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.

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.

Since I've become a *gasp* productive member of society (at least somewhat), I have less time to devote to my chosen hobby than I'd like. That is, I'm away from my game consoles more often than I'd like. But to fill the gap, there's always portable gaming, right?

You betcha!

But it's not just the Nintendo DS and the Sony PSP. Most of us have some kind of cell phone at our disposal, and most of those are just right for playing quick 'pick-up-and-play' games in the odd moment of downtime. Which sounds great, but after playing a few of them I've made a sad discovery:

Most games available for your cell phone suck.

It's not the phone's fault, exactly. Most of them appear that they were designed to be phones first, with the ability to play games just kind of tacked on (there are exceptions, of course). The screen's too small, the phone interface just isn't designed to do more than input numbers, or maybe letters, and so on. Playing action games is just an exercise in frustration. Which means that you'll have to find something that takes less-precise input, and means that you're left with puzzlers. Slow puzzlers.

Which is what I'll have to take, so I will.

Oh, and I'm fully aware that this is going to open up the floodgates for people to start telling me how great their cell phones are for playing. But I'm ready for it.

We're at an interesting place in the evolution of video games. It's now possible to have hours and hours of high-definition spoken words played back in your game. This is a far cry from just 20 years ago when hearing a couple of words compressed nearly to oblivion was considered pretty amazing. Like in Blades of Steel.

So, since space was at such a premium, if you wanted lots of dialogue, you were limited to text, lots and lots of text. Which never bothered me too much, it was a limitation of the media.

But games have now evolved where multi-minute scenes are played out (with varying levels of talent, but that's fodder for another discussion), and text-heavy exchanges are becoming more and more infrequent.

And, to be honest, I hadn't really given that a whole lot of thought either, until I was watching some video game review show or another and one of the reviewers actually gave the game a lower mark because he had to read too much. He was of the opinion that technology had progressed to a point where everything can be voiced, so everything should be voiced.

But does it really add that much to the experience? Yeah, it's great to hear what the developers think the characters should sound like so I don't have to improvise voices in my head, but I can actually read far faster than most people talk. So if I come across a game that has the audio subtitled, I end up skipping over the dialog and reading the text instead. Which ends up sounding pretty herky-jerky and unbelievable.

So, for me, the jury's still out. I don't mind doing a lot of reading, but, I have to admin, having big blocks of text punctuated by the occasional voice-acted section (for the important plot points) is kind of nice.

In my time behind the various consoles, I've put in some marathon gaming sessions, occasionally hitting mental states very near to sleep. But I sometimes actually do remember to eat or drink something during a several-hour binge. Mostly because I start feeling too weak to hold up the controller without significant effort.

It's about then that I reach for something to get me going again. You're probably thinking, "Duh, caffeine." But you'd be wrong. Caffeine for whatever reason doesn't have much of an effect on me, and besides that, Mountain Dew just isn't a substitute for actually eating something.

But some foods are better for eating while playing games than others, especially if you can do some planning beforehand. I'm going to run down some choices and their relative pros/cons. We'll start off with some obvious choices:

Chips are pretty much a given. It's easy to grab a few during a break in the action, cram 'em down your throat, and continue gaming. But, unless you get baked chips, they're a little on the greasy side, which makes your controller slippery, and if you do get baked chips, they're pretty gross. Chips with flavored powder on them (like Doritos) are delicious, but you get that cheesy, gunky residue all over your fingers, which gets on your controller, which gunks it up worse than just the grease does. And anything that requires dip? Forget about it.

Pizza's convenient, since you can call up your favorite pizza joint and they'll cook it and bring it right to you. But, eating pizza really requires two hands to do properly, so it's really only viable if you're taking turns and it's not your turn or during the next several-minute long cutscene, and who knows when that's going to happen.

Candy seems like an obvious choice, especially the non-chocolatey kind. It's not messy, tastes great, and comes in these little wrappers. Which makes them good for a quick fix, but if you've ever eaten nothing but candy for a whole day (and I have) you're going to start feeling... weird. Weird is not good.

Fruits are actually a decent choice. Not necessarily because they're reasonably healthy, but because several of them come in their own wrappers. Just stay away from the ones you have to peel and you're golden. Stuff like pears and apples are OK, but once you eat more than half of it, you can't just sit it down without getting the flesh all gross, so bitesize stuff is a much better choice. Like cherries, grapes, or strawberries.

Simple sandwiches are also a good choice. Throwing your favorite filling between two slices of bread takes almost no time at all. As long as you don't go overboard making a Dagwood, that is. Just make sure you have a paper towel or plate handy so you can throw down your sandwich between bites, and you're in business.

I've tried a few other things, like soups, cereal, or even some herbal stimulants that were marketed toward golfers (no, I'm not kidding), but nothing has worked as well as fruits and sandwiches. I'm interested to see what other people have come up with to get them through marathon gaming sessions.

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?

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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)

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Activision game designer James Portnow has an article up on Next-Gen where he explores the concept of fairness in games. Games, he argues, must be unfair in some way to make them engaging, which seems counterintuitive. The problem with generating unfairness is to make the game challenging without making it frustrating. Dissatisfaction, he reasons, is brought about by the frustration at being unable to overcome the unfairness, rather than the unfairness itself.

Let us again lay out the standard argument against making an unfair game, “making a game unfair makes it frustrating and a frustrating game is unfun!” In this sentence lies the key to our problem. If we examine this sentence closely we find that it is not the unfairness that makes a game unfun but rather the resultant frustration. Thus our great question becomes: can we make a game that’s unfair and yet not frustrating?

Then, he does almost a 180° turn and decries indiscriminate use of unfairness.

"Of course we’re talking about a dangerous subject here, playing with fairness is playing with fire. There is no easier way to sink your game than to make it unfair. In my studies on the topic I have found dozens of games ruined by unfairness and only a handful elevated by it...but the potential is undeniably there."

More inside.

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A while back I explored the phenomenon that some games are like some movies, and are so bad that they become good. Clive Thompson, perhaps reading my article, has recently explored this idea in his column, though he wasn't able to find any games that traversed the SaT.

The pleasure of B entertainment is pure, narcotic-level irony -- the peculiar joy that comes from seeing something that is trying to be good but failing on every level.

Bad games never produce this pleasure. Gamers never sit around and fondly recall games that were so ludicrous they circled back and arrived at greatness. There is no game analog to, say, Sid and Marty Kroft children's show, or Plan Nine From Outer Space. When a game is bad, it's just ... bad.

I'll concede that he may not have gone far enough back into gaming history. All of the games he played were relatively modern. Many games in the 8-bit heyday fit squarely into this pigeonhole. Games like Bad Dudes ("President Ronnie has been kidnapped by ninjas, are you a bad enough dude to rescue President Ronnie?"). They do exist, you just need to expend a bit more effort to find them.

EDIT: Whoops, almost forgot about the original Resident Evil.

Link! (Wired via Slashdot)

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I don't really understand how Game Daily has managed to stay afloat as long as it has. Its staff is exceptionally incompetent. That they've managed to become and continue to be a source of news and information for anyone is beyond me.

Case in point, their recent review of Pokémon Battle Revolution. While not a great game by anyone's standard, the review manages to get some key issues completely wrong which makes me wonder if Robert Workman even played the game he was reviewing.

More inside.