This blog is the chronicle of my experiences with Grandma, the video-game playing queen of her age-bracket and weight class. She will beat any PS2, XBox, GameCube, etc., console game put in front of her, just like she always has. These are her stories. She is absolutely real. She lives in Cleveland.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
One day at a fuckin' time
Grandma's bypass surgery was February 16th. It's now almost May and and the first glimmer of normalcy is creeping into Grandma's overstressed life in the form of getting utterly pissed off at Professional Mode in Resident Evil 5 on her 360. The past month and a half of never-ending hospital visits, close scares, and doctor's appointments definitely rank as the most pain she has ever felt in her 73 years on this weird little planet. It also probably came close to the lowest she's felt emotionally in the past few decades.
Maybe I don't need to tell you, some of you already know, but goddamn if it wasn't your cards, letters, phonecalls, emails.. or even just your presence out there in the world that made her feel as though everything would be okay.
Hold on. That sounds like a line of bullshit. That sounds like one of those things people recite out of courtesy. I'm not making myself clear enough.
Let's start at the point where Grandma got out of the hospital.
I'm trying to find the best way I could describe University Hospitals Cleveland to you and I can only come up with a single word:
Midgar.
The UH Campus is a series of buildings and hospitals connected on multiple levels with a giant tower connecting everything at the center. Construction cranes surround the North East side, building something new after Avalanche or whoever destroyed what used to be there. The gleaming buildings of steel and glass squeeze a tiny row of houses down beneath them like a forgotten shanty town. There is a parking garage on Cornell Rd off Euclid that's usually full during the peak hours, but its worth it to scope out departing cars because of the pedestrian bridge connecting it to Mather Pavilion.
When Grandma first arrived at the hospital, usually the only available parking in this garage was on the top floor. When I lived in Cleveland, I remember my friends and I taking the stairs to the top of that garage for a view of the skyline in the distant valley. It's quite a view. The automatic sliding doors to the elevator waiting area was busted; I'd like to think some silly fools with access to the hospital-provided wheelchairs ramped down from the very top of the garage and smashed into it, but my YouTube searches haven't turned up anything.
The day I was finally able to bring her home, however, the door was repaired. That's how long she had been there. The place was already changing around her. The week before that had been a series of tiny steps. She would, with the assistance of a walker and oxygen, walk a few steps beyond the nurses' station and back again. And then a little further the next day and so on. We planned to eventually help her walk all the way to the elevators, down the long corridor in the lobby, into the atrium and eventually into the cafeteria as sort of a Grand Journey that would symbolize her readiness to start life again.
They discharged her before we had the chance. Maybe that was an omen of things to come.
When I reached her room, she was reviewing a video game of sorts. The UH television network has these little games you can play using the remote control; games like word puzzles and trivia and Bejewled knock-offs that had kitten heads instead of jewels.
"I can't get the goddamn cursor to choose the right kitten.." she said.
At least nothing has changed, I thought.
After a bit of waiting, a nurse removed the IV from Grandma's arm while another began to go over a list of medications and instructions for me. More contradictions. "She's going to have a lot of surgery pain for a little while." -"What kind of pain?" "Pain where they opened the ribcage, mostly. In the chest. Perfectly normal."
And later:
"If she has any chest pain, go the emergency room immediately." -"...Okay."
"When should she go back on her Coumadin?" -"Tonight. INR levels are good."
And later:
"Have her talk to her doctor before going back on Coumadin."
There was a lot of that.
I fetched the car from the garage and they wheeled her to the front lobby so I could pick her up. Of course, they released her at exactly 5:00pm on a weekday for some sadistic reason so it took awhile to get home. Even in the winter, the cold air from the vents in the car made her feel good.
At home, we cleaned up the walker she used after one of her knee replacements if she needed it. She was able to get in and out of bed easily, which was a relief. We bought her one of those super tall toilet seats for the bathroom in her gameroom so she wouldn't have a problem getting up again. I had installed it just that morning, so I felt like I accomplished something. The kids had shoveled the snow from the driveway to the front steps, but a fresh coat had made it look slick again. Luckily, she didn't have any problems using the walker.
I moved her chair out of the gameroom and replaced it with my computer chair from the office which was higher up for her; less effort getting up and down. After unfolding a seat for the shower so she could bathe, we were set. For the first couple weeks, I slept upstairs, just outside her room on the couch in case she needed something. If anything split open, if something went wrong, if she couldn't reach her walker, somebody needed to be there.
Grandma was in a lot of unbelievably uncomfortable pain during those nights. I could hear it from outside her door. She couldn't sleep for more than ten minutes without grimacing audibly. Perhaps it was because of the medication she took before going to sleep, but she couldn't remember doing it. Because she couldn't sleep, I couldn't sleep. Not with those noises coming out the room a few feet away from me. Most frustrating of all was that I couldn't do anything about it. If I opened the door and asked her if she was alright, she would wake up annoyed. I'd say "Let sleeping dogs lie" and all that, but The Dog didn't seem to care. Shiloh was passed out next to her bed, his paws flat on the carpet, just as he had always done before she went in for surgery. Everyone else was stressed the fuck out.
One bit of reprieve came from the visiting nurse assigned to Grandma during her initial recovery. She's this unusually cheerful person with a contagious laugh that had the unfortunate task of filling out mounds of paperwork every time Grandma would go back to the hospital or one of her doctors changed instructions, which, as you'll come to find out, meant she had to fill out a lot of goddamn paperwork.
Soon after she came home, she was back in. The pain was too great. She was too short of breath. She felt light headed. She couldn't sleep at all. If you can imagine how you would feel if you ran until your body would absolutely not allow you to run anymore, when you collapse onto the track, vomiting and cramping and breathing as though the oxygen levels had suddenly dropped to Everest Summit levels, well.. that's how Grandma felt from the action of putting on a shirt in the morning. She called her doctor but the doctor was in surgery. The nurse on the line advised she go to the emergency room. She was told to come to the Cleveland emergency room so if she was admitted, the doctor would be able to see her.
So we drove back to Midgar.
I dropped her off at the Emergency Room doors and went searching for a place to park. For reasons I don't fully understand, even now, I was angry. I was angry at the hospital for having three parking garages marked "full" when there were a line of cars exiting them. I was angry at Cleveland for only having a set number of parking meters behind Rascal House Pizza. I was angry at University Circle traffic for existing. I was angry at the tourists in Little Italy gawking up at the church, crossing the street slowly; happily to the Frank Sinatra tunes being pumped into the air outside any number of restaurants nearby. I must have drove around a small, four block radius for an hour trying to park. I was angry at the nurses for contradicting the doctors. I was angry at the kids for hugging grandma and coughing with their mouths open, getting her sick and setting her back.
Most disturbing of all: I was angry at Grandma. I was angry at her for feeling the way she did. I was angry she wasn't jumping around, yelling at the kids to cut the bullshit and behave like she used to. I was angry at her for not listening to the doctors, that it was an expected pain. I was angry that she breathed the way she did, hyperventilating when she hurt, making things worse. I was angry that I had to focus on all of this, on the medication, on the appointment times, on the scheduling. I was angry that it was up to me to repeat to her what the doctors told her not because she didn't understand but because they spoke too quietly and too quickly, and her hearing aids weren't working. I was angry that I had to watch her suffer instead of retreat into some safe state of self-pity.
And I was angry and ashamed that I felt that way.
I finally found parking on the Case campus next to the hospital. I walked a familiar route along the road in the rain feeling sorry for myself. When I finally found the Emergency Room door, I also found a sign next to it that read "Free Valet Parking for ER patients as a courtesy of University Hospital" with a dude in an uniform next to it taking people's keys.
Mother fucker.
I asked my way around and finally came across Grandma stuffed in a back room already hooked up to an IV that would buzz a piercing, loud alarm until some passing nurse would come in and push some buttons. We sat there for awhile.
"Are you still mad at me?" she asked. -"I'm not mad at you," I lied.
I knew my passive-aggressive bullshit was easy enough to see through for Grandma, but I couldn't even begin to explain myself. I knew I was being a jackass, but I didn't know why.
"You think I'm not trying hard enough, is that it?" -"No..." "It fucking hurts, Tim! I'm trying!" -"I know! But it's gotta be the deconditioning they talked about! Look, they said it was going to be like this and just.. take it easy for awhile! If it hurts when you do something then don't fucking do that thing right now!" "Don't do what? Get dressed? Walk to the bathroom?" -"No, I don't mean that..."
But I didn't know what I meant. What was she supposed to do?
They admitted her to the hospital for testing and I drove back home. I was able to get over myself and stop being an asshole. She was in for a couple days. They changed her medications a little and let her go.
Things did not improve for Grandma.
Her doctor told her to take pain pills for the pain, but she doesn't like pain pills because they make her feel stoned. She hated the way she was treated by pain management clinics in the past, like some druggie just out to score some Oxycontin to snort, so she had always done her best to just avoid them. The pills helped her at night but not as much during the day.
The physical therapist came out to the house all of one time and then promptly left saying that Grandma was doing exactly what she needed to be doing at the moment and she wasn't required.
Her cardiologist seemed to be as leery of her symptoms as Grandma.
The problems she described, she was told, warranted another heart catheterization. Worse case scenario: the heart bypass didn't take, and they would have to place stints to open up the blockage, something they didn't want to do in the first place, which is why they did the heart bypass.
I don't even know how to tell you how scared she was.
She opted to have the procedure performed in Cleveland again, for if something was wrong and they had to fix it, she would have to be transferred there anyway.
So we drove back to Midgar.
This time, the hospital was a bit more tricky to navigate. I couldn't drop Grandma off at the front door like we did in the Emergency Room because the surgical center was too far away for that. I'd need a wheelchair. So! I parked the car on the top floor of the Cornell Rd. garage, took the stairs to the bridge, crossed the bridge, found a wheelchair, asked permission to use it, got a funny look, took the wheelchair back over the bridge, waited for the elevator, let some people go ahead of me that looked like they couldn't stand too long, waited for the next elevator took the elevator to the top, collected Grandma from the car, wheeled her to the elevator only to find a whole mess of wheelchairs for those who needed them.
Mother fucker.
They have an entire area all set up for heart catheterizations at UH Cleveland. This is some common shit. They took Grandma back and offered me a bagel. That's fucking class, right there. When they let me back to see her before they got started, a resident-fellow (which is a silly title) comes over to Grandma to make small talk and answer any questions before the procedure.
"How long will the heart-cath take, usually? I have to make some calls to the rest of the family but I want to be in the waiting area when she's done," I asked.
And as nonchalantly as a man pondering the metric weight of his own balls, this guy says to us "Oh.. let's see, best case, nothing's wrong, we're in and out in no time flat, and worse case, she'll need another heart-bypass."
Grandma starts to cry. Douchebag starts to retrace his steps.
"I mean.. well... that would be done.. later, I guess...." -"I'm not going fucking through that shit again. No fucking way," Grandma tells me.
He scared the everloving shit out of her.
"You have time for lunch if you leave now," they told me. So I did. I hurried down to Rascal House, horked down a couple slices of pizza and ran back upstairs, but she was already in. So I waited.
When they told me she was done, they didn't tell me anything else. The cardiologist who performed the thing was busy doing another one, so I went back to see her and asked her if she knew the result. But nobody told her shit either. Finally, a dude comes out and says the bypass took very well, there's no fluid to worry about, and everything's groovy. That livened Grandma up a bit, albeit as lively as one can be as they are told to lay perfectly still lest the artery in their leg bursts, killing them. Okay: she smiled. Which was the first legitimate smile I'd seen in a long time, it seemed.
"But there's one thing we did find," he continued. "You have a serious blockage in your leg that we found going in, so some people from the vascular department are going to come up and have a look."
...Okay.
And then a dude pushing a cart comes up and performs an ultrasound on Grandma's leg. I think he actually whistled as he did this. Then some other 'resident-fellow' comes by to make small talk and answer any questions about the procedure they just did.
"So there is blockage?" -"Yeah, but it's weird, you've been able to create paths around the blockage so your circulation is okay. Otherwise, we'd have to amputate with blockage like that, it's like 100% totally blocked."
Either these guys haven't figured out the art of bedside subtlety or they just watch House M.D., too much. Luckily Grandma didn't hear that one, I had to tell her about her freakishly cool vascular system later.
But the good news was she was fine. Follow-up appointments with her surgeon would confirm it. She was completely deconditioned from the surgery. Physical rehabilitation was something they were planning to get her into from the start, she just hadn't been ready, yet. She had joined the zipper club with flying colors and just had to work to get back on her feet. But that shit's not easy. It's not like the thing they made you go through before you could join the swim team in high school, it's much, much harder.
She visited the cardiac-rehab center for the first time last week; a cramped room of torture and treadmills in a dark corner of UH Geauga. It took her a lot of work, and a lot of stress, just to make it that far.
But she had encouragement.
Her friend Evan at Edelman/Microsoft sent her three games: Scene It: Lights Camera Action, Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise, and Halo Wars, along with some Microsoft Points for something in the Arcade (she has her eyes on Crystal Defenders). She immediately tore the SHIT out of Halo Wars. It was her first bit of gaming she could focus on. An RTS that didn't stress her out as much was perfect.
Thank you, Evan.
That package was waiting for her when we got home from the hospital after her trip to the ER.
Her friend Gamer Named Tim made her this awesome goddamn card. You should have seen her eyes light up when she got that one.
Thank you, Tim.
That card was waiting for her in the mail after her trip to the cardiologist after he told her she needed another heart catheterization.
Her friend Jenny sent her a motherfucking boomerang and a little book of Australian slang, so it will be fun for Grandma to take out her clackers, job one of those ratbag quacks so hard in the date, they can't do nothing but stand there like a stunned mullet.
Thank you, Jenny.
That package was waiting for her on our porch after her last trip to the surgeon after he told her she was ready for rehab.
And there have been others. Vic Ireland (!) called her last week to make sure she was okay because I hadn't posted in awhile. She was tickled to hear Vic was still doing his thing (she fucking loved Working Designs, so she's all about whatever Vic is up to.) That was after her first day in rehab.
Your emails, your comments in the last post, everything you guys have done for her..
You see? You were with her every step of this horrible goddamn trip. You were with her when she found out it was possible the bypass didn't take. You were with her after the emergency room meltdown. You were with her when she was frustrated and not getting any answers. Whenever things were bad, the moment she got home she could carefully lower herself down onto her computer chair, log in to her email, and there would be something to cheer her up. And more! You guys were fucking with her.
That's what I meant, up on top of the post.
And you were with me, too.
Which brings me to this morning:
We live at the top of a huge goddamn hill. Our little village is on the banks of the Cuyahoga River, which dips down into Kent, then Munroe Falls, then Akron, then it curls into the valley and divides Cleveland before spilling out into the lake. The river is way down there, and our house is way up here. We can see for miles from our back window. If you are crazy sensitive, you may feel your ears pop if you drive up to our house from the park.
Between all the doctor's appointments and hospital visits, Grandma has either spent her time here or with me at the store, grocery shopping. Because of how weak she's been, she has relied on those weird little scooter thingies you often see lazy people use so she could shop as much as she liked. It's a big deal if she can make it to the pharmacy inside the grocery store without using the electric carts. If she can walk there by herself without aid, she comes back to the car with me, sits down, breathes heavy and says "...I DID IT!"
A couple weeks ago she went grocery shopping without using the scooter. She was having a good day. She kept walking and kept walking and was commenting about it saying "man, this is nuts! I feel fine!" By the time she got home, she was a wheezing mess. It almost put her back in the hospital. Her doctors had her agree to take things slow from that point on. So she started using the scooters again, as she did just a couple days ago.
Today, it was beautiful outside here. 70 degrees, sunny, a little breeze.. It was fucking gorgeous. Mom decided to take the dog for a walk.
"You should come to!" she told Grandma. -"Pfft.. Yeah. Sure." "Why not, if it's just down the hill? Once you get down there, Tim could come and pick you up so you wouldn't have to walk back!" -"I don't think so, Linda."
But she thought about it.
It really was pretty outside, and the sun would be good for her and she needed to walk, so.. why not?
And so she did.
Grandma, who was just a month ago couldn't dress herself without sitting down afterwards and focusing her breath, walked past the first block, then the second, passed the police station, crossed the highway and went further on to the post office and then further to the store to get something to drink. This isn't something she would have attempted before the heart surgery.
But she did it today.
Afterwards, she did NOT collapse from exhaustion into the car. She did NOT wheeze and hyperventilate. She fucking made it.
And do you know what she's doing right now?
She's upstairs, in her original gameroom chair, b*tching about Licker β's in the sixth chapter of RE5, which she has beaten on Veteran Mode, collected every figurine, activated the infinite launcher, all the costumes and filters, scored a number of infinite ammo weapons and now she's focused on Professional Mode.
"This is fucking IMPOSSIBLE. I can't DO THIS SHIT. And this bitch is STANDING THERE DOING NOTHING- NOOO! GOD DAMMIT! SHOOT SOMETHING! You WHORE!"
After seeing what she has accomplished recently, I'd say she has a fighting chance.
Grandma and I haven't posted anything in a little while. It's only fair that you folks know why.
The short of it is this:
Grandma has been in and out of the hospital since just after the holidays. Her back pain got to the point where something had to be done. She's been to several specialists to see if anything could be diagnosed, let alone treated. The medication wasn't helping, so under the advice of her doctors, the nerves around her spine were jabbed and selectively electrocuted to death to alleviate the discomfort. Before the second series of shots could be administered, her now familiar chest pain became unbearable, and she was taken to the emergency room. After a series of tests and a heart catheterization, it was determined that the endless fucking around with stress tests and routine EKGs at her previous hospital over the past four years had failed to uncover the now 80% blockage that threatened to give her a massive heart attack.
She would need open heart surgery. Let's back up:
Grandma's back problems are nothing new to you guys; you'll remember that due to osteoporosis, a George Foreman rotisserie grill and a particularly steep staircase, Grandma went through a bone-fusion operation that made her rock a cane at E3 2006. There are other factors that we didn't fully understand until very recently, mostly dealing with possible nerve damage as a result of knee-replacement surgery.
She had switched doctors from Robinson in Ravenna to a family doctor here in Mantua affiliated with the University Hospitals of Cleveland system. It's a much shorter drive and she likes the man. He referred her to a pain management specialist in Beachwood. He was somewhere else, so she met with a different guy and let's just say they "didn't get along."
Okay: Grandma has this card she carries with her; a laminated piece of paper with a typed list of all of her allergies to medications. Only they aren't allergies- well, not most of them anyway. A long time ago a receptionist somewhere at someplace we don't even remember typed it up from the information in her file so it would be easier for her to fill out forms. The bulk of the list comprises of sensitivities she has to medications taken orally- the pills make her stomach uneasy and nauseous. Taken intravenously, it ain't no thang. It's the pill form she can't handle.
Well this guy didn't have time for that explanation. He spoke in that unfortunate medical habit of treating older folks like children; yelling his questions in frustration and rolling his eyes when she stumbles the answer. Honestly, I think by the end of it she just wanted to fucking punch the dude. His accent didn't help, either. He sounded like Ricky Ricardo if Ricky Ricardo freebased cocaine.
Her doctor referred her to someone else. A much nicer guy. But he was a surgeon, and didn't recommend surgery. She would either have to go back to the asshole, or find someone else who was particularly good at the asshole's craft.
She found someone else.
We drove to the surgical center in the middle of a goddamn lake-effect blizzard. The first procedure was purely diagnostic. She had to lay on her stomach, awake, as they prodded different nerves to map the worst of the pain. The next week, Lake Erie decided to shit out another foot of snow on Rt. 271 and yet we still managed to get there early. Too early. Nobody else was there yet. This procedure was much longer, as they carefully either destroyed or deadened the nerves that seemed to only have one purpose: causing Grandma pain. When it was over, the doctor told us "okay! Next week, we'll do the other side!" Grandma groaned.
Before each procedure, Grandma has to stop taking her blood thinners for five days, then drive the night before the surgery for a blood test that makes sure she isn't going to bleed to death or get paralyzed. The constant roller-coaster of on again/off again Coumadin levels were pissing her off. She couldn't eat or drink anything for twelve hours before surgery, so they scheduled them early in the morning for convenience, which meant that if mother nature didn't destroy us, rush hour could always have a shot too. Before the second surgery, the waiting room didn't fill up as fast as usual, because people were calling off their own surgeries. From hospital beds. From getting in car accidents.
The only thing she had to look forward to was the first cup of coffee after surgery, when I would drive her to Solon to Panera Bread. The second surgery was the day after Obama's inauguration, so we bought a few Plain Dealers for souvenirs while we ate our bagels, drank our coffee and talked politics before the drive back home.
Last week, when Grandma got out of bed, her chest pounded with pain. It was a bad one. Mom drove her to the emergency room. Common or not, you don't fuck around with chest pain. I was used to this; I've driven her there before for the same reasons many times. But we had always gone to Robinson in Ravenna. This time she went to UH Geauga, which is just as far- just in the other direction. I expected the same drill. She gets hurried back to a bed, they place a heart monitor on her right away, do a chest xray, possibly an MRI, wait to see what happens, she gets better, they schedule a stress test and send her home.
But not this time.
Mom came back to the house alone. They were admitting Grandma to keep her overnight for observation and further testing.
That night, I drove up to see her. The 'further testing' was a heart catheterization, and we worried about her Coumadin levels. They were too high for such a thing. She could've bled to death if they went too soon. They waited another day.
The morning of the procedure, I drove up early so I could see her before she went in. It helps when you know people are waiting just outside to find out the results, so we had other family coming as well. It was scheduled for 1:00pm, I got there at 11:00am. She wasn't in her bed. They had already started. I gave my name at the information desk and told them where I would be sitting so the surgeon could speak to me when it was done. If you're unfamiliar with such a thing, a heart catheterization is when they stick a tiny camera on a wire and push it through your veins, usually from the leg, up into your heart and look around for a bit. If something is clogged a little, they can place ...things inside the vein or artery to keep it open. It isn't pleasant to think about.
The surgeon met me in the waiting room. It was bad news. She had 40% blockage when she had a similar procedure done in 2005. It was now at least 80%. They couldn't do anything there without damaging the heart. She would need bypass surgery. They would transport her to the hospital downtown tonight or possibly over the weekend. The surgery would probably be Monday. Did I have any questions.
I didn't know what to ask.
In retrospect, I should have simply asked "what are the questions I should ask?" but I wasn't very quick on the draw after being hit with it. I could only revert to what I really wanted to know. "Is she going to be okay?" "What kind of risks are there for something like this?" "Will this take care of the pain as well?" "Will she be alright?"
I should have asked about recovery times. I should have asked what kind of bypass surgery would be done. I should have asked about where the blockage was, whether there was a problem with the valves, which surgeon would be performing the surgery, if we needed a second opinion, what her options were, etc.,..
All I could ask is whether or not she would be okay.
Which is fine, I suppose, but it's a bullshit question for a surgeon. What's he going to say, "no, she will never be able to love again, you twit."?
But I was the only one there to ask the questions at the moment. And there I was feeling sorry for myself because I was alone dealing with this when Grandma was laying flat on the bed in a hallway somewhere trying to come to terms with how close she came...
I called Mom and everyone else I could. Other family started showing up, expecting to see her before the procedure that was already done. After a lot of anxious waiting, I finally got to see her. She was petrified.
And who wouldn't be! A heart cath is one thing, even with the blood thinners at the levels she had, but bypass surgery is no fucking joke. They cut you from your neck to your stomach, saw open your ribcage, crack that shit apart like a motherfucking lobster shell and poke around your goddamn heart while you're on life support.
"I don't know if I want to do this" she said, obviously scared out of her mind. "Yeah, but you have to. This is serious shit," I told her, like I knew anything about what had to be done.
The next few days were a mess. We were taking care of things at the house and trying to stagger schedules so we all had time to go see her downtown. The kids took care of the dog, who would only sleep at night if Grandma was next to him in her bed. I'm not even kidding, that dog is nuts- every night when Grandma goes to sleep, she just.. looks at the dog, and he goes running next to her to be with her in her room. If someone doesn't mimic this routine every night, he shits all over the goddamn house in confusion. I picked up a book for her to read in the hospital, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. (We have a dark sense of humor.)
Unlike the week before, we were ALL there the morning of her surgery. We were there as they wheeled her back to prep and just before they began anesthesia.
It was a long day.
University Hospitals has this terrifying beeper system during major surgeries like this where the family sits out in the waiting area and one person has a pager. One of the nurses in the operating theater gives updates to the desk outside, who pages us with new information. Surrounding the waiting area are these little 'consultation rooms' with heavy doors. You can imagine what sort of news is given in those places.
The pager intrigued me in these, the post-Twitter days.
I imagined some resident clumsily typing on an iPhone as the surgery progressed.
SexxxyManNurse12: ok, knoking her out now... SexxxyManNurse12: peple luk so stupid when we knok them out SexxxyManNurse12: iodine stains everything. jesus SexxxyManNurse12: ok, cutting now... SexxxyManNurse12: oh shit. SexxxyManNurse12: oh SHIT. there's BLOOD EVERYWHERE. OH FUCK. SexxxyManNurse12: Okay, stopped the bleeding. j/k, still bleeding SexxxyManNurse12: vacuums r so cool. I wonder where all this stuff goes. SexxxyManNurse12: ok, cutting ribcage now SexxxyManNurse12: omg that smells so bad SexxxyManNurse12: surgon got bone dust all over him SexxxyManNurse12: lol
Sadly, it wasn't that fun. Our updates were limited to "they are starting surgery now", "they are starting the bypass now", and "they are finished with the surgery, everything's fine, someone will be out to speak with you in a moment."
The surgeon was in a happy mood and pleased with the result of the surgery. That was good enough for me at this point.
We waited a while longer while they wheeled her up to ICU. She was still unconscious and still had the breathing tube and all manner of drainage tubes and IVs stuck in her neck, chest, stomach and arm. She looked rather silly, but I thought taking a camera into the ICU was probably a bad idea.
When she finally woke up, she was still pretty stoned from the drugs. She fought the breathing tube (everyone does, from what I understand) but was out of it enough that I hope she doesn't remember that particular horror.
When I spoke with her the next day, she was in a lot of pain. She now sports a gnarly looking scar down the center of her chest. She has to stay mobile and eat, but her appetite is non existent and finding help to get out of bed so she can walk has been difficult lately. Her heart has had periods of fibulation since the surgery that make her feel dizzy and weak, and as of yet I don't know what that means or if it's normal.
If everything goes as planned and she can kick her own ass into gear, she'll be home tomorrow. If not, she might be in for a few more days.
Either way, it's going to suck for a couple weeks.
On a positive note, if I understand the surgery correctly- Grandma is now technically a zombie. She is now counted among the legions of the 50+ demographic of The Undead. It should give her a unique perspective of Resident Evil 5.
Meanwhile!
On January 12th, I was laid off from my job. I am no longer a photographer, nor am I a journalist. I'm ex-media. In a hand delivered letter from the general manager, my editor and the publisher of the newspaper, I was told that the state of the economy has been particularly hard on us all, and the job cuts were inevitable. Even though we all saw it coming on some quiet, subconscious level, it particularly hurt to come, of all times, now. I miss it already. I had built so many professional relationships with all the people I photographed, during the good times and the bad, that being laid off from the newspaper feels like I've been fired from the entire county. I see these people everywhere and I just.. don't know what to say.
Finding work, ANY work, has been tougher than I thought. Even WalMart isn't hiring.
I still have this persistent (and perhaps pathetic) hope that maybe things will get better and they'll ask me to come back.
I don't know.
Normally, after all this, gaming would be a natural stress reliever- but there isn't really much out there right now. Not yet. Grandma is looking forward to some games, I'm looking forward to some games, but all we can do is look forward. When she had a little extra cash, she went to the store, several times, looking for something, anything to play- but nothing really interests her at the moment. She's just waiting for Killzone 2, Resident Evil 5, Fatal Frame 4, Final Fantasy XIII, God of War III, etc.,.. She's waiting for the good stuff.
Until then, we've become addicted to utilizing the Xbox 360's streaming Netflix feature. She bought herself a bigger hard drive after the trusty ol' 20GB finally filled up. Evan sent her a transfer cord and the rest was easy.
It's been nothing but movies and older games for the past few weeks while Grandma marches back and forth between trips to the hospital and I keep sending out resumes.
Around here, the fun never stops.
Still, even as I write this, I don't need to tell you that things could be a LOT worse.
Video 23: Grandma plays Brothers in Arms - Hell's Highway
I know I can't keep the schedule right at the moment, so I'll post a video of what she's playing today.
She got CoD: World at War for Christmas, which she's still trying to defeat on Veteran mode. Fallout 3 is pretty much as done as you can get, but she didn't really want to go back through and play as a Neutral character because it just doesn't seem as fun as being an absolute saint or a motherf*cking psychopath.
I promise we'll post more often- but I can't guarantee what games it's going to be about, really.
Here is what I've been up to: Work work work work work work work. I don't think I've played a game in months. It makes me sad.
Here's what Grandma has been up to: NCAA Football 08', Metal Gear Solid 4, F.E.A.R., Infinite Undiscovery, Fable II, Resistance 2, and now Fallout 3.
She just started Fallout 3 and Resistance 2, so there isn't much to say yet. But I can give you a quick rundown of what life has been like recently. After she had her EA fun with the commercial thing, she decided to focus more time on sports games. She has said in countless interviews "I don't play sports games because I fucking suck at them." She wanted to change that a bit. She dived right in to NCAA Football '08. Mainly because '09 wasn't out yet and she saw a bit of the new Madden when she was in Orlando and thought it looked pretty good.
To hear the EA guys explain it, the new Madden would be perfect for her. The 'old' EA sports games were intimidating with complication and learning curves that made a lot of gamers squirm. Anticipating the new game, she bought an old one from the bargain bin at Wal-Mart to see what the hell they were talking about.
It turns out that EA is filled with silver-tongued demons who can only lie.
NCAA '08 was difficult for Grandma. For a day or two. Then it got so ridiculously fucking easy she played it for a week solid out of spite.
Being a Buckeye gal, she chose Ohio State as her favorite team. Her very first matchup after a dozen or so tutorials was Michigan State. A bitter rival only seemed appropriate for her first slaughter. In the RPG mentality of things, you first have to be destroyed by an all powerful evil force so you can truly appreciate the hours and hours of life wasted by leveling up and learning the ropes.
Applied to sports games, it looks like this:
Day 1 "Goddammit, I can't kick the fucking ball straight!"
"SHIT! Interception."
"FUCK!! INTERCEPTION!"
"NOOOOOOO!!!! WHO THE HELL ARE YOU THROWING THE GODDAMN BALL TO! This SUCKS!"
"COCKSUCKER!" -"What?" "I can't believe I did that." -"Did what?" "I RAN THE WRONG. FUCKING. WAY." -"Well that's embarrassing." "Motherfucking SAFETY. God DAMN."
Final Score: Ohio State 0 - Michigan 51
Day 2 "YAY! I SCORED A TOUCHDOWN! ALRIGHT! WOOOOO!!!! You fucking SUCK, Michigan!"
"YAAAAAAAY!!! I SCORED AGAIN!"
"ALRIGHT! ALRIGHT! KEEP IT GOING!" -"What quarter is it?" "Still the first, I think." -"Did you change the difficulty? "No. I think I just figured out what the hell these different plays mean." -"Ah. You want to bump up the difficulty?" "NO!"
Final Score: Ohio State 63 - Michigan 6
Day 3 "Hey! I.. scored again! Alright!"
".....Okay, this is getting ridiculous."
"How high will they allow the score to go before they just end it?" -"I don't think there is a limit. I don't know, why?" "Because I have like.. 105 points." -"What quarter is it?" "Third." -"This announcer needs to say some new shit, he's annoying."
"Tim. Tim, how do you make it harder?"
Final Score: Ohio State 112 - Michigan 0
Day 4 "I'm just picking random plays now. I'm TRYING to f*ck up. I even turned up the Human chance or error percentage and turned down the A.I. error to the point where they're fucking.. GODS or something. What's a Screen Pass? I don't even know, but it worked."
"This is boring. What the hell is this?" -"Maybe if you played Dynasty Mode it would be harder. You could start playing with Kent State or something." "Alright." -"More of a challenge."
