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Sorry, Mr. Developer, but your game is too long

Sunday, January 25th, 2009

Being a video game aficionado is a little bit different than being, say, a movie aficionado. Barring the occasional ridiculous exception most movies can be seen and enjoyed in one to three hours. You can throw in a movie at the end of a long day at the Widget factory and experience all it has to offer before you go to bed that night. Video games, on the other hand, take a little more work.

Take, for example, a game like Final Fantasy VI. My first time through it took me well past 30 hours to complete it. Which is roughly the equivalent of watching, say, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone about twelve times (or The Number 23 once). But what if you missed some side quest or accidentally killed off a major character? Or what if you just want to play it again? You might be a little more efficient, but you’re still looking spending at least ten more Sorcerer’s Stones worth of time playing this game. And here lies the problem.

If you want to fully re-experience the game, you have to invest virtually the same amount of time into it each and every time. Using our prior example, by the time you finished Final Fantasy VI twice, you’d have invested about 60 hours to it, or viewing the Sorcerer’s Stone 24 times (or Underworld once). Assuming you play the game two hours a day, you’d spend 30 consecutive days playing the game just to see it all twice.

I don’t know about you, but I just don’t have that kind of time.

This isn’t some rant about how I have a Job and Real Life Responsibilities(tm) now that I didn’t have when I was younger. I make time to engage my hobby (though, that’s another article). But games are getting longer and longer. In the month that I’ve been chipping away at whatever the Flavor of the Month is, several other games have come out that are of decent quality, similar length, and demand my attention. I know I haven’t fully experienced everything that my current game has to offer, but I did complete the main thread of the story.

So what do I do? Do I spend another month chipping away at the game again? Unlocking little bonuses, finding hidden story sequences and maybe finding some kind of in-joke that the developers put in? Or do I start a new game, learn about its mechanics, and where everything is fresh and new?

For me, the latter situation usually wins.

I have nothing against the old game or anything, it’s just that I’ve got other games to play, other stories to experience, and other puzzles to solve.

And as much as I’d like to plumb the depths of the game that obviously took years to craft… I just don’t have the time to dedicate to it. In fact, I’d go nearly as far to say that after spending three-dozen hours trying to work my way through a game, I’m borderline sick of it, even if I enjoyed it.

And besides, that that month I spent playing it, there’s a good chance that two or three other several-dozen-hours long titles have been released, and I can’t very well leave them sitting on the shelf unplayed, can I?

Posted in articles, opinion | 1 Comment »

The Stages of a Video Game Purchase

Sunday, January 18th, 2009

From a casual glance, it might seem that your average obsessive video-game geek is a slave to retail impulses. That he just goes to the store, picks up an armload of software, and runs home to ravenously digest it all, but you might not know that this is but just one phase in a cycle that repeats itself over and over again. Here’s your guide to recognizing these stages so that you can be better informed about what it is that’s going on in the mind of your local video game hobbyist.

It’s worth noting that these phases may happen slightly out of order or my be skipped altogether. They’re just numbered here for reference.

Phase 1: Rumor-mongering

At this phase a game may or may not exist in any form. The player may have heard from a friend of a friend’s uncle who has a friend who has a daughter that knows a guy that works next-door to a developer of one of his favorite games. Will there be a new game in the BloodPhaser X series? Or another game by the same company, only this time with 34% more applesauce? This person seems to think so. At this stage you’re likely to hear your gamer-friend say ‘You know, I heard that BloodPhaser X2 is totally in the works and supposed to come out sometime in the Spring of 2015′. You, of course, haven’t heard anything, so you should just nod, say something agreeable (i.e. ‘Really? That’s awesome!’) and then move on.

Phase 2: Official Confirmation

You know that game that your friend told you might or might not exist? He’s just been vindicated. Someone with some authority on the matter has openly announced to whoever will listen that the sequel to BloodPhaser X, BloodPhaser X2: Double Montana is indeed in the works and will be released… when it’s ready. (Incidentally, saying that a game will be out ‘when it’s ready’ is a slightly less pretentious way of saying that ‘you can’t rush perfection’.)

