Becoming a Trophy HoundJanuary 28, 2014 by

Just a quick post to let people know about two gaming sites I've started using recently that I've found invaluable for both keeping track of my games collection, as well as hunting trophies.

The first is  You can enable checklists for the trophies for your games, and it has some of the best trophy guides I've seen on the net.  It's a site basically dedicated to those who want to trophy hunt like a pro.

The other is  This one is probably my favorite; it automatically downloads your trophy data for all games and then compares the trophies of all users to determine which trophies are easiest / hardest to get.  Each trophy is assigned a numerical value based on its global rate of achievement (i.e. how many people have played the game vs. how many people have the trophy).  It's a great way to see what trophies you can easily get, as well as which trophies you already have that are hard for everyone else (great for bragging rights).  The only downside to is that it doesn't track games in which you have zero trophies - you have to earn at least one trophy from each game before it will register on the site.

For the XBOX fans, there are sisters sites as well - and  Happy hunting!

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Make Me Love DRMJuly 3, 2013 by

I've had a Playstation Vita for quite some time, maybe about a year, and I still have no idea what one of the games looks like.  If you handed me one without a label on it, I would have no idea what I was looking at.  If you told me it was a Vita game, I wouldn't know where on the device it was supposed to go.  But I have bought lots of Vita games (hundreds of dollars worth, I'm sure), and picked up more for free via Playstation Plus, and I've done it all digitally.

On my other consoles - XBOX 360 and Playstation 3 - I have some digital games, but only games which can only be purchased digitally (like XBOX Live or PSN games) or those I got free via Playstation Plus.  So why is it that my Vita library is 100% digital, and my console libraries are almost 100% physical?  The answer might sound kind of silly to you, but here it is: digital Vita games are about $5 cheaper than physical Vita games.

That's it.  Apparently, five bucks is all it takes for me to stop caring about DRM or ownership issues or anything like that.  I get games a little cheaper when they're digital (about the same discount as buying them used at Gamestop) and that's good enough for me.

Okay, so that's not the entire story - digital games are also really convenient.  When I wanted to play Person 4 Golden on my Vita, I legitimately tried to find a physical copy so I could save some space on my memory card.  I went to multiple gaming stores and it wasn't for sale in any of them.  So I bought it digitally because that was the only place I could find it.

But mostly, it's the money thing.  Cheaper games means more games for the gamer on a budget.  If you have a smartphone, every single game on it is digital (just try to go to the Apple store and ask for a physical copy of Angry Birds Star Wars), and every one of those digital games is locked under downright Draconian DRM, and nobody cares.

Apple eased us into digital content with iTunes by saying "You can rip your physical CDs onto your computer if you want, and you can also supplement your music library with digital tracks from our store."  After doing this for a bit, everyone realized buying digital music was cheaper (I can buy the three songs I like for way less than buying the whole CD) and now the CD industry is basically gone.  I don't even know where I'd go if I wanted to buy used music.

Games need to do the same thing.  You've already got the convenience factor down, now make the price factor match.  I can download The Last of Us from the Playstation store for $59.99, but why would I when a physical game has the same cost AND gives me something I can sell or trade later?  Buying it digital is lunacy - I'm paying the same amount for an inferior product.

This is part of the used games solution - don't give us online passes, or try to do mandatory online features.  Make me want to buy games that I can't sell back by pricing them competitively.  Apple does it, Steam does it, and Sony is starting to do with the Vita and PS+ sales.  Don't charge me a physical media price for a piece of digital content and I'll never buy or sell used games again - it won't even make sense to do so.  After a few years of digital games being cheaper than physical games, a GameStop will be just as hard to find as a Tower Records.

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An Embarrassment of RichesJuly 13, 2012 by

I imagine if I asked you, you could almost immediately tell me the game that you have mastered.  Everyone has at least one game that they are totally unstoppable at, and for me I have two: Super Mario World, and Aladdin.

When I was a kid, I got a Super Nintendo and those two games.  I mastered those two games because they were the only two games I had for about a year.  That's how life was when you were a kid in the '80s and '90s: you'd get a game at Christmas and a game for your birthday and they had to last you the rest of the time, so you'd play them over and over until you'd memorized the location of every enemy, the timing of every jump and the path to collect every hidden item.  I haven't played it in years, but I imagine if I sat down with Aladdin right now I could clear the game in an hour without dying and while collecting every red gem.

This drought of games in my early childhood is probably one of the reasons why, to this day, I have a particular penchant for long-playing RPGs.  Had Skyrim existed when I was 10, life would have been a lot more interesting on the video game front.

The reason I point this out is to illuminate a contrast between then and now.  Back then, I had loads of free time but practically no disposable income.  These days, as an adult in his 30s, the opposite is true - I'm financially able to buy whatever games I want, but don't really have the time to dedicate to them like I used to.

When I sit down to play games, I usually start off by feeling a little overwhelmed.  The presence of digital games distribution, as well as digital sales (and a PS+ subscription) make it really easy to buy games, many of which I'll probably never play.  For example, when I got my PS3 I bought Metal Gear Solid 4.  I had never played a Metal Gear game (I opted for Nintendo products during the PS1 and PS2 cycles) and didn't know anything about the game except it had pretty graphics and critics seemed to love it.  After a few minutes with the game though, it became apparent that MGS4 had a pretty involved back story, as I had no idea what was going on in the game at all.  I've been told since then that players who actually have played all the MGS games have a similar experience.

To rectify this, I got the Metal Gear Solid HD collection.  Then I found out that there was a MGS game before those, the original MGS, so I downloaded that from the PSN.  This is a total of five MGS games I have purchased, and I have completed zero of them.  The farthest I've gone in any of them is about an hour into the first MGS (which is at the first boss fight).  I died a few times on this boss, and then quit playing - why would I spend my few valuable gaming minutes trying to figure out a challenging boss fight when I have tons of others games I could be playing?