5 days later... "Nope." -"Nope what?" "It wasn't harder. I took Kent State to a BCS Championship. I didn't even think that was possible." -"It's not." "Apparently it is."
"I don't get what people see in this."
And so ended Grandma's brief feeling of euphoric joy for beating Michigan. It just isn't any fun when it's easy.
The first time she scored a touchdown she was screaming like Mexico had just won the World Cup. She was so excited she missed kicking the extra point.
Then, slowly, every touchdown after that was a little bit more subdued than the last. Eventually it was just silence, and then frustration. Frustration because now she would have the boring task of playing defense until the other team fucked up enough to give her the ball.
She felt cheated.
Being broke and hungry for something new, she rented Metal Gear Solid 4.
Metal Gear, PS3 graphics, playing an old bad-ass.. it seemed like a good idea.
It was fun for me, anyway.
I didn't get to play the game, but as I sat on the computer just feet away from her journey as Solid Snake played at full-volume, it was great to hear that all too familiar "HOLY-SHIT-SOMEONE-SAW-YOU-AND-NOW-YOU-ARE-FUCKED!" alert sound again, followed by a torrent of Grandma's usual verbal challenges that said to the game "No, I do not believe he saw me, my good sir, for as you can see I was crouching under this futuristic camo thingy and was invisible; thusly I believe there must be some mistake."
Or if you prefer:
"GOD DAMMIT! HOW THE FUCK ARE YOU SUPPOSED TO HIDE WHEN THEY STEP ON YOUR FACE?!"
I'd have more to say on MGS4 but to tell the truth, she took it back to Hollywood Video before she finished it. I did get some video of her trying to explain the plot to me, though. Although I think that might be unfair to Grandma. I watched her play it for hours and I still have no idea what the hell it was about.
I'll post it as soon as I get my sound card working again :)
F.E.A.R.!
I don't know what it stands for and neither do you. A bunch of you guys online recommended it to Grandma so she went out and bought herself a copy.
She found it to be a pretty solid manifestation of what Doom 3 or The Darkness could have been. SadakoSamaraMayu Some fucked up little evil girl is killing some dudes; you got to stop her ass. As far as FPS games go, it wasn't her favorite but she played it to death. I wasn't with her most of the time she played the thing, but I was with her at the end.
She had tried fighting a boss or... something for hours to no avail. It would, in her words, "kill you with a single touch. I don't know what the fuck."
She printed off a couple pages of GameFAQs and went back to work. After awhile, she killed the thing, stared at the screen for awhile as the subwoofer shook the room and then..
..nothing.
"That was it? It's over.. I think. Yup. That's the end of the game. Huh."
Not exactly the most glowing reaction she's ever had to a game but it'll do.
From hearing her talk about it, it's the FPS equivalent to King of the Hill. Not exactly the best thing on television but at least it's not painful to watch.
Infinite Undiscovery!
Grandma loved it. That's not surprising seeing Grandma digs all things Square. She even said herself it was more or less a FFXII clone. Me? I hated it. I've never played it, but I hate it. Have you played it? Then you know why I hate it. Here's why:
"CAN YOU TREAT THEM?!" "CAN YOU TREAT THEM?!" "SOMEONE! PLEASE TREAT THEM!" "CAN YOU TREAT THEM?!" "CAN YOU TREAT THEM?!" "SOMEONE! PLEASE TREAT THEM!" "CAN YOU TREAT THEM?!"
The syncopation of this audio (heard during every SINGLE FUCKING BATTLE) is right up there with those annoying goddamn Saved By Zero Toyota ads-- it gets stuck in your head all day.
When you're at the gas station, waiting in line to pay. CAN YOU TREAT THEM?! When you're at work, trying to concentrate. CAN YOU TREAT THEM?! When you're driving home. SOMEONE! PLEASE TREAT THEM! When you're eating dinner. CAN YOU TREAT THEM?! When you're trying to sleep. HELP THE INJURED! When you're stabbing yourself in the temple with a steak knife. SOMEONE! PLEASE TREAT THEM!
Grandma didn't give a shit, she's hard of hearing. But when you hear something that sounds like "INNUENDO DIVE!!" for the one millionth time and you STILL have no idea what that could mean, it's hardly a milestone that can be celebrated without a call to the suicide hotline.
God DAMN.
But she liked it! She thought the storyline was kind of cliche, but it's a Square game so she can forgive. She would talk about how it was sort of immature and how awkward it was constantly having little kids in one's party, a strange Japanese sort of necessity in RPGs, but that was before she played Fable II.
And she's got a hell of a lot to say about Fable II. So that gets its own post next week.
I'm a news photographer. That's my day job. Every instance I get to shoot an assignment, make some composition, some ethical choice- to say "no, I can't shoot it this way, because that would be masking truth" or "no, I can't Photoshop the levels so much that the picture looks awesome because it's going too far", I get that self-righteous feeling of glee that comes from knowing I did something right. Even if the assignment is just shooting the winner of the youth beef cattle competition at the local 4-H fair, goddammit- the pictures are going to be good and true; same as when I'm shooting Obama making a speech or an accident on the turnpike. Errol Morris, as a documentary director, challenges and moves and plays with those ethics. Not in some overbearing, propagandic way like Michael Moore or Ben Stein. He doesn't need that. But he can produce a reenactment with actors or stage camera work and slow down time and shift color saturation confident that his film is no less true than the doc purists. He absolutely fascinates me.
And there he was, a few picnic tables away, munching on a salad.
And I wasn't sharing this grand banquet with my fascination because I had worked hard; earning a place near the light. I wasn't at this place, talking about the nature of truth in photographs upon the success of his documentary on Abu Gharib as some key-note speaker on a panel with a colleague. I hadn't earned this.
I was there because my Grandmother plays video games for fun and doesn't give shit what people think about it.
It'd be cliché to say the world is a funny place, but goddamn it sure is fucking funny sometimes. Grandma, meanwhile, was putting on a front of her own. Sure, she was eating with everyone else, chatting away about the oddness of Florida weather to a Northerner. "It was just raining a second ago, and now it's beautiful again!" But I could tell she was terrified.
Her turn with Errol was coming.
She was already wearing the clothes that wardrobe had given her, complete with the hard, paper tags still jabbing her in the ass, making her shift around on the bench uncomfortably. After lunch was over and the crew had their fill, she was up.
The red-headed boy and his mom were talking now; apparently the kid did well. Errol even invited the mother into a couple shots. When she arrived, she was just another stage-mother, dutifully driving her son to another job. Now, she had a brief moment where she was an actress, too. She was beaming. Her son was telling everyone how he had gotten a hole-in-one, on camera- a feat that impressed us all.
Grandma was quietly getting ready. Her leg twitched a bit out of nervousness like she had to pee. She was concentrating on something, god knows what, rehearsing in her head the same routine I had seen in the faces of batters on deck.
I threw away our trash and got Grandma some water, betraying my lower-class Cleveland accent to the caterers before going back inside with "Let me tell you something: that fish was fucking awesome. Absolutely awesome. I wish I could make tilapia taste like that. Seriously." I went to the Green Room to get Grandma's purse and get her a bottle of water. Cleve escorted Grandma to the soundstage. Irene was outside waiting for me. "You want to watch?" -"I don't want to get in the way...." "Come oooon, they don't give a shit. Follow me."
And there we were.
The soundstage looked like a darkened airplane hangar. To the right was a huge chroma-key green cloth that draped from the ceiling before being stretched along the floor. At the center was a single, leather chair. Grandma's chair. Surrounding this massive tapestry were intense lights diffused by sheer white screens as big as cars. To the left were an array of computer screens, mixing boards, oscilloscopes and tiny flashing LED lights which I could only guess their function. Next to them stood a corkboard, filled with Polaroid pictures of all the different actors at different stages of their interviews, arranged like a mafia hierarchy. Directly in front of me were a few couches pushed out of the way where Wieden + Kennedy staffers tapped away at laptops, endlessly checking emails and looking busy. Behind that, a line of directors chairs where people wearing business casual sat and studied the scene. At the far wall, over a minefield of cables and switching boxes, three folding tables held Nutrigrain Bars, soda, fruit, and candy. At the center of it all was a small, photobooth like tent. The Interrotron.
Irene led me to a row of chairs behind one of the tables. On the table were three monitors. One feed had the camera that showed Grandma, one feed showed a build of Tiger Woods PGA '09 playing on a 360, and the last feed showed Errol's face; the end of the Interrotron no one other than the interviewee would see. From that spot I could watch everything coming together. The game she was playing, her view of Errol, and what Errol Morris saw through his camera.
It was heaven.
But not for Grandma.
She sat in the chair, staring into the Interrotron. Someone handed her a controller as Irene fixed her hair. Monitors were dimmed, cell phones were turned off, spotlights were turned on, a hot set was announced just as Grandma's tiny Tiger Woods stepped out onto the green at Sawgrass in the monitor in front of me, action was called and then...
...silence.
Grandma was playing the game.
Her first tee shot blistered to the left. Her face showed a tiny bit of disappointment as she struggled to follow its path out of bounds.
Her second shot was worse. Something was wrong.
A few folks scrambled to whisper in each other's ears. They ran up to the camera operator, who moved everything a bit closer to Grandma.
She repeated her first mistake. They asked her something, she affirmed, and they moved a bit closer.
All in complete silence.
This happened a few more times until the decided to turn the chair and film from the side, so her monitor could be even closer still. She couldn't get a shot to go straight. Worse still, she thought she was to blame for playing poorly after playing a few beautiful rounds in the Green Room. She wasn't yelling at the game in frustration, perhaps what they wanted- she was sitting in silence, playing a game she couldn't see.
They stopped filming for a moment to assess the problem. "It isn't her," someone told me. "It's the monitor. It's like.. trying to play a high-def game on hard mode while squinting into a teeny tiny television CRT screen. It's really fuzzy. We're working on it."
Now they were trying a different approach. If Grandma couldn't see the three click meter to shoot the ball correctly, at least she could give them some of her usual Grandma banter in frustration. Errol tried talking to her a bit.
"We need you to react more!" he shouted from the Interrotron tent. "Do it like you do at home!" -"WHAT?!" "WE NEED YOU TO REACT MORE!" he shouted again, smiling into her monitor.
But it was no use. Even with her hearing aids and the strange silence of the soundstage, she couldn't hear Errol's instructions.
He quickly found a solution. He grabbed a mic from a production manager and spoke over the PA system for the building.
"GRANDMA, CAN YOU HEAR ME?" -"Oh yeah, I can hear you now." "Okay. I need you to react more, like you do at home."
She tried. But she was reserved and censored her profanity. It sounded stilted.
"Awww... missed it." "Can't seem to get on the fairway.." "Aw, you big fu-.. um, dummy!"
Errol sensed it right away, so he would try encouraging her into repetition.
The scene was bizarre. I don't know if I can do it justice in description.
There are forty people in this huge room, intently watching monitors and Grandma and levels and Grandma and laptops and Grandma. And yet it was deadly quiet. There was no game audio for what she was playing. Other than the clicks of the controller, the only sounds were her uncomfortable self-deprecations and Errol's booming voice over the PA system, reacting to her reaction.
"Darn... missed it..." -"LOUDER GRANDMA!" "I said I missed it!" -"LIKE YOU DO AT HOME!" "Oh, I don't think you want me to do it like I do at home!" -"SURE! GO AHEAD, IT'S OKAY!"
She relaxed a bit.
The vulgarity began as small mutters under her breath.
"......aw, shit." she said. -"WHAT?" Errol boomed. "SHIT!" She yelled. -"SHIT! He replied.
And then, again, silence.
The vulgarity grew in waves of confidence. She now knew what they wanted.
"Come on.... come on! FUCK!" she said. -"FUCK!!" Errol replied.
Suddenly, the room was no longer silent. People were holding back their laughter. They loved it. This is what they wanted to see.
She was real.
"I CAN'T GET THE GODDAMN BALL TO GO STRAIGHT!" -"GODDAMMIT!" "I KNOW! -"ARE YOU MAD?!" "I'M PISSED OFF!!"
More laughter. The business casual guys were looking at each other approvingly. The audio guys were smiling. No one seemed as on edge.
For a moment, I was reminded of that first day in the studio at MTV when the blog first took off, when she sat on a stool in a small studio next to TRL, trying desperately to please the producers. Nothing was working until loud voice on a PA system spoke up.
Alex - "Say things like you do at home." Grandma - "I can't!" Alex - "Don't worry, we can bleep things out." Grandma - "I don't know..." Booming Voice - "JUST SAY WHATEVER THE FUCK YOU WANT, GRANDMA. IT'S OKAY!"
And with that laughter, she was back to herself.
Errol seemed to be pleased enough with that portion of the shoot. They took the controller, moved her monitor back in front of the camera, removed the chair, and Errol began the interview.
She was still nervous. She hadn't heard the subdued reaction from the studio. She hadn't seen anyone smiling at her. She only saw the blinding spotlights.
Errol asked her questions over the PA system and she answered the best she could. It was over after fifteen minutes or so.
And just like that, we were in the corner of the soundstage as they struck the set in preparation for the next person. I saw this as my one opportunity to meet Errol Morris. I would not get this chance again. Probably ever. I put down Grandma's purse, approached him, shook his hand, spoke for a moment, and excused myself. He was as cordial and polite as I hoped he would be.
People came up to me afterwards.. "she did great. She gave us a LOT of good stuff. A LOT. We could fill a ton of 30 second spots if necessary."
Grandma felt like a failure. She hadn't even gotten the ball on the green. If she was here to play a game, she certainly didn't do it. If she was here to ask questions, she certainly wasn't the cheeky, honest and playful person just bullshitting with her grandson like she was at home. She didn't know what had just happened.
She was crying.
Nobody else had noticed. She hid it pretty well. I walked her outside the soundstage and Cleve went to fetch a PA to drive us back to the hotel. I gave her a hug.
"You did fine." -"I fucked it up!" "Nah, they couldn't get the screen working right on the game, for one." -"What?" "The Interrotron wasn't quite made to do that, it seems." -"I couldn't even hit the ball straight. I looked like a fucking idiot to those people." "You did fine!" -"Like hell I did." "You didn't see all the people in there while you were being interviewed. Trust me. You did great." -"I felt like a moron." "Grandma- seriously- don't worry! Don't worry! You did fine!" -"I couldn't play the GAME!"
I realized exactly what had happened.
"Look- all those people in there? They're actors. All of them. Honestly? They probably could give a shit if you could play the game or not. You're a gamer. You tried playing the game. That's what you came to do. You. Those folks are actors. They can look like they are playing a brick wall if it had a controller plugged into it. You tried your best. You met some cool people, and trust me on this, you gave them usable stuff. Hell, Errol liked you." -"Yeah?" "Yeah! I heard him say so myself." I wasn't lying. I had heard him speak with his assistant after the shoot.
Grandma quickly changed back into her own clothes and met the PA and I outside. As we rode in the car, the PA told us the news. Tiger Woods himself would be at the soundstage tomorrow to film with Errol for the commercials. This was just a couple days after his Masters victory, played through injury. He was coming, but we wouldn't be there to see it. And that was okay.
We drove back to the hotel, went souvenir shopping for the family, spent the last of the per diem on a three course meal at TGIFriday's, and flew back to Cleveland the next day, as new reports of Tiger Woods' injury graced the front pages of every newspaper we saw.
---
"Advertising is a wonderfully weird thing", someone at Ogilvy & Mather once said. And they were right. We too were right about our own predictions. An advertising campaign with a bunch of different actors in a few different cities with multiple games on multiple systems catering to multiple demographics, ready for E3, ready for broadcast, ready for viral spreads, etc.,. well, it's all very complex. One thing that Grandma and I constantly mentioned to each other about the possibility of this commercial before we flew to Florida was that- even if she was selected for a call back; even if she was flown down to Orlando; even if she filmed the commercial with Errol; even if she gave the performance of her life.. that didn't mean that a single second of all that excitement would end up on television, the internet, or as a still frame in a magazine.
And wouldn't you know it, that seems to be the case. For Tiger Woods PGA Tour '09, they seem to be focusing on two things: 1. Tiger Wood's Jesus Shot Viral 2. The Wii
There was one actor out of everyone down in Orlando, other than Tiger Woods himself, who made the cut for the system and demographic on which they wanted to focus.
Our little red-headed friend. (And for a brief second, his mother.) Remember him? The one whose legos were scattered around the Green Room. You've probably seen the commercial already. I saw it a couple times on ESPN just this week.
So here it is, the Errol Morris directed, Wii focused, red-headed dude whose mother had difficulty getting him cast in other things because the color of his hair didn't match the red of others... Tucker:
Tucker, if you're out there my friend, make sure your mom gets you a proper case for your PSP UMD's. Otherwise, they are all going to end up cracked like that, man.
The ride from the hotel to Universal Studios was a quick one. The facility was, literally, just across the street. Grandma chatted a bit with Peter, an actor living in New York a little younger than me who sported a UK accent. He was a pleasant, cordial sort of dude.
"I wonder what it's going to be like!" was the comment of the trip, it seemed. -"It's probably a bunch of fucking big empty warehouses with a bunch of people running around in golfcarts wearing headsets and looking busy" we'd guessed. Of course we only knew from those movies and television shows that pan out and show the inner workings of the places that birth damn near our entire imaginations. How very meta.
Universal Studios is a bunch of fucking big empty warehouses with a bunch of people running around in golfcarts wearing headsets and looking busy, as it turns out. Everyone is very active and very nice. The security guards at the front gates not obese, donut eating simpletons admiring lists of upcoming celebrities, much to our disappointment. Apparently we would need to tour Warner Brothers for that. Here we were, in the land of Double Dare and Legends of the Hidden Temple, staring in awe at the impressive array of battered picnic tables and smokers stations lining the alleys. Who had sat here and eaten a turkey sandwich? we wondered. Scott Stapp probably smoked a cigarette right over there by that porta-potty, prayed to Jesus, jerked off on that spider plant, downed a slug or two of vodka and then recorded the music video for My Sacrifice. This was truly the place where dreams are made.
We were met at the studio by Cleve, a big happy fellow with a clipboard and a mission. He took us through a couple short hallways and into The Green Room.
Now, I don't really know if it's considered a 'Green Room', per se, but it had a couple couches and some snacks- so that's what I assume everyone called it. It had an older projection TV in the corner with a Debug Xbox 360 sitting on the floor, not plugged in to anything. We were the first ones to arrive. At this point it was just the three of us (Grandma, Peter and myself) and the room seemed large enough.
Then more people began to arrive.
First was a mother and her son who looked to be around 6 or 7 years old. "It's hard sometimes for him in auditions because he has bright red hair but it doesn't match the red of other people," she told us. The kid was cool. He brought with him his PSP and a bag of mostly destroyed UMD's and some legos. "I keep telling him we need a case." He was there to play Tiger Woods PGA 09' on the Wii.
Next was a thirty-something guy who had done commercials pretty much everywhere. He wore a blue-ish work shirt and tie with slacks.
Then came a couple with their younger daughter. They had driven up from Miami. "We were really excited when she got a call-back from the open audition."
After that a brunette, then a blonde who confessed that she had to call off work to be here today and they wouldn't be happy about it.
Then a dude who looked like a cross between Dimitri Martin and Woody Allen who did nothing but play Madden as he waited anxiously for his turn.
The room no longer seemed so large.
All of them were actors. Most had began with local casting calls in South Florida. It wouldn't be fair to say they weren't gamers, as quick discussion revealed that most were, but we felt outclassed. Grandma and I exchanged looks that said "what are we doing here?" Oppositely, as they asked Grandma how she came to be part of this thing and she responded with the story about the blog and Monica and the video, they seemed to segregate themselves as well. They didn't turn up their noses and give us any sort of "well, YOU'RE not an actor!" looks, but I felt as though they perceived the situation opposite the way we did; thinking that Grandma was perhaps a ringer, and they were merely backups. "They flew you in?!" someone asked. "Hell, we all live here."
Nevertheless, in that Green Room, we all felt that we were in the same club, regardless of how we got there. No one was snobby.
In fact, if any of us were snobby in the least, it was me. It didn't seem that anyone there other than Peter, Grandma and myself knew who Errol Morris was. I wouldn't shut up about him. "Come on! You have to know him! Thin Blue Line saved a man's LIFE!" -"What's it called again?" "Thin Blue Line. What about Gates of Heaven?" -"Nope." "Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr.?" -"Uh-uh." "THE FOG OF WAR?!" -"This is all on IMDB, right?" "[*look of exasperation*]"
Grandma was called for hair and wardrobe. This is where we met Irene (pictured above). Irene was cool as fuck. After talking with her a bit, she recognized that being in this place was a big deal for Grandma and I both; this was not business as usual. At first, as I photographed Grandma getting her hair ready, she thought I was Grandma's personal photographer. "Nah, I'm just her grandson." -"Aww! That's so cute!"
This would not be the only instance of such an exchange today.
As Irene did Grandma's hair, thirty-something actor guy and I escaped the stuffy Green Room and went outside for a cigarette. A production assistant came out to ask him some questions about his wardrobe. It was exactly this moment that I realized that Grandma was going to be doing greenscreen work of some kind. I recognized the chroma-key language from MTV. I hoped her outfit would be suitable.
A woman approached us an introduced herself. "Hi, I'm Errol's assistant." Quickly realizing a possible faux-pas, I moved aside. -"Sorry-- I don't want to blow smoke in your face." "Thank you." Fuck!, I thought. Way to make a first impression, Tim, you fucking dick. "Did you get any sleep last night?" she asked us. "The fucking people next to me were up and down the entire goddamn night."
I backed away from the conversation to avoid saying something stupid, a tactic I stuck with for the rest of the day until moments where it was no longer possible. I did NOT want to fuck this whole thing up for Grandma by putting my foot in my mouth or tripping over a power cord or some other dumb fucking thing that I've been known to do [In the fall of 2004, I volunteered for The Democratic Party in Cleveland. A week before the election, I fell like the dumbass I am, pulling loose the power cord to a laptop owned by the chairman of the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party, effectively erasing hundreds of database entries for canvassing and voter pick-ups. It is possible that my clumsiness clinched Ohio for Bush against Kerry in 2004, and by consequence, continued the Iraq War, killing thousands of people and destroying the regional stability for decades.]
Back inside, Grandma had finished up in wardrobe and was wearing new clothes, the tags still affixed and poking her in the ass. "You nervous?" I asked. -"Tim, all these people are actors!" "Um... yep." -"I don't know what the fuck I'm doing!" "Relax. It's just like we did with the video. Just be honest, be yourself, play the game a little and your done! No big deal." -"No big deal." "No big deal."
By now, Grandma had been waiting for about four hours or so, getting more anxious each minute. I'm sure my constant ranting about how awesome Errol Morris documentaries are didn't help much. We were reprieved by lunch.
I don't know who catered this thing, but it was AWESOME. We were expecting cold cut turkey sandwiches and cans of Pepsi from a taco cart manned by a burly, mustachioed Italian-in-a-wife-beater named Rocko or some such thing. In truth, it was trays upon trays of tilapia, golden potatoes, pasta, and veggies. Grandma ate a stuffed mushroom of some kind. "This is awesome! What's in this?!" -"Blue cheese," I responded with a smile. "No it isn't. I fucking hate blue cheese." -"That's what the dude said." "Goddamn."
Sitting a table further down the row, tucking away at a salad, was the man himself.
Grandma was four under par by the time I had finished eating some cold pizza. I awkwardly asked someone if I could go outside for a quick smoke. "That's what the badges are for," she said, pointing at the "Visitor Pass--Escort Required" card clipped to my shirt. I left the conference room that housed the dying rehearsal party and walked past the security guard, pointing at my badge like I knew what I was doing.
I stepped out into a cloud of Florida humidity, sat down on a bench away from the door draped with banners advertising various familiar games and lit the first cigarette since the plane landed in Orlando. I retraced our journey thus far in my head, ignoring the lizards running around like squirrels on the fountain facing EA Tiburon.
The plane ride down was uneventful; aside from the woman who lifted her kid to stand on the tray rails at the Sbarro in Cleveland Hopkins and an unintelligible taxi driver who got us lost going from the hotel to EA using what might have been the most annoying, audible GPS unit ever (TURN RIGHT; TURN RIGHT; TURN RIGHT; TURN RIGHT; TURN RIGHT... "Hmmmm, we seem to be going in a circle...") there wasn't much to look back on. The sense of urgency to get to this place had deceived us, I think. Pack quickly--Drive to the airport quickly--check in quickly--fly around the storms (can you fly more quickly?)--get to the hotel to check in--secure the room--hail a cab--get to the rehearsal party--WHAT WILL THEY THINK OF US IF WE ARE LATE?!
And yet everyone was groovy. No worries. "Have some pizza! Hi Grandma! Would you like to play some games? Are you thirsty?" The quiet casualness of it all hit us like a fire hose. I needed to relax. I needed a cigarette.
I went back inside with the others.
The first thing you notice about EA Tiburon is that damn near everybody still there at 7:30pm is dutifully wearing polo shirts branded with the EA logo like they were uniforms at Footlocker. The atrium is a large, glass place with vinyl tapestries draped from the ceiling proudly showing ads for Madden and NASCAR like museums promote upcoming exhibits for The Bronze Age and dinosaurs. Beyond the security desk with the young looking guard are doors lining the hallways that go to god knows where.
"No, you have to scan that badge before you can go back in..." -"Sorry."
At the end of the hall was the conference room where the rehearsal party was held. On the left were collapsible tables with pizzas, soda, and chicken wings. In the center were five or six dev-kit or debug Xbox 360s playing the various games to be used in the commercials. A family was playing Tiger Woods 09' on the right. A couple guys were playing a fighting game I didn't see on the left. At the center was Grandma and a dude with WK and EA who had grew up not far from us in Ohio. In the back corner of the room were freelancers working for WK, typing away on a couple laptops.
It felt like a low-key Counterstrike LAN-party in the back of a student center at college.
When the party ended, we took a cab back to the hotel. Less traffic this time, yet impressively-- this taxi driver was even more misunderstood than the last.
"So where'y frm?" -"Sorry?" "Where'y live?" -"Cleveland." "Clvlynn!! Man, y'shud check th' Mimi's Place in Universal Studios." -"Sorry?" "Mimi! Drew Carey, y'know? I used't drive 'im this one time. Good meatloaf."
I can't really recall the rest of the conversation; Grandma and I could only detect the meaning of sentences by the pitch of his voice towards the end of any given string of words. If the pitch rose, it was a question. "Given' try flood basketball, jumpin' roun' gettin' all hungry and that?" -"I couldn't say, really. Maybe."
If the pitch fell, it was a statement. Statements are easily agreed with. "Pineapple! Fish is gonna' get iodine man' you up there makin' squirts." -"I know just what you mean."
If the pitch rose or fell but was followed by laughing, it was wise to simply laugh in response and say "I hear ya'."
Somehow we made the thirty minute drive from the Maitland Blvd. to International Drive gabbing away at each other and having a good ol' time without actually saying anything at all. The phenomenon was fascinating.
Back at the hotel, we were isolated without a car. Luckily there is a TGI Friday's just across the street from The Doubletree Universal, where we were staying. This particular place doesn't close until 2am. Grandma ordered some mesquite chicken and I had a couple shots of bourbon to ease into the fajitas.
"Alright. Your call time tomorrow is 8:30am." -"What's that?" "It just means that's when you have to be there." -"Oh." "Somebody is going to meet us in the lobby of the hotel tomorrow at 8:00 sharp, and take us across the street." -"In Universal Studios?" "Yeah. Apparently they actually have studios at Universal Studios." -"Smartass." "Well, I mean they actually film shit there." -"Well, that's the idea." "I knew they had a theme park; I knew they shot game shows and shit- but I thought it was like King's Island when Paramount owned it. I didn't think the studios played as much of a part." -"It's probably a bunch of warehouses." "Probably. After we get there, I don't know what's going to happen. Probably wardrobe, but who knows. The call time for you might be different than for somebody else, it might be the same for everyone; I honestly don't know." -"How many other people are going to be there?" "I don't know. There were maybe a dozen at the party last night, maybe less. It could be a long day tomorrow. Are you excited?" -"I'm nervous." "Nah, fuck it. You'll do fine. Just be yourself." -"Still." "Everyone has been really cool so far. I don't know what Errol Morris is like, but in everything I've read about the man over the years, I've never seen anything that suggests he's an asshole. He's probably the same as everyone you've met. They just want to see you do what you do. They won't bite." -"It's not so much that.. it's just, I'm afraid I might fuck everything up. I've never done this before." "You did it for MTV." -"Yeah, and I sucked." "You didn't suck. You're just not an actor. They know that. If they wanted actors, they'd hire them."
The next morning a PA met us in the lobby holding a sign that said "Barbara & Peter." I introduced myself. "Is 'Barbara' Barbara St. Hilaire?" -"Yup! She's for the commercial?" "Yes. My name's Timothy." -"Yes. We're just waiting on one other person here in the hotel- Peter. He's another one for this shoot." "Another?" -"Another actor."
Gather 'round my children; grab a stool and a stoop of ale and hear of flying machines, lizards and beasts unknown; insane cab drivers with GPS devices and waitresses and drinking and other vices. Hear of directors and producers and freelance PA's. Hear of actors and actresses and NDA's.
Grandma auditioned for a commercial directed by Errol Morris promoting a new EA game (which we cannot talk about as the looming shadow of contractual obligation and confidentiality agreements stares at us from a readied attack position.) Her audition tape made the final cut, and she was chosen to fly to Orlando to be a part of the wonderful and fascinating realm in advertising known simply as Creative.
This is how it went down... Honestly, given the odds, we didn't expect a call. The audition tape was all kinds of fucked up, the audio was messy and the levels were too low, and we were emailed by advertising freelancers who had no doubt cast a giant net into the land of gaming to see what kind of crazy ass fish would respond. Grandma was happy to try out (she really does dig Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08, so it wasn't a soul-selling venture) and I was happy to help her.
The call came, as most things do, at Sam's Club- because there's nothing like a gross of Reese Cups and a crate of oatmeal to make a family feel secure in case the apocalypse comes within 72 servings of breakfast. As we walked down the aisle looking at all manner of bulk-priced portraits of Americana Consumerism; admiring the deal one could get on mayonnaise if only one buys it by the gallon, my cell phone rang. An Oregon call.
Grandma's tape was a hit.
They wanted to fly her down to L.A. at once for filming. "Could she come Tuesday?" It was Saturday. "Sure! No problem! Great!" "Wonderful! We'll arrange all the details."
Tuesday became Wednesday. Wednesday became Tuesday through Thursday. There were forms that needed to be filled out. Errol Morris was confirmed as the director. L.A. became Orlando a week from now. Before the end of day I wasn't quite sure what we had gotten ourselves into. Whatever was being filmed, it was being done fast. Travel arrangements were being cemented as soon as was possible, which sometimes wasn't possible until the day before travel. It was exciting.
We still didn't quite know the format of the commercial. Would it be an interview? Was it staged? Scripted? Would she play the game?
"Interrotron" I said simply. -"Excuse me?" Grandma asked. "Interrotron!" -"Interrotron." "It's the one of the main reasons they would have to hire someone as cool as Errol fucking Morris." -"Okay." "Fog of War." -"Robert McNamara." "Errol Morris. -"No shit!" "Mr. Death." -"Holocaust Denier Guy." "Errol Morris. -"I remember that." "All these documentaries where the person is looking RIGHT into the camera. He invented that. He directs that. Apple Switch Campaign." -"Which one?" "THE one. Girl looks into camera, talks about her PC crashing, Apple Logo." -"Errol Morris?" "Goddamn right."
A quick search on Wieden + Kennedy's website showed others. Wikipedia at least let me know I wasn't a complete jackass and hadn't thought of the wrong films. Another search on Moxie Pictures website (who represented Morris to W+K) revealed a snag in our theory. In one commercial, a dude is eating donuts in a workshop. Dude opens up a beer. Dude is conflicted, but only briefly. Voiceover: "Sometimes a MAN gets too hungry to clean his hands properly. The powdered sugar on this donut puts a semi-protective BARRIER between your fingerprint and your nutrition. But even if some grease DOES get on that donut, well.. that's just FLAVOR. To a HIGH LIFE MAN." Miller Logo. Fade to black.
This was more complicated than we thought.
"Well, fuck it," Grandma sighed. "At least it will be an adventure."
At least it will be an adventure.
Goddamn right.
Grandma rescheduled her doctor's appointments for that week. Her Coumadin levels check and a pain that flared up in her knee would wait until she got back. She packed what medication she would need for the two nights in Florida, a few changes of clothes and some mints.
I packed a PSP, both Kill Bill movies on UMD, my toothbrush, and a camera that I wouldn't get a chance to use.
Okay! Grandma will probably do another vCast pretty soon, but I'll preempt it with a bit of an update on how she's doing and what she's playing.
First up, because I know everybody's curious, Grand Theft Auto IV:
Solid fucking game. You empathize with the characters and the story. The over-the-shoulder shooting style rocks, particularly with the auto-aim feature. Gorgeous graphics yet- it's still GTA. Shit, even the radio stations are good.
For Grandma, though, the game has one major flaw. Well, it's not the game so much, and it's not a flaw- it's Grandma. She can't drive for shit.
And she's not the only one. A lot of people have been bitching about the driving physics in GTAIV, but you have to realize that- alright, if you're driving in a city, and you're on a straightaway and you pass an entire city block in a couple seconds, chances are you are going at such a speed that wouldn't quite allow for a 90° left turn into that narrow alley ahead of you.
Now, nobody wants to play a game where you assassinate a motherfucker, get seen by police, and drive 35mph to the nearest safehouse. But there are consequences in the decisions you make; decisions about which car to steal, the route, or following the GPS or just gunning it to make the boundary to lose the wanted level. And of all people, Grandma has learned to appreciate those decisions.
"Shit... Goddammit... No... GODDAMMIT- FUCK, now they're chasing me; cops are chasing me and I still have to stop THAT guy......... fucking minivan can't corner for shit. But if I hop out and steal a Banshee then this dude will get run over by the cops or I'll lose that other guy.... I quit."
"GARBAGE TRUCKS GO FASTER THAN THIS. This is BULLSHIT."
"I've tried this over and over again. I can't make it! There's no guy when I get there!" -"Yeah there is, he's in the tunnel. After you pick up the car from Little Jacob, get just before the GPS says you've reached the destination and there's a tunnel underneath the road. I couldn't find it either the first time." "Oh." [several minutes later, Grandma plows through the tunnel, killing everyone.] "I KILLED HIM! I FINALLY MADE IT BUT I KILLED THE GUY! Here, YOU do it."
Also, the helicopter and Grandma are not on good terms.
I think she's something like 75% completed with the main story, and just about done with the Brucie missions and the Assassination plot.
It's an on-again, off-again relationship.
Meanwhile, she's been into golf more than usual. She's played Hot Shots Golf: Out of Bounds near to DEATH on her PS3, maxing out every character and unlocking every course. She likes the game, although it's sort of cartoony, and not in the Outlaw Golf way. The character animations before each swing can get sort of tedious after awhile, and she was just getting used to Advance Shots when she got into Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08', also on her PS3.
It's a stark contrast to Hot Shots Golf for obvious reasons. More realistic courses and players, although the ability to apply spin while the ball is in the air kind of takes away from the ultimate skill of the thing. I'd pay MONEY to see Tiger Woods use his magical mind-powers to force a ball into spinning forward mid air after flopping the thing from a fairway. If lasers came out his eyes and storm clouds began to rumble over Pebble Beach, all the better.
But she'll have a lot more to say about those later.
Speaking of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08', she auditioned for a spot in EA's next run of commercials for their sports games- but who knows if that will happen. We were contacted by somebody at Wieden + Kennedy about the possibility a couple weeks ago. Grandma and I had talked about such things last year; if it came up- what to do; where we stood. Basically, if Grandma really digs a game she'd absolutely be thrilled with endorsing the thing, if someone really felt her endorsement would mean anything. Thing is: she wouldn't even consider it if the game was shit. Oh yeah, big talk from the lowest places of the internet. Who the fuck are we, really. But that's the way Grandma feels. And I agree with her!
Sure, she'd do a commercial. Fuck it. But she's got to honestly love the game. Otherwise, what's the point? She dig's Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08'. She loves that fucking game. Now, if they came to her and said "alright, we think you'd be great for a Madden '09 commercial", chances are she'd tilt her head slightly to the left and say "...but I suck at it."
Like I said, it probably doesn't matter because there are no doubt a lot of hats thrown into this particular ring, and a 72 year old woman in a commercial for an EA game directed by Errol Morris (from what I understand, Moxie Pictures is producing the creative for the broadcast portion of this particular campaign, and Morris would be the likely director) is probably not their first choice.
I could go into the reasons why perhaps it should, but that would be just another advertising rant about risk and demographics and I'm not going to pretend I know what I'm talking about when it comes to Wieden + Kennedy. That shit's intimidating.
If you'd like to see her audition video, well-
Here ya go!
You got to crank your speakers up for it, I had some audio levels issues with compression (my fault).
I think she did an awesome job. I decided to be a smartass and edit the thing like it was Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. If the commercials are going to be directed by Errol Morris, then goddammit we're allowed to be smartasses.
We'll let you know how it goes!
Also in the news of the awesome, Grandma did an interview with these guys via Skype a little while back. Fun fact for those of you who didn't know (because I didn't)- you can just plug your Xbox Live vision camera to a USB port on your computer and Skype just automatically picks it up and uses it perfectly. I'm kind of curious how it looked on their end, so if any of you Kiwis happen to see it on their show, let us know!
Grandma will update in a couple days with a vCast for everyone, I just wanted to say hi and let you know what was up.
There was maybe about 30 people when we got there tonight; about a hundred or so when we left.
Also: there was Eric. Eric was dressed as a banana for some inexplicable reason; defying the art of logic in a Dada like display of neo-post-absurdist joy.
If you've read us long enough you'll know that it happens once and awhile; sometimes there will be a game worshiped by many that Grandma just can't enjoy. It almost makes her feel bad to have to say she hates it. Almost.
But then she falls off another ledge because her fucking Wii-mote isn't cooperating and she comes back to her senses.
She's tried repositioning the sensor bar, sitting further away from the television, recalibrating the sensitivity, everything. With Super Paper Mario, everything came together nicely for the Wii.
But for whatever reason, Super Mario Galaxy, which has been called the must own Wii game and Game of the Year and all that just isn't fun to Grandma.
She thinks it's boring. It's not that she hates the Wii style controller entirely, just its dependency. Think of all the reviews for Super Smash Brothers Brawl recently. Or even emails and comments made by some of you guys to Grandma recommending the game. It's alarming to think that one point that needs to be made in a review of what is being heralded as the best selling Nintendo game of all time is that one doesn't have to use the frustrating controller for which it was made.
"Use a GameCube controller and it's awesome" they say.
Grandma wishes she could have used a GameCube controller for SMG.
"I hate this fucking game. I feel so stupid playing it, it's a kid's game for fuck's sake and I can't.. get.. the fucking... CANNON to line up- GODDAMMIT!"
[vigorously shaking controller back and forth] "COME ON, DAMMIT! HIT THE BASTARD!"
"No sense talking to this guy.... I don't have any money to buy anything because collecting coins is a pain in the ass."
"Fuck this. I quit."
To her credit, she's said 'fuck this, I quit' many times while playing Super Mario Galaxy, but she keeps plugging away for some reason. There isn't a whole lot excitement about the current crop of games out there for Grandma right now, only for that which is to come.
It makes her worried about her poor Wii.
Super Paper Mario was the last game she played and really enjoyed for the system and she got into the plot; cared about the characters and had a generally good time with it. But she isn't apologetic about her hatred of SMG to its fans; it's just not a game for everyone, I suppose.
"I fucking HATE it. It's not the upside-down multi-dimensional aspect of it, hell Portal did that and it was brilliant. It's more of what it isn't, if that makes any sense. It isn't Mario 64. It isn't Super Paper Mario. It isn't Super Smash Brothers or even Super Mario RPG. You compare a game like Super Mario Galaxy to everything else I played just last year and it seems old already. And the weird part is I played a demo level at E3 in 2006 and I thought it would be a lot of fun. Oh well. Can't win them all, I guess. Goddamn, I can't wait for another good game to come out. There isn't shit out there."
So, in the past few months or so, she's bought more movies than games. Mostly on BlueRay, but she did take advantage of the HD-DVD firesale at BestBuy because.. well, the attachment for the 360 is only something like $40 now, and HD-DVD movies are cheap as hell. She knows it's a dead format, but what the hell- we're poor and we like movies.
It makes her sad that she and I talk more about the meaning of the ending to No Country For Old Men more than we talk about Super Mario Galaxy, for instance. She used to hate when the gaming magazines started reviewing DVD releases after the PS2 came out. "I subscribe to read about GAMES," she'd tell me. "Not about the different languages available on Pulp Fiction." And yet here we are in one of those gaming lulls where, honestly, what else can we do?
In a nutshell, Grandma's reviews of things she'd rather not review:
On HD-DVD... American Gangster - "Not Ridley Scott's best, but it ain't bad." King Kong - "Don't look at me, it came with the HD-DVD player." Elizabeth: The Golden Age - "Sucked." Zodiac: Two Disc Director's Cut - "Great movie. David Fincher is great." Planet Earth: Complete Collection - "Great series, but we had to return it to BestBuy to get another copy because it came with scratched discs. HD-DVDs scratch really easily it turns out. And when they do, it won't even load up. You have to get a new one." Ultimate Matrix Collection - "Pretty much the reason we got the player. used to be $100, then $90, then briefly during the firesale after the announcement that Toshiba gave up HD-DVD it was only $50. So you could get a player, all of the Matrix movies plus The Animatrix series for just $100. Awesome." The Pianist - "Nothing like watching The Holocaust in high-def to make you feel like shit."
On BlueRay... Weeds: Season One - "Hilarious!" Weeds: Season Two - "Not as hilarious. More serious." Letters From Iwo Jima - "Better than Flags of Our Fathers." 30 Days of Night - "Scary as fuck. I liked it." The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford - "Really well done movie. Pitt was great it in." Kingdom of Heaven - "Better than Gladiator." Blade Runner: Complete Collectors Edition - "Awesome, but I don't even know why you'd want the original narrated version." I Am Legend - "Thought the effects were done much better in 30 Days of Night, actually. I wish they wouldn't use CGI for everything." Ocean's Thirteen - "Great, but don't get it on BlueRay." Ratatouille - "Loved it!" 28 Days Later - "We've already mentioned this before. Don't get it on BlueRay." Black Hawk Down - "If you're going to play Call of Duty 4, you might as well know why the story is compelling." Close Encounters of the Third Kind - "Only reason to get this in high-def is the great audio. Otherwise, there's not much they can do to make it look any better than it did before. Great movie, though."
Grandma knows what to do. She posted a video (she'd like to do more, by the way, she likes talking directly to yas') and at the moment she's doing a lot of baking. Which is great for me because I fucking love her cookies.
She's been scanning the gaming magazines for exciting new releases each month, waiting with the anticipation of a vulture watching a rabbit try to cross a highway. She's just ITCHING to get the same experience she had playing Call of Duty 4 or Orange Box or actually- what she REALLY wants is another horror game like Fatal Frame, Resident Evil or Silent Hill. She talks about that genre a lot, now. Condemned 2 came out recently, but it hasn't been received well and she wasn't exactly a huge fan of the first game. I know she won't buy it, but if she does end up renting it, it will be for achievement point whoring reasons only, I'm afraid.
Grandma's on the search for another awesome game to get into; to get her fix before GTA IV, FFXIII, RE5 and other ambiguous acronyms are released.
Me, I've been working my ass off. I like working. Working means more money, which means bills get paid and I can save for better equipment which means more work, more money, better equipment, and so on...
It ALSO means that we here at OGHC are proud to introduce the newest member of our little family.
But first some backstory for those of you who weren't with us in the beginning. When I first started writing about Grandma, people thought it was fake or at best a funny sort of hoax. So I had to take pictures of Grandma to prove she even existed. The moment she discovered the site existed was when I asked if I could take her picture to put it online. Of course, that's wasn't good enough for the folks who thought she wasn't real and I wanted to give at least audio of her doing her thing while she plays because I felt no matter how much I wrote, people wouldn't understand why I thought she was so awesome until they heard it and seen it themselves.
So we got a little ol' webcam from Staples. A Logitec something or other. It was choppy but it worked okay. Then, after we finally relented to those calling for us to put up a PayPal donation button to get some better equipment to show Grandma, you guys bought us the Sony Handycam that we've used for all the videos of Grandma on YouTube. It's suited us very well. I can't thank all of you enough for helping us get it with your donations back in the day.
While we didn't feel quite right taking such a gift, you can imagine how stupid I feel not being able to use it as often as I used to; giving you guys new videos of Grandma playing all her latest stuff as it happens. I felt like such an asshole recently because of that. Here are you folks who loved Grandma enough to want to see her and talk to her and gave us money to help me do that and here is me not doing all I can after work to do that. And Grandma likes to talk to you guys too! That's why she made the last video.
So, I needed to give something back. I figured, well- if we're going to do videos we might as well DO VIDEOS.
So I got THIS:
This is Panny. Panny is a Panasonic DVX-100B MiniDV 3CCD ProLine Camcorder. It's also the same model camera used by MTV whenever they filmed Grandma at our house or at E3 or at the press-junkets.
I use it for work shooting video for the newspaper's website when I can, so it still pays the bills. I'm a still photographer by trade, but everybody wants video now. Still, Panny is my camera; not the newspapers. So I can use it to shoot anything else I like as well. Porn, Nature Documentaries, Weddings, whatever! So why not use it in conjunction with a decent audio set-up to give y'all some kick ass videos of Grandma being Grandma?
Dig this: let's say you have some free time this November, say from the 13th to the 18th. Let's say there existed a cruise that went from Long Beach, CA to Ensenada, Mexico that just so happened to fit into that schedule. Let's also say (hypothetically speaking of course) that on the first night of the cruise is a concert by VIDEO GAMES LIVE. Just to fucking START. Let's say this whole cruise is packaged for gamers. Let's say Cloris Leachman was a guest star, just to tag along for the fun of the thing. Let's just pretend for a moment that there would be a full casino, fine dining, Wii tournaments, handheld contests, the works.
Let's just think about the notion that there exists a short, inexpensive vacation for gamers to just relax in the Pacific ocean soaking up that Mexican sun and talk about games for a few days. The very PURPOSE of this aquatic mobile congregation of like minded technophiles is for us to knock back a few drinks and argue on the virtues of Western vs. Eastern RPGs. Just for the hell of it.
And, just for shits and giggles, let's say Grandma was going to be there to bullshit about games right there with the rest of us.
Well goddammit, it's happening. I'm not even kidding.
It's not some podunk rowboat fitted with a television and an N64 with a single copy of GoldenEye for us to fight over, no. This is a huge-ass Carnival line CRUISE.
Look at this shit:
Yeah.
Pools, spas, restaurants, and the best damn video games concert in the WORLD. This little cruise has been officially added to their world tour schedule, slated for November 14th, 2008. If you want to see them, this is truly the way to do it. You simply CANNOT do better than this, I SWEAR to you. Of the whole trip, this concert is what I'm looking forward to the most. YOU SHOULD COME, DAMMIT!
Grandma's not much of a drinker, to be honest. She wants to hang out with you guys deckside and talk gaming. I'm a responsible drinker (never the day before I have to work and never before driving) and I'll be completely sincere: I want to feel the pleasant buzz of Mezcal and Tequila with the Pacific wind on my face. I want to buy you guys a drink. I want to test the functional impairment of Wii playing after six shots of whatever Agave-based liquors they have to offer. It's a vacation. That's what vacations are for. I'm not an obnoxious drunk, I'm quite giddy in fact! So you can make fun of me right along with Grandma if you want to. Or join me! It's all good!
Let's go to Mexico, hang out with Grandma, watch what may be the most brilliant concert of this decade, bullshit about games and just have a blast doing it.
And, because you know us by now, here's some full disclosure: Grandma isn't getting paid to come to the cruise. I'm not getting paid to advertise it. She was invited and emphatically said yes. We're just thrilled to go. Grandma doesn't whore herself out to anyone, not even for a cruise. She and I both like to keep things honest. It's just easier that way. So let's be honest. Drinks and food are probably going to be expensive. You folks that have been on cruises before know what I'm talking about; it's a fucking cruise. That's how they are. I'm going to work on saving a lit bit to make sure Grandma has a good time. You should do the same for yourselves (but seriously, hit me up for a drink, I'm always happy to.)
It's a shorter cruise compared to a lot of the mega two-week cruises so you don't have to bring too much unless you intend to gamble, which- by all means do if that's your thing. I'll keep mentioning it throughout the year in case you forget where to register. If you don't yet have your passport, GET IT NOW. We aren't just parking outside Baja and looking ashore, we're GOING TO MEXICO. So you need a passport. The cruise is in November so you've got lots of time for the State Department to screw up your application and get it right.
Let's go! I'm serious! How often to you get to go away from things for awhile? Make an impulsive decision to treat yourself. This is going to rock.
Okay!
Grandma is currently tackling Veteran Mode on Call of Duty 4.
You have no idea how happy this makes me. It wasn't that long ago when Grandma was terrified of FPS games. Sure, she played them. But she never really counted herself as an FPS gamer. She dug RPGs and platformers, she'd tell the press, but apart from that she always said she liked some of the more difficult FPS games like Perfect Dark and Halo with the caveat that she completely sucked at them.
I cannot take credit for any of that. I never pressed her to play any game or genre, I just kicked back and watched her do her thing. As you could tell from some of the videos, like when she played Resistance: Fall of Man, I'm not much of a coach, either. I know fuck all about FPS strategy other than that which got me through the level. She did this on her own.
I'm pretty sure the progression of skill level went something like RE4 - Halo - Lost Planet - Resistance: FoM - Doom 3 - Gears of War - Halo 3 - Mass Effect - Call of Duty 4. She is getting through checkpoints on Veteran difficulty that I simply could not. It's a beautiful thing to see. So far she is to Act II: One Shot, One Kill. The last bit of sniping at the end of the mission is starting to make her, well.. let's say "frustrated."
You bet your ass we're going to have another video here in the next week.
She hasn't attempted multiplayer mode yet; hell, she doesn't even have a single achievement for Team Fortress 2. I think it's in part because she's intimidated by those online who know who she is and also because Xbox Live wasn't exactly cooperating in finding matches when she was deep into Orange Box. I think that's why she moved on to Mass Effect so quickly.
When Jennifer with Sony sent Grandma Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction, she also included Heavenly Sword just in case Grandma was into that too. Grandma popped it in after she was done with Mass Effect so she wouldn't neglect any of her systems. She likes to give each console an even break when she's done with a game. To play a Wii game, then a 360 game, then a PS3 game seems to lower the wear on her setup and in some karmic way she's not hurting the feelings of any one of her soulless machines. (Don't laugh, I think we all do it to some extent.)
But Heavenly Sword and Grandma just did not get along. Sure, the graphics were incredible, but Grandma had difficulty with the timing of the attacks; treating the game as a button masher instead of another Devil May Cry. Add to that a rather over-the-top plotline with extraordinarily dramatic dialogue and some frustrating SixAxis controls for the flight path of projectiles and it was pretty much over for Grandma. She didn't like it. So I bought her Call of Duty 4 based on your constant recommendations online so that she might have a new challenge. I figured if she didn't like that either, no problem; she could get maybe 200 achievement points and I would have something to play on my own profile for those rare days when I don't have anything to do.
But she really got into it!
Grandma's main problem is that she battles her way through a checkpoint so quickly that often she doesn't pick up the right weapons to get through the next one, so she starts the chapter over again a little wiser and with more of a tactical plan. Through a combination of repetition, memorization of AI movement and locations, as well a healthy dose of emotional outbursts, she eventually gets through.
Sometimes I honestly don't know how. She's putting C4 in doorways and bottlenecking enemies into claymores and doing shit I could only get through on Hardened difficulty by running from cover to cover praying I could go prone by the time a bullet flew by. Apparently that doesn't work as well in Veteran mode.
So.. well done, Grandma!
Many, many of you have been e-mailing us and leaving comments on YouTube wondering about Grandma's holiday and what she got. Truth is, not much. We had a pretty modest Christmas this year. When I got her the television I said "well, that's your Christmas present. I'm broke!" I wasn't kidding :) She of course didn't care, she's cool like that. From the rest of the family she got some awesome gift certificates to one of her favorite local cooking-supply stores among other things. She did get a pair of pajamas with the Super Mario Bros. logo printed all over it, which she's probably rocking right now as I type this.
I got her the Close Encounters of the Third Kind Boxed Set on BluRay. She loves that movie. We're starting to rack up a little BluRay collection. Right now she has Weeds: Season 1, 28 Days Later, Kingdom of Heaven, Ratatouille (which is awesome in high definition), and I have the Blade Runner: Final Cut boxed set. Now that Warner Brother's has gone the way of the Blue, there's a lot of movies she has her eyes on.
Let me back up a little.
Grandma had a god-awful, shitty Christmas. I had a awful, no-good shitty New Years. Our holidays were just BAD. Not at all because of the gifts, we loved what we got. We're not the greedy type. Gifts were great.
No, it was something quite different.
Let me tell you a little bit about our holiday season. On Christmas Eve morning Grandma felt an incredible pain in her stomach. It was bad. REALLY bad. She later told me is was worse than childbirth. It had kept her up the night before and now it wasn't letting her do anything. She couldn't bake the cookies she wanted to, she couldn't sit down, she couldn't stand up, she couldn't do shit. If it was gas or something simple, it was the worst fucking gas she ever had in her life. She called her doctor who gave her the usual predictable answer: go to the ER.
So she did.
I drove her to Robinson Memorial Hospital in Ravenna where she's pretty much a regular customer anymore. It just so happened that I was the only photographer on duty that day, but luckily the assignment was scheduled for later that morning in the same city as the hospital. So the plan was, take Grandma to the hospital, get her registered and attended to, go to the courthouse for the assignment, take the photo, go back to the office, upload the photos, go back to the hospital, see what's up with Grandma. It worked pretty well! But the day was filled with omens. That morning the windshield on the Jeep cracked from the intense cold as the defrosters blasted on the other side. The coffee machine at the courthouse spit out grounds into the water. The cell phone battery died. Lots of little things like that. Warnings, maybe.
When I got back to the hospital, Grandma told me she had a fresh round of CAT-scans and MRIs coming up, so we were going to be there for awhile. They gave her some morphine which helped the pain somewhat, and we were pretty sure that when the tests came back clear she would get to go home and that would be the end of it.
They kept her overnight.
Now, this is Grandma we're talking about. One might think of such a situation as an "aw jeez golly mister, but it's CHRISTMAS!" kind of episode, but that's not the case with Grandma. I was in the waiting room playing Lumines II when she finally called me back and told me to go home until they knew what the fuck was going on. She called that night, and she was PISSED.
We made the decision as a family that we wouldn't open the presents until she got home from the hospital, which we figured (and the nurses figured) would be on Christmas Day, sometime in the afternoon. It just wouldn't be cool for her to miss the thing, so we'd wait. Well, that pissed Grandma off too. She more or less said "goddammit, you don't have to wait for me to open your presents, that would make ME feel like shit!"
So we opened a few and brought Grandma up some of hers. They kept her overnight again. After the third day of this, she never really was told what had caused the most sharp pain of her life, only that "well, it's not there anymore, or at least not as much so.... you're cool. Followup with your doctor."
She's fine now, but that was one shitty Christmas. She came home, got back to gaming and we went shopping the next day so she could use her giftcards.
THAT was just a prelude for an even shittier New Years Day.
I can't drink New Years Eve. Not allowed. Personal rule. I'm working that night, driving to all manner of bars and restaurants photographing the celebrations for the big New Years spread. Drinking and driving isn't safe nor is it smart and drinking while WORKING is just downright stupid. Add both of them together and you can see why it's a pretty good rule to have. Being the third year in a row of doing this I don't mind, really.
So imagine the irony when, the next morning as I'm driving back from work to drop off the photos from the previous night, THIS HAPPENS:
Black ice. High winds. Blowing snow. Hell, I wasn't even speeding.
If you look close, you can even make out Grandma's special "OGHC" license plates.
Luckily, I was the only one in the car, I was wearing my seatbelt, and nobody else was in front of me when it flipped. But let me tell you, the people that stopped immediately to pull me out of the flipped vehicle and cleared away the glass and called 911 and got my camera bag well... those people are my fucking heroes. I hadn't expected that. THAT was awesome. The unexpected kindness and urgency I saw made me almost not even care that the car we had loved so much that had been through so much had just been destroyed by a thin patch of frozen water.
To whoever you are, thank you.
The time it took between the car settling in a ditch after the rollover and my ass being in a hospital bed was maybe 8, 9 minutes tops. Mantua-Shalersville police department were quick as a bunny out there, man. Lots of accidents that day and they were on top of them all.
Well, just fucking GUESS which hospital I went to.
The neckbrace and everything turned out to be an unnecessary precaution. I walked out of there maybe an hour or two later (following X-Rays and CAT-scans and all that jazz) without a scratch on me. I had some shattered glass in my hair. I think that was pretty much it.
How lucky was THAT.
The paper called me later that night to see if I had any weather related, car-in-a-ditch type feature art for them during my travels. They still didn't know I had been in an accident.
It just so happened I shot some pictures from the back of the ambulance before we took off to the hospital. (The paramedics must have thought I was goddamn insane.) I told my editors the story and it made front page above the fold the next day. You can read it if you like!
At the end of this messy story is as good of an outcome as I could have hoped for. The Jeep was totaled but insurance paid for everything. Grandma got a much more gas-efficient car with less mileage and less of a chance of rollover to replace the Jeep. I finally killed the fucking car, but maybe it was for the better.
So when I tell you that our holidays were somewhat lacking in that charming fireside spirit, even as bad as they were, slap me upside the head and remind me it honestly could have been worse.
A HELL of a lot worse.
I've thought quite hard on just how worse it could have been.
I could have lost my RT button finger, for instance.
Upcoming posts include a new Call of Duty 4 video, a whole post on Grandma's adventures with Dead Head Fred (by request), and Evan sent Grandma a couple of NEW games that Grandma is excited to try, so lots to come!
Wii bowling teams at retirement homes, the Penny-Arcade guys having one of those moments, AARP trying its best to teach older folks about video games, a 95 years young Japanese woman playing Halo 3, the Brain Age phenomenon with all of its knock-offs and cheap imitations, pensioners becoming addicted to World of Warcraft... and what does it all mean? Where are we going? What is the significance? Are the older folks leading the games industry to new frontiers or is the gaming industry trying desperately to steer us all back into the comfort of the familiar? What will all this look like in ten years?
All questions being currently asked and answered by people much smarter than us, no doubt; a massive amount of purchasing data is being illustrated on the whiteboards and Powerpoint presentations in the offices of the curious executives and shareholders of the industry. Grandma wasn't a catalyst for all this. She doesn't influence these folks or hold some position of advocacy on behalf of her generation; she never did. As we have said before, Grandma is just a teeny, tiny part of an inevitability. The attention brought to her, however, has afforded us with the opportunity for a unique perspective on the future of things; to see the whole picture from different levels.
So let's do some predicting. 1. Media & Sales
Here's how it works for a lot of older folks today: Through news programs, newspaper articles and the front pages of websites like Yahoo and MSNBC that syndicate Reuters or AP feeds (before they check their email, they usually glance over the news a bit) they'll hear about Brain Age or about the Wii. When talking with their friends, they might talk a little about how they've heard it's fun and easy to play. The conversation tends to lead to one of three different ways: First, about how they know someone whose kids have one and really like it to which the subject switches to the kids and not the system. Second, about the mental health benefits of things like Brain Age to which the subject switches to homeopathy and the snake-oil promises of charlatans. Third, and most unfortunate, is how difficult it is to get one of those newfangled Wiis nowadays.
Now- of course this isn't everyone, it isn't even Grandma's personal experience (she's a bit of an anomaly), but give us the benefit of the doubt when we say it's the trend.
Next, it will be a day of shopping in a mall or big-box store like Best Buy, Circuit City, WalMart or Target (less typically a GameStop or EBGames or something similar). They will look at the displays a bit and the first thing they will usually see is a giant wall of games behind glass of all varying degrees of violence and cartoonishness. It's pretty overwhelming at first glance to an impulse buyer. You'll notice already that in some instances, a repeating video in the fashion of an short infomercial, rather than a playable demo, will play above the Nintendo section, which stands out from the rest of the wall because of the thick, white borders on all of the games. If they watch a bit or at least confirm that this commercial is talking about the same thing they heard or read about, they might stay a bit longer; completely abandoning the impulse buyer attitude and moving towards the behavior of a true shopper. Overcoming all odds, the person will approach a salesperson.
"Excuse me, is this the thing... the um... Nintendo something or other I heard about with the bowling and the math problems?"
Good Salesperson - "Yes! We've sold these for kids, for college students, parents, retirement homes, it's pretty much for everybody...." Bad Salesperson - ".....yup. For your grandkids, right?" Most Salespeople - "Yup."
If the salesperson manages to fish around to find out what the person already knows about it without sounding patronizing and rude AND doesn't overcomplicate things as they typically do around older folks to get a moment of feeling "man, old people don't know shit about electronics. I should ask her what it was like to ride a motherfucking horse to school" feeling of superiority (this isn't always out of malice, but some salespeople tend to overuse acronyms and spew technobabble so they can feel as though they are educating the customer), they will score a sale.
That's about how it works nowadays.
Here's how that's going to change:
Older folks are going to become a lot more web-savvy. They are already a lot more internet proficient than most folks give them credit, but the days of the newspaper and single-time-slot television news shows are coming to an end, for better or worse. This means in a decade or less you're going to have a hell of a lot more 60+ year old forum users. The older demographic will be courted the same way the rest of us are courted now, with PR plants, trusted review sites, and blogs. Sites like ours will do alright, I suppose, but it's going to be the large community sites like GeezerGamers and 2old2play that will hype the newer stuff and influence buying decisions (if hype is warranted; both sites are filled with honest folks who give honest opinions). Truth is, they probably aren't going to need to change their format much if at all, but the big dogs will be the community based sites linking the videos at GamesTrailers and articles on Kotaku and Joystiq and The Escapist and all the good ones that exist or have yet to exist. New blogs written by older gamers will appear and become popular and trusted.
It isn't a "new paradigm" or any of that bullshit, it's just a demographic shift. Today's 55 year old dad and VP of International Sales is the 65 year old bored-ass blogger of the future. It's possible that a mature gaming magazine might pop up and become popular, but the way publishing costs are these days, it's fairly safe to assume most opinions will be formed on the web first. Most of all, it's going to be about trust. Plants, carefully disguised press releases, and paid-for articles of praise for games and systems will always be a part of things, unfortunately, but they are going to have to get really sneaky. In ten years the whole Web 2.0 cliché user will be pretty seasoned, and it will be tempting to use the tricks of today, but god help the poor marketing folks of the future who try to fall into old habits. The older generations have a wicked bite when they've been played.
Because of this media change, the point-of-sale experience also changes. You'll see more of them in GameStops and EB Games-type stores. They will already know exactly what they want; everything else is just polite conversation. The box stores will no longer require the Brain Age kiosk or the repeating infomercial to stand out from a mosaic of choices. The older generation isn't a primary focus of the industry in the future same as it isn't one today; but they are assimilated. No longer will a salesperson immediately break out the casual game recommendation when a mature gamer asks for ideas for personal entertainment. It won't just be Brain Age and Card House, it will be the nineteenth iteration of Final Fantasy VII for the PSP 9000³ or whatever the fuck we're all playing then. A good RPG will be the new audio-book for many; a game that rewards you with a great story.
That's the good. Now for the bad.
2. Games & Design
There are some obvious adaptations we'll likely see in games; mandatory closed-captioning or subtitles (sometimes a pain in the ass for developers but long since overdue), newer accessibility options and an advanced, chock-full-of-ads social networking system that may likely become cross-platform; Home for the PS3 and XBox Live for the 360 will seem as antiquated as AOL web browsing is to us today, no- a truly powerful network will be accessible and changeable from all consoles. Like MySpace but more clumsy and full of achievements and successes and records and videos of all of your gaming travels.
But even this mystical beast will be overshadowed by something horrifying.
Consider: For every Orange Box and Okami, there are 30 Kane & Lynches and Red Steels. The primary market focus isn't going to disappear with the inclusion of an older demographic BUT you are going to see whole shitload of horrible, god-awful games flooding the shelves at the big box stores that will try and desperately fail to make incredible claims about the broad reach of appeal. So, comparatively, for every Brain Age and Wii Sports, you're going to have 30 World Championship Poker IIs.
This isn't just because they want to exploit a new, older market. It's something more sinister. We, as a gaming community, young and old, have to prepare for a time when the Jack Thompsons of this country will win.
Gaming has always been an easy scapegoat of the publicity hungry politician. If the ESRB continues to handle them the way they are now, it is likely that those of us here in the states will soon experience the same kind of gaming iconoclasm that is already in place in Germany. That means banned games, harsher ratings boards, and extremely cautious retailers.
So: there will be a factioning of the gaming community. A broad spectrum of gamers of all ages who have been enjoying their entertainment for a time will try, and likely fail, to fight back against the censors. There will be older gamers who focus primarily on casual gaming that will feel as though they have won a moral victory and directed the industry into something more noble. Then there will be younger gamers who will blame the older crowd for spoiling the fun; isolating them in an attempt to return to the days where everyone, in a way, was represented in the market.
Shareholders of major publishers will panic and demand expansion rather than a costly lobbying battle. Think of it. Partridge Family Expansion Packs for Rock Band. New, downloadable house designs for The Swiss Family Robinson Adventure built of the Little Big Planet engine (fuck, I might just play that now that I think on it.) And yes, Biblical games out the ass. Maybe even a few good ones. ANYTHING to cater to the populist call for a new technological conservatism. And yet, it will come from both major political parties leaving everyone to congratulate themselves, and all of us to blame for the apathy that set it in place.
This is big money. We can't reasonably assume that the art is going to be protected at the expense of losing a corporation. Forget the masses of gamers who vote, forget the popularity, this is simply a war we cannot win if today's lobbying efforts are any example of our competence as an influential community. Chances are, this terrifying new world is exactly where we are headed according to Grandma.
Games are going to be quite different in a decade, but it's not just going to be improvements in graphics and audio and new input devices, it's going to be a whole different realm. The older folks are going to be blamed for it. And they will certainly not benefit from it.
This isn't what Grandma wants to happen. This isn't the gaming utopia we all dream about; the paradise we seem to feel is on its way. Things are great right now, but that doesn't mean they will stay that way. Could we be wrong? Maybe. I fucking hope so. I would be so happy to learn in ten years time that we were the crazy people who hoarded food for a Y2K disaster that never came. But as we all enjoy the current state of things, we have to think long and hard about what is to come.
'Goddammit, Josh': A reflection on the loss of Grandma's Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction save files
There is a certain phenomenon in the gaming world in which one's save files on a memory card, hard-drive, or cartridge are deleted by another, whether it be a friend, enemy or relative. The phenomenon is typically the product of accident or negligence, but on certain, rare occasions it is performed deliberately out of malice. Either way, it is unique to a certain classification of instances that transcend the personal relationship between a gamer and a single-player game, forming a new, multiplayer element to the experience above and beyond the intentions of its creators.
Most instances within this classification focus on distraction, for instance- a roommate yelling on the telephone in the chair across the room; a parent of a younger gamer scolding them for some infraction; a child of a gamer attempting to gain attention, or the common "HA, MOTHERFUCKER- YOU CAN'T SEE THE TELEVISION!" gag performed daily by persons waving their arms in front of the eyes of Guitar Hero players world-wide.
The file deletion phenomenon, however, is unique in that the damage can be easily and effectively measured with precision; the time one had invested advancing within a single-player game up to the moment of deletion is lost forever.
In our house this phenomenon is called the "Goddammit, Josh." Our house hosted Thanksgiving again this year. When I woke up and came upstairs, I found that my brother had already arrived. He was sitting in Grandma's chair in the gameroom playing something on the PS3.
"Josh, what are you doing?" -"I'm playing Ratchet & Clank!" "Does Grandma know?" -"Yeah, but-" "Who are you signed in as?" -"I'm playing on Grandma's profile." "JESUS GOD, DON'T DO THAT DUDE!" -"No, it's cool, I started a new save, I'm not messing with anything...." "Create your own profile if you have to, but don't play on hers." -"I'm not, I'm just on a new save! It's fine! "......"
There's a few very good reasons we don't play on Grandma's profile. It's all networked so when people see Grandma's gamertag or PSN ID pop up and say "OGHC is online," it better ass be Grandma holding the controller. She has friends online who message her and talk sometimes and the last thing she needs is for one of the kid's friends to pop on her account and start mouthing off to people who then think it's her. It hasn't ever happened, but it's possible. Also, her achievement points are all fairly earned on XBL. She's not overly noble about it or anything, but if one were to casually compare gamerscores with Grandma one day and find that she had just obtained the "Right Hand of God" achievement on Guitar Hero III, they might think that she's capable of that kind of thing, then rumors start, things are posted on certain forums, charges of fraud are made and we get more hate-mail than Charles Guiteau on President's Day. She likes her settings a certain way. She likes subtitles to be the default. She likes her controller sensitivity turned just right. She doesn't like people fucking around with that.
All good enough reasons, but none more important than the fact that GAMES AUTOSAVE NOW.
Grandma hadn't had much time to play Ratchet & Clank this week because of all the cooking and baking in preparation for Thanksgiving. She was cooking pumpkin pies from scratch, which involves torturing a lot of rather tiny pumpkins. She had stuffing to make, which for her takes forever because she does things just her way. All of her save files were dated for Monday, the 19th. That's how busy she was. It wasn't until yesterday evening when she finally sat down with a full glass of Diet Coke and a few printed pages from GameFAQs to guide her towards the location of the last Gold Bolts when she discovered that every save in her profile was dated for Thanksgiving morning.
There exists a hierarchy of frustration for the Goddammit Josh phenomenon.
Level 1: 5% or less of the game complete at time of deletion.
Expected result upon discovery: "Man, now I have to go through all the opening cut-scenes and tutorials again... Goddammit.... This cut-scene really is cool though, look at this..."
Level 2: 6-15% of the game complete at time of deletion.
Expected result upon discovery: "Aw, this is BULLSHIT. I had JUST GOT the one weapon and things were getting good. God DAMMIT!"
Level 3: 16-40% of game completed OR the save immediately after the defeat of a particularly difficult boss.
Expected result upon discovery: "WHAT THE FUCK?! Aw.. you have to be kidding- aww.... no fucking way, no FUCKING way he deleted that. God DAMMIT, JOSH..... He's going to create his OWN goddamn profile if he wants to play, I can't believe he did that."
Level 4: 41-96% of game completed at time of deletion.
Expected result upon discovery: "You. Are. SHITTING ME?! Look at this shit. It's gone! Completely gone. You know how many hours I put into this?! How CLOSE I was?! That was the whole game!! I have to start ALL OVER. FROM THE BEGINNING. Look... Look at this shit... ALL the way back, and I do mean ALL THE WAY. That's it. He's not touching anything in here. NOTHING. How fucking CARELESS do you have to be?! GOD.. DAMMIT!!! Jesus... so many hours in- THIS FAR IN and I have to do it all over again. I don't even REMEMBER where I found half this shit. All the BOOTS. All the WEAPONS. All the ARENAS. I have to do that robot thing again, all that swinging/timing shit.... I'll fucking......YiiiieeeeeEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!
Level 5: 97-99% of game completed at time of deletion, i.e., just before final boss battle / final item collection
Expected result upon discovery.....
Well...
This WAS a Level 5 Goddammit Josh.
I had never seen one before. Not a Level 5. I remember witnessing a Level 4 once, a long time ago. If I remember correctly it was an accidental Memory Card format on her PSOne, right around the time she was finishing up FFVIII. I remember her being so hurt, so frustrated, that I honestly didn't think she would even start the game over.
You think you can prepare yourself for a Level 5, but you can't. Not to go through one yourself, and not even to watch someone else make the discovery on their own game.
So, although I'm sure most of you can imagine it; most of us have gone through it at some point, I'll give you a recent game example to provide a little emotional context:
Imagine you have been spending the past week or so, a little bit at a time after work, trying to get that "Little Rocket Man" achievement in Half Life 2: Episode 2. You have been schlepping around a tiny little garden gnome on what would be your second playthrough of the game. Every time you face an enemy, you put the gnome somewhere you can find it, change weapons, attack the living shit out of whatever is attacking you, then go back, pick up the gnome, and trudge on. It's not the most difficult task, perhaps, but it's certainly tedious, and worth arguably more than that 30 points that's coming to you once you reach White Forest Base. You've saved responsibly. Every time you get past some tricky part, you save. You just have a little more ways to go; that was your last save. You're SOOO close.
So you come home from work, pour yourself a drink, fire up your 360 in anticipation of completing this thing when suddenly YOUR FUCKING HARDDRIVE CATCHES FIRE--SOME CAPACITOR INSIDE THE 360 EXPLODES SENDING YOUR CONSOLE FLYING THROUGH YOUR FRONT WINDOW AS THE GLASS SHARDS FROM YOUR AV RACK RIP LIKE SHRAPNEL INTO YOUR 60" SAMSUNG LCD HDTV SCREEN AND CUTTING INTO YOUR CHILDREN'S SKIN AS THEY RUN IN CIRCLES, SCREAMING IN PAIN, BLOOD STREAMING FROM THEIR EYEBALLS.
It's a lot like that.
Grandma:
".......Josh, if you-... .....I swear to god if he deleted my-...... IF HE FUCKING DELETED...... oh god! It's gone!" -"What?" "These aren't my saves- THESE AREN'T MY SAVES! I didn't... look..... these are all at the beginning..... I just... two more... gold bolts..... where are the saves?" -"Are you signed into your profile?" "Yes! OGHC! He didn't... oh jesus.... EVERY. FUCKING. FILE........They're just....gone......everything is..........Goddammit, Josh..."
And then she was quiet for a real long time just staring at the save list. I didn't expect that. Strange things occur during a Level 5. She was probably thinking. She was thinking about every difficult part of that game she would now have to repeat. She was thinking about how when she replayed it all of the plot up until the final boss would be something she already knew, how there was nothing more to discover or new weapons with which to play. She was thinking about what she could have done differently Thursday morning; maybe had been more assertive or just paid better attention to what Josh was doing when he walked into her game room to try some stuff.
Or maybe she was just plotting different ways to kill my brother. Maybe she was considering places to dump the body and how to clean up the mess from the hardwood floors. Maybe she was thinking about how to properly respond to the flurry of articles that would no doubt be written in vindication of those who said that gamers are a violent people, and maybe she thought her good buddy and best friend in the whole wide world Jack Thompson would offer his legal services in the murder trial that would be forever known as the "Ratchet & Clank Killing."
But I doubt it.
She was just pissed-off and hurt.
And sometimes when you're pissed, there's nothing to say.
But we gamers are a hardy people. She'll start a new save on that beautiful game and she might even catch some glimpse of something to which she hadn't quite paid attention before the same way we find new hints of the identity of Kaiser Soze every time we watch Finding Nemo. It was obviously an accident but... god DAMMIT, Josh...
Anyway: One way I think you can help Grandma is by sharing your own Goddammit Josh stories. This phenomenon is more common than any of us really think. It might help her to ease back into R&C.
Grandma's health has gotten better. The bills are being paid early. The Jeep is back from the shop and running better than before the accident. My schedule is now fairly regular. Working longer weeks has finally paid off in spades for me. Gaming for Grandma has become fun again; filling the time with Guitar Hero III, Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Dead Head Fred, Halo 3, Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction, Heavenly Sword, as well as all the good backups: Catan & Texas Hold 'Em... well, she's overwhelmed with gaming awesomeness at the moment. This is the very opposite of the dry spells she's had this year. The question of "what are you playing tonight?" is met with "Jesus... I don't KNOW!" No longer is it frustration that she has to fall back on something she's just not into, it's a huge buffet of the finest foods- and Grandma's appetite is endless.
Things are awesome. There is so much to post about. God damn. Let me back up a little.
Halloween is a big deal here in our little village. While other towns have houses that compete over Christmas decorations; each neighbor quietly counting the strings of lights over the gables of the other homes on their block trying to appraise the cost to compare to their own, OUR village is filled with folks who try to out-perform one another in garage-based haunted houses, candy quality, lawn decorations, and overall tenor of the poor fool handing out the treats.
It's not uncommon to overhear the parents walking around, politely trading flames to light their cigarettes, say things like "oh well, Maple St. really killed everybody this year. Fucking... full-sized Snickers, man. It must be nice to have money" or "Jesus, did you see the haunted house on Spruce? Jesus GOD that man has too much time on his hands. Still... the lighting was well done, you have to give the bastard that."
This year, however, the folks around the village were talking about our house. It wasn't because we had elaborate decorations, hell we didn't even have pumpkins this year because Grandma wanted to use them all for pies. It wasn't because we had the best candy, pretty much everyone knows a Sam's Club membership and two or three 300ct Wonka & Hershey variety bags is an easy way to be liked. In truth, they weren't even talking about our house, still known around these parts by the name of it's previous owners; they were talking about the woman sitting in front of the house wearing perhaps the cheapest costume next to the dude on Main St with a sheet over his head.
"I heard she's like 90 years old and plays in Xbox tournaments or something."
"My son's friend went over there once to hang out with one of her grandkids, and he said it's true- she's got a game room and everything. She's in there screaming at the hard parts of the game and she's got like every gaming thing you can imagine."
"I bet she's got money. You know how many times she's been on TV?"
"Look... she's got a PacMan head on.." -"No, that's a MS. PacMan head. It's got a bow." "Whatever.
"My kids love that goddamn Guitar Hero game." -"Is that what she has?" "It's actually kind of fun...."
But Grandma didn't hear any of that. The parents were standing next to me on the sidewalk; smoking their cigarettes and fiddling around with their flashlights. There are trick-or-treat boundaries that are silently obeyed. It was the KIDS that got a kick out of Grandma.
"HEY!! I KNOW YOU!"
Kid - "Can you beat Free Bird on Expert Mode?" Grandma - "No." Kid - "My big brother can." Grandma - "He sounds really good! Have you played Guitar Hero III yet?" Kid - ".......THERE'S A THIRD ONE?!"
"AW MAN! I've seen like ALL of your videos!"
"Do you really play video games or do you just pretend to?" -"I play them! I don't think it would be very fun to pretend, do you?" "No. ....Do you like Naruto? I like Naruto a lot."
"Are you really Old Grandma Hardcore?"
"Who's your favorite Super Smash Brother character!"
"My mom says you say bad words."
"YOU'RE FUNNY!!"
Meanwhile, the high-schoolers either stuck walking their siblings around the village or picking up candy of their own could be seen outside our house snapping away pictures of Grandma on their camera-phones and comparing Gamerscores.
There were even a couple parents who made the obvious maneuver to avoid our house; either because of some moral disagreement with Grandma's habits or because they don't let their kids take candy from anyone they don't know or, even less sinister, because our house is on top of a huge goddamn hill and they were pretty much done for the evening.
Grandma had a ball talking about video games with the little kids who found it to be the coolest thing ever that a little old lady in THEIR town not only knows who Naruto is, but also agreed that Clash of Ninja 2 was really hard. To be honest, she didn't want to hand out candy this year at first, but Mom doesn't get home from work until late now and I was "conveniently busy." I offered to take her place but after the first half-hour or so, she was so into it she decided to stick it out until the crowds had died down. She loved it.
After the decorations around town were replaced by red wreaths and depictions of turkeys gleefully standing next to boring stalks of corn, Grandma was waiting patiently for a gunship to circle out from hiding so she could fire another rocket the relative safety of a concrete stairwell.
But then: disaster struck.
And disaster's name is Alyx.
"Goddammit, NO! NO! GET BACK DOWN YOU STUPID BITCH!! NO!!!!" *Alyx has died* "FUCK!!"
Whenever Grandma ducked down into the stairwell to wait, Alyx would push her way past her and stand out in the open to face down a rain of shattered wood and bullets holding a motherfucking pistol. Grandma isn't altogether unfamiliar with Half-Life 2: Episode 1, but goddamn if she wasn't having flashbacks to another "escort" type game. "Why do they always do this?!" -"Do what?" "It's like they don't know what COVER is. They just STAND. RIGHT where they don't need to be." -"Who?" "THESE PEOPLE!! Alyx, Ashley, anybody who has to follow you around and NOT die. At least The Arbiter came back to life after awhile and could DO stuff." -"Alyx does stuff." "Yeah, like a handgun is going to do anything against THAT THING. This is BULLSHIT."
And yet, after enough tries, Grandma made it through. She beat Episode 1 sometime while I was working. When I got home, she was playfully jumping around the insane world of Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction. Needless to say, I was a bit confused.
"When did you get that?" -"Isn't it beautiful! Look at this... WEEEEE!!!" "Yeah, but when did you get it? I had the car all day today." -"Jennifer sent it to me!" "Jennifer? Sony Jennifer?" -"Yeah! I e-mailed her to ask her something and she said she would send me copies of Ratchet & Clank and Heavenly Sword if I wanted, so I said sure!" "Well what did you ask her?" -"I asked her when the new Ratchet & Clank was coming out." "......" -"What?!" "Well, I don't know- it sounds like a thinly veiled way of asking her if she'd send it to you." -"It wasn't! Some places said it comes out on the 23rd and I called the GameStop and they said it wasn't out yet and I wasn't sure so I asked!" "Grandma. You KNEW when it was coming out, we talked to the guys at INSOMNIAC on THEIR PODCAST about it. You could have looked at your own site!" -"Yeah, but Jennifer was real sweet and sent me a copy. So it doesn't matter. She knows I'm not a begger. Seriously- check this out, it's cool as hell..."
But she wasn't really playing as she sped through from checkpoint to checkpoint; she was just seeing what it was like. She didn't pay attention to saving the game or reaching the objectives; Ratchet & Clank would have to wait until she was done with The Orange Box. So, the next day, she fired up her 360 again and began Episode 2. Witnessing her frustration with Episode 1, I knew I would have the perfect opportunity to make another video, but in the meantime- I was scheming.
Wal-Mart. The very name of the company can either strike the inner chords of a Midwestern snob as they lift their nose into the air or pass over the register completely; just another place to shop. Grandma and I live in Ohio, which- for better or worse, goes apeshit over the opening of Wal-Mart Supercenters. It's just a store for fuck's sake- you can buy food and shit their while shopping for clothes or taking your car in to have its tires rotated. But as much as we hate to admit it, the call of a new store opening close by intrigues us as much as any other out here. It's front page news in the local papers when a Wal-Mart is closed and replaced with its uber-cousin: the SUPER Wal-Mart. Our new iteration of the latest in retail shopping opened last Wednesday in Streetsboro.
Grandma wanted to go see what the new store was like (and so did I, to be frank.) But I had another reason for wanting to go.
We pulled up to this monstrosity of a store; just a few acres shy of the hyperbolous Costco depicted in Idiocracy- it's MASSIVE. A few weeks ago, it seemed like it was just woods and grass and a construction driveway heading out into the wilds. But now it was a pristine palace of asphalt, security cameras and new, faux-wood panels on aisle endcaps that presented an illusion that this place was anything more than just a plain ol' Wal-Mart. Despite Grandma's handicap parking permit, we still had to walk quite a ways to enter the beast. Apparently everyone else in town had the same idea (and yet each of us are convinced that we're not like all the other morons...)
There was some guy in a giant dancing tiger costume or some shit that would pat you on the head when you entered the store. He was unavoidable. Beyond that there were no less than five, trained and at-the-ready greeters to accost you will welcoming smiles before you can even grab a cart and enter into the fray.
We headed straight for the place we and everyone else goes when they first enter the place- The electronics section. Nothing ever changes back there, there aren't any new CD's or DVDs in the bargain bin, it's just a curious habit we seem to have. You enter a store, any store for browsing purposes- you head to electronics. They had a giant wall of televisions; all flat panel. Plasma. DLP. LCD. Projection. HD. 1080i. 1080p. 720p. Cheap. Expensive. Unknown brands. Trusted brands. Some were pretty awesome. Some had a contrast ratio so low they might as well have been shitty lightbulbs.
As we stood before this display like characters in a Normal Rockwell painting eyeing the first Zenith color televisions to hit the store windows at Higbees, a dutifully prepared, first-day Wal-Mart employee asked us if we needed any help. I tried to drag out the moment a little. "So... uh.. tell me because I always forget- which is better for video games: LCD or Plasma?" (like Grandma and I didn't know) -"Oh, LCD. Definitely. You don't have the burn problems and all that." I couldn't take it anymore. "Great! We'll take that one. And that stand over there. Grandma, your stand won't hold one that big, I have to get you a stand, too." Grandma just stared at me with a look suspected sarcasm. "Hey, I can afford this! I've always wanted to get you a decent television, now I can, so I'm going to get it for you." The Wal-Mart guy was still standing there. -"So, you're serious then? You want that one?" "Yes. And that stand over there." -"Okay... um... look, it's a new store so I don't know where everything is yet so I'll go um... find those." "That's cool, we'll wait."
Grandma's look changed from suspicion to "you're a moron and can't afford this" to finally "...are you sure?"
I was sure.
When we got home I busted into project mode. My motivations were two-fold and it showed. This wasn't just for Grandma. If Grandma finally got a big-screen HD television, then Mom would get the big TV from Grandma's game room. One of the kids would get the television currently in the living room and the circle of life continues. Grandma's happy, Mom is happy and the kids are happy. It also means I would have to dismantle two, possibly three rooms in a single evening.
We busted ass and got it done.
BEHOLD Grandma's new game-room setup:
I don't have a lens wide enough to show you everything from the front unless I use a fish-eye :) She deserved it. Ever since I started this thing she's laughed at comments saying "Jesus, get her a better TV" and "She has a 360 and a PS3 and she's NOT playing in HD? What's the point?!" etc.,.. Well, Microsoft and MTV gave her the 360. Nintendo gave her the Wii. She's gotten games from everybody. I keep feeling like I was the only one not doing all they could do to make her gaming life better. This is a tiny contribution to the overall effort in the grand-scheme of things, and I love making Grandma happy.
So is she happy?
Hell YES.
"Oh my fucking GOD."
Both of us were staring at Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction with our mouths open. It's like we were staring into a solar eclipse just after being told by a Mayan high priest that the Sun-god was angry. It was AMAZING. I honestly don't know why I waited this long. She put in Half-Life 2. Halo 3. Resistance: Fall of Man. Lost Planet. We watched every game with new eyes on this huge screen pointing and laughing in the ecstasy that we weren't fooled; HD was real. The differences were obvious. It wasn't the slight color shift we experienced when we first started using composite cables instead of a coaxial. It wasn't the slightly improved sharpness we experienced when we moved on to S-Video. It wasn't even the 'wow' when everything became saturated once we switched to Component cables.
It was as though we had been nearsighted for years and only just NOW discovered what the world looks like through prescription eyeglasses. How could we have been so stupid for so many years to think anything less than this was cool?! We felt as though we had wasted a good portion of our life on standard definition. It's so beautiful it's depressing.
As Grandma played on her new TV, she found that sometimes she would have to choose at which part of the screen to look. It's that big and that close.
Life continued. Half-Life 2: Episode 2 was kicking Grandma's ass, although she never failed to tell me how much better it was whenever I was around.
"Hey! I can read the words now!" -"What? You could read the subtitles before." "Yeah, but now I can read the shit on the walls, on the suits, on the car, on everything! Like here- look... that says 'Restricted Area,' right?" -"Sure." "I couldn't tell you what that said before!" -"Yeah but you could guess." "Sure, but now I know!"
It went on like that for awhile. Last night she was approaching the end of the game. I sat on the computer in the game room just listening to the euphoria that is quality game audio. Tension was building. Striders were spotted by the water tower. Then the saw-mill. I heard Grandma reload her weapon and drive away after it; listening to the explosions in the distance. I won't give you any spoilers, but Grandma has determined that Half Life 2: Episode 2 probably has the most perfect ending to any video game in recent memory, if not ever.
The battle is incredible. It's powerful. It's difficult. Everything about it is perfect. The game as a whole might not reach perfection, but the ending certainly does. The alarms. The sound of the panic in the radio transmissions and PA speakers. The immensity of it all.
But by the time I pulled myself out of the experience of watching her do it to grab my camcorder to capture some great video of her at this, her finest moment in this beautiful game... it was over. She had done it. I had just finished rewinding the DV tape when I hear "Was that all of them? Is it OVER?! DID I MAKE... I MADE IT!! FUCKING HELL!! Jesus GOD that was a bitch! Wooo! CHRIST!! .....what do I do now.. oh, I follow this guy...."
Grandma:
This is probably a longshot because I've seen so many of you on my friends list playing it, but if there is any of you who have NOT bought The Orange Box yet, do it. Do it right now. Get it for your Xbox 360 or your PS3 or your PC, it doesn't matter as long as you get it. TODAY. I'm not even kidding with you. Half-Life 2, Episode 1, Episode 2, fucking PORTAL... JESUS, it's just a beautiful, awesome, wonderful game. The last time I felt this way.. I don't even know. It was better than Bioshock and I LOVED Bioshock. You HAVE to buy this. It's just fucking gorgeous. Sure, it has some little problems with AI and it WILL freeze on you occasionally if you've been playing for a few hours and there are a lot of enemies on the screen, but it doesn't happen TOO often like it did in Lost Planet. It's going to be extremely hard to top this. Either they have to come out with Half-Life 3 or Episode 3 or SOMETHING in the next year or so or I might have to personally go down to Valve and do one of those hunger-strike things until they do. It's just that good. God DAMN it was good.
And now, Grandma is playing Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction. She goes back sometimes to play the original Half-Life 2 some nights, but I think it's safe to say she's done. The next post is going to be chock full of Ratchet & Clank goodness, and going by what I saw today, there will definitely be videos.
MOVING ON!
As I mentioned in the last post, Grandma made an appearance on Australian television, specifically ABC's Good Game during a segment that featured mature and senior gamers. You can watch it right here! The show made ABC's front page last week as well. The segment highlights the universality of the mature gaming phenomenon and repeats its inevitability. In other words, Grandma was proud to be a part of it. Cheers, Australia!
Grandma's friend and all around awesome games industry guru Vic Ireland sent Grandma a copy of Dead Head Fred for her PSP. It's a surreal thing that's kept her occupied on the little screen for a little while now, so she has lots to say about it in the next post. Prepare for brutality.
Also- do not forget that those of you who sent in postcards will be getting a little something from me in the post, so watch your mailboxes.
I can say with complete confidence that we are back on schedule. Grandma is engrossed in her own private gaming theater just waiting to talk to everyone about what she's playing. If you see her online, don't hesitate to send her a message. She loves to chat! (Although I wish she'd use her headsets more often.)
It's not the first time something like this has happened; in 2005 I actually received a sympathy card. A single anonymous comment in a thread somewhere can trigger that sort of thing whether it's a joke or a misunderstanding or ...something, but allow me to clear things up right now by stating that Grandma, in every sense, be it biologically, cognitively and philosophically, is still alive.
She is not dead.
She's doing Science and is still alive.
She feels fantastic and is still alive.
Which brings me to the game Portal... But how the hell can I talk about Portal when I haven't mentioned everything else for the past few weeks first?!
Dig: Evan emails Grandma to see if she'd like a copy of Halo 3. She was playing the copy of Blue Dragon he sent her so she's on sort of a Microsoft kick at this point; her poor Wii and PS3 just patiently counting down the days until she picks up copies of Metroid Prime 3 and Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction, respectively. Of course, she quickly gets back to him to say something on the lines of "fuck yeah!" It came about a day after that. Seriously, it was quick. Evan, you're very much like Santa Claus, I hope you know.
As Grandma sat listening to inane dialogue spoken by the most annoying English speaking voice actors towards the end of Blue Dragon (which was a phenomenal game, otherwise) she noticed her friends list exploding with Halo 3 requests. Her friends list on Xbox Live is at capacity, and she hadn't seen nearly as many people play BioShock upon release as she saw Halo 3 begin to saturate the entire list, and she thought BioShock was pretty dominant. Even that one guy who only ever seems to play Texas Hold 'Em for hours on end was now available in Social Slayer. Simply put, she was as excited as the rest of us.
Now, here's the funny part: literally the DAY that Halo 3 arrived, as she was playing Blue Dragon, her 360 died. Her second Xbox 360. No red-rings-o-death this time. It would just sort of... freeze then fizzle away. She tried a different controller. She tried resetting it. She tried letting it sit and cool down for a few hours. Sure enough, five minutes in, *poof!* At least it was consistent. She tried Halo 3, thinking that perhaps the third Blue Dragon disc was just wonky. It got all the way past the opening cutscene for the single player campaign, but after just a few moments, the same digital-artifact laced frozen screen was all she could see, rather than the texture rich helmet of the Arbiter leading Master Chief's squad through a jungle to attack some Brutes.
Well.... shit.
To their credit, Microsoft got this Xbox 360 to the repair center in Texas and back to Grandma in about two weeks.
In the meantime, Grandma had some money in the PS3 wallet since buying flOw awhile back, so she downloaded the worst online poker game in the history of online poker games. I don't even know what it's called. All I know is that it's on their online store, and Grandma fucking hates it.
"You can't turn off the goddamn animations, so whenever somebody calls or checks or folds, you have to see them scratch their chins or look at their nails- I swear to god they must think all women who play poker want to be portrayed as bimbos or some damn thing. I mean, it's fucking POKER! It's a CARD GAME! I don't give a shit about the graphics, there really doesn't need to be much more than some decent looking cards and a table. What's all this other shit?! And even THAT sucks. I remember being able to character customize better on old Xbox games. And there's hardly enough people on there to play, although at least it doesn't cut out as often as the 360 did. I don't really like it."
When her XBox 360 arrived from the repair center, I was lucky enough to be the only one home (she was out shopping, I think). Shiloh barked at the door, which was unusual for Shiloh because he's not really much of a guard dog. FedEx guy had me sign for it, and in about two minutes I had the power supply, ethernet and AV cords hooked up and was signed in under my gamertag playing the first level of Halo 3. I remember finishing Halo 2 around the same time as the rest of the world, but it all came rushing back. The Covenant, the Flood, Truth, Cortana.... I completed Heroic later that night.
I think Grandma let me take over just that one day. It had been awhile since I really had time to get into a game; I'm always worried that if I start one I'll play into the night too late as she does and feel groggy and shitty the next day at work.
After that- it was all her. It took her a bit longer to finish a Normal campaign, but that's because Grandma deals with The Flood a bit differently than regular people. She can't just run through and get to the next checkpoint, she has to blast every last one of the fuckers until there's no little red dots on the radar, which isn't always the best strategy. She was pleasantly surprised that the online demeanor of folks in ranked matches has matured a bit. There's less body humping and people calling nobody in particular "faggot" and the match playback system is the stuff of genius. If you find someone who's really good in a match and want to see things from their point of view afterwards, to study it; learn from it- you can! That, and seeing newer players unfamiliar with different maps run repeatedly off ledges to their deaths is sort of enjoyable in some sick, voyeuristic way.
She's still trying to plow her way through the rest of the game.
But she has something else in her cabinet that's causing distraction: The Orange Box.
She's been waiting for that thing for a looooong time. She bought the Xbox 360 version because hey: Achievement Points are good.
It didn't take long to get through the infinitely wonderful Portal, although she still has a lot of medals and advanced maps to get through (without using YouTube to cheat a solution, as I shamefully did.) "What's the point of playing a puzzle game if you're just looking up how to do it?" she told me. She's worried that her reflexes aren't quick enough for some of the Momentum based jumping sections of the advanced levels, but I think her problem is that her frustration shows and affects her game (if it didn't I don't know how interesting this website ever would have been.)
She's started in the middle of the Half Life series, opting to play Episode 1 first, then Episode 2, then Half Life 2. Why? Who knows. I'm still trying to get her to play Team Fortress 2 as well.
We'll be talking quite a lot about Halo 3 and The Orange Box in the coming days, I promise you that.
Let's see, what else...
Ah: you've sent Grandma lots of links and videos recently of other older folks getting into gaming and to say the least, she's thrilled! We're going to be talking about that too.
And to our Australian readers (one in particular, you know who you are ;) Grandma will be appearing on the ABC television show "Good Game" here pretty soon, so watch for it- I'll be posting more about this as it comes in! Grandma and I are both huge fans of The Chaser's War; so we're all about ABC.
Also: the Jeep is back and repaired, the insurance covered everything, we found a hell of a body shop that did an incredible job, and that nightmare is over. My work schedule is much more structured now, so hopefully these long gaps in between posts can be eliminated.
We have lots more to talk about but if I try to cram it all in one post it's going to be bad. More on the way!!
The past month has been brutal. Grandma, stoically leveling up different classes in her Blue Dragon party, is waiting for me to come from work to tell me about something she read in EGM, about an e-mail from one of you, tell me about a part of whatever she's playing or to pass along a message from someone who called about a job- someone needs senior portraits done before some yearbook deadline; someone else liked a photo in the paper and looked me up for a copy, etc.,. and just to talk a little and find out about my day. She's waiting to tell me how, yet again, her doctors can't tell her what's wrong with her shoulder, why she was sick, when chest-pain is severe enough to call 911, which prescription drug is deteriorating her nervous system, and various other things about which they seem to have nothing to say.
I know this because Grandma is consistent. When I leave for work at 7:30am and finally come into the game room sometime around midnight, 1:00am, 2:00am, Grandma is always in her chair, listening for the sound of the keys hitting the desk; waiting for that thump of my camera gear hitting the floor, to arch her head around and say "hey! You made it home!"
She's always there, playing whatever she's into at the moment, waiting to say hello. Lately, it's seemed as though we both had cause to worry that, when the day was over, one of us wouldn't be there to complete that perfect little ritual.
Earlier this month, on the way between assignments, a car pulled out in front of me on a back road. The thing cut out into the street like a deer from the woods; bolting from hiding the moment the beam of the headlights cuts away from its field of vision.
This was the result:
After the police had been called and my fingers stopped shaking, I was able to dial the house on my mobile. The first question my mom asked- "are you okay?" -"Yes. I think so. The car is fucked up; Jesus Christ- it's gone. The wheel well, it's just.. Jesus fucking Christ..." She didn't even hear anything past the word 'yes,' that's all she wanted to know. She didn't give a shit about the Jeep. While I was bawling into the phone about the car; the Jeep- that beautiful SUV that was the very first newish, non-clunker, dependable vehicle we had ever been fortunate enough to finally scrape enough together each month to afford- destroyed now no matter how careful I had been- she was talking to Grandma. "Tim has been in an accident, said the car is gone." -"Fuck the car, is he alright?" (like daughter- like mother) "Yup." And they were on their way.
With the Jeep awaiting insurance approval for repair, mom secured a rental car so she could get to and from work while I drove her car to my often sunrise to early morning shifts. Meanwhile, Grandma was stuck at the house without a vehicle until everything was resolved.
Being without a vehicle, especially for Grandma, produces a feeling that goes beyond boredom. She feels trapped. She can't go for walks because we live in a big house on top of a big goddamned hill that she wouldn't be able to ascend on foot on her best days. The kids are in school, mom is at work, I am at work, all she had left was her Wii, 360, PS3, broadband internet access, and a telephone. She needed a friend to talk to; or at least something to break the monotony.
So she got a dog.
She fell in love with a cream-white husky taken in by a rescue and made her decision that day.
Meet Grandma's dog:
Now, you know Grandma. You know her very well. You see a beautiful animal like that with its wolf-life back and kind face and you know of a recent, magnificent PS2 game featuring such a creature and you're already figuring out what she named it. You know EXACTLY what she named it. You would think you would, and so would I.
But you and I are wrong.
She named it fucking "SHILOH."
Shiloh! EVERYONE knows a dog named Shiloh. Neal Diamond wrote a song about it for fuck's sake. It's about original a dog name as "Sadie" or "Shadow." When I saw it I was about to playfully scold her for naming it Amaterasu or Shiranui or even just 'Okami' even though she didn't understand Japanese, but then she laid it on me. SHILOH.
Nevertheless, Shiloh is a great dog just perfect for Grandma. They love each other. He cries when she leaves the house. He's a powerful dog but he doesn't fight her. He is, without a doubt, Grandma's dog.
Now that Grandma had at least some companionship that didn't come from the speaker of a headset during a game of Catan, we kept up with our routines, undaunted by the accident; the kids drudgingly back in school, Grandma with her new friend plugging away at Blue Dragon, mom in her rental car plugging in her work week and me in her car plugging away at mine. Of course, when we're all so focused on keeping things as normal as possible with only one car of our own until the storm passes, a nasty wave is bound to toss our ship.
The inevitable occurred at last about a week ago.
On this particular day, Grandma was in pain. Severe pain. As our long time readers will know, she knows the drill. Chest pain = a trip to the emergency room, no questions asked. They see her immediately, do bloodwork, hook her up to heart monitors, eliminate the worst of scenarios one by one until they reach that shallow end of that Spectrum of Cause, at which point they shrug their shoulders and pass her along for followups with family doctors and a re-analysis of any prescription drug interactions and complications. She was tired of this predictable and often useless pattern of repetition. Pain, ER, tests, home, wait, doctor, nothing. Pain, ER, tests, home, wait, doctor, nothing. Pain, ER, tests, home, wait, doctor, nothing...
I was unreachable, on assignment somewhere that required quiet; the vibration or ringing of a cell phone would be enough to disrespect some politician or speaker or lecture. My cell phone was on silent. Not that it mattered, because instead of calling 911 and commencing the familiar pattern, she called her doctor first and asked what to do. No surprise there: "go to the ER!!" Then she called mom. "Call 911!" On chance, I arrived home to get some flash batteries just as the decision to finally call 911 was made.
Emergency vehicles arrived quickly (the cities and villages around here have excellent response times) and she was taken to the same hospital she's been to many times since the creation of this site, Robinson Memorial Hospital.
Like the other times, the time before a heart catheterization where we brought up her Xbox so she could play Psychonauts, or the time she played Size Matters on PSP so much that her stay seemed to fly by, everyone knew her name; the doctors, the nurses, everyone. Unlike those times before, however, it made her nervous. She didn't know if it was because of her small bit of fame or her familiar laugh or unique last name.. she began to think of it another way. She remembered stories from nurses about hypochondriacs, about how everyone at the hospital knew them because they were there so often, how sometimes they were there because they convinced themselves they were ill, or they did it for attention, or for company, or to debate with medical professionals to make themselves feel smart...
She got scared.
The pain she felt was real, she's had the surgeries, bloodwork, stress-tests, and a medicine cabinet filled with legitimate non-placebos sanctioned by many people who confirmed her medical problems, all of it vindicating her honesty to anyone who lazily raised their eyebrows to ask "well maybe it's psychosomatic..." But they had no answers. They couldn't tell her what was wrong, really. And everyone knew her name. She's been brushed aside to specialists, been prodded, poked, and scanned in more ways than is possible to view an environment in the entire Metroid series, and yet they only had a list of maybes and perhaps and possibly. And everyone knew her name. "Hi, Barb! Back again, huh? Still playing your video games?" "Hey! It's Old Grandma Hardcore again! Back to see us?" "Oh, I remember you! You're Barb!"
And everyone knew her name.
"I wonder what these people think of me" she said flatly as I sat next to her hospital bed, wondering if I read the schedule right; that my next assignment was in the same town as the hospital and that I had time to be there with her as she was going through this; and wondering who I would call if I didn't. Fucking hospitals with their 'no cell-phone' policies... "They do the same stupid shit every time I come here, and every time it's the same." -"They're just as frustrated as you are when they can't figure out what's wrong." "Yeah, I know. Still.. I wonder if they think it's all in my head." -"Did it hurt today?" "Yes I hurt today! It hurt like hell!" -"When did it start happening?" "When they put me on that fucking medication." -"Did you tell them that?" "I don't know if they even listen. I don't know anything about this shit, they're supposed to know." -"Still. You should tell them." "I know."
That night when I got home from work, she wasn't there waiting for the sound of the keys or the thump of the camera bag. It's not uncommon for the omission of something expected is just as jarring as something explicitly surprising. It was especially strange for her not to be in her chair that night. They had admitted her to the hospital proper. Apparently, she told somebody. They were looking into it. In some kind of misplaced sense of priorities, I knew that now would probably be the only time I would have to play any games I had missed over the weeks, but ironically enough- I was too tired. Besides, I knew that once she got out of that place, it would take her a little while to get back in track with where ever she was on the Blue Dragon second disc. RPGs are notably difficult to regain one's orientation within the story after a break. I didn't want to fuck around with that even further by putting BioShock or the Darkness in.
I was able to see her again the next day and again it was in between assignments. When I finally found the room up on the third floor, tucked away behind a bustling nurses station, I found her holding her arm, bleeding. "What the fuck?!" -"Forty goddamn minutes" she said, her eyes tearing up in panic. "I told them the thing had come loose or something and was spurting blood but she just said to put pressure on it. It's been forty minutes and no one has come in here to help me or clean it or anything." Her IV lock was still sticking out of her arm, a stream of slowly drying blood staining the blanket under it. "Don't they know you're on fucking blood thinners?! Jesus!!" I went to find the chief nurse for that floor. I explained that she was taking motherfucking Coumadin to prevent blood clots, that she had a motherfucking alert tag hanging around her motherfucking neck explaining this and was told by her motherfucking doctors that if she ever had so much as a slightly deep cut on her motherfucking hand she could bleed to death. So here she was, after the idea that the smallest of cuts could be a big deal with that particular medication was pounded into her head, being told to hold her hand on the needle in her arm in an uncomfortable position, in pain, for forty goddamn minutes without anyone coming in, lest she bleed herself into shock.
They sent someone in right away, removed the IV and cleaned her up. I found out later that very soon after I had left, they said her stress-tests came back alright and she could go home to followup later with her doctor.
Pain, ER, tests, home, wait, doctor...
Now she is home. She just finished the second disc of Blue Dragon and is quickly approaching the end of the thing. Vic Ireland called to make sure he sent her a PSP game he had. She's been emailing Evan about Blue Dragon and Halo 3. Playstation Magazine UK wants to do a story on her. As we sit and talk for a few minutes every night about Halo 3, Metroid Prime 3, the new PSP, Jack fucking Thompson, how David Jaffe should be allowed to say that he hates Utah without getting pounced on, etc.,. etc.,.. I realize that this time we have isn't enough. We'll take it, but it's just not enough.
Time together is a difficult thing to procure right now, it's true. Time to update the site after we do talk is even more difficult, but it isn't forever. This month has been brutal, but it's just a month, and another, hopefully better one will follow. So no, to respond to some one of the comments on the previous post, we're not going to give up on the blog. The function of this blog is sharing this wonderful, cool woman with everyone. I'm not about to give up on that, no matter how hard it gets ;)
Grandma sits still in her chair, waiting for me to come home from work, playing video games in the dark; waiting to tell me all about them.
And just like you guys, I can't wait to hear what she has to say.
Game on.
--- The winner of the "One Year Xbox Live Gold Subscription Giveaway... Thing" is.... Gamer Named Tim! We sent Tim his subscription card so he'll be getting it soon (California mailing address, so it shouldn't take that long.) Thanks for the postcards everyone, and as a way of saying thanks- I'm sending everyone who sent us a postcard a little somethin-somethin to show my thanks. Grandma LOVES getting postcards and e-mails and letters and photos and it just makes her feel awesome so I really, really need to say thank you to everyone in my own little way. I haven't been much of a grandchild recently with the work schedule, so you have all acted as her extended family by proxy of the United States Postal System, and that's damned cool.
So if you sent her something, expect something from me in the mail in the next few weeks. It won't be much (I'm poor) but it shall be awesome :)
What's going on! Where are we?! What's Grandma doing?!
Well I'll tell you.
Lots of gaming goodness has been going down at our house, I just haven't had time to post anything. My hours have been increased at work. I recieved a promotion and now I'm rarely at home. That will change when schedules settle down, but at the moment, I'm just happy if I can grab a few hours of sleep. We have been getting your postcards and letters for the contest (and you still have plenty of time to get yours in, by the way) and Grandma has been reading everything. I, however, have been busy as hell.
So has Grandma, just in different ways... Breakdown: Thursday, August 30th Me - "soooo..... tired......." Grandma - "These GOD DAMNED LITTLE SISTERS keep stopping for GOD DAMNED Adam and keep getting KILLED. I swear to Christ this is RE4 all over again."
Monday, September 3rd [Achievement Unlocked - 5pts - Two Fully Upgraded Weapons]
Tuesday, September 4th Grandma - "Hey! Welcome home! Did you hear that Lair sucks?" Me - "Well that's..... bad, I guess. I want to go to sleep." Grandma - "No, it's great. I don't have to waste $60 to find if it's horrible. It's not even a debate, everyone- and I mean EVERYONE fucking hates it. I'm almost relieved." Me - "Panzer Dragoon Orta was good. You could always play that again." Grandma - "Yeah, but the S-Controller feels weird now. I'm used to the 360 one. I don't know. I'm thinking Metroid."
Wednesday, September 5th [Achievement Unlocked - 10pts - Three Fully Upgraded Weapons] [Achievement Unlocked - 10pts - Four Fully Upgraded Weapons] [Achievement Unlocked - 10pts - Found Cohen's Room]
Thursday, September 6th Grandma - "I don't remember this game being this goddamn impossible on Easy Mode. And it's not the Big Daddys either, they're simple enough once you learn how to use the plasmids right. It's those fucking Houdini motherfuckers. They just pop out of nowhere!" [Achievement Unlocked - 50pts - Maxed All Tracks] [Achievement Unlocked - 10pts - Five Fully Upgraded Weapons]
Friday, September 7th Me - "I had the worst day at work today. Sometimes I take pictures of things for the news and I just... You never really feel disconnected like you're supposed to, you know?" Grandma - ".........Yeup." [Achievement Unlocked - 100pts - Little Sister Savior] Grandma - "Ooo! Check out what Evan sent me!" [Achievement Unlocked - 5pts - Back Attack] Me - "I want to play Blue Dragon :(" Grandma - "I thought you wanted to play BioShock?" Me - "Wait, are you done with it?" Grandma - "Well, I went through it twice, just finished it the second time on a harder difficulty. I don't think I can play it again to harvest all of the sisters this time, they're so damn cute and precious when you save them I don't think I'd have the heart." Me - "Cool! So I can play BioShock now?" Grandma - "I don't know, I kind of want the last achievements..."
Grandma is loving BioShock, edging in some Blue Dragon time, and eyeing Metroid Prime 3. Meanwhile, I haven't even touched Lumines II on my PSP (the ol' standby) because I've been so incredibly tired lately. When the new shifts start to take effect, there shall be much gaming.
Hopefully, that will be very soon. So... new post is coming soon!!
Grandma and BioShock part 1: A Series of Vague Spoilers
Grandma finished her first run-through of BioShock last weekend. There's still a lot she wants to accomplish, so we're not quite calling this game 'destroyed' yet. From what she's told me there are something like three different endings one can get; not to mention she only has about half of the possible achievements. For a single player game, this just isn't acceptable to her. She needs to get everything she can before setting it aside to the cabinet; to pull out later as some fantastic little piece of nostalgia from way back to that late summer of 2007. You guys know Grandma by now, that's just the way she is. I've been working a lot lately. That's great for me but it creates a strange interruption of game cognizance that Grandma just can't explain, saying simply "you haven't played it yet; you wouldn't understand." I leave for work one morning and she's chasing around some surgeon who had tried to turn his patients into works of Cubist art. I come back from work late that night and she has motherfucking bees flying out of her arm.
When I came home Friday night, she was beating Andrew Ryan with a golf club and I thought "well fuck, she's already done with the thing and I haven't had time to post!" As it turns out, however, she still had a ways to go. Not so much a ways that she hadn't seen the somewhat jarring first ending by the time I finally dragged myself in from another full weekend at work. First she was harvesting the Little Sisters, next she was saving them... I still don't know what the hell is going on. I haven't had time to play it! Her explanations are completely lost on me.
Hearing Grandma try and explain to me the purpose of ADAM and The Little Sisters and what a Big Daddy really is, well... that's like listening to someone explaining congressional points of order to a six-year-old standing at the front of a tour group that keeps pushing ahead. I just get that stupid look on my face that says "I have to go eat lunch with the other kids by the big Washington Monument thingy."
All I know is- she wants to talk to somebody who's as deep into the thing as she is, namely you folks.
I'm no help :)
So ask whatever you like about BioShock. Talk with Grandma about it. I'd love to discuss the art style, the implications of major ethical questions brought about in the game, the philosophy of Rapture, the ignominy of Jack's decisions, the anachronisms throughout the underwater city of the 60's... But I'd be lying if I said I was as up to speed as the rest of you and Grandma. I'm just not there yet. I am one confounded gamer.
I picked up a copy of BioShock Tuesday afternoon for Grandma, much to the ire of the poor soul behind me in line who heard the clerk say the depressingly cheerful phrase "you got the last one!" to that grinning jackass in front of him. She immediately dived into the thing (no pun intended) cranking the exquisite audio to a point where I now hear the preemptive whistling sound of an approaching sentry bot in my sleep.
From the start, it became clear to Grandma that 2K Games had read her mind to search for all her necessary components:
1. A clear map 2. Subtitles 3. Frequent health and ammo pickups 4. Terrifying fucking enemies 5. Hilarious fucking enemies 6. Evil children 7. Potato Chips Now, I've been working quite a lot lately and haven't found the time to play the game myself- but according to Grandma one can write an entire GameFAQs-like walkthrough by typing two little words:
PRESS "RIGHT"
The game has a handy dandy little 'goal tips' feature that tells you exactly what you need to do. Prima Games is going to have to find a hell of a lot of artwork to fill the rest of the 105 pages, but essentially- that's all you need to know! Getting through it is another story. It's not just some simple tour through of a beautiful environment; it's goddamn challenging. I've heard Grandma say many things some folks wouldn't expect their grandmothers to say, so I'm pretty much immune to surprise and awe anymore.
That was until this morning when she told me "goddammit, I can't hack worth SHIT."
It's just not a sentence that suited Grandma. If she ever uses "pwned" or "l33t" in casual conversation I may have to rethink things a bit.
Anyway! She's playing BioShock and from the looks of things, she'll be playing it for awhile.
Now on to the postcards: Here are two of our favorites right now.
First up is from Gamer Named Tim who sent Grandma an awesome, early welcome into the BioShock realm. This one was somewhat curious to our postman as well, but an arm-drill usually raises eyebrows with federal employees these days.
Second is from miltownkid, who sent Grandma a little somethin' somethin' rights about here: Why is this particular card so awesome? Because we all get to fucking see the thing get sent! Right here:
You guys are alright :)
Now some folks were asking us about deadlines for the giveaway and such so here we go: The deadline for postcards is September 21st, 2007. That's closer than you think, so send them right away! Yes, the drawing is completely open to international readers so you can send a card too. The winner gets a valid card worth 12 months of Xbox Live Gold. Rock on. We'll make a video of Grandma randomly choosing the winning postcard at the end of the contest, and we're posting the coolest postcards as they come in each week. You can put whatever the hell you want on the card, or nothing at all for that matter, as long as it has your name and address so we know where to send the Xbox Live goodness.
If you want to send her a postcard, send it to:
One Year Xbox Live Gold Subscription Giveaway Thing c/o Barbara St. Hilaire (aka Old Grandma Hardcore) PO Box 553 Mantua, OH 44255
Here's Grandma doing her best Darkness infused Jackie Estacado impersonation, complete with glowing, demon snake heads, upon completing this god-awful, piece of shit game. Even Mr. Bungle couldn't salvage this thing. For me- Mike Patton growling evil things into a microphone would have been reason enough to buy it but they somehow managed to fuck that up too.
This one was my fault; I take full responsibility. On Monday we read on Joystiq about some lucky bastards getting their hands on BioShock from Toys-R-Us early. Wednesday, (without checking, mind you) I took her to get a copy of her own, figuring the Toys-R-Us mistake was someone jumping the gun by only a day or so. Surely it would be out then. Well it wasn't. NEXT Tuesday, we were told, would be the day for BioShock awesomeness. But Grandma was bored NOW. She needed a new game and we didn't have much from which to choose. And so- it was I who pointed at The Darkness on the PS3 rack and said "hey look, that one is made by 2K as well. Let's get that one for now. I heard it's good."
That was a goddamned shameful lie. Grandma:
"Jesus, where do I even start with this? It was DUMB. I don't know if the game was supposed to be funny or serious or what but it sure didn't make any fucking sense. So it's supposed to be this guy, Jackie's 21st birthday, and he ends up getting in a car accident by being chased by the cops and some guys paid by his Uncle Paulie (the bad guy) to kill him, but he ends up in this building that just happens to have a television set with a message from Paulie that he now, out of the blue, really fucking hates Jackie because of a thing that just happened that day, and he planted a bomb in the closet and it blows him up and now he's hearing voices and has demon heads coming out of his shoulders and shit and he decides to calmly GO SEE HIS GIRLFRIEND.
You know, any normal person that has fucking demons coming out of their body is going to freak the fuck out, find a doctor, crawl in a ditch and scream for awhile, anything! But to head down through the subway saying hello to everyone he meets like he just had a slightly bad day at the office? It doesn't make any sense! Maybe I could have gotten passed the shitty dialogue if the graphics on the characters didn't look like they were Guitar Hero singers just moving their mouths up and down a little bit. And it was really obvious when they zoomed in to show how great the skin textures were or something. I mean- they can make a guy have really sharp looking stubble but they can't make his mouth move when he talks?
And that's the other thing. He NEVER SHUTS THE FUCK UP. I don't mean he's like Dante in Devil May Cry 3 or anything, I mean- and this might be the worst part of the whole game- whenever you go from one area to another, like going from Chinatown to the Canal Street station, you have to sit through a stupid fucking cutscene of him sitting in the dark playing with a gun acting all stupid. EVERY TIME. Sometimes he's talking about what's going on in the game, and that's fine, but he repeats himself every time you go into that area.
You enter the Subway a LOT in this game. They couldn't make it so you could just walk down the street, no- you HAVE to go through the station. So that's two stupid cutscenes you have to sit through. You can't skip them, you can't turn them off, they're always there. It would have been better to just have a black screen with a loading bar at the bottom but I had to listen to the same goddamn quip about Crazy Abdul given in a ridiculous, cartoony New York-Italian accent about fifty goddamn times.
And if you accidentally step back into the area you just left? Fuck you- you have to watch the cutscene again. And then another one when you correct your mistake.
Then there's the 'collectables' thing where you pick up pieces of paper with phone numbers written on them. You call the number, listen to an occasionally funny message, and it says "Extra Content Unlocked" every time you do it. I still don't know where this 'extra content' is, and I really don't care at this point.
It has minions like Overlord, kind of, only they're called "Darklings." They're good for shit. They don't always go where you tell them to go and when they do get there they don't always do something. It was funny at first when they would say stupid shit like "let's kill a commie" or "up yours asshole" or something like that, but it gets old. It was FUNNY when the minions in Overlord peed after getting drunk in a pub. The Darklings seem to pee on every corpse they pass, even if you're being shot at and need them to do something! It ceases to be funny and just gets annoying.
The game isn't really fun at all until you get the Black Hole Darkness Power and start sucking groups of people up into the air. It's easy enough to aim the weapons because it sort of drifts into whatever there is to shoot at, but the weapons are nothing to write home about. Then there are these parts that go back to World War I trenches with his grandfather or something and everyone looks like Frankenstein and those whole levels are just dumb as hell to anyone who's played a decent WWII shooter recently. They could have made it so much better. Make it scary. Make it funny! WHATEVER. Just make it not suck.
I haven't played Multiplayer yet so maybe that will justify what I paid for it but I doubt it.
Maybe I'm just pissed I didn't get BioShock and ended up with this crap. I don't know. But this was really, really lame."
I haven't finished it yet, but Grandma finished it tonight. She even went back to her save to see if there was an alternate ending if you make a different choice at the end.
She didn't find one.
We've gotten a few postcards (more on the awesomeness of what's going down with that contest coming next post) so if you haven't already, send us one! Here again is the address:
One Year Xbox Live Gold Subscription Giveaway Thing c/o Barbara St. Hilaire (aka Old Grandma Hardcore) PO Box 553 Mantua, OH 44255
I cannot stress enough how much Grandma loves getting mail.
So send her a postcard! And unless you haven't already- for the love of GOD, avoid The Darkness, out now on the Xbox 360 and Playstion 3.
Just to review: The Darkness = quirky, crazy band from the UK The Darkness = mediocre television show The Darkness = mediocre vampire movie The Darkness = shitty video game
If you remember that, then we will have done something good this week.
One Year Xbox Live Gold Subscription Giveaway... Thing
The story about how we got this thing is actually kind of sweet. Evan at Microsoft/Edelman was afraid Grandma's Xbox Live subscription would run out before they got a chance to get her a code, so he sent her a 12-month card before he searched for a one-use code he could e-mail to her, just in case he couldn't find one in time. Well, he did find a code, and the card arrived anyway via DHL. She e-mailed him back to thank him and also to find out what to do with the card. His reply: give it to someone else, give it away on the blog, whatever we wanted. It's all good.
Evan's awesome like that.
So we're going to have a giveaway! We can't do the e-mail thing because that didn't work so well last time when 20th Century Fox bailed on us when they found out Grandma didn't like the movie Grandma's Boy respectfully fell out of contact, so we'll do it the old fashion way. Grandma digs old fashioned shit. And so do I!
Send an awesome postcard to:
One Year Xbox Live Gold Subscription Giveaway Thing c/o Barbara St. Hilaire (aka Old Grandma Hardcore) PO Box 553 Mantua, OH 44255
Now when we say "awesome postcard", it can be whatever the hell you want. You can make it yourself if you like; she doesn't care as long as it gets here. Grandma loves getting mail; if you want to be creative or unique- all the better. If you send her something crazy we'll even post the best ones for posterity. The drawing for the subscription, however, is going to be random. Whether you send us a beautiful stick figure rendering of Grandma kicking some zombie ass or a nude picture of yourself licking a wireless controller provocatively or if you just send her a $.29 "Greetings from the World's Largest Toothbrush Holder" postcard from the highway rest-stop down the road, you have the same chance of getting the card, worth about fifty bucks nowadays.
The card hasn't been cracked open or scratched or anything, and I don't see any restrictions about international 360 gamers written on the back so as far as I know, you're good for it too. If I turn out to be wrong about that and you win the drawing, I'll get you a region appropriate subscription myself. The only thing I see is that it's just for the Xbox 360, so classic XBox gamers are out of luck on this one.
So send her some postcards!
And if any of you folks who aren't 360 owners just feel like writing Grandma for the hell of it, the address up there is the place to send it. She loves getting mail. We'll do something similar for the other systems as well later on so no one gets left out. Most of you know Grandma enough to know she's all about all the consoles.
G4 Media Inc. Demands Removal of Our YouTube Video
Some of you may remember Grandma appearing on G4's Attack of the Show last August for a panel discussion on 'Women and Gaming'... We drove to studio here in Ohio from which Grandma could participate via satellite. During the taping, I sat in the control room with our little camcorder pointed at the screen (with the studio's permission, mind you) showing the feed from the camera that was being sent to LA, with the audio from Grandma's earpiece piped into a tiny speaker by the monitor. We couldn't see the show, only Grandma. Grandma was told by a producer of AOTS before the show started to speak up whenever she had something to say. Grandma tried the best she could. She didn't get too frustrated when it was clear the 'panel discussion' was merely going to be a tongue-in-cheek sort of thing, but it was obvious from our view that she was a bit disappointed.
The day after it aired we put up a post showing our video from the control room. Under our video we also included G4's own embedded flash video of that particular segment of the show so readers could compare and also see what it's like to be on the other end of a satellite feed. The G4 producer who contacted us initially saw the post, thanked Grandma for participating and that was the end of it. Amber and Seanbaby were actually very cool people, it was just a silly skit rather than a real discussion.
Our video, in the year it's been online, only got a little over 10,000 views total. To put that in perspective, Video 21, which we posted Wednesday, is already at 15,000. Nobody really seemed to care all that much about the AOTS fiasco.
Today, G4 Media Inc sent a third party copyright infringement notice to YouTube for the video I shot of Grandma sitting in the studio in Ohio. The video was subsequently deleted and we were given a warning that that ALL our videos may be removed if another video is flagged.
We don't have any hard feelings against YouTube for the video removal. It's more or less an automatic thing anymore. Hell, even the person at G4 who flagged our video might not have watched it, they simply saw the thumbnail of Grandma on a television screen with the video title "Old Grandma Hardcore on Attack of the Show" and thought to themselves 'SONOFABITCH! I got one!" ...and then pressed the 'report' button. Could have it been taken down because it portrayed AOTS and G4 in an unflattering way? I don't know. Maybe! But it's more likely that this is either a mistake or there is just some real fucking ball-buster content manager over at G4 Media that cracks a heavy whip to the backs of interns to meet their daily quota of YouTube, Break, and Metafilter infringement reporting.
Hell, they might even have a little corkboard with everybody's name on it with differently colored stars representing the number of videos deleted in a day. Now, I'm not saying that corkboard was stolen from an underfunded elementary school; the poverty stricken kids forced now to huddle around an ancient eMachines monitor displaying a poorly formatted spreadsheet of the class roster with cold, unfeeling numbers where their beautiful, shiny star stickers used to be.
I'm not saying it isn't possible, but it's highly unlikely.
Here's why: G4 Media Inc is located on W. Olympic Blvd. in West Los Angeles, right near the Santa Monica Freeway. The closest elementary school is The Park Century School, which is a private institution. A G4 Media Content Manager couldn't get passed the guard without some sort of identification as a parent, and it's even more unlikely they could make it out with a corkboard and shiny star stickers if they managed to bribe one of the kids with a classic and rare TechTV t-shirt from their secret Vault of Quality Programming into faking a family relationship, because the guards at an elementary school in West L.A. can see right through that shit.
It just wouldn't make any sense.
So it was probably just an innocent mistake!
Anyway, here's the segment as you would have seen it on television, provided by G4 on their very own nifty embedded player.
Our video, however, has been cast out into the ether; lost forever, only the remnants of its tiny zeros and ones remain in the form of a haunting thumbnail on our YouTube Channel.
That is, unless you click here and judge for yourself. That's right folks. Grandma is clearly an evil copyright infringer. She infringes constantly. Just look at her infringe. You might want to do it quickly before an intern goes for another coveted gold star.
1. The chain 'bling' she's got around her neck is an emergency alert tag displaying that she's currently taking blood thinners.
2. This stage was the battle with Kahn at Heaven's Peak. There's some voice cues you might pick up if you've played it through, but other than that there's nothing that could be construed as a spoiler ;)
There wasn't a post Sunday because my goddamn monitor's base broke because goddamn NEC makes great goddamn LCD screens but sh*tty goddamn bases, goddammit. All is well now, so the next post is Friday for yas.
"I don't really care about the corruption thing, I just kill the peasants and the sheep and raid all the houses for the hell of it. It gets your little guys all armored up and you don't get arrested like in Oblivion. Farming sheep is an easy way to boost up your weapons and shit in the forge, but you can do that in the dungeon and you don't have to run around all over the damn place. I set the Sacred Tree on fire too, but that was an accident."
"I fucking hate this camera.... SHIT! I keep going to use the thumbsticks and that just drowns your minions! They're stupid! Look at 'em; you make them go in the water and they just stand there and die. Why can't it be where you hold down the LB button and use the thumbsticks? This is a pain in the ass, you can only turn left."
