If you've ever been to an online forum where you get a silly little title under your name to reflect your post count, you know how much people will go through for that little piece of kitsch.

Long-time friend to crummysocks.com, Stage Select has just implemented a kind of hybrid system somewhere between forum rankings and Achievements called, well, 'Achievements'. You get these achievements for general participation, forum posting, submitting codes, answering questions from users, and pretty much anything else you can do to make the database more complete.

Achievements are retroactively awarded, too. I had a flood of them waiting for me when I logged in this morning.

Gimmicky? Sure, but remember, I like gimmicky.

I know what you're thinking, you wish to be more pro. Don't worry, lots of people do. You owe it to yourself to check out Protip of the Day to get a genuine Protip each and every day from our staff of genuine Pros. If not for you, then... well, who am I kidding? Do it for you. Take advantage of this resource to impress your friends, annoy your neighbors, and possibly learn a thing or two.

The other day I posted a list of every NES game (according to Wikipedia, at any rate), and then ranked them. A couple of sites picked up on the list and it generated a little bit of a controversy. So, what's up with the list anyway? Was it just a ploy to get web hits? What do the ranks mean? I'm going to answer all those questions and more.

As I've posted before, all lists that attempt to rank video games in any kind of meaningful way are inherently flawed. They're ways to quickly drum up content in a pinch, they don't take a whole lot of research to compile, and almost every time you see one the discussion is rife with comments saying that the list failed in some way because Game Y was rated higher than Game Z and the editor must have been smoking hallucinogenic drugs to order the list the way that they did. In fact, a list from 'worst' to 'best' implies that the games in the list can be quantitatively broken down into numbers that somehow reflect the 'goodness' that might be in a game. It would be pretty awesome if there were a kind of 'fun unit' that we could use to determine the amount of pleasure one might get out of a game.

But we can't. Primarily because experiencing video games is hugely subjective. Someone might favor graphics over all else. Someone else might give the edge to sound quality. A third might give passes to both of those as long as the story is well-written. And so on, ad nauseum. This brings me to my main point: There is no good way to rank games in any meaningful way because tastes vary too widely. Which, stated another way, is "All 'Top X' lists are essentially equally as valuable as another" and are little more than excuses for the authors to meander down Memory Lane. And there's nothing wrong with that, so long as we recognize them for what they are.

My solution to this mess involved taking a list of games for the NES (though any platform would do) and creating a simple script to randomly order it into a list. I then sent notice out to a few key websites to see what reactions might be.

Bear in mind, now, that I never once mentioned how I ranked them, or what the rankings might be. Everyone pretty well assumed that the game at the top was the 'best' and the game at the bottom was the 'worst', but it was simpler than that. The game with the 'number 1' ranking was simply the game with the number 1 ranking. Immediately, comments started pouring in on various websites saying that I didn't know what I was doing, or that Goonies II was ranked higher than Zelda II, when clearly it should be the other way around.

This was the expected response.

Most lists of this nature have some pretty loud objectors. Mostly due to their widely varying tastes (remember those?). I've taken note of that and created an outlet. Press F5 and *boom*, new list, exactly as valid as the last, and primed for new discussion.

Of course this has the (also intentional) side-effect of no two people seeing the exact same list (with the exception to the first couple of hours the list was up due to a snafu on my part) leading to two people arguing over their favorite game's placement:

SomeGuy: No way, can you believe this moron put Bad Dudes at 468? What an idiot, that was a great game!

SomeOtherGuy: Are you insane? Bad Dudes is number 8 and that game sucked. 468 is Metal Storm, which is way too good to be so far down.

And that, friends, achieves my ultimate goal: to foster discussion. Which The List did admirably. There were no hidden motives, no 'publicity stunt', no 'whoring for webhits', or anything like that. For those that 'got it' and appreciated it, I thank you for your kind words, and those that didn't... well, better luck next time, I guess.

It's been a long, hard process. But, with the assistance of an esteemed colleague of mine we sat down and produced a ranking of every NES game that has seen domestic release (plus a few extras). I'm not really comfortable disclosing our methodologies, since we might sell them at some point to buy pizzas, and I'm quite sure that someone out there will find fault in this listing because we put some game he hated over some game he loved. And all I can really say to that is, "get your own website and make your own list". Now, hit the jump for the complete listings, and let the debates begin!

Since I've been playing a fair bit of Mega Man 9 lately, I thought it was pretty awesome when my sister surprised me with this:

Yep, she's pretty awesome.

I've somehow been bitten by the dungeon-crawling bug lately. Maybe it's because Diablo II recently had its disc-checks removed. Though I only played the game long enough to verify that the CD-check is indeed gone, I've somehow managed to lose large tracts of time to two other games in the same vein at roughly the same time, Baroque and Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon.

Baroque is something of a train wreck of a game. You play as this silent protagonist whose actions somehow brought about the end of the world. You have to travel to the bottom of this massive tower in order to unravel the mystery. There are some other characters in the game, both inside and outside of the dungeon, and they give you clues, but they're neither coherent or clueful. So you just kind of wander around trying to figure out what in the world you're supposed to be doing, because the game doesn't really tell you other than 'go into the tower, get to the bottom'. So you go along and go into the tower, fighting enemies until you run out of health. Run out of health and you leave the tower, all the experience points/level ups you got are gone, as is any weaponry or armor or special items you may have found. Essentially, it's like the game just gives you a giant middle-finger when you die. Oh, but you can send items back to the start, so that if you do die (and you will) you can grab them and start anew with stronger stuff and last a little longer before you die again. Problem is, though, that you can send a pathetically small number of items back to the start. 'Pathetically small' in this case meaning four. Four items when your inventory can hold over twenty. Four items when one of the subquests involves collecting souls of creatures in the dungeon, and you find far more than four. So, do you send back the souls to start to complete that quest, or do you send back items that increase your attributes, or do you send back weapons and armor? Either way you go, you're going to be making a lot of runs through this dungeon to do anything worthwhile. I poured over twenty hours into this thing and managed to get far enough that I saw one of the fake endings, after which the game restarted and I began anew without all my stuff again, and still didn't know what in the world was going on.

