I’ll shamefully admit it: I’ve never beaten Super Mario Bros.

So the other day, I buckled down for a Super Mario Bros. 3 marathon with my nephew, age 7. While playing, I realized that Mario is timeless, and sure as my little nephew is growing up with him now, we’ll still remember Mario in a century.

Mario, Link, Master Chief, Solid Snake. These gaming monuments speak to desires and dreams rooted deeply inside of us, and the experiences they offer will never die.

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Whether you’re shooting zombies, terrorists, aliens, or Nazis it seems that most first person shooters all follow the same simple formula.

Pit a player in an epic environment with a desperate conflict in which his/her faction or side is losing. Then have their respective faction enlist their help to somehow turn the tides of war.

The player then must slaughter their way through countless armies and foes in order to achieve victory and save the world. Now throw in some explosions and engaging firefights throughout the game and you got yourself a FPS.

Predictable? Yes, and many have complained as a result, but will the FPS genre change anytime soon?

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Saving the world and thwarting the malicious plans of evil organizations is tough work even for video game heroes. And while characters like Master Chief get all the glory, their trusty partners are often behind the scenes pulling all the strings unnoticed.

Without their directions, these main heroes would have become hopelessly lost. In addition, many gamers would’ve slowly gone insane without these vital instructions. So this is for all those unsung sidekicks out there, this is another hormone driven Fuck-Marry-Kill: The Trusty Sidekick Edition!

If this does not offer the acknowledgment they deserve, then I’m not sure what will.

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For countless generations it has been said that the children are our future. But exactly what does this mean? A superficial interpretation will merely state that the youth will take over the roles of tomorrow.

However, as older generations are physically replaced by newer generations, there is also an introduction of new ideas, new values, and new perspectives that result in an overall change that expands throughout all social, cultural, political, and economic spectrums.

Often times, popular culture plays a large role in influencing future values. So, this begs the question of how will the generation of current popular culture, which also includes video games, come to view the world?
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It seems like Collector’s Edition have been around forever. If you go back and count gold cartridge games on the NES, then this may be true.

But gamers might remember Collector’s Editions’ later proliferation, beginning somewhere around the mid- to late-PS2-era of video games as a sort of test market for a reestablished price point of $60 per game.

With the new price point in place for this generation, it’s only natural for collector’s edition eclipse this mark by another 10 dollars. If my math is correct, that would put a current-gen CE running for $70.

Wrong! Read More »

That’s it! I’ve had it! I’m done!

Those roving bands of cocky 12-year-olds plaguing XBox Live have pushed me too far. It’s time to fight back! Since the Internet has taught me that revenge is a dish best served passive aggressive, I found one of those little shit’s Twitter accounts and pasted the contents below.

Gaze into the abyss, if you dare. But stare not too long, lest it transform you into the enemy. (Among other things, this means you’ll get a violent God complex and a voice that sounds like Chris Tucker singing falsetto while freebasing helium.)

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The new Xbox 360 commercials are dumb. Sure, there’s lots of eye candy and pretty music, but just think about the commercial for a second: they show some people watching an Xbox 360 in motion and enjoying, only to later find out that the 360 has EATEN THEIR BRAIN, hollowing out their skulls and replacing the insides with colorful images beamed in by some ungodly TV technology. Last time I checked, moms and politicians everywhere are still arguing that video games rot our brains, so I can’t say this ad speaks in the gamer’s favor. Furthermore, let’s pray that HDTV (Head Destroying TV?) isn’t some secret government plot to erase our minds.

But I digress; the point is, it can be hard to get your point across in a 30-60 second commercial, and most of these attempts end up being failures (that laughing baby doll from the first PS3 commercial still gives me the creeps). Yet over the course of the medium’s few decades of existence, there have been a few successful ad campaigns that have, at the very least, given us half a minute of pure enjoyment. Here are a few that have stayed in my mind throughout the years:

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I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the internet is full of assholes. Yes, the world at large is full of assholes too, but the internet distills humanity down to its most prick-ish essence. Every time you read a blog, the writer tries to be an asshole. If there is a comments section, the commenters try to out-asshole the writer and each other. Well, I want to take a moment to reflect on the small things in games that make me happy rather than just trying to be another asshole. Fair enough?

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