I have just been handed a fantastic bit of LocoRoco art that makes a pretty awesome desktop wallpaper, or whatever else it is that people do with these kinds of things.

The picture above goes to the full size version at the artist's DA site, which I might suggest you also go check out.

Thanks, Starcharms!

Sometimes I get the feeling that game designers hate me. Either that or they don't actually listen to some of the stuff that they put in the games. Alarms, ridiculous sound effects, and just plain grating sounds that just make me want to reach through the screen and throttle the person that composed that mess.

Don't believe me? That's why I've compiled a few examples for your listening displeasure.

1. Castlevania - Counting Down your hearts.

You all know the old-school NES Castlevania game. The one where you take Simon through the castle and have to make him kill off Drac's minions. At the end of the stage your points are tallied up, and you get some bonuses for the amount of time and hearts you have left. Time, no big deal, sounds fine. But hearts? Oh man, each one has a metallic, grating 'ding!' that sounds as your bonus counts down. And if you're like me and hoard your hearts to the end of the stage, you're going to hear a lot of dinging.

Click here to hear what happens when I have 80 hearts at the end of a level.

2. Metroid Series - The HP Alarm

Samus, the heroine of the Metroid series, wears a super-advanced suit that lets her do all kinds of things: jump real high, curl into a ball, grapple from conveniently-placed rocks with grapple-shaped holes in them, and so forth. Her suit even comes with a handy alarm feature that lets you know when it's low on energy. Even better is that this alarm will continue to go off indefinitely until you either get some energy to shut it up or you mute your television. I'm usually lucky enough to trigger the alarm right before I get to an area where there are no enemies to kill. No enemies = no energy pickups. No energy pickups = throwing your console into a wood chipper to make the sounds finally stop.

Click here for a small taste of the Super Nintendo's version of the ever-so-helpful reminder.

3. Mischief Makers - Shake-Shake!

Mischief Makers stars a young girl robot who has to go around a planet to rescue the perverted old man who created her.

I think it's a Japanese thing.

But, one of the core mechanics in this game is to grab things and shake them vigorously to find out what's inside, or to trigger a switch, or to mix things up in a pot, or any number of other things. Each and every time you do that, your hero belts out a "Shake shake!".

"Shake shake! Shake shake! SHAKE SHAKE!"

Gah! Good thing the whole game's built around grabbing and shaking things, I'd hate to have any sanity left after I'm done playing it.

Click here for the tiniest sliver of the joy that you'll experience as you meander through this game.

4. Mario's Picross - Timer

Mario's Picross is a puzzle game where you have to logically deduce how to draw a picture by using numbers. No big deal until you realize that you're under a timer, and that's not even that bad until you get to three minutes on the timer. Then you get a 'ding' every five seconds until you hit two minutes. Then you get a ding every other second until you hit one minute. Then you get that ding every second until you lose your mind or lose the game, whichever comes first. For me, it's usually the latter since nothing helps me concentrate more than a repeated beep of a timer's countdown.

Click here and see if you can concentrate on... well, anything with any sort of complexity while it's playing.

5. Pokémon Series - The HP alarm

It's the same old story. Your monsters fight other monsters for the express purpose of getting stronger. They also have a meter that gives you an idea of their overall health. When the meter hits 'red', you get a helpful notification that lets you know that your monster is on the verge of passing out. And this alarm keeps on going. Win the battle and cause the other trainer to pass out? Good for you, but the alarm keeps sounding. It just sounds and sounds until you either kill off your monster or the battle ends and you've gone through the post-battle speech by the rival trainer. At least the volume slider is really easy to access on the portable systems, of course the system is also really easy to throw from your car over the side of a bridge, too.

Click here too see if it inspires you to give your pet electric mouse a 'potion' or of it makes your ears bleed.

6. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - The HP Alarm

Noticing a trend yet?

In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles you get four turtles to choose from, all with their own separate HP bars. Whittle them down so much and you hear a helpful, shrill, and piercing alarm sound to let you know that your turtle is about to 'get captured'. So you switch back to a different turtle for a while. Switch back, though, and it's the alarm again piercing your skull and possibly shattering any glassware you have in the vicinity of the television.

Click here to check it out if you dare. But you might want to remove any glass from the area before you get started.

7. Waverace 64 - The announcer

Waverace tries really hard to be awesome. Even including an announcer to call the hot, Jetski action. The thing is, though, he only has about a dozen things to say, and he has to call absolutely everything that happens to you on the course.

Oh, and I should mention that Nintendo seems to have found the most annoying announcer-man in the country to do the voicework for this game. "OK! Good! Okaaay! No Problem!"

Except, yes, there is a problem. My television's reception has been compromised by the amount of controllers I've wedged into the screen after a couple of races.

Click here to see if you can stand to listen to the guy for more than one race.

8. Yoshi's unsettling grunt

Somewhere around the time of Yoshi's Story, Yoshi got a voice. A voice that is equal parts childish and hydrochloric acid. Even worse is that when he jumps and needs to get a little extra lift, he flutters his legs and does a completely bizarre grunting thing. Something like a cross between being constipated and trying to shove a watermelon through a drinking straw.

Even better, he's kept this sound through the Smash Bros. series, so that in the heat of a battle you hear these grunts pretty well all the time.

Click here to experience the fury of a green dinosaur sounding like he's about to burst a vein in his forehead.

9. Yoshi's Island - Mario's Cry

We can hardly talk about Yoshi without mentioning the Super Nintendo game where he has to take baby Mario through a number of different stages. Touch anything more dangerous than the ground and Mario flies off Yoshi's back, gets wrapped in a bubble, and starts bawling.

Even better is that he cries in what sounds like a recording of an actual baby bawling. And if you've ever heard a baby bawling, you know exactly how this sounds. In fact the sound is so annoying that you anything to get it to stop. You panic, lose your composure, and scramble around trying to get that stupid baby out of that stupid bubble so he'll stop his STUPID CRYING.

Click here to be indoctrinated into the Church of Baby-Cry.

10. Legend of Zelda Series - HP Alarm

It's just like the other series. Link takes enough hits and you get a helpful chirp-chirp-chirp-chirp-chirp-chirp-chirp-chirp-chirp-chirp to let you know that your health is low. Which, yeah, is helpful for the first five minutes, but after you kill enemy after enemy, and very very carefully avoid all the projectiles and dangerous articles in the world trying to find just one heart to refill your meter a little bit and get that beeping to stop. Oh, but there aren't any more hearts for some reason. The world was lousy with them while you had full health, but drop to critical levels and the supply completely dries up. It's like some kind of Heart Goblin comes down and steals them from beneath every rock and bush in the land.

Click here if you think you can stomach the Search for Just One More Heart To Stop That Beeping sidequest in the Super NES Zelda game.

11. Ocarina of Time - Navi

I could hardly compile a list like this without mentioning the Queen of Annoyance herself, Navi. Navi is a little fairy that helps link out in the Ocarina of Time. She's oh so helpful by pointing out that you should "Look!" at something, "Hey!" you should "Look!" at something else, "Hey!" "Watch out!". Every single time you target something, or want to get a closer look at something, or something is possibly interesting in the vicinity, or she just wants to talk to you for a while.

You literally hear her holler at you hundreds of times throughout a playthrough. And you can't shut her off, she's going to haunt your dreams once you turn the console off.

Don't believe me? Click here for an (admittedly mildly excessive) example of what I'm talking about. Gird your sanity.

Ever since I first heard about Dungeon Runners I was intrigued, it's a free to download, and free to play MMORPG that doesn't quite take itself seriously. I was a little apprehensive at first, though, because 9 Dragons was also free to download and free to play, but was a complete train wreck.

I also had kind of forgotten all about it for a long time until I went to Best Buy one day and saw that they had a retail box of the game for sale. A box that showed one of the characters running around wielding a giant pizza cutter for a weapon. But I still didn't get it because I was real busy at the time... probably something Internet related, I kind of forget. But I passed on it, and didn't really give it a thought for a while until I went to a different Best Buy and saw that the game was $10, and it included six months' worth of the premium content (which I'll get into in a minute). And that's when I decided to take the plunge.

Also, my free month of LOTRO ends tomorrow.

The game is kind of like a silly cross between World of Warcraft and Diablo II. Except for towns, everything is instanced, and you take your character and run around the various dungeons killing swarms of monsters. Monsters that drop phat lewt (like the Sweet Acid-Wash Boots of the Hardy Unicorn that my character currently has equipped). Probably the strangest item I've gotten so far is a gun that shoots fowl as ammo.

Quests are pretty standard stuff, go somewhere and deliver something to someone, go in the dungeon and kill X amount of Y, collect Z trinkets, etc. So there's nothing too crazy there, and there's been a little bit of a story to link them together, but nothing terribly complicated.

There are three classes to choose from, Warrior, Mage, and Ranger. But it doesn't really matter what class you pick because as soon as you leave the n00b area (and they call it the n00b area in the game, there's a lot of fourth-wall-breaking stuff in there) you can visit the class trainers and learn skills from whatever class you want. The class just determines what class bonuses you get.

Now, as a member (which costs a cool $5/month once the trial is up) gets you certain benefits. You can stack potions in your inventory (very handy), you can equip stuff that's higher quality than Green (the progression goes: grey, green, blue, yellow, purple, and rainbow), no ads, extra bank space, and (probably my personal favorite) access to a Members Only Server. Most of the Free Players will be playing on the Free Server (duh), so it has the highest population (even though the highest I've seen the population climb was about 225), but it also has the highest population of people spamming the server with , "I TRAIN 4 YOU. REEZNIBLE R8S." (which I only saw two people doing) But on the Members Only Server there haven't been any in the times I've been on, which is super-nice. Of course, you can't trade gold anyway, so that is probably also part of it.

Also, if you buy a boxed copy, you get access to a 'Bling Gnome'. These things will follow you around and pick up any gold that the enemies drop so you don't have to worry about it, and they can also pick up and Blue or lower items on the ground, eat them, and then crap out some gold, saving you a trip to town to empty out your inventory, which was always a tedious part of these kinds of games.

So far I like it. But I've read on a couple of forums where folks complain that they also liked it a lot at first, but that they got burned out on really quickly, so we'll see.

They sucked pretty bad last year, but I'm going to suffer through the annual trainwreck that they put on. Mostly because it's the closest thing to mainstream coverage my favorite industry gets.

Watch this space to be updated periodically as the awards take place.

7:57 PM CST: Just finished reading last years' notes. It doesn't fill me with confidence.

8:00 PM CST: Jack Black is funnier than Samuel L Jackson, right?

8:01 PM CST: A pseudo-sex scene... waiting for the inevitable Wii gag.

8:02 PM CST: Right on cue.

8:03 PM CST: I guess I was aware that diapers were made in that size, I just chose to not consciously think about it.

8:04 PM CST: OMG, games provide stories just like books? You can play games by exercising, and not all gamers are closeted xenophobic hermits? Shocking! Though I guess some mainstream folks might know that.

8:06 PM CST: I'm sure that shooting sparks out of the genital area means something symbolic, and that it's just over my head.

8:08 PM CST: Hot model tells us that she's hot. Good thing she's humble, too.

8:09 PM CST: Gears Maps will be 'Available tonight... Pacific time' I'm not sure that's even English. Ah well, at least the maps look OK.

8:10 PM CST: LL Cool J?! Seriously? I thought he was retired, or dead.

8:15 PM CST: Back from an impossibly long commercial break to watch some Cool J... Might be time to refill my refreshments.

8:17 PM CST: We didn't even get the full song? Lame. Oh, but we get to see some UFC game footage... probably because UFC airs on Spike TV.

8:18 PM CST: Just realized that the audience is sitting on couches... probably because people play games on couches. Clever.

