BlindFire

It’s been a long time since I’ve remembered that I still have this site. Not sure I even remember how to write. But I’ll give it a whirl anyways.

First off, I will write up some sort of 2009 year in review.. eventually. Once I stop being lazy. Using this Google spreadsheet borrowed from cheapassgamer.com, I figured out that I’ve played 24 games that came out this year (25 if you include the latest IIDX). And of those, I only completed 12. You’ll just have to wait an unknown amount of time until I post again to find out what those games were!

It’s as decently OK of a Japanese arcade book as you’ll ever read.

For now, you’ll have to make due with my little review of Arcade Mania by Brian Ashcraft of Kotaku fame. The content was exactly what you’d want and expect: a glimpse into the types of games that inhabit Japanese arcades and pictures of the famous and weird cabinets. The organization was spot-on, starting with games designed to draw you in like picture booths and claw-games, then onto the meaty, hard-core, suck-out-your-coins-and-free-time games like fighting games and pachinko, then finish it off with the wave of the future: card collecting games. Throw in a few people/gamer profiles, and you’ve got the backbone for a fine book that could practically write itself.

Perhaps it should have. Instead Ashcraft wrote it and wrote a lot. There were some interesting histories and tidbits to be sure, but I would’ve liked more games and pretty pictures and less chit-chat. Basically, I wanted one of those over-sized coffee table books that guests could peruse while I made cups of tea in the kitchen. Instead, it felt like when you go to a party where you don’t know a lot of people, and one of the guests traps you in a corner and starts talking to you about his job and life, despite the fact that he’s well aware that he doesn’t have a good story to tell nor a point to telling it, but continues to drone on but you don’t really mind his chatter and you’re just there to drink and people-watch anyways. Or maybe that’s only something that happens to me. Or at least the hypothetical me; I haven’t been to a party in ages.

So yeah, the book I just read is like the review I just wrote. Kinda like a rambling high school research paper, lazily slapped together, here lookey, I did something, and wrote enough to make it seem like a real essay, and now.. uh, here it is, and… it could’ve been a lot better but, welp, there ya go. I recommend the book because it’s got arcades and stuff.

Will! William of http://www.willandbeyond.com/ fame! Does this update show up weird in your RSS? If not, then COOL BEANS!!

Well, I foolishly decided to interrupt yet another fine summer of video game playing to get a job. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t get some sweet sweet game playin’ in. Let’s check out what I played.

Don’t get too attached; he has a tendency to get splattered upon things.

Hmm.. apparently the only new thing of interest in July is N+. Seems as good a place as any to start.

I got this on sale for $5 and it was worth every penny, and probably not one cent more. It’s like paying for a Rubik’s cube. You have fun manipulating the cube at first, you do a little touchdown celebration dance when you figure out how to solve a single side of the cube, but then you throw the thing right thru the damn window when it comes to the hard part of actually solving the damn puzzle. And you don’t really care because it was cheap and disposable, and it doesn’t make a great paperweight anyway.

Same thing with N+, except replace anything referencing ‘the cube’ with ‘the bandanna clad ninja and his zany puzzles’ (especially the paperweight part, xbla games are terrible at keeping papers down). The game gets way too hard at a point, and then there’s no more fun left to squeeze out of the damn thing. I will say that the multiplayer games, while a bit shallow, are fun nonetheless. If you really must play this game, just play the flash version. I’m sure it’s just as good.

I also read Empire, the book based on Shadow Complex…. or vice versa, or something like that. Not really video game related, and not a very good book, but at least it made me think that Shadow Complex’s story can’t be that much worse. I am very looking forward to Shadow Complex, as its spiritual cousin Super Metroid is probably in my Top 5 or 10 games ever. I am fully prepared to have my unattainably high expectations crushed on August 19th.

Who doesn’t love the violet unis?

But until then, I’ve got a bunch of high school boys to woo to the heavily homo-erotic school of NYU. That’s right, it’s NCAA Football time! Go Bobcats!

I borrowed NCAA Football 10 from the library, and first thing I did was recreate my NYU football team. All violet uni’s just look wonderful, I must say. Like giant grapes tromping about the field. They play inside of the sub-basement of the Palladium dorm, which just happens to look like Ford Field in Detroit I believe. Haven’t actually played too much football though, as I’m having fun trying to recruit high schoolers to NYU. You can give them pitches like how vibrant the school atmosphere is or how famous the coach is to entice them.

