[02/14/04]

[01/30/04]

[01/22/04]

[The forums]

Author

Busty 18-year-old girls

EmX

I hope you spend the rest of your life re-living Auschwitz as a busty 18-year-old girl with a burning syphilitic infection, you ass-tacular fuckbag!

Author

God I'm so smart

Psiga

The image responses are a gimmick, by the way. You're using them as a crutch. You don't deserve to be here.

Author

I play to be inspired

Mr. Mechanical

I had a monster of a post, ...that I won't post here, but perhaps elsewhere. To answer your question Drew, plain and simple:

Games consume me.

I'm not a shut-in and I do have a life, not much of a life but a life nonetheless. I play them for fun, for creative inspiration, to see how they're made. I don't want to make them for a living, no, I want to study them. I want to write about them.

I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to do this, but at least it'll involve gaming. I think gaming, on some levels, can be a new way for one person to communicate thoughts and emotions. I think games can be art, in the truest sense of the word. I think games can embody soul.

That's how games affect me.

Ataru Moroboshi

Mr. Mechanical nailed it for me as well.

Gaming isn't just something I do for fun, although I definitely game for fun. It is an art form and the best games move me deeply and influence my art and my thoughts. I am working on several video game related projects for my grad school classes, and as an aspiring librarian, I am very interested in how libraries are going to deal with archiving and maintaining availibility of video games as they become more culturally important.

In ten years, just how hard is it going to be to find a working saturn and Panzer Dragoon Saga? Or will we (librarians) resort to emulation to keep "classics" in circulation? etc.

Video games are part of my exercise routine; at least a couple hours of DDR a week.

Games are definitely an alternative to TV for me. My TV habits suffer greatly from my gaming: my tolerance for comercials has dropped to an all time low, and the shows I make the effort to watch are very few.

Author

Onimusha Tsu

Sklabah

The fact that I'm posting here instead of finishing my game of Onimusha 2 or, say, sleeping, pretty much defines my gaming "life". I see them as an outlet for my elitist sensibilities, and a way to connect to people that are usually more thoughtful than other fanatics. That is, they think along the same lines as I do, so I feel safe with them. Mostly.

Basically, I'm fascinted with control, and levels of control. Playing a game is akin to playing with an action figure that can only do limited things. And "playing right", as the old adage went in my circle of friends. Like, I hated when people would pick Firefly for their army when they'd already chosen to be the "good guys" , namely GIJoe... I was limited in that respect, a slave to the creator's vision. I respected it, and tried to play within that vision. Games are an extension of that.

But these days, talking about games is more fun than most games. And that's lame. Or is it? I guess that writing about and discussing games acts as an extension of the creative process that I respect so much. Most game makers aren't game players. I'd bet most players aren't writing about playing. Just playing. What are we, that would spend hours thinking about gaming instead of gaming?

I'm gonna finish Onimusha 2 again. Now.

Author

The MTV model

DeusJester

Seeing as this undercooked idea was mine, I may as well man up and post something significant.

Stand back, and try not to get any on you.

Games have always been in the background of my life, just like a lot of people in my generation, the one preceding it, and presumably every one from here on out. I was never indoctrinated with the “you must be this socially fucked up to play the game” mentality, so the associations of geek and gamer never went hand-in-hand for me. Cool kids played Contra just like everyone else, the Nintendo vs. Sega argument was the political hot button of the schoolyard era, and having a friend’s dad, who worked for Zoom Telephonics, score an early copy of Doom II actually made people want to hang out with you, not run the other way.

All through my childhood, games were there. They were never center-stage, but they also never went anywhere. I can sort my game collection in chronological order, like some new-school High Fidelity knockoff. If I want to remember the first time I played Super Mario Bros. 3, I’ve got to remember that I had an early teen crush on my friend’s sister, and it was his family that had the Nintendo (my parents forbade it) so heading up the big hill near my house to go visit Corey and Stacey held all sorts of good things. Wizards and Warriors gets points because I was playing it the first time I saw an R-rated movie, which my friend’s parents were watching in the other room and I was clandestinely sneaking glances at. Uniracers is quite possibly the best multiplayer game ever, thanks to a 14-year old birthday party with six restless kids in my parents’ attic. The first time I played Symphony of the Night, it was because a bunch of people had come over to witness this new game Resident Evil, and we all decided it was stupid and wondered what else we could play. Games were always there.

