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Veteran Member - Level 13
However shameful my "games played" list was at times, the achievements were always genuine. I never employed any method of trickery or cheating to skirt around the necessary task. However, my perfect record is tarnished by what I did last week, and my score may require an asterisk from this point forward.
As some of you may have seen from previous blog posts, I love elaborate pranks. I've pulled a lot in my life, but I've found that my favorite person to prank is easily my father. He's always genuinely annoyed by the pranks, but he also has the sense of humor to recognize how funny a good one can be. Unfortunately, this is the first April Fools since I moved to Minnesota from Kansas, so it was time to enlist some help for this year's joke. More
I've found that my favorite person to prank is easily my father. He's always genuinely annoyed by the pranks, but he also has the sense of humor to recognize how funny a good one can be. Unfortunately, this is the first April Fools since I moved to Minnesota from Kansas, so it was time to enlist some help for this year's joke.
It's been a fairly light month for reviews. After the blitzkrieg of Mass Effect 2, Bioshock 2, Heavy Rain, Bad Company 2, God of War III, and more, it's pretty slim pickings around here right now. That's why I reviewed Dead Or Alive: Paradise this month. If you haven't read my review, I can sum up the game by saying that you creepily take pictures of near-naked digitized women on a beach. That's about it. They lather themselves up in lotion, share ice cream cones, and generally prance around with unearthly (and unnerving) boob physics. It's a bad game. More
DOA: Paradise is a really bad game. My girl Tina didn't do anything particularly interesting while I was taking pictures, so I had to whip out the Photoshop to create my own fun.
I sit next to Tim Turi here at Game Informer. Tim Turi likes video game music a lot. He listens to Sonic music incessantly, he can tell you exact track names of Castlevania tunes, and he's prone to humming Mega Man stage music at any point in the day. More
In this edition, Tim unwillingly (and unknowingly) shoots his first music video.
I'll preface this blog by admitting its contents could likely earn me an official diagnosis for obsessive-compulsive disorder. For some reason, I've always been obsessed with the "hours played" tally on my games. Some people actively avoid looking at their play time for fear of the "holy crap, I've wasted X hours of my life doing this?," but I'm the absolute opposite. If I'm about to go to bed and I see my hours tally for Mass Effect 2 is at 19 hours and 35 minutes, I think to myself "Well, if I just play 25 more minutes I'll be at an even 20 hours." Back in college, I even made a giant Word document in which I listed every game I could ever remember playing, and proceeded to estimate my hours count for each.I'm not really sure where this obsession came from. I think it comes from when I was younger and didn't have much in the way of disposable income, so every game purchase was a huge decision for me. When I would read a review that stated "Devil May Cry should take you 20 hours to beat," that made me more comfortable with a purchasing decision. If I knew I'd be spending at least 20 hours on a game, that made it much easier to talk myself into buying it. After all, I wouldn't want to relive my nightmare of paying $50 for State of Emergency and playing it for about two hours.When I look at my Borderlands play time and see 100+ hours, that makes me think "Wow, this game has given me almost a week's worth of entertainment...that's awesome." I don't think of it as time wasted, I see it as an objective reminder of how great a game is. If a game like Mass Effect 2, Oblivion, or Fallout 3 can keep me interested for 30, 40, or 50+ hours, that's a sign of an amazing gaming experience.Here's where it gets ridiculous. If I play a game for a certain amount of time and it's not going towards my official tally, I'll let the game run for the appropriate time when I am back on my profile. For instance, if I play Street Fighter IV for two hours at a friend's house, I'll leave mine on the menu screen for two hours when I get home. The most extreme example of this was when 220 hours of Soul Calibur data was mysteriously deleted from my Dreamcast VMU. Sure enough, I left it on the menu screen for over nine days once I started my new file (and then pumped over 200 more hours into the game after that).During the last generation of consoles, EA introduced a new feature called the "EA Profile." It was meant to track your stats, records, and play time across all EA Sports titles. I was thrilled when I heard this, and hoped it would be the first step towards all games tracking hours played. Unfortunately, it turned out that I was one of the only ones who gave a crap about the feature, as it quietly disappeared and was never heard from again.To this day, I'm still hoping for the next generation of systems to include an hours tally within the framework of the console. Current systems already add up your achievement points and trophies into one overall score (which has unsurprisingly turned into another obsession for me). Imagine being able to see your total hours played of gaming across the board, or even your hours spent playing a specific genre of game. Taking that idea even further, what about stats for total kill/death ratio across all games with multiplayer deathmatch, or total win/loss record throughout all fighting games? I think it would be amazing to see such a comprehensive array of stats that would display your gaming habits in such an objective manner.Or maybe I'm just going to turn into that guy who checks to make sure his door is locked 300 times a day.