I wish I could give the “you’re in the city of New York, so there’s hot babes in every club, plus the college itself is like a 60:40 female:male ratio, plus at least 30% of those males have the hots for the other 70% of the males, and just ye gods, imagine the amount of different sexual conquests you could check off your bucket-list, no matter what sexual urge you got” pitch. How would this not be an instant recruit commitment from any horny male 17 year old? I would probably pluck at least 10 of the top 50 players each year with that pitch, though they’d always be out with a groin “injury” or something equally VD-ish.

And lastly, Jialu and I couldn’t stand the rainy summer weekends any longer, and got Marvel Ultimate Alliance for cheap. It was fun yet stupid, much like how Doritos are tasty but unhealthy. In fact, both are probably equally as cheesy. The story was haphazard and full of nonsense excuses to change scenery. The voice acting was either tongue-in-cheek or phoned-in, but I can’t be sure of which. I’m not sure that’s an attribute you want from your voice actors. The puzzles and boss fights were either painfully stupid, confusing, or filler because the game wasn’t long enough.

We ended up making our team out of none of these characters. Spider-Woman, Human Torch, Dr. Strange and Deadpool are where it is at.

Everything about the game design says “We know this will sell because people want to play as superheroes, so let’s at least make them cool, and forget about everything else in the game”. It eventually gets to the point where you become overpowered and topple everything in site, but at least you could kick ass in hilarious ways. I especially enjoyed Mr. Fantastic’s hilarious spinning fists of doom, and Dr. Strange’s turn-you-into-a-crate fireball.

It’s fun, a bit short for an RPG (which is not a bad thing in this 100-hour RPG world we live in), a bit long for a beat’em up and takes very little brain power. Excellent for wasting away a rainy day. I’ll probably end up getting MUA2 during the next rainy season that El Niño sends our way.

If it feels like forever since I’ve updated, that’s because it has been. Maybe I should set up a bet with someone that if I don’t update weekly or something, I have to pay them like, $10 or something. It’s all about powerful incentives ya know.

A screenshot of me beating my high score for the week. Can’t you feel the excitement?

Speaking of powerful (yet sucky and pointless) incentives, Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook has all the wrong reasons to play it. The premise is that you have 1 minute to score as high as possible by matching 3 or more like colors every move. There are special jewels that do stuff, and multipliers, and whatever. But all of that doesn’t matter because it’s pretty much playing a slot machine, except without the 0.0003% chance of actually making money. The randomness should make the game unplayable, but sadly, I find myself sometimes saying “Just one more game, it’ll only take a minute anyway, and maybe this next board will be ‘the one’”. So it really is gambling, sans being able to spend your winnings on hookers. Though to be fair, I have yet to show off my high score to any hookers, so I could be wrong.

This game is also playable by hooking up 4 DDR pads in a row and running frantically back and forth.

Slightly lower than hookers on the social ladder are all the groupies you’d get if you were in a rock band. But imagine if the real world were like Rock Band Unplugged for PSP, where you actually play all 4 instruments (not at the very same time though, that’d be madness). Would you get 4x the groupies? Probably not, maybe more like 3.2x. I’ve never heard of anybody getting all antsy in the pantsy for a bassist.

Anyway, there’s nothing bad to say about the game. It’s fun and has multiple difficulties and plenty (maybe too many) challenges to conquer. But I’ll take DJ Max Portable instead. I like the songs better in DJ Max than Rock Band, as they appeal more to my yellow-fever addled brain.

Can this witch-in-training and her Earthling friends use golf to save the world from a golf-derived armageddon? And has that question ever been asked before?

My PSP has also been getting some golf in with Pangya: Fantasy Golf. It’s like the PC version of Pangya which you can play online with people, except with less courses, and more uh… story about saving the world from the lord of darkness. Apparently the world can be destroyed via golf, and the only thing that could stop such a heinous thing from happening is more golf. I think it somehow has a worse plot than Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10.

