Video 25: Grandma plays Dead Space

A couple things about this one: first, it's dark. This is how Grandma insists on playing it (she was the same way about the Fatal Frame series). Second: I noticed she's sporting the Left 4 Dead 2 shirt she scored from PAX :)

Try as I might to get her to use the saw in a more, say.. practical manner, she gets by just shooting the holy hell out of everything until she has nothing left in her inventory. So, her equipment upgrades are a bit lacking. She just got the Level 4 suit at the end of chapter 9 (that's where she is in the video).

But it's not like I can talk. I can't help her in Dead Space. I'm really quite horrible myself.

Thank you again to Ian for the incredible game. Grandma's very near the end of the story on Normal mode, and, per your suggestion, she's going to take a crack at a greater difficulty.

With the lights on, maybe.

Game on!

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EA's Ian Milham gives Grandma the gift of awesomeness

In yet another puzzling roadblock for Grandma's quest to answer "Who the fuck am I?", Ian Milham, art director of Dead Space, sent Grandma a very special Halloween present.

And the fantastic depiction of Grandma wielding a 211-V Plasma Cutter was only the beginning.

Ian assures Grandma that her apparent love of survival horror games is not at all complete without the addition of Dead Space. Sure, she loved Resident Evil. Sure, she loved Fear. Sure, she nearly swerved off the road when I told her the new iteration of Fatal Frame wasn't coming stateside. But the man worked hard on Dead Space. He worked hard specifically for people who love getting the shit scared out of them as they waltz their controller down another corridor painted with flickering light. People like Grandma. Who are we to deny Grandma the pleasure of surround-sound induced nightmares? Who are we, he would surely argue, to prevent her from seeing mangled and terrifying hell-creatures ripping her game-manifest body to pieces?

Well?

And who can argue with that, really.

So Ian sent Grandma the above drawing.

And also this:



Grandma was honored, thrilled, and honestly a little perplexed.

But what made her the most excited..


She's already on chapter 3 :)

Ian, thank you. That was fantastic. Grandma insists on playing it in the dark with the volume cranked up.

Grandma: "Tell him.. I don't know, ..tell him it's harder to be scared when I know these things were made by a big sweetheart. Or is that too corny? Shit, I don't know what to say. Tell him THANK YOU! And ask him where I get the saw thingy!"

Game on.

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Video 24: Grandma plays Brutal Legend

I'd say never so much before has a game made Grandma squeal with joy whilst simultaneously pissing her off, but you know that's not true. That describes pretty much every goddamn game she likes.

She absolutely adored it.

Brutal Legend is not an easy game. Usually if a game seems relatively impossible, Grandma will lower down the difficulty, play until she gets the hang of things and slowly raise it up. That's how she made it through Veteran difficulties in the Call of Duty series, for instance.

Brutal Legend is, well.. fucking brutal. The demo never really allowed one to preview its RTS-esque functions, so even though she knew it was coming, it was still difficult to switch from her Halo Wars view of RTS strategy into this new technique of augmenting the shit out of oneself and plowing towards an objective. The difference between Gentle, Normal, and Brutal modes seems to be a test on how much you can utilize doubleteaming effectively. Grandma likes to just smash the hell out of things without resorting to that triangle button, but she got used to it.

Enough to get through it on Normal so far, anyway.

One could argue that Brutal Legend tries to be a whole bunch of different games. Twisted Metal, Psychonauts, Overlord, with a hint of Guitar Hero and a dash of Starcraft. For comparisons' sake, that's fair. But the game has an overriding theme that's held soundly, Metal, that gave it a soul of its own.

The art and the music bring everything together very, very nicely.

After watching Grandma play one particularly beautiful cutscene that I won't give away, I can never listen to the song Mr. Crowley the same way again. And I don't mean that it was ruined. Far from it. It just fit, hauntingly.

THAT is the best way I can describe Brutal Legend. Everything just fits. It NEEDED the car action; it NEEDED the stage battles; it NEEDED that story for it to all work.

The voice acting was perfect. These people gave life to the characters. I don't have to mention any names, you can already think of a dozen games where the voice acting was unnecessary and annoying. I can't imagine Brutal Legend without them, honestly. And that's rare.

And it was the characters who gave Grandma the most joy. This was a surprisingly great fucking story. When it starts, you think "okay, quirky dude kills some bad dudes and does quirky things." And the game lets you believe that.

For awhile.

But I won't ruin it.

Grandma insists it was the driving that gave her the biggest challenge, but I was the one sitting at the computer in her game room listening to her swear at her television, and I can tell you those stage battles can be HARD.

"GOD DAMMIT. I need so many fans to make the army big but they keep knocking down my towers but I can't fight them because I don't have an army! COCKSUCKERS, NO GODDAMMIT"
-"Build an army, then."
"I DON'T HAVE ANY FUCKING FANS!"

She'd shove her controller at me and give me a puppy-dog look, and I'd try to do it. The thing is, I really suck. So she'd get frustrated just watching me.

"No, you have to use the roadies, the speaker guys to sneak up to the stage."
-"How do you do that?"

"Use the face melter. THE FACE MELTER!"
-"What?"
"Here, gimme..."

And then she'd take the controller back :)

Full disclosure and all, Grandma bought her copy, and I got her the Brutal Legend hoodie she's rocking in the video. She preordered her game from Gamestop (at PAX, on a little computer at the EA booth), but we did see it at Target for $10 less than other places if you don't have a copy yet. It's safe to say we worship Tim Schafer and his merry band of lunatics, but Grandma would be happy to tell him to go fuck himself if the game was shit.

This game is not shit. You will not be disappointed if you expect a game made by brilliant crazy people. Just dive into it for a few hours and you'll know what we mean.

Double Fine put a hell of a lot of heart into this thing. It's just a real bitch to pry it from their steely metal ribcages.

Game on!

**edit** Holy shit, you guys! Kotaku gave Grandma some love... again! Thank you, Owen! We're not traffic whores by any stretch, but it's always exciting getting a link like this. We love you guys. If you jump a couple posts down, you'll read about our brief reunion with Stephen Totilo at PAX. (He's really short.) Rock!

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Helter Skelter

Grandma has been enjoying the hell out of Beatles Rock Band on her PS3. We're poor, so she bought one of those value-deal type thingies where it came with the original Rock Band instruments instead of the cool new Beatles instruments. And that's okay. We already had the original Rock Band for the kids' PS2, and the instruments are the same, so now we have two of everything, which is enough to do almost everything in the game, except for the trophies that require more than two vocal parts.

Also, all of us kind of suck at it, so the PSN trophies were never an issue anyway.

It seems that God didn't want Grandma to play Brutal Legend, but Grandma is apparently more persistent than God. A few days before her preorder arrived, her 360 finally went to that great gig in the sky after a single level of Lego Indiana Jones we picked up in a bargain bin at WalMart. After three red rings of death in about four years, the poor thing is out of warranty, but Grandma discovered again she's got amazing friends to help her out.

We first saw Beatles Rock Band at PAX, as part of the Omegathon. Grandma dug Guitar Hero and the sequels, but only so much. She only recognized so many of the songs and often, the songs she didn't recognized annoyed her; a frustrating hurdle to jump to possibly unlock a song or two she knew. This wasn't the case with BRB. She, like the rest of us, knew damn near all the songs. So from start to finish it was simply a joy.

She got the Day Tripper trophy the first day.

Of course, that was playing it like she plays Guitar Hero. By herself. And that's not how Rock Band was meant to be played. For us to come anywhere close to five-starring a song, we need all four of the Fab Four, so to speak. We were apprehensive at first, if only because the space in front of Grandma's television is pretty tiny in her game room. In order to fit everyone, we had to take temporarily take out her recliner and replace it with a few bar stools. Luckily, one was short enough where it wasn't completely impossible to reach the bass pedal on the drum set, but it was still a pain in the ass; it would flop up in the air if you took your foot off, so we have to come up with a way to tape it down or something. I don't know yet.

Grandma missed the clicking of the Guitar Hero guitars, but she got used to it well enough.

It was also fun to see her face light up on some of the more trippy songs like Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds; the high-def swirling visuals behind the playing field were amazing, if not a little distracting. She was so focused on getting the notes right she didn't even really notice at first.

"That's fucking... ...wow!"

But the amazement and nostalgia of the songs quickly fell to the sheer frustration of getting through them as, one by one, we ventured from Medium to Hard to Expert. Coupled with the heat of being in such a small space with so many people and the drunken buzz Maker's Mark does to a body, and this fun, happy game sounded like team-chat on a Counter-Strike server.

"Goddammit, somebody save Josh."
-"I CAN'T DO IT!"
"FUCKING SAVE HIM! WE'RE GOING TO FAIL!"
-"YOU FUCKING SUCK, JOSH."

"Awwww shit... aww shit... this ain't gonna happen. Who the hell stuck me with the bass in this song."

"Who's going to sing?"
-"Screw that, I'm not drunk enough."
"YOU'RE NEVER DRUNK ENOUGH."
-"I KNOW!"

And yet we still play, when we have the chance. Moving the chair out of the way and setting up the instruments makes the decision to play Beatles Rock Band a heavy one. When we decide to do it, we're in for the evening.

Grandma felt her Xbox 360 was a bit lonely while we were all jamming on the PS3, and the preorder for Brutal Legend was still a couple weeks away. We had played Lego Star Wars pretty much to death, with still a couple things in it yet to do. Now that I think about it, which actually own it twice. We have a copy of the Original Trilogy, and a copy of The Complete Saga, both for the 360. Grandma felt we could use some more Lego goodness without overindulging on Star Wars. Lego Indiana Jones was $20 bucks. Good bargain.

