Top five reasons why your Top X list is dumb and wrong

November 5th, 2009

About a year ago I successfully played a prank on the Internet, and the results were better than I expected, and I thought it did a pretty good job of explaining why I have such a strong dislike for ‘Top X Lists’, but I figured I could expand on that with a more generalized tack.

And with that I’d like to present: The top five reasons why your Top X list is dumb and wrong

5. Lists are lazy. All Top X lists, including this one, are lazy. They take very little effort to produce and are really just filler. All you need is some space to fill, a desire to not really talk in depth about anything, and a wacky topic, which brings me to…

4. Topics are getting wacky. There have been so many Top X Lists that it’s getting tougher to find a way to connect ten or so seemingly unconnected things. Stuff like, “Top 13 games where the number of powerups you can get is a prime number” or “Top 7 cartoon characters based on ancient Greek cartographers” is becoming the norm.

3. Your rankings are wrong. No matter your methods, about half the people who read your list will find something wrong with it. You ranked something dumb as super-high, or left something off the list that obviously should have been there. What are you, an idiot?

2. When you’re doing “Best of” or “Worst of” lists the same things pop up over and over again. Top whatever video games: Final Fantasy something, Zelda something, Mario something. Worst video games: ET, Atari 2600 Pac-man, Smurfs, and then some terrible adult game. Yawn, seen ’em.

1. Once you reach a big enough mass of material, trying to pick the top few is futile. According to this list in 2005 alone around 175,000 books were published just in the United States, not to mention the rest of the world. And you’re going to tell me that you can pick the top 25 of them that featured protagonists riding on the back of a talking dinosaur? You’ll have to pardon my skepticism.

Posted in articles, editorials | 1 Comment »

Borderline obsession

November 4th, 2009

Back in March of 2008 one of the most anticipated games I can remember finally made its way into my grubby little paws, Super Smash Bros. Brawl. On the day that I bought the thing, I spent over ten straight hours playing it. During that time I didn’t eat, didn’t drink, didn’t sleep, didn’t do anything except play that game, and I did the same thing for another half-dozen hours the next day.

Believe it or not, that used to be a common experience for me in the nineties. Possibly because I’d be dumb enough to rent a game that couldn’t be finished in under 20 hours and had to return it the next day. But from roughly the period between 2000 and 2008, that didn’t happen, at least not for me. Oh, sure, I played some pretty good games, but none of them put me in a state apparently one step removed from sleep.

I had thought that maybe something had changed. Had my passion for my hobby waned? Given that I started this very site in 2001, I’d say that’s probably not the case.

My best guess is that I have logged enough hours in enough games that I’ve kind of become one of those so-called ‘jaded gamers‘. I’ve been there, done that so many times that I almost forgot what it’s like to experience something new. But I’m relieved to know that the feeling is still buried down there somewhere, I just have to dig around a little to find it.

Posted in articles | 1 Comment »

Massively Single Player

November 3rd, 2009

It’s been quite some time, really, since I decided to try the new online sensation that is the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. Since then I’ve logged several hundred hours across Final Fantasy XI, World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, The Lord of the Rings Online, Dungeon Runners, Everquest, City of Heroes / City of Villains, and R.O.S.E. Online.

And I’ve given them all up. For one main reason:

Trying to organize a group of strangers to achieve a common goal is next to impossible.

Take Final Fantasy XI for example. Most of the game consists of finding a ‘camp’, sending one guy out to lure a monster over to your camp, and then beating on it mercilessly until it keels over and you get somehow stronger. Especially in the early levels, it really is that simple, but you’ll get people who act like they’ve never held a controller before, will walk off from their PC / Playstation without telling you, or instead of bringing one monster back to the camp, they’ll bring every monster in a five-mile radius for an insta-slaughter.

Or World of Warcraft. You might have a quest that tells you to take a thing to a guy in the next town over. If you’ve done the quest before and you know where the second guy is, you tell your buddies and start off to deliver the parcel. You get there only to discover that one guy followed you there, one guy got lost and ended up falling off a cliff, one guy is still at the store getting his gear fixed / selling trash, and one guy went to get supper 20 minutes ago, but didn’t bother to tell anyone, so he’s two towns back wondering where everyone is and begging them to come back to help him finish up the steps of the quest that everyone’s already done.

And on it goes that way. It’s as if the people on the other end of the game were plopped down in front of the control panel of a nuclear submarine, and all of the controls were in Esperanto.

So, rather than trying to deal with that nonsense, I mostly end up playing those kinds of games in single-player mode. Which is great, I don’t have to listen to anyone whining, I don’t have to bother with trying to coordinate chunks of missions around someone’s dog-walking schedule, and I can generally do things in the order that I want to, with the added bonus that if I take down a challenge that’s meant for a group by myself, then the victory was harder fought and slightly more memorable.

Of course, that means that I also miss out on large chunks of the games, mostly because I’m not bothering to do much of the group stuff, but that’s a tradeoff I’m willing to make.

Posted in articles, MMORPGs | Comments Closed

Unauthorized strategies

November 2nd, 2009

A couple of weekends ago I found a copy of the Ultimate Unauthorized Nintendo! Game Strategies at my local thrift store for a quarter. It’s got hints, tips, and strategies for around 100 NES games, which is pretty awesome.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Isn’t this the same guy who told us some time ago that strategy guides were contributing to the dumbing down of our game players of today?”