Is your "hours played" count a badge of honor or a scarlet letter?
Last August, Game Informer hired five new associate editors. They threw three of us (Tim Turi, Phil Kollar, and myself) in the same room, so we've grown very familiar with each others' gaming interests. One thing that Phil and I have learned over and over and over again is that Tim really likes Sonic and Mega Man. The latter obsession may not quite reach the almost-creepy depths of his hedgehog fetish, but it's nonetheless present. Bring up any Mega Man boss to him and you'll be sure to hear him hum the level's tune for a good two or three minutes, followed by hours of him listening to Sonic & Knuckles music on YouTube. More
Tim really likes Mega Man. Take a look at some of his choice utterances I overheard while he reviewed the Blue Bomber's latest adventure.
Ghost looked pretty lame even from the first time you saw him in Modern Warfare 2. He was kind of that cliche, forced "ooh, check out this mysterious badass" character that really didn't add anything to a story that was convoluted and sub-par to begin with. Then Rios and Salem had to come back in a sequel no one wanted, and there they are, right on the cover with stupid skull masks. Enter Halo: Reach, with Emile bringing the skull mask look to space. It's like the video game version of an Affliction or Ed Hardy shirt...they look stupid but you still see them everywhere. More
Let's end this trend now. They're basically the video game version of an Affliction or Ed Hardy shirt...they look stupid but you still see them everywhere.
My dad has told me numerous times that I have an uncanny ability to mess with people, and unfortunately for him a lot of my efforts are directed his way. He took a nap yesterday and I decided to pass the time by exploiting his lack of technology knowledge to give him a good scare.
I'm back in Kansas City for a couple weeks to spend some time with my family and celebrate the holidays. As such, I'm spending a lot of my time at my mom's house for the first time since high school. Most of my time has been spent playing video games with my sisters, but they're over at their dad's place tonight so I've had a chance to take a look around the house I spent most of my formative years in. More
Considering that I don't ever plan on living in a place with anything fancier than white walls and a couch for playing video games on, I might as well be visiting Jupiter when I walk into my mom's house. Here are a few of the items that especially confounded me.
All of the discussion we had while putting together the Top 200 Games of All Time got me thinking about my favorite games ever. Here's the ten I've had the most fun with in my life...although not necessarily what I consider the ten "best" ever made.
I mentioned in my print review of Borderlands that I'd be offering a rare achievement and some nice weapons to our readers, so here's the info. Send me an Xbox Live friend request at ExileOnMassSt with "GI Borderlands" in the message, and I'll begin sending game invites to readers starting at 10pm CST on Sunday, November 22nd (I cleared room for about 24 people, so if you don't get added that means it's filled up). I'll be online until midnight at least, and I'll keep rotating participants every 30 minutes. Immediately upon joining the game, you'll receive the "...And They'll Tell Two Friends" achievement for playing with someone that has played with an employee of Gearbox. In addition, I'll be giving out plenty of free loot and weapons. This will be on a fairly high level playthrough, so bring your best character if you're interested. See you in Pandora! More
Find out how you can get the "And they'll tell two friends" achievement and some free weapons this Sunday in Pandora.
If you're in your mid-20s like me, there's a good chance you spent entirely too much time in junior high playing Goldeneye 007 on the Nintendo 64. While it had a massive assortment of cheats, the easiest to achieve was certainly DK Mode. Rare had the Donkey Kong license, so they decided to include this comical mode that made every character's body proportions match those of DK. In honor of Goldeneye 007, we take a look at DK Mode throughout American history. More
If you're in your mid-20s like me, there's a good chance you spent entirely too much time in junior high playing Goldeneye 007 on the Nintendo 64. In honor of its most attainable cheat, we take a look at DK Mode throughout American history.