better than life?

So I have been playing a lot less games the last couple weeks. The Reason? Well my son was kind enough to have his 3rd birthday which not only got my wife to stay home for a week, but brought in both grandmas and the great uncle. With all that babysitting I spent a LOT of time outdoors.

I spent several days surfing, it had been far to long. Had an okay day at Trestles, a pretty crap day at Strands, and then a stellar day at Salt Creek. So I did one more day at Salt Creek for good measure.

Then I did a track day on my motorcycle with my good buddy Rolf toting me and my bike around in his pickup. He probably won't ever read this, but what a great friend. Thanks man. Anyway, I am trying to upload the video to YouTube because I am too lazy to edit it again to make it small enough to fit in my limted google storage. I swear if you have a motorcycle do whatever it takes to ride it on a closed track. It's worth it.

So anyway with the exception of coming down with a nasty fever that kept leaving me hypothermic and shivering my ass off, all in all it was a good week. If you think video games are the best thing ever (and I think they are pretty close) you should still get out and taste the real world. Believe it or not some things are even better than games. Maybe a little more expensive, but definitely better.

Sweet, YouTube says my video is done:

can beer help your gaming?

So I was competing in a gamerscore competition over at 360voice.com. The objective was to boost your gamerscore the most out of 10 people in 2 weeks time. Well hey I did pretty good at nearly 10,000 points, but was bested by a kid on bed rest due to a torn Achilles ligament. I think he made nearly 15,000. So how does one boost their score that much in a couple days?

Easy, play REALLY CRAPPY games. Normally these are games I wouldn't even look at, let alone place inside my Xbox 360. But in the interest of competitive gaming, I headed on over to this forum and started working my way down the list. I ended up scoring between 600-1000 achievement points in each of the following games in about 4-5 days of play:

Avatar: The Burning Earth (1000 pts in about 5 minutes)
Cabela's Big Game Hunter 2008
Madden 06
Madden 08
MLB 2k6
NBA 2K6
NBA Live 06
NBA Live 07
TMNT
NCAA March Madness 08
Open Season
Peter Jackson's King Kong: (I didn't complete before contest ended)

Was it worth it?
In a word no, I didn't win the 4000 MS Points card (ARV:$50). I had to suffer through dreck like Open Season, which I am sure annihilated close to 50% of my brain cells. On the lighter side I doubled my gamerscore, played one decent game I wouldn't have otherwise (TMNT) and figured out why Cabela's keeps making hunting games, people will actually buy them.

No matter how poorly they are designed from a gaming perspective, people just love to kill things. Hillbillies won't play Halo3, but I bet for sure they all own a copy of "Cabela's Shoot Some Animal or Another." They probably own every Nascar game too. Quite honestly Big Game Hunter wasn't the most painful experience in a week of sheer self-inflicted pain. In fact it wasn't even a close second. What does that say about a game I expected to make me vomit? Fact of the matter is the jerky first person camera in King Kong brought me closer to hurling than any game in recent memory, and it's otherwise not that bad of a game. Okay maybe I hurled once while playing Open Season, it can have that effect on you too.

So even technically bad games apparently can have some redeeming value. Maybe not for me, or you, or the gaming mass-media. But for some small niche of people that either don't know how good games CAN be, don't have the manual dexterity for anything more than an Atari 2600 joystick with its solitary button, or just like to buy anything with a pretty picture on the package. To you I say: "Be sure to take 6 beers and 2 Advil with that." I did!