The Art of Video Games: The Guestbook

I went to The Art of Video Games exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. yesterday with my brother. I'll upload more of the video we took when I get back from the two-week road trip I'm leaving for tomorrow, but I wanted to show off one of my favorite things at the exhibit: the guestbook. This guestbook was laid out for visitors to sign just a few days before on August 30th, and it already had quite a few people write in it. There are a lot of nice messages in there, along with people mentioning their favorite games or drawing their most beloved characters. It's a little lengthy, but I recommend checking it out to see what fellow enthusiasts had to say about the exhibit and video games in general. You can see my brother and I put our own messages in at the end.

I didn't see any mentions of Giant Bomb in there (I'll do that when I return to the exhibit later this month), but someone did draw the NeoGAF logo!

Go to the 15:00 mark for my hilarious suggestions for what my brother should write.

Saves

If there was a fire, I would do whatever was necessary to save the following:

People

Pets

and Hard Drives.

To someone who plays games, no item is more important than their save device. Disc gets broken? No big deal. Get a new one and it will be like nothing ever happened. Console dies? Again, no big deal. Get it fixed/get a new one and it will be like nothing ever happened. Saves get erased/corrupted? Well, then you're screwed. Barring a miraculous recovery of the files, all you can do is accept the fact you lost all your data and will have to start over on every game. The more you play games, the worse of a fate this is. Thankfully, I have never experienced loss on a large scale, and I hope I never do. I have had a few small instances occur though, some of which changed my game-playing habits forever.

The first time I ever experienced the loss of save files didn't even happen to me. It happened to one of my best friends at the time, James. Back in elementary school, I would occasionally head over to James's house to play games. On one of those days, James discovered that he had lost his Tomb Raider save files due to his third-party PlayStation memory card. It was one of those memory cards that boasted about having larger storage space than the official ones, even though they weren't as reliable.

I have never, ever, used a third-party memory card, and never will.

If only James had one of these.

The second time I ever experienced the loss of save files was the first time it directly happened to me. Apparently, one day when I was out of my house for a while, my brother and Jeremiah (who I was not friends with at the time, but am now) decided to go into my room and play Cruis'n USA on the N64. Now, I have mentioned Cruis'n USA on here before, and about how I recently discovered that it received a lot of hate, but I LOVED that game. Dozens of hours were devoted to that game, often with friends, and I did absolutely everything a person can do in it. I basically 100 percented that game, and was very satisfied with myself. You can imagine how I felt when I discovered that my brother and Jeremiah somehow inexplicably erased all of my data. When I confronted my brother about it, he was very confused and didn't understand how they did it. I am grateful that it happened after I had completed it, as opposed to being in the middle of it, because I felt no desire to play the game again after that.

The lesson I learned from that? Be wary of who is using your stuff. Ever since that day, people have either had to be supervised, or straight up not allowed to play my games or consoles. After the Cruis'n USA incident, we moved. For a little period there, my brother would bring large groups of people in which he barely knew some of them, and I would hide my consoles. Some people would call me an asshole, but you know what? My shit was protected. Whenever my brother would say anything about it, I would say: "Cruis'n USA."

View fullsize

Protect Ya Saves

The third time I ever experienced the loss of save files was actually kind of my fault. For a long period, me, my brother, Jeremiah, and Jarvis were all heavily into The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind for the Xbox. Now, for anyone that knows anything about Morrowind, you know that game is huuuuuge, and therefore could get pretty long. Super-duper long, even. You might also know that the game had an auto-save feature. I am one of those people that likes to have as few save files as possible. I feel good when my save devices are clean and organized (every couple of weeks I like to scan through my 360's hard drive to see what I can delete). Because of this, I foolishly decided to have the auto-save as my only save, without thinking that next time someone played the game, everything I'd done would be erased. So, next time I loaded up Morrowind and went to load my game, I quickly became confused. Continuously scrolling through every save, wondering how my file could have been lost, I remembered that my brother was the only one who had played it since I last did. "First Cruis'n USA, and now this. My brother needs to be taught a lesson."

One button press away from erasing all of his data, my mind raced. I went through every scenario I could as to how this could have happened, and whether or not I should get my revenge. Eventually, I decided that erasing his saves in retaliation was the wrong thing to do (though I don't remember if this was before or after I realized it was my fault). But honestly, I restarted Morrowind so damn much anyways that losing the save file was something I quickly got over. The lesson I learned from this was to always have a separate save file from the auto-save. With the way today's consoles work and the use of individual profiles though, it isn't something I ever really have to worry about again.

