Hadouken!

Aaaaalright ladies and gentlemen, now that I've replaced my broken laptop, successfully gotten married and honeymooned, and have returned to something resembling a normal existence, let's see if I can't begin updating this blog with some regularity. For this installment, I figured I'd take a cue from a million and one other websites and create a top-ten list of something I know and love: Video Games. It's safe to say that I am, and have been, a gamer for most of my life. Back in the 80's when I was roughly six or seven years old, my parents got me a brand new Nintendo Entertainment System for Christmas, and I've been told my reaction was the equivalent of this video (http://youtu.be/pFlcqWQVVuU), only ten years earlier and with the original Nintendo system. It was on that holiday morning that a love affair was born, one that has endured well into adulthood.

Now, I've never been one of those "hardcore" gamers; I've never counted frame-rates in order to gauge which microsecond something would happen... I've never mapped screen quadrants in order to memorize what part of the tv screen would be affected by a punch or bullet... I've never registered for or entered into any public tournaments in person or online... and my record for consecutive play in one sitting tops out somewhere around the eight hour mark, which I'm sure is laughable to most serious gamers out there. Nevertheless, since I first fired up the original Super Mario Brothers / Duck Hunt around twenty five years ago and got my first magic mushroom, games have been a regular part of my life. I've always played purely for fun and satisfaction, and found early and often that not only can video games be used as a great social activity, but in a few cases they will tell some of the most intricate, compelling and well thought out stories you've ever seen or heard, rivaling many books and movies.

Much in the way people use other entertainment mediums such as television shows or music to mark time periods and experiences in their lives; I can map the same caliber of milestones to video games. The beauty of being involved with these things for over two decades is I can link friendships, mindsets, relationships, ups, downs, houses, apartments, and all sorts of real life situations to what I was playing at that time. For example, while playing the original Contra or Metroid back in the late eighties, I recall the neighborhood I grew up in, the friends I had down the street, Back to the Future and Karate Kid being released on VHS, riding bikes around the neighborhood during the summer, and a general sense of innocence that can only come from being under ten years old. Adversely, I link playing Grand Theft Auto III on my PlayStation 2 in the early 2000's to a very dark and tumultuous time in my life where I had moved away from my family and friends, was addicted to a number of illicit substances, was in a terrible social and financial situation, and subconsciously needed the virtual escape that video games provided in order to be able to tolerate the miserable existence that was my life.

Without getting too heavy or morose, let me set up my list and get things moving here. It was tough putting this together mainly because of how many games I had to exclude, but in the interest of my time writing and your time reading, I shaved it down to just ten. I've put them in descending order from ten to one, of course with number one being my favorite game of all time. Also, I've painstakingly tracked down the most appropriate video clips that best encapsulate the experience of each title, so give them a watch to better understand any of the games you may not have seen or played.

One last note before I start, keep in mind this list is subjective. Sub-jec-tive. I realize that many of your favorite games may not be on here, and adversely that you might have downright hated some of my choices. This is a list of my favorite video games, so don't bother hitting me with comments like "Chrono Trigger mother fucker" or "Call of Duty romps all those games" - this isn't youtube, so I'd invite you to take those comments and fuck yourself raw with 'em. Here we go...


10. Streets of Rage 2 - Sega Genesis - 1992 - 1 or 2 Players
http://youtu.be/Exl19341EbM

I had played the first installment in the Streets of Rage franchise and wasn't hugely moved, but Streets of Rage 2 was a pivotal game for me in that it was the first side scrolling, beat-em-up game I truly fell in love with. This game had all the fixin's: four characters to choose from, two player simultaneous cooperative mode, unique move sets for each character, special attacks, weapons strewn about to pick up and use against enemies, long and interactive levels, a surprisingly awesome and very well suited jazz-inspired soundtrack, and even a plot akin to a late 80's/early 90's Van Damme or Steven Seagal action movie. This game provided me with the interactive equivalent of what those old action movies offered, which was a relatively mindless but engaging and fun romp through a seedy environment where good is good, evil is evil, and a certain level of violence on the part of the protagonist is somehow justified within the setting of the story. These mindless action games would end up being one of my favorite genres of game, specifically the ones that would benefit from simultaneous cooperative play with a buddy.

I played this game back then with a number of different friends, but the occasion that sticks out most in my mind was with my cousin on a hunting trip. At some point in the early 90's my father and my uncle decided to go pheasant hunting, and thought it would be a good idea to bring their ten year old sons with them. After a long day of people shooting birds out of the sky and us kids watching our dads and other random grizzled men skin pheasants on the tailgates of their respective pickup trucks, we all headed back to one of the seediest, dirtiest motels the town of Willits, California had to offer. I remember eating dinner at a Chinese restaurant which was located like an island right in the parking lot of our roach motel, and that evening my cousin and I disconnected the hotel room cable and fired up my Sega Genesis that I had the forethought to bring with me. We turned on Streets of Rage 2 and ended up playing it into the wee hours of the morning. We were both dead set on beating the game, and we played for many, many hours until we accomplished that goal.


9. Super Mario Brothers 3 - NES - 1990 - 1 or 2 Players
http://youtu.be/82TL-Acm4ts

What can I say about the Super Mario franchise that hasn't already been said 1.2 billion times? If the first Super Mario game from 1985 was the bone structure for what all the subsequent Mario games would be based on, then Super Mario Bros 3 is the brain, heart, nervous system, flesh, clothing, and mustache. It was a wonderfully intricate game, with countless hidden secrets to find, new and unique power-ups to take advantage of, dynamic levels to work through, boss battles to survive, an inventory of items to keep track of, and even that board game style map which would be used in nearly every future Mario release. I spent hours playing this game, both alone and with friends, trying to find every secret area and every elusive power-up possible. Little discoveries, such as finding out you could fall "behind" the map by crouching on a white block, opened up days and sometimes weeks’ worth of exploration as we'd go through each level scouring for any and every white block we may have missed, trying to discern where the hidden "path" could lead us.

Not having the internet or YouTube available when Super Mario Bros 3 was released probably did this game the biggest service possible, in that you had to find everything for yourself. Occasionally a friend with a subscription to a video game magazine would read about a secret and come over to show off what he just learned, but a large part of the fun was finding things for yourself, something I'm afraid is lost now in the digital age where anything can be found in under a minute on the internet. That said, the folks at Nintendo (being the smart cookies they are) modeled many of the gameplay elements for their 2009 "New Super Mario" game for the Wii very closely after Super Mario Brothers 3, resulting in over 22 million copies being sold worldwide as of this writing. Not a bad reception for what is essentially a shiny repackaged version of a 20+ year old game. Gotta tip the hat to that fat Italian plumber for being as viable a commodity today as he was back when Garbage Pail kids ruled the playground.


8. WCW/nWo Revenge - Nintendo 64 - 1998 - 1 to 4 Players
http://youtu.be/OxcigoGshcA

This game came out while I was in high school, at a time when I was admittedly a big fan of professional wrestling, and it coincided with what I (and many, MANY others) feel was the best era of modern wrestling. The briefest of synopsis for those who don't know (or care) about pro wrestling: In the late 90's, the premier wrestling company WWF (now WWE)'s main competition was a company called WCW. WCW had ramped up their product so much that they actually overtook the big company in terms of television ratings, event attendance, and merchandise sales. This forced the WWF to step their game up as well, and we fans were the ultimate winners because both brands were putting out the absolute best possible wrestling product anyone had ever seen. They both released video games as part of their war, and WCW/nWo Revenge was the game that WCW put out at the height of their popularity. It was hands-down the most fun anyone I knew ever had playing a wrestling video game up until that point, and the gameplay mechanics would ultimately become so popular that virtually all subsequent wrestling video games to this day have been based upon it.

WCW/nWo Revenge boasted a roster of over 60 wrestlers to choose from, each with unique moves and animations, so the choices of match ups were nearly endless. It offered costume choices for each character which represented phases of the wrestler's career; i.e. you could either play as the red and yellow Hulk Hogan of the 80's or the clad-in-black bad guy "Hollywood" Hogan of the late 90's. You could choose which venue you wanted to wrestle in, ranging from their weekly telecast venues to those of the monthly pay-per-views. It even had the title belts, which could be won from each other and the characters on screen would wear them so you knew who was kicking ass and taking names. And since the Nintendo 64 allowed for four controllers at once, four friends fighting at once was the only way to play. This truly was a social game, I don't believe I would've cared about it nearly as much if it wasn't for the social aspect of having 8-10 guys clambering over each other fighting for the next turn, everyone screaming at the TV rooting for one person/team or another. Although any and every wrestling game released after this one was much more improved and refined, WCW/nWo Revenge is more of a snapshot of camaraderie and community for me than anything else. Those were good damn times.