Phase 3: Media Collection

Invariably, after the Official Confirmation, the Media Trickle begins. The developer will excruciatingly slowly release a screenshot here, an extremely short gameplay movie there, possibly some unrecognizable corner of a piece of concept art to keep the game fresh in the minds of the salivating public (some of them are literally salivating at this point). This slow media release then becomes like a game of Pokémon for the player, he’s gotta collect, or at least view, every screen, every video, every concept piece, and read every last tidbit of information about this game. He’s vicariously playing tiny morsels of this game through the previews and screenshots that he can find.

Phase 4: Early Reviews

After months of very little in the flow of information, finally, the game’s retail appearance is right around the corner. Some media outlets have gotten their mitts on the game a few days/weeks early so that they can get their precious reviews up on their sites. Did they like it? Did they hate it? Did they give an arbitrary number that agrees with what he had built up in his mind that it should be? This is a time for a decision by the player. Is the review and negative, in which case it was probably done by a complete moron, or was the review glowingly positive, in which case it was probably done by someone extremely talented and insightful? Does the review contain anything that might spoil the experience (revealing key plot lines, for example)? Is the review going to even weigh in on his purchasing decision?

There are no easy answers to all these questions. In fact, you’re very unlikely to even find someone in this Phase, unless he makes you read some review online and tell you how great or awful it is. Your best bet here is to just agree with everything that he finds good or bad with the review and move on.

Phase 5: Retail Release

After months and months of nail-biting, collecting and digesting media, and generally knowing as much about the game is if he’d actually been on the development team, the day has arrived. The game is in his local retailer and just waiting to be purchased. But now new issues crop up. Does he buy the dumb-old Regular Edition, or does he get the super-snazzy Collector’s Edition with Concept Art Book, Game Soundtrack, BloodPhaser X pin, window cling, and a coupon to mail-order a customized action figure? Sure, it costs almost twice as much, but he’s getting oh, so much more. You might want to question that decision, telling him that he’s spending an extra $50 for a CD, a pin, some plastic, a ten-page ‘book’, and a coupon that will cost him more money to redeem, but he’ll refute every one of your points and tell you that it’s an investment.

Which, of course, is total hogwash.

But you probably shouldn’t stand in his way. Let him get the limited edition bonus stuff if he wants. He didn’t stop you from getting that super-sweet limited edition novel that was autographed by the guy who swept the floors in the author’s apartment complex, did he? Wasting a few bucks on a couple of junkets isn’t the end of the world.

Phase 6: Getting the game home

It’s all been building to this. The game is in his hands, the cellophane has been shredded, the bonus goodies are in a bag on the floor for later, and the game goes into the game playing device of choice (PC, console, whatever). This is where one of several things might happen:

Phase 6a: The game is phenomenal

This is the best possible outcome. The game is great in every sense of the word. Your game-playing friend will probably lose vast tracts of time to this game. He won’t call, he won’t email, he might even forget to eat, sleep, and/or bathe until the game is done. He’s got to get to the end and see as much of the game as he can as quickly as he can. And if you do manage to see him outside of his house, he’ll probably talk to you about it endlessly, telling you all about the minutiae. You’re going to feel like you’re the one playing the game after all is said and done here.

Phase 6b: The game is mediocre

This isn’t quite as good a result as if the game had been awesome, but it’s not all bad. He’ll play the game off and on until he either trudges his way through to the end or he just gives up on it. The good thing here is that he probably won’t want to talk to you endlessly about it, which is something.