Grandma - "There's a spawn thingy out in the middle of the water for the yellows, but only the blues can go in the water." Me - "Browns." Grandma - "What?" Me - "They're brown." Grandma - "Well the fucking glowing thing is yellow and the Y button is yellow so they're yellow." Me - "But the dude says 'Browns' when you press the button." Grandma - "Whatever. The thing is, you have to put the blues in the water before hand so when the yellows or browns or whatever-the-fuck comes out and dies, the blues can bring them back to life and carry them HERE." Me - "Okay." Grandma - "But they won't stay there for very long so you have to fight with the goddamn thumbstick after you let the yellows out or you have to keep the blues until the very last possible second. And you don't have enough to get all of them anyway." Me - "Well what do I do with them when I get them?" Grandma - "Hell if I know."
"Fucking... BLUES don't fight for SHIT- GODDAMMIT. They're all fucking dead. Now I have to go all the way back."
[While on phone with someone] "Hang on a minute I have to turn this down. When the dude is almost dead- yeah, in the game I'm playing- well, when his health is low the heartbeat sound shakes the goddamn walls. .........There, that's better. Now I can hear you."
"Aw, you cocksucker. Every last one. Couldn't kill the fucker fast enough and it lit them on fire. ........FUCK!"
Grandma - "You know this game would be fabulous if it had a goddamn map." Me - "It has a map." Grandma - "Where?" Me - "It has this little fold out thing that came with the manual." Grandma - "That's not a map. I can't even read that. They might as well have put it on a postcard. I need a real map on the screen. Each area; all the paths look the same. I just run around in circles until I find some tree or something that they were supposed to cross. This game needs a map."
"FUCKING BIRD KILLED ALL MY BLUES."
Me - "Did you get a Mistress yet?" Grandma - "Yeah, but all she does is puts that thing upstairs so you can decorate." Me - "Well what did you think she was going to do?" Grandma - "I don't know. Maybe it would be like God of War." Me - "Nah, it's rated Teen." Grandma - "So that's what teens do, then." Me - "What?" Grandma - "Decorate." Me - "Right." Grandma - "What kills me though, is that it assumes you're a dude. You have to get a Mistress for the achievement. You can't see the Overlord's face, so maybe it could be a woman." Me - "Why are you assuming it isn't?" Grandma - "I'm saying you should have a choice."
"C'mere! Look at this! Watch.. you put them in the bar or ..tavern or whatever, well look- ....They come out pissing! Hahahahaaahaaa! You know what this is like? This is like Conker, kind of. Conker was a drunken pisser too."
Grandma - "Shit." Me - "What?" Grandma - "I have to go all the way back to the Tower to get health and I have no more minions. Goddamn zombies killed them all." Me - "No you don't, just pause the game and select 'Go to Tower'". Grandma - ".......You gotta be shitting me." Me - "What?" Grandma - "I didn't know you could do that! Jesus! You know how many times I've ran around this place? Christ! You could have told me that before." Me - "I thought you knew." Grandma - "Yeah well... I didn't."
"I have to get rid of some of these but I need the yellows or the greens to fight those things because the blues and reds don't do much in the front. At least the greens jump on stuff."
"God DAMMIT! NOooooooo!! There goes every one of my guys. He fucking sat on them."
Well, I decided to quit smoking this week and now I pretty much hate everyone. Seriously, I have no idea how to deal with this shit. I'm not even quitting because of health reasons or because of the evils of the tobacco industry or because truth.com has convinced me of the error of my ways. I'm quitting because it's too goddamn expensive. So there you go, you nonsmoking health-nazi nanny government fascist fucks. You've WON.
When Grandma and I have heard the gaming news of the week, my reactions have become amplified like some paranoid cokehead reading the national security summary on terrorism. Grandma's response has been consistently "...meh." It's not my fault I'm freaking out over every stupid thing. I am denied the nicotine necessary to function as a rational human being. For instance: the moment the Resident Evil 5 trailer found its way to the PSN network, she downloaded it to her PS3. It was beautiful. Still, while watching it I (and I'm sure a bunch of other people) had one of those "aw shit" moments that revealed itself today in the form of someone's small blog post that consisted of merely:
The new Resident Evil video game depicts a white man in what appears to be Africa killing Black people. The Black people are supposed to be zombies and the white man’s job is to destroy them and save humanity. “I have a job to do and I’m gonna see it through.”
This is problematic on so many levels, including the depiction of Black people as inhuman savages, the killing of Black people by a white man in military clothing, and the fact that this video game is marketed to children and young adults. Start them young… fearing, hating, and destroying Black people.
Well, that little post ignited a huge shit storm that reached all the major gaming sites and forums. Well my reaction was entirely different from Grandma's.
Me - "HOLY SHIT! I fucking KNEW this was going to happen. She's got a point, too; I mean they basically SAID the game was going to be like a scene from Black Hawk Down and THAT fucking movie wasn't exactly racially sensitive either. But it looks so goddamn cool and we were soooo close and now it's going to create this big deal when Capcom didn't mean it to be that way, but fucking look at the trailer- it IS that way. FUCK!! Everything is going WRONG, man."
Picture an ugly person with long hair saying that really fast while pacing around a tiny room, and that's pretty much how it went down.
Grandma on the other hand...
Grandma - "You know, I really didn't even think about it the first time I watched it. It was just Chris and some zombies. It never even occurred to me that they were all black. I guess I could see how someone might think the trailer is racist, but it's just zombies. No one meant anything by it. RE4 was fucking Spain, this is just another location. Oh well. It does look cool as hell though, doesn't it?"
Meanwhile, Grandma is primarily playing Overlord, which she seems to really dig. The camera controls were a bit difficult for her to get used to, but 12 hours into the game she's speeding right along. If you haven't checked it out yet, it's kind of an Oblivion meets Lemmings RPG/RTS where you play an evil dude who controls a bunch of happy little evil minions who just love to do evil shit for you. The humor is in line with Conker, Destroy All Humans and the like, so naturally Grandma and I both find it to be hilarious.
For some reason I laughed incredibly hard the first time a minion came up to Grandma's character to deliver some sort of something he had found somewhere and says in the cute little evil minion voice "for YOUUUUU! ♥" Then again, I'm allowed to be crazy. My heads all fucked up from the lack of ciggies.
Hence the absence of a Sunday post. That was Day 1. When you go from a pack a day to practically none a day, every tiny frustration in a video game sets you off in a Hulk like rage. It's probably best if I just watch Grandma play for awhile instead of also playing a game myself.
Grandma and I had a little extra cash today. This is a pleasant opportunity for entertainment we couldn't pass up, so she decided on a new game. It all came down to 'Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80's' for the PS2, or 'Overlord' for the XBox 360.
Grandma decided to go with Overlord. Everything she and I had read about the 80's expansion for GHII was fairly negative, especially about the price and the short playlist. That kind of thing REALLY stands out when she's making a decision. "It'll be cheaper later," she predicted; looking at the box the way clairvoyants look at tea leaves. She hadn't played anything resembling an RTS since Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth so "why the hell not?"
I'm really hoping she likes this one, seeing as Odin Sphere is pissing her off so much (more on that later). Grandma doesn't shop for games to get digusted, she buys them to have fun.
God help me if this isn't like Fable.
At Best Buy we noticed small piles of Wiis and PS3s stacked neatly in pyramids while the employees stood to the side, apparently shooting the shit to pass the time:
BB Dude #1: "Yeah, a guy came in and saw all the Wiis and PS3s around and he said 'are those boxes empty?' and I was all like 'nope!' So he bought TWO of each system!" BB Dude #2: "A lot of people don't know we have them in stock!" BB Dude #1: "I know! Well, these will be gone soon, I'll tell you that right now."
Now I caught this set-up; so did the guy in the baseball cap who breathed through his nose in something like a laugh. But to the rest of us, the bait was planted; in the crowd milling about the games section pretending to look intently at the front label of the movie 'Rent' on UMD and flicking through strategy guides, reaching for their cell phones or trying to remember something in the back of their minds... Are these things rare? Should I get one? Maybe I could sell it if everyone can't find one. I bet the kids would know. Man, they'd be thrilled if I got them something nobody else can get...
The trick is to let the bait stick. The sales associates go back to whatever they were doing, shut up, and let the customers come to them. That's the way Baiting is supposed to work. But these guys were hardly seasoned pros; lacking the skills and tact of a Ricky Roma-esque, Five Tour Black Friday veteran. A mistake was made.
BB Dude #1: "Um, Hey Bill. I gotta tell you about this guy. A guy came in and saw all the Wiis and PS3s around and he said 'are those boxes empty?' and I said 'nope!' The guy bought TWO of each system!" BB Dude #2: "People don't know we have them in stock!" BB Dude #1: "I know! Well, these will be gone soon, that I can tell you."
They recited it just a tiny bit louder and just a little bit closer to the center of the crowd. Only 10 minutes had passed, maybe a bit more. It was almost comical. The bubble popped. People sensed insincerity. They smelled it on these guys. They grabbed their carts and went away, into the appliance section, into the DVD racks, into the cameras, anywhere but there.
The Best Buy guys lost their fish. It was hard to suppress the urge to give them some knowing, jackass smile; something that said "They know what you did."
We grabbed Overlord from the rack and left them to their shame. It would probably be another 45 minutes or so before a new crowd gathered close enough for them to try again, that is- if they could work up the courage.
Maybe they learned something.
I don't know.
The EDF: 2017 completion is coming slow because, honestly, we both suck at the harder levels, and when you split the screen vertically in half it makes noticing mobs of insects flanking you sort of difficult to spot.
Ah well.
Has anyone played Overlord yet? (PC or 360, I'm just trying to get an idea of what to expect.) What do you think?
[We have to moderate comments now; sorry about that. You can still post anonymously without signing up for anything, I just have to check it off before it shows up.]
Earth Defense Force 2017. Grandma doesn't know WHAT to tell you
Grandma is still forming an opinion on EDF: 2017. It's a game of many contradictions. The graphics are shit, and yet the graphics are awesome. The dialogue is terrible and annoying but the dialogue is hilarious. The game is easy as hell and hard as FUCK. Its manner of leveling up is tedious but god DAMN those weapons are sweet. The plot is absurd and stupid. The plot is absurd and AWESOME. It's so unrealistic, you can blow up entire buildings with a single shot from even the weakest rocket launcher; a rocket launcher with which you begin the game. Then again, you can blow up BUILDINGS with a SINGLE SHOT from even the WEAKEST rocket launcher, including the rocket launcher with which you BEGIN THE GAME!
AWESOME! Grandma received her copy as a gift from Vic Ireland a little while back. He said "be SURE you try the co-op mode and FORGET about the first two difficulties, they are way too easy." He was right, although those first two difficulties can come in handy for leveling up. We'll talk more about that upon the full review, but right now we'll address the plot.
The plot of this game is something that confounds Grandma.
"So... it's the future. 2017. Ten years from now. All of a sudden, a giant metal ball ...thing... comes down to earth with a bunch of flying saucers which drop giant fucking ants, spiders, robots, and dinosaurs all over everything. They also release these flying things that shoot lasers. The ants look pretty much like normal 'Earth' ants, only they're twice the size of tanks. The spiders jump around and shoot web at people, which kills them. The robots come in two sizes: big and huge. The dinosaurs or lizards or whatever the fuck they are look like a tyrannosaur or something only with giant, shiny metal plates all over it and a big blade on its tail. There's also this giant thing that looks kind of like an AT-AT.
Okay?
But who are the aliens?! Are the aliens the giant ants? Ants, even giant ones, can't build a complex, laser shooting robot or be able to understand all the shit they would need to know to fly a giant mothership battle-saucer to different planets. They don't even have HANDS. And the small UFOs: if you don't shoot them down, they'll just keep dropping the ants or spiders FOREVER. The UFOs are not that big. So what happens exactly? Is it some kind of teleporter? That wouldn't make sense either, because they would also need an infinite supply of giant ants somewhere. And if they DID, why would they even bother invading tiny planets when they already have a huge one big enough for billions and billions of giant ants?!
Tim tells me 'well, it's like Pac-Man. Pac-Man didn't have a plot.' So that's it then, we're just supposed to think of this dude as Pac-Man and the aliens as ghosts that just happen to be invading, no explanation given. Bullshit. You know why? Because Pac-Man didn't try to explain itself (at least not until later when they decided they wanted to milk that thing for all its worth.) When you put in a quarter for a game of Pac-Man, it didn't give you a back story saying "you are PACMAN, a yellow animal who needs white dots to stay alive, but the ghosts are there because-" you know what I mean. Nobody cared to think anyone would care.
But then there's this game. The people around you fighting the aliens are screaming shit like 'This is for my brother!' or 'let's get something to eat!' So I don't know what I'm supposed to think. Am I supposed to care about some guy's brother or remember that people get hungry or am I just supposed to blow up aliens and have fun doing it? Sometimes I think they want both. I don't know.
I really don't know."
We're still working on the last achievements, which pretty much require co-op for us because they're so goddamnned hard. Both Grandma and I have been through the game a few times on the easier difficulties, but the harder modes seem like a completely different game. I really like it!
I think Grandma wants to hurry up and get it over with so she can focus on Odin Sphere. The one thing we both agree on is that after awhile, it can get reeeeealy boring if you don't have a clear goal.
Grandma's latest fun-filled injury: Torn Rotator Cuff
Well this one's confusing. How the hell she ended up with a common sports injury is beyond me, but one thing is for certain: her ass ain't pitching in the post-season. Of course they asked her about her enthusiastic Wii playing style just thirsty for a new "video games are harmful" scandal, but the truth is much more boring. She's pretty sure she just slept on it wrong and twisted it. Then again, sensationalism is quite fun so... OMG WII BOWLING! So it looks like she's going to have to go in for some sort of 'micro-surgery' which she's just THRILLED about. In the meantime she's just doing her thing, swearing at Earth Defense Force 2017 and Odin Sphere as though it was their fault it hurts to get a jar of peanut butter from the top shelf in the pantry. Also, she relays this message from her uncomfortable position of frustration and pain:
"What the hell is wrong with people who drop out of a game of Catan once they realize they're losing? Don't do that! And Texas Hold 'Em on XBLA, what they do is they start playing a game, win a hand, and then set themselves as 'away' so they keep folding as the rest of us play. The deal is they usually end up in second place and their rank goes up. They don't lose as much money so they can build up their bankroll. It's not fair to the rest of us, goddammit! Don't fucking cheat by bringing your friends in to pad their rankings, that's bullshit. I'm about ready to stop playing the thing because that's all people do anymore.
Also, if someone at our table doesn't have a headset, or they have it muted, you don't have to keep saying 'HELLO, HELLO, HELLO' to them. Then you leave negative feedback on someone's gamertag thing because they don't know how to say 'Shut the hell up' without sounding rude. Don't do that. IM them if you want to find out why they're not talking. Don't ask us. We don't know! Why would we know?
As Grandma ponders the etiquette of Xbox Live, I'll keep ya posted. Sunday we'll probably talk about Odin Sphere or Earth Defense Force 2017; whichever one she's focusing on, really. I'm also working on some new videos as well, so... on we go!
Grandma has Destroyed Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters
It took Grandma a while to complete this one, which is strange because it hadn't left her PSP since Jennifer from Sony sent it to her. Honestly, I blame my almost perfect scheduling and driving abilities. All the various doctor's appointments she has endured lately had relatively short wait times in the queue rooms filled with uncomfortable chairs and old Newsweek magazines and various unpleasant children's toys. This is usually the time she really puts toward completion for a level or two in handheld games, but we're so goddamn used to the appointments that I can time it pretty well so she doesn't have to wait long.
She doesn't like to whip out her PSP when she's supposed to be paying attention to a nurse's instructions for matters of convenience and to avoid what is now the common "oh... you're that grandma who plays with those electronic things! How cute!" Such people tend to think Grandma lacks the qualities of other grandmas who provide delicious baked goods to the faculty upon repeat visits. While in the hospital, however, she had all the time in the world to play uninterrupted. Ratchet & Clank has always been one of Grandma's favorite series. She scolds the rest of us when we accidentally say Jak and Daxter. "Naughty Dog and Insomniac are similar but not the same. GET IT RIGHT." She found Size Matters to be a nice addition. The first time she played it was a demo at the Mondrian Hotel during Sony's press junket before last year's E3. She was attracted to it then for the same reason she likes it now:
It's more or less just like playing it on a PS2. The graphics are the same, really. And not in that half-ass kinda way where the cutscenes are pretty but the gameplay is blocky, either- it actually looks GOOD.
She really didn't have anything to say about the sound quality or voice acting because she tended to play it with the sound off so as not to be rude to those around her. Even her frustration was muted, to an extent anyway, when Grandma encountered problems with her least favorite aspect of the game: the camera control.
That fucking camera. For weeks it was all I heard about. Sure, the game was fun but THAT FUCKING CAMERA. It's strange because most of the reviews I've read list the camera system to be fairly intuitive; moving towards the FPS practice of using the shoulder buttons exclusively for camera operation (Grandma points out I shouldn't say 'exclusively'). For whatever reason, however, Grandma couldn't stand it.
"I can't see, I can't see, I CAN'T SEE, GODDAMMIT! FUCK!"
Taken out of context, you can see why she tried not to say such things in a hospital; lest they think her diabetes has finally rendered her blind.
In one twenty minute period of sitting next to her while she played the thing, she mentioned the camera 10 times.
"I have to hook over to that thing to swing across there or else the goddamn fish gets me but the fucking camera won't let you change direction while you're swinging."
"Fucking CAMERA!!"
"Shit. No!!! I can't SEE!"
"At least with the races you don't have to deal with the god damned camera. I STILL run into the fucking wall, though."
Oh yes, the races. Another now ubiquitous part of platform gaming that started with Crash Bandicoot riding a pig. Grandma HATES the races. If it's not MarioKart, forget about it. In fact, scratch that: even MarioKart pisses her off sometimes. I think it's because if she makes a mistake or if something goes wrong she needs some time to yell a bit and regain composure. In a race, however, once you screw up, the results of your error continue to fly by, just making Grandma more angry.
"I hate this fucking camera. I can't see what's hitting me."
You get the idea.
Now, Grandma loves her handhelds, but her heart is always with the big consoles. You can imagine the contrast of her downloading the new Ratchet & Clank trailer for the PS3 at the same time finishing up the PSP game.
"God, look at that. Now why can't I just hook up the PSP to the television and play it so it's BIG." -"That kind of takes away the point of having a handheld game, doesn't it? I mean, then you're not playing a PSP game, you're just playing a ...GAME... game. Does that makes sense?" "I guess. Still, that'd be cool."
And then they announced the new and improved PSPs at this year's E3 presentation which include, you guessed it, a fucking video output. That conversation will be forever etched in my memory as one of those prophetic Grandma instances of the industry reading her mind. I'm a bit skeptical, to tell you the truth. All of the camera problems Grandma encountered would still be there in the shoulder buttons, they'd just be ...bigger. The DS and the PSP both are without the greatness of dual-thumbsticks; it's just something most of us have learned to live with. I don't know. I guess we'll find out in September.
When all is said and done, Grandma recommends R&C: Size Matters to anyone who has a PSP. It's probably the best platformer out there for the system, and the camera control issues aside (which Grandma tends to blame on herself) it's a hell of a lot of fun.
And it's a Ratchet & Clank game so of COURSE the weapons are cool :)
Also, to all those nurses and orderlies out there: just because Grandma games doesn't mean she doesn't make delicious cookies.
You just don't get any. (The chocolate smears on the PSP screen.)
Sweet mother of god I need to update. Grandma has been back from the hospital for awhile but she has frequent, scheduled trips to physical therapy to deal with now. The whole situation has been less than pleasant. Meanwhile, the 'mini E3' anti-hype coming from the games industry has put her in a somewhat healthy funk; allowing her to once again be her old visceral self. She wants to play and review some games. Actually, she wants to play and review some GREAT games, but the well is dry at the moment it seems, so she'll settle on yelling at any available shitty port she can get her hands on. So! Let's see... She finished Ratchet and Clank: Size Matters. She STILL has to review that fucker. Now that we're back, that shouldn't be difficult. She and I have been playing Earth Defense Force 2017, another gift from Vic Ireland (Thanks Vic!) and we're trying desperately to complete the last stages of the "Hardest" difficulty on co-op while simultaneously building up health by farming some of the more populated levels for Armor so we can take on Inferno mode later.
She wants those fucking achievement points.
She FINALLY received the last achievement for Texas Hold 'Em Poker on XBLA even though she had drawn a Royal Flush a few times over the months, and she's close to getting the last achievement for Catan.
She played, and then gave up on Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree saying it just "wasn't the same" as her little DS favorite.
I bought her Odin Sphere because she was curious as hell and bored out of her mind. She just started the thing last night.
I'm thinking of pulling Guitar Hero II for the 360 back out so we can get all the achievement points we can and practice for GHIII and Rock Band so she's not so self-conscious about her rhythm game abilities when the time comes.
First of all, thank you guys so much for all the e-mails wondering if Grandma was still alive ;) She especially loved reading those comments and e-mails so she had an excuse to slap me upside the head and yell "POST SOMETHING, DAMMIT!" Truth is, that was my fault. Like Grandma, I too fell into a little funk for the past month when it came to gaming. She wasn't saying much about the demos and trailers coming out of Mini-E3, so everything I wrote felt repetitive and lame. I mean, when you look at our front page, one of the entries at the bottom is about Grandia III and another is about that crazy upcoming DS game called "Brain Age". That's goddamn pathetic. I'm not posting near enough to do Grandma justice.
No more of that shit. Our new posting schedule is Sunday-Wednesday-Friday, every week.
Grandma finishing up Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters in hospital
Don't panic; it's nothing serious. She had a breathing treatment (she uses a nebulizer for asthmatic bronchitis) on Saturday morning that didn't agree with her, so to speak, in that she was having difficulty breathing and a sharp pain in the middle of her chest that prevented her from moving; even standing too long made her feel dizzy. I took her up to the emergency room to see if there was anything they could give her to counteract the breathing treatment, and they decided to keep her for a few days until they could get her heart rate down and check for clotting. They're going to do lots of tests, apparently.
Needless to say, she wasn't too happy when she found out.
She just wants to come home. At first she honestly didn't want her DS or her PSP with her in the hospital. She doesn't intend to stay for very long, and if someone takes a paperback or a magazine out of her little mini-closet while she's sleeping it's no big deal; whereas if someone takes or damages one of her handhelds, it'd be like losing a friend.
Also, as we've mentioned in the past, we're not exactly rich, either. Grandma's DS Lite and her PSP were given to her by Nintendo and Sony, respectfully. She's really careful about where she takes them.
But in the end, she decided the copies of Women's Day and Luxury Vacations Magazine (a little joke on my part) that Mom and I got her just weren't cutting it. She wasn't riveted to the television last night for The Soprano's finale like I was; the hospital doesn't have cable. She wasn't watching our beloved Cleveland Cavaliers led by fellow Cleveland Magazine 'Most Interesting Person in Cleveland' award recipient LeBron James get trounced by the Spurs, either.
She was silently cursing the controls of Ratchet and Clank: Size Matters and wishing she had something to write on.
She wants to give a complete review.
In the meantime, however, I've checked out your game suggestions in the last thread and I'd like to buy her one as sort of a 'welcome home' surprise when she gets back to doing her thing in a couple days. (She couldn't yet get the Hospital's crappy WiFi to work with the PSP, so I hope it will be a surprise, anyway.)
Here's what you suggested:
Ninja Gaiden Sigma Mario Party for the Wii Tomb Raider Anniversary* Odin Sphere Portable Ops Crackdown MLB07 Dead Rising** Rainbow Six Vegas Pogo Island Planet Puzzle Leauge
* I think Grandma would kick my ass if I got her another Tomb Raider game. ** She's already played Dead Rising to death.
So of the rest, which do you think I should go with for her? I'm not really leaning on any one game yet; I know from her Google Search History that she's curious about Odin Sphere. She's talked about Mario Party. She's looked into Ninja Gaiden Sigma trailers and I know she's heard nothing but good things about Planet Puzzle League. Hell, they are all decent choices, but I can only really get one.
Grandma's XBox 360 came back from repair just before last weekend. Well, not really her 360. It's a replacement unit with an April 2007 manufacture date and a new serial number. Apparently The Beast was beyond repair. Microsoft treated Grandma well throughout the whole ordeal; but there is still a DRM issue we're trying to get corrected (They are walking her through the process of getting all 47 of Grandma's XBLA games to work correctly on the other profiles on the machine.)
She's been playing Ratchet and Clank: Size Matters on the PSP along with Oblivion (again) on the PS3, and now that she has a 360 again, she's become somewhat of a Catan addict.
The night before the 360 arrived, Grandma had checked the UPS tracking number forwarded to her by the Microsoft repair system... thing.. and confirmed that it was scheduled to arrive sometime between 8am and 7pm. Someone would have to sign for the package, otherwise it would go back to some pickup center in Northeast Ohio. Grandma is extremely hard of hearing, and I'm not much help if I'm downstairs, and neither one of us really entertained the idea of positioning a chair next to the front door and staring out at the driveway for 11 hours like some crazed redneck ready to take potshots at a census pollster with a rifle.
So we devised a better solution:
Even after our brilliant and artistic plan went into effect, we were both paranoid for the rest of the day; jumping up to the front door at the slightest of sounds. The collective panic was never denied, all it took was one of us to say "did you hear something?" and we would both bolt to the door with our faces scrunched together by the tiny window to get a better view of the front porch. It would have been funny if it wasn't so god damn sad.
When the unit came, I happened to be the one closest to the door so I signed for it, brought it into the game room and took a picture of the box. Grandma looked over and yelled at me for not immediately telling her of it's arrival.
"Goddammit!" she said. "I've been waiting for how long for the fucking thing and you don't tell me because you want a picture of the goddamn box! I would have let you take a picture if you wanted before I opened it. Christ!"
So she opened the box.
It was a similar two-foam-inserts and a static bag set up as when we sent hers out to the repair center, plus a letter apologizing for the inconvenience and instruction on how to hook everything back together.
After we snapped the HardDrive to the new unit and plugged in the Component, Audio, and Power Supply cables, we fired it up and fucking prayed. We're not religious people by any means, but we're not typically lucky in such situations either. The possibility of getting the wrong unit back was something that crossed our minds simultaneously; just at that moment when the ring of light started pulsating and working it's magic.
It worked beautifully.
There was a brief setup for transferring her XBox Live Account and Gamertag to the new machine so the XBLA games would work, and everything was right again.
Almost.
Mom is the kind of causal gamer that craves Luxor 2 and Zuma, and her profile on Grandma's 360 was chock full of achievements in such games. The repair came back with a card good for a month of XBox Live, and Grandma mentioned in an email to Evan that she would probably give the card to Mom so she could compete a bit and add her scores to the leaderboards. Evan replied back that he had a code for a year of XBox Live if she wanted it, and it was Mom who answered back "Thank you thank you thank you YES!!!"
Evan has always been cool like that.
But it was after Mom had created an XBL account (Gamertag "LSainte" if you want to send her a friend request; she's kind of lonely at the moment in the gaming world) that she and I realized that all the XBLA games for any profile other than OGHC now reverted to the trial versions of the game.
It's a known DRM issue, Mike from Microsoft is working with Grandma now to correct it, and there is even a "download again" feature in the marketplace for such things, it's just a matter of us getting it to work (it hasn't yet.)
The new games Grandma has downloaded since the repair, such as Catan and Double Dragon, work on all profiles, but the older ones are in limbo.
We'll update you as soon as we find a fix, I know a few of you have gone through similar things with your 360's.
So!
Our next post is going to be about Ratchet and Clank: Size Matters for the PSP. I'll try and get some video, but it's different for handhelds; a little more complicated. Grandma is trying to teach me how to play Catan, and we're both trying out some evil characters in Oblivion just for the hell of it. As it is now, Grandma is looking for something to really sink her tooth into after she's done with Ratchet and Clank.
Any ideas? What are you playing right now? It can be for any system; Grandma just needs some recommendations.
Also, I have to share this one with you guys: We were at Wendy's one day for lunch and noticed they had those weird little Wii toys and figures so Grandma and I decided that if they had a cool one that day, we'd just fucking buy the thing to accent her Nintendo Wii shrine.
It turns out they did have the Mario Ridin' a Shell toy, so we asked the girl how much they were.
Wendy's Girl - "You can't buy them." Grandma - "What? Why not?" Wendy's Girl - "You have to order the kid's meal." Grandma - "..." Me - "Well how much is the kid's meal? I'll have one of them." Wendy's Girl - "Umm... which one do you want?" Me - "I don't care. Hamburger. Whichever one will give us Mario."
The Red Ring of Death; O, Texas Repair Center! You're our only hope.
It happened. Grandma's XBox 360, "The Beast", gave her The Ring of Doom; The Three Red Lights; The Texas Eyeball; The Major Nelson Stare.. and this time, there was no cooling off period or power supply reconnection solution. This time, we had to leave it to the professionals. To say it made Grandma depressed is an understatement.
Grandma is bummed.
Grandma is down.
Grandma is on edge.
It happened sometime in the past couple weeks; she fired up The Beast to play some BoomBoomRocket or 3D Ulta Golf. Rather than giving her an error message or at least booting up the dashboard to toy with her into thinking there was some chance; some possibility of human wrongdoing; something she could fix, it gave the three red lights and a black screen, whirring quietly in it's own way of saying "please.....HELP ME!" The power supply light was green. We ran through all the troubleshooting measures we knew, but she did what had to be done.
She e-mailed Evan in a panic.
Evan has acted as Grandma's "guy" at Edelman; he's the guy that happily exchanged e-mails with Grandma about the release of new XBLA games. He has even sent her the codes for full versions of games he thought she'd enjoy. Now, Grandma needed a guy who solves problems. She needed "The Wolf", and he was happy to be Grandma's Harvey Keitel.
Grandma knew she had to be very careful about all this. The Beast was a gift from MTV, afterall. She couldn't afford the 360 when they were released so MTV with Edelman and Microsoft made it happen; beating her to the punch on that first week of January 2006. Grandma wasn't like the other customers that send in their 360's for repair and if anything, she considered her case to be less special because it was a gift rather than a purchase.
I remember her reaction when Alex and the crew of the G-Hole gave it to her as a surprise tour of the TRL set. I remember us hooking it up back in the hotel room, setting up the dashboard for the first time and playing Kameo and Hexic HD. I remember it not quite fitting in the box for the plane ride home, and watching her and Jeff cross Times Square with the The Beast loosely boxed inside at a time when people were still being shot over the system.
And that was the birth of The Beast.
But! There is still hope. Evan sprung into action for her and begun the process of getting the poor thing repaired.
Someone from Microsoft called her right away to explain how this would all go down. Grandma at least feels as though she's in good hands. Everyone has seemed sympathetic and helpful.
She's been casually exploring Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion on the PS3 as a second runthrough; so she played and she waited. She constantly checked the front porch for the empty UPS Box sent from the Texas repair center for a few days before it finally came; and uninteresting thing with two foam inserts, instructions, and some packing tape. She removed the harddrive, checked for games, unplugged it all, and sent The Beast on its way.
And now she waits.
It's not all bad news, thankfully. Jennifer from Sony sent Grandma Ratchet and Clank: Size Matters and LocoRoco for her PSP and SingStar Pop for the PS2. So right now Grandma is playing Oblivion on the PS3 and Ratchet and Clank: Size Matters for the PSP while I'm playing LocoRoco on the PSP and Civ IV on the PC. The kids "play" SingStar a lot and seem to really like it, but I have some theories on the karaoke nature of that game for another post, and Grandma has LOTS to say about Ratchet and Clank.
Thanks again, Jennifer! You're always very cool to Grandma.
Now that I've finally figured out the basics of how to set up a chain of routers to avoid conflicting IP Addresses, she can finally use the VC more often on her Wii, and there's LOTS to talk about there as well.
On the PS3 front, she downloaded a couple classics: Jumping Flash and Crash Bandicoot and we started on the Easy pack for GoSudoku! which has only proved like Brain Age that once again, we suck at Sudoku, but we can't stop PLAYING for some reason.
Also! Grandma gave her opinion about the potential senior Wii owner reaction to Manhunt II's summer Wii release in this month's EGM (out now) that I think you'll agree with :)
Grandma is playing much so there is much to talk about. And soon!
When she gets The Beast back from repair, there will be even more.
Sweet! The 5th episode of Full Moon Show podcast is now live and Grandma is their Mystery Guest this week. It's worth the listen if for no other reason than more news on the upcoming Ratchet and Clank game.
Grandma talks about her gaming history, Resistance Fall of Man, violence in video games, among other things, so... if you have any questions that you WISH they asked, go ahead and use this comment thread to ask her. She'll be here to answer. We mentioned it in the last post, but once again- THANK you, O people of Insomniac Games for the Child's Play donation. We cannot thank you enough for that. That was DAMN cool.
These guys love feedback, so let us know whatcha think.
Well, Grandma beat Super Paper Mario on her Wii last night. As semi-RPG's go, it didn't take her very long to complete this cool little game. This game didn't invoke the full power of Grandma's frustration, but she did get annoyed at certain points in which her objective wasn't exactly clear.
More on this after the jump, as well as some fantastically awesome stuff that makes Grandma and I jump up and down within the limits of our capabilities.
***Update*** May 8th -- Holy shit, guys! Here we go again! Grandma made Joystiq, Destructoid, Kotaku, Canardplus and someone even submitted it to CollegeHumor where it made National Pick and ended up on the front page. You folks are cool as hell!-- First, a warning that should be pretty clear in the opening seconds of the video: Do NOT purchase the "DreamGear Charge-n-play" for your Wii controllers. The thing, as Grandma put it, "isn't worth shit." Granted, she's been spoiled by the relatively long lasting charges provided by the Bluetooth Sixaxis and her Wireless XBox 360 controllers. With a few notable exceptions, she's fairly cautious about third-party hardware.
She didn't sit and play Super Paper Mario for her usual four or five hour slots, she would usually progress to the next stage, save, and put it aside for awhile, happy to progress a little at a time. Even so, the DreamGear charger and battery pack would only allot her maybe 3 or 4 hours on a full charge.
So... buyer beware and all that.
She's looking into replacing it with a quality Nyko charge station, so if anyone has any experience with it, let us know how you like it.
The last Paper Mario game we remember was the Thousand Year Door, which was more of a turn-based RPG that fit in nicely with DS Mario games she had completed, like Mario and Luigi: Partners in Time. This one, however, went in another direction, back to the old days in which jumping on the heads of your enemies as they milled about waiting for something to happen was the zenith of Mario combat. It's neither better nor worse, but she founded it incredibly easy compared to some of the other, almost musical timing-based combat systems.
The Wiimote handled well, and she found herself pointing at shit on the screen she otherwise couldn't care less about, just to find out if there was some interesting back-story. Switching from 2D to 3D was fun at first, and to Grandma it felt almost like cheating, being able to circumvent obstacles entirely and exposing new paths and blocks. After awhile, though, it turned into a strange, Portal-esque maze of lines that rendered all the GameFAQs guides worthless when she got stuck; reading about as vague as "go over to the thing, change to 3D and jump on the other thing, then go down."
She loves using GameFAQs on those confusing parts, but maybe it was just too soon after release to get a more concise guide.
The sound was on par with all the other Mario games you love. Go ahead, admit it. You're among friends :) Some of those tunes are little TOO catchy, if you know what I mean. Subtitles weren't an issue for Grandma because like the last two Paper Marios, no one really speaks, the words are audibly given emotion by the changing of the pitch and speed of the crazy-ass typing ...um, sound... thingies.
There is the issue of phallic imagery in Super Paper Mario that I don't think I'm qualified to analyze, but Grandma puts it simply: "Dried Shrooms look like cocks. I'm not kidding! You tell me that doesn't look like a penis."
***Spoilers!*** The part that I loved to watch when I reviewed what to put in the video, the part that I otherwise would have missed because I was sitting in some back corner out of frame smoking a cigarette and reading a magazine, is her look of absolute, genuine joy at the revelation that Bowser, Peach, and Luigi were still alive and had returned to assist in the final battle. It's that tiny bit of an emotional leak that we all try to hide when watched playing; the reason we shoo people out of the room and tell people to leave us alone and shut the hell up during those final boss battles and cutscenes. It's the moments that we've EARNED by playing for so many hours; for paying attention to the storyline. It's the motherfucking PAYOFF.
If a game works, you get that moment. THAT'S what Jaffe was talking about ...fucking "game that'd make you cry." He wasn't talking about burning the movie "American Beauty" onto a PS3 disc and making a rather elaborate scene selection menu, he was speaking of a game that effectively creates those moments.
Was Super Paper Mario one of those games? Who knows. All I know is that Grandma was sincere in her interest for the characters. That's just how she plays. Hell, that's how I'd like to think I play too.
Think about all the games that made you feel something. Think about GTA: San Andreas. Didn't you want to find out who the FUCK thought they could kill CJ's Mom and didn't you want to show them how Grove Street deals with that shit? Think about Kingdom Hearts. Think about God of War. Think about Oblivion. Think about Gears of War! If you weren't as pissed as Grandma was when she got the "second ending" to Dead Rising then you might be a sociopath. Or a Replicant. Ever read "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep"? It's like that.
.....um.....anyway...
Super Paper Mario is an awesome little game. If you have a Wii, go out and treat yourself.
Now! On to some really cool shit.
GamesRadar did a piece on Grey Gamers that included someone you all know. This piece was awesome not only because Grandma was awarded the coveted "Five/Five Walkers" rating, but also because it shows you so many other mature gamers out there. The one thing you notice in all those videos is that they're having fun; they're all getting into it, just like Grandma. When we tell people that Grandma's not unique for her demographic, that there's others out there just like her; people that have never HEARD of OldGrandmaHardcore or The G-Hole and do more or less the same sort of things for fun and entertainment, the response is almost always that Grandma's just being modest.
MODESTY doesn't even enter into it. Grandma isn't afraid of someone stealing her thunder, she's afraid that mature gamers, grey gamers, whatever you want to call them, will be treated like an oddity long after they've begun to become active in the gaming community. Grandma doesn't game for attention, she does it because she enjoys it. The GamesRadar piece illustrates that others do the same.
And THAT is fantastic.
SECOND THING! Insomniac Games made Resistance: Fall of Man and Ratchet and Clank. Insomniac Games has a website. That website has a podcast. The podcast with a special mystery guest comes out TODAY (Episode 5). Now, I don't want to spoil anything for the guys over at the Full Moon Show and reveal their mystery guest Yeah it's Grandma.
Not only were these guys cool as hell to Grandma, but they did something that made Grandma beam for the rest of the day. Fuck, she's still beaming about it.
"In honor of each Mystery Guest, Insomniac Games will donate $500 in their name to Child's Play!"
They laid that one on her at the end of the segment and it fucking FLOORED us. $500 is a lot of money to people like Grandma and me. Child's Play is damn near our favorite charity, and those guys know how to stretch that for people who really, truly need positive escapism and focus during times that scare the piss out of the rest of us.
Grandma can only say "thank you, guys. And keep making games, goddammit! Stop wasting time with me and finish Ratchet and Clank for fuck's sake!"
I'm still trying to get a good Guitar Hero video with Grandma, but the work schedule has destroyed my posting time. She's got lots of games to play, so there is much more coming. Thank you again for the comments and e-mails, everyone! Grandma reads them all.
Grandma wanted me to post a very specific point so all of you know; she wants to be extremely clear in announcing to the world that she is terribly horribly bad at Guitar Hero II on the PS2 and the 360. She has asked me to tell you exactly how god-awful she is, so there is no mistaking her complete and utter lack of skill when it comes to rhythm games.
"I fucking suck," she says. "But I can't stop playing the goddamn thing." It was sort of a surprise to see her so excited about the GHII launch for the 360, she already had both games for the PS2 as well as an extra guitar controller for family tournaments. It might have been curiosity about the graphics improvement, which is sort of silly seeing as one stares only at the never ending bar of little colored dots sliding down the bottom of the screen. It might have been the excitement of the song download capabilities of XBox Live. Who knows? But she wanted it, goddammit.
She's sort of peeved at the local GameStop for constantly trying to get her to preorder things (nothing new, really) after she was refused a copy of God of War 2 and yet could obtain one easily at the hated Circuit City behind the store the day of launch (which included a free t-shirt that's started many a public conversation.) So she decided to patronize WalMart for this one. She called the morning it launched on a whim that they might have a few. A man in the electronics department told her he would hold it for 30 minutes for her if she came to pick it up right away. She snatched me away from the computer and said "we're going to WalMart. Now."
As we walked in the store, there was a man who looked to be in his thirties walking briskly with his wife directly in front of us. I immediately clocked them as trouble. Sure enough, they made the same bee-line we did to the electronics department in the back of the store and asked if there were any copies of Guitar Hero II for the 360. The employee answered that no, they had all sold within the first hour of the store opening that morning. Apparently a group of people had waited for the store to open to snag theirs. Grandma, being a bit more than hard of hearing, strolled up to the same employee as the rejected customers stood around disappointed and said rather loudly "Hi! I called this morning about Guitar Hero for the 360." "Yes ma'm! It's right here for you." "Yay!"
I felt really bad watching this uncomfortable scene unfold. I don't know if the rejected couple heard Grandma, but I still felt like we had cheated someone somehow. I knew Grandma didn't really like the songs on the second game, and minus "Possum Kingdom" she probably wasn't going to like the new ones added to the 360 version. She had three guitar controllers hanging on her game room wall at home and quite frankly didn't NEED a fourth, but here she was smiling and chatting with the WalMart employees as she retrieved her bank card as two potential Guitar Hero fans left empty handed.
It didn't seem fair.
Grandma didn't provide much consolation. "Did you see those people in front of us? That guy told me he shouldn't have held it for me, that it was against the rules or something, but he was nice enough. HAHAHAHAAA!! I FUCKING GOT IT!! It's mine." "Karma is going to eat you alive one day." "I know."
The graphics ARE improved on the 360 version. It's pretty obvious in some of the venues. Grandma cranked out the Easy Mode in a few days and is trying to get five stars in each song. For the rest of us in the house, Easy Mode is a hellish, boring place. We're can't five star Jordan on Expert by any means, but we need a bit of challenge, you know? Grandma, however, sucks at Guitar Hero. She hasn't spent too much time in Practice sessions on Medium and Hard but I'm sure she'll get the hang of it one day; so Easy Mode is her way of enjoying the game.
To each their own, I suppose.
I'm confident she'll at least complete Medium and Hard modes if for no other reason she's a bit of an Achievement Points Whore. It provides her with just enough added incentive to learn how to hammer-on.
It's not like I can say much, though. Both Bobby and Kenny could most likely kick my ass competitively on two player mode.
Speaking of the 360, here are the XBLA games Grandma's trying to destroy:
Alien Hominid HD is a fun, quirky little gem that is FUCKING HARD, JESUS CHRIST ON A FUCKING CROSS. I'm not kidding. This is a game best played on co-op if for no other reason than its absolute, Fuck-You difficulty. Sure we all screwed around with it when it was nothing more than a cool little game on Newgrounds, but goddamn if this game doesn't make you question your self-worth as a gamer.
The Mini-Games are worth the trouble of blistering your fingers to unlock. The 360 really does the animation justice, which in some instances consists nothing more than stick figures and block sprites- but it's smooth.
It's not uncommon to see Grandma wring her hands; visibly communicating that "gee, that particular part in the game was indeed quite the button masher" but it's a guarantee in this one. There's no way in hell she's getting some of those achievements and she's better than I am at 2D side-scrollers.
If you do play by yourself, make sure no one is around to watch. It's just humiliating.
Worms was disappointing for those of us familiar with the PC games because of the lack of some of the more interesting weapons, but Grandma wasn't, so she wasn't disappointed. It's a tactical, time-limited turn based game. She hasn't tried the multiplayer mode yet because she's not comfortable with her blow-torch wielding abilities.
The AI on the challenge modes can be pretty difficult to beat, but if you learn how to use the rope and the dynamite you'll get through most of the harder ones with at least a couple of your little wormy guys left.
It's definitely worth the download, but you may want to turn down the worm voices after 50th time you here that falsetto "Special Delivery!" line.
Also, practice aiming that bazooka in the Quick Play modes before you even ATTEMPT the later challenge modes. As Grandma discovered, your ass will be handed to you. (The ass of the worm is the end without the eyes.)
Luxor 2 has become the reason that Grandma has been reading more books lately. It's easier than Zuma in some ways, but it's still a bitch. Ever since Evan gave her the code for the full version, someone (who will remain nameless) hijacked Grandma's game room to play "just one more level, wait until I die... I still have more lives left....I'll be done here in a minute..." Even on the easiest difficulty, once that fifth color shows up on your screen you'll start irrationally cursing the Ancient Egyptians for their peculiar ball-floaty powers.
You learn early on that the trick is to work everything into getting combos as the screen fills; at least that's the way to get the most points. It's a deadly strategy later though, as things start going a bit faster and you stop caring about points and start caring about survival.
Graphics-wise, it's prettier than Zuma in many respects, but I don't know what that implies about the artistic competition between the Mayans and the Egyptians.
It's not really a game for me, but if- like Grandma, you really dug Zuma, then it's like a fresh expansion.
She's also into the XBLA Castlevania, but that's a post for another day.
I'm hoping to get a video of Grandma playing Guitar Hero II here soon if work doesn't interfere (it's been busy around here lately.) And the next post will likely be about Super Paper Mario for the Wii, a game she's fallen in love with since we got it a few days ago- but I have to tell you this story now because it really ties in with what happened earlier with GHII:
She stopped playing Super Paper Mario last night because the batteries on two of her Wii controllers died and we didn't have any replacements. Rather than buy rechargeable batteries, she decided to hunt down a couple of those Wii-controller charge packs everyone's been raving about instead. The one place that had them was Circuit City.
She rushed out to get them (along with Oblivion for the PS3; long story) but the people directly in front of her in the store bought the last two. They don't know when they're going to get more.
I couldn't help but smile :)
In the meantime though, she just bought more regular batteries so we'll update you as she continues the game.
When Cory Barlog and his motley gang of misfits and outcasts designed the FANTASTIC game that is God of War 2, they made certain that you would learn to hate the 'O' button on your controller. You'll notice that the 'O' button is the farthest right button on the pad, and the most difficult to mash when your thumb has been hovering over 'X' and 'Δ'; it's just that much more of a pain in the ass!
There also wasn't as much random ass kicking this time around, there seemed to be many more puzzles and boss-like instances rather than the hoards of disposable red-orb bearing creatures put in your way just for the satisfaction of trying that new move you acquired.
Now, I don't want to say it but Grandma feels it needs to be said: "Prince of Persia." I don't really have a point, but one notices the time-shifting elements of GoW2 are somewhat familiar.
The game is simply fucking beautiful. It's short, but it's beautiful. God and Titan Modes will teach you the importance of blocking and dodging, and also make you question your self-worth as a gamer and as a person. Grandma STILL hasn't completed the first one in God Mode.
If you have a PS2, buy this game and rejoice. If you have a PS3, buy this game, you won't miss the rumble.
It's THAT FUCKING AWESOME.
Coming up this week: Grandma and Guitar Hero II (360), as well as Alien Hominid HD and Worms.
Of all the Wii Sports games she likes bowling the best and boxing the least. Grandma began playing video games when arcades were first introduced to bowling alleys back in the 70's when she was on a league. She can't bowl anymore because of her knees and back, but she's can still play, goddammit!
Let's meet her first set of enemies, The Twins... This is Bob. Bob can hook the ball like a motherfucker but his weakness lies in the desire to make strange and peculiar "dude, I totally rock!" faces while bowling, distracting him just enough to screw up an otherwise good serve to the pins.
This is Barbie, Bob's twin sister and all around tormentor. She lost miserably to Grandma at her first Brain Age War and is back for revenge. She rolls fairly straight, but she almost never splits for some reason. Her weakness is 'the slump'; being unable to recover from the failure of picking up a spare.
This is Grandma. Grandma has years of bowling experience but while some may see that as a strength, she sees it as a weakness; she's physically conditioned to her habits of holding a ball with a specific weight, stepping forward in a practiced way, releasing the ball with a rehearsed curve, etc.,. and the Wii provides only a simulated experience. Grandma has retained her team camaraderie from the 70's and often congratulates her challengers on good rolls.
The Wii Bowling War consisted of the three players, each playing for themselves; one practice round followed by three rounds. Winner is best of three; additional rounds to be played if necessary.
The players moved Grandma's gaming chair from in front of the television to remove any chance of obstruction, sync'd the controllers, selected their Mii's, and began the practice round.
Grandma went into the game with a Skill Point level hovering around 1100; just beyond the pro-line. The Twins were significantly lower due to recent poor interim reports preventing them from accessing the Wii, yet both had experience playing the game on their older brother Josh's Wii.
Highlights from the practice round:
Grandma - "Come on.........HOOK!! See?"
Bob - "I hit my hand on the wall!" Grandma - "Well don't do that."
Barbie - "I suck." Grandma - "You have to move over more before you throw the ball." Barbie - "Okay, tell me when to stop..." Grandma - "Right about there should be good." Barbie - [rolls gutter] "I still missed! YOU said to roll there!" Grandma - "Yeah, but you have to roll harder than that."
At the end of the practice round the scores were overall about what I'd expected.
Grandma - 166 Bob - 129 Barbie - 134
No one was surprised that Grandma won, but she was disappointed in herself for getting less than 200. Barbie was excited to beat Bob after he had slumped in the last four frames.
And now the war could begin...
Grandma began the very first frame with a strike. The Twins had both left open frames on the board, but it didn't stay weighted for long. Barbie slumped after following a strike in the fifth frame with an unexpected (6), but Bob caught right up to Grandma after she failed to achieve a spare on the seventh frame. It was extremely close, but Grandma was able to pick up the extra frame after a nine-one spare in the tenth.
Final Score for Round 1: Grandma - 169 Bob - 165 Barbie - 141 At the beginning of the second round, Barbie took over the board at first, making strange celebratory faces after her first ever Turkey that I honestly don't think she was aware were possible to capture with a high-speed flash sync; something between happiness and pained looks of terror.
Highlights from round two:
Grandma: "Shit! I lost my mark!"
Bob: "I POWN." Barbie: "Did you just say 'pw3n' in actual ...life?" Bob: "Yeah. So?" Barbie: "Dude."
Barbie: "Loo!Loo!Loo!Loo!Loo!Loo!BLAARGHH!!!!" Grandma: "See? You moved your hand right that time." Barbie: "I got a strike! Yay!" Me: "What the fuck."
In the end, however, it would be BOB to dominate all, pulling a personal record of 196 out of nowhere to even the score at 1-1. Grandma had missed her mark too many times to regain a lead, and surprised everyone by finishing last.
Final score for the Round 2: Grandma - 160 Bob - 196 Barbie - 166
The third game was tense. If either Bob or Grandma won, the tournament would be over unless Barbie could stop making strange bird noises and actually win the last round; sending things into a tie-breaker.
Grandma flubbed a Turkey in the fifth frame by missing a 7-10 split outright and up the middle, which suddenly made things much closer. Although Barbie had calmed down, her game didn't get any better. Bob, however, saw his opportunity.
He watched Grandma's gentle hook leave the 7 and 8 pins standing, so he tried himself from the far right with a stronger hook for a turkey in the last four frames. By the ninth frame, Grandma knew she was beat, already having scored it in her head.
Bob threw heavy in the tenth frame with the comfort that he had already won, and even that put him well over the top. Barbie had since given up; lobbing strange throws down the lane and Grandma was angry at herself for splitting in the fifth, but not so angry as to not congratulate Bob and challenge him to another game later.
That is, until she realized that her skill level had gone down.
Final Score for Round 3: Grandma - 180 Bob - 202 Barbie - 125
Video 18 - Grandma plays "Resistance: Fall of Man"
***Update*** March 17th -- Holy shit, guys! The Last Boss and Kotaku (again, Brian, dude... we love ya) posted Video 18, which made its way to the front page of Digg for quite awhile today, which ended up on the NeoGAF forums... Jesus. It's been quite a ride for this one. Thanks everybody!-- The thing about Resistance that I didn't realize; the thing for which I will now be chided forever thanks to the magic of video; is that flanking your enemies when playing against the CPU in single player mode is not only impossible, it's just silly to suggest.
Grandma and I are used to playing Gears of War on co-op mode on the XBox 360, in which Grandma usually hides behind a rock of some kind, peaks around a corner and blows up emergence holes while I sneak around to the side and try to pick off anything she misses. You can't do that in Resistance. Whatever has the firepower is coming after YOU; it doesn't matter that there's a platoon of AI friendlies it should probably worry about more. It'll ignore them and come after your ass from across an empty field.
Ah well. No matter. Grandma figured it out, even though I couldn't.
Coming up later this week: Grandma's First Wii Sports Bowling War.
It happened Wednesday night; the realization that she finally had enough money. Sometime during her daily ritual of going over the bills and balancing the checkbook, something clicked. It didn't take much guessing to wonder what she meant when she said aloud, hunched over a calculator: "holy shit.... I could actually DO this.."
The next morning, she fucking did it. She chose the 60GB version PS3 along with Resistance: Fall of Man and Genji: Days of the Blade. The reviews seem to agree with her first choice but not her second. No matter, though- she had seen the demos and knew what she wanted. Later that day she bought the necessary component input cables and an optical audio cable for the surround sound as well as another surge protector so her Wii and PS3 wouldn't be connected to some cheap ungrounded extension cord (her other surge protector had filled up some time ago.) She made the decision early, "if I'm going to do this I'm going to do it right."
When we brought it home, it took me a little while to hook up everything so all the wires were guided elegantly behind the two matching console towers through plastic tubing. We turned it on and set up her account to a surprisingly identical profile as she uses on her XBox 360. So... predictably enough, if you want to add Grandma to your friends list, her Online ID is OGHC.
She browsed the Playstation Store a bit and ended up buying flOw because it "looked pretty." She also got some demos for Lemmings and Go! Sudoku. Just as she had done on the Wii when she first explored around the system, she popped open the internet browser and checked her e-mail; just for the "because I can" factor of it all. The only she HASN'T done yet is set up her PSP for the Remote Play feature.
It's so incredibly shiny :)
She was almost afraid to start playing Resistance: Fall of Man because, as she puts it: "look, God of War 2 is coming out NEXT WEEK. It's almost HERE!! I'm playing that goddamn game the second I get a hold of it. I can't just play two games at the same time and really enjoy them, you know? Rayman is almost done; I can still play Wii Sports whenever because it's not a story based game. I'm done with Lost Planet. So if I start playing Resistance or Genji, I know I'm going to stop playing them when GoW2 comes out, and then I don't know if I'd start them up again. I just don't work that way!"
And yet, when I got home from work on Saturday, I found her ass-deep into Resistance, swearing at Chimera and rattling off names of weapons she hated that I hadn't yet known about, again. As is usually the case, she's ahead of me. She's ahead of me on all the Wii games except Excite Truck, and my Wii Sports skill levels are embarrassingly low compared to hers. Evan sent her the codes for Alien Hominid HD and Worms for the XBox 360 and she had to get even the most minor achievement before I could. What can I do! I've been working, dammit :)
This morning she played Texas Hold 'em on her 360, added some more friend codes that came in from you folks on her Wii, and then played Resistance for a while. Her distribution of playing time on each system is sort of amusing actually; I've even accused her of doing it on purpose so as to not hurt the system's "feelings" but she insists she just plays whatever the hell she feels like playing at the moment.
And that brings me to my next point.
When typing this post and the Wii post last time, I almost felt as though I was acting as a Nintendo or Sony apologist; lighting skipping my words around everything being said about both companies at the moment to avoid triggering an outbreak of fanboyistic hate-mail. That's the state of things that has been created in this manufactured and illusionary "console war" that we all bought into over the past year. But then I came to my senses.
I will not apologize for Grandma wanting a Wii and a PS3 since E3 2006. I hate that I feel as though I need to. She just wants to play great games, guys; she couldn't give a sh*t about corporate politics and projected competition, with one notable exception.
So here it is, Grandma's message to Sony:
"Alright, Sony. I bought your system. It cost me $850 when all was said and done, with games, cables, taxes and all. Eight hundred and fifty FUCKING dollars. That's a lot of goddamn money for me, I hope you understand. Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to go hungry or anything, but it was quite a long time before that kind of cash was available. I think, however, that it was worth the wait. Do you know why I bought it? Because of David Jaffe and Cory Barlog and Alex and Max and Jennifer and everyone I met in Santa Monica last year. Those people know what they're doing. They're damn good at what they do. I did not buy it because of Ken Kutaragi's opinion of the XBox 360. I don't fucking care. I love my XBox 360. I did not buy it because of Peter Moore of Microsoft's opinion of the Wii. I love my Wii. Are you noticing a pattern? I DON'T CARE WHAT ABOUT EXECUTIVES' OPINIONS OF RIVAL COMPANIES. All I care about is that they spend less time fucking bitching at each other and spend more time giving the developers what they need to make great games.
The money I paid was an investment into your ability to "wow" me. I think you can do it. I truly believe that! But goddammit, if you fuck this up for the developers, (and I think I speak for a lot of people when I say this) there's going to be hell to pay. Now on to the gaming! I got a PS3 motherfuckers!!"
***Update (03/11/2007)*** Thanks for all the emails and friend additions, everybody! Grandma has a couple pages left in her address book so if you haven't yet friended her you still can.
This is a quickie post because a much larger one is coming tomorrow. If you want to friend Grandma on your Wii, go ahead and add her code but MAKE SURE you post a comment or send us an e-mail with your friend code (and your name) otherwise we'll just end up with a freaky Mii parade and she won't be able to send you vulgar messages when you send her pictures of your cat.
Let me tell you a little story about what happened to Grandma on Thursday... Grandma woke up before the kids got on the bus for school. She wanted to get a shower in and clean up the place before reporters from the Columbus Dispatch arrived sometime around noon. Like every morning, she first plopped down at the computer to check her e-mail, check the weather and read the news. Grandma subscribes to a shitload of gaming related newsletters and press-release alerts. One of them, for good or bad, is GameRival.com. She opened a message titled "New Game New Game New Game!" only to find:
"'Super Granny 3: Help granny rescue her precious kitties'," she read aloud. "Why the hell do people think that old people like cats?! I fucking HATE cats! I know lots of people my age that can't STAND the little bastards!" "I like cats" "Yeah, well I don't. That GDC challenge thing last year with the guy who made Katamari Damacy, he thought we all like cats. For some reason that's the first thing that pops in peoples heads when they think of grandmas. Fucking CATS. Why?" "Maybe they have statistical data that shows most grandmas like casual games and cats." "I don't know who they're polling. You have to realize too that most folks hang up the phone when they get called for that shit. The people who give that kind of answer; 'I like casual games and I like cats', are probably people who want to talk to somebody for a little bit and don't mind the inconvenience of some stupid poll." "So you're saying that every demographic is represented by focus groups comprised of lonely people who enjoy talking to telemarketers?" "Exactly."
She slid on her shoes and drove to the post office a couple blocks down the hill to get the mail. If there is anything that really bugs Grandma, it's waiting; sitting on her hands anticipating something about to happen. I guess getting the mail was her way of alleviating that. When she came back, she showed me her new copy of EGM, in which she made another appearance in a small blub under an interesting read about EGM giving older folks the opportunity to play the Nintendo Wii to see what happened.
She got a big kick out of Crispin's little addendum at the end of the blurb:
(Page 16; Electronic Gaming Monthly 213, March 2007) [While] she says she didn't come to immediate grips with its motion-sensing magic, she's confident she'll master the controls if she could just get a system. 'I'm hoping I'll get one for my birthday in February,' she says. Nintendo, are you listening?
"Great," I told her. "Now everyone knows I'm too goddamn poor to buy you a $250 system." "Tim, seriously, nobody cares. We'll get one. Jessica told me." "Nintendo, Golin Harris Jessica? She said she'll try, they're not so easy to come by, you know." "Trust me. Jessica's cool."
And that was that.
She went about dusting off the back of the television and straightening everything in the living room, trying to again create the illusion that we're not slobs. It's probably the most deceptive thing we've ever done to the press; right up there with fixing better coffee than we usually drink. I took a shower. Our doorbells are rigged to be incredibly loud. The previous owner of the house, like grandma, was a bit hard of hearing, so when one presses the button outside, a buzzer rings in the garage, a buzzer rings in the kitchen, a doorbell chime rings upstairs and another rings in the living room. While in the bathroom, I was pretty sure I heard the buzzers ring twice; once at the beginning of my shower and again fifteen minutes later while brushing my teeth. I knew Grandma was in the living room cleaning and could hear the buzzer ring so I wasn't worried. Besides, if it was the folks from the Dispatch here early, they were here to see Grandma, not me; and Grandma doesn't need a minder. I took my time.
After getting dressed and brushing my hair in such a way as to cover my hideous face should I be within the bokeh of a sneaky photographer, I asked Grandma about the doorbell. "Check THIS shit out!" she gleamed, obviously excited.
"Just when I was worried I wouldn't have much to play after Lost Planet! Evan sent it to me!" "Awesome! You should show the guys from the Dispatch when they get here," I told the woman. "They'll get a big kick out of you having 'contacts' in the 'industry'." "Yeah, who the fuck am I? Evan is just being cool, you know that," she smiled. "So what's the second thing?" "What do you mean?" "When I was in the bathroom I heard the doorbell ring twice." "Nope, just once, and that was UPS. It's not 12:00 yet, so I doubt they're here already." "You sure?" "Pretty sure."
I looked out the little window on the front door to the porch. No strange cars were in the driveway, there wasn't anything on the porch steps and there wasn't anything near the inside door. So I let it go.
Grandma put in Gears of War to see what it was like while we waited.
"I fucking SUCK!" she noted, trying to fire at creatures while behind the cover of dystopic ruins. "That's what you said about Lost Planet when you first started, too." "I don't have time to really get into it is the thing. I know I'm just going to have to stop when those people get here."
So, thanks Evan! And thanks Microsoft! Grandma shall play.
After a quick "Hi! Columbus Dispatch here. We're in Mantua, what's your house look like" call, they were parked in our yet to be plowed driveway, tromping around in the snow, as Grandma put it- "without fucking coats. Are they crazy?!" I met them on the porch to let them know they had the right house. After introductions, we turned around to go back inside and I saw something beautiful. Apparently FedEx decided to put the package WAAAAAY to the side of the front door. There HAD in fact been two rings of the doorbell, and with "Nintendo" written in careful handwriting on top, it didn't take much guessing to figure out what it was.
I took the box to Grandma with some guys from the Dispatch following right behind. I don't think they quite knew what was up, but it didn't matter. When she saw the box, she too knew right away.
"YEEEAAAAAAH!!!!" she screamed in a familiar happy sort of way. "I GOT A WII!!!" "Um... Grandma, these are the guys from the Columbus Dispatch, and this was on our porch." "Oh, hi!"
Nevermind that for all we knew these poor guys might have driven 3+ hours from Columbus to the frozen Northeast corner of Ohio, she was opening that goddamn box.
Inside Grandma found a Nintendo Wii, which included Wii Sports; three additional Wii Remotes; three additional Nunchucks; Rayman: Raving Rabbids; Excite Truck; Marvel Ultimate Alliance; Spongebob Squarepants: Creature from the Krusty Krab, and a note from Jessica in which she bragged up her Wii Tennis skills :)
So there it was, waiting to be played. I have to admit it's pretty cool Nintendo would consider giving Grandma a Wii after some of the things we said about it when it was still the "Revolution". Add to that the hilarious aspect of physical frustration while playing a video game and I hope they know what they're getting into. A video, for instance, of Grandma swearing at Spongebob Squarepants because "that cocksucker won't fucking go to the fucking left, god DAMMIT" is probably not too far off from what will likely happen if Grandma becomes ensarled in a particularly tricky part of a game. Now that I think about it... I wonder if they had some sort of risk assessment around the decision? That'd be an amusing set of e-mails.
Anyway- THANK YOU Jessica, and THANK YOU NINTENDO!
After Grandma opened the box, it seemed as though this interview, unlike the many other cool and collected interviews she's had in the past, was really rushed and not by the writer or the photographer, but by US. The questions that they honestly needed to ask but had been asked many times before by others were met with shorter, maybe even less enthusiastic answers, and I knew why. Grandma wanted to play the Wii, and I was damn curious as to what she'd think of it; alone, without the attention of others. They could tell we were distracted. For example: I think one bit of conversation went something like this- "So did always work for the Dispatch?" -"No, I used to work for the Akron Beacon Journal; even went to the last two Olympics in Athens and Torino." "Really, what did you think of Spain?" [headslap] -"um.... Italy."