All the trappings of my youth have MIDI tunes running through them.

So, given all that, I can’t explain why I have the bug so much harder than nearly everyone I grew up with. When everyone else’s interest in games began to wane with the onset of the final years of high-school and subsequently college, mine deepened. In thinking about games so much, I began to develop an interest beyond their nostalgic value, which is where it seems to terminate for a lot of my friends. I began to track down books on the subject, reading articles and visiting websites devoted not so much to the games themselves, but to the study of the phenomenon as a whole, the emergence of a new medium of expression into the public conscience along the lines of the birth of cinema. This was good; I had gotten in on the ground floor in a colossal structure spiraling heavenward, I played this shit back when, I was there when it hit the ground and I was still with it as it took off again, and the more I knew the more I liked what I was seeing develop around me.

Why just me? I have no idea. I do know that a lot of people find a niche, decide they like it, and set up a permanent cerebral home there, honeycombing the whole thing together with like-minded individuals to form a hive collective that insulates and isolates their particular vintage of appreciation in human expressionism.

That’s how I view myself as a gamer. Not as a person who plays games – remarkably little of it is about the actual playing of the games – but rather as one who has a certain awareness and comprehension of the periphery that comes along with the lifestyle, and the realization that it’s the details that make it good. It’s the experiences tied into it, the ability to levy some kind of appreciation invisible to ordinary eyes that makes it a worthwhile study.

You see this in all sorts of circles of appreciation. If you read The Piano Shop, it’s the same deal, except it regards the insular world of piano making. It’s less about the ability to play the piano as the ability to appreciate it. This kind of vision can be brought to bear on damn near anything, really; It’s not hard to imagine someone who’s seriously into, say, the hip-hop scene. They don’t just listen to it, they appreciate it on a level that most mortal men cannot hope to comprehend. Likewise with violinists – Ever see The Red Violin? I wouldn’t know what to do with a Stradivarius if it fell out of the sky and hit me in the junk while I was sitting on a bench in the park. If an MVS 4-slot with KoF 2003 and ’98, Metal Slug 3, and Mark of the Wolves were to fall out of the sky, however, I’d be a happy motherfucker. Actually, if it was in the cabinet when it fell on me, I’d be dead, but you get the point.

That’s what gaming means to me. It’s something to identify with on a level that eludes the perceptions of 95% of the people who partake in it. I’ve been in the lonely void of Zebes and the whimsical world of a plumber on a quest for mushrooms and stars. I’ve been shot at by countless aliens, soldiers, and combinations thereof; I’ve shot ten times that number. I’ve been killed by bottomless pits, huge flying jellyfish, ninja swords, demonic lightning and the occasional rocket-propelled-grenade to the face. At the end of the day, so have millions of people, but I took something away from it that most people left behind, and that makes all the difference.

I think of gaming as a part of my life like most people regard skin as an organ. You don’t think of it as such because it’s the most there of anything within you and it hardly warrants a second thought. I’ve always played games, and I’ve always loved them. It’s never gone away, and it’s not so much the only thing in my life as it is the thing that’s always there.

At this point, you either get what I’m talking about or you’re not going to. It’s the easiest thing to see if you’ve got the right eyes for it, but it’s hard as hell to put into words. But, there’s my attempt.

Author

Game skin

l33t rud13

Back to the Topic at Hand...

Video Games have provided me with a common link to people. Hearing some kids in arguement about which is better Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat when you first move to a place is a good sign. 8 years later talking to those same kids over a game of Counterstrike about how our college lives are going is something pretty awesome.

And then there are games that have changed my perspective of life and how I view it. Shenmue makes me whenever I go someplace new look around and examine everywhere in detail. Metal Gear Solid 2 made me want to get politically involved. The fact that these games made me involve as a person is a lot to be said.

A common bond amung all my friends is Video Games. We all have different tastes and interesting but the resounding connection is calling each other "Bitchass" or "I'm A Fucking Wario" in Super Smash Bros. is a way to get together.

At one point in High School I was addicted to PSO and my grades and life suffered because of it. I adventually wore off the addiction to gain it back 2 years later. In order to stop me my parents banned me from playing for a week (kinda sad?) Though I happen to meet my first girlfriend during that week was something nice though.