Phase 6c: The game is garbage

This is absolutely the worst thing that can happen (in this context, of course). The game that he’s poured his life into following for the past two-and-a-half years somehow turns out to be slightly less fun than getting punched in the face repeatedly by a guy wearing gloves covered in red-hot sewing needles and dipped in a mixture of lemon juice and salt. He’s disgusted and will actually probably not play the game much at all. He’ll probably quickly jump to…

Phase 7: After the game’s done

Once the player has completed as much of the game as he’s going to, he’s got a choice. He can add it to his personal archive of video game titles and paraphernalia (saying that he’ll play it again someday, but he probably won’t), or he can try to recoup a portion of his money by selling it off. Sure, he spent about $100 getting all the goodies that came with the game, but the used game store doesn’t want those, they just want the disc and they throw the rest of the stuff in the trash, and give him $25 (if he’s lucky) that he can apply to his next purchase.

This is fortunate because he just heard that Dungeon Disaster IV is supposed to be out in a few months…

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Snazzy LocoRoco Wallpaper

Sunday, January 4th, 2009

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!

Posted in art, articles, wallpaper | Comments Closed

Eleven of the most annoying sounds in video games

Saturday, January 3rd, 2009

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.

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Dungeon Runners Impressions

Monday, December 22nd, 2008

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.

Posted in articles, games, impressions | Comments Closed

On Being a Budget Gamer

Wednesday, August 6th, 2008

I play old games. That might be a strange thing to admit, but it’s true. I have an odd compulsion to collect and play lots of video games, but to also not want to spend a whole lot of money doing so. These statements might appear to be at odds with each other. I mean, video games are expensive, right?

So, kind of out of necessity, I became somewhat of a bargain hunter. A connoisseur of cheap games, if you will. I know what you’re probably thinking, “Cheap games? Everyone knows that cheap games are awful. They’re games with no marketing budgets and no development budgets, and they’re designed to separate uninformed parents who don’t want to spend a whole lot from their money.” And, yes, you’d be right in most cases.

So, what do you do?

Do you pony up $50 or more per game? That gets expensive real fast.

Do you buy and sell used games? It’s tough to build a collection if you’re selling everything off when you’re done with it, and used games are usually missing some important component, like the final install disc or a serial number. Not to mention that buying a game for $50, selling it back to the store for $25 in store credit so they can resell it for $45 means that they sold the game twice and essentially charged you $25 to rent it.

Do you rent? Renting is a great way to play a lot of games for cheap, assuming that the people that had the game before you did handled the game with a reasonable amount of care (i.e. didn’t use the disc as a surrogate dinner plate one day when the dishes were dirty. But you don’t build up much of a collection from borrowing, and if you ever want to go back and play a game that’s become out of print… well tough luck.

The best compromise I’ve found is to stay a couple of years behind the curve. This actually has several benefits.

  1. You get to figure out of the game is actually any good by taking a look at the user reviews, which I admit are mostly worthless. You have to filter out the reviews that blindly give out perfect scores because, “OMG the game is sooo good because it has Cloud in it and he and Aerith are both going to totally make the game awesome, and I haven’t played it yet, but it’s obviously perfect in every way, LOLz!” You have to also filter out the ones that give the game a zero because, “OMG the grafx are totally gay, and I haven’t played it and won’t play it because Link totally looks like a girl.”
  2. Bugs get worked out and games get patched. This is more true for PC games, but there have been several console games where later versions have quietly been released to fix a bug or two.
  3. Again, this mostly applies to PC games, but running games that are a little behind the curve means that if you have a reasonably powered PC, you can push the games to their absolute limit, and have them look as good as possible.
  4. Probably most important of all, playing games that are on the verge of going out of print or have just gone out of print are going to be dirt cheap. Which is one of my favorite prices.

So, let’s take a look at some of my recent finds for the PC:

Game Cost
Painkiller: Gold Edition $6.00
Medieval 2: Total War $7.50
Medieval 2: Total War Kingdoms $7.50
King’s Quest Collection $5.00
SimCity Societies $8.00
Total $34

Not bad, right? I got five reasonably good games for slightly more than half the price of a full-priced game.