And there it sat for awhile, unopened. Finally, when the game room was free and we had some time to kill, we booted up her 360 and got ready to kick ass with Dr. Jones.

After dicking around the first level, the loading screen froze. Okay, no biggie, we restarted the system. Then the flying "X" orb on boot-up froze.

I began to panic a little bit.

We shut it off and let it sit for awhile.

"I told you, it's been going on me."
-"Sure, but games freeze sometimes, it's no big thing."
"No, I mean.. like frequently. I'll be playing poker and it will just lock up."
-"Let's just see what happens. It's probably fine."

This time when we turned it on it made it all the way to the Dashboard before locking up.

We turned it off. Turned it on. Black screen. Three blinking red lights.

God dammit.

Grandma became despondent.

"FUCK! FUCK-FUCK-FUCK, NOOOO! Brutal Legend is going to be here in days!"
-"What do you want me to do?"
"SHIT. Well... I guess we have to get it fixed. I can't be without my 360!"
-"I know."
"It's going to go to Texas, it will be a few weeks. Brutal Legend is going to have to wait, I guess. FUCK."
-"At least you have Beatles Rock Band in the meantime."
"Yeah... ...god dammit. Maybe it's okay, try it again, maybe it's was just a hiccup or something."

The 360 went to the three red flashing lights as soon as I hit the button.

-"Nothing."
"Damn."

We went to the Xbox support page and followed the troubleshooting guide, thinking, hoping maybe it was just a power supply problem or something similar, but no such luck.

It was dead.

Grandma moved away from the television to the computer. "I'll email Evan. He'll know how to get the repair started. He helped me last time."


As expected, Grandma's copy of Brutal Legend arrived right on time and completely unplayable. We begrudgingly took it to GameStop and exchanged her unopened 360 copy with an unopened PS3 copy; an admission to ourselves that her 360 would be out of commission for awhile.

However, now she could kick some Brutal Legend ass.

God or Satan or whoever controls Grandma's gaming luck decided once again that it was not to be.

The next morning, the very moment she put the disc in her PS3, the power in the house shut off. Being the silly person I am, I took a walk down into town to see if it was just our house. The police station was running on a generator, the gas stations were closed, and the Post Office was dark. Nobody had power.

"Somebody really doesn't want me to play this game," said Grandma.

She's upstairs now, somewhere on that huge map, figuring out the mechanics and oddly, the strategy of the thing. She finds the game completely remarkable. And best played loud :)

We'll have lots more on Brutal Legend soon. Grandma is loving every second of it.

But right now I want to talk about Grandma's Xbox 360.

When she first got it, it was that first week of January 2006 on the empty set of TRL. Poor Jeff Castaneda lugged it across Times Square because Grandma was dying to hook it up to the television in her hotel room. (If you watch the credits of Beatles Rock Band, you'll recognize that name.) And then he lugged it back because the box was all unpacked and we wouldn't be able to take it on the plane the way it was :)

When you look inside Grandma's game cabinet, you notice right away most of her games have that recognizable white edge corner with the green logo. Her Xbox 360 games collection is only second to her PS2 collection, and just barely.

Much of that, as you recall, is thanks to Evan from Edelman/Microsoft.

After Grandma emailed him about her 360's final in warranty death, and to find out, honestly, which version of the console she should look for when she buys a new one in the coming weeks, Evan responded simply "...let me see what I can do."

He put Grandma in touch with Natalie, another Edelman/Microsoft warrior.

I came home from the store to find Grandma floating around the kitchen.

"Guess what!"
-"What?"
"About the 360. Guess."
-"It's working again?"
"No."
-"They'll wave the repair fee for you?"
"Kind of..."
-"....no fucking way."
"Yes!!"
-"They didn't."
"It's already been shipped."
-"Holy shit, was that Evan?"
"Evan and Natalie! I even got to talk with Evan a bit today too. I called him up."

They are sending Grandma a brand spanking new Xbox 360 system. All she has to do is swap the harddrive and it's like nothing happened at all.

It arrives tomorrow.

So Halo 3: ODST, Dead Rising 2, Left 4 Dead 2, all the stuff she wanted to play coming up.. she's got a system to play them on. How fucking cool is that? :)

None of us expected this. She was grateful just to get the one before. We were going to save up some money and buy one that would last her until the next generation of the Xbox line. Now she gets to use that money for a different purpose. GAMES.

Game on!

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PAX 2009: Holy Shit

Our plane just landed back in Cleveland a little while ago.

Businessmen and tourists have the luxury of West to East jet-lag that allows them the magical feeling of being in the future when they get home. We were not afforded such pleasures. The last five days were so solidly packed with awesome that the artificial systems of time imposed upon the rest of the world no longer hold meaning to us.

Our money is gone, our feet are blistered, our backs are crooked, our suitcases bursting with swag, and I can't be certain but I'm pretty sure we killed a man. At this point I don't know. It wouldn't surprise me. I have this general, haunting feeling that we've done horrible things that were drowned from our memories in an ocean of euphoric, unnatural joy.

That's why I have to write this now. All of it. While I still have notes. Before I forget.

Thursday - September 3rd - Plane juggling - Seattle - Fark People - The Madness Begins


We sat in Cleveland Hopkins Airport watching a little boy race imaginary enemies with his own, empty stroller in front of terminal, waiting for the employees of American Airlines to clock in and start their work day. The boy's parents exchanged exhausted looks of encouragement that gave away the Dramamine and NyQuil in their carry-on luggage. A woman wearing a light Hawaiian shirt stood outside smoking a cigarette next to a sign saying she shouldn't. She would check her watch every few moments between unnecessarily long drags of nicotine and look back at the counter as though someone watching her passive-aggressive frustration would say to themselves "gee, that woman looks like she's in a hurry. We'd better get our asses out there."

A man who wanted everyone to know he was An Experienced Traveler casually plopped his huge goddamn bag onto check-in scales before the currently motionless conveyor belt, deliberately taking note of its reading. He seemed like he approved of whatever it read.

Curious, I followed his example. The bag with our clothes was 43.9lbs. I didn't know if that was good or bad. I carefully unpacked a hoodie and put it on just in case. 43.2lbs. Good for me, I guess.

Grandma was happily munching on some Werther's hard candy we picked up from Giant Eagle the night before. She handed me one and I immediately recognized how goddamn cliche we were. Still tasty, though. I almost choked on it.

I walked to the smoker's area outside by the drop-off curb, annoyingly excited to be there. The TSA employees didn't return my disgustingly cheerful "good morning!" as I passed. I paced a little, smoking what was to be my last cigarette until Seattle and almost tripped over a girl wearing a Sbarro uniform hanging her head over a coffee looking sullen.

Back inside, the United and Delta desks became active and lively. Our American Airlines desk at the end remained empty, and Hawaiian Shirt Lady looked as though she was going to pace even faster and more angrily lest they get off their fucking ass and get over there.

"So what do you want to see first when we get there?" I asked Grandma.
-"I don't know."
"Well, do you want to do some tourist shit? Go shopping? Anything particular you don't want to miss in the city?"
-"Sure, we can explore a little."

Seattle wasn't really on her mind. PAX was. PAX didn't start until Friday, so anything else was just groovy. Ever the overly-prepared dickhead, I produced a printout of the PAX schedule from a folder in my camera bag.

"I can't read this shit," she said, making a face.
-"Why not?"
"It's too fucking small!"
-"I printed it from a .pdf so it would be on one page," I explained. But, being the overly prepared dickhead that I am, I gave her a big stack of papers from a different folder; the complete list and summaries from Penny Arcade of each panel with their time and theater.

She leafed through it.
"Which one is Tim Schafer in?"
-"I think it's Friday night at 6:00pm."
"Is it just him and Brutal Legend or what is it?"
-"I don't know."
"Is it a Q&A? Will we get to talk to him?"
-"I don't know, that's all I have right there."
"When is Annie's panel?"
-"Saturday at 10:30am."
"Who is she speaking with?"
-"I don't know! Read the thingy! That's why I printed them."
"When is Blair's thing?"
-"...."
"I'm screwing with you, you know."
-"I know."

A single American Airlines employee finally came up to the counter. People we hadn't realized were waiting near us appeared from nowhere, getting in line. We didn't care. There was no hurry.

But standing there in line, every scenario I didn't want to imagine popped into my head. What if the zipper on the luggage breaks? I wondered. What if the e-ticket number doesn't work and it doesn't show us? What if the shampoo bottle leaks through the grocery bag I wrapped it with and gets on our clothes? What if some Quebec Separatist with the same name as me found his way on a no-fly list? What if we took the wrong credit card? What if we fucking crash into Lake Erie? Would we still be able to make PAX on Saturday after the FAA investigation into our water landing? How long does that shit take exactly?

The man took our bag and $15. He gave us our boarding passes and we made the long walk through security.

Grandma has always tried to rush through getting her shoes off and putting her jacket in the plastic bins. She does it too quickly out of fear of appearing inattentive to the impatience of those behind us in line. Because of this, she almost trips herself getting it done. Wearing pajamas and a t-shirt with my hoodie and slippers in the bin, I strolled through that goddamn arch of doom practically daring it to beep. When Grandma walked through, it lit up like a police dog in a bodega.

After two knee replacements and a recent heart bypass surgery where they stitched her up with piano wire and a staple gun, she tends to know the drill at airports.

I waited for her public interrogation to end sitting on a bench eying my camera bag. Probably not a good idea to whip that out right now, I thought.

We grabbed apple fritters and coffee and waited at the gate.

Grandma noticed a youngish couple sitting by themselves playing two matching DS-Lites. I noticed them too. We didn't say anything to each other. Grandma and I didn't need to. Unfortunately, perhaps, we assumed others would be as privy to the subtleties of our nonverbal communications.