8:19 PM CST: Twenty minutes in to get to the first award on an awards show... could be worse, I guess. Best shooter goes to... Gears of War 2, which apparently also won Best Xbox 360 game.

8:21 PM CST: Is it just me or do the silver-clad women with the harpy wings just look completely out of place and kind of horrifying?

8:22 PM CST: God of War 3 footage, not a whole lot of footage, actually.

8:25 PM CST: We're 25% done with the show, have given out two awards, and the host hasn't been seen since 8:06. Who's in charge of scheduling this thing?

8:28 PM CST: Jack Black antic-ing... And then introducing Peter Moore with some world exclusive Fight Night footage... and Mike Tyson?! Dear Lord, who's next, Duran Duran?

8:30 PM CST: The Fight Night footage was so-so, just some pre-rendered footage. Neil Patrick Harris is out to give out the best 'Independent Game Fueled by Dew'

8:32 PM CST: HA HA SHOOTING A HECKLER!

8:34 PM CST: Pregnant pause because Neil did not come prepared with the card with the winner printed on it... fantastic. Turns out World of Goo wins.

8:35 PM CST: Commercial time again, but this time with an Afro Samurai commercial. Guess I won't be able to go the whole evening without hearing his sweet, sexy voice... er, I mean gravelly, displeasing voice.

8:38 PM CST: The VGA page says that there are 25 categories, and we've done three in 35 minutes. Thinking some of them are going to either get cut or combined together again.

8:39 PM CST: Didn't her this pretty lady's 'silly last name', but she's here to introduce some voiceover work.

8:40 PM CST: Keifer Sutherland won, but we didn't get to hear who the other nominees were. Screw you, Liam Neeson!

8:42 PM CST: I guess I'm showing how out of touch with popular culture I am, but I have no Earthly idea who the All American Rejects are. Do they wear the ill-fitting, stylishly bankrupt, and mismatched thrift store dregs ironically? Or is that just the band's 'thing'?

8:45 PM CST: All I can think of is how I saw the lead singer's back fat lapping over the back of his too-tight women's pants.

8:46 PM CST: More commercials. It's about time, I was getting tired of watching actual show.

8:51 PM CST: Konami Code is in the graphics on the back of the screen, clever.

8:52 PM CST: Kim Khardashian (don't care if I spelled that wrong) "Dante's Inferno is a game... based on a book... *giggle*..." I really want to thwack her with a Cluebat.

8:53 PM CST: The game doesn't actually look like the book did in my mind's eye.

8:53 PM CST: Tony Hawk is here to introduce Will Wright, I can see the connection.

8:54 PM CST: I think this is the first time I've actually heard Will speak.

8:56 PM CST: I must be the only person that finds Geoff Keighley annoying.

8:57 PM CST: People give me a hard time because I haven't played any of the GTA games, and to those people I say, "Go lick a running meat slicer, I don't have to play it."

8:58 PM CST: More commercials. And the host hasn't been seen in over 30 minutes. He's doing a fine job.

9:02 PM CST: Aah, the Burger King commercial was a sly allusion to their sponsorship.

9:03 PM CST: Oops, they let an unbleeped 'shit' through. I guess arguing with Jerry Stiller will do that to you.

9:05 PM CST: Our gracious host allows us another award to be given. Best RPG? Guarantee the lone DS title isn't going to be in the running. Pretty sure it was thrown in there so that the whole show wasn't going to be the Xbox 360/PS3/PC song and dance.

9:06 PM CST: Fallout 3, no big surprise there.

9:07 PM CST: Busta Rhymes. Fan. Tas. Tic.

9:08 PM CST: Mr. Rhymes is a poor public speaker, has trouble pronouncing the word 'engine'. Also he mangled the name of the game so bad, I don't know what the preview is for.

9:09 PM CST: Uncharted 2, and that's about all I know. It look OK, I guess. More footage from 'Gamer's Heaven' that's just a bunch of old-school games being played backstage by celebrities... woo? And more commercials. I guess it has been almost ten minutes since I've been reminded how extreme Mountain Dew is or how long-lasting and tasty Stride Gum is.

