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Never trust a gamer who doesn’t own any bad games

Sunday, August 5th, 2012

It’s no secret to anyone that’s visited the Crummysocks family of sites that I do sometimes play the odd, or sometimes very odd, terrible game, and then talk about it at length. Sometimes that’s because the game I played was so bad it crossed over into awesome, but that’s not always the case. A lot of times, the game is just bad. And, yet, I keep most of them.

That doesn’t make a lot of sense, especially for the truly bad ones. Why would I keep something around that I didn’t like, and have very few (if any) good memories about. I’ve touched on this before, but I think it can be summed up as: bad games make me appreciate the good games more.

Take a site like IGN for example. They love to gush on about how great Latest Blockbuster 4 HD is, and you will find the occasional review where they find something terrible and treat it appropriately. They even address this in their site’s Ratings FAQ

And yes, sometimes people are eager to play games that turn out to be really bad. No one wants to review just the AAA titles. It gets boring after a while to write high praise for everything.

And, even though IGN is currently hovering at about a 68% aggregate rating, which tells me that they might give some of the good games a little too much praise, and might knock a few too many points off for the faults in the less-than-stellar ones, they at least acknowledge that if all you have is wonderful things, those wonderful things become pedestrian, and your perspective is skewed.

So, with that said, I figured I’d share a few of the games from my actual collection, and how they make me appreciate something better.

Exhibit A:

Kung Pow

The uploader of this video has disabled embedding, so you’ll have to click the image above to view the video, and you really should. 15 years later, I’m still wondering how this game got released.

Game: Clayfighter 63⅓
Genre: Fighting
System: Nintendo 64
Released: October 21, 1997
Offenses: Aside from the massive delays, cut features, and the most unfunny jokes imaginable, this game also includes: poor controls, uneven difficulty, blatant racism (it was a different time, 1997), unbalanced characters.
What it makes me appreciate: The very games that this is attempting to parody: Killer Instinct, Street Fighter, Marvel v. Capcom, etc.

Exhibit B:

Game: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan
Genre: Side-scrolling beat ’em up
System: Nintendo Game Boy
Released: August 1990
Offenses: Prerendered cutscenes, challenge-free gameplay, somehow combines cartoon ninja turtles and video games to create something that boring and tedious.
What it makes me appreciate: That we live in an era that allows for video previews, enemies smart enough to not get stuck on terrain, player characters who aren’t just re-skins of each other.

“Oh sure,” you’re probably saying, “pick on games that are 15 years old or more.” Alright, how about something from the last five years?

Exhibit C:

Game: Avatar: The Last Airbender – The Burning Earth
Genre: Beat ‘Em Up
System: Xbox 360
Released: November 12, 2007
Offenses: Just the one. If you’re (somehow) unfamiliar with how the Xbox Achievement system works, it goes something like this: the game developers put in a series of tasks that a player can perform during the course of the game. These can range from hitting certain plot points to collecting some arbitrary number of widgets, to finding all of the secrets hidden in the whole game, to just about anything. Each of these tasks is worth a certain amount of points, which go on your profile along with a little picture and date you performed the task. Most games top out at 1,000 points for completing all of the tasks. Avatar, however, dispenses with most of the challenge of completing the tasks, and instead of giving you numerous varied tasks to perform, it asks you to do one thing. And, even if you weren’t trying to complete all the achievements in two minutes, you’d do it in pretty short order anyway.
What it makes me appreciate: I get it, coming up with achievements that are interesting, challenging, and achievable in a reasonable length of time, is really hard. So, it’s really great to see a list of achievements are actually fun to do, and not tedious grinding.

Now, I’m sure someone will point out that a lot of people sell their used games back to Gamestop or wherever. That they take the bad ones back and exchange them for store credit on something that they’d actually enjoy. And that’s fine. But if I can’t find something at least a little bit bad on their shelf, I start to wonder about where they’re coming from.

Posted in articles, classic gaming, collecting, confessions, crummysocks, culture, editorials, gameboy, opinion, site news, video games, wii, xbox | Comments Closed

Being a successful failure

Monday, April 16th, 2012

Alfred, Lord Tennyson once wrote (among other things)

I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it when I sorrow most;
‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

Which some folks have failed in remembering, attributing, and quoting as some variation of:

It’s better to have tried and failed, than to never have tried at all

I’ve even heard that Abraham Lincoln himself was some kind of colossal failure (which isn’t entirely true, by the way) until he became president. Which is, I guess, supposed to make me feel better about any mistakes I might make or hardships I might encounter, because some day I’ll be president! Then I’ll probably somehow stop making mistakes and be the most best president of all time… at least until some other joker gets elected.

But what does that have to do with this website, or video games, or anything else?

More than you might think.

For the last 11 years or so, the Crummysocks.com network of sites (including this site, this site, and this site, which have all been archived) have taught me a lot. Each of those sister sites that I’ve started over the years scratched a particular itch, and none of them became what one might call successful. But I have learned a lot, and if you don’t mind a little navel-gazing, some of the lessons I’ve learned include:

  • How to set up and run a web/email server in a non Microsoft Windows environment (Hello, all the website software that I tried to use)
  • How to restore your web/email server from a backup once it’s compromised
  • How to secure a web/email server and keep it up to date
  • How to create a blog post every day for 500 days in a row
  • How to set up and administer bulletin board software
  • How to capture and edit screen shots and videos to teach people how to do something they might not otherwise know how to do
  • How to run a collaborative blog
  • How to objectively talk about what I like and don’t like about video games
  • And more things than you probably want to read about here

But what does all of that mean? Not much. I’m not president yet, and nothing I’ve done on the Internet (with a couple of exceptions) made much of a ripple. In fact, it seems like the lesson might be that: You can’t have success without hard work and determination, but just those two things alone won’t make it happen. There’s a bit of luck involved in being in the right place at the right time.