There it was! All I needed to do was hook up the sensor bar, plug in a few wires and away she would go, but we also had to respect that these guys came out to do their job, so it would have to wait. I think we realized what we were doing with a few Roman-esque knowing glances towards each other, at the Wii, at Gears of War, and back at each other. We relaxed a bit after that. The photographer had Grandma play a game she was comfortable with for awhile and took some pictures and some audio of Grandma's collection for a slideshow. They were polite, cool guys and they never drank our coffee.
After they left, we IMMEDIATELY dived in. Grandma made a Mii.
The Wii instantly recognized our Wireless internet and she tried the News and Forecast Channels. She played some Wii Sports. She tried bowling. We put in Rayman. Rayman gave us a glimpse at the fashion of grannies that for whatever reason was unknown to Grandma.
I was good at the mini-games at which she wasn't so good. She was good at the mini-games at which I wasn't so good. We had fun! There will be a lot more to be said about the games they sent, and this opens up another facet of the gaming world for Grandma to love and also upon which to feed and take out her agression.
We hope it will be sweet.
The television show they taped a couple weeks ago in Columbus for the Ohio Department of Aging, "Finer With Age" sent Grandma some DVDs of her appearence. They arrived that afternoon. We both thought the interview went well, and they made her feel very comfortable, which goes a long way. Still, Grandma said "I TOLD you I needed a haircut!"
I was just happy the footage they took of me losing terribly to Grandma at Brain Age was used merely as B-Roll, and one couldn't deduce how much of a dumbass I am from the clip. We'll put the video up as soon as I convert the file after work this weekend for all of y'as. (We also have a Lost Planet video coming. She's trying to find all the target markers now, so this should be interesting.)
At the end of the day, as Grandma trudged through the opening chapter of Gears of War, learning how to do a "perfect reload", I finally opened the operations manual for the Wii, seeing as like any proper geek, one reads the manual only AFTER you've already fucked around a bit.
And it was there, on pages 30 and 34, where I saw their graphical example message from someone's Grandma:
What can I say? Apparently old people love cats :)
God of War 2, Lost Planet, Neverwinter Nights 2, Gamertag Radio!
No, we don't have the demo of God of War 2 yet; hell we just stole the cover art from (the big man himself) Cory Barlog's blog. The men and women at SCEA have been literally killing themselves over making this game perfect for its launch. Literally. I think people might have actually DIED. Grandma envisions Cory three different ways whenever we talk about game development:
1. He's the strong leader type; bringing the army of artists, programmers and testers gifts of coffee and booze in a sly attempt to assess what they're doing and coordinate the effort.
2. He's the slave-driver, cracking his whip upon the bleeding backs of "the wretched", compelling them to work faster without deviating from his empirical vision lest they be punished in ways that better capture the mythological theme of the piece.
3. He's hiding under his desk weeping; rocking back and forth muttering something like the word "Kratooooos" while his coworkers desperately try to get him to drink liquids.
Who can be sure, really... All I know is that Grandma is looking forward to March. And who isn't?! We have what she played at E3 to go by to be sure, and the press junket last May where Cory and David talked about what GoW2 was to be, but now we need something new to drive our highly rational, anticipatory high.
So all we have is the cover art of the demo. That's alright, we can work with just about anything, really. Let's take a closer look:
So, the first thing that catches your eye is this big scary statue thing with glowing blue shit coming out of its eyeballs. Look at that thing. That thing is pissed. It has its hair styled in a messy sort of way rather than the braided, straight look of the Archaic period, so we're guessing probably more Late Classical or Roman Hellenistic. This may suggest Kratos is kind of an art snob. And who could blame him! Braiding makes sense; gods can braid each other's hair in their off time, but to suggest there is some kind of immortal cosmetic coppersmith that could fashion a headband for a god is absurd. That thing NEEDS a Kratos style ass-whoopin'.
Next up you see Kratos looking like he's having a bit of a bad day. He's got that German pieta Jesus look to him that just says "This fucking HURTS, god DAMMIT!!", but that wouldn't be Kratos. He's definitely more of a Laocoön figure this time around, but it's going to take more than a few snakes to take him down, and certainly more than a haphazardly manicured giant hand of Athenian marble, we'd guess.
Kratos' look of pain can only mean one thing, then. This game is going to be fucking HARD. God Mode? Forget about it. Cory says welcome to TITAN mode.
Hmmmmm..... I wonder what the rating is going to be! Picture Grandma scratching her chin in a very conspicuous, dramatic way looking toward the ceiling as though the concentration on this thought is so deep it forces her to divert her attention to the somewhat less distracting sky.
I just WONDER what the ESRB is going to rate this game! It's so not obvious, I just may lose sleep thinking about it.
Anyway, if you haven't already read Cory's history of making this game, from the moment he discovered he was to direct it, all the way to the beta testing and beyond, check out his blog. "He's one of the good ones" as Grandma says.
The Final Fantasy XII/Okami overlapping tale has repeated itself once again, this time with Lost Planet for the XBox 360 slowly taking over Zelda: Twilight Princess on the GameCube. Truth is, Grandma may have spent too much time on the mini-games in ZTP, so it's taking her longer than most. We'll update as soon as she gives her final thoughts on the game. Lost Planet so far is very.... Capcom. You'd know it was a Capcom game even if you never saw the opening logo. It's fantastic. But more on that later!
On the 10th, Godfree over at Gamertag Radio published their interview with Grandma and I for their podcast. You can find the whole thing right here. They silenced our usual slew of vulgarity, so the podcast is SFW for all you employed readers. Grandma talks about the next-gen console war among other things, and I ramble on about god-knows-what. It's worth a listen to get addicted to their podcast, which has always been cool.
Speaking of things that are absolutely cool beyond measure:
Annie, who incidentally is one of Grandma's first friends from all this, sent Grandma an early Birthday present. As I think I've mentioned before E3, she works at Obsidian entertainment now. She thought it'd be groovy to send Grandma a copy of their masterpiece, Neverwinter Nights 2. She also thought it'd be groovy if she got the whole dev team to sign the box.
How fucking groovy is THAT?! THAT'S AWESOME!
So that does it, I'm getting Grandma into PC games. She's reluctant, goddammit. She loves her consoles and will never abandon them. EVER. So I'd like to get her to play some PC games as well, starting with this PC game right here. She's played a few in the past, but she's convinced she's the Alan Grant of computer destruction. Besides! If I can convince her of the virtues of PC gaming, it will be the one thing for which I can take credit in her gaming history. Everything else that she's liked, she found on her own. Now I get to teach her something. It's kind of exciting actually! It's my new project. I'll document her progress here.
Until then, you can guess who's playing it. It's a lot like KOTOR! (Obsidian made KOTOR II so it makes sense now that I think about it.) I like.
Grandma took a trip down to Columbus yesterday to appear on "Finer with Age", a show developed by the Ohio Department of Aging and it was ..quite the adventure! (All went well, don't worry.) We'll have more on that soon. We have some more things lined up as well and if I can get my ass in gear I'll be able to relocate the site to a more dependable server so we can post more often; something that will suit our "upcoming plans." More videos coming, by the way!
Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Lumines II, Final Fantasy III, and more Grandma press
Grandma has been inching forward on The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess on her neglected little GameCube for the past week or so. She couldn't quite get into FF:III for the DS after finishing XII last month; the contrast between the Job system and the License Board system was just too jarring to make such a sudden switch. Besides, I think she had a bit of Final Fantasy fatigue after the last one. You can only play a single genre for so long before you get bored. That's good luck for me, however, because now I actually get to play something without her telling me how much further in the game she is. Between the two of us, Lumines II on the PSP is getting plenty of play (as is MLB '06 The Show; for whatever reason it just became addictive.) Evan sent us the codes for Lumines over XBL Arcade, but it just isn't the same without the full game.
Goddammit, I'll say it. Bottle Rocket is a guilty pleasure. Here's Grandma's initial take on Twilight Princess:
Before I even tell you what I think so far, I have to ask you- please don't hate me. I love Zelda! I'm a Zelda fan! I've loved them from the beginning. Shit, Tim will tell you how much I got into Wind Waker. I'll admit I didn't like Four Swords too much, but other than that, I've watched Link grow up. I have to tell you that apparently because I see how much people pounce on those who suggest that Twilight Princess is kinda... ...mediocre.
It's not a shitty game at all, but it isn't what I expected. Granted, I'm not that far into the game, maybe only a third of the way through I guess, but from what I've seen I can't say I'm impressed. The graphics aren't too hot, for one. From what people tell me, The Wii version looks better, so there's always that, but I've seen some incredible looking games on the GameCube, so I'm not sure why this one is so choppy. Graphics are hardly everything, though. The controls are frustrating to say the least. Maybe it's just harder and I can't quite cut it right now, but it sure doesn't feel that way. It's just... ...frustrating! The button combination needed to attack something, put away your weapon, pick something up and run with it just feels weird. I HATE when Link turns into a wolf, which is strange considering how cool Okami was. For some reason it's just a pain to control Link-Wolf with Midna sometimes.
I don't know. Like I said, don't hate me, and I'm not that far into the game yet, but I'm going to need to finish this one before I can really have an opinion. Right now, all I know is: it's a bitch.
Grandma's playing it right now, riding a horse, shooting arrows at some flying something or other and damning the controller verbally. We'll get back to you as the situation changes.
305031015072. Apparently, that's the friend code you'll need if you want to taunt me while I'm trying to level up my FF:III characters. I can't imagine what sort of message you'd send, though.
"Hey, Tim! You're a goddamn loser! Look at you sitting around, mindlessly walking a little sprite around a screen until some arbitrary, meaningless number goes up a few digits. Say yo to Grandma- Peace!"
"Tim. What are you doing with your life? Anything important? Doubt it. Shout out to yer G'ma for me, LOL."
"Tim, you know what would be great? If this was a multiplayer game, I could totally whoop your ass. But it's not. So I'll just tap out this message so you know your ass would be kicked. That is, if this was a multiplayer game. But it's not. So I won't. Tell Grandma I said hello and such."
Leveling up is a staple of the Final Fantasy series we've come to accept and love, but Jesus Christ it takes forever to get their job levels up to anything usable. Ah, well. It's still fun!
Lumines II has a nifty new feature the first game lacked that adds the sense of excitement that public shame and embarrassment provides. Lumines II is awesome, there's no doubt about that, but when you find yourself turning down the volume on your earphones when Hollaback Girl starts up lest the rest of the otherwise silent denizens of the dentist's office conclude that you're a Gwen Stefani fanatic, you realize that some games really highlight one's insecurities. Really, I mean- who gives a shit if I like listening to some shitty Missy Elliot song, or the Black Eyed Peas' horrible resampling of Dick Dale tunes?! I don't care! Let the bastards think whatever they want to think!
And yet I still turn down the volume and angle the PSP ever so slightly so that some Middle Aged watcher of sensationalist nightly news segments doesn't confuse the beautiful game I'm playing with the "Playstation Pornable" material that would cause her to cover her mouth ever so delicately to stifle the exclamation "oh my word!" before she averts her children's eyes and starts to pray.
It's the fact that I catch myself turning down the volume that's most embarrassing of all. Grandma? Grandma doesn't give a shit. Grandma plays on MUTE. She's pretty much deaf and headphones aren't very comfortable for her. I couldn't imagine Lumines without the music.
The Press Conundrum.
Grandma has been around in quite a bit of press in the past month or so. The Newark Star Ledger did a lengthy piece on Grandma and the "phenomenon" of elderly gaming, which prompted WCBS in New York to call her for a short interview; Igromania Magazine had a HUGE spread on Grandma that garnered a lot of Russian traffic; Frauenzeitung Fraz magazine had an article on Grandma in the same issue they discussed the graphic novel "Persepolis" (which is awesome); Cleveland Magazine's January issue was just released, naming Grandma as one of the Most Interesting People in Cleveland (more on that in another post); NPR and the one and only Alex Cohen produced a short segment, which was picked up by Joystiq (who we love), but there lay the conundrum in plain sight in Joystiq's comment section:
2. I personally find it hard to believe that 25% of the gaming demographic is over the age of 50. Excuse me for a moment whilst I perform some research...
Posted at 11:01AM on Dec 8th 2006 by Unimental
OK, as of 2004... 19% of "gamers" were over 50. I put gamers in quotes since gaming can consist of consoles, PC, handhelds, and (what I think boosts the stats here) online quick-and-casual games like popcap et al. I would assume playing a round of solitaire at work would put you in this crowd as well.
Posted at 11:12AM on Dec 8th 2006 by Unimental
10. "kick butt with her grandson"
that makes it sound more like she watches him win and pretends it was her idea. i know the type (i am the type).
Posted at 11:37AM on Dec 8th 2006 by spoot
20. 25% of all gamers are over the age of 50
I CALL BULLSH*T!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Posted at 12:09PM on Dec 8th 2006 by JimmyHACK
23. Another bullshit research such as some Nielsen recent ones: they mix "gamers" of traditionnal PC/consoles games and "casual gamers" of free online games. But it is trendy those days to say crap like "there is more women 18 to 35 playing than boys 12 to 18..." and so on.
Posted at 12:26PM on Dec 8th 2006 by gabur
26. I should have gone with God of War: Bed Pan Prophecies. That's better than Splinter Cell: Geriatric Showdown.
Posted at 12:53PM on Dec 8th 2006 by matthew
30. "She has 13(!) grandkids"
Thirteen grandkids isn't really that many...my grandma has almost 40....
Posted at 2:38PM on Dec 8th 2006 by Chyld989
The NPR piece didn't mention Grandma's nickname or MTV or even this site, which is fine in that we don't make any money from this site so traffic fluctuations aren't hugely important. What's surprising is that it's been what, almost two years now for Grandma's press, and Doris Self has had a lot of mentions, and there have been a ton of segments about adults playing video games, and adults waiting in line for PS3's and Wii's and 360's, and adults playing in tournaments, and the benefits of video games for adults and yet even NOW, when the industry itself says the target demographic is 18-35 year olds, people STILL say it's all bullshit and games are for children and immature teenagers.
So..... why the hell do people think this is such a rarity, anymore?! Grandma was not the first, she's just the most recognized. She's not the best, she's just the most recognized. She's not the oldest, either. There are MANY people just like Grandma out there! So all this press, all this attention, millions of people reading hundreds of sites and newspapers and watching syndicated news segments, and some people still think it's unusual to see an older person (or a woman, for that matter) enjoy gaming means that the problem must be with us. We're not doing a good enough job at getting the message accross.
So we're going to have to get better then, aren't we? :)
Final Fantasy XII is a difficult game to review for Grandma and I. I remember showing her the early Japanese trailers when they first appeared on IGN.
"OOoooooooo.... That looks awesome as hell. Still, I remember Final Fantasy X-2. I'll have to wait and see."
Then she stumbled across the demo that came with Dragon Quest VIII; proudly announced on the cover of the damn game as if it were the most dramatic selling point.
"OOOoooooooo... I.. I still don't know if I can trust them!" Grandma replied.
Then she was escorted around the closely guarded Square-Enix booth at E3; tempted by the flashing lights and hypnotic visuals of FFXIII as the FFXII demos were bogarted by lonely gaming journalists.
"Goddammit, what are they HIDING?! I can't wait any longer!!"
And then it happened. Two weeks before its USA release on Halloween, she received a forwarded e-mail exchange between her producer at MTV and a Square-Enix rep. The game was on the way. It arrived the next morning while Grandma was dutifully plugging away at Okami. She was to review it for a short spot on a special broadcast of The G-Hole.
The wait was over. What began as a skeptical reunion with a long loved franchise ended as the longest logged single game in Grandma's gaming history. It's hard not to repeat what has already been printed about the game; solid graphics, great cutscenes; bloody fantastic musical score; easy acclimation to the combat system; fun gameplay; somewhat corny "Tony Kushner-esque" dialogue, etc.,.. so I'll skip ahead to a major point of criticism: The Gambit System.
For instance: Gary Hodges over at Cleveland Scene Magazine titled his review of the game "Hands Off- Final Fantasy XII: Role-playing on autopilot." To his credit, he seemed to like the game for its strengths, but his principle problem with the game was the macro-like quality the Gambit System imposes on the game.
For Grandma, that seemed a bit unfair.
"Look, people have said The Gambit System makes it too easy; they say it takes away from the good ol' days of RPGs where you actually have to 'press the button' to make your characters 'do things'. That's a bunch of bullshit. First of all- The Gambit System is entirely optional. You can go the entire game without turning on a single Gambit. Hell, you can even turn off the wait system entirely and go Active Battle and maybe turn down the speed a bit to give yourself a bit of time to respond to situations. It's not for everybody, but that's what makes it so damn cool- it's customizable. Everybody can play a different way. You don't HAVE to level everyone up to 99 and get every Esper and fill up the License Board- but trust me, some of us do. You don't even need to use every character! The game doesn't force you. That's what makes it a good RPG. YOU decide your own handicap. If you can't live with yourself because you played it on the easiest possible setting and it made the game seem pointless, don't blame the game. Just because it didn't have an option at the very beginning spelled out clearly: 'EASY' 'NORMAL' 'HARD' doesn't mean that the options weren't there.
So... Yeah."
You don't have to be a die-hard Final Fantasy fan at all to enjoy the game on its own, but it does make the game better. Yes, there is a character named Cid. Yes, there are Chocobos. Yes, there are airships. Does the name "Bahamut" mean anything to you? How about a weapon named "Save The Queen"?
Yeah, you know it does. Don't be embarrassed about it, just enjoy it!
Towards the end of the game, Grandma developed a strong case of "Level Up Exhaustion"; maxing out every possible attribute; equipping everyone with the best armor; getting three or four ribbons; preparing for any possible situation. Even after she achieved this feat, she still didn't like certain characters. It doesn't matter that when on even levels equipped with the same weapons, the only difference between characters is their appearance on screen (they'll fight the same way, take the same HP; heal the same, etc.,..)
Grandma: "Goddammit, why do I have to use THIS chick? She fucking sucks."
Me: "But... she's the same level as your main dude."
Grandma: "I don't care. She always screws everything up."
Me: "But... she's a princess descendant of the mightiest king ever known to the realm, given power by the GODS THEMSELVES."
Grandma: "She's still a stupid bitch."
We also had an interesting conversation about the political implications of the game.
Grandma: "So do you think that... Nethecite is like... the nuclear bomb?"
Me: "Well that would mean that Oppenheimer is god."
Grandma: "What do you mean?"
Me: "Well, the Gods gave them Nethecite to ...you know, never use."
Grandma: "Okay, MANUFACTURED Nethecite is like the nuclear bomb then."
Me: "That makes more sense, but that would mean that Oppenheimer is Doctor Cid."
Grandma: "Did Oppenheimer have a ridiculously stupid laugh?"
Me: "I don't think so."
Grandma: "Okay, well if manufactured nethecite is the nuclear bomb, then... Nabudis is like Chernobyl, and if Dalmasca wants it to protect itself from Arcadia... then... Dalmasca is like... CUBA?!"
Me: "No, no... that wouldn't make any sense."
Grandma: "I don't know how I feel about fighting on the side of Fidel Castro. That guy is kind of an asshole."
Me: "Arcadia can't represent the United States, because we didn't have anything to do with Chernobyl. So Dalmasca isn't Cuba."
Grandma: "So who tried to get a hold of nuclear weapons to fight the Soviet Union?"
Me: "Afghanistan."
Grandma: "Woah, woah.. hold the fuck on. That would mean Vaan is ...OSAMA BIN LADEN?!"
Me: "..."
Grandma: "I'm not a fucking terrorist."
Me: "I don't think Vaan-"
Grandma: "What if Dalmasca is like... Kashmir, and Arcadia is Pakistan, and Rozzaria is India."
Me: "That would make sense, ...I guess."
Grandma: "That one dude acts all sexy and shit. Maybe that's an ...homage or whatever to Bollywood."
Me: "Yeah, but Rozzaria wants Dalmascan independence and autonomy. India and Pakistan both claim Kashmir for themselves."
Grandma: "Well, what then? North Korea? IRAN?!"
Me: "Nah, North Korea is way to isolated and crazy to be Dalmasca. Iran, maybe; Rabanastre is surrounded by desert- but then again, no- because nobody in Dalmasca is an anti-semitic douchebag."
Grandma: "I just want to know where I can find a fucking Ribbon. These 'disease traps' are a pain in my ASS."
Crazy, misattributed political associations aside, Final Fantasy XII is a fantastic game, worthy of a space in any RPG fan's collection. It's not as crazy as FF X-2 and not as annoying as FFX, so the only comparisons left are to VII and VIII, and even then- it holds its own. At 240+ hours and a full Pirate's Den, Grandma is more than satisfied.
Grandma says: "let's just hope they don't fuck up Final Fantasy XIII."
Midgar.
When they told me she was done, they didn't tell me anything else. The cardiologist who performed the thing was busy doing another one, so I went back to see her and asked her if she knew the result. But nobody told her shit either. Finally, a dude comes out and says the bypass took very well, there's no fluid to worry about, and everything's groovy. That livened Grandma up a bit, albeit as lively as one can be as they are told to lay perfectly still lest the artery in their leg bursts, killing them. Okay: she smiled. Which was the first legitimate smile I'd seen in a long time, it seemed.
The ride from the hotel to Universal Studios was a quick one. The facility was, literally, just across the street. Grandma chatted a bit with Peter, an actor living in New York a little younger than me who sported a UK accent. He was a pleasant, cordial sort of dude.
Gather 'round my children; grab a stool and a stoop of ale and hear of flying machines, lizards and beasts unknown; insane cab drivers with GPS devices and waitresses and drinking and other vices. Hear of directors and producers and freelance PA's. Hear of actors and actresses and NDA's. 
If you've read us long enough you'll know that it happens once and awhile; sometimes there will be a game worshiped by many that Grandma just can't enjoy. It almost makes her feel bad to have to say she hates it. Almost.
It makes her worried about her poor Wii.
So, in the past few months or so, she's bought more movies than games. Mostly on BlueRay, but she did take advantage of the HD-DVD firesale at BestBuy because.. well, the attachment for the 360 is only something like $40 now, and HD-DVD movies are cheap as hell. She knows it's a dead format, but what the hell- we're poor and we like movies.
She's been scanning the gaming magazines for exciting new releases each month, waiting with the anticipation of a vulture watching a rabbit try to cross a highway. She's just ITCHING to get the same experience she had playing Call of Duty 4 or Orange Box or actually- what she REALLY wants is another horror game like Fatal Frame, Resident Evil or Silent Hill. She talks about that genre a lot, now. Condemned 2 came out recently, but it hasn't been received well and she wasn't exactly a huge fan of the first game. I know she won't buy it, but if she does end up renting it, it will be for achievement point whoring reasons only, I'm afraid.
Yeah.
Grandma is currently tackling Veteran Mode on Call of Duty 4.
There is a certain phenomenon in the gaming world in which one's save files on a memory card, hard-drive, or cartridge are deleted by another, whether it be a friend, enemy or relative. The phenomenon is typically the product of accident or negligence, but on certain, rare occasions it is performed deliberately out of malice. Either way, it is unique to a certain classification of instances that transcend the personal relationship between a gamer and a single-player game, forming a new, multiplayer element to the experience above and beyond the intentions of its creators.
Grandma's health has gotten better. The bills are being paid early. The Jeep is back from the shop and running better than before the accident. My schedule is now fairly regular. Working longer weeks has finally paid off in spades for me.
Let me back up a little.
And disaster's name is Alyx.
It's not the first time something like this has happened; in 2005 I actually received a sympathy card. A single anonymous comment in a thread somewhere can trigger that sort of thing whether it's a joke or a misunderstanding or ...something, but allow me to clear things up right now by stating that Grandma, in every sense, be it biologically, cognitively and philosophically, is still alive.
Grandma - "Ooo! Check out what Evan sent me!"
Grandma finished her first run-through of BioShock last weekend. There's still a lot she wants to accomplish, so we're not quite calling this game 'destroyed' yet. From what she's told me there are something like three different endings one can get; not to mention she only has about half of the possible achievements. For a single player game, this just isn't acceptable to her. She needs to get everything she can before setting it aside to the cabinet; to pull out later as some fantastic little piece of nostalgia from way back to that late summer of 2007. You guys know Grandma by now, that's just the way she is. 
I picked up a copy of BioShock Tuesday afternoon for Grandma, much to the ire of the poor soul behind me in line who heard the clerk say the depressingly cheerful phrase "you got the last one!" to that grinning jackass in front of him. She immediately dived into the thing (no pun intended) cranking the exquisite audio to a point where I now hear the preemptive whistling sound of an approaching sentry bot in my sleep.
Here's Grandma doing her best Darkness infused Jackie Estacado impersonation, complete with glowing, demon snake heads, upon completing this god-awful, piece of shit game. Even Mr. Bungle couldn't salvage this thing. For me- Mike Patton growling evil things into a microphone would have been reason enough to buy it but they somehow managed to fuck that up too.
The story about how we got this thing is actually kind of sweet. Evan at Microsoft/Edelman was afraid Grandma's Xbox Live subscription would run out before they got a chance to get her a code, so he sent her a 12-month card before he searched for a one-use code he could e-mail to her, just in case he couldn't find one in time. Well, he did find a code, and the card arrived anyway via DHL. She e-mailed him back to thank him and also to find out what to do with the card. His reply: give it to someone else, give it away on the blog, whatever we wanted. It's all good.
Some of you may remember Grandma 
Hell, they might even have a little corkboard with everybody's name on it with differently colored stars representing the number of videos deleted in a day. Now, I'm not saying that corkboard was stolen from an underfunded elementary school; the poverty stricken kids forced now to huddle around an ancient eMachines monitor displaying a poorly formatted spreadsheet of the class roster with cold, unfeeling numbers where their beautiful, shiny star stickers used to be.
"I don't really care about the corruption thing, I just kill the peasants and the sheep and raid all the houses for the hell of it. It gets your little guys all armored up and you don't get arrested like in Oblivion. Farming sheep is an easy way to boost up your weapons and shit in the forge, but you can do that in the dungeon and you don't have to run around all over the damn place. I set the Sacred Tree on fire too, but that was an accident."
Well, I decided to quit smoking this week and now I pretty much hate everyone. Seriously, I have no idea how to deal with this shit. I'm not even quitting because of health reasons or because of the evils of the tobacco industry or because truth.com has convinced me of the error of my ways. I'm quitting because it's too goddamn expensive. So there you go, you nonsmoking health-nazi nanny government fascist fucks. You've WON.
Grandma and I had a little extra cash today. This is a pleasant opportunity for entertainment we couldn't pass up, so she decided on a new game. It all came down to 'Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80's' for the PS2, or 'Overlord' for the XBox 360.
Grandma is still forming an opinion on EDF: 2017. It's a game of many contradictions. The graphics are shit, and yet the graphics are awesome. The dialogue is terrible and annoying but the dialogue is hilarious. The game is easy as hell and hard as FUCK. Its manner of leveling up is tedious but god DAMN those weapons are sweet. The plot is absurd and stupid. The plot is absurd and AWESOME. It's so unrealistic, you can blow up entire buildings with a single shot from even the weakest rocket launcher; a rocket launcher with which you begin the game. Then again, you can blow up BUILDINGS with a SINGLE SHOT from even the WEAKEST rocket launcher, including the rocket launcher with which you BEGIN THE GAME!
Grandma's XBox 360 came back from repair just before last weekend. Well, not really her 360. It's a replacement unit with an April 2007 manufacture date and a new serial number. Apparently The Beast was beyond repair. Microsoft treated Grandma well throughout the whole ordeal; but there is still a DRM issue we're trying to get corrected (They are walking her through the process of getting all 47 of Grandma's XBLA games to work correctly on the other profiles on the machine.)
When the unit came, I happened to be the one closest to the door so I signed for it, brought it into the game room and took a picture of the box. Grandma looked over and yelled at me for not immediately telling her of it's arrival. 
Alien Hominid HD is a fun, quirky little gem that is FUCKING HARD, JESUS CHRIST ON A FUCKING CROSS. I'm not kidding. This is a game best played on co-op if for no other reason than its absolute, Fuck-You difficulty. Sure we all screwed around with it when it was nothing more than a cool little game on Newgrounds, but goddamn if this game doesn't make you question your self-worth as a gamer.
Worms was disappointing for those of us familiar with the PC games because of the lack of some of the more interesting weapons, but Grandma wasn't, so she wasn't disappointed. It's a tactical, time-limited turn based game. She hasn't tried the multiplayer mode yet because she's not comfortable with her blow-torch wielding abilities.
Luxor 2 has become the reason that Grandma has been reading more books lately. It's easier than Zuma in some ways, but it's still a bitch. Ever since Evan gave her the code for the full version, someone (who will remain nameless) hijacked Grandma's game room to play "just one more level, wait until I die... I still have more lives left....I'll be done here in a minute..." Even on the easiest difficulty, once that fifth color shows up on your screen you'll start irrationally cursing the Ancient Egyptians for their peculiar ball-floaty powers.
No, we don't have the demo of God of War 2 yet; hell we just stole the cover art from (the big man himself) 
So, the first thing that catches your eye is this big scary statue thing with glowing blue shit coming out of its eyeballs. Look at that thing. That thing is pissed. It has its hair styled in a messy sort of way rather than the braided, straight look of the Archaic period, so we're guessing probably more Late Classical or Roman Hellenistic. This may suggest Kratos is kind of an art snob. And who could blame him! Braiding makes sense; gods can braid each other's hair in their off time, but to suggest there is some kind of immortal cosmetic coppersmith that could fashion a headband for a god is absurd. That thing NEEDS a Kratos style ass-whoopin'.
Next up you see Kratos looking like he's having a bit of a bad day. He's got that German pieta Jesus look to him that just says "This fucking HURTS, god DAMMIT!!", but that wouldn't be Kratos. He's definitely more of a 
Hmmmmm..... I wonder what the rating is going to be! Picture Grandma scratching her chin in a very conspicuous, dramatic way looking toward the ceiling as though the concentration on this thought is so deep it forces her to divert her attention to the somewhat less distracting sky. 
Grandma has been inching forward on The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess on her neglected little GameCube for the past week or so. She couldn't quite get into FF:III for the DS after finishing XII last month; the contrast between the Job system and the License Board system was just too jarring to make such a sudden switch. Besides, I think she had a bit of Final Fantasy fatigue after the last one. You can only play a single genre for so long before you get bored. That's good luck for me, however, because now I actually get to play something without her telling me how much further in the game she is. Between the two of us, Lumines II on the PSP is getting plenty of play (as is MLB '06 The Show; for whatever reason it just became addictive.) Evan sent us the codes for Lumines over XBL Arcade, but it just isn't the same without the full game.
Here's Grandma's initial take on Twilight Princess:
305031015072. Apparently, that's the friend code you'll need if you want to taunt me while I'm trying to level up my FF:III characters. I can't imagine what sort of message you'd send, though.
Lumines II has a nifty new feature the first game lacked that adds the sense of excitement that public shame and embarrassment provides. Lumines II is awesome, there's no doubt about that, but when you find yourself turning down the volume on your earphones when Hollaback Girl starts up lest the rest of the otherwise silent denizens of the dentist's office conclude that you're a Gwen Stefani fanatic, you realize that some games really highlight one's insecurities. Really, I mean- who gives a shit if I like listening to some shitty Missy Elliot song, or the Black Eyed Peas' horrible resampling of Dick Dale tunes?! I don't care! Let the bastards think whatever they want to think!
Me: "Well that would mean that Oppenheimer is god."
Grandma: "Okay, well if manufactured nethecite is the nuclear bomb, then... Nabudis is like Chernobyl, and if Dalmasca wants it to protect itself from Arcadia... then... Dalmasca is like... CUBA?!"
Grandma: "Woah, woah.. hold the fuck on. That would mean Vaan is ...OSAMA BIN LADEN?!"
Grandma: "Well, what then? North Korea? IRAN?!"
