Personal

Why I Maintain a Blog About Video Games

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Based on my Google Analytics stats, virtually nobody reads this blog. The majority of the hits are from myself, making sure my posts are formatted properly and don’t have any spelling mistakes. Every now and then I’ll get a few hits from random parts of the world. But for the most part, traffic to this blog is a joke. I admit, I haven’t tried very hard to promote it: I infrequently update the In Third Person Twitter feed, which has 0 followers as of this post, and outside of my girlfriend (whom I’ve kept this blog a secret for about 6 months) nobody I personally know even knows this exists.

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Girlfriend Gaming: How Boom Blox Brought Us Together

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Due to the varying interests and skill levels, finding games for my girlfriend and I to enjoy on the same level is difficult. Every now and then she’ll play one of “my” games and I’ll play “her” games, but I can only really think of one video game series that we can really call “ours”. That series, is Boom Blox for the Wii.

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PS3 vs. Life

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Historically, the day after my birthday party has been one of my favourite days in the calendar. After a fun-filled day of family, friends and birthday money, I would tear the mall up with reckless abandon. To me, the concept of saving did not exist. I would spend every penny of my birthday cash on video game stuff with no remorse. The most extravagant of these post-birthday shopping sprees ended with an XBOX 360 Elite, Gears of War and Guitar Hero II.

My birthday recently came and went, and while there wasn’t any birthday money to be had, I still had my sights on a treat for myself. In spite me now being old/paid enough to buy my treat outright, birthday shopping will have to wait.

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Metacritic and My Video Game Collection

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Hate it or love it, review aggregators are becoming an increasingly important service for consumers of just about anything. In the video game space, people like them because it gives them a quick and quantifiable way of knowing what games are good and what games suck. The counterpoint to those people are those who don’t feel that aggregates tell the whole story and put an emphasis on a number rather than the context from which that number is derived from.

I’m not here to choose sides. Out of boredom and curiosity, I decided to take my XBOX 360 and Wii game collection, full retail games only, compile all of their Metacritic scores and see what the results say about my game stash. I must preface that this is far from scientific and that my collection has changed since I compiled these numbers.

With that said, lets hit the results.

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Game Case Nightmares

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I get the feeling I’m in the minority here, but I know I’m not alone on this one. I like to take care of my games. I take pride in keeping everything intact and in top shape. This includes the cases that my games come in. Back in the days of Nintendo boxes, I would go as far as storing all of the cardboard boxes in a safe place. Nowadays, it’s a lot easier to keep everything in top shape, as game cases are well built to withstand average wear and tear.

However, having bought a number of used game stores and more recently, having bought a number of used games, I’ve seen so many games with messed up packaging. Everything from broken cases, to missing box art, to stickers all over the box. The majority of these cases makes me wonder: what are you people doing with your games?

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Reemployed Gamer

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These last two months have been difficult for me. At the end of January, I lost my job due to circumstances beyond my control. It was the first time I’ve been unemployed since I first began working in 2001. The good news is I just got a new job. I start as of Monday and I’m really excited to begin anew.

On my first day of unemployment, I wrote a blog post outlining a few gaming resolutions of sorts to tide me over during this tough time. I can say right now that I failed horribly at not purchasing games, having bought a total of 16 games during these last two months, but how did I fare at the rest of my resolutions?

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Come On DJ, Spin That Wheel

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As a fan of music games, hip-hop music and DJ-ing, DJ Hero caught my eye the moment it was announced. At first, I had my reservations in regards to how it would control. Unlike my previous forays into video game musical instruments, I do have a bit of background in real DJ-ing, which skewed my perception of how it would work. While I am no DJ Shadow or DJ Q-Bert, I do have the ability to blend tracks on CD turntables and do some basic scratching. I was kind of bummed that the controller would only feature one turntable and I wasn’t so sure I was cool with having buttons on the turntable. It wasn’t until I got my hands on it a few weeks ago that I changed my stance.

I Caved

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Back when I first lost my job, I made a vow to myself that I would not buy any games until I got a job. I admit, I made this vow to myself in hopes that my drought would not last long, and that I could hold out with my current stash of games.

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Living The Dream?

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Over these past few weeks of unemployment, I have played a lot of video games. I do spend time every weekday applying for jobs, and I’ve even gone to a few job interviews, but I think it would be unreasonable to expect me to spend every moment awake job-hunting.

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