Now that I'm in college I can pretty safely say that video games will always be a factor in my life. Either in passive way, in always being there. To butting into a conversation overheard about the guy who bought the MVS cabinet from the closing arcade.

I still need to call that guy.

Hell the fact that I'm currently discussing Video Games on a Internet Message Board with people from all around the world says something about the impact Video Games have had on me.

Now I think I need to see something Viewtiful.

Author

The floating post of dreams

Random Logik

Videogames have always been a big part of my life, but WHAT IT MEANT to me has changed over decades of my life.

When I wee little runt in primary school, my life revolved around going over to my next door neighbour's, to see this guy called Chris.

You see this Chris was in high school,he was a big kid, i looked up to him. More importantly he had a NES, and there was nothing more i wanted in my life than to play NES at his house. He had a cute little sister who seemed to have a crush on me, I had zero interest in her, and much more interest in playing Zelda and Mach Rider. She ended up being a rich model, Im not kidding. She didnt play games - so that was that.

Skip forward a few years. Family moves to a new city, and after saving up pocket money and paperboy money for god knows how long I bought my first console (not counting a gameboy, cause owning a gameboy was kinda mandatory back then). It was a SNES. I bought it from the local dodgy HK/Japan video game dealer shop, complete with the 50/60hz switch and a honey bee convertor.

From that point i was very much 'in the scene'. Latest jap releases, Bung backup devices, devising a plan to steal a Neo Geo etc. It was a big jump from someone who could never convince the parents to buy him a NES. I enjoyed gaming a lot at this point, but it was moving from being a hobby to a full time obsession.

Also around this time, I was getting into Sierra and Lucasarts adventure games on the PC. I also began coding some simple games with my best friend, we even managed to sell a few. Simple ASCII based RPG's pretty much, but we gave them a very JRPG feel, which was original back then on PC's anyway. (my best friend is now a professional programmer, and will proabably end up being someone big in the industry)

And it was ALL ABOUT THE GAMES back then. I finished almost every game I got. I was a fighting game fanatic, and a squaresoft fan. Before long I was getting bored of the SNES, so I got a megadrive as well so I could play Gunstar Heroes.

Then came the 32bit era, everyone was buying Playstations, I was hanging out for the N64 and cared not for the Playstation. This is a lie however, as this is when I got my job at Sony. I got a job working in the Sony Poweline (those technical support/hints and tips charged phonecalls). This was well into high school, I was still getting rare SNES games in cart and floppy formats, and was still crazy about games. So much so that my grades were dropping.

Well not dropping as such, as they were never good to begin with. I had the attention span of a lemming at school.

I finally got my N64, and loved it to death. I bought ridiculously priced Japanese carts from the import dealers every two weeks. And I was still finishing every game I bought.

Not long after this - i began having relationsip problems with my parents. You see my parents never really understood me, I had never really opened up to them, I was always very independant, which is what they wanted, but they wanted me to be closer to them.

I fell into a very depressive stage in my life, problems with family, friends and school. Its all a big blur. I dont think about it much anymore. But things that was consistent during that point in my life was Doom, Goldeneye, metal music and graffiti. I spent every school night at the arcades, pumping money into KOF, Point Blank and Daytona. I met my first proper girlfriend at the arcade, she kicked my ass at Samurai Showdown.

Anyway these were the things that kept me going in my life, gave me a reason to wake up in the morning. I know it sounds kind of ridiculous when written like this, but I'm sure some of you can relate. GAMES MEANT SOMETHING TO ME. Even though my parents were always telling me that I would grow out of games, I knew I wouldnt. I was always going to be a gamer. And i was proud of it.

Skip forward again. I started studying seriously as I did want to go to college, and most importantly I wanted to study design (realising I had no coding talent whatsoever), so I could hopefully get a job as a game artist, or just a graphic artist in general.

I ended up getting into the college I wanted. Doing the course I wanted to do. I was hoping to make a lot of friends who shared my passion for games. I was suprised to find nearly everyone in the course was a hardcore PC gamer, who had only general interest in consoles.

Being at college changed my life again a lot. I developed much more of an interest in design and art. I played games less and less, as I just didnt have the time.