It goes something like this:

When we saw somebody we suspected of being on their way to PAX, we we both too much of a pussy to just ask. We both developed some kind of knowing stare that retrospectively probably came off as just creepy and weird. We would wait for eye contact, look down at the DS quickly, back up at their eyes, and wait- interrogatively, as if this motion was enough to ask in a single telepathic syllable: PAX?

I suppose we expected such people to return a smile. PAX.
From which we would return a nod. Us too.
And they would return a nod. Cool.
Then maybe a long distance fist-bump of acceptance and we would go our merry way.

This did not happen.

They sheepishly avoided eye-contact and whispered awkwardly and we slunked down into our seats and gazed upwards as though we were just admiring the ceiling the whole time.


In clear weather at 30,000 feet, you can see the lights of Windsor and Detroit from the skies above Cleveland. Today was such a day. We followed the sunrise West to Chicago and landed at O'Hare International; the perfect rows of Illinois suburbs all pointing to the skyline in the distance. American Eagle is American Airlines regional service, so it was a relatively tiny plane that shook and creaked when the landing gear moved beneath us.



Like magic, the sun rose for the second time that morning. We were exactly an hour away from Chicago by air, so it made sense, but it was weird seeing it happen. Seeing the orange sunlight bounce off the freshly waxed floors in the terminals casting strange shadows onto everything reminded me of the scene in Blade Runner when Deckard first meets Rachael in Tyrell's office.

It also reminded me just how goddamn geeky my brain is sometimes.

Without anything cool too look at, Grandma started reading her book: Robin Cook's Foreign Body. I started Reading mine: Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods. I had read it before, but it was a good read for travel. I have no idea why Grandma chose her particular paperback.

Our DS friends from Cleveland apparently were not going to PAX. They got off the plane and disappeared into a parking garage. They were replaced, however, by two more DS people. They sat close, so I skipped the nonverbal banter and just came right out with it.

"If I had to guess, I'd say you were going to PAX."
-"PAX? No."
"Really?"
-"We are going to Seattle, though."
"You're really not going?" I asked, like their love of portable Nintendo gaming devices meant they must be attending.
-"We know some people who are going to PAX, but we're not."

For some reason, I was perplexed by this.

Grandma bought us some McDonald's breakfast and we wolfed down a couple McMuffins, which were neither Scottish nor muffins, and boarded the plane to Seattle.

They fed us Coca Cola and ice and we watched the earth spin below us in various checkered shades of brown. The Badlands appeared and just as quickly faded back into boring ranches. If there was a screaming baby on that plane, I wouldn't have known it. Our focus was on the hazy horizon, looking for the first signs of Montana mountains. Black rivers sat quietly between impressive hills and peaks, reflecting the sky back at us. Brown hills turned into green hills and we were in Idaho for a moment or two. Western Washington reminded me of New Mexico or Colorado with circular irrigation patterns and empty space. Just before the green returned, the clouds took over. We would see nothing until the airport.


Our first look at the Pacific Northwest was a line of conifers in every direction around the tarmac. Inside SeaTac we passed no fewer than ten coffee shops and a skinny dude wearing a Fleet Foxes t-shirt.

We had arrived.

We found the shuttle to the Sheraton and got in another line.

We found the lines to be excellent practice for the lines at PAX. We were going to be fucking line PROS by the time we got there. Everyone else would be blown away by our queue skills. They would post on Twitter about the amazing people they saw at PAX and write stories about us, telling their friends "see? THAT'S how you do that. Look at them. Goddamn."

On the shuttle, we gawked at the amazing wonders of the I-5 corridor. The peripheral license plates of Ohio were New York and Pennsylvania. Here they were Alaska, Oregon, British Colombia and Idaho. Amazing! We marveled at the number of self-storage companies. Hey! Look at that! They have 7-11's here? Astounding. And just look at the price of gas. $2.91 for regular unleaded. Jesus.

I texted all the appropriate contacts on Grandma's cell phone, mindful of time zones. We arrived at the hotel and picked up something I ordered earlier in the week at the bell desk. Something special for this trip. Something necessary that would also change the tone of the trip entirely.

A travel chair.

Not a wheelchair, mind you, a travel chair. A wheelchair has big ol' wheels one can use to propel oneself through the world. A travel chair is lighter and has little bitty wheels on the back, so the person pushing has an easier time. I anticipated a lot of pushing. It was red-plaid fabric which I found appropriate for Seattle.

How very grunge.

Attached was a receipt from the rental agency. When I ordered it, I spoke with a woman named Joyce, herself a Youngstown transplant to the area.

"Ah, so you escaped.." my standard line for such discoveries.
-"Oh, yes," laughed Joyce. "This is certainly the place to do it."

We wheeled all our shit to the elevators and anticipated our 20th floor view of the surrounding environment. When we got there, however, Grandma couldn't help but voice her disappointment.


"Awww.... I'd hoped we could see the mountains," she sighed.
-"Yeah, me too."

The view could have been from the inside of any major city, really. Lots of buildings and lots of traffic. But we didn't care all that much. We were just relieved to be there without problems and without incidental costs.

We decided to get some lunch and explore a bit.

We changed clothes and decided to give the grunge chair a spin. It was a pleasant, sunny day in Seattle. After three or four blocks of Nordstrom and American Apparel, two things were clear: first- we were in the wrong place for our socio-economic caste level. Second- I was going to die of heatstroke before PAX even started. I was wearing a t-shirt and jeans with an open longsleeve shirt layered over. Grandma was bundled up in her soft hoodie and a sweater.

"Aren't you cold?" she asked, visibly uncomfortale.
-"No, I'm good" I wheezed, pushing her up a fascinatingly steep sidewalk.

Even though I'm an overly prepared dickhead, my pre-trip Google Earth exploration of the city didn't account for Grandma-pushing induced hallucination. I couldn't find a Quizno's or a Chipotle, and the McDonalds in the distance was telling me to go fuck myself by being up three or four blocks of hill. We descended back towards Pike and 6th.

Grandma noticed a sign for a steakhouse down near the Sheraton, which I had quickly come to know as simply: "base camp." Morton's Steakhouse had a handy dandy menu outside and I rolled Grandma up to read it. When you are poor like us, you know something about menus like this. If it doesn't have prices, you have to go inside to find out. If you have to find out, you can't afford it. Morton's was easily passed up.

Then we noticed Taphouse Grill more or less directly across the street. We had never heard of it, we didn't know anything about it, all that we knew is that it had "grill" in the name and there wasn't a menu out front. Inside was what seemed like a huge goddamn staircase with a sign that read something like "please see a server at the bottom of the stairs to seat you." I looked at Grandma.

"Fuck it, I'm hungry," was her response.

She got out of the grunge chair and very slowly began walking down the stairs. We were passed a few times. Just before the bottom, a hostess asked "Hi, how are you?"
-"Tired."
"Two?"
-"Yes please."
"Okay!" And she grabbed some menus. "Just so you guys know, next time, there's an elevator like.. right there."

Grandma gave me a look. Mother. Fucker.

I ate the calamari and the halibut fish and chips with a beer. Baron Pilsner. It was REALLY good. I asked the server "so is it spelled BARREN as in.. a woman who can't conceive?"
-"No, no. BARON. Like the Red Baron."
"Oh."

And I was suddenly embarrassed.

Grandma had a Diet Coke and was eating something spicy. I begged her to try the calamari, but she just made a face and adamantly refused. "I fucking hate seafood."
-"But it tastes so goooood! I doesn't even taste fishy or like lobster or anything- it's like chicken or onion rings."
-"NO."
"Alright; your loss."
-"...."
"....but it is REALLY good."

When I'm not looking for a job, I'm usually on TotalFark bitching about not being able to find a job. The threads are always amusing and the people are groovy. It wasn't difficult, then, when I found out a TotalFarker was going to be at PAX to agree to try and meet up with as many of them as possible during the trip. Fark and TotalFark are filled with the kind of people who you know are going to be great conversation. SomethingAwful Goons share this trait. If you want to have some drinks and dick around a new city for awhile, seek out either of them and you won't be disappointed. They're good people.

A guy I've known for a long time only by the name el_dudarino was to be a volunteer at Jonathon Coulton's booth selling tshirts and CDs and the like at PAX for the duration of the convention. He submitted a Fark thread to get some like-minded folks drinking the night before the convention. While Grandma and I were eating lunch at Taphouse, he texted us "Hey, it's David. How's six at The Taphouse sound to y'all?"

Shit, that was easy.

We decided to do stupid tourist shit in the meantime. And when it comes to stupid tourist shit, Seattle has a cornucopia of choices. Of course, one stands out.

The motherfucking Space Needle.

The Space Needle is at Seattle Center, which, if I had been paying attention to local media the week before, I'd know was currently being prepped for a huge goddamn concert/art festival/mud-orgy known as Bumbershoot. All I knew was that it wasn't very far and goddamn if we're going to waste money on a cab when I can fucking see the thing looking down 5th Ave. So I decided to hoof it, pushing Grandma in the grunge chair.

After more than a few blocks, I noticed the Space Needle wasn't really getting any larger. It turns out it's quite tall, in fact. When you march up hill pushing your Grandma, who is laughing at you, carrying a camera bag, it's really not the short jaunt you think it is. The grunge chair revealed its one major flaw: the front wheels. Each curb between streets has a little ramp via ADA rules so wheelchairs and scooters can cross the road. But these ramps in Seattle still have tiny cliffs and rough-asphalt obstacles to conquer. After five or six times of trying to just ram the goddamn thing up onto the next sidewalk, nearly catapulting Grandma onto unfortunate pedestrians when it came to a stop, she opted to get out of the chair and walk with me.

She got back in when there weren't hills anymore. Which is right at the base of the thing.

