that I was simply spinning my wheels. So I decided to whittle down those feeds, to unshackle myself from Bloglines.
I’ve completed my first pass through, removing a lot of feeds (junk and otherwise) and I’ve worked it down to about 130 feeds. Another pass could get me under 100 feeds. It wasn’t easy. Even as I was removing them from my list, I wondered what I’d miss after they were gone. I took out a couple big ones (Digg and Engadget) but I figured if there was something of value there, someone else would pick it up. I just couldn’t keep up with everything that was getting posted. If every feed averaged 3 posts a day, that was close to 1,000 new items a day. It was a lot more than that. That’s simply too much.
After I worked out of that funk, I turned my attention to my collection of unplayed games.
I came to the realization that I simply won’t get to every game I currently have. Games like Viewtiful Joe 2 and Metal Gear: The Twin Snakes sit on my shelf, unplayed, while I spend my third week with Dead Rising. I know that I’m missing out on some great gaming, but I just can’t do it all. With next generation upon us and the excellent DS library growing, I simply can’t get to everything. I still couldn’t bring myself to do something about it. Just like my stack of feeds, I was afraid I’d miss something. With more demands on my free time (real job, kids, golfing) I simply can’t can’t get to it all. I’m not a 40-hour gamer anymore.
So while I used to operate under the delusion that some day I’d get to it all, I realize it’s simply not doable. And worrying about it didn’t do any good. In fact, it probably made procrastinating even easier. So after deciding to cull my “daily reading,” I will also take a hard look at my library. I’m not sure what I’ll do with some of my games that I have yet to play, but I no longer look at them, there on the shelf, and feel guilty. I don’t know if my “Queue” of games will ever exist. I don’t need to feel like I have to play them all. Some I’ll get to, at some time, but others will probably never be played. They’ve got to go.
A weight has been lifted. And I feel free!
Extravaganza #2
Well, it’s strawberry time, which means that the buttonWife packs up the kids and heads to her parents house to help out at the strawberry patch, leaving the buttonMasher with a weekend of free time. It’s not as much time as last year, but it’s cherished alone time nonetheless.
The schedule is already filling up, with golf Friday afternoon and Saturday morning, along with yard work squeezed in there somewhere. That should still leave me with plenty of time to get my gaming on. I’m currently a little sour on EVE-Online, so I think I’ll be diving into “the Queue.” I’m about halfway through Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, so I think that will be the first on the list. I’ve got my Metroid Prime Hunters match with Brinstar, so I’ll need to get some practice in with MPH. I’ll also probably pick up the new Super Mario Brothers game for the DS.
So much gaming, so little time! Hopefully I can pull myself away from my current game obsession: Spider Solitaire.
How do they keep up?
When I was into the BBS scene, I was a pretty active message board poster. My main haunt, a place called Inverted Reality, had some pretty lively discussions on a variety of topics - sports, video games, high school (I was 18 at the time), things like that. I would probably average 20+ posts a day. There were probably 50 active users, with about 10 of us being “heavy posters.” Since then, I’ve participated in various message boards and the like, but I have never returned to my prolific posting ways. I still participate in the occasionaly discussion over at Evil Avatar, but that’s about the extent of my posting nowadays.
A while back, I came across a link to the site Forum Rankings, which ranks the most active message boards across the ‘Net. I was simply amazed by the numbers some of these boards are boasting. Unbe-fricken-lievable! Gaia Online, the #1 board, has 3.8+ million members and 630+ million messages. That is insane! (Don’t even get me started on the way the message threads are laid out, what an atrocity that is.) Honestly, how do the members of these forums keep up!? If you go into the actual discussion areas, there are threads that are 25 THOUSAND posts long! I simply can not wrap my brain around those kind of numbers. The Boards at IGN (aka the Bane of Gamers everywhere) come in a distant second, with a paltry 132 million posts. Honestly, are there that many things to say about things? That’s a lot of things! With those kind of numbers, shouldn’t the internet be full by now? Holy shnikes!
Funny thing is, I wonder how many of those messages are “me too!” and “O RLY?”. Is anything really accomplished in these threads? Are people ever convinced by the other side? Or is it simply the inane cacophony of millions of disparate voices? The mind boggles at the collective hive that is the internet. I think the singularity may be farther away than some people think
Are you a Nintendo Geek?
I scored 1700, getting two wrong and getting a couple clues. I’m a “Nintendo Geek”. Darn skippy.
(via my buddy Grant. Destructoid has been added to the feed list!)
I’m level 31
… and 365 days till my 0% to my next level.
I’ve gone from “just being thirty” to now being “in my thirties.”
It’s a strange feeling.
Butt-kicking girls
Saw this article about girls and video games at Utopian Hell. It’s a pretty good article, but this little bit troubles me:
That’s evidenced at GamerzNet where nearly 5-year-old Sarah Grodin and her mom, Heather, play Counter-Strike together. Across the aisle, Kathryn Grodin, Sarah’s aunt and co-owner of GamerzNet, also plays the counterterrorism game.
A five-year-old playing Counter-Strike? That doesn’t strike me as the best way to game with your kids. I mentioned early about the article that a large portion of parents that are gaming, which I think is great, but this seems a little over the top.
But it’s a good article nonetheless. Getting more people involved with gaming is always a good thing. This last little bit made me a little sad, though:
Of the nine girls gathered in a circle minutes before game play, all of them have a PlayStation system in their house. Two have an xBox and five have a Nintendo GameCube as well.
None of them had ever heard of Atari, the first console video gaming system.
That’s not right! Know your roots!
iPod envy
I’ve had my iPod mini for almost two years and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it. It’s been a fantastic piece of gadgetry. I’ve followed, from a distance, the evolution of the other iPods. When the Nano and Shuffle were announced, I was still happy with my mini. I felt no hint of jealousy. Even the shiny, colorful iPod photo couldn’t do it for me. But today I had a chance to mess around (that sounds so adulterous) with my buddy’s video iPod. Wow! It might have been a childish infatuation, but now I can’t get it out of my head. Now I want one.
I’ve heard mini’s have held their value pretty well. Maybe it’s time to start a video iPod fund. Any buttonMashers out there have the latest iteration of the wonderful iPod? Was my initial impression so positive because of its beauty and not its abilities? My friend had an episode of Alias on and it looked fantastic. Is it all that? I love the mini interface and I love the simple design. Have they carried over the great design all the way through to this generation? I am certainly tempted right now.
I just need to make sure that money wouldn’t cut into the Revolution fund…
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