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by Casey Johnston / May 27, 2010

 
    

This guy loves all the bits and pieces associated with gaming. He actually bought the
Nintendo Power Glove and the Virtual Boy. He has Rumble Paks on his Rumble Paks.
Maybe he just really likes Nintendo« No wait, there¶s a stack of every color of PlayStation
memory card ever made. He always shows up with his own controller in pristine condition,
and you laughed at him when he brought over the Master Chief helmet that came with the
Legendary edition of Halo 3, because it¶s tiny and you can¶t actually wear it. Then he used it
to build a scale model that actually fit, and you were kind of jealous.

     
Ok, I thought pot made your reaction time slower. I thought being on the phone while doing
stuff made you less skillful. I thought having played the game before would give me some
kind of advantage. Yet here you are, high as a kite, talking on the phone with your girlfriend,
never having played this game before, and beating the crap out of me. I don¶t know whether
to salute you or cut you up into little pieces and hide them in the CD tray.

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Doing stuff out of order just freaks this guy out. Don¶t ever invite him to play multiplayer on
a level he hasn¶t played through himself on single player. He won¶t put down a game until he
has every scenario beaten, every achievement achieved. ³I¶d love to play MF2 with you,
man,´ he says, ³but I¶m still working on GTA IV.´ He still brags about how, at the age of 12,
he got every star in Super Mario 64 in perfect order. You wonder seriously whether he puts
this on his resume.

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He¶s indifferent about games today, but oh man, were you alive when the first Super Mario
came out? That game was tight. The mechanics, the controls, both groundbreaking and
breathtaking. Halo can¶t hold a candle to GoldenEye; A Link to the Past leaves Uncharted in
the dust. His reaction to any Call of Duty titles is lukewarm at best, though in a private
conversation he¶ll admit he finds the realism of the guns frightening.
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This guy loves his old games, but he can¶t play them any more because every one of his
consoles is completely trashed. The floor of his room is littered with scratched CD¶s, and
even when playing his 360 you can¶t use the left trigger or it¶ll erase his whole hard drive.
His controllers have brown grime in every nook and cranny, and starting up his console
blows a hurricane of dust up from behind the TV. Because of this guy, you get down on your
knees and thank your older brother for forcing you to swiffer the entertainment center, lest
you receive a beating by his hand.

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No points for originality here² he plays games until dawn, with empty energy drink cans
covering every horizontal surface in his room, which, yes, is still in his mom¶s house. You¶re
his only friend left that isn¶t represented by an avatar, because he makes way too many
gaming jokes and disdains anyone who isn¶t on at least their fourth prestige in Call of Duty.
Any game he touches, he masters; if only that were a marketable skill.

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This guy has never lost a fair game, ever. He always wins. Except when he loses, but that¶s
only when the game is glitchy, every other player is modding, the connection drops, someone
resets the modem, a small focused lightning storm over Texas brings the servers down, or
everyone else had made more animal sacrifices to the gaming gods. I mean, if it weren¶t all
that stuff, he¶d win all the time, no problem.‘