On the Xbox 360, I got my nerd on with Magic: The Gathering. I argue that $10 for the eight or so decks in this game is much cheaper than buying cards, so it’s worth it. And the single player is quite lengthy, if you can be bothered to unlock all the cards. Another bonus is that the computer knows the rules of the game, whereas I do not. So that’s less rule books for me to read. If you like Magic, but hate buying cards and knowing rules, this is certainly the version for you.

Probably the game I played the most this month was the 1 vs. 100 beta. I wonder how a reviewer of video games would review a trivia game. I mean, it has trivia, and let’s you compete against others, and eventually you’ll be allowed to win prizes. Does this even count as a video game?

“I just won 10,000 MS points and tore my groin! Woo!”

I guess not, since it’s just a virtual reality game show type thing. Anyway, the trivia is good and all, and I think the host for the live programs manages to make the breaks between questions a non-boring experience. And really, that’s all you could ask of a host in an online show. I do find myself enjoying the ads that they show. It’s like I’m really watching TV! There’s something about it being sponsored that makes it more authentic. Like a verification that they are legit, and not somehow stealing MS points away from me instead. I’m not sure why 1 vs. 100 would need to prove itself like that, but it’s comforting nonetheless.

Don’t worry. The kid’s Asian, he probably knows Kung-Fu.

So this Malcolm Gladwell article on Davids vs. Goliaths is typical Gladwell. Stupidly fun to read. To sum it up quickly yet unsuccinctly (which should totally be a word, btw), people who are underdogs can win by working harder and/or smarter than their opponent. So for example, David beat Goliath not by out-muscling him, but by making the fight a long-range vs. short-range attack. Advantage: rock-slinger.

It is not that Davids break the rules; they merely break the tradition or perhaps the spirit of the rules.

So perhaps when people cheat in online FPSes (like people shooting from underground in COD:WaW), they think that if the machine is capable of doing this trick, then it’s within the set of rules?

So at the end of Gladwell’s article, the referee is kind of like the video game company patching a game to make it more fair. Well, fair to the people who are playing the way it’s “supposed” to be played.

This is the first dunk in women’s college basketball.

In the 40s or whenever the first slam dunk occurred in basketball, I wonder if people playing with the dude were like, “Hey! WTF are you doing??” Imagine if they had rewritten the laws of basketball to say No Jumping Higher than the Hoop Allowed. Now that would be weird.

All this reminded me of this chapter in Naruto, you know, the one with the annoyingly voiced ninja kid, where all the kid ninjas had to take an impossible writing test where the only way to pass was to cheat without being detected for cheating using their ninja skills (I still think this is the most ingenious thing ever to come out of manga (however, the YouTube clip of it is a lot less cool than it seemed in my imagination)).

So, I finally ask: have there been any games where the only way to win is to cheat, or play in a way the game didn’t intend you to play?

I can’t remember any game that specifically required you to break the rules of the game to beat it. If I could make video games (nevermind the shooting and puzzle games I made in Flash a year ago), I’d make one like that. Though if it’s designed to be cheated, then it isn’t cheating… or is it? Now I’m just confused.

This is how I got most of my boxing knowledge. By getting kicked in the face.

So I was ranting to Jialu (as if I knew what I was talking about) that Boxing is a poorly designed sport. It seems that every match is either a quick knockout, or a long boring match with lots of clutching and grabbing. Of course, I derived this from the maybe 5 or 6 matches I’ve ever watched on Pay-per-view (and the recent Pacquiao-Hatton fight I watched on Justin.TV).

There are good matches for sure (mostly whatever Ali fight they show on ESPN Classic). But I don’t know enough about boxing and boxing history to say if it’s a poorly designed sport. Maybe a poor spectator sport, as you’ll never know how long the fight will be and the most hyped fights are expensive to watch.

This got me thinking, what non-video game things could use a bit of video-game-ification?

1. Humans

Pro: Highly developed brains, opposable thumbs
Con: No HUD, difficult to determine HP and other vital stats

I for one would like to know what my HP is, so I can tell whether to enter into tennis battles and if I have a chance of surviving the encounter. The addition of a HUD, which shows how close you are to passing out from tiredness or how many minutes you have left until you need to go to bathroom, would allow people to make better decisions about their free time.