I met my current partner in college too, our first conversation we had was an arguement about whether '3D games sucked and how 2D was still important or not'. I HATED HER BACK THEN, cause she was stuck up and good looking (and she knew it). Little did I know that in two years we would be involved.

I finished college last year. And I have a boring corporate 9-5 design job now.

I look at where my life is now. Its depressing - gaming wise. I own a ridiculous amount of consoles and handhelds. I buy new release games monthly. And I have barely played through the games that I own for the GC. I still order stuff off ebay expensive gaming rubbish of ebay every day, and spend a considerable amount of my working day reading gaming websites and forums.

I've become more of a collector than a gamer. And I hate myself for it.

I dont know where I went wrong, or if this is just a phase. Or if I have become a poser gamer or whatever.

I just know that games are still a big part of my life. But I didnt think it was going to be like this.

NothingXS

So, there was once a time when I was young.

We'll say... 4 years old?

My mom brought me home the coolest thing I'd ever seen beyond a computer, and it was this little light-and-dark gray box with two weird-shaped ports on it, two buttons and a flip-top. I'd put a cartridge inside, and then I'd be having some fun times with a plumber in a red suit running around, kicking ass and taking names.

This was the beginning, when I first discovered the coolness that is video games. I'd play Mario, my grandfather would play Mario -- we'd all have a fantastic time. I'd take my NES with me almost everywhere, with only Mario on it, and I'd play it at the hotels, at my house, at my friends' house, at my grandfathers' -- everywhere. Mario was the game.

I grew up with time, and became a latchkey kid at about... 8 years old, my guesstimate is. I was very into playing this broken-up version of Street Fighter II, which was technically a hack on a famous SF2 hack called SF2 Rainbow. You'd do a Shoryuken and a slew of Hadoukens would fly out, shit like that. I liked fighting games, and was ecstatic when I received an SNES with SF2 Turbo bundled in for Christmas. I'd play that over and over, up until I "met" the game that'd hook me for a decade, in an arcade.

On a boring day of doing nothing, I went by this little convenience store nearby my house and walked in to buy stuff... and found a machine featuring The King of Fighters '94. For the next couple of years, I'd make friends and learn the finer points of gaming and begin my long journey in building skill for the game, finding lots of competition and essentially living a life of gaming more than anything else, because that was all I knew besides shitty escapades in elementary school. When I hit junior high, a lot of that flew out the window, and while I still played a good amount, I was mostly engaged in playing other things, and hanging with my friends.

Then, I moved to Cancun. Hooray, I'm a latchkey again, and I hate where I am.

And there was a '98 machine around the block. Convenient. Needless to say, I was there every single day for more than an hour.

I would waste my lunch money every day for '99 before going home to sleep for school, when '99 came out. I never performed exceedingly well in that game, but I sure as hell had fun learning more from the people I played against.

I failed 9th grade because of my lack of interest in school and the amount I disagreed with my mom about everything at the time was insane, especially considering we pretty much lived in poverty and we shared a room for a long time (she had air conditioning, you see). I spent most of my time playing KOF or dicking around on a computer. I then went to another school, and -- lo and behold -- we had open campus for lunch, and there was a '99 machine nearby. That got a lot of playing from me.

We moved one more time to a much better apartment, and were actually doing alright, when I decided again that school was shitty and began skipping every so often. I'd spend a lot of time skipping to go to a taquería where they had a 2000 machine set up, and I played a lot of 2000 there. They switched it to '99 after a while, and I ended up unlocking Kyo and Iori because I was the person playing it the most.

When I moved on to 10th (which I also failed), I was playing even more '99 and 2000. Halfway through 10th, I picked up 2001 when it appeared at the store around the corner and played that to death (for a while, they featured a BUNCH of SNK games... MOTW, RBFFS, LB2, MVC, MVSF, etc).

Then, there was a tournament. And, silly as I am, I went. And I played.

And I won. A CD player, but I won. All those years of work finally paid off, somehow.

Then I moved to the USA, and no more SNK for me. Thankfully, I met a few people who were actually into fighting games, and while they weren't initially good at SNK games, they improved a lot, in part due to playing against me all the time (Azagtoth and ElGranSalchichon -- both Team OK! Come on, come on! and SEXYYAROU), and so I was happy again with competition. Flipper's picked up SVC, so I started playing that. Somewhere along the way I picked up DDR, which was excellent because I finally picked up something resembling exercise (and it was a snug fit, too -- DDR has music I actually like, and it's not so bad to pound at arrows with your feet, really).

And just today I won two of the events at GameFlex 2 in South Florida, MOTW and 2001.

You could literally say that gaming -- no, more like SNK -- is deeply embedded into what I am. I know people who live for the game, quite like I do. It's strange, but I ask myself sometimes: would I have it any other way?

No, I guess not.

Author

ROD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111

108

Like Aderack, I hate videogames. I write about them because I hate them, and I hate them because I despise them.

The secret to writing about videogames well -- nay, the secret to living well with videogames in your life, at any rate -- is to always have a good-looking woman by your side.

No, it's to have a very, very large rod, and a very good-looking woman to touch the tip of that rod, with four of her fingers, making a motion something like chalking a pool cue. It helps if the woman is maybe a foot shorter than you, maybe a foot and a half. So you play a videogame, and the woman touches your rod while you play the videogame, and this way, your mind is full of thoughts of a woman touching your rod while you're playing a videogame, and then if you write something about that experience, leaving out the part about the woman, the fact that she's twio feet shorter than you, and the conjecture that she was touching your rod like a pool cue, you will have a piece of writing about videogames, yet it will be colored by your having been having your rod touched like a pool cue, in itself an instrument of a game, by a good-looking woman either a foot or a foot and a half shorter than you while you were playing that game. This will make the writing flow, and reading that writing later, you will be able to fondly remember the look on that woman's face when she smiled when she first beheld the girth of your rod.

A game, and the playing of a game, is something that fits into my life, not something that shapes it. A game is only as good as the television I'm playing it on, the beverage I drink while looking at that television, the chair I sit on while drinking, and the woman a head, a hand, and a foot shorter than me, who's touching my large rod consistently, like chalking a pool cue, while I'm sitting in that chair.

I could go for a glass of orange juice right now.

See, that's a lie -- I already drank a glass of orange juice. To be precise, I drank it -- nay, I finished drinking it -- four minutes and sixteen seconds before starting this post. And while having my rod touched by a good-looking woman who's now reading a newspaper article and talking about brushing her teeth, while the television talks about Iraq.

I have a Gameboy Advance in a pink drawstring bag in my backpack, one that's black with a white battery lid, one what I got off a guy who was arrested. I'm meeting Don Marco, Final Fantasy Dog, and our new friend Nick in Shibuya tomorrow at noon, at Hachiko, so we can play The Legend of Zelda: the Four Swords on Nintendo Gamecube. I told the woman I had to be in Shibuya at noon, and she asked me why, and I lied to her about how I'm going to meet a woman who wants to inquire about the girth of my rod, a woman a lot like this one woman might be. The woman kept on reading the newspaper. She takes my word for it. She believes me, because she knows what I'm talking about, even when it's not true, kind of like how I say untrue things about videogames, things I've found in magazines before selling them to Las Vegas, because I want to see how dumb the people are who point out the errors that they think are mine.

In conclusion: my original quest of Suikoden's game clock was six hours over the actul time it took me to beat the game because, one snowy night, I was having violent sex with a Russian woman who was drunk on vodka while I was full of A&W Root Beer.

That's how videogames fit into my life.

Author

Whispering through a tin can

Psiga

I'm just goddamned tired of people thinking that 128kbps MP3s are good enough. What kind of shit-filled coffee cans are they using for speakers, anyway? Folgers, maybe?

Dammit.

Aerisdead

Pfft. Luddite.

Get with the ogg, G.

Aderack

Ludologist, don't you mean.

Aerisdead

I think I know what I mean.

PersonaSama

SUPER MEGAZORD ULTIMATE DELUXE AFRO INFINITY MAKE/POWER UP!

I remember hearing that when a woman gives birth to 6 children, they're call septuplets. Or is that seven children..?

Didn't the White Ranger have like a talking dagger? I remember seeing a few episodes and thinking, "What the fruck is this talking salad fork? Bring back the harmoniknife!" The Green Ranger was cool because he had a gold vest.

I want the gold vest too. *Plots Psiga's death*

Extra Life

Wait

...

What the fuck is going on?

Closing comments:

How am I supposed to finish skinning these mountain gorillas alive if PETA hippies won't stop fucking breaking in?

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