Okay – here’s the first absolutely ridiculous news tidbit from ComicCon 2009. EA is encouraging con-goers to grope, molest, and commit other “acts of lust” with its boothbabes, and then post those photos on Twitter for a chance to win their contest. Although I’ll fully admit that I’d enjoy looking were I at the con, this supercedes the skeevy barrier. EA’s already catching a good bit of backlash on twitter.

They call it “Bubble Bobble: The Revival”. All I know is that it’s got the same old music I remember from playing Bubble Bobble on my Commodore 64. If you remember Bubble Bobble, maybe you’ll get as much of a kick as I do from this game.

Play Bubble Bobble

Keepers is a weekly segment in which I discuss games I’ve played that I’ve seen fit to keep after playing. I generally sell a game that I’ve finished, so the only reason I keep one is because I plan to replay the game some day. Classifying a game as a “keeper” is generally a badge of merit.

Starcraft 2 is coming out soon, and I’ll be picking up a copy on day one. To prepare, I’d decided to go back and replay the single-player campaign in the original Starcraft. Again. But wait – what about Warcraft? No – not the MMO, I mean the other game that everyone has forgotten about – the RTS. Warcraft III.

It really is a great game – I’m replaying it now. I’ve finished the human and undead campaigns, and I’m in the midst of the orc campaign. I’ll admit that it’s not quite as good as Starcraft – few games are – but it’s a lot of fun despite its age. I love necromancers and meat wagons. I love Kodo beasts. I love planting mines. I love uprooting Elven structures. I only wish they’d included ships like in Warcraft 2.

Like Greg, my love of gaming goes way back to my early childhood and begins with the goodness what was the Atari 2600. I have fond memories of my mom and I playing Pac-Man, Combat, Yars’ Revenge and even the debacle that was E.T. I think we went through a joystick every six months, those damn things were just so poorly made. I played this system on a little 19” black and white TV for most of my childhood until we made the leap to the NES when I was in 7th grade. From this point on I mastered my platforming skills and found a love for sports titles. Tecmo Bowl still kicks Madden’s ass to this day.

Although home consoles have always been a big part of my gaming history I can’t say that they were the major influence in my tastes today. My gaming teeth were really cut in the arcades, where I plunked down innumerable quarters and mastered the skills of ignoring distractions and building my tolerance for cigarette smoke.

I had older cousins when I was young and they grew up with the arcades. The Atari was just a cheap knock-off in their eyes, so if I wanted to be cool like my cousins I had to hit the arcades. So I’d pull up a stool and play like the big boys at games such as Zaxxon, Sinistar, Galaga, Tron, Dragon’s Lair, Pac-Man, Centipede, Donkey Kong, Dig-Dug, Tempest, and Star Wars. Later when I was old enough to go to the arcade by myself I indulged in such favorites as: Altered Beast, Operation: Wolf, Superman, Street Fighter II, WWF Superstars, Terminator 2 and countless others at the local Boardwalk arcade. For $20 you could play all day and I did exactly that all summer long.

My arcade passion really hit a new level when I found X-Men: Children of the Atom at the local arcade. This totally blew me away. A game that combined the fighting of Street Fighter II and my favorite comic book heroes was like interactive crack. When I moved into my first apartment I found an arcade within walking distance and spent way too much time and money playing this game. This lasted for about a year until a new Marvel vs. Capcom cabinet arrived. This was too much, Marvel AND Street Fighter characters in the same game? Was Capcom trying to kill me? The gameplay wasn’t your traditional Street Fighter fare either, it was out of control, but I didn’t care because it was so damn fun to play. The crowds that game attracted were what really made gaming so much fun back then.

However, growing up gaming in arcades doesn’t expose you to a lot of RPG’s. I didn’t own a computer until I was in college and never got into the Zelda or Final Fantasy games. My gaming tastes usually ended up trying to recreate that arcade feeling at home, whether it’s the Super Nintendo, Dreamcast, or even today with the Playstation 3. Right now I’m salivating for the PSN release of Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and praying for a TE Fightstick to fall in my lap so I can properly relive those glorious arcade days. All I’d be missing is the background noise of Mario jumping barrels and the smell of spilled soda. Ahh, those were the days.

Greg asked me to contribute my own “Gaming Made Me” article and in doing so, provide insight into my own gaming past.  I have to be honest, that when I read his email, outlining what he was talking about I was gripped with fear.  When I then read his draft of his own article, that fear grew and grew.  Finally, my years of running had caught up with me. Time to come clean and fess up.  So here goes.

The truth is that I don’t have much of a gaming past.