Annie had warned us about The Space Needle in an email before we got here. She said it costs a ton of money to get up the thing and for the love of Christ don't eat at the goddamn restaurant. A quick look at the menu online confirmed all this. $59 steak. $20 appetizers. Sure, we love a good restaurant if we could afford it but we knew a tourist trap when we saw one. So the restaurant was out. The gift shop downstairs had all manner of "I Climbed the Space Needle!" t-shirts and Space Needle shot glasses for when you want to drink your Space Needle liquor sitting on your Space Needle snuggie watching a DVD about the Space Needle.

Hell, they might have even had a BluRay version. I don't know.

But we were going up that goddamn tower if it killed us. Grandma had fastidiously budgeted for stupid tourist shit and this was really going to be the only day to do it. Not to mention: we climbed up a goddamn mountain to get here so we might as well summit the bitch. (This was my primary reason.)

And to be honest, we were kind of curious. The view from the hotel was bad and we couldn't see much flying in because of cloud cover. The weather was pretty good now so this might be our only real chance to see some honest to god fucking mountains during this trip. When Grandma told people she was going to Seattle they'd all say "Oh, it's so pretty up there" and "you'll just love the mountains." So we had to.

We didn't have to worry about the stigma of being ridiculous tourists looking at tourist stuff because upon arriving at Seattle center, we were saturated in it. The common insult "pfft... TOURISTS" is dissipated a great deal when you're in a crowd.

So we were in the middle of people taking pictures of their kids by its foundation and pointing their cameras upwards like crazy people.

Shit, I did it too.


It was here we should have learned a valuable rule that would have aided us at PAX in the coming days.

The grunge travel chair gave Grandma special powers.

She didn't have to spend $17 to get up to the top. She only had to spend $14.

She didn't have to wait in line to ride the yellow elevator up, she got to ride the blue elevator. Which had no line.

Her bypass surgery may have weakened her, but she was, in many ways, stronger than all these other folks.

The only thing I had going for me was that, as an ex-journalist, my camera far exceeded necessity.



Even tourists with mid-level DSLRs chimped a little lower profile around me when usually they would be bragging up their new lens purchase to all those around them. To augment my high status here, I took pictures of them looking at their pictures as they wondered if they were anything like mine. (A special note: it's all the same shit, really. Unless you're in difficult lighting, then yes- my pictures will blow your goddamn mind.)



The view from the top is quite spectacular, really.

Grandma got to see mountains.

We found our way back to the road, and quickly decided against a forced march back to the hotel in favor of a quick cab ride and a bruised ego.

I approached a parked Yellow Cab with Grandma in the chair.
"Can we get to Pike and 6th?" His face sunk in a very obvious way. We were a low fare. A shit fare. Why would he take us to 6th and Pike while some other cab got that nice chunk of change driving tourists back to the Airport Marriot.
-"ummmm...."
"Look, if you can't do it-"
-"No, just... um....."
"So, no then?"
-"No. Okay." He got out of the cab to help Grandma the same way drunks exit cars to submit to sobriety tests. Reluctantly.

He drove us into traffic which we couldn't find walking and sat for awhile. He fucked around with the meter a few times. First our fare was $4.00, then $941.00, then nothing.

-"Wait, 6th and Pike or 6th and PINE?" he asked.
"6th and Pike. The Sheraton. Look it's right there, this is fine right where we are, okay? We'll get out here."
-"Ummmm....."
"Please?"
-"Okay."

He opened the door for Grandma (gee, thanks) and I retrieved the grunge chair from the trunk.

"How much do I owe you?"
-"Ten dollar."
"Okay." I handed him a twenty. "Can I get five back?" I asked, almost pleading.
-"Okay.... um.... I only have three, so...."

I took the three dollars. He took my dignity.

$17 for six goddamn blocks.

That's what I get for being lazy, I suppose. But still. Fuck you, Yellow Cab.

We dropped off our stuff at the hotel and walked back to Taphouse. Grandma was clearly still on Eastern Standard Time and trying desperately to stay awake. She also brought up a good point as we stood outside.

"Do you know what these people look like?"
-"No."
"Well... how are we going to recognize them?"
-"Hmmm..."

I texted Dave who was almost at the restaurant. He replied he'd be the one wearing a green shirt with a zombie. At that moment, a bunch of obvious PAXers walked passed us wearing Left 4 Dead t-shirts. That narrows it down. Miraculously, we all found each other. I liked them immediately.

As all of us sat around the table, drinking our alcohol of choice and munching on appetizers (calamari again, for me. It's really fucking good, I'm not even kidding) I began to feel really bad that Grandma had no reference to our conversations. We were internet people talking about internet shit because- how often does one get to do that in life? I don't mean that we were talking about memes, shit- Grandma would have gotten Keyboard Cat references- Grandma just didn't know who the hell Kitwilly is. Do you? Either way, you know what I'm talking about.

It didn't matter much, as Grandma decided to head back to the hotel and crash anyway. She wanted to get up early to queue for the Expo (I told you, we were line pros) and it was already late in the day in her East Coast head. I remained at the bar and we shot the shit for awhile before deciding to move to another place.

Having been fucked over by cabs, I didn't hesitate when they suggested taking a bus up to Capitol Hill.

From the bus ride, to the bar, after a pitcher of beer (thanks, Dave), and the long walk back downtown- I listened with genuine interest as we talked about internet marketing, technology advisement in law, local Seattle politics, Netflixing the movie Battle for Seattle, and the shitty qualities of Florida. They politely listened to my bullshit about Ohio and Cleveland and the joys of being ex-media looking for a job in a recession. We had a ball. The night seemed to go on for hours.

Back at the hotel, Grandma woke up as I walked in. The bookmark in her paperback was a little further in. I collapsed on the bed and looked at the alarm clock.

It was only 9:30pm.

Friday - September 4th - PAX Queue - The Expo - Jonathan Coulton - The Great Schafer Hunt - Friday Concerts

We arrived a little before 8:00am. We already had our badges, so we didn't have to deal with the madness of Will Call. We found our way to the Queue Room on the 4th level next to the expo hall and wheeled our way into a line already a couple columns deep. They gave us some swag bags and lanyards for our badges. We were READY.

This brings me to The Enforcers. Enforcers are volunteers at PAX that have to put up with a lot of bullshit. They guide you to where you'd like to go. They hand out the swag bags. They give you the sad news that you can't bring your Sprite into the theater during the concert. They give you your concert bracelet. They organize the lines for the panels. They know the answers to your questions that (and I'm not being disrespectful to Convention Center employees, they are awesome in ways I'll talk about later) nobody else can really answer. They set up the mics for the Q&A's and so much more. Some of them wear kilts.

Because Jerry and Mike at Penny Arcade are not douchebags, this is not a thankless job, thank Christ- they make sure their Enforcers are taken care of, but they deserve a lot of credit for making PAX work.


Just remember: Don't call it a kilt to their face.

Grandma didn't meet an Enforcer she didn't like.


There was a snarky and hilarious game to play via text messaging in the queue room. Sometimes it was merely voting which internet video to play to pass the time, sometimes it was trivia, but it was always entertaining to watch, which made the line seem to go a bit faster. It also afforded us the opportunity to hear other people say, out loud, things you don't typically hear people discuss. Things like Caramelldansen. (Now it's stuck in YOUR head, too. I regret nothing.)








Grandma returned from the women's restroom and showed me a piece of (unused) toilet paper. It was screened with ads for No More Heroes 2. We laughed. She put the toilet paper in her swag bag as a souvenir. Anyone else might think we were weird.

It was during this slow squeeze closer and closer to the expo hall where we first really noticed it.

It began as others watching us, curiously, and snapping a quick picture of Grandma with their cell phone. Then, as the noise around us increased, the looks became comments- not to us yet, but to each other.

"Hey! Grandma's here!"

"Dude, I'm standing in front of the screen and Gaming Grandma is like... right next to us. You'll probably pass her pretty soon from where you are."

"No, it was a video of her playing Resistance: Fall of Man. She's awesome."

"Who brings their grandma to PAX?"
-"No, man- that's Grandma. You know, the Gaming Grandma lady?"
"No."
-"She actually plays."
"Really?"
-"You've never seen that?"

Keep in mind, we're standing in fairly close proximity to these conversations. Sound travels, you know. We've never been somewhere like this when such a high concentration of people have either read the blog or read about her from somewhere else like Kotaku or Destructoid. It felt weird and cool simultaneously.

Then it became more direct.

"Hi, Grandma! I love you!"

"You kick ass, Grandma. It's so fucking cool you came."

"Graaaaanmaaaa haaaardcooooore!"

"Hi!" she would respond, smiling.

And after we moved on, after every instance of this amazing phenomenon, Grandma would arch her head around to look up at me with a recognizable emotion: That was cool! Many times people spoke to me instead of Grandma, and we would talk a little bit. Grandma couldn't hear. So after she'd ask "do you know that person?"
-"No."
"Who were they?"
-"That was one of your friends from the blog!"
"Oh! You were talking like you knew each other."
-"Well, we do know each other, kinda. Remember a comment a looong time ago from someone whose brother had MS?"
"....Yeah! I think I do! That was her?"
-"That was her."

It was incredible :)


Grandma leafed through her swag bag to find all manner of goodies, fliers and ads. We now have two full versions of Lord of the Rings Online that we're not quite sure what to do with. And buttons! O, the buttons. Grandma has many buttons. She read a bit about EVE Online and a magazine about making it in the games industry. Enforcers handed us our concert bracelets for the evening, the line lurched forward and the madness began.

We didn't so much casually stroll the convention floor, we assaulted it. The speed of the grunge chair on flat surfaces is only limited to the one doing the pushing, and I can push pretty fast it turns out. We ran like children from booth to booth, searching for flashing, hypnotizing stimuli to entertain and educate us. BioShock 2! Brutal Legend! Mass Effect 2! Halo 3: ODST! God of War III! We began scouting empty controllers to play. Any game will do. Just show us something cool. The PAX 10 were well chosen. A new Splinter Cell? Hooray! Bethesda is making something new? Yes! A new Ratchet and Clank? Don't mind if I do!

We engorged ourselves. Grandma and I sped through the convention like it would all disappear if we didn't tag each booth.

Hothead Games was showcasing a game called Deathspank that looked damned hilarious. We couldn't quite tell if it was a brick and mortar game or if it was XBLA. The fact that we couldn't tell was a credit to the game. After the demonstration, a dude approached us.

"Man, I just want to say- I love your blog."
-"Thank you!" People are cool. We talked about what we had just seen a bit and Grandma was trying to come up with a comparative title. It looked like something she had seen in the past, she just couldn't put her finger on it.

The dude left and we felt ten feet tall.

Exhausted and happy, we bought a couple PAX 09' shirts and added them to the wardrobe of free shirts we just liberated from the expo.

"I wonder if all this is going to make our bags too heavy when we go back" Grandma thought aloud.
-"I'll just wear all the t-shirts at once." I was only half-kidding.


The Washington Convention Center has a neat little area just outside the 4th level so smokers can do their thing without going all the way back downstairs. We bought some Subway sandwiches and headed out. Some excellent Team Fortress 2 fans allowed me to take a quick picture of Grandma among them. Later in the convention, I would accidentally run into The Heavy's ankles with the travel chair. (I am sorry about that by the way. Please don't kill me.)


It was almost 1:00pm, and the convention was now flowing nicely. Everyone had scurried off to lines for different panels or were standing in line for game demos or were standing in line to meet Wil Wheaton or standing in line at Subway or standing in line to board the elevators.. Everyone had their place in line, and it was time we entered ours.

The panel was titled "SPIKE SNEAK PEEKS." At first glance, that sounds stupid as hell. It was scheduled to run at the same time as the live Co-Op taping and the Strategic Game Design panels, not to mention the queue for the Left 4 Dead tournament. At PAX, you have to choose your panels carefully; weighing their priorities against each before picking one, mindful of queue times taking up the space of whole panels themselves. And that's okay. You can't possibly see everything, but you can come close.

Spike Sneak Peeks had one thing that took priority against all else: Tim Schafer.

We wanted to see Tim Schafer. In fact, we were greedy. If there was an opportunity for a Q&A, then we would be first on that motherfucking microphone. Whatever it took. We'd murder your enemies if it meant 45 seconds at a microphone to say thank you to Tim and DoubleFine. That's all we wanted.

But we didn't need to kill anyone to make this possible at PAX. All we needed were our awesomely powerful queue skills. This was the moment when they would be tested.

This was The Great Schafer hunt.

Spike Sneak Peeks was scheduled in the Main Theater adjacent to the Queue Room at 5:30pm. That meant if we got in line at 2:00pm, we'd have a shot at getting what we wanted.

We had about 40 minutes before our self-imposed line commencement. Outside the queue room a huge goddamn line formed for Wil Wheaton. Next to him, with a rather short contrasting line, was the one and only Jonathan Coulton.

"Holy shit! We can meet JoCo!" I exclaimed.
-"Who?" asked Grandma.
"....I tell you when we meet him, okay?"
-"Okay."

I didn't see Dave, but the table had a couple people running through the line giving people their change and merchandise.

"Hi! Grandma, this is Jonathon Coulton, who wrote Still Alive from Portal."
-"Oh!!! Hello!" Now she knew who he was and was instantly a fan.

I took their picture.


Grandma bought me the Ultimate Flash Drive which had all his music in the history of ever for $60, and came with The Best Concert Ever DVD. I don't need to tell you that my Grandma is awesome :)

Loaded down with t-shirts and swag, we opted to race back to the hotel room and unload some stuff before beginning the hunt.


We also figured out that it was impossible to carry both the huge ass still camera AND the huge ass video camera. As it was, I couldn't take many pictures when I was with Grandma because my hands were busy steering the grunge chair. We left the video camera back at the hotel and set off again. I was becoming pretty adept at pushing the thing, so I was in full gallop running to the elevators to the 4th level, skillfully avoiding the ankles of many.

We reached the queue room at 2:00pm right on the money. A very large line was emptying into the main theater for the first Penny Arcade Q&A with Jerry and Mike. We knew we couldn't do both, so we would try to see the next on Sunday. An enforcer told us where we could sit to begin the Spike Sneak Peek line.

That's right, bitches.

We were first.

We were also alone.


Grandma and I sat by ourselves in the queue room for the entire first Penny Arcade Q&A. We watched Enforcers do the regrettable business of telling folks it was full and they'd have to come back for the next one. We watched husbands and boyfriends stand awkwardly outside the women's restroom waiting for their better half to emerge refreshed. We watched a few EMS paramedics run somewhere with a gurney and a purpose. We watched Enforcers sort through the swag bags in bins for the next day. And we talked about how cool Jonathan Coulton had been.


Nobody got in line behind us. Not for a long time. But still we sat. Stoically. People would ask "what's this for?"
-"Spike Sneak Peeks."
"Oh...."
-"It's got Tim Schafer."
"Oh!" Then they'd text someone quickly and run away, presumably to go get them.

We were fucking queue PROS. We were shining.

It wasn't until the Q&A was over that some folks sat behind us. A father and son from L.A.,. They were cool. The dude was heavy into Magic Cards, so I gave him my booster pack from an earlier swag bag. I didn't have any use for them and he did. His dad and I talked a bit about the book I was reading. As we talked, the son slowly realized something.

"Wait... are you THAT Grandma? Like THE Grandma?"
-"Um..."
"Hey, Dad! We're sitting next to an internet celebrity!"
-"Oh god. No. No, no no. I'm not a celebrity. Celebrities get money," she smiled.
"You played Resistance, right?"
-"Yup!"
"Yeah! I saw that!" And suddenly he was more relaxed; more comfortable. He was just among gamers, not a gamer and his grandmother.



Slowly at first, then like a flash mob, the queue room began to fill behind us. A couple guys, confused as to where the line began and ended, sat directly in front of us. They started to get dirty looks from the people behind us. I didn't want to be the asshole that tells them to move, so I used strategy.

"Guys, those people back there are giving you the evil eye."
-"What?"
"The line behind us. They're looking at you funny."
-"The line behind you?"
"Yeah."
-"Oh! This is the front!" They quickly got up and moved. Easy mistake. They didn't do it on purpose.

Nevertheless, Grandma and I exchanged a congratulatory fist bump.

After a few more hours, The Enforcers unleashed us upon the main theater. We made a beeline for the front row. Our hunt was on.

Some dude from Spike TV was on stage with nobody else. It didn't look like this would be a Q&A format. Disappointing, but there were still options. I started studying the stage for weaknesses should I have to bring the fucker down using nothing more than an empty swag bag and a bit of rope. Maybe I could employ a diversion; somebody could have a fake seizure, maybe- then I kidnap the man and hold him in a custodial closet I noticed in the back until I said what I came to say.

He was the first panelist.


Even if it wasn't DoubleFine, even if it wasn't Tim Schafer's work, Grandma and I would be all over Brutal Legend like shit on rice or however the saying goes. It looks like ridiculous fun. We love the idea of metal covers as a game universe. And fuck the haters, Jack Black is goddamn hilarious. They showed the opening cutscene of the game on the large screens bordering the stage. It was everything we wanted it to be.

Spike TV dude asked some soft questions, including the painful "what's it like working with Jack Black? You must have stories..." before he opened the mic for questions. There were mics?! Questions?! Oh no! I bolted back to the closest mic on the theater floor, but there were already three guys in front of me and an equally impossible line on the right.

It also suddenly occurred to me that I had no idea what to say.

"Hi, you were really awesome to my Grandma and I think you are great" is just the sort of microphone banter that elicits groans from everyone. Also: this was a Q&A. It was like Jeopardy. If it ain't in the form of a question, you lose. This was a savvy audience, they weren't going to fall for such a trick as "how did you get so awesome?" That was too shallow. I had to think of something and think fast.

Before the first question began, a warning came from the moderator. "Let's make sure these are questions for Tim." Shit. Shit shit shit. Question asked and answered. Spike TV guy motioned to the other microphone and said "okay, I think this is going to be our last question." The guy in front of me let out an audible whine. We sat down. Tim left. We missed him.

Goddammit.

The Naughty Dog panelist suffered even a worse fate. Spike TV guy, I swear to god, actually checked his watch and shuffled uncomfortably in his seat as she talked about Uncharted 2. As they were projected on the large screens, his impatient body language was magnified into 20 foot tall awkward video.

The panel was a bust. We did get to see a live demo of Left 4 Dead 2, though. We stuck around for a few minutes afterward hopeful that he might come back out on stage to.. hang out or something.. but he didn't.

At least we got to see him. We were disappointed we didn't get to say hello and thank you, but we still had all of PAX to explore and experience. It was only Friday. Grandma wasn't about to let this get her down.

We rushed down to the EA booth where they were showing demos of Brutal Legend and ordered a copy so we wouldn't have to wait on release day. (I know, I know, but we wanted to be sure.) He wasn't there, either. But we did hear some good news. He would be back tomorrow to sign some stuff. At 10:30am. The same time as Annie's panel.

Prioritizing events at PAX had never been so easy to choose.

As luck would have it, we ran to Annie and Brian outside the Expo. Hugs for everyone followed. Grandma has always thought the world of Annie, so she got a big kick out of seeing her again- especially here, especially seeing her busy, especially seeing her doing well and doing what she's good at.

