Exposing my socks to the world

Tom’s Hardware Guide put up their review of AsylumLAN 18, and my picture made it into the review. Neat!

AsylumLAN is having their three-year three day anniversary party starting tomorrow evening, and crummysocks.com will be there organizing a 5 game cross-genre Super Nintendo competition. I’ve made a special trophy to award to the winner.

It all started with generic trophy with a Camaro on top (I got a deal on it because someone else had ordered it from here and never picked it up) and an ASCII Pad that I found at the local goodwill for $0.25. I took the controler apart and painted the shell gold. I decided to leave the buttons their original colors, mostly because the sliders for turbo and autofire are color coded, and I painted over the labels (I actually did that on purpose).

Now, since the controller still works, I wanted the winner to be able to easily take it off and put it on the base. As cool as it might look, it’s a little difficult to play Super Nintendo games for any length of time when it has a two pound weight on it. Since I couldn’t find Velcro in this city for some reason, I opted to use some craft magnets to attach the two pieces of the unit together.

And there you have it! It’s a fairly straighforward project, but the end result actually turned out better than I thought it would.

Video games are known for puttng the characters in some… well, let’s just call them improbable situations. When people ask me for help, I find myself putting words together in ways that, taken out of context, might make me sound like I’ve been eating too much paint.

Here are some examples (I’ll give you some bonus points if you can name the games they’re from):

1. “First, defeat the Ninja beating up the old man, then take his money to the pizza delivery man in the sewer to get the pizza.”
2. “Throw the turnip at the fish.”
3. “Before you go up the stairs, get the pork chop in the wall.”
4. “You can kill that ghost by throwing a hammer at it.”
5. “It is possible to ride the snakes to the top of the room, but it’s not easy.”
6. “Right after you go through the parking garage, there’s a lady on an awning that wants to go to the Tennis Court.”
7. “You’ll have to use your hammer to clear out a section of forest.”
8. “When he winks at you, punch him in the face to get a star.”
9. “If you give him some dried meat, he’ll join your party.”
10. “All you have to do is type the words that appear on the zombie’s chest to kill it.”

And the list just keeps going. This is just the tip of the iceberg. As long as the people who make games insist on putting the characters into these bizarre situations, I’m stuck trying to describe them to people while simultaneously trying to make myself not look like a huge dork… If such a thing is possible.