Clip: Bottle-Blowing Mario Love In

There's a time in your life when you have to choose between casual sex and playing the Mario Bros. theme with bottles. These poor souls chose poorly.

Surprise! Mall Shooter Didn't Own Video Games

I used to work where the shooting took place, and my friend still works there. Also, I have a bud that knows the father and son that were shot. Really a tragic story.

As for how it relates to videogames, quite frankly it DOESN'T. It doesn't have anything to do with videogames, and that's the whole point of this article. People saying that it's good for the videogame world because videogames weren't involved is like saying Columbine (sp?) was good for the heroine world because heroine wasn't involved.

Also, you've got to realize that nobody (but J.T) thinks that every murder is videogame induced. People aren't stupid, they know that murders happened before videogames. But that doesn't mean that no one is influenced, either. Yes, most of us play violent videogames and are none the more murderous for it, but that doesn't mean that NO ONE is influenced by it.

The fact is, media does influence us. Movies, games, music, etc. It all influences us. You may not be able to pinpoint an exact time or place in which you were influenced, but th overall effect is there. America has become much more desensitized to violence and sex because of the media. On "I Dream of Genie" they had to cover up her bellybutton because it was deemed too... I don't know, sensual? But now, I've seen breasts on Fox. Why? Because the people will accept it now. We've been influenced.

I can eat a hamburger and not get fat. Heck, I eat as many hamburgers as I like, and I still don't gain weight. Doesn't mean hamburgers don't make you fat. Cause they do. Just not me.

You get the point.

Surprise! Mall Shooter Didn't Own Video Games

I too also live just outside of SLC. This event has had a pretty big impact here. We have been in a 17 year decline in crime rates. I believe the last time something like this happened was in the early 80's when someone shot up a news studio. Cant remember too much about that since I was only a few years old at the time.

My condolences go out the families and my praise goes out to the off-duty Ogden Police officer Ken Hammond who took the shooter down.

For what this is worth, the interview (yes, just one) of the boy's father he said he had little knowledge of his sons activities in general. He was unaware that he had access to firearms and he said he was confident that that someone put him up to this. It sounded like BS from the way he was stating things but he said the mother just had a heart attack and that would be the only (and last) interview he would give. Oh, he also said at the time of the shooting they thought he was downstairs in the basement. In whole it just came across that the father had paid little attention to his son.

Strange to note also, the boy liked fishing. Several people came forward saying they remember meeting him repeatedly at one of our local rivers. They said that they were killing some fish that they had caught, and while they were killing the fish this boy told them killing was wrong and that living things deserved to live.

Bit of a hypocrite, eh?

College: Play WoW And Still Get A Degree

Thank god I graduated, THEN played WoW during the unemployment phase.

GameCube Finally Laid To Rest

The GameCube transitioned me back to console games. I had an Atari 5200, NES, and Genesis before deciding that PC gaming was the way to go. So I became completely oblivious to what was going on during the N64/PS1 generation and the early PS2 generation.

Eventually I discovered emulation and naturally got into playing my old console games on the PC. And then came UltraHLE which was a huge deal at the time and I played Super Mario 64, and more importantly, Ocarina of Time, and later on, Majora's Mask. Ocarina became my all time favorite game at that point, so that really got me back into the Zelda series which I never should have abandoned. I wound up playing Link to the Past on the computer too.

Then the XBox and GameCube came out to much fanfare and I got the bug to play console games again so I hooked up the NES and Genesis. This didn't take too long to wear thin though.

Once I started hearing about Wind Waker, I decided I couldn't resist and wait many years to play that smoothly on an emulator. So I pre-ordered it (and it easily held a pre-order record at the time) and got the Ocarina Master Quest disc.

The funny thing is, I was ready to buy the ~$160 GameCube solely for the $50 Wind Waker... and it just happend to come with the Ocarina disc, the bundled Mario Sunshine, and the free Metroid Prime. So I played all of those games... both Ocarina versions and both Wind Waker and Prime twice so I could unlock everything. And I realized that I hadn't had so much fun with video games in years. I honestly bought the GCN for one game and wound up with 17, most of them among the best I've ever played.

And now I've had a DS for a little over a year and already have a stack of 15 GBA/DS games. I also have a Wii and look forward to many games on it. It's also home to Twilight Princess which is right up there and maybe a little above Ocarina. As for the PC, there are games here and there that I want, but it's too expensive to maintain a computer that keep up at the highest quality settings. And for the small handful of PC games I want anymore, it's not worth it. I've acquired I think one PC game in the past year and I'm not overly excited for anything on the horizon.

So my indigo GameCube sits on the top shelf of my bookcase and will likely never be powered on again. But it brought me back to the very fun side of gaming, and I've still got some catching up to do with the Virtual Console... Super Metroid, Super Mario World, etc. It's no surprise the Cube isn't going to be produced any more.... the sales have been awful in recent times and there has been little to buy for it for quite a while. Hopefully a lot of Wii owners will discover the many tremendous GCN games out there for $20 or less.

And I don't care what anyone says... the Cube did not "lose" this generation. It was definitely the winner for me, and realistically, it was right on par with the XBox (in sales and graphical quality)... except Nintendo profited.

Okay, that was long. Maybe someone other than me actually read it.

by Mezodon

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