Long-time readers might remember this joke article that I wrote all the way back in 2002. I had all but forgotten about it until an astute reader sent me a link to an article with an oddly familiar picture.

But, since my site or my name doesn't appear anywhere on that page, you might not have known it was me or where it came from.

Bad form, guys.

EDIT - 1/17/10 5:45 PM

Looks like asking nicely got the problem fixed. I guess saying 'please' does sometimes work.

The VGAs are just minutes away. I have a stable Internet connection, a tube of Pringles, and a 20 oz. bottle of Faygo root beer.

It's on.

Oh, and I can't be the only person that finds listening to Geoff Keighley's voice slightly less enjoyable than licking a running powersander, can I?

7:00 PM CST Sounds like we're opening up with Mark Hamill's Joker, could be worse, I suppose

7:01 PM CST And we lead off with a Batman trailer, not too shocking. Can't tell anything about the game from that, though.

7:04 PM CST I should probably check out more media than just video games. I don't know who half of these people are.

7:05 PM CST Not wasting any time this year getting to the awards. I'd like to see more professional voice actors getting nominations instead of movie / TV actors.

7:06 PM CST Jack Black? Seriously? What's wrong with the Spike TV audience?

7:08 PM CST A True Crime trailer. Looks OK, but not my kind of game.

7:10 PM CST Our first mercy commercial break.

7:15 PM CST Local commercials that cut off the content of the shows? Yeah, we've got'em.

7:16 PM CST Why are we watching this lousy Tron footage on the terrible Jumbotron instead of the TV?

7:17 PM CST I never was that big a fan of Tron, so I don't get the fangasm about the universe.

7:17 PM CST Tony Hawk looks like he just woke up. And making stupid jokes doesn't help. He's here to present the award for best action/adventure game. Because when I think Action/Adventure, I immediately think of Tony Hawk.

7:18 PM CST Assassin's Creed 2 takes it, not bad.

7:21 PM CST I still can't believe that someone gave the greenlight to make a Deadliest Warrior video game.

7:22 PM CST That was a short commercial break. And now we have Kimbo Slice out to look drunk, stumble on his words, and talk about the UFC game.

7:25 PM CST Zach Braff? Seriously?

7:26 PM CST Studio of the Year at 26 minutes in? Are we clearing the way for the rock band interlude.

7:27 PM CST Rocksteady gets the nod. Good for them, I guess.

7:29 PM CST Haven't seen Samuel L. Jackson since the '07 awards, I wasn't upset about that.

7:31 PM CST Does this Star Wars Game have a name?

7:32 PM CST Force Unleashed II, sounds obvious

7:37 PM CST Jake Gyll... um... That actor guy with a name I can't spell with a first look at the Prince of Persia movie. I probably won't be seeing that movie willingly.

7:39 PM CST And the cast of a show that I will never watch to present the award for a game genre I don't typically play, Team Sports.

7:40 PM CST NHL 10? Really? How on Earth did that beat out Madden? And NBA for that matter?

7:42 PM CST More Prince of Persia stuff. I should probably play the new PoP series at some point.

7:49 PM CST That was a long commercial break. Guess Hugh Jackman won best performance by a human male, and for best cast. Good thing he couldn't be bothered to actually show up, that will speed things along.

7:50 PM CST Best Independent game 'fueled by Dew'. Why does 'independent game' mean something that doesn't fit into a genre.

7:51 PM CST Flower? Tonight was the first I've heard of it, and it won.

7:54 PM CST Snoop Dogg? Well, looks like it's time for the first bathroom break of the night.

8:02 PM CST I can't tell if that Split Second commercial was supposed to be part of the show or not.

8:03 PM CST Spec Ops... Don't really get too into these military-type games either, but this one looks decent.

8:04 PM CST Stephen A Smith, some sports guy. I dunno. I worked in a sporting goods store for over 11 years, I didn't have time to learn about the stuff I was selling.

8:06 PM CST An awards show on Spike TV, which shows a ton of UFC matches, and the UFC game won? No, I'm not surprised.

8:09 PM CST Crackdown 2? Enough people played the first Crackdown game to warrant a sequel?

8:13 PM CST The second hour seems to be loaded with a few more commercials than the first. But anything that delays the appearance of Mike Tyson is something that I can live with. I'm no good against those one-hit-ko uppercuts he throws in the first round.

8:15 PM CST Snoop Dogg? I thought he went home. But at least he's presenting best RPG, because nothing says 'RPG' like he does.

8:16 PM CST I didn't think that the lone DS Game would win anything tonight. The VGAs aren't very Nintendo friendly. Dragon Age takes Best RPG and Best PC game. It's a great game, but this guy looks a little flustered onstage.

