According to my running tally* of all the video games I have ever played in my life, I recently played my 750th game ever.

My 750th game: Plants vs. Zombies (PC). Awesome.

This makes me think back to the first game I ever remember playing, which is hard because I was tiny and my memory was sketchy. At the time, I didn't think I'd be writing about it decades later.

I'm pretty sure that the first game I ever played was: Donkey Kong (Cabinet in an Italian restaurant)

Although it is possible that it might have been one of these instead: Pac Man, Space Invaders, Galaxian, or an ASCII Hangman game loaded from a cassette (Atari 400)

750. Seven hundred and fifty. Seven-Five-Oh. I've come a long way.

*Undoubtedly inaccurate due to poor memory; incomplete Wikipedia lists; confusion about sequels, expansions, iterations, demos, cross-platform versions, and games I've only tried for a minute or two. Whenever I had any doubt about including a game, I didn't include it

...

EDIT: Thinking harder on the matter, it is entirely possible that the first game I ever played was an Intellivision, Colecovision, Atari 2600, or Nabu Network game.

I'm going to quit drinking coffee this month. Each week I'm going to cut my coffee drinking in half and see how it goes. (After the last week, I'll stop completely so that I don't get stuck in a caffeinated Zeno's Paradox.)

I'm not going off of caffeine altogether, mind you. Tea and chocolate (and Coke when I have headaches) are still fair game. I'm just going off coffee. I drink too much and it wastes cash that I could otherwise be spending on MOAR GAMEZ!!!1!

Let's see if I can do it… I have a tendency for migraines and I have a kid who likes getting me up before 5:30 a.m and coffee helps me deal with both of these…

Why do I mention this in a games blog? Well, as a side study, I'm going to see if, by the end of the month, I've gotten any worse at video games for lack of any coffee-induced buzz. ;)

Here I go.

...

...

Man, I'd probably have a better shot at this if I could get a trophy for it…

A lot of the games we play involve heroes. But what does it mean to be a hero in real life?

Phil Zimbardo has started a site and project called the Heroic Imagination Project which appears to be taking an interesting approach to answering the above question.

http://heroicimagination.org/

Every one of us can be a hero, even away from our games.

I made an observation like this once before, about video games affecting my thinking in real life, when I wondered what my rapidly-developing infant son would spend his next skills points on. (Answer: Agility (he's now walking), Defense (he now has more teeth), and Speechcraft (he can now say 'bus').)

Anyway, this past weekend, I ran a 5K race, pushing my son along in a jogging stroller. The race was packed. Over 9000 people. From the starting signal, it took 6 minutes before my son and I even crossed the starting line!

So, it didn't turn out to be much of a race. With so many people, and with me pushing a big stroller, I could hardly pass anybody. It was frustrating—I was hoping that we would get an excellent racing time, and here I was stuck behind slow runner after slow runner.

Then I thought about different game modes, like fighting games with Survival or Time Attack, and I saw this situation as the same thing. I was in a race, but the game mode here was not to run into other people, of which there were plenty. Then it became fun again. I dodged and weaved and navigated like a craft charging through bullet hell or a Battletoad on a hover bike, and I was satisfying my alternate objective since the standard time objective wasn't working out.

In the end, we beat the game mode, because we finished the race without hitting anyone's heels or making anyone fall over, and we had a good time of it too. Once more, thank you video games!

Just got my fifth platinum trophy by beating God of War III on Titan difficulty. Nice. :)

I got the Tetris PSP Mini. The game itself is awesome. You can't go wrong with Tetris. But it takes just as long to load as a full-size UMD game. Why? The Minis splash screen stays up much longer than it needs to and you can't skip any of the game's opening screens.

If the NES could have you up and playing Tetris within 7 seconds of turning on the system, why can't the PSP have you playing a 21MB game, specifically referred to as a 'Mini', running off the memory card, at least within 7 seconds of selecting the game?

End aerobie rant Mini.

Speaking of Tetris: If you have not yet seen The God of Tetris, then you must see The God of Tetris.

Addendum: I checked my watch last time I played PSP Tetris. On the PSP-Phat, 55 seconds elapsed between launching the game and actually getting to play the game.

If you haven't played Portal yet, go to Steam right NOW and get Portal for free. It's one of the best games ever made. And it's now free for a week!

A writer at GamesRadar brought up an interesting topic recently. He explored the idea of gaming moments that make you, the gamer, feel morally uncomfortable. I experienced this recently playing God of War III. (Part of the reason I play GoW is to experience something far removed from myself, to play a character whose beliefs and behavior differ so vastly from my own. Another reason is just to play something totally epic.) Early on in the game, Kratos fights Poseidon, and my stomach turned at how brutally Kratos dispatches the God of the Sea. Poseidon isn't portrayed as evil; he is just defending Olympus and Zeus from a berserk Spartan. Yet, he is ruthlessly, horrifically broken by Kratos. It is very unsettling.