2. Public Education

Pro: Provides you skills necessary for expanding your mind
Con: Boringly easy for smarty pants, frustratingly hard for dummies, and not guaranteed to provide you with any skills necessary to expand the mind

Just a few of the possible majors you can select as a young’un.

A possible fix for this is classes. Like, the ones provided in Team Fortress 2, or WoW. Yes, there are honors, remedial, and electives as well, but there’s a bit of an over-emphasis on well-roundedness for my tastes. Why must it always be general skills leading to specific ones? So I’m not interested in history, how does giving me a C provide me with any new info? I know I don’t like history class, I don’t need a grade to solidify the fact.

With selectable classes, kids can work on getting good grades on the stuff they give a crap about or have a natural advantage in. Perhaps you’d say that everyone needs to go through a few years of general education to find out what they like in the first place. Fair enough. But once, say, middle school starts, if I want to be a doctor, let me start getting my Doogie Howser on! It’s a lot easier to learn if you know the stuff you learn will help in the future.

3. Jewelry

Pro: Impresses the ladies, shows off your financial status
Con: Lacks the stat boosts of video game jewelry, probably not worth 6 months of your salary

Or maybe a ring that lets you translate languages… or silly codes at least.

Kinda like those magnetized bracelets, except that actually work. I’m thinking like, medically enchanted rings that could provide practical protection for people. Imagine a ring that when worn, prevented your skin from getting sun burnt? Maybe a memory necklace, that would vibrate every once in a while to remind you of something you don’t want to forget, like getting milk. Or an anklet that stabilized clumsy people from tripping over cracks in the ground? Or an eye-patch that improved vision? Wait, that’s called a monocle. Uh… well you know what I mean!

4. Life

Pro: The ultimate sandbox game, Super high quality graphics, Realistic physics
Con: No achievement points, world-wide easily accessible leader board

Sigh… a boy can dream. A boy can dream.

While we do have things like diplomas, certification, the Guinness Book of World Records, and sports statistics, we could do better. I know that if there were a Friend’s Leaderboard in Pull-Ups Done in One Exercise session, I would work out a lot more, simply because I’m a competitive jerk. Instead, I have no clue how much weaker I am than my friends/enemies, and am thus a fat slob.

Possible solution: A Facebook app that auto-updates stupid competitions you have between friends. Who wouldn’t constantly F5 their Facebook seeing if one of their friends has pee’d farther than your high score of 1.23 yards?

I don’t make enough lists. It’s the internet, I’m required to write a list at least once a year, right? Anyway, here’s my list of three hypothetical games that would be mildly edutainment like, or at least help with some problems in life.

This game idea is just like this street sign, except more fun. Or less fun. Well, certainly not the same amount of fun, that’s for sure.

1. Career Fighter – Point of the game: Help focus the player on the process of choosing a career path in life.

Much like how the cast of Street Fighter kinda sorta tries to represent every country/fighting style (or how the cast of Arcana Heart represents every Japanese fetish.. well, at least the palatable ones), this game would have a cast of characters that represent rough approximations of different vocations.

Let’s say for the sake of simplicity there are only 4 occupations in this game (though the “real” one would probably have more): Musician, Grave Digger, Lawyer, and Engineer.

How it works is through some sort of test, perhaps a personality test, the game assigns various advantageous attributes to each character depending on your answers.

These girls kick the crap out of each other to find out whose fetish reigns supreme!

For example, let’s say your answers show you’re more extroverted. Let’s say this translates to greater projectile range for the Lawyer and Musician characters, a faster filling Special Meter for Engineers, and perhaps a penalty to the Grave Digger like blocking is only 10% effective. This somehow correlates to the idea (in my head at least) that Lawyers and Musicians are better at what they do because they can reach out to others more easily, Engineers can be more creative by sharing ideas with others, and that a Grave Digger would be wasting his extroversion in a job that I’m fairly certain has no use for being able to shoot the shit with co-workers.

Conversely, let’s say you answer on the test that you like physical work. I’d assign a strength bonus to the Grave Digger, faster casting of spells for the Engineer (he can.. uh.. build things faster?), and penalties to the Lawyer and Musician such as greater rate of misfire (they are more clumsy when working with mental objects?).