"Are you guys going to be able to see the panel tomorrow?"
-"Of course!" We were planning on seeing her panel before we even left for the airport.
"Cool! I'm kind of nervous. I just hope I don't.. you know, choke the life out of somebody."

I have a tendency to say things that get me in trouble later. This was about to be one of those moments.

-"Hey! Do you want me to tape your panel for you? I have a camera."
"Would you?! That'd be cool!"
-"Sure! Hell, if they have an XLR mult-box I can just tap in and get audio from all the mics and make it really cool for you."
"Awesome!"

Okay. Yes, I do have a really nice video camera that can do that. And I have seen mult-boxes during other panels so that wouldn't be a problem. But I didn't have a tripod. For the love of god, I didn't have a tripod. Or a second tape. And I'm pretty sure my batteries were low. But here I was, promising something cool, and I had no idea if I could deliver.

Shit shit shit shit.

"We'll see you later!" I said, already realizing the logistics of this promise were going to bite me on the ass and never let go.

Things were winding down, so Grandma and I left the expo to grab some dinner and explore a bit more of Seattle. We walked the same circles around downtown we had walked before and decided to just order a pizza. The concierge at the hotel asked what type of pizza we liked. We replied New York style. She recommended Pagliacci's and gave us a little menu with the number. Back in the room, Grandma scoffed at the prices.

"Goddamn."
-"What, it's just like Ohio. Pizza's expensive, man."
"Let's just get Papa John's or something."
-"Alright."

Papa John's of Seattle doesn't deliver downtown. We tried Pizza Hut. They gave me an alternate number. Neither place delivered downtown. I wasn't about to call Dominoes', we were on goddamn vacation. How was it that we were in a pizza-free zone?! Shit, we lived in the middle of fucking nowhere in Ohio and had some decent choices. We relented and ordered from Pagliacci's.

It was awesome. And quick, too! We ate ourselves sleepy.

Grandma decided not to go to the Friday Night concerts.

"Really? Why not?"
-"It's going to be hot in there and long and honestly I think I'll fall asleep."
"But... Metroid Metal!"
-"Yeah, I know. I just want to crash right now. You want to go, you go ahead."
"But I'll feel bad if I go by myself. Shit, I felt bad last night when you crashed early."
-"It's eleven o'clock already and we have a long day tomorrow. The concert is going to last forever, Tim, I'm telling you."
"It's 8:00pm."
-"Not according to my watch."
"Ah. Do you want to see a movie instead? We could go out and do something if you're not up for the concert."
-"It's not even that- I just want to sleep."
"You sure?"
-"Very sure."

She relaxed on her bed, pulled the covers up and turned down the television. KOMO was reporting a cougar sighting in a nearby park and something about a teacher strike in Kent. Grandma looked happy; content, so I didn't argue or press anything. If she was happy sleeping, that's what she'll do. No worries.

I still wanted to go. I changed clothes and headed out, emptying my camera bag of all but the essentials.

A line outside the Cheesecake Factory circled around the block. A busker with a drum jammed in front of a hat full of change. The air was cool and the breeze refreshing. The lights of the traffic trickled off the skyline like water.

Inside the convention center, I followed the line already going up the escalator, a novelty I hadn't experienced with Grandma and the grunge chair. It felt weird being inside without her, like I was missing a limb. I exchanged nods with people I had met that day, and met some new ones. "I love your blog, dude. Grandma rocks." How did they know? How did they know what I even looked like? Who the fuck am I? The concert line was pretty short yet. A mass of people on the other side of the queue room were busily trying to break the DS World Record.




I was happy I got to see it. I noticed a couple guys talking video cameras next to me in line. Holy shit, Annie's panel. I dug into my pocket and quietly counted what I had.

"Excuse me," I interrupted. "Are you guys shooting MiniDV?"
-"He is. I'm shooting onto a harddrive."
"Ah! Listen, if you can't do it- I completely understand- you won't hurt my feelings, but is there ANY way I can buy a MiniDV tape off you for... ...eight dollars?"
--"Eight dollars? Well, let's see how many I have..."

Amazingly, he agreed. It was a JVC tape, I had been shooting with a Panasonic brand, but if you clean the heads of the DVX series it will shoot on damn near anything. I was ecstatic. "Thank you!! You don't know how much this saves my ass."

I talked with them further about equipment and photography, which is always an easy thing to talk about because I don't have to fake it. It turns out one of them was Daniel Borders, shooting video for the PAX Photo Patrol. As he explained it, everybody can submit their photos of PAX and they can document the whole convention in such ways. I thought it sounded brilliant, if not server taxing. He gave me his card.

"Submit your photos, man. We need all we can get."
-"I will!" I promised.

Shit. These words instantly invoked the necessary neural connections in my brain that sent me straight into journalist mode. Now I just wasn't shooting for the fuck of it, I had sort of an assignment. I had fully intended to just put my camera in my pack and jump around with everybody on the dance floor like a crazy person. Now I wanted, more than anything, to shoot everyone else doing just that.

This is Daniel by the way:


I cranked up the ISO to 6400 and switched to black and white. I was in position.

I waited.

Anamanaguchi took the stage.

















It was bloody awesome. I wonder if they'd be insulted if I said they were the best prog-rock I've seen in a good while.

Between sets in the concerts is probably the best time to people watch at PAX. It's dark. Everyone is a bit tired. But they're comfortable. You see them as they are. They play their DS Lites and PSPs not because they want to be seen playing something, but rather because it's just the natural thing to do. Nobody was bitching about the temperature inside the main theater. Nobody was shining laser pointers into the eyes of audio techs.

I mentioned the smoking area outside the 4th level before. The Eden. Get this- I'm not even kidding: one of the convention employees was always standing at the door during all three sets to open the door for smokers so they could get in and out easily. That's unheard of. That's phenomenal. That made the night. One could go outside into the cool night and relax if they wanted and come right back in without any hassle at all. Sure, they might ask to see your badge, but apart from that- they were very accommodating. It was a tiny luxury that didn't go unnoticed.

And outside, everyone was talkative and sociable.

"Oh, you liked the Taphouse?"
-"Yes. I had Baron Pilsner, it was wonderful."
"Then you HAVE to try the Pike Brewery."
-"I've heard that from others as well."
"Just tell them what sort of beer you like and they'll find one better."

"I love Seattle. This is amazing."
-"Where are you from?"
"Ohio. There's lots of transplants from Ohio here, I noticed."
-"Really?"
"Oh yeah. I've met six today."
A guy passed by and interjected quickly before walking away. "Seven," he said simply, smiling.

A guy opened up a water bottle that proceeded to spray fucking everywhere. "SHIT!"
-"Oh... damn. What is that?"
"I thought it was WATER." He read the label. "Goddammit. It's sparkling water."
-"Have anything to mix it with?"
"I wish. I'm just glad it didn't get in my bag. I just bought this damn thing." He opened up a swag bag revealing a large box with an elegant and expensive looking Street Fighter controller.
-"Goddamn, that's pretty."
"It was cheaper here than at Gamestop."

Lots of little conversations in the smoking Eden.











Metroid Metal took the stage.














Fucking cool. Every single one of those songs triggers that recognition center in your brain that makes you want to rock.

If anyone wants to start the first Milon's Secret Castle metal band, count me the hell in. We could call it "MOTHERFUCKING BUBBLES."












An announcement was made.

"Ladies and gentleman, we regret to inform you that MC Frontalot will be a couple hours late. So please enjoy Wil Wheaton playing Rockband for an hour and a half."


And then MC Frontalot took the stage :)









I put away the camera and danced.

Saturday, September 5th - Annie's Panel - The Great Schafer Hunt Continues - Grandma Walks the Expo - Saturday Concerts


We set the alarm a bit later Saturday morning because the first thing on our agenda was Annie's panel, not the main floor. We still got there early enough to get concert bracelets, so coffee was a must. As I wheeled Grandma into the queue room as we had done before, an Enforcer stopped us.
"Follow me." He motioned towards the front of the line.
-"No, it's cool- we don't need to cheat. It's all good."
"That's awesome, but actually, you HAVE to go to the front of the line. It's ADA, man. One of the convention center employees said they can get sued if we don't make sure to accommodate the handicapped."
-"Yeah, but she's not like... disabled, she gets tired really fast. We're just lazy so I rented the chair," I said, following him to the front of the line anyway.
He laughed.
"These two get concert bracelets," he mentioned to... somebody.. while walking away.

If last night was any indication, Grandma wasn't going to need a concert bracelet tonight either. But they put one around her wrist and offered up some stickers.


I told you.

The grunge chair gives Grandma powers.

A dude in a wheelchair next to us explained further.

"Yeah, we can go to the front of any line. You don't even need to wait. I guess for concert bracelets and stuff you still need to be early, but everything else- you get priority." I recalled the previous day's three hour wait to get into see Tim Schafer with regret. We could have wheeled right on up to the front without waiting at all. Still, it felt better to do things "right." I don't know how to explain it, but it didn't feel fair.

Fair or not, this information was pretty useful in the coming days.

We opted to wait it out with everyone else and sprint to the EA booth to see if Tim Schafer was there early so we could thank him, give the man a hug and a fistbump then bust ass up to Annie's panel which started at 10:30am. We met a couple new friends in this 'new' line and talked about perception a bit. They let us onto the floor a minute or so before everyone else so we wouldn't be trampled, I think.

Trampled, shit. As soon as that gate pulled open we all flew like the fucking wind to where we wanted to be. Let's see the 'normies' go that fast. Don't imagine us walking rather briskly to the EA booth, no- imagine my arms bent all the way forward with my head tilted upwards just enough to see like an Olympic bobsled driver as my legs kicked into the air as I ran; the wheels on the grunge chair vibrating violently from the sheer speed. Sure, I looked goofy as hell.