7. Super Smash Brothers - Nintendo 64 - 1999 - 1 to 4 Players
http://youtu.be/OnNz7_o39yI

Ahhh, Super Smash Brothers. This has got to be one of the fastest paced, most spastic, epilepsy causing, seizure inducing video games ever created. For the unfamiliar, Super Smash Bros took all the characters from many popular Nintendo-owned franchises and pitted them in battle against each other. It featured Mario and Luigi, Link from the Legend of Zelda, Fox from the Star Fox games, Donkey Kong, Kirby, Yoshi the dinosaur, Samus from Metroid, a couple of Pokémon, and a few other lesser known characters from other games. Essentially, I can't figure out an effective way to describe the mechanics of this game so I encourage you to click on the video above to watch an example... if you can actually keep track of what's happening I think you'll agree that there must've been a backroom deal where Nintendo accepted money from Ritalin manufacturers in return for developing and releasing one of the most hectic, frenzied, and absurd games in history.

Weirdly, however, I was inexplicably good at it. So good in fact that the way I came to own it was by beating a guy who had a copy so thoroughly and so many times in succession that he gave it to me out of rage, saying he never wanted to play it again. I would go on to win over $200 from my friends who actually bet money that they could best me at this game. Because it was also a Nintendo 64 game, it too featured 4-player-at-once gameplay, and at a certain point, I had three guys on one team against me by myself and I still came out on top, the match where the majority of my $200 winnings came from. I still to this day have no explanation as to why I was so adept at this game, and although I'm almost certainly out of practice these days and would probably get stomped by a 5th grader with ADD in a heartbeat now, for a brief period of time back in 1999 I was the Rain Man of this game. And the fact that I had a room full of 6 other guys seething with anger and frustration while I effortlessly mopped the floor with them is the sole reason this game is in my top ten. That was god damn fun.


6. Final Fantasy VII - PlayStation PSX - 1997 - 1 Player
http://youtu.be/xrmfrWhyTAY

This is the only Final Fantasy game I ever played, and as of this writing there are more than fifteen official games carrying the Final Fantasy name. The reason I haven't played any others is not because I didn't like the one I did play, quite the opposite. This game was SO enthralling, so rich, deep, immersive, and insanely engaging, that it unapologetically usurped nearly a year of my life, and I loved every second of it. There's no way I could justify mentally and emotionally checking out of my daily life again in order to indulge any more of this franchise. To put this game into perspective, it was three discs long, meaning at a certain point, many tens of hours into the game, it would tell you that to progress further you had to insert the next disc. And that happened twice. Most games being put out at that time on that platform didn't even make full use of the one single disc that the games were imprinted on.

This game had everything, and I mean everything: love, loss, betrayal, amnesia, exile, impending doom, hatred, natural disasters, alienation, a tattood talking wolf, the plight of the lower class, revenge, self-discovery, political elections, large scale war, magic, demons, environmental issues, inner peace, turmoil, murder, government cover-ups, ancient prophecies, a large black man with a machine gun, swords, mystical sky creatures, motorcycles, airships... It is by far the grandest game in terms of scope that I've ever played. I won't even attempt to summarize the story, partly because it would take days to be accurate, and also because I can't claim that I personally understood more than 85% of it myself. But I will say this, the $20 I paid a kid in history class for his used copy of this game without knowing anything about it was probably the single most rewarding gamble I ever took. In fact, just writing about it and watching the video above is tempting me to dust of the old PlayStation and give all three discs of this game another spin. Epic, simply epic.


5. The Saboteur - Xbox 360 - 2009 - 1 Player
http://youtu.be/kWnRNOI7h9g

The Saboteur was a sleeper of a game that came out very late in 2009. It got virtually no press, there was no advertising campaign I was ever aware of, and the studio that developed and released it was shut down by it's parent company immediately after the game's completion. I probably wouldn't have even known about this game except it literally fell into my lap, by way of a friend coming by my house after not enjoying his new copy of it, and tossing it to me while I was sitting down. I initially didn't expect much after his poor review and having not heard of it before, but this turned out to be one of the most fun, visually striking, and ultimately satisfying games I've ever played.

The Saboteur's premise hooked me immediately: set in 1940's Nazi-occupied France, you play as a drinking, smoking Irish race car driver. A series of events that begin as a simple raceway rivalry between your protagonist and a Nazi colonel escalate and snowball until the Irishman is waging a full-scale war against the entire occupying German force in Paris. The real standout feature of this game is the art design and graphical presentation. When the game begins, everything is black and white except for the color red, present with both the Nazi swastikas and blood. As you progress through the game, killing ze Germans and destroying their military installations, you gradually reduce the Nazi presence and as you do, full, vibrant color is returned to each section of the city and surrounding countryside that you have liberated. It becomes so much more than a series of objectives, you get to know the city as you drive down it's streets and jump from rooftop to rooftop, and genuinely begin care about being successful in your quest and returning color to the city of Paris.

The other shining point where this game moved me was with the music. Setting complimentary tunes by the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, and Koop very much enhanced the entire experience. Hearing Nina Simone belt out "Feeling Good" while I snuck up behind a Nazi General and silently slit his throat elevated the experience of playing this game to an art form in my mind. On a side note, I was so god damned disheartened when I heard the song being reduced to being featured in a cheap weight-loss commercial campaign a few months back, but I digress. Ultimately, any game that allows you to mount an anti-aircraft gun and shoot down Nazi Zeppelins is already a potential winner, and the fact that this game actually has a mission/level titled "A Pint and a Shag" pushed it WELL into my top ten list. And oh yeah, if all that doesn't seem bad ass enough, you can download a developer-sanctioned add-on from the internet that enables nudity within all the brothels. What a game.


4. The Street Fighter Franchise - 1987 to 2011 - 1 or 2 Players
http://youtu.be/-tU654_Fbjk

Hour for hour and dollar for dollar, I don't think any other game franchise in history has taken more of my time or money than Capcom's Street Fighter. It would impossible, and downright unfair to make me choose just one favorite incarnation of this game out of the 20+ years it's been around and the 20+ releases in the series. These guys have been throwing fireballs around nearly as long as Mario's been stomping those little walking turd things, and I've played (and owned) almost every variant along the Street Fighter path. If you've never seen or played these games, there isn't a huge amount to them: you and one other guy fight it out. That's it. Of course the games have evolved over the last two decades and each version has unique and varying degrees of window dressing and features, but when you boil it all down, it's just you and your opponent, duking it out.

I remember giving the original game, simply titled "Street Fighter" a spin somewhere between 1988-1990 in an arcade, but the second game in the series is where this franchise went through the roof. It started with the original "Street Fighter 2" down the street at my friend’s house on his Super Nintendo (I never had one, I was a Sega Genesis kid), but I quickly got my new copy of "Street Fighter 2 - Championship Edition" of my very own. That soon was replaced by "Super Street Fighter 2" with the four new characters, and before long we were headed back to the arcade to play "Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo". Sound confusing? It's gonna get worse before it gets better. SF2 Turbo was very quickly replaced by the "Street Fighter Alpha" series, of which there three separate games released between 1995-1998, all of which I owned on PlayStation. Towards the end of that came the Street Fighter 3 series, which I wasn't a huge fan of so I cooled off the franchise for roughly two weeks or so until I discovered and purchased the first two installments of the "Street Fighter EX" series, which were a late 90's attempt at three-dimensional fighting.

Then the drought happened. There were no substantial new releases for something like ten years. A few collection games were released for the PlayStation and PlayStation 2 (yes I own those as well, both the Street Fighter Collection and Street Fighter: Anniversary Collection, both of which include two versions of previously released games bundled together), but nothing new to play. That was until late 2008, when I heard tell of a seemingly too-good-to-be-true "Street Fighter 4". When it finally dropped in 2009, I played the FUCK out of that game, until it was replaced one year later by "SUPER Street Fighter 4," which included 10 new characters. Without boring you too much more with any more painful minutiae about the differences between various incarnations of these games, the point is they've been present in my life just about every step of the way. I can track these games from elementary school through middle school, high school to adulthood, and beyond. These games are truly geared towards kinship and camaraderie, I tried playing one or two of them by myself and the experience blew donkey ass. They can only be played with a buddy on the couch, whether it be over apple juice at ten years old or a fine ale at 25, I've found Street Fighter to be a phenomenal way to get together with people, friends or otherwise, and kick some ass. Hadouken!


3. The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker - GameCube - 2003 - 1 Player
http://youtu.be/r1AVNa8q8T8

There was nothing easy about choosing which Legend of Zelda game to throw on this list, especially considering how much I truly and honestly enjoy these games. Ocarina of Time was a stellar game back in the 90's that revolutionized how virtually all future Zelda games would operate, and Twilight Princess was a superbly dark and moody tale that captivated me for months. But in the end, Wind Waker had an edge that placed it a notch above the others in my personal opinion, in that rather than roaming forests and deserts and fields like virtually all the other Zelda games ever made, this one takes place on an immense and seemingly endless ocean. Sailing the open seas is the one thing that hasn't been very prevalent in video games, and I don't know why that is. But I've always been drawn to water, spent a large portion of my life on boats, and it's likely for that reason that I was drawn to the Wind Waker entry in the Zelda universe. I was apparently in the majority when I was initially put off by the uber-cartoonish look of the game. It looked like it was geared towards children... young children. If I remember correctly I owned this game for months before I even considered giving it a try, based solely on the graphical design.

It took a little getting used to, but once I finally let go of my preconceived notions and gave it an honest chance, I found a wonderfully fun game that presented itself as small and simple, but opened up to be a long and massively rewarding adventure. All the elements from the other Zelda games are present, from the swordplay to the bow and arrow, unlocking new weapons and items along your quest, and of course the infamous dungeons that have appeared in all the Zelda ventures before and after this one. But the ocean, the massive, vast ocean, makes this game truly unique. I spent hours, days, sailing from one island to another. Some had towns, others had caves, and some were simply a series of moss covered stones not ten feet above the water line. All had something of interest in or around them, and sailing from one to the next was a liberating thrill. The implementation of certain elements such as wind direction necessitated some mild but unobtrusive strategy, and the grapple apparatus used to search the ocean floor equated to hours of searching for treasure. Running into tornadoes, fighting giant octopuses, learning spells that could affect weather patterns; it all hit a home run with this gamer.

My fears of this game being exclusively for children were dispelled at the end of the story, when the player's character drives his sword directly into the forehead of the antagonist, down through his skull and all the way through his neck into his chest. That shit ain't for kids, no matter how the graphics look while he's doing it. The other portion of this Wind Waker that resonated with me was its apparent respect and clear reverence for the legacy of the previous games in the series. Although it was set in a drastically different environment, there were subtle nods and clear associations made to the preexisting mythology. Without giving away too much of the plot (well, who gives a shit, the games nearly 10 years old), when your character finds the path to the ancient Atlantis-style city buried miles under the sea, and it's revealed you're actually in the same world as one of the previous games, just centuries later and after a great flood... that sealed the deal for me and elevated this game to an all-time favorite.


2. Crystalis - NES - 1990 - 1 Player
http://youtu.be/pEPqFC5OvGU

Crystalis was one of the first ten or so video games I ever played in my life, and I can safely credit it as THE game that hooked me on gaming. First things first, the scope of this game was wildly ambitious considering the time period it was released. This game took hours to complete, and that was if you knew exactly what to do. If you were just figuring it out for the first time (without help or a guidebook, obviously), you could expect to be playing for weeks. Crystalis was immense in terms of story, game play, weaponry, the world you explore, the towns you visit, and the tasks you have to complete. It was technically a role playing game in that you could level up and boost your abilities, but I fondly think of it more as one of the first open world action/exploration games. Just traveling from the one end of the "world" to the other would take over fifteen minutes if I remember correctly, which is enormous by the video game standards of 1990.

I was very much drawn to the post-apocalyptic story of Crystalis, which was essentially that civilization as we know it was wiped out in 1997 due to world war (they probably should've pushed that date out a bit further), and although technology had been banned as a result, as you might have guessed somebody gets their hands on some modern weaponry and begins causing trouble, which you're tasked with putting a stop to. I won't go into huge detail about the whole story since it's relatively convoluted and would just take too long to describe, but I enjoyed and appreciated it so much that I've occasionally considered exercising my writing abilities by trying to novelize it in a not-for-profit labor of love. Acute alcoholism has prevented me from undertaking that project just yet, but there's still time.

A couple notes about this game. One, it's hard. It's DAMN hard. While you get four distinctly different kick ass swords with different abilities throughout the course of the game, most enemies can only be killed with one or two select weapons, and if you go up against one of those enemies with the wrong sword equipped, you're pretty well fucked. Second, this game gives you little to no hints in terms of what to do next. Some guy in one of the many towns mentions in passing that he lost his statue? You gotta pick that out from all the other rambling of the town's residents and get to searching for that fucking statue, or else you're in for hours of wandering around trying to figure out what to do next. I read somewhere that they re-released this game on Gameboy ten years later and did away with a lot of the difficulty, in that any sword can kill any enemy and they clearly spell out your objectives and guide you to them. This pisses me off. The reason this game was so good is because it didn't apologize for what it was, i.e. difficult. It was up to you, the player, to develop problem solving skills, read between the lines and decipher codes and riddles, along with getting some dexterity in your thumbs so you wouldn't get killed while trying to figure it all out. The point of this game, at least in my mind was NOT to be led around by the nose and have things spelled out for you, but some obtuse programmer with no comprehension of or appreciation for subtlety went ahead and ruined that for the next generation of gamers after mine.

Anyway, for shits and giggles, I downloaded this game onto my phone and played it with an NES emulator just a few months ago (ain't technology grand?) just to see how it's withstood the test of time. I'm happy to report that other than the obvious fact that it looks like it was developed in the late 1980's, this game gloriously stands up on its own merits even today in 2011. I had just as much fun playing it now as I did at nine years old, which is a good barometer in my mind of how solid this game is and how right I was to be addicted to it way back then.

Post script: the attached video is kind of shit quality, but it was the best I could find of the opening of the game that demonstrated some of the gameplay. It looks and sounds like the guy is using a crappy emulator judging from the screen jumps and audio skips, but it was the only one available that didn't have some fat ass hole talking over the whole thing.


1. Red Dead Redemption - Xbox 360 - 2010 - 1 Player (online multiplayer available)

Before you read anything I have to say about this game, please watch these five videos in the order that I've posted them. They only come out to about ten minutes or so, and since words can't, and won't do this game justice, you have to see and hear it. Do yourself a favor and switch them all to 720 resolution before they load to truly get the experience.

http://youtu.be/T0t_QQgtrgM
http://youtu.be/5IBgoy73pJw
http://youtu.be/Qtfbm0PMh4g
http://youtu.be/RL2_SBLgsx0
http://youtu.be/Y1mb723fuYg

This game firmly and squarely sits at the very top of my list of favorite video games of all time, and nothing even comes close to dethroning it. Every aspect of this game gets a 10/10 from me, and I do mean every aspect. The graphics are perfect. The voice acting is perfect. The soundtrack is perfect. The way the game handles is perfect. It is the pinnacle of gaming in my opinion, and what the above videos don't touch on is how deep and intense the plot really is. If you're anything like me and appreciate good character development, by the end of the game you'll be so emotionally invested that you'll actually feel strange when the dust settles on the final scenes and the story is over. I don't know any more eloquent way of putting it without giving anything away, but my best friend said the same thing when he completed the game and I've read hundreds of others online say similar. If you haven't played this game and you plan to, do yourself a favor and DON'T spoil the story for yourself by turning over too many rocks on YouTube or other websites.

Once the main story is complete and everything is done, try taking the add-on episode for a ride. In "Red Dead Redemption - Undead Nightmare" they take the game in an entirely new, far less serious tongue-in-cheek direction that successfully and effectively pays homage to zombie B-movies with the same sincerity and depth that the main Red Dead Redemption game paid to serious westerns. Watch this video for a little overview: http://youtu.be/0Di2eOr-kqs

Red Dead Redemption is more than a game, it's an experience. It's better than most movies you've ever seen. It's better than most books you've ever read. It's better than most video games you ever played, stories you've ever heard, food you've ever tasted. I haven't put this game down in a year and a half since it came out, and I still haven't tired of it. If all games were as compelling and rich as this one, I'd be 300 pounds, unemployed, unmarried, and would likely still be living back with my parents. Luckily, no other game has even come close to this one, which is the only reason I'm still a productive member of society.


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And that's that! Thanks for reading, now go fire up whatever video game system you have available and indulge your inner geek for a while!

Bummin Around

I was raised in and currently live in the bay area, just a few miles out from San Francisco. This is an area generally known for it's super-progressive ideology, it's ultra-liberal political views, and it's general "we accept, embrace, and care about everyone and everything" attitude. To left wingers it sounds like a utopia, while conservatives probably wouldn't mind if this region broke apart from the continental land mass and drifted out into the Pacific. Don't worry, I'm not going to get political here, I'll save that oil drum full of feces for another day. But for all the self indulgent, altruistic bullshit that gets strewn about this region I call home, I've repeatedly come across one glaring inconsistency that I feel needs addressing.

Now, for the out-of-towners who have never been out here, a little clarification: despite widespread perception, not all of California looks like the Santa Monica beach where they filmed David Hasselhoff shtooking Pam Anderson throughout the 1990's. Even being less than 20 minutes from the ocean and one of the U.S.'s largest major cities, we've got a shit ton of undeveloped, rural land all over the place. This little factoid will become relevant in a moment.

On my lunch break from work, my fiance and I (we work in the same building) will usually grab some food and find a good place to park the car and eat. Yesterday was no different; as it was over 90° out we found a nice shady spot behind the local movie theater where we parked to eat our sandwiches or whatever the hell we got. The lot we parked in sits adjacent to a roughly ten acre field of unincorporated county land, which boasts nothing beyond a lot of dry grass and a set of old train tracks that haven't seen a train for a few decades. It's common knowledge among locals that these old railroad tracks are used as something of a transit system by the homeless, as you can quickly and effectively navigate from one end of town to the other without following or crossing over too many public streets. There's a crappy chain link fence with missing sections and disconnected pieces that follows much of the train track line, so you can essentially get in and out wherever you need to be. This system was useful as a teenager who may or may not have been avoiding officers of the law after engaging in arguably objectionable behavior, but I digress.

Back to the story. As we parked, we heard the voice of some woman yelling angrily at the top of her lungs. As I killed the engine, we traced the voice to a homeless woman, who was screaming obscenities and flailing about in the bushes not fifteen feet away from the car. Although my fiance was uneasy about our proximity to this unfolding altercation, I was wildly intrigued as to what was going on. As she emerged from the bushes and into the parking lot, it became clear she was having a full-scale argument with... an invisible person. She kicked over her shopping cart full of belongings, threw empty soda bottles and random trinkets in frustration, all the while shouting some of the most frenzied bile I can remember hearing. Specifically, some of her greatest hits were: "I know EXACTLY who the fuck you are! You're the ass hole who fucks with people until they're DEAD!" and "I'm not letting you take MY shit like you took everyone else's, you dick!" and of course "Go fuck yourself you dumb mother fucking piece of shit, bitch!" - Now, on the surface there was something amusing about this scenario, it's certainly something me and my friends would have laughed at (and possibly tried to film) back in our high school days. But as the novelty wore off and I watched this woman's gaze focused intently on a person only she could see, the stark reality set in that to her, there was actually someone there, and further, she was honestly threatened by them. The pity began to set in. Who was this woman? What is her story? What has happened in her life that drove her to this point? What was the invisible man threatening to do that was so alarming to her?

After about twenty minutes of this sad exposition of dementia, and after a few more cars full of voyeuristic lunch breakers had slowly driven by the scene, she picked up her belongings, pulled back a portion of the chain link fence, and wandered aimlessly into the massive empty field on the other side. Eventually she reached the train tracks and began to follow them, and she kept arguing with her imagined attacker for as long as I could hear her, but what was even more disturbing was when vultures began circling above her head. Yes, the eat-dead-flesh, scavenger-of-the-sky kind of vultures. Now, she was fueled by rage and spry enough for me to be confident that she made it through the afternoon unscathed, but the entire situation got me questioning how progressive and evolved we really are, both as a bay area resident and as a member of our entire collective society in general. I mean, this is someone who has clearly lost all control of her mental faculties and is literally in danger of being eaten alive by scavenging birds, and yet nobody but jerk with a blog and his fiance on their lunch break took notice, let alone did anything to help.

A slightly more humorous homeless anecdote, a few years back, my buddy and I were looking for a picture suitable for the cover of our album we were recording, and from the side of the freeway we saw a sweet, dilapidated old bridge that was falling apart. It fit what we had in mind, so we tried to find a way out to it in order to snap a picture. We parked at a shopping center nearby, and hiked out behind it along a little dirt path that headed in the direction we thought we needed to go. About halfway to the bridge, we came across a homeless encampment with about six vagrants, and once they saw us coming they perked up and picked a representative to greet us. As three or four homeless guys watched intently from their shanty village, one of the women met us in the path and asked us for some money. We told her we didn't have any cash, but she noticed we were both smoking cigarettes so she asked for some of those. I handed one over, and had the foresight to hold it above her hand, dropping it to her without any physical contact. She then looked to my friend and said "now you," almost as if she were collecting toll. He did not have the chance to follow my lead, thus she grabbed his whole hand when taking the smoke from him. This sent him into a bit of a panic, as he justifiably assumed she probably infected him with her hep c handshake. So after paying the "toll" and continuing on to snap a few shots of this bridge for our album, we had to head back past the camp once again to reach the car. This time, they were more prepared for us. As we approached for the second time from the opposite direction, the same lady was holding on to another homeless woman, this one much younger, and wearing a pair of short shorts. As we shuddered all the way towards them, she offered to "sell" us her friend, saying she just "washed her real good and put her in a pair of daisy dukes" for us. I insinuated she must be joking, but she made it clear very quickly that she was deadly serious. My friend jokingly asked how much, and she responded with "twenty dollars and she's yours forever." We politely said we'd think about it and come back, and after paying another toll of two cigarettes each, we continued on. As we walked away she said that she'll see us the following Tuesday to purchase her friend, to which I replied that there was no Tuesday this coming week so we'll have to reschedule. She was pondering the concept of Tuesday not being a day as we made it to safety and out range. The rest of the evening was spent watching my friend Purell his hands until they were raw.

Here in the bay area we're bombarded with news stories about the university students in Berkeley protesting against the use of plastic grocery bags, or San Franciscans organizing a rally to force employers to cover gender-change operations under their healthcare plans. Everything is always so important and urgent, and there's always a litany of perceived injustices that need to be addressed and rectified by all these bleeding heart democrats out here, and yet when it comes to the homeless and the emotionally disturbed, you don't hear so much as a peep beyond a news story saying that the police had to tell a group of vagrants to "move it along." Sure there are soup kitchens and shelters peppered throughout the area, but the vast majority of our time, effort, money and resources go towards bickering about issues such as ensuring illegal aliens can attend a four year college tuition free, or probing a police department for six months to make sure they didn't violate some drug dealer's rights when they kicked down his door to find 1.2 million dollars worth of meth being cooked up in his living room. It's utterly absurd to me that as a civilized, first world society, we aren't able to properly prioritize and take care of our citizens first and foremost. These people are literally fighting with invisible attackers, selling their friends into what I can only assume would be sexual slavery, and are so out of their minds that they'll die horrible, lonely and painful deaths until they get real help.

It's easy to step over a bum who's asking for a smoke or some change and say they need to get a job and stop putting their hand out. But picture this objectively: A homeless man sits on the curb in <insert locale here>. His legs don't work due to a hit and run last year, and since he can't afford a wheelchair he rolls himself around on an old skate board. He's got about six of his original teeth left in his head, and smells of urine due to the fact that he doesn't have access to a bathroom, can't move effectively, and hasn't showered in over six months. His hair is falling out in part due to a drug addiction he had a few years back, and also because he's malnourished and hasn't eaten a real meal in upwards of three months. He has virtually no social skills because nobody other than his fellow homeless has talked to him as a human being for a decade, he has no mailing address to receive mail at, his credit is non-existent, his social security number is long forgotten, and having spent so much time on the fringe of society, he occasionally forgets his full name. Now someone explain to me, please, how in fuck's name that guy is supposed to "pull himself up by his bootstraps" and get a job. Even entry level jobs require you to furnish good to great credit, bank statements for the last three months, utility bills at your address in your name, professionally presentable attire, a coherent demeanor, and an impressive resume with proof of education and a solid work history. So again, how exactly is the guy on the street corner asking for the discarded half of your filet-o-fish going to get it together?

I'm not preaching from a soap box here or trying to organize a movement or anything, but I strongly urge whoever reads this to use it to put things into perspective. Treat these people like human beings. Sure they might squander away any cash you give them on booze, but why not give them some food? Grab an extra cheeseburger in the drive through and toss it their way. Donate some shit, throw them a jacket or something. Stop treating them like sub-human vermin, and take pity on them. Every one of us is dealt a hand, be it good or bad. Maybe you were born fortunate, or maybe it's been a struggle. Maybe you had to work your ass off to become successful, or maybe you haven't gotten there yet. Perhaps you had it all but squandered it away to a gambling addiction or alimony/child support. Whatever your situation is, you aren't any more important or valuable of a person than these people are, you just had a better combination of luck, drive, mental capacity, opportunity, and perhaps decision making skills. Everyone makes mistakes, and maybe they made some bigger ones that you wouldn't have made, but the point is they're still human beings; they're someone's sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, and for whatever reason they're in a terrible situation now and need a little help, or at least to be treated with the dignity that one human should show for another. We should all be so lucky as to not see invisible people who mean to do us harm, and moreover have no family or friends to turn to for help.

And to all my left-wing super-liberal hippie neighbors around here, get off your fucking high horses. You're not helping anything with your hybrid driving, self-absorbed, holier-than-thou attitudes. You're not enlightened just because you vote democrat and live in San Francisco. You aren't more evolved than anyone else in the country regardless of region or political affiliation. Want some proof? Tonight, on the streets of the very city that you tout as the most progressive, open minded, and caring in the country, a homeless man is going to die of starvation and/or disease and/or the elements. And it's not because of lack of resources or the inability to prevent it from happening, it's because while you were rallying for gay marriage to be legalized, you stepped over that homeless man rather than help him to his feet. And rather than rent a hotel room for a night and buy a warm meal for someone in need, you were pumping fifty bucks of your money into the campaign fund of whichever politician promised to address whatever first world problem you care about. So knock it the fuck off with the "my shit don't stink" attitude, because your shit smells downright horrific.

And by the way, New York legalized gay marriage a few weeks ago and it's still illegal here, so who's progressive and forward thinking now, retards? Try focusing on a real, pressing problem that actually has real life or death consequences, rather than sucking each other off because of how awesome you think your ideologies are.