Okay, it’s not perfect. But the gist is that you find that fighting in the game is easier when you pick a character with the occupation that matches your occupational strengths better. And for more life analogousness, if you do want to pick someone your personality doesn’t match with, you’ll have to work much harder to get through the game. But it wouldn’t be impossible.

Uh.. this is not exactly what I had in mind.

2. World of Dating – Point of the game: A dating site, except with dating-sim/RPG/real-life reward elements

I don’t know if anything is wrong with the current online dating site scene. But I see my idea as at least providing a way for people to pre-date each other (that is to say, date before actually going on a date, and not try to one-up each other on who was born first). Some people try to make a better mouse trap. I’m trying to make a better ice-breaker.

So when you first sign up, obviously you state your sex and orientation (let’s just assume everyone tells the truth). Congrats! You are now a LVL. 1 dater. You gain XP by going on online dates with other people who match your preferences in sex and orientation. From LVLs 1 through let’s say 5, you’re not allowed to choose who you date, the computer decides for you. This let’s you “shop around”, and try out different kinds of people.

Online dates will be something like forcing two people to have a constant chat box on their screens, and the two decide what to do on the internet together for 15 minutes. Maybe you’ll browse Gizmodo together, browse Japanese hentai blogs, or go on a scavenger hunt for the best tap-dancing on rollerskates video. You two have to figure it out. Or maybe you two will just fight or not talk to each other for the 15 minutes.

Just for going on these online dates you’ll get a base amount of XP. You can get more XP by detailing how the other person was. And you can get more XP by writing notes to yourself about what you liked/disliked about that date. As you go on more dates, you’ll get more XP. You can also get XP by sharing tips to lower LVL noobs.

Also not what I had in mind.

LVL ups will get you things like access to others’ profiles, what other people thought of them on their dates, or more personal profile space, and eventually, the ability to send messages to others or setup online or real-life dates. And also, if you go on real life dates, you can exchange codes to get even bigger XP rewards. Maybe eventually XP can be exchanged for movie tickets, or gift certificates to restaurants, or other items to help you in your real-life quests, err, dates.

Anyway, I’m sure there’s a whole bunch of logistic problems with this idea (ugh, don’t even want to think of what havoc griefers could do). But the theory is to make a site that is a better social lubricant for the shy adventurer to get his/her feet wet in the world of dating. The less-personal online dates provide a taste of one-on-one interactions. Then once they feel comfortable enough to try the real thing, the site will provide other incentives for real-life dates such as free food and movies, so that at worst, your crappy date is at least a cheap one.

3. Peggle Piggy Bank – Point of the game: Help people get out of debt/save money, and track their results via Peggle.

EXTREME FEVER!!!! You’ve unlocked the ability to buy stuff!

So how it’d work is that you enter all your debt and savings/retirement/checking accounts into the game. The game asks for the balances of each account let’s say every paycheck, and you can only play the game once per paycheck. Depending on your preset choices on where money should go per paycheck, it either awards you with more or less Peggle balls to try and beat a level. Each paycheck, the amount of balls starts at where it was last paycheck, and then that amount is altered depending on if you met your debt reduction/savings goals for the paycheck.

If you can beat the Peggle level with the allotted amount of balls, it’ll unlock new levels and power-ups. Levels will get harder and require at least x amount of balls unlocked before being played. You can beat the entire game once you’re out of debt/save enough.

This is probably the stupidest of the three ideas, but I just like the idea of having a piggy bank that doubles as a Peggle machine.

…

And so ends a caffeine-fueled brain dump on video games to help society. Maybe next time I’ll tackle video game ideas that will help bloggers think of better things to post about?

Aaaahhhhh….

My cleverly titled review of Rhythm Heaven is up on the New York – Tokyo website. It’s the first I’ve ever made and uploaded without assistance from the friendly NYT staff, so hopefully I didn’t break the site.

Go read the review, I’ll wait.

…

K, thanks. Think of what follows as the B-side to the review.

So I mentioned how it was a challenging game, but I never mentioned how many times the game made me want to stab my DS right through its not-so-squishy touch screen. Argh, remix 8 should go die to death.

I for one, do not believe I can fly. I checked the other day and ended up falling on my butt.