The final time (hopefully) I ever experienced the loss of save files was also my fault. It also marked the last time I ever used codes in a game (there was also another incident that contributed to this, but that is for another post). After completing Grand Theft Auto III and still yearning for something to do, I decided to stack as many insane codes as I could. Codes that would transform normal pedestrians into crazy violent people full of hate. Some might remember that saving with some these codes could corrupt the data on your memory card. That is exactly what I did. Thankfully, all I lost was some Metal Gear Solid 2 stuff (mostly photos I had taken). Either way, it was a lesson learned that will save me worse grief in the future.

View fullsize

Like this, but with more upskirt.

With traditional memory cards a thing of the past (at least for myself), the loss of data nowadays would be far more devastating. I could easily see myself going into a deep depression if I were to lose the 90 gigs worth of storage on my 360. The PlayStation 3 makes backing up data so easy that it isn't even a concern, and I play my Wii so little that it wouldn't be too big of a deal. The PSP works similar to the PS3, and as far as the DS goes, I would only be losing the data of one game, so it wouldn't be too bad unless I was deep into the latest Pokémon title or something. With cloud storage becoming more prominent, it seems like we'll have to worry less and less about data loss in the future.

Games I've Beaten: Introduction

Playing games since the age of three (or maybe earlier, who knows?!), a 21-year-old is likely to have beaten a lot of games. Going through a database of pretty much every game ever made, I made a list titled "Games I've Beaten", which consists of exactly what you would think. After finishing, I was surprised by my results. The following is a list of the number of games I have beaten per platform:

Arcade - 4

Game Boy - 3

Game Boy Color - 3

NES - 10

Nintendo 64 - 12

Nintendo DS - 9

Nintendo GameCube - 6

Nintendo Wii - 7

PC - 7

PlayStation - 21

PlayStation 2 - 30

PlayStation 3 - 16

PSP - 5

Sega Dreamcast - 5

Sega Genesis - 18

Sega CD - 2

Xbox - 22

Xbox 360 - 69

This all comes to a total of 249 games. The reason I was surprised by my results? I figured the number would be a lot higher. I was also shocked to see how many Xbox 360 games I've beaten compared to every other platform. Thinking back to my past though, these numbers started to seem less crazy.

Over the years, I have played a LOT of games. If I were to make a list of games that I've played but never necessarily beat, that 249 would turn into a much larger number. When I was younger, I owned several more games at once than what I do now. I would often get new games without first beating the ones I already had, and eventually the number of games amassed to such a large amount that I would never have enough time to play through them all. The new games became old, I would lose interest, and then I would get something newer. This continued until around the time of the Xbox 360.

Another factor that plays into the low amount of games beaten is local multiplayer. When I was younger, all of my best friends were my next door neighbors or people that lived on the same street as me. A game that a single person would play through once or twice and put down became a game that lasted several months amongst a group of friends. Games like Cruis'n USA (which I have discovered recently a lot of people hate), Super Smash Bros. (99 lives for all!), Mario Party, and various Sega Genesis games would be played for several hours a day. Even games without a multiplayer component, like Mega Man Legends or Pokémon Snap would rarely be played alone. Then of course, you had Pokémon Red/Blue, in which everyone had their own Game Boy and would sit outside playing through their own adventure, occasionally trading (and later came the actual trading card game, which also lasted us all a while).

View fullsize

Mmmmmm. So good.

Eventually, everyone moved away from each other, and with us all being console gamers and online play not yet viable, those several hour long multiplayer sessions sadly came to an end. Living in a new area full of douchebags I wasn't interested in associating with, playing games by myself became more common (until Halo, but that shall be reserved for a separate post). As I've become older, the importance of beating the games I play has increased, and I figured the new generation of consoles would be a fresh start and a great way to change my game-playing habits. Now, with services like GameFly, playing through more games has become easier and cheaper than ever before.

So, I have decided to start a series of posts titled "Games I've Beaten", in which I dedicate a post to each game on my list. Going through the list alphabetically, I will write as much as I can about each game, so depending on the game and how long ago I beat it, the amount I write could be miniscule, or it could be quite long. I will stray from the alphabetical format for every new game I have beaten as well, after there has been enough time since its completion. This is to ensure I have had enough time to actually think about the game and the aftereffects of hype have worn off.