You better believe it! Let’s engage in a thought exercise for a moment for those who might think I’m a hypocrite for loving an old timey strategy guide over new-fangled ones.

Pretend for a moment that there’s no Internet. No GameFAQs, no GameWinners, no IGN, nothing of the sort. You’re sitting there, playing through a pretty tough game, and you hit a section or a puzzle that you just can’t wrap your head around. What do you do? I recommend throwing your hands up in frustration, staring at the ceiling for a few minutes, turning off your system, going to bed, and trying again the next day. But what if that doesn’t work? You can get a friend involved to see if you can work together to overcome whatever challenge is standing in your way, or you can run out and grab a hint book, I’ll repeat, hint book, not strategy guide.

A hint book won’t give you step-by-step handholding directions on how to overcome every challenge the game throws at you. It gives you a few pointers and then turns you loose. Heck, one of the most complicated games covered in the book, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, only gets five pages of exposition, and the first page is nothing but a fuzzy screenshot and some data about the game itself.

Which is a large part of why I have the stance on walkthroughs that I do. I view them as an absolute last resort if you’re stuck. Not some holy text to be followed by rote. To sail through the game guided along every step of the way by someone else’s instruction is more of a hollow victory.

Posted in articles, old school | 2 Comments »

NaBloPoMo 2009

November 1st, 2009

It’s time again for another National Blog Posting Month, and on the day that Daylight Saving Time ends, no less.

Do I have the chops to keep this site updated every day and this site updated every weekday during the month of November?

Stay tuned to find out!

Posted in nablopomo, site news | Comments Closed

Pro tip of the Day nominated for the Top 50 Indiana Blogs

October 22nd, 2009

Pro tip of the Day has been nominated for one of the Top 50 Indiana Blogs.

As of this writing it’s ranked at #65, but you can change all that by voting at this link.

Posted in ptotd, site news | Comments Closed

Sometimes it pays to get up early on a Saturday morning

September 14th, 2009

You might be wondering to yourself, “Why on Earth would I want to give up hours of sweet, sweet sleep on one of my precious days off?” Because, Saturdays in the Spring, Summer, and part of the Fall, are prime yardsale times.

And, yeah, a good number of them might not have anything that you’d ever be interested in, but if you persevere, you might find something good… like this!

Yard sale haul, September 2009

What do we have here? A whole pile of goodies for the NES. Let me break it down for you:

  • Tengen Pac-Man, with box and manual
  • Marble Madness, with box and manual
  • Mission Impossible, with box and manual
  • The Addams Family
  • Gradius
  • Ghostbusters 2
  • Q*Bert with manual
  • Nintendo Tetris
  • Excitebike manual
  • RBI Baseball
  • Jordan vs. Bird
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
  • Super Mario Bros / Duck Hunt
  • Kung Fu
  • Back to the Future II and III with manual missing the cover
  • Silent Service manual
  • Game Boy Super Mario Land manual
  • And in the top left corner, the fold-out map / skill chart for the NES Final Fantasy

Plus a big ol’ Tupperware-style bin. All for $2.

Which I’d say is totally worth sacrificing a little bit of sleep.

Posted in blog, news | 2 Comments »

Fun times

July 19th, 2009

It’s been a busy time for the Crummysocks network of sites:

Over at Pro Tip of the Day we’ve had some pretty interesting tips including my personal technique for mashing buttons faster, and a way to play the SNES Civilization that borderlines on cheating.

Rejected Screens got a ton of new screens, particularly from the Super NES version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time. I just can’t help myself, I really like that game.

On the game-playing front, I’ve finally gotten around to opening my copy of Final Fantasy VI Advance, which I bought back in ’07. The retranslation definitely changes the tone of a few of the scenes in the game, so it’s definitely worth it to play through for the thousand-and-first time.

I’ve also been slogging through Tales of Vesperia for the Xbox 360. I was pretty jazzed because I really liked the two Tales of Symphonia games but it’s been tough going, and I’m not really sure why. All of the pieces that I liked from the other games are there, but something just hasn’t ‘clicked’ for me yet. I’ll probably end up working though it all anyway, because I’m invested in it now, but it’s going to take some time. Probably even longer now that we have a remake of Turtles in Time coming down the pike.

Posted in articles, site news | Comments Closed

Competing sites

June 15th, 2009

After a few months, Pro tip of the Day is still going strong and closing in on its 200th update. And, like any site that’s a runaway success (or in my case a slightly lethargic sauntering success), it’s spawned an imitator.

I’m just as shocked as you are.

These jokers have also started a Pro tip of the Day dot com site, except their focus is less on video games and more on being funny. Except they quit updating after two weeks, and they weren’t exactly funny or useful.

But, hey, imitation’s a form of flattery, right?

Right?

Posted in articles, pro tip of the day, site news | Comments Closed

Oh, hi, site!

May 11th, 2009

Kinda forgot this site was here, sorry about that. We’ll have to fix the stream of content.

In the meantime, I might suggest you check out sister site Pro Tip of the day, which features a genuine pro tip from our highly-trained staff… which is really just me, every weekday.

Posted in site news | Comments Closed

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »