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Video games are bad and terrible. They are a horrible waste of time and you shouldn't play them. Like any form of addiction, they suck your life away one minute at a time. You can spend so much time playing a video game that, even though your eyes are bleeding and you haven't pooped in a week, you refuse to stop until you kill that last monster. Don't you have better things to do than play video games? Things like painting, playing music, learning a new language, or writing love letters to me. Besides, have you seen what other gamerrs look like? They're losers, man. I mean, big losers. Gaunt, pale, malnourished, and covered in acne - these people don't know what outside looks like. Don't believe the hype in whatever G4 or MTV have to say about how 'cool' gaming has become. True gamers are not cool. They're shut-ins. They live on Ramen and potato chips. Their most interesting conversations are about breast physics in games. I heard their penises fall off after enough time playing games. I wouldn't be caught dead playing a video game.

So, like about 2 or 3 years ago, I really started playing Asheron's Call a little too much. It went from being a fun, afternoon diversion, to a fun, all-day diversion. I remember when I finished summer classes a couple years ago, I realized I had an entire month before fall classes began. I had friends who went to the gym. Others surfed. Some went to bars or played poker. Some of my friends actually had friends. But soon none of that mattered. The sting of not hearing my phone ring - ever - quickly faded away. Leaving home was for chumps. Washing one's body was for chumps. Eating was for chumps. Everything made sense because of the simplicity of the situation. If it got in the way of playing AC, it had to go. The only problem was disposing of the bodies.

When I was about 7 years old, my dad finally let me play with the family computer. It was one of those shitty old-school IBM PCs with an 8086 processor (or something ancient sounding like that) and CGA graphics. Alls I really remember about this setup was that CGA meant Crappy Graphics Adapter. It supported a whopping 4 colors in 320x200 resolution. Most of the games were retarded and frustrating. We had a bunch of bootleg games like Space Invaders and a Dig-Dug clone called Digger. I wasn't allowed to watch tv after school, but for some reason, I could play video games on this piece of shit as much as I wanted. I guess mom saw it as some kind of machine in which us children could learn new stuff on, but that really wasn't happening at first. It was just a more repetitious way to turn my brain into mush. I remember loading that disk of Zaxxon and playing for hours and hours, everyday, not because I enjoyed it, but because everything else in my tiny universe required the use of my brain or body and that was just not going to happen.

But then, something strange started happening. I couldn't help but learn while using the computer. This game called King's Quest III found it's way into our house and it had a strange interface in which the main character was directed by me through English statements I typed into the keyboard. My brothers were both reading by ages 3 or 5 or something like that. I don't think I could read a single word before 6. I'm sort of a late bloomer. So, this cool game where you got to do things like sneak around your evil wizard master's house and collect ingredients for spells, basically taught me how to read and write. Ok, so I was in first grade when I actually learned to read. I remember Mrs. Kromingay's (or however you spell it) class, and she wrote a bunch of crap on the blackboard and slowly deciphered the messages to us through repetition and torture. True stories: in this same class, we were given minature clalk boards to practice writing simple words, and this nimrod in class wrote "ass" on his. I was proud of my newfound reading skills, so I read the word out loud and was promptly punished. Why? Because I conformed to the system, and learned to read like the rest of the robots. And then another time, I threw most of my cafeteria lunch spaghetti out because it was cafeteria lunch spaghetti. Mrs. Kromingay grabbed me and asked me if I ate my whole lunch. I said I did. Then she fished my syrofoam lunch carton out of the trash, discovered my half-eaten spaghetti, and made me finish it. What the fuck was that about? I don't even know. And then another time...ok I'll stop this now because this really isn't what I was getting to. If first grade taught me to read, it was King's Quest that taught me how to write sentences and learn how to spell. I mean, its not like I was going to open a book or nothin. Books are for chumps.

And then, in 9th grade, some friends and I became familiar with Qbasic. Qbasic is a slightly fancier version of Basic, which is a computer programming language that I believe Bill Gates helped create. The version of Qbasic that came with the current version of MS-DOS did not allow you to compile your code. Rather, it was interpreted. What this meant was that any program we used in Qbasic came in the form of a text file that anyone could read. You know that game Snake that was on every old Nokia phone? Well, back in the early '90's the same game was shipped as part of MS-DOS as a Qbasic text file called Nibbler. Somehow, we pieced together the simplest commands in Qbasic and started writing text-games. Naturally, we are all pretty stupid, so all of the games were really just like 3 or 4 paragraphs of text that were spit onto the screen when some obvious statements were entered on the keyboard. None of our games ever went anywhere or had much of plot. They were just graphic descriptions of chainsaw murders or other stupid shit like that. Oh, and by the way, just because a kid is interested in things like chainsaw murders, does not necessarily mean he's gonna join the trenchcoat mafia. I mean, look at me - I turned out all right. Right? Right?

But here's the thing: we SHOULD have gone from there and taught ourselves to really program and do something productive with our time, but we didn't. You know what we ended up doing? We played Street Fighter II. That game was the biggest obsession of all of our lives from 8th grade to 10th grade. Everyone played that game. A lot of people sucked ass, but some of us were good. And some were scary good. As a group, my friends and I were decent, but not unbeatable. That didn't stop us from playing that game until our thumbs bled. And that's not an exaggeration. When the Super NES version of it came out, I literally played until the skin under the joint of my left thumb fell off and left the raw, virgin skin underneath. Then, I would play some more.

Eventually, SF2 got old and newer, more technically impressive fighting games came out. This was around when I stopped playing fighting games. Also around that time, Doom became popular and first person shooters really took off. I played Doom like crazy, but after all that I sort of fell out of the video game world. Its not as if I did better things with my time in the beginning. I just started pining after girls who never returned the favor and entered a whole new layer of hell.

Ugh. Can I possibly talk about myself any more? Yes. Anyway, it seems that video games relingquished their cruel grip on my life and slowly, I began to do interesting things. Like making new friends in a new town and forgetting all my older, loser friends. I'm just kidding you bastards. I love you Fawker. Oh yeah, and I also made a potato (potatoe for Republicans) gun. That was a lot of fun. Except, it couldn't really launch potatos for some reason so we used rotten grapefruits. I knew someone who lived on a ranch, so we practiced shooting it into one of his fields. Then we drove around town, shooting it out of a car. Except we were a bunch of pussies, so we didn't actually shoot it at anything when we shot it out of the car. It was just fun driving around, stopping occasionally and firing it off the side of the road. Thinking back, I guess it was pretty lame. What's the point of having something that shoots grapefruits if you can't shoot it at anything? I guess its because I'm anti-gun by nature. I'm a lover, baby, not a redneck. Guns look cool, especially in movies when Arnold shatters frozen liquid-metal cyborgs, but in my day-to-day life, they're pointless. I don't hunt because I'm not Ted Nugent. I don't need one for protection because I'm not 50 Cent. And I believe the same holds true for 99.9999999% of the population. Your neighborhood is not Najaf (unless, of course, it is), so what the fuck do you need a gun for? And I'm not saying this because I "just saw Bowling for Columbine and think that it's the best film ever made". Because it's not. Evil Dead 2 is. But you already knew that.

Then in college, I started playing Asheron's Call and it was all over. I didn't drop out of school, but otherwise, I was basically another video game retard. So video games are evil. I hate them. And people that play them are assholes.

So, there's this game you should play. It's this first person shooter called kkrieger. It has really pretty graphics and stuff like that. You'll play it forever and forever be a prisoner in video game hell. No, not really, because in all actuality, it's not much of a game, but more of a technology demo. It is insanely tiny. The programmers were able to fit the entire game into a single 98KB executable file. What's so special about that? Well, if you play the game (Windoze only), you'll see that its fully 3D, fully textured, features animated monsters, multiple weapons, tons of lighting effects, and sound. And the cool thing is that the graphics really detailed. There are spiked doors that open, pillars, and a bunch of cool tunnels.

If not for the game's size, it wouldn't be that much of an acheivement. It only features one level and the monsters are completely idiotic. But it's 98KB man. Thats insane. Most games these days run at least several hundred megabytes without video cut-scenes. If the average game is 400 MB, it would take up 4000 times the space on your hard drive that kkrieger does. A single screen-shot of kkrieger takes more space than kkreiger. A 3 minute mp3 takes 30 times the space of kkrieger. A mouse fart takes up 4 times the space of kkrieger. If you use a 56k modem, you can download kkrieder in less than a minute. If you use DSL or cable, you can download kkrieger in about half a second. That's small. Very small. Smaller than many NES games. Smaller than the average American's IQ.

Awesome, isn't it? Go ahead and play the damn game. I'll wait. Seriously. Go now: kkrieger

Ok, so really this isn't new news to video game nerds. I heard some nerdlings in the CS labs talking about this months ago, but when I heard 98kb, I thought to myself, "Surely they can't mean 98 kilobytes. They must mean 98 bk. As in '98 British Knights, bieatch!" So, I ignored the nerdlingers and went back to picking my balls.

Now, why do I rant for what seems like centuries about the evilness of video games, then go and promote one? Because I'm a whore. A whore with a purpose. See, the purpose of all of this is that there IS a purpose. Some nerds in Estonia or Croatia or some other wierd place got together and said "Nerds! Today, we go from loser gamer nerds to loser programmer nerds!" And then instead of playing shitty fighting games on the xbox for 6 months, they created something new. A new game that pushes the current limits of technology. In reality, these guys didn't just sit down and program this game out of the blue. They're into the whole 'demo' scene, where groups come up with pretty graphical demos which show off their skills, and also have stringent requirements - such as a 98kb size limit. Anyway, the point is that the creation of something new is always beautiful, unless you're my parents, in which case it can be a crime of nature. Opportunities for creativity are all around us.

Unfortunately, it seems that a lot of hard core gamers miss this opportunity. There are actually some pretty smart gamers. But instead of getting inspired by what they play and do something, they just play. It's pretty sad when you think about it. There are now video game tournaments where people actually play money for kicking other people's asses - in video games. We're talking about professional gamers. In their little world, these nerds are kings, but outside their tiny bubble, they look like poster children for the war against scoliosis. I mean, I'm no big sports fan, but at least jocks are getting a workout. Picking finger blisters is a gamer's workout. Get off your greasy ass and just DO something.

While we're on the subject of video games and programming, I want to mention a fellow nerd from my school, Hayato. This guy was in my senior project group, and despite the fact that he's a dirty Jap, he's a rockin' programmer. He's also a gamer and and asshole. Anyway, he's pretty smart. Smart like the Japs usually are. His code will rock your ass all over town. All this guy wants to do in life is make video games. Making video games > playing video games. Check out the shit he's working on now at his website Zetsu.

Bizzaatch!

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