But this is ridiculous!
Surely this is a joke. Surely no one would pay to have their Playstation 3 game “installed,” would they? Surely this is just some guys on the Geek Squad having fun!
Should I stop calling you Shirley?
Mashing buttons since 1984
by Tony 2 Comments
But this is ridiculous!
Surely this is a joke. Surely no one would pay to have their Playstation 3 game “installed,” would they? Surely this is just some guys on the Geek Squad having fun!
Should I stop calling you Shirley?
by Tony 3 Comments
Bill Harris looks at what “hardcore” really is.
by Tony 8 Comments
I’ve really been enjoying the podcast scene lately, and gaming podcasts in particular. For those who don’t know what a podcast is, think of it as talk radio on-demand. Pick a topic, pick a program that will aggregate all the files (I use iTunes) and have a listen. They’re like blogs with a human voice. Gaming podcasts are plentiful and there’s one for just about every aspect of gaming. There are podcasts for specific games, specific consoles, and just about everything else under the sun.
Read on for my Podcast Playlist.
[Read more…] about My Podcast Playlist
by Tony 5 Comments
Good post over at Dubious Quality, wherein Bill takes EA to task about the future of their sports games. Thoughtful stuff. Thinking about this is disconcerting, if Bill’s vision of the future comes true.
In other words, NBA Live might be an absolute train wreck, so bad that EA wouldn’t send out advance copies for review, but fixing that is totally unimportant to EA. What’s important is to make sure we can buy the fourth alternate unis of the Pacers.
Yikes.
by Tony 6 Comments
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!
by Tony 8 Comments
Buttonmasher Theorem 1 States:
The amount of content generated by the video game blogger will be inversely proportional to the amount of good gaming said blogger is engrossed in.
Proof:
1. The Buttonmasher is a video game blogger
2. The content on his blog, buttonmashing.com has decreased recently
3. He is currently playing Dead Rising for a second time through.
4. Dead Rising is considered a lot of “good gaming”
Therefore, an increase in good gaming causes a decrease in blogging output.
Q.E.D.
by Tony 6 Comments
Before I caught the blogging “bug,” I was an active Epinions user. For those who don’t know what Epinions is, it’s basically a community-driven product review site. Users write reviews on products and services and other members rate the “helpfulness” of those reviews. There is also a way to comment on reviews, discussing what has been written, what have you. It was Web 2.0, only it started during Web 1.0. Anyway, for a while, I was averaging 3-4 reviews a week on the site. For whatever reason, I liked the idea that people were reading (and rating highly) my reviews and that, in some small way, I was affecting people’s purchasing decisions. It was a lot of fun.
Recently, for some reason, I’ve been bitten with the reviewing bug again. I don’t know what it was, the urge to write a review about my new-ish monitor, or my new headphones or something has taken over.
I’m posting this because I even though I doubt this will effect buttonmashing.com but I plan on writing an occasional review or two, departing from the normal kind of content I’ve been putting down lately. I’m also pointing out to see if there are any Epinionators out there among the buttonMashing readers? I know the guys that run NetJak are former (current?) Epinion users and they’ve visited the site a few times, but I was wondering if any other readers out there that are (or were) Epinion users.
Well, even though this was widely linked last week, I’d be remiss if I didn’t comment on it as well. There was a piece in the Opinion Journal (of the WSJ.com) by Brian Anderson about video games. It’s the same mantra we’ve been hearing but it never hurts to repeat it:
Video games can also exercise the brain in remarkable ways. I recently spent (too) many late-night hours working my way through X-Men: Legends II: The Rise of Apocalypse, a game I ostensibly bought for my kids. Figuring out how to deploy a particular grouping of heroes (each of whom has special powers and weaknesses); using trial and error and hunches to learn the game’s rules and solve its puzzles; weighing short-term and long-term goals–the experience was mentally exhausting and, when my team finally beat the Apocalypse, exhilarating.
And the ever-present challenge to would be gaming-Nannies:
With the next generation of high-powered consoles on the market or soon to appear, gamers will have even richer, more complex virtual environments, many of them nonlinear, to explore. Working through these worlds alone, with friends or–in the ever more popular “massively multiplayer online role-playing games,” or MMOs–with thousands of strangers is far from a “colossal waste of time.” Video games are popular culture at its best. Critics would do better to drop the hysterical laments and pick up a joystick.
Of course, that can be favorably contrasted with this article in the Washington Times about video game legislation, that claims:
For one thing, these laws have tended to be mostly symbolic; the fact that interest in them tends to fade in the absence of newspaper headlines suggests strong elements of political theatrics at play. Second, the laws are regularly struck down by courts for their dubious constitutionality, and everyone including the scourges knows this. Third, more than 9 of 10 retailers have policies restricting the sale of such games to children anyway. All of which begs a question: Just how sincere are the proponents of these laws? Most of them are Democrats with strong interests in easy “moral values” scores. Smells like opportunism to us.
Political theatrics? Political opportunism? Perish the thought!
As an aside, the Opinion Journal mentions the study done by Dmitri Williams at the University of Illinois (which I mentioned here) which uses the game Asheron’s Call 2 for its study. I’ve never played AC2 (or the first one, for that matter), but it doesn’t seem like that game would be explicitly violent or very gory. Is it? Are the violence and gore on the same level as a Resident Evil 4 or a Grand Theft Auto? And if so, can fantasy violence really be compared to a game with more “realistic” characters? Is running over an innocent bystander with a pick-up the same as smashing a goblin with a mace? Just a thought.
Related articles can be found here.
by Tony 7 Comments
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.
Why I read blogs #9138. It’s a pretty moving piece.