But we got there.

Tim Schafer hadn't yet arrived at the booth. Or he was signing somewhere else. We didn't know and it didn't matter. We weren't waiting, it was just a hopeful hunch.

We ran over the elevator bank and made our way to the sixth level outside the Unicorn Theater, which was hosting the Girls and Games panel. Annie's panel. (To give you an idea of how fast we were going, the people in the queue room where still waiting to get into the Expo when we reached the elevators.)

We met Annie and Brian outside the theater. She was preparing for the panel, so I didn't want to bug the shit out of her. We waited across the hall (no need to queue anymore, you see) for a bit before the Enforcers allowed us all inside. The line became pretty decent, and I was happy. The more people for the Q&A the better. People cared about the topic. Nothing is sadder than an empty room with some panelists sitting by microphones, sipping on water bottles.

As I sat next to Grandma, we saw the most perfect moment across from us.

The panel was titled "Girls and Games: The Growing Role of Women in the Game Industry." Sitting against a wall was a perfectly normal looking woman. Just sitting down across from her was the most absurdly dressed cheerleader cosplay fan.

I call it "Not Ironic At All."


The theater was modestly sized and the chairs filled up pretty quick. Grandma and the grunge chair scooted up front so she could stare down Annie and make her really nervous :) I spoke to an Enforcer.

"Hi, do you guys have a mult-box or anything I could plug an XLR cable into for an audio feed? If not, that's totally fine- I just thought I'd ask."
-"Oh yeah, we've been using this one for cameras. You can use that if you like."
"That's awesome!" He saved the day.
-"I have to tell you though, if one of our regular media people come in and needs to use it, we have to bump you."
"I completely understand. Thanks for this."
-"And even then.. you know, if that happens, we can think of something."

Jesus.

Keep in mind, Enforcers are volunteers. They don't get paid. And this guy was being more helpful than any AV tech I've ever encountered at trade shows and conventions for work. Hell, even when I was in traditional media they weren't this helpful. I mean god DAMN. Once at an Hillary Clinton rally, the mult-box kept sending a clipping signal to everyone's cameras and recorders, and the tech just shrugged his shoulders as if to say "not my problem, yo."

But this guy was not one of those. He knew his shit. He wanted to be helpful. I'm still impressed.

Not that any of it mattered in the end, but we're getting to that.

I set up the camera to LP mode, hoping to squeeze a few extra minutes onto this new tape. The battery was going to die in 45 minutes no matter what I did, and a battery switch wouldn't be fast enough to keep everything uninterrupted. I could have brought an AC adapter, but I was already being a pain in the ass using their mix feed. The audio levels were all kind of weird coming in through the cable, but I didn't have headphones so I don't know what it sounded like. All I knew is that it was responding to their voices and it wasn't clipping unless the moderator spoke (he was much louder than the panelists.) I fixed the white balance, set it to manual focus in case someone stepped in front of me and I was ready to make the very worst video of a panel in convention history.

The XLR cable wasn't very long and my lens doesn't have a lot of reach, also, there were people inexplicably sitting behind me, so I had to sort of duck around a bit while awkwardly holding the video camera, very unsteadily. This was to be a new Blair Witch sequel. Also, I had to grab my camera bag from a chair after the panel already started, so I'm pretty sure there is three or four minutes of beautifully color balanced views of the florescent bulbs on the ceiling.

Half-blind hyperactive toddlers have taken better footage of their older siblings in school pageants, with a cell phone no less, than this video from a so called "photographer."

It may possibly be the worst thing I have ever done with a video camera. And that includes that amateur candy-themed porno I shot: Willy Wonka's Everlasting Cocksuckers. (don't judge me.)

Next time, I'm bringing a goddamn travel tripod.

The panel received some not-surprisingly interesting questions from the audience. One of my favorite answers to a question came from EA Dice Sweden's Senta Jakobsen. Someone asked about health benefit incentives to entice more women to enter the field of gaming; things like maternity leave and better insurance.

Her answer was simply "We don't have that problem in Sweden."

I loved that :)







Annie made some excellent points about the perception of the field in general, regardless of gender. She wants people to realize what exactly goes into gaming. She wants them to understand what a programmer does, what a designer does, etc.,. The work, the sweat and blood of gaming and what one needs to learn to get into it. She sees such ignorance of these positions and technologies as a barrier that discourages those who were never pushed in the right direction because their skillsets were never recognized as being vital. This is what makes these panels so goddamn fascinating. We're not in the games industry. We don't know this shit.

Even though I was secretly thankful there were only three questions after my battery died (so I didn't miss much at the end of that horrific tape), I do think that particular panel needed to be a couple hours longer to truly address some of the larger subjects that came up.

Grandma wanted to hear more about the perception of women in the games industry itself; whether or not their opinions are more valued because of "insider information" about such things, or if that itself can be viewed as sexist. She wanted to know if someone comes up to them and says "hey, Elizabeth, you're a girl, right? How should this go down exactly?" And how one would react to that. You see what I mean? It's complicated.

It's complicated and it's contentious. It's filled with opinions from those who love too much the sound of their own voice, sadly. This, coming from a person who started typing this thing Monday night when we got home and is still typing at 3:00am Wednesday morning, but it's true. We can debate for hours about the systems of perception employed by each gender as it applies to gaming and those who make the games alike, but there are so many overlapping arguments it's difficult to narrow anything down by field. The same applies to movies, music, theater and books. For instance: there are people who are incapable of hearing an internal female voice upon reading neutral text written by a female author. And get this: some of those people are women. Wrap your head around that shit.

After the panel, I gave Annie the tape from the video camera and we sprinted back downstairs to the EA booth to hunt for Tim Schafer again.

You can probably already guess that he wasn't there.

"Is he gone for the day?" Grandma asked.
-"I think so, yeah," replied the EA booth person.
"Well.... ...shit."

We glanced over the day's schedule downstairs and noticed that Blair's G4 panel was upstairs. In the Unicorn Theater. From which we had just came. The programs said it was in the Raven Theater, but apparently it moved. So again, we sprinted. It was just about to start. We sat in a middle row looking for Blair. I didn't see him, and I didn't see a card with his name on it on the panel table.

A dude in front of us turned around.

"Hey, man- I just want to say, I love your blog." Blair or no Blair, that was damn cool.

Grandma and I settled back in our seats as the line filtered in. Morgan Webb, Adam Sessler.. no offense, but Blair was the reason for the season, so to speak. She looked at me.

"Bail?"
-"Bail."
"Let's go."

I pushed her back through the lobby. A woman approached grandma.

"Are you Old Grandma Hardcore?"
-"Sorry?" She had taken out her hearing aids after Annie's panel.
"Are you Old Grandma Hardcore?" Her accent was such that the word "hard" was higher pitched than anything else in the sentence.
-"Yup!"
"That's fantastic! I love that you're here!" It was pouring rain out the window, but in here, Grandma was beaming.

We made our way back to the hotel so I could put the video camera away. It was 12:30pm. As we entered the room, Annie called our cell phone.

"Hey! I'm waiting in line for a Tim Schafer panel. Thought you guys should know!"
-"Seriously?! Where!"
"Serpent Theater. Sixth level, right by where we were."
-"Sweet!"

Grandma jumped into the chair and I grabbed the camera bag. We crossed 6th Avenue a bit too quickly. The chair jolted to a stop on the ramp. I spun her around and pulled her up backwards. It tilted almost to the ground. She yelped. We laughed. We spun around again like it was choreographed and slipped through the crowds, back inside and sprinted to the elevators. We ran to the second bank of elevators with a friendly "hello!" to the convention worker checking our badges.

We were outside the Serpent Theater at 12:39pm. When we're a team, we're fast.

We shuffled through the program and sure enough, there it was. "Medium is the Massage: Story Matters. Panelists include Denis Dyack, President, Silicon Knights; Greg Zeschuk, VP and co-founder, BioWare; Joseph Staten, Creative Director, Bungie; and Tim Fucking Schafer, Founder, Double Fine, God among Men."

Well I'll be damned. How did we miss this?

The Enforcer on guard didn't know about any wheelchair rules so we just got in the huge goddamn line surrounding the theater with everyone else. As long as we got in, we thought. All we had to do was get inside. We felt like assassins.

The line hugged the entire perimeter of the theater almost twice. But when we got inside, there was a snug little spot for us in the front corner. Bad viewing angle of all the panelists, maybe, but that was incidental to our goals. Tim Schafer was sitting close by. Once again, we studied the situation. The panel hadn't started yet so everyone was just sort of sitting around bullshitting. If there was ever an opportunity, this was going to be our last one.

A guy further down the line approached him and it looked like he signed an autograph or something.

Briefly, I entertained some horrible result to our stalking this man. Not everybody is like Vic Ireland, as much as we'd like them to be. For a moment I thought maybe a PR lackey at DoubleFine had him sign something and he never really followed what had happened. For a moment I thought perhaps he would respond coldly, maybe even harshly to approaching him so soon before a panel. For a moment I thought there was a chance a bad experience now would forever ruin Grandma's perception of all that she had come to love about DoubleFine and the mythical Tim Schafer, like watching your favorite athlete kick a puppy and call you a slob. For a moment, I hesitated.

But it was just a moment.

"Fuck it," I said aloud to nobody.

I moved up to the table. He was talking to Greg Zeschuk. I waited for a pause.

"Hi!" he said.
-"Hi! Um... when my Grandma was in the hospital, you sent-"
"Wait- wait, hospital-" he said, looking around. "Wait are you talking about-"
-"Yes!"
"Where-"
-"She's right over there!" I pointed.
"Hey!!"