With the exception of a few days one summer when I spent time at my dad’s playing Space Quest and redoing up until you had to drive the space motorcycle through the rock field over and over and over again because I didn’t know that you could save your game to a floppy, I didn’t play video games as a kid.  I didn’t have an Atari, or a computer or any handheld gaming device of any kind.  I didn’t live near an arcade and while my best friend had a computer, he thought that games were stupid so he never played any. Well, that’s not true, he loved Wall Street trading simulations, but when faced with the option of playing that, or nothing at all, nothing was an easy choice.

I mean, it’s not like I was Amish or anything. My mom didn’t fear the devil box, and I dropped my fair share of quarters into the machines in the Barn at Seaview Playland in Cape Cod, but other than those few days every summer, my childhood, adolescence and early adulthood were video game free.

Now that I get paid, however meager the amount might be, to review video games, I always look at my past with shame.  When people talk about all night sessions playing Mega-Man or the original Zelda, I can’t contribute anything. I never had an NES or a SNES.  I never played Mario Brothers or Sonic.  By the time I got my first computer and booted up Tomb Raider and MechWarrior 2, I was 25 years old.  By then, anything I was came about without the benefit of gaming.

Now, you could argue that my current devotion to gaming is simply making up for lost time but the truth is that I just really love playing games.  I don’t burn with secret jealousy over those that got to spend their childhood days playing Contra.  I will say though that the fact that I didn’t play games as a kid has a strong factor towards why I don’t get the whole retro gaming thing.  I don’t have the emotional link to older games, so when I see them released as Nintendo virtual console titles, or as games on the PSN, I have no desire to play them.  I’m sure they’re good, but if given the choice between some 8-bit platformer and the ability to drive a dump truck through an officers’ barracks in Red Faction: Guerrilla, I’ll take the dump truck.

I like to think that my lack of a childhood spent gaming gives me a fresh take on games, but I also realize that’s patently ridiculous.  For one, I’m 37 years old, which means I’ve been gaming pretty hardcore now for twelve years.  Any fresh take left the building a long time ago.  Second of all, if I do have a different take on these new fangled video games, it’s probably at the expense of the perspective gained from having played over two decades of games.  In the end, it’s probably a wash, and my lack of experience playing older games just means that I have to fake it when I find myself in these types of conversations.

At this point, I’m not sure if my kids are going to end up with any more of a gaming childhood than I had.  Well, that’s not true. The simple fact that they have a father who’s so much into gaming means that they’ve already had more of an exposure to games than I ever did, however neither one of them seem all that interested in what I’m doing.  It’s not for lack of trying, although I don’t play much that is appropriate for them.  However when we do play Boom Blox, my daughter doesn’t like all of the exclamations of victory and Linda and I eventually end up doing the same stages over and over again so that we can get gold.  At this point, any memories my kids have of gaming will all be that their insane, loud parents bogart the Wii so that they can get gold medals on every stage.  That’s hardly the environment that fosters a will to game.

So maybe my kid will escape my gaming-free past.  Maybe not.  Honestly, it doesn’t matter all that much to me.  Sometimes we stick to the things we had as kids, like me and Transformers, sometimes we don’t, like me and fishing and sometimes we find something new to love, like me and gaming.  As long as I teach him how to fake his way through a conversation, he should be just fine.

I’ve been following Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s “Gaming Made Me” series for the past week or so now, and I’ve really enjoyed reading nostalgic tales from different people in the industry about which games most influenced them. The series has inspired me to go back and re-evaluate which games most inspired me as I grew up.

My first game console was the Atari 2600 my father brought home when I was eight. I spent countless hours playing Yars Revenge, Adventure, Demons to Diamonds, and Warlords. I even loved that crappy Raiders of the Lost Ark game. But the one I probably spent the most time with was Video Pinball. Never before and never since have I obsessed so much about a numeric score in a video game. I developed a pattern whereby I could repeatedly nudge the ball – gently, so as to not tilt – and bounce it back and forth, watching the score go up and up.

A few years later, and after a brief stint with a Timex-Sinclair PC and an Atari 800XL PC, my parents bought me a Commodore 64. I do not jest when I say that the Commodore 64 changed my life. It got me interested in programming, which many years later led to a career. But 90% of the time, if I was on the Commodore, I was playing games. Defender of the Crown. Pool of Radiance. Autoduel. Maniac Mansion. The Racing Destruction Set. Wishbringer. Wasteland. Mail Order Monsters. Super Giana Sisters. Forbidden Forest. I could easily write about all of them. I had dozens of 5.25 floppies, and they all saw a lot of use.

I still remember vividly the day I got my copy of Bards’ Tale 2 via UPS. Cash on Delivery. Words cannot express the excitement I had as I broke open the packaging, slid that floppy into my 1541 disk drive, and typed LOAD”*”,8,1 – to this day, when I type that, my fingers try to hit shift-2 to get the quote.

