Game reviewers all have giant targets on their heads: Offer an opinion or score of any sort, and someone somewhere is going to want to kill you.
Or at the very least, tear down your character like it was a dollar-store piñata. During my 13 years in gaming media, I've been called biased for and against so many games and companies, I actually think they've all balanced out, and I'm technically back at "neutral."
In more recent years, however, due to the high review scores I've given to Halo 3 and Gears of War (10 out of 10 for both), I've been accused of being a Microsoft/Xbox fanboy by some message board folks. Well, damn...if I'm going to be called a fanboy, at least let me steer everyone in the right direction.
Sure, I've sat at my TV before, casually playing Halo by myself, studying maps, weapon locations and respawn times, jumping angles, and worst, the dispersing of shotgun pellets at various distances. (You'd think my game was better than it actually is....)
That's nothing, though. If I'm a fanboy of anything, it'd be these five games or series below. You want to see crazy? And unreasonable obsessions? Read on...but more importantly, tell us your stories on Bitmob (tag: "fanboy confessions") or in the comments below.
The game: Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow (also: Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory)
The obsession: As detailed on the last Mobcast, friend and former EGM coworker Mark MacDonald and I used to hold classes to teach our friends how to play and get the most out of multiplayer Pandora Tomorrow. That's right...classes. We'd have open voice chat and walk players through the levels, teaching them tactics and how to navigate the labyrinthine stages and look out for enemy-alerting motion sensors. It was an awesomely complicated game, and we were trying to get as many friends into it with us as possible.
I still listen to the Chaos Theory soundtrack by Amon Tobin today...one of the best in all of gaming.
I think I'm still in love....
The game: Dark Reign
The obsession: I once made charts detailing every unit in this real-time strategy game: their costs, movement, damage, damage type, and so on. Once you're making charts, you're in a new tier of dorkdom. We used to play all night then discuss strategies the next day at work -- it would drive our coworkers absolutely nuts.
Perhaps my proudest gaming moment ever was when I created and submitted a Dark Reign map, which made it into a user-map-compilation retail package. I'm still waiting for the royalty checks no one ever promised me...11 years later.
The game: Advance Wars
The obsession: I played through all the games in this series four to five times each, and I used to sneak in local wireless games throughout the workday with nearby coworkers back when I was at EGM. If that's not obsessive enough, then how about this: I would take unnecessary movement/steps/turns or beat a level the extra long and complicated way, all to work toward meaningless in-game achievements in Dual Strike. I never got all 300 of them, but I got sadly close.
The game: Soul Calibur
The obsession: Namco once brought by a preview version of Soul Calibur to the EGM offices. After they left, taking the disc with them, I was jonesing so bad, I was actually literally sad. We ended up jury-rigging an old Soul Calibur arcade board so that we could practice in the office until the Dreamcast reviewable or retail release came out. After getting the finished game, our office addiction got so bad, we used to organize tournaments and ladder competitions to give ourselves excuses to play during normal work hours.
The game: The Bard's Tale (the original)
The obsession: If you use recycled paper products, chances are you can find traces of one of my old Commodore 64 Bard's Tale maps in them somewhere. I used to spend hours and hours and hours mapping out every single square, wall, room, doorway, and special location in every dungeon and tower of the first game. (Thank God they introduced automapping for the 84 levels in Bard's Tale 3, or I might've been institutionalized.) So back then it was all pencils, truckloads of grid paper, and a lot of patience -- damn teleporters and spinners nearly destroyed my cartographer soul.
And Bard's Tale veterans probably remember a specific level-grinding gold mine of a fight with four groups of 99 berserkers. Go in, blast them with spells, leave after you've won, reset the encounter, and repeat for all the XP your nerd heart would ever desire. I spent way too much of my youth in this one room, mainly because it was a painfully slow battle -- to report damage, the game would load and list an individual line of text for each attack on each of the 396 berserkers each round until you've killed them all.
I'm sure you all have much better stories to tell about your fanboyism and obsessions, so let's hear them!