Awesome.

Of course this also means that I have to keep up on the latest releases to know what’s going to be good in a few years. And I have to put up with the sneers of my peers when I get excited about getting a game that they’ve already played through and retired four or more years ago, so I’ll end up buying a new game at full cost occasionally to keep up appearances. But that doesn’t really work very well. That label of ‘plays old games’ is permanently affixed to my forehead.

And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

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NES-Tones

Friday, September 21st, 2007

I have an article over at Stage Select that walks you through the process of making your very own NES ringtone for your phone.

We all love our cell-phones. We love the ability to download a custom ringtone to show off our individuality. What we (and by ‘we’ I mean ‘I’) don’t like is paying $2.49 or more for a 10 second snippet of audio that’s been compressed so aggressively and then played back so loudly that is sounds like you’re trying to listen to a piece of some song through a blown speaker under a swimming pool. Or worse yet, $2.00 for a MIDI version of the song that only sounds kind of like the track you really wanted. And if you’re interested in video game songs? Forget it. You have the choice of exactly one song: a MIDI version of the Super Mario Bros. theme song. It’s recognizable, but only just.

It’s well worth a read. Check it out here (Stage Select).

</shameless_plug>

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The Pokémon generation

Tuesday, July 24th, 2007

You may or may not be aware, but last weekend a Pokémon tournament took place at several GameStop stores across the nation, mine included. I was seriously contemplating going and testing my mettle against the best my city had to offer, but unfortunately had to work (sudden schedule changes, the bane of my existence). Penny Arcade guy ‘Gabe’ was able to attend and his account is pretty telling. As the event approached, I was feeling a bit weird about going, and was pretty certain that if I did go, that I’d be the oldest one there by a pretty significant margin. I would have felt very strange knowing that I bought my first Pokémon game back in 1998, my sophomore year in college and the same year that some of these kids were born. So it’s somewhat comforting to know that someone else shared this concern.

“As it turns out I was the oldest person in the tournament by roughly twenty years and the only one not wearing a shirt with Pikachu on it.”

I’ve ended up purchasing a ridiculous amount of Pokémon things in the last decade. Since I’ve played games in the series for so long I sometimes forget that though the game is as deep as you want it to be, see EVs and IVs, it really is easy enough for the next generation of gamers to get in to. Gamers that don’t know or care what the different natures mean or what moves compliment others in a double-battle situation, just which ones look neat.

My mom, as it happens, works as a photographer for many of the schools in the region. One day she produces a copy of Pokémon Fire Red that she found in some parking lot of some school. This game was pretty beat up, it had been run over at least once and was missing a chunk of plastic from the corner, but still worked. I looked around the save file on it and noticed a few things, primarily that the person that played the game was not ‘Pro’. This might not mean much if you aren’t versed in the game, but his wallet was empty, all of his TMs were gone, all of his items were gone, he had no pokéballs, and all of his pokémon had been taught all of the HM moves they could learn, whether they were useful or not. He had linked up with and battled 9 times and lost all but one of those times. But the thing is, the timer on the game had clocked more than 145 hours in the game. The person who owned the game, someone called BLAKE, had spent a significant amount of time with it, and played the game the way he wanted to, not the way that it must be played, if the voice of the internet is to be believed. I sometimes forget that for every player on a message board obsessed with crafting the optimal team with perfect stats, there are dozens that just play the game. Not to necessarily be the best, but to take their ragtag team and show it off to their friends.

I don’t really know if I’d have made any significant progress in the tournament or even have made a respectable showing, but I do know that it was not for me. I am by no means ‘Pro’ at the game, and might well have lost, but contrary to what you may have been led to believe I would have felt pretty crummy if I managed to pound some little kids into oblivion.

Link! (Penny Arcade)

Posted in articles, opinion, PA | Comments Closed

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