Stated another way. It sometimes seems like it’s possible to have a dream, chase it for years, work as hard as you can, and still fail to achieve it because circumstances favored some other person with the same dream.

So it’s very easy to become bitter and jealous. To look to those who have success doing something you like to do and are good at, and realizing that no matter how many hours you invest in doing the same thing (or something related), you won’t be as successful (or famous, or rich, or paid), if you’re successful at all.

Which is kind of a bummer.

Until you start to reflect on the journey. Until you think back at all the things you’ve learned along the way. The ways you’ve honed your craft, the techniques you’ve discovered, streamlining your workflow, growing as a person, and finding what makes you happy and sticking with it. Most of the time you can’t force success. It either happens or it doesn’t, and most of the time it doesn’t. But it’s pretty obvious that success never comes to those who don’t try, and I’ll keep trying to have a successful website until the day I die. Or the Internet collapses. Whichever comes first.

Posted in articles, blogs, confessions, Misc, opinion | Comments Closed

Vidcaps

Thursday, March 22nd, 2012

I mentioned recently that I’ve began to chronicle some of my backlog-clearing exploits over at Twitch.tv, but I left a couple of questions unanswered that nobody was really asking, such as, “I want to make videos of myself playing video games, too. How do I do that?” There are lots of ways to do this, ranging from pretty cheap to bowel-emptying expensive, but I’ve got nailed down what I think is a pretty good starting point.

First, the capture computer itself. It was tempting (and way cheaper) to just toss a video capture device (more on that below) into whatever existing computer that I used for gaming. But that would cause it’s own problems. First: if I wanted to capture video from my computer while I’m playing a game, performance would be dragged way down the toilet while I was trying to play and the capture card was doing its thing, and second: I would have to move my gaming PC into the room where my video game consoles are, and hook them up to the television (which has a lower resolution than my monitor, so it’s not ideal). So my happy medium was to build a low(ish) cost PC that would act as a dedicated capture station.

After checking around a bit, I settled on the AverMedia MTVHDDVRR. It had pretty much all I needed: HD capture, HDMI, S-Video, Composite, and Component inputs, and modest system requirements. As a bonus, it was (relatively) cheap at about $100.

Running total: $94.99

The requirements for running such a card weren’t too outrageous, and it’s no secret that I’m a fan of AMD and NVIDIA, but I wanted to also take a look at the other side of the fence, so to speak, and checked out the Sandy Bridge stuff from Intel. Staying relatively low-end, I settled on the Gigabyte GA-H61M-DS2 with an Intel G850 stuck in there. And since RAM is cheap, I went with 8GB, and put it in the cheapest case I could find. This probably means that I’ll have to replace the power supply with something better at some point down the line, but that’s probably not going to happen for weeks.

As an aside, it turns out that this combination can be used as a Hackintosh if I ever decide to go down that road, so, you know, bonus for me.

PC Components: $211.12
Running total: $306.11

Well, this is turning out to be not quite as cheap as I thought. No time to think about that, though! Let’s press on!

Now it’s time to think about connectivity. To tackle problems such as, how to send the output of my consoles to my television and to my computer at the same time? (Otherwise I would be playing in a tiny, slightly laggy, window). The solution? Use an HDMI Splitter, of course. There are powered and non-powered kinds. I chose a powered one, and it seems to get the job done.

Splitter and HDMI cables: $36.95
Running Total: $343.06

At this point, my build was missing a couple of key components: optical drive, hard drive, operating system, and cable to hook my computer to the television. My television has a VGA input, so getting a cable was a piece of cake, however, if yours doesn’t, you might need to use one of the other connectors on your television, or just haul a monitor in the room with your capture stuff.

VGA Cable: $11.25
Running Total: $354.31

What about the rest of that stuff? Well, it turns out that I, for some reason, accumulate lots of parts and components from past upgrades (including mine and that of friends and family), so I was able to scrounge up a copy of Windows Vista (effectively $0), a 500GB hard drive (effectively $0), and I used this guide to turn one of the several freebie USB drives I have laying around from various IT conferences into a bootable Vista install drive. It didn’t seem worth it to install an optical media drive just to install the operating system, and then never use it again.

Drive and Operating System: $0
Running Total: $354.31

After all of that, assembly took place, and in one day of installing updates and drivers, it was time to move on to broadcasting software. The bundled AverMedia software works well enough for capturing, but if you want to broadcast out to the greater Internet there are several options. However, most people that I can find seem to be using either the Flash Media Encoder (free), or XSplit (free and paid versions exist). So far, I’ve just been using FME since it’s free and relatively straightforward to get configured with the Twitch.tv service.

And how well does it work?

You can check out the results here.

Posted in articles, hardware, howto | 2 Comments »

Backward Tetris

Saturday, March 13th, 2010

And now, for no particular reason, the latest entry in my video series, “Backward Tetris”.

It’s much harder to play Tetris this way, but that’s part of what makes me a pro.

Posted in articles, tetris, video | Comments Closed

Uh oh

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

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.

Posted in articles, site news | Comments Closed

Video Game Awards 2009 reactions entry

Sunday, December 13th, 2009

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.

Posted in articles, opinion, video game awards | Comments Closed

Game Awards 2K9

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

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!

Posted in articles, video game awards | Comments Closed

NaBloPoMo End

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

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.

Posted in articles, nablopomo 2009 | Comments Closed

Genre bending

Monday, November 30th, 2009

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.

Posted in articles, opinion | Comments Closed

Tippage

Sunday, November 29th, 2009

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.

Posted in articles, plugs, pro tip | Comments Closed

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