buttonmashing

Mashing buttons since 1984

Gaming

Bioshock + start of college football = BUSY

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I just did the unthinkable — I attacked a Big Daddy (an Elite Bouncer, to be exact) with my pipe wrench. I was near a vita-chamber (a respawn point) and decided to pound a Big Daddy to a pulp with my wrench. It actually took a while but I did it. I’m not sure why I did, maybe I was hoping it was one of the secret achievements or something, but I took him down. Down to Chinatown. Sure, I went down a dozen times myself, but that’s beside the point.

So, ya, I’ve been busy playing Bioshock. Absolutely excellent game. If you want to read more about the game, I suggest you read Tom’s piece over at G-pinions.

I’ve also been busy posting at my other blog, Men of the Scarlet and Gray. College Football started tonight and we’ve been in preview mode all week over there getting ready for the 2007 Ohio State Football season to begin.

But I am alive and I believe my co-bloggers are as well. We’re still playing games when we can and regular posting should resume shortly. As far as games go, I think it will be Bioshock with a dash of Everquest 2 until Halo 3 for me, and then copious amounts of Halo 3. I’ve been actively recruiting work-mates to get in on the Halo 3 bandwagon. The more the merry! Hard to believe it’s less than a month away.

It’s a sickness. Help me!

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Recently, the medical community confirmed what most of us already knew — playing video games can be addicting. Anyone who has grinded for a few more gold pieces, played that stupid helicopter flash game for one more level or dropped yet another quarter into the Galaga machine can attest to it. We didn’t need some egghead with an M.D. to tell us that.

Clearly, the people that make up the AMA have never played Desktop Tower Defense. All those “addictions” they talk about pale in comparison to what Desktop Tower Defense will do to your soul. Hopefully everyone by now has played DTD, but the newest version came out recently and it’s better than ever. When I first saw a link to the game a few weeks ago, I played it for a few minutes and went about my merry way. It was a fun little game, but I was at lunch at the time and I didn’t have time to really delve into it.

Well I decided this evening to “delve into it” and have wasted the last four five and a half hours playing the game. And all I can think about while I’m writing this is, “finish the fricken blog post already, dude! I have a great idea for a new tower layout!” That’s not right! I should not be having this conversation with myself. I wonder if there’s a DTD Anonymous?

So yeah. Are games addicting? When they’re as fun as DTD, yes. Horrifingly so. If you play this game for more than five minutes and don’t like it, you have a defective gaming gene.

Update: I made a Group called “buttonmashing.com” on the DTD site, where you can compare your score to other sickos players. So if you play a few games today, add your score to our little “group.” I’d like to see how afflicted much fun you guys are having.

(On a side note, James Lileks has a great piece about this so-called addiction, which is worth a read)

What I’m (not) playing

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I’ve been in a bit of a gaming lull the past few weeks. I haven’t been completely out of gaming, but for the better part of the past two weeks, there has been very little buttonmashing going on. I don’t know if it’s apathy, lack of anything compelling to play, or what, but I just haven’t been playing much.

I got over my initial fear of firing up my 360 last week and everything seems to be copacetic with my system — my downloaded games and content was all there and everything went off without a hitch. It felt good firing up the white and green machine and loading up Crackdown from some mindless jaunts through town. I even downloaded a new arcade game (Dig Dug) to play around with. The kids have asked for “the Pinata” game a couple of times, but they get bored with that after a half an hour or so. The kids love naming the pinatas, and my daughter loves outfitting the pinatas with accessories, but even that gets old after a while. The 360 has returned to service, new and improved.

And yet, that has only been a few hours of gameplay. I watched most of Dawn of the Dead the other night, so I feel like playing Dead Rising again, but that’s about the extent of my gaming ambitions on the console front. I still log in to EQ2 a couple times a week, but it’s been a little tough to get my rag-tag group together. Hopefully we’ll have some time this weekend to get some questing in.