I never did complete Bards’ Tale 2, although I likely spent hundreds of hours in its dungeons. That distinction goes to Ultima V, which was the most epic game I ever played on the Commodore. The NPCs had daily routines – the shopkeepers would close shop for lunch and walk to the bar to eat. I could have conversations with just about anyone in the game and ask them their names and their jobs. I could pilot ships and balloons, learn area effect spells, relocate moongates, and track the movements of the Shadowlords. I had to travel the world to learn the magical entrance words to open various dungeons so that I could travel to the underworld, battling mongbats, sand traps, and gazers along the way. When I finally made my way to the dungeon Doom in the center of the underworld and rescued Lord British, it was such a momentous event in my young life that I wrote it on the calendar and celebrated for a number of years afterwards.

While Ultima V is undoubtedly my most fondly-remembered Commodore 64 game, Wasteland isn’t far behind. It took the top-down style from Ultima, and mixed it with Bards Tale’s battle system to create an awesome mesh of the two. You could split your party during battle to have the melee fighters run up while the gunslingers stayed back. The game’s atmosphere was what later inspired the first Fallout game, but Wasteland was far edgier. The battle descriptions had you exploding foes like a blood sausage and spinning them into a dance of death, and a later mission in the game had you battling nuns with machine guns. You could even hire a hooker and contract Wasteland Herpes. And my favorite part of the game was the over-the-top robots you’d battle at Base Cochise. The robots you’d fight had names like Sonar-targetted Proton Carbine, Life-seeking Flamethrower, and VTOL Auto-fire Robot.

Fast forward to 1996. I’d just broken off an engagement, and I was depressed. I hadn’t played games much in the past few years, and my friend Rich talked me into buying myself a Playstation. One of the first games I played was Resident Evil 2, and it blew me away. To this day, no other game defines survival horror like Resident Evil 2 does. There are moments in Dead Space that come close, but the storyline in Resident Evil 2, while very complex, is the best of any game in the franchise. Also, the T-103 zombie is by far the best Resident Evil villain ever.

After that, I became primarily a PC Gamer, moving on to games like Fallout, Baldur’s Gate, and Mechwarrior. But I’ll always have fond memories of that Commodore 64.

Although Street Fighter 4 isn’t the first game I’ve played that uses Games for Windows Live, it’s the first game I’ve played that makes significant use of it. And while I’ve heard others’ complaints about GFW Live often enough in the past, this is the first time I’ve really experienced it personally.

I set up my Games For Windows Gamertag a while back, when I wasn’t sure that I’d ever really be using it much. I first used it when I played Fallout 3 and got a number of the game’s achievements. That’s probably when I first realized that there were a number of things, such as setting up an avatar, that can only be done if you actually own an XBox. What reason does Microsoft have for disallowing GFW users from selecting an avatar or using a custom gamercard image? As a GFW Live user, you have a choice of 28 images. Even the crappy selection of images on the Playstation 3 is better than that. And when I choose to compare achievements with an XBox user, it always shows me with zero achievements in the two GFW games where I do have actual achievements. That one’s just a bug. Some programmer needs to get on that shit and fix it now.

And whose idea was it to insist that you use an XBox interface with a PC? To back out of screens in Street Fighter, I’ve got to push “B”. I initially tried to hit escape, but that maps to the XBox’s start button. That means that to continue the game after I lose a match, I’ve got to hit escape, which is exactly opposite of the behavior I’d expect. Anyway, I need to navigate all the screens by pushing “A”, “B”, “X”, “Y”, escape, and the right and left control keys. Way to go, Microsoft.

When I set up my Games for Windows account, I chose “ghowley” as my ID. In retrospect, I could’ve done better. And now I find out that if you want to change your ID, Microsoft makes you pay them for it. What a supreme bit of douchbaggery on Microsoft’s behalf!

And here’s another thing. Microsoft lets you select a 21-character motto. I chose “I like turtles”. Seems innocuous enough, right? When try I enter that, GFW tells me “Please enter an appropriate motto.” What??!? Are they filtering on the word “turtle”? Doing a quick google search, it seems that you’re also unable to use the words “geezer”, “Linux”, “Japan”, “god”, “Buddha”, “poop”, “halo”, or “xbox”.

Lastly, the thing that made me decide to write this article. Games For Windows voice chat. It doesn’t work for me. Two different microphones, tweaking settings both in the GFW voice options and in my control panel, and I still can’t get it to work. I see other people using it – maybe you need a special Microsoft-approved headset.

Maybe I’ll go back to playing Team Fortress 2 on Steam, where the voice chat works, the achievements display, and I can use a photo of myself for my avatar.

I spent a while longer playing Hobo than I do most Free Game Friday titles. It’s addictive. It’s essentially an old skool beam-em-up wherein you play the titular hobo, running through a city beating up everyone in sight. Your combos include spitting on people, blowing boogies at them, and the dreaded vomit attack.

Play Hobo