Tag Archives: game

You Can’t Pwn At Pong

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Mario Bros Atari
I’m only twenty-something, but I still am not sure I feel right saying ‘pwned’.

It feels a bit unreal to have gaming be the younger cool. It seems like just yesterday, I was my little brother’s age and getting flack for the same reason he’s considered awesome. I feel like the same people who will wear Mario Bros. shirts now might be the same ones who poked at me in school for video gaming. Part of me wants to reveal the poser they are. I would ask them:

In the first level, do you go down the pipe for the coins? You do? Now why would you do that? There’s a barely hidden one-up that you miss if you go down the pipe. 100 coins equal a one-up. Do the math.

They look at me blankly, thinking, “Up-whats?”.

Am I still allowed to use the word poser?

Across the room, nestled between cd video games and Super Nintendo cartridges are little rectangle bricks that belong to no Nintendo. One of them even says “Mario Bros.” on it.

People think Mario, they think Nintendo. It’s hilarious how many games people remember as being exclusive classics for the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System originated for the Atari, early PC, and even old Macs.

You just can’t pwn at old video games. There was no typing to other players in a multiplayer environment. Even when doors and muds came about in BBS land, I don’t know about you guys, but I remember there usually being 1 node for one person to play at one time. In Legend of the Red Dragon, when you killed someone in the field and were interviewed for what you said after kicking ass, no one ever uttered “Pwned!”. They would have looked at the screen, backspaced a few times, and totally “Owned!” you.

Legend of the Red Dragon

I also feel I don’t really pwn, because I don’t play Halo. To me, Halo is just MIDI Maze, Wolfenstein 3d, Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem, Heretic, Hexen, or GoldenEye 007(etc.) all over again… in space… with more jumping. Wait, System Shock was in space (with zombies even). So yeah, just with more jumping. I know people will raise their fists at me, but to me Halo has been repeated so many times that I shrug.

I watch my little bro in his headset screaming ‘Dude! Let’s super jump.’ and just ask, “Why is there so much jumping?” and feel kind of old.

I don’t mind feeling out of touch with pwnage. What is kind of sad is that I’ve stopped being as excited by new video games. I’ll say, “That’s kind of cool.” or “That’s pretty neat.”, but for the most part, I just feel like I’ll never be as excited as I was when video games were still new with leaps and bounds in their advancement. I didn’t even have the money for them, but I had plenty of time and an obsessed uncle.

Don’t get me wrong, I roll up my Katamaris and I play my voice acted RPGs, RTSs, and TBSs. So, maybe I’m just not a shoot ’em up kinda gamer.

This is not the case, because I’m not all about the MMORPGs. Instead they horrify me. The amount of time (or cheating) you have to invest to have a good time just boggles my mind. In addition, it’s kind of like I say when I see someone play Halo and I say, “Why is there so much jumping?”, with these it’s, “Wow, why is there so much running around?” Sure, there’s always been world map trekking, but this is insane. It used to be a few steps to the next town or a few random fights, now the random fights *ARE* the game. The intimacy of you, the characters, and the plot has been sacrificed to hack and slash with a subscription fee.

If you are reading this and like Halo or your MMORPG of choice, good for you. I mean, I’m obviously old and not so cool, so don’t listen to granny here.

I will keep saying “In my day…”, but that’s okay too. The best part about it is that now I have the resources to find all the old games I missed and try them out with the PC and emulator. Then I’ll snap shot the screen shots that amuse me and put them away for future posts. I know old games are not without flaws, but their flaws were lack of budget and technology to back them. I am floored by the mediocrity of today’s games. We have the tech and budget now, but where is all the fun game play and awesome writing? Creativity used to outpace the ability to convey it, now that the money and tech are there… where has it gone?

I am glad that there are exceptions. I just wish they were more the rule than the exception. At some point I’m hoping I’ll see it come back around and people will learn that eye-candy and hack and slash just isn’t enough.

Pure pwnage needs something more to back it up.

When You Google Yourself

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Phantasy Star 2 Wanted

To the right: Phantasy Star 2 (Sega Genesis).

When you Google yourself, you expect to find yourself in at least a few places that you didn’t expect to be found.

What no one expects is for some idiot to treat their blog like it’s some pre-teen’s live journal and talk about you unkindly as if no one would ever know it was you. If someone were to do that, you’d at least expect them to try and hide who you are. Like say “this guy” or “someone I know…” or “…we’ll call him Bobalicious…”. If they still used, not just your first name, but your whole legal, given name, you’d figure they’d at least have a reason to… like some kind of vendetta. Maybe you keyed their car or slept with their sister. Maybe you kicked their dog.

What if all you did was try to be polite?

A friend of mine ran into someone she used to know. During the conversation, another old mutual friend came up. She asked how this friend was doing, what they were up to, and even took down their number. She did it just to be polite, never called the number, and didn’t even think about it again until much later.

Much later, she was playing everyone’s favorite internet game: Google myself!!

When she Googles herself, she gets a lot of results from people who are spell check impaired since her name is close enough to real words. There are other people with the same name. Nothing too noteworthy…

Then she found this (all misspellings, bad grammar, etc. I kept, but the names are ***ed out):

 
“So I wonder what’s gonna happen when ********** calls my cell-phone. Will I answe it? What would we ever have to talk about. Apparently we’ve been living in the same town for quite awhile- I wonder why she doesn’t ever come downtown. ***** said she looked the same, acted the same. It would be a shame if she’d never blossomed. Maybe she just still shy. I’m terrified of talking to her”

 
She was satisfied with telling her friends about it and us all saying ‘what an ass’, but I was a bit more pissed. I wanted to call that number and give this guy something to be terrified about.

Another friend did some reconnaissance and found the blog. I left a comment. I even left a link to my blog…

 
“So I wonder what’s gonna happen when ********** calls my cell-phone. Will I answe it?”

When? Don’t you mean if? Just because she was polite enough to ask for your number doesn’t mean she’ll call it, especially if you’re posting this.

“What would we ever have to talk about.”

Life? Is there really so little that has happened to you since you last spoke that you’d have nothing interesting to tell an old friend about?

“***** said she looked the same, acted the same. It would be a shame if she’d never blossomed.”

She still looks and acts like ****. Yeah, I know, too bad she didn’t conform to the way she should look or act.

“Maybe she just still shy. I’m terrified of talking to her.”

She’s shy but you’re terrified of talking? She’s like barely five feet tall and an openminded individual. Whatever she had to say, I bet it would have been nicer than what you had to say on the internet.

Well, no need to be afraid. I’m sure she won’t be calling you now.

 
I hope he reads it. I hope it makes him blush. I hope he then links to here and sees that I talked about it in my blog. I hope he then writes a follow up post either bad mouthing me or trying to defend himself.

Never blossomed? I’m sorry that we’re not all flowers or bloomin’ onions. We’re women who come into our own, but not exclusively in ways designed specifically to appeal to your own individual male sensibilities.

Look the same? Did he expect her to have a problem with not being a six foot blonde with a paper thin tummy and mushy melons? Did he expect plastic surgery on his behalf?


Sound the same? She’s always had interesting things to say and an amazing singing voice. Who should she sound like…

Him?

And all these conclusions are jumped to because he talked to someone who talked to her.

Is the terrifying thing that he may hear about how great she’s doing? She’ll tell him all the places she’s been and things she’s done, and he’ll feel small and empty and write about it on his blog. So instead of calling her, and judging for himself how this friend is doing, make a preemptive strike online. He belittles her so he can feel better about it when she calls. If she calls. She isn’t going to call him. Why would she?

He apparently has nothing much to say anyways.