I’m also considering picking up the new Halo 2 maps, as one of them is a remake of my favorite Halo 1 map, Hang ’em High (also the best map name, ever). I’m pretty rusty with Halo 2, though, so I’d just embarass myself. Not that it would be any different from when I was playing Halo 2 nightly, but now I have an excuse.

What have you been playing? Anything new or exciting that I probably missed?

Video game capital of America?

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Where is the Video Game Capital of America? Seattle? Austin? San Jose? Nope. Salt Lake City. According to the Salt Lake Tribune:

It’s called gamer’s thumb, and families in Salt Lake City could be among the nation’s most afflicted: the city has been named No. 1 in the number of households owning video game systems.

The least? People living in Florida’s coastal areas. Makes sense — go to the beach or play Halo 2? No a tough decision there.

What to look for in 2007

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As the year comes to a close, I plan on doing a small recap of 2006, but it’s never to early to start thinking about 2007. Nick takes a look at twenty games he’s looking forward to (ten here and ten more here). I agree with just about everyone of them. In fact, my top 8+2 games for next year are

1. Mario Galaxy (I’m an unabashed Mario fanboy)
2. Halo 3
3. Turok (the idea of more Turok multiplayer goodness is nectar to my soul)
4. Mercenaries 2 (if it comes to the Xbox)
5. Lost Planet
6. Mass Effect (RPG goodness)
7. Assassin’s Creed
8. Bioshock (Don’t know a lot about this series, but I know this game looks amazing)

I won’t be playing the Wii (in all likelihood) until next year, so the two games I’m looking forward to that are already out are:

1. Zelda Twilight Princess (duh)
2. Super Swing Golf

It looks like another great year for gaming.

Drinking the podcast Kool-Aid

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podcast icon.jpegInitially, when podcasts where starting to gain traction with geeks (almost always early-adopters) I ignored them. Why would I want to dedicate time to concentrate listening to someone prattle on about their opinions? I like to read other people’s opinions (blogs), but actually downloading someone’s “show” and spend free-time listening to it? Didn’t seem like the best use of my time.

Then I decided (months later) to give it a try. I downloaded a few podcasts and started listening. I realized that I could listen to them at work and still concentrate at the task at hand. I’d listen closely when I heard something of interest, then tune it out when I wasn’t interested. I could also listen to them in the car when there wasn’t anything on the radio. Next thing I knew, I had subscribed to dozens of podcasts and decided this would be a good blog discussion (very meta of me, I know).

So over the next week or two I’ll be sprinkling in a handful of podcast-related posts in with the other Buttonmashing.com fare. Feel free to ignore them (as I did) if that’s not your thing, but hopefully I can interest a few of you to start drinking the Kool-Aid.

I eventually plan to review as many podcasts as I can, but I’m finding that to be a daunting task. In the meantime, I also would like to know what, if any, podcasts you guys listen to. I listen to a lot of the popular ones (1UP Yours, Gaming Steve, Major Nelson, the CAGCast) but I also listen to a few that might not be as popular. I’m interested in hearing what you guys listen to, maybe I’ll find a few that I’ve skipped or have slipped under the radar.

I am free!!

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I'm freeI 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!

Carnival of Gamers #14

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tilt a whirl.jpg

Welcome to the one year anniversary of the Carnival of Gamers! A little over a year ago, I tossed out the idea of holding a blog carnival for fellow gaming bloggers. The idea was well received and since then, we’ve had thirteen other carnivals. So now, here we are, one year later. Welcome to the first annivesary of the Carnival of Gamers. Step on up and wander around the Carnival of Gamers.

I wanted to do something different with this Carnival, but I just drew a blank. I initially tried to make witty comments about everyone’s submissions but realized I was out of my league. Something clever like Thomas’ old-school interface or Cosmic’s screenshot Carnival would have been nice, but I just couldn’t do it. So instead, I categorized, as best I could, the links and will present them with little commentary, letting the writers speak for themselves. Besides, they do a better job than I would. So without further ado…

Casual and Hardcore Gamers

Gianfranco Berardi at GBGames’ Blog asks if Can You Envision a Casual FPS?