8:18 PM CST Green Day Rock Band? Why not? I don't know how much longer this series is going to go on, but I'm really excited to see stuff like John Denver Rock Band.

Time for other awards that they just can't seem to find time to give out in a show whose only purpose is to give out awards. If I had to guess, I'd say that these were the games that won where they couldn't get someone to appear on the show to accept them:

Best performance by a human female: Megan Fox
Best downloadable game: Shadow Complex
Best Wii Game: New Super Mario Bros. Wii
Best DLC GTA 4: The Ballad of Gay Tony
Most Anticipated Game of 2010: God of War 3

8:24 PM CST Joel McHale, eh? I stopped watching The Soup a long time ago.

8:26 PM CST Screw you, Gamestop

8:27 PM CST Mike Tyson is starting to look a lot Torgo these days. What Mike Tyson and the cast from Jersey Shore have to do with 'Best Shooter' is beyond me.

8:28 PM CST Modern Warfare 2 won, and won Best Multiplayer game. It was one of the fastest selling games of all time, so this isn't really shocking.

More awards where either nobody showed up to accept the awards or they just didn't think were important enough to bother with the 'ceremony'.

Best Fighting Game: Street Fighter IV
Best Handheld Game: GTA Chinatown Wars
Best Driving Game: Forza Motorsport 3
Best Soundtrack: DJ Hero
Best Xbox 360 Game: Left 4 Dead 2
Best Original Score: Halo 3 ODST
Best Game Based on a Movie or TV Show: South Park Let's Go Tower Defense Play

8:35 PM CST Wait, South Park Tower Defense beat out Ghostbusters? Seriously, SpikeTV viewing audience, and video game players, what's wrong with you?

8:37 PM CST Stevie Wonder presenting Best Music Game? Well, that's nice.

8:39 PM CST Beatles Rock Band, eh? That's kind of a surprise.

8:40 PM CST Another band interlude. My bladder isn't full yet, but I'm going to go empty it anyway.

8:48 PM CST I don't get into Halo. It's just not that good. I don't care what you say.

8:52 PM CST Game of the Year? How could these game have kept me occupied 'all year' when a couple of them are only a couple of months old?

8:54 PM CST Uncharted 2? Ah, it won Best PS3 game and Best Graphics. No wonder we didn't see those categories with 6 minutes left in the show.

8:56 PM CST And we're going to end the show with another song by a lousy band.

I will say that this year's show came off as a little bit more professional than it has in years past. It looks more like an actual awards show and less like a bunch of idiots making fart jokes and mugging for the camera.

Now the industry just needs to work on getting people who are more groomed to be on television and talking... Except for Geoff Keighley.

It's that time of year again, the 2009 edition of the Spike TV Video Game Awards will be shown this Friday, December 12th. It looks to be just as bad as it has been in years past, but I'll still be here with my reactions to it in real time.

I won't actually be at the event, though, I'll be at home, just like you, watching along from the comfort of my couch.

What fun!

Well, that's it, 30 days and 30 entries. I now turn you back to your semi-regular series of updates as they are completed, I'd advise you to subscribe to my RSS Feed if you want to be notified when they go live.

Also, I might humbly suggest that you check out some other sites in the Crummysocks Network, since my time's divided between them:

Pro Tip of the Day: gives you a new tip for some video game or another every weekday
Rejected Screens: is a repository of screenshots that didn't quite make it to one project or another, and
Closeout Warrior: a side project where I talked about a different game every day for 521 straight days.

Play enough epic games (epic, in this case, being anything over about 25 hours or so) and you'll eventually come across a section that turns into an entirely different game. Playing a vast role-playing game? Watch as it turns into a rhythm game for 20 minutes. Playing an action-adventure game? Recoil in horror as it turns into into a real-time strategy game for a stretch.

I haven't actually figured out why this happens, maybe the developers think that I'm going to get bored playing the game and they throw something in to break up the action, or maybe they had this great idea for a different game waiting in the wings but couldn't flesh it out to make it its own game, so they crowbarred it into this one instead, I don't know.

But what I do know is that I do my best to minimize the experience, power through the cross-pollination and get back to the game as soon as possible. I mean, I started playing a game because I wanted to play, say, an RPG, not a rail-shooter.

For me, video games have been simultaneously individual and a social. I would play whatever game was the Flavor of the Month and then meet up with friends who also happened to be playing the thing and we'd swap strategies, secrets, and thoughts on whatever it was.