He got up immediately and walked down to Grandma, proudly wearing her DoubleFine hoodie. He sat down next to her grunge chair and gave her a hug.

"We just really, really wanted say thank you for what you and DoubleFine did. In person. You have no idea how much that meant to us. To Grandma. And to me."
-"We're happy that you enjoyed Psychonauts!" Grandma was ecstatic. He remembered.

I took a picture of Grandma with Tim Schafer. Actually, I took 20 photos of Grandma with Tim Schafer, throwing the camera into burst mode and bracketing like a motherfucker to make sure something came out. It sounded like a machine gun or an old IBM sorting machine.


Then he handed me his iPhone to take a picture of the two of them for him. He asked me to send him a copy of the photo I took with my camera. I promised I would. Grandma told him she just bought Brutal Legend online downstairs and was looking forward to playing the hell out of it. He gave her another quick hug and headed back up to the table, as the panel was ready to begin.

"Good to see you Grandma!"

The people sitting around us must have thought we were insane. But we didn't care. Grandma was so happy you could have punched her in the face and she would have just giggled. "Oh, you face puncher guy. You're such a card."

Then the panel started. For us, it was like an added bonus.


The addition of Joseph Staten of Bungie made the panel seem awkwardly matched. Silicon Knights produced Blood Omen: Legacy of Kane (a particular classic Grandma favorite), Metal Gear Solid and Eternal Darkness. BioWare had Knights of the Old Republic, Neverwinter Nights, and Jade Empire. DoubleFine had Psychonauts and Brutal Legend. Bungie has Halo.

And I like Halo! I dig the series.

But for those of us who really try to get into the story behind the Covenant and Brutes and The Flood and all that jazz, his statement on the lines of creating the stories via the players actions (focusing on multiplayer), well, it sort of cast us aside. The panel was called Story Matters. He had a clever point, but it was a dodge that didn't seem suited for the present company on the panel, as if to say "can your games do that?"

I'd could to sit and listen for hours to Denis Dyack talk about Eternal Darkness, but I think that would just get my hopes up for a sequel. I'm beginning to think sequel talk from Denis is merely just another Sanity Effect on some deep, disturbing level.

Greg Zeschuk did get a pretty good question about the polarity of game decisions being either entirely too evil or entirely too good, but to be fair, I don't think that's an easy question to answer, especially in these, the days of GameFAQs where one can simply find out the decision tree to discover the ultimate consequences of each action. So his answer was appropriately vague.

It was no wonder why the theater was packed to capacity.

As it ended, people swarmed the table. We had said what we came to say; there was no reason to be greedy. As I turned Grandma around to file out of the theater, we noticed a familiar face had been sitting directly behind us for god knows how long.

"Totilo!" I said, immediately regretting calling him that.
-"...should I remember you from somewhere?" he asked, looking up. Actually, no, he shouldn't remember me. We had only actually met once, briefly, outside the Viacom building in New York, and he had looked cold and in a hurry at the time.
"You wrote the very first article about Grandma when you still worked at MTV."
-"Oh!" We mentioned trying to find Blair, another MTV exile, and Stephen said he had been floating around somewhere, but he was here.
-"Wait- what's your first name?"
"Timothy."
-"....St. Hilaire. Good to see you you guys here!" He even pronounced it correctly. Ours is not an easy last name to remember. What can I say, the man's a journalist.

We met with Annie and Brian outside the theater. It was time for some food. Downstairs at the convention center there are various shops and restaurants. We settled on pizza because the line for tacos was long. Annie and Brian took Grandma to a table to hang out while I ordered us some stuff. Then I found out why this line was shorter. They were still just making the pizza. The people in front of me quickly snatched up multiple slices leaving the selection pretty bare.

I ordered the last four remaining slices and Brian came back to help carry the drinks and stuff back to the table. I felt foolish only being able to get us each a single slice, but the day was good.

We talked about the panels, we talked about gaming, we talked about the weather in Seattle. We talked about the berries growing in their backyard. We talked about their move from California; looking back at Los Angeles and seeing the hills on fire as they drove North. The pizza wasn't very good, but we could not have had a better lunch.

We said our goodbyes; our group divided and and we all left feeling that we would see each other in only a few days.

Grandma decided on a new strategy. She would walk the convention floor a bit.

The grunge chair allowed her to explore PAX in its entirety like everyone else rather than in patches before finding somewhere to collapse and wheeze but it had also limited her views of demos and presentations to the level of a rather tall child. We came up with a plan. I would park the grunge chair along one of the outer walls and stay with it as she walked out onto the floor and did her thing. I was happy with this plan. I couldn't take any pictures of the convention floor when we were together because my hands were full. Stationary, I still couldn't get everything, but at least I could get something.

We parked on the wall near the 2K booth and Grandma hobbled off, disappearing into the crowd.












Grandma returned with a bunch of stuff in her hand.

"I got more t-shirts!"
-"Cool! What did you play?"
"I played this thing, I forget what the hell it's even called, but it was basically a God of War knockoff. It was the same damn game. I watched some demos, I tried following some stuff at a tabletop gaming booth but I didn't get it, and I watched a dude fall off a mechanical horse."
-"Where would you like to go next?"
"I don't know, let's head over to the other end."

We checked out a booth that sold a bunch of 70's and 80's nostalgia right along side Commodore 64 and Atari games. Grandma pointed at a glass in a cabinet.

"Haha! They have an old A&W glass. Shit, I think I still have one of those somewhere. You used to get your rootbeer floats in a special glass if you paid extra."
-"They still do that, I think."
"Yeah, but the glasses suck.

"Ahhh... the Sega 32x," she said like a wine connoisseur touring a vintage collection. "Your brother broke mine, remember?"
-"I do."
"Goddammit, Josh."

We perused the selection of classic NES games at the PinkGorilla booth. I looked at a Game Gear charging cable like it was a relic that escaped my hands before that bastard Indiana Jones brought it here. Grandma noticed a rather large book tucked in a corner.

"Hey, weren't you looking for an FFXII strategy guide a few weeks ago?"
-"YES."
"They got one."

We watched a new Katamari Damacy demo as a giant Prince danced next to the screen outside the convention hall. It was a very random placement for a very random game. Grandma whispered in my ear.

"I read they use the SixAxis to do some new move or some shit."
-"Damn."
"I know. Just give me buttons to press."

We passed a conversation that made little alarms buzz around our head.

"What panels are you seeing tomorrow?"
-"I don't know, I was thinking of seeing Victor Ireland talk about some stuff."
"Working Designs Vic Ireland?"
-"I think so."
"Fucking Arc the Lad, man."
-"I know, right?"

Holy shit. Were the rumors true?! Grandma and I stopped abruptly in the middle of the thoroughfare to the chagrin of everyone behind us and dug out our programs.

Nothing about Vic Ireland.

The people were gone. We moved on, confused.

We left late in the day. The rain had stopped and I rolled passed base camp to the market at the end of Pike. We found a silk shop to get mom a present and the Pike Brewing Company I'd heard so much about. We walked around until it closed.

Both of us decided that the single slice of pizza with Annie and Brian wasn't going to cut it, so we sought out a McDonalds. Say what you want about the company, but it's cheap and delicious. It's the one place Grandma and I can find in every city and know that billions of dollars were spent in chemical research to get the fries to taste just so.

Inside, we discovered one of those wonderful instances where crazy people think everyone else is crazy.

"Hey, yeah, give me a meal, man."
-"Um..."
"A MEAL, what are you deaf or something? Speaky English? A MEAL." He glanced at Grandma with one of those Can you believe this fucking guy? looks.
-"Which one?"
The crazy person rolled his eyes in obvious frustration. "I want some FOOD, man. I'll give you money if you give me some FOOD."
-"A Happy Meal?"
"Do I look like a god damn child? No, man- give me a MEAL."

We happily munched on our Quarter Pounders and discovered that Seattle is at war with salt. Apparently they think they're winning.

Outside I smoked a cigarette in anticipation of our climb back up to base camp.

A guy came up and asked about the badge.

"Hey, what band is that... 'Three Day...'"
-"No, it's a three day pass. For a gaming convention." He got a bit closer. We had information.
"Did you hear anything from Bungie? Are they doing anything new?"
-"Absolutely. Halo 3: ODST. She got to see it," I pointed to Grandma.
"I love Halo!"

He was originally from New York City. We talked for a while. Here we were, three adults outside a McDonalds, talking about Halo. This is why we were here.

"A long time ago, my friend was into that stuff and I said 'man, that's kid's stuff; what are you doing playing.' And then he had me play... um... Goldeneye for the N64."
-"Great fucking game," Grandma and I said in unison.
"I know! So then I hear about his new system coming out, the Xbox and I knew I had to get that. I mean, it had Halo, the greatest game of all time."

The geek centers of my brain wanted to argue that particular point, but I didn't have the heart. This guy was our kind of people. He and Grandma traded Xbox Live gamertags as he walked away, yelling back up the street to make sure he got it right.

"OH, GEE, AYCH, SEA?"
-"O-G-H-C, yup!"
"I'LL SEND YOU AN INVITE! THE GUY OUTSIDE MCDONALDS!"

It gives me profound satisfaction to be able to tell you this happened.

This happened.

Grandma and I reached base camp sometime close to 8:00pm. She was spent.

"I am going to sleep."
-"But... Jonathan Cloulton, Freezepop, and Paul and Storm. You now know the first two, I'm not sure about the third."
"I am going to sleep!" she said, smiling.

Okeedokee. She pulled out her book and pulled up the covers on her bed. I grabbed my camera bag and headed out for the line.

The line was much longer Saturday night when I arrived. Once again, I switched to black and white and cranked up the ISO.












A round of Omegathon included two groups playing Beatles Rockband in front of us all. Even as they stared