Finster at Top of Cool proclaims We Still Matter. That’s “we” as in us hardcore gamers. Some people get “us”. Some obviously don’t.

Nintendo’s Wii – [You knew we couldn’t get through this carnival without at least a couple mentions of Nintendo’s newly named console! -ed]

Brinstar at the Gaming Chair would like to remind us that Wii isn’t alone in the naming weirdness.

Kehaar, projecting the Comic Store Guy, proclaims the Wii is the Worst.Product.Name.Ever. He goes on to say, “Wii will be the straw that breaks the back of the camel that has been carrying Nintendo in the horse race that is video gaming these days.” Time will tell…

Jason has thoughts on the name Wii. In particular, the marketing implications of choosing such an odd name. Is it genius on Nintendo’s part? Not likely, as he says, “it’s more like nakedly exposing how much they don’t understand the American gaming market.”

More thought on Wii from John Watzke at Pure Digital Thought, where he asks, “Do they really think that naming the console the Nintendo Wii that it will grab these new fans?”

Violence, Politics, Public Service and video games [Oh my! -ed]

Greg at Among the Dust points out “Media influences people, and it influences them strongly. This is true of all media, and it has been true for a very long time.”

Kim Pallister talks up Public Service Gaming. Public Service games? As Kim says, “A mini-meme seems to have caught regarding government funding and ‘public service games’.” Check out to see what he’s talking about.

Violence, immigration, and bad taste. Johnny Pi tackles them all in his post “Shock Value.”

Our MMO-World [Who am I kidding? It’s a WoW world and you know it. -ed]

The Curmudgeon Gamer thinks gamers can deal with gold farmers in a similar way some people have dealt with getting people to quit smoking in his post, Gold farming and the war on smoking.

Tobold at Tobold’s MMORPG Blog compares players that don’t interact with other players in WoW as the dark matter of this game.

The Prognosticator asks what makes us go Ding?

Bill Harris looks at what could be a rather startling precedent started in the virtual world of Project Entropia and being able to access in-game cash at real-world ATMs. This could be huge, both for good and for bad. As Bill says, “What matters is that the door is opened and it will never be closed again.”

Foton relates “Seven Things I Have Tried Unsuccessfully to Ban from My Guild,” where he tries, and fails, to improve his own guild experience in World of Warcraft.

Time to take some Tests (Tests? At the Carnival?)
Jeff asks Carnival readers grade a test for him. What kind of test? You’ll have to read on to see.

After you’ve graded Jeff’s test, you have to take the MMO Proficiency Test from Van Hemlock. I was stumped with question #3. “Nerf” means “b) To have one’s character victimised by God,” right? I sure hope I passed!

Everything Else
Jacob at the Gaming Chair asks Microsoft “Where is my co-op Gaming?”

In what could be a first, we have a video blog from Resident Gamer, their interview with Marc Ecko, talking about the urban gaming space. .

Corvus ruminates on the inadequacy of Evil. “Evil, I always felt, was simply inadequate for the task of giving people someone to be truly afraid of.”

Over at Tea Leaves, psu discusses the decline of a strong narrative in video games, comparing the recently released Oblivion and the venerable Planescape. Me, I simply can’t get that picture of that character from Oblivion. shudder

Josh at Cathode Tan is talking about “ESRB’s Line In The Sand.” He says, “The ESRB needs to focus on their actual job – reviewing and rating content intended for gameplay.”

That’s all, folks!

Well, this brings us to the close of the Carnival. A year older and a year wiser. It’s been a great trip and we’ll be pulling into another blog next month. The schedule over the next couple months is currently up in the air, but once I get that straightened out, the Carnival will be back before you know it!

Thanks for reading and enjoy all the great gaming bloggage this month. Read ’em all!