On the flip side, Chocobo's Dungeon was far more coherent and had a storyline I could follow without having to resort to mailing the developer a Bundt cake to ask for an interpretation of the story. It involves a chocobo, those big birds from the Final Fantasy games, named Chocobo, who ends up in a town where everyone's memory was erased due to some calamity before the game started. Chocobo has to go into the memories of the townsfolk and restore them to normal, and unravel the story along the way.

The dungeons here are a lot the same as Baroque. Each one is randomly generated, there are items laying around all over the place, you have to work your way to the bottom, that kind of thing. But! The game is far more lenient. You die in this game and you lose all your items except the ones you have equipped, so you won't lose that super-awesome weapon or armor you found. You leave the dungeon and you retain your strength levels, and get to carry everything out of the dungeon you can carry, assuming you left of your own volition, that is. But other than that, Chocobo's Dungeon shared a lot with Baroque, so I've put together this chart showing the similarities between these two games:

I guess it kind of goes without saying that I really liked Chocobo's Dungeon a whole lot better than Baroque. I just have some sort of odd compulsion to know what's going on with the story in a game, if it has one (yeah, the story in Tetris was riveting...), or if I can't understand the overblown complexity of the story, I'd at least like to have enough information that I can at least pretend that I know what's going on, or at the very least hit the highlights (see Final Fantasy VII). Which is something that FFF:CD was able to provide, while Baroque was just... broke.

Some months ago I decided to try out the free-to-play MMO Guild Wars, which fit in pretty well with my new-found casual approach to MMOs. But, I kind of got tired of the base game and decided that I wanted a bit more, so I decided to pick up a copy of one of the additional campaigns for the game, Guild Wars Factions.

I get the box home, tear it open, and go to enter my key, when I notice that something is a little weird. Apparently two keys had gotten glued together at the factory and stuffed in my box.

Since I don't really have much of a need for two keys, I contacted NCSoft's support to see what they suggested I do with the other one. After they verified that the keys were legitimate and valid, they gave their blessing to essentially do with it whatever I would like, which I thought was pretty generous of them. (It's spoken for, sorry).

So, has anything like this ever happened to any of you guys? Leave a comment below if it has.

Saturday's post about some kind of mysterious message showing up on my instant messenger just kind of weirded me out a little bit, but I thought very little of it and decided to move on. Today, though, I get a different, yet similar message in my IM window:

At this point, I'm getting a little annoyed, so I decide to dig a little bit deeper, and what I found isn't so much unsettling as it is just plain annoying.

These 'troutbots', as it seems, are robots that trawl the Internet looking for screen names. They then act as sort of a middle-man and relay both sides of the conversation to the victims, obscuring their names. So, when I was talking to OrbitingTrout the other day, the poor sap on the other end of the line was also talking to OrbitingTrout.

I can't actually fathom why such a thing exists other than to momentarily confuse random pairs of people for a few minutes. But now that it's happened to me twice in two days, it's having the effect of making me very irritated.

There is more information to be found in the following places:

• Wikipedia
• Saalon Muyo
• Livejournal community based on the concept

In short, if you get some message from someone with 'trout' or 'salmon' in their username, it's a bot designed to annoy you and someone else for as long as the two of you keep bickering back and forth figuring out who IM'd who first. The best thing to do is to not respond to any of it and close your browser window, or better yet, disallow IMs from folks that aren't in your buddy list, though that may be infeasible for some.

Oh, and please pass a link around to this page to spread the word to educate people about this completely ridiculous waste of time.

Just spent several minutes with a mysterious caller from the AIM network. The person, one OrbitingTrout, claims that he doesn't recognize my screen name, didn't message me, and chooses to believe that he has a virus on his computer that send out messages to people. I'm fully willing to accept that I've not seen every virus/spyware out in the wild, but one that sends out the occasional spam comment seems to be the kind of things Ron Paul's supporters might come up with.

Or the guy's an attention whore, you decide.

MMOs are a slightly different beast as far as video games go. If you've been living under a rock for the last couple of years, the gist is that the game is more akin to a service that you have to subscribe to. Ideally you and potentially thousands of other players subscribe to the game and your subscription fees pay for stuff like server upkeep, content generation, and stuff like that. There are, of course, exceptions, but we won't bother with those today.

The thing is, though, that you're not going to really know if the game's going to be worth your time unless you play it first. Of course, you could just jump headlong into the game and see if you like it, but then you've wasted a month's worth of subscription fees if the answer's 'no'.

The solution is, then, is to offer a token amount of 'free game time' for you to decide if you're going to like the game or not; one month is the norm.

But, here's the thing. That free month isn't actually a free month. Who says so? Math says so!

Let's take the current darling of MMOs, World of Warcraft. As of this writing you can get your very own copy of the base game from Amazon for $20. Now, your 'free' month of gameplay is worth $15, so if we subtract that from the cost of purchasing the media, we end up with $5 for your copy of the game and $15 for your 'free' month.

Or how about that other MMO that's making waves right now, Aga of Conan? You can get the for a scant $50(!). Subtracting the $15 worth of fees of the month that you're being 'given' leaves us with paying $35 for the ability to use the trial, which is over twice the value of gametime that you're using. Suddenly the free month doesn't really seem so free anymore.

I guess what I'm saying is, if you have to pay something to use it, it's not really a free trial.