Gamer Mom & Other Wacky Quirks

I was having a good old time on the web today and came across a few things to share, enjoy!

The Top 7... Stereotypical gamers we hate

6. RPG snobs

Usually plays: Any RPG and/or "something you wouldn't understand"
Favorite snacks: Dhalmel pie, Bland grilled shark fin (STA +1)

We relish any chance to talk shop about our favorite hobby with fellow gamers, except when we're confronted by one of these - a hyperventilating nerdlinger who looks at us like we're farting Philistines for wanting to pull off the occasional headshot or kickflip. With so much time spent indoors, they don't understand how low on the social ladder they rank, and how little the cultural impact of a spell-casting cat-person in a buckled leotard matters to anyone. We'd rather hang out with the ghost of Adolf Hitler then hear about the finer nuances of Lady Yuna's Tickle Summon.

Usurping the Throne of Snobbery from the once mighty record store employee, they've also donned themselves with some kind of omniscient Gate Keeper status, using their false sense of authority to talk unsubstantiated shit about anything you can't import from Japan.

"Do you have Grand Thef-"
"Pedestrian!"

Next time, kick him in his Forgotten Scepter before he can sneer at his own, barely ironic, aside. We promise - he won't fight back.

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What Life Will Be Like In The Future - November, 2008

IT’S 8 a.m., Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2008, and you are headed for a business appointment 300 mi. away. You slide into your sleek, two-passenger air-cushion car, press a sequence of buttons and the national traffic computer notes your destination, figures out the current traffic situation and signals your car to slide out of the garage. Hands free, you sit back and begin to read the morning paper—which is flashed on a flat TV screen over the car’s dashboard. Tapping a button changes the page. The car accelerates to 150 mph in the city’s suburbs, then hits 250 mph in less built-up areas, gliding over the smooth plastic road. You whizz past a string of cities, many of them covered by the new domes that keep them evenly climatized year round. Traffic is heavy, typically, but there’s no need to worry. The traffic computer, which feeds and receives signals to and from all cars in transit between cities, keeps vehicles at least 50 yds. apart. There hasn’t been an accident since the system was inaugurated. Suddenly your TV phone buzzes. A business associate wants a sketch of a new kind of impeller your firm is putting out for sports boats. You reach for your attache case and draw the diagram with a pencil-thin infrared flashlight on what looks like a TV screen lining the back of the case. The diagram is relayed to a similar screen in your associate’s office, 200 mi. away. He jabs a button and a fixed copy of the sketch rolls out of the device. He wishes you good luck at the coming meeting and signs off.

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The Top 10 Video Game Easter Eggs

The Egg: When you start the game type in “Zelda” as you character name to unlock the 2nd quest mode.
The System: NES
Don’t expect to breeze through this game these monsters are tougher and items are more difficult to get.

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Top 5 Botched PC Game Launches

4. Vanguard: Saga of Heroes

Books could be written about everything that went wrong with Vanguard, and that's before you do any real digging into the early development mess, where the money bled off to, what EverQuest co-creator and Sigil CEO Brad McQuaid was doing through all of it, and what happened in the parking lot afterward. Shoved out the door way too early for what were admitted to be financial reasons, the game was just plain half-baked, plagued by enough bugs, missing content, and instability to compete with the very best of the worst. From little things like a "display hoods/helmets" option that didn't do anything because none of the hoods or helmets in the game even had any graphics to frequently previewed back-of-the-box features like flying mounts that didn't make it into the game until long, long after release.

Vanguard staggered away from its absolute train wreck of a launch and slowly, steadily recovered. These days, it's pretty well healed up and finally living up to promises that were made and broken long before. But it's still hard to forget that, until lately, players were paying for the privilege of participating in a really, really long beta.