I have God of War 1, 2 and 3, and have only played one of them (and have barely started that one).  I've hardly touched Kingdoms of Amalur on my 360, and of the seven Vita games I've downloaded so far, the only one I've made it to the end of is Mutant Blobs Attack (which you can finish in about 2 hours).  Before that, the last game I finished to the end was Journey (which can also be finished in about 2 hours).  I'm sure you can see which side of the fence I come down on in the "short games are the future" debate.

My point here is that I have piles of games - both physical piles and digital piles - that I haven't played, and I just need to come to terms with the fact that I will never play them.  Some I'll probably never even take out of the shrink wrap (I'm looking at you, Assassin's Creed 2).  Yet despite this, I have already pre-ordered Borderlands 2 and will undoubtedly be getting Playstation All-Stars when it releases.

My predicament (the definition of a first-world problem) is apparently not a new one.  There are entire web sites dedicated to helping gamers finish their games (The Backloggery is the first that comes to mind).  I have seen info graphics detailing the number of games people buy on Steam vs. the number of times those games are actually booted.  I don't see how anyone can complain they don't have anything to play, and I know 10-year-old me would have passed out from excitement if this game collection were dropped into his lap.

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The Importance of Late AdoptionJuly 5, 2012 by

I remember waiting outside in freezing cold weather, wearing three shirts, a sweater and a heavy jacket, all night long, just for the opening of a Wal-Mart in a small Texas town.

My wife (who was my fiancé at the time) wanted me to have a Nintendo Wii on launch day.  When we went to our local game stores at midnight, they were all sold out of Wiis (many started selling even before midnight).  I fully expected this, and said "Oh well, let's go home and we'll get one in a few weeks."

But she was committed, and so we called all over the state until we found a small Texas town that had a Wal-Mart that had "dozens" of Wiis in stock, and the store didn't open until 6:00 AM, which meant if we could get in line before everyone else, we could get a Wii.

To make a long story short, after waiting several hours in the blistering cold, we got a Wii and Twilight Princess.  I went home, stacked the Wii by the television, and immediately went to sleep.

But the next day, it was Wii time!  I set up the system and my fiancé and I spent almost the whole day playing Wii Sports and Twilight Princess. Over the nextmonths we downloaded a huge pile of games onto the virtual console, and playing titles like Metroid Prime 3, Super Paper Mario and Super Smash Bros. Brawl.

But then something unfortunate happened, which is that the Wii turned into the shovelware system and the good games disappeared while the system's library started to fill up with garbage.  I had purchased every AAA game the day it was released and now I had reached the point where I no longer had anything to play.

It was at this point that I bought my first XBOX 360, and I never looked back.  In fact, after I purchased the 360 I don't think I even turned my Wii on ever again - at least not until the time I turned it on to make sure it still worked before I traded it (and all of the games) into GameStop - in order to buy more 360 games.

It's in this long-winded way that I tell you I am a relative newbie to the Playstation family.  My 360 kept me occupied for years (and keeps me occupied still, though I'm on my third system).  But at the end of last year, for my birthday, my wife bought me a PS3, and then a couple of weeks ago she bought me a Vita.  If you're jealous of my marriage right now (and you should be) let me temper your jealousy by saying that the real reason she bought me a Vita was so I would have something to do besides bother her when she spends the whole day dragging me across the countryside to every crafts store known to man.

My point is this: I read a lot of articles and blogs in which people complain about the lack of content for the Vita and PS3.  "There's nothing good on the PSN this week!" they digitally shout.  "When is Sony going to give me something to play?"

This isn't a problem I have, as a late adopter.  In fact, just the opposite.  "When am I ever going to find time to play all of these games," I moan.  There are dozens and dozens of great PS3 games that I will never even purchased, much less play, before the next generation of hardware is released.  My purchasing a PS3 this late in the console's life cycle, I can look back and pick out the cream of the crop.  I don't have to "take a chance" on any games - they've been out so long that I can reviews by the truckload.  As a result, my PS3 games library is only the cream-of-the-crop.  I missed out on the excitement when these games were released, but I also missed out on a lot of the junk that came out with them.  They say hindsight is 20/20, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the games industry.

I suppose my message here is this: if you don't have one of the Big Three consoles, you should consider picking one up.  All three have lots of terrible games, but at this point it's much easier to find the good ones (and find them cheap).  Even the Wii has a vast library of quality titles at this point, if you've never played any of them.  And with the new systems on the horizon, the prices will never be better than they are right now.

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Downloaded Plants vs. Zombies . . . AgainJuly 3, 2012 by

I just downloaded Plants vs. Zombies on my PS Vita, and I'm not sure if there are any platforms left for me to download this game.  I have purchased it on my iMac and Macbook, iPhone and iPad, and XBOX 360, and have beaten it on each platform (and earned all achievements in each).  It is, in my opinion, almost a perfect game, as evidenced by the fact that I continue to download it despite the fact that it's basically the same game every single time.

It's a very basic game in the tower defense genre, and I'm constantly confused at all the reviews that describe it as "challenging" because I am far from a pro gamer and have never had any problems beating any part of the main game.  Some of the achievements and challenges can be difficult, but playing through the game is pretty easy for anyone - and if you get stuck, I believe every part of the game has been documented on YouTube at this point.

The graphics are great, the gameplay is simple but addicting, and there are enough plant combos to keep the game strategic without making it overwhelming.  I wouldn't describe myself as a huge tower defense fan (though I also love Fieldrunners and Defense Grid) but Plants vs. Zombies is amazing and keeps me coming back for more.  At this point, I'm sure I've paid the salary of a PopCap employee on my own.

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