9:13 PM CST: The show's half over and less than 25% of the awards have been given out. Probably going to see the 'awards not important enough to show us giving them away' blip here in the next two or three segments.

9:15 PM CST: Terminator premiere footage.

9:17 PM CST: Mafia 2 premiere footage. I thought we just got done with watching commercials.

9:19 PM CST: Tony Hawk again? Did they run out of celebrities with nothing better to do?

9:20 PM CST: 50 Cent performing. I need to check the listings again, I thought I was watching an awards show, not the 'Two-Hour Random Variety Show Crap Hour'.

9:21 PM CST: At least they're showing footage from Mr. Cent's game in the background to keep it tangentially related to gaming.

9:22 PM CST: More commercials, and then more 'world premiere' footage.

9:25 PM CST: Looking over the nominees for the awards we're probably not going to see, I can't help but notice that Super Smash Brothers Brawl didn't even get a nomination for Best Multiplayer Game.

9:27 PM CST: About 25 seconds of Watchmen footage, I feel like i should probably care more about it than I do.

9:28 PM CST: Weezer is actually painful to watch, even when they're not performing. They're here to present the award for best music game.

9:28 PM CST: Wii music is the second game on a Nintendo platform that I've seen all night. Probably thrown in as a pity nominee. Rock Band 2 wins... Shocker.

9:32 PM CST: Kevin James used to be kind of funny, but this skit is just kind of sad.

9:33 PM CST: Studio of the Year nominees.

9:34 PM CST: Media Molecule wins, kind of surprising. They also won PS3 game of the year, way to consolidate the show, guys.

9:35 PM CST: Holy crap, all the awards that they didn't bother showing.

Best Driving game: burnout paradise
Best Game based On A Movie: Lego Indiana Jones
Best Fighting Game: Soul Caliber 4
Best PC Game: Left 4 Dead
Best Multiplayer Game: Left 4 Dead
Best Handheld Game: Professor Layton and the Curious Village
Best Wii Game: Boom Blox
Best Individual Sports Game: Shaun White Snowboarding
Big Name in Gaming, Female: Jenny McCarthy
Best Performance by a Human Male: Michael Hollick as Nico Bellic
Best Performance by a human female: Debi Mae West as Meryl Silverberg
Best Graphics: Metal Gear Solid 4
Best Original Score: Metal Gear Solid 4

13 awards in about two minutes. Can't clutter up the awards show by giving away awards onscreen, can we?

9:42 PM CST: Just saw a Little Big Planet right after Media Molecule won two awards for it. I thought that wasn't going to happen this year?

9:44 PM CST: Our host has graced us with his presence to introduce Tim Schaefer.

9:47 PM CST: I can already tell that I won't actually care about Brutal Legend, sorry.

9:48 PM CST: Game of the year time already? Did we miss some?

9:51 PM CST: Nope, GTA 4 wins, and takes Best Adventure Game. Good for them.

9:53 PM CST: All the awards are given out. Time for some skits and maybe some performances.

9:54 PM CST: I was almost going to be elated that I'd be able to go for one day without hearing a Weezer song.

9:54 PM CST: Yes, I'm aware that my television has a mute button.

9:59 PM CST: Credits rolling over Weezer, I guess we can call the show over.

Overall, I'd say that the tone of the show was a bit better this year, it was a whole lot less frat-party oriented and less amateurish, but the fact that they shoved more than half of the awards to the curb to make room for 'entertainment' is still kind of lame.

Also, Nintendo platforms get the short end of the stick again this year. Outside of Best Wii Game, we saw, what 3 nominations and one winner? Can't shake the kiddie perception, I guess.

Given the progress the show has seen in this year's presentation over last, I think there's some promise here. But, seriously, the industry does not have a whole lot of folks that put on good interviews. That's going to be a tough hurdle to overcome.

Just performed my semi-annual bad-user cull/mass banning. Mostly just the people that registered accounts and didn't do anything with them and the jerks that registered just to promote their genital drugs herbal supplements.

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.