Speaking of other musical tangents, Jialu and I have been investigating acoustic guitars. I think the new Spring anime K-On! was what piqued our interests. Of course, I’m also interested in this anime about basketball-playing mechs, but that doesn’t mean I want to play some sort of basketball in outer space. But I’d call it Space Jam if I did.

Anyway, back to the guitars. I have this crap-ass guitar from the flea market, and it sucks a lot. I decided I’d try to fix it up by replacing the strings. This lead to me breaking one of the tuning pegs, thus making it impossible to tune the 6th string.

Nevertheless, I’ve been trying to learn some chords and such. Trying to a play a shittacular guitar with only 5 out of 6 strings as a beginner has made me think back to when I first tried to learn other musical games.

I remember my first DDR session ever, I think I passed Rhythm & Police on Light with a D. I hardly knew where the arrows were, I stepped too lightly most of the time, and felt like a douche all of the time.

Come on, anyone else want to learn bass and drums so me and Jialu can start a Japanese school girl rock band? Don’t worry, our uniforms are quite flattering.

Then I think back to when I first got beatmania IIDX 8th style. I didn’t have the special controller yet, so I learned to play on the controller. Hitting 8 buttons on a controller is so far removed from the 7 + scratch pad on the real thing, that I might as well have played Stepmania doubles on my laptop.

It’s funny how every time I try a new music game or instrument, I seem to start with a handicap, whether it be a -$10 guitar, a lack of proper controller, or in DDR’s case, a lack of bodily control and dance pad awareness (nearly broke my ankle falling off the pad on my 2nd or 3rd song ever). But these things are just fun to learn, even with stupid handicaps in the way.

Rhythm Heaven has none of those handicaps. And maybe that’s why I didn’t like it as much as I thought I should’ve. I loved the hell out of the Ouendan/Elite Beat Agents, because screen-tapping was a new and exciting adventure at the time (hell, it’s the reason I imported a DS Lite from Japan).

Once you’ve smacked one frog, you’ve smacked them all, I suppose.

But Rhythm Heaven just seemed like it didn’t add anything to my arsenal of video game music skills. Maybe that’s why I found the end-game so frustrating? Like, I know what to do, and with practice I could do it, but what’s the point of getting perfects when I want to move on to new cool things I’ve never seen before?

So my opinion on Rhythm Heaven? Pointlessly difficult. At least IIDX is cartoonishly difficult so that beating a hard song feels like an accomplishment. But Rhythm Heaven feels more like an exercise in being a perfectionist. As for me, I’d rather focus that energy into trying not to snap my assy guitar in half.

This is my awesome patch.

Decided to finally fix my rollerblade boot. There was a huge hole in the inside that my heel would get caught on. This made it hard to get my skate on my foot.

One problem. Well, a few problems. A) I don’t know how to sew. B) I don’t have any fabric. C) The inside of a boot is very difficult to maneuver and it is fixed to the rest of the skate. This resulted in what you see above.

I solved A by watching a video on sewing a patch onto a pair of pants using a sewing machine and then decided, eh, I can extrapolate from there. B was solved by cutting up a pair of Dockers I was gonna get rid of anyways. And C I never really did solve, as you can see from the huge gaps in the stitching and the fact that I pricked myself at least 10 times.

What does this have to do with video games? Well, nothing really. But I did start writing for New York – Tokyo, so you should check that out if you have time.

Also, I have links to everything I’ve written on the internets on the About page. In case you really want to know why perverts love the Wii.

As you may remember from my previous post, I set the parental timer on my Xbox for a hour a day time limit. I decided to play an hour a day and keep a mini-diary. I mostly played Resident Evil 5 (review of choice here). Here is the thrilling diary of the past week:

The most fearsome enemy in the game by far. And most cuddly.

Day 1 – I played my first hour and 5 minutes of the experiment. Started RE5 on Hard so that I can eventually unlock super-hard mode. I cheated a tad on time, as I was in a boss fight with the chainsaw-wielding deranged cousin of Sackboy and needed an extra 3 minutes past an hour to get to a save point.

Day 2 – No video games. Played outside because it was a nice day. I choked a tennis set. I was up 5-2, but lost in a 6-6 tiebreak. I lost my ability to serve just as Ben regained his. Unclutch.

