Warty Goblin's Holiday Game Buying Guide

Its a trap

This is the time of year when mainstream game review sites post hopelessly self-serving ‘holiday buyer’s guides’ which are basically their way of showing off three important facts:

1)    Whoo boy, did we review a lot of games this year, here are the ones we attached larger numbers  to than others.

2)    Also, we know how to put hyperlinks in text.

3)    And we figured out how to photoshop some holly and tinsel onto this picture of Marcus Fenix chainsawing a dude. See how the spraying gore makes it all Christmasy? Because blood is red? Like Christmas?

Well, I am not mainstream, and I assume those of you who do read this are savvy enough to know how to look up game reviews on your own like all the big girls and boys, and I’m not going to demean you by telling you what games to buy.

            No, instead I’m going to tell you how to buy them, and also work in some subtle PC elitism at the end, because ‘tis the season. See Christmas is a very special time of year, a time of year when other people go buy things for you. The problem is, if you are like me, you have parents who are not savvy enough to go game shopping for you. This exposes you to two risks:

1)    You don’t get any games. Instead you get socks.

2)    You get the wrong games. You ask for Age of Empires 3, but instead get Empire Earth 3. This leaves you with a horrible choice, either lie to your parents and tell them it’s a good game when they explain that they didn’t have ‘that other Empire game’ so they got this instead, while you try to figure out how quickly you can burn the disk and then perform an exorcism on your computer, or tell them that the game sucks harder than hard vacuum.

This brings me to an important point: Non-gamers do not know how to buy games. It’s really not their fault, buying games is one of the least intuitive processes on the planet, requiring roughly the same amount of knowledge and balls to the wall experience as performing brain surgery with a chainsaw. You of course are OK with this, you read IGN, Gamespot, Gamespy, Gamesradar, Eurogamer, 1UP, UGO, and a few others on a daily basis. You know that VALVe is spelled like that and that Steam is either awesome/mediocre/demonspawn, the difference between the NES and the SNES, and that every Sonic game released this century should be burned at the stake by technicians wearing Hazmat suits. Your parents think Valve are those people who make games about radioactive decay, and have no idea what water vapor has to do with it anyway.

You may think that giving them an explicit list would be good enough. You would be wrong. How do you account for the fact that most games come out on four or five completely incompatible hardware platforms, or the weird layout of the store, or the bit where every game projected to sell more than three copies will have some sort of Ultra Collector’s Special Edition, and still fit your list into a document shorter than War and Peace?

What happens with the list approach is your parents go to the store, and they become confused by the intense smell of unwashed nerd, the packed isles, and the TV which is endlessly demoing some Wii shovelware. Being children of a more innocent era, they ask the salesnerd for help, something which you or I know is only permissible when you are asking if they carry an ultra hardcore title made by some studio in the second world with an unpronounceable name that came out a year ago and suffered from what the industry refers to as ‘localization issues’, which is code for ‘makes “all your bases are belong to us” look like Hemingway.’ This immediately establishes your bona-fides as being sufficiently hardcore, and the salesnerd realizes he’s not going to be able to unload five year old football games on you, you really don’t need a gaming magazine since you have the internet, and that you already have all forthcoming Blizzard games pre-ordered, including ones that haven’t even been announced yet.

Your parents on the other hand just don’t have the look, the three foot stare of a real gamer.  When they are confronted with a creature made of pure evil the size of a skyscraper, their first thought isn’t to make a pile of boxes and stab it in the eyeball, and there’s no way to hide this lack of 1337ness. They’re a bit clueless in the alien environment, clutching your Moby Dick sized list in hand, and trying to figure out how to pronounce ‘Left 4 Dead,’ probably compromising at ‘Dead Left 4. The salesnerd lives for people like this. He’s got a shelf of good games, which actually move, and a set of crap games which sell at a pace that makes continental drift look zippy. His only chance to unload them is on people like your parents. Asking him for help isn’t walking into an ambush, it’s walking down the middle of a crime ridden district at midnight wearing only a suit made out of money and a slightly confused yet nonthreatening smile.

Thus the salesnerd explains how although Fallout 3 has all of those five out of five reviews on its cover, they are from reviewers who are totally bought out, and therefore meaningless. What the hardcore gamer in your parent’s lives really really wants is some pile of ‘Family Fun’ style Wii party games. Your parents consult the list, unsure whether or not you even own a ‘We.’ The salesnerd does his best Helpful Saleshuman impression, and asks if you ever wave the controller around when playing, knowing that all gamers wave the controller around when playing. Your parents answer yes, because admit it, you wave that controller around too, and then the salesnerd explains that this means you’ve probably got a Wii since that’s how you control Wii games. Your parents are good people, they try to do what’s right, but the salesnerd makes the snake in the Garden of Eden look amateur. After all the snake was selling an apple, which at least tastes good, and nobody on the planet has yet to come up with anything positive to say about Wii Party Games 39.

So your well meaning parents buy you Wii Party Games 39: Shovelfulls of Fun and it’s ‘smash hit’ sequel Wii Party Games 39,298: Direct from the Shovel, along with a pre-order on a sequel to a boring game that came out two years ago to  thunderous ‘mehs’ across the internet, and a subscription to a magazine that’s still running previews for Starcraft: Ghost.

           

            So what is a gamer to do? The answer is really simple, at least for those of us enlightened enough to use PCs, just ask for a Steam gift certificate. Even your parents can’t get that wrong. You console sorts are out of luck. Consider it retribution for Wii Party Games 40,000: GRIMDARK Shovelware edition.