To further add to the controversy:

I’m not going to admit that the opinions in this video are of my own (especially because it mostly is a statement on how the game does not hold up today), but X-Play is about to anger you severely.

I love the comments in this post as well. My favorite has to be “Dragon Warrior graphics sucked too lolz!!!1 Look, I can write for X-Play now!” Sure, because X-Play is all about the lolz!!!1 Anyway, just here to fan the fires. I won’t say I’m glad I’m not alone, but it’s comforting to know that my lack of interest in replaying it is justified.

Bad gamer habits.

** WARNING: You better bet there’s f***ing foul language all over this b***. **

At the end of my shift today I heard laughter erupting from one of the rooms in our employees only area. Gazing past many many people crowded in a little room I was able to catch what everyone was watching: a YouTube video of a guy cussing the hell out of one of those “Impossible Mario” (or Kaizo Mario as I’ve heard it called) levels. Watching those levels being played without audio is funny enough (just search YouTube for “Impossible Mario”), but this added commentary– done by a guy who obviously was just over-dubbing his own vocal to the video– really made it hilarious.

It brings to mind, however, the kinds of things I would say or have said when playing video games that were just WAY too hard. I can recount many times where I’d get to a point in the night where I’d be so tired and so bereft of sleep that I’d start talking to myself. These videos sound exactly like me as a kid. More than enough times I’ve said, “Ok, Mario, that was not my fault. That was your fault. I push the buttons, you jump. That’s how it works.” As if any of this made a fucking difference!

Other favorites of mine: “Listen… I know you don’t like me, Toad, but all I’m asking you to do is drive you FUCKING kart through FUCKING Rainbow Road in this FUCKING race. You don’t have to be #1 the whole time but AT LEAST stay on the FUCKING track for one full FUCKING minute!!!”

It’s really bad when you’re doing a marathon run of SimCity (the original) while singing the entirety of BoyzIIMen’s Cooleyhighharmony in mid-broken voice and neglected girlfriend on your bed. So very, very sad.

Anyway, to share in the hilarity, I’m embedding here the three parts of… well, I don’t know the official title since it looks like four people have uploaded this same video in three parts… let’s put it this way. This guy has a lot of fans. Be sure to watch in order, and you might find yourself stopping at the middle of part 2 since it does get a little repetitive and somewhat hard to watch all the way to the end. Part 1, though, is absolutely the best. Minus the Family Guy comment.

So, what dumb shit have you ever said when frustrated at a video game?

As mentioned at the end of Ep. 3…

At the end of Episode 3 of vgconvos.com the podcast (or whatever it’s called), I quickly mentioned that I had given Mike a gift before the recording. I had, in fact, printed out a photomosaic of one of Mike’s Top 10 favorite games.

This image, if you can’t tell, is the opening screen to Pokemon: Fire Red Version done in photo-mosaic style. It was done using a program called MacOSaiX which is Mac OS X only and was something I discovered with one of my trainees. It’s a phenomenal program where I can not only set whatever size and image I want to use, but I can choose what source the images come from–not just a folder on my hard drive of images or my iPhoto library, but Google image search results and flickr search results. So, this image is comprised of every image Google and flickr found when I put “Pokemon” in the search.

In short, it’s awesome, I printed it out on an 8×10 for Mike, and hopefully he has framed it and placed it comfortably across the toilet and copies of EGM in his bathroom.

No, really, check it out.

Wow, apparently the documentary was requested back for another week due to high demand, so you now have a second chance to see Blip Festival: Reformat the Planet at Pitchfork.tv. It’ll be up until Aug. 29th, so go! Now! Watch!

My Gameboy, my instrument.

Anyone who is familiar with my podcast-hopping has known that I am a bit of a music nerd. I love listening to it, talking about it, sharing it, recommending it, etc. Video game music has also been a huge part of my life. I can easily replay some of my favorite game tunes in an instant like the Legend of Zelda theme from the NES, M.U.L.E. from the C64 or anything new like Katamari Damacy’s main theme. Since I can’t seem to shake off the stuff I loved as a kid, I also really dig the chiptune music scene. When I was attending art school in 2002 I first heard a Glomag composition after I had ripped it from some poor person’s unsecured music folder on my school network. I then got into Bit Shifter and Nullsleep and found myself diving headfirst into the music scene. I also started an internship with New-York Tokyo that gave me plenty of opportunity to go to sponsored events and see these guys play live before they even knew they had a scene. Since college I haven’t really had the drive to listen to more of those songs since I’ve been so wrapped up in indie tunes and my electronic phase has semi-ended.

But if there’s one thing to bring you back to the music, it has to be a kickass documentary. You gotta check out Pitchfork.tv‘s One Week Only documentary. This week, it’s Blip Festival: Reformat the Planet. It’s a film about the chiptune scene and it highlights the original artists of chiptune music as well as a lot of new faces that really caught my ear. I would especially recommend it to people who have never heard the 8-bit obsessive sounds of this genre. It’s quite amazing that there would be retronerds who, like me, found the sound processor of their old consoles to be irresistible when you put Kraftwerk-inspired melodies to it.

I think everybody who played the C64, Atari, NES, Genesis and other consoles of that era, will find something here that they really enjoy. There’s no better community to be a part of. The records of most of these artists can be found at 8BitPeoples and a lot of their songs can be downloaded for free. Some of the new artists I would recommend are Random and chip/rock foursome Anamanaguchi. Hearing the 8-bit bleeping next to electric guitar and real drums is quite a nice harmony.

That’s my recommendation for this week. I believe Pitchfork.tv switches their documentaries on the weekend so make sure you get a chance to see it before they change it! Reformat the planet!