Day 3 – Tried to win a CoD:WaW map pack from Kotaku. Not sure why, as I don’t play this game anymore. This took 15 minutes of my Xbox time. I did not win. Played more RE5. Finally got the best magnum in the game to be fully upgraded. Did not have enough bonus points to buy the endless ammo though.

Played some DJMax Fever. Decided I hate the button fix/glitch. (You can press the wrong button but timed correctly, and get the note anyway. It’s stupid as hell and cheapens the act of passing songs.) Played IIDX, which has the correct amount of strictness for my tastes. Also, I failed a bunch of songs. Then my back started aching from tennis the day before.

Day 4 – Earned enough to get the endless ammo for the magnum. Running around with a magnum has turned RE5 into a point and click adventure. It’s pretty sweet. Played more IIDX, and my back started acting up again. Getting old.

Day 5 – Had only the back-end of a bout of insomnia, woke up too early, already used up my 1 hour of play by 7:30am. I listened to the Adam Carolla podcast with Seth MacFarlane (of Family Guy fame) instead of the game music and sfx. It was odd having Brian the dog and Death talking to each other while playing RE5.

These aren’t the best games on the Genesis, but merely Sonic’s favorite games on the Genesis. You can tell because neither Gunstar Heroes nor NBA Jam are in this game.

Later that night, I broke the hour limit on the Xbox to play some meh Genesis games with Jialu. Mini-review time!

Altered Beast – So silly that it is awesome for 5 minutes. Then you remember that it sucks.

Golden Axe 2 – Magic in this game is useless and takes a long time to use, so we don’t like the game. Jialu wishes it were Gauntlet Legends. I wish it were The Simpsons arcade game.

Streets of Rage 3 – I always wanted to be Skate growing up. But after seeing the moves he can pull off (backflips, flying jump kicks, and breakdance spins, all while wearing rollerblades), I put my childhood dreams on the back burner yet again.

These beat ‘em ups make me realize that the item collecting and leveling aspects of Castle Crashers are why these games seem less exciting than I remember.

Day 6 – Played RE5 and breezed through the super boring chapter 4.

Day 7 – Played at 12am until 1am, getting through chap 5 – 1 and 5 – 2. Then played online poker from 1 – 4am after seeing some HORSE being played on ESPN. I learned that I’m dreadful at Razz and need to learn odds.

…

I forgot to mention this in the post prior, but this experiment was inspired by a post on Get Rich Slowly on passive barriers. The gist is that there are little barriers in our every day lives that prevent us from acting optimally. If we remove barriers from things we want to do, and insert barriers in front of things we want to do less, then we can guide ourselves towards what we really want to do.

For example, I found myself being easily distracted from studying because I’d do it in the same room as my computer, my TV, and my video games. There was no barrier preventing me from easily segueing from work to play. To combat this, I set up a desk in another room that faces a blank wall, and always has my notebook open to the page I left off at. This way, no barriers. I just plop down in a chair and get to work. No shiny objects to steal my attention away.

I don’t know why I keep insisting on showing the boring screen to setup your timer.

Back to the Xbox, when the hour expires, a box pops up no matter where you are in the game. This pop-up box disrupts my gaming momentum and brings my focus back to the real world. You can choose to enter a password, or turn off the machine. Whereas entering a password is a 5 button input, turning off the Xbox is only 1 click away. This is an annoying enough barrier for me to choose quitting.

So far, I’d say the experiment was a success. True, RE5 isn’t a game I’d want to play for more than 1 hour a day (since I’ve already beaten it twice). But even so, I do want to lessen my daily consumption and string out games for longer.

To apologize for the image prior, I give you this more interesting picture of a sackheaded chainsaw dude.

I feel silly buying a $60 game and then beating it in a weekend. I could’ve taken that $60 and went skiing for a day. But if I spread out that $60 game into 2 or 3 weeks, that feels like I’m getting more value. The math doesn’t work, as the amount of hours put in would probably be the same no matter which way I played it. But the non-logical part of my brain (which there is a lot of) seems to be A-Okay with the idea.

And so the experiment continues indefinitely. Look out for commentary on RE5 or some other game in the near future. In the mean time, watch Zero Punctuation and Unskippable.