I can think of two other times I've felt similarly uncomfortable. The first was during the first God of War when Kratos sacrifices a caged warrior at a flaming altar. (Hey. If I recall correctly, the sacrifice was made to Poseidon. So maybe Poseidon isn't so clean-cut after all if he accepts this behaviour!) The second was pretty much the entire span of Shadow of the Colossus from the death of the first Colossus to the end of the game.

I didn't bring this up to discuss morality or violence in video games necessarily (I know I have a habit of doing that). I guess I brought it up to marvel at how far games have come that they are able to make me experience such a broad range of emotions. Pac-Man or Dig Dug never made me feel this way…

Speaking of God of War: I finished the Challenge of Olympus a couple of nights. It was far easier than the challenges in GoW I & II, if you're thinking of giving it a try.

And, Super Street Fighter IV is awesome. The replay system is awesome. You can save replays of your fights to your hard drive for microscopic analysis of your SF strategy and suckage. And, if you're good enough, you can even upload replays on occasion for all to watch. I was never good enough to do this in SFIV, but I recently uploaded my first SSFIV replay. I don't think it will be of any help or interest to anyone playing SSFIV, but I'm proud to have at least one replay in circulation!

I'm not ashamed to admit that I collect trophies. I find them an enjoyable additional incentive for playing those games that I was already going to play to begin with. Often, trophies encourage me to play a game longer, or on a higher difficulty setting, or in a different game mode than I probably would have played without them. So it's great. For me, trophies extend a game's playlife.

And I always make sure, while I am collecting trophies, that I am having fun. If it ever turns out that I'm just grinding for a trophy and not actually enjoying the process, I make a point of stopping.

Recently, I got Super Street Fighter IV. I did a double-take when I looked at the trophy list and figured out what needed doing in order to get them all. In order to get all of the trophies in Super Street Fighter IV, you have to, at minimum:

1. Beat Arcade mode on Hardest* with all 35 characters (* The trophy says to do it on Medium with all characters, but you need to beat the game on Hardest with each character to get all the titles, which are required for another trophy)
2. Clear every character's trials (again, there are 35 characters, and each character has about 25 trials)
3. Rank every character up to C by fighting online (ONCE MORE, THERE ARE 35 FREAKIN' CHARACTERS to do this with!)
4. Fight 300 online matches, and win 100 matches online
5. Win 10 ranked matches in a row (which took me more than 500 matches to complete in SFIV)
6. Win 10 Endless Battle fights in a row (which is like doing 10 ranked matches in a row all over again)
7. Win 10 Team Battles
8. Create 30 Endless Battle lobbies
9. Create 30 Team Battle lobbies
10. Fight 30 Fight Request matches
11. Watch 30 Replays
12. Execute 365 Ultra or Super Combo Finishes (which I already did in SFIV)
13. Unlock all colors, taunts, titles, and icons
14. Plus a pile of other, less complicated tasks you may or may not accomplish in the process of doing all this other stuff

Numbers 1 to 3 are the hardest and most time-consuming tasks, and immediately I am doubting that chasing trophies in SSFIV will be worth it, especially considering the fact that I never even finished the hard trials in the original SFIV. I might have to give these trophies a miss.

I find that trophies work well enough in adventure games like God or War, or in racing games like WipEout (although the WipEout HD trophy set is even harder than SFIV). I'm not sure how well I think trophies work in fighting games. Invariably, you have to beat the game with every character, and these days fighting games have tons. It gets too repetitive. Too onerous.

One thing I love about video games is that they are among those experiences where you can see actual improvement in your performance. Like in Batman: Arkham Asylum, for instance, I went from hardly being able to walk through an air vent to beating all of the game's combat and predator challenges. I could see a marked improvement between when I started and when I finally beat that last challenge.

And it feels good to see improvement in oneself, even in a leisure activity like video games. Improvement is something I don't always see as concretely in other areas of life, like in the workplace or as a parent or during any of my several misguided attempts to learn Japanese. I don't always see that improvement, so I don't always feel a payoff for the time I have committed. That's probably part of the reason I find games so appealing.

What I dislike though is how quickly you lose some of that skill when you stop playing a game. I played some Street Fighter IV the other night to prepare for Super Street Fighter IV, and it almost feels like I'm starting over. I've even lost some skill at DJ Hero, which I only stopped playing two months ago!

Just like with anything, I guess, you can commit to excellence at a single game (or a few games), or be generally good at many games. I've always been more of a Jack-of-all-Trades, dabbling in everything at the expense of mastering any one thing in particular. Some think that's the way to go. Some think it's the way to fail.

The choices we make in life, eh? Maybe I'll choose mastery at one thing next lifetime. :)