That's kind of what led me to start working on Pro tip of the day. I haven't really talked about it much over here, but its goal is twofold: 1. to consolidate the tips, tricks and strategies that I've accumulated over my lifetime of playing games, and 2. to discover new tricks and strategies that I may have missed.

And I know what you're thinking: "Well, what about GameFAQs?"

Well, yeah, GameFAQs is great, but the main problem I have is that it's all text. Video games are a primarily visual medium, and a lot of the strategies they are easier to wrap your head around if you have pictures or videos, which is what I strive to provide.

So if you haven't checked it out lately, I'd urge you to drop on in.

These days I find it tougher and tougher to find time to devote to playing games, which is side effect of having a full-time job. Which pretty much means that I get to play through most of my games once before moving on to the next. But some games can transcend that. They're games that I not only have played through more than once, they're games that I've purchased multiple times, sometimes as remakes, and have been able to squeeze them in during particularly lean times, or when I have enough time to play something short and sweet instead of something epic and lengthy.

Mostly, it ends up being puzzlers. If they're good enough, they can't really be mastered, and you're only competing against yourself. So games like Puzzle League / Tetris Attack are a must, but also stuff like the old NES games (thank you, Wii Virtual Console) make the cut.

I know I can't be alone in this, so I'd like to know. What games make the cut for you? Which ones are good enough that you'll buy them more than once?

Today is the traditional day, here in the United States, for giving thanks for stuff we have. It's also a day where we gear up for some crazy sales that most stores have on the day after, now known as 'Black Friday'.

If you're willing to get up hours and hours before dawn, stand in line in the cold, damp air, and brave huge crowds of people, you might be lucky enough to grab one or two of the things that you saw in the ad that brought you to the store in the first place.

Then, since there are hundreds of people in the store, all trying to buy limited quantities of the same thing, you get to stand in line, possibly for hours, to pay for your thing. Then you go to the next store and do it all again.

Doesn't that sound like fun?

After I had my NES for a while, I got a decent selection of games that I had played to death. Most of them I traded in for other games at my local resale shop, but a few, like Super Mario Bros. I kept, even though I didn't play them much.

A while later, I got wind of an add-on device that promised to 'breathe new life' into my old games, the Game Genie.

For those of you unfamiliar with it, the Game Genie is a piece of hardware that gets inserted in between your NES and the game you're wanting to play. You put in some codes (either from the manual or you could just randomly poke around on the code entry screen). Depending on what codes you put in, you'd get varying effects. Stuff like: infinite lives, late-game powerups early on, ludicrous rewards for defeating a foe, that kind of thing. How it worked is a little beyond the scope of this article, but the gist is that it effectively replaced bits of code in the game with its own, resulting in a change.

So I put in in, played a few games with it, and after a few weeks, started to get bored with it. Why? Mostly because the games I'd played were games that I already played until my fingers were numb and I knew them inside and out. Twiddling with the gravity in Super Mario Bros. was kind of neat for a few minutes of goofing around and flying around a few of the levels, but ultimately not that satisfying.

But that didn't stop me from getting the Game Genie for the Game Boy a while later, and then for the Super NES a while after that. They were gimmicky novelties that I just had to have.

Given all the physical activities I do while playing games (*snerk*) it might come as a surprise that I haven't injured myself more than I have. In fact, I can only remember one time where I sustained any kind of injury, and it was many years before Wii Remotes were flying through televisions.

Flash back to the year 1994, December 31st. I had gone to a friend's house to spend the night and ring in the new year. To pass the time we rented a copy of WWF Raw for the Super NES, which, you might suspect, is a wrestling game.

One of the mechanics of a wrestling game (and especially this one) is that when you and your opponent lock horns, you both have to press the buttons on the controller as fast as you can. Whoever presses the buttons fastest gets to do a signature move and deplete the stamina of his opponent.

So we played the game all night, all told, about seven hours. Then, once midnight struck, we rang in the new year by parading around the front yard, banging soup pots with wooden spoons. Then back to the game for another couple of hours. Then, around 2:00, it was time for bed. No problem. We bed down for the night and I drift off to Slumberland.

For about an hour.

After that I woke up to an intense ache that stretched from the base of my thumb all the way to by elbow, on both arms. And, since there were no painkillers in the house, my only source of relief was to fill the sink with cold water and soak my forearms until they numbed up enough to allow me to get about an hour of sleep, and then I had to start the process over again.

Amazingly, the next morning, the pain had gone. Although I didn't tempt it by playing any more button-mashers for several days, and I've learned, more or less, where my limits are when playing a marathon like that. But I know I can't be the only person that's suffered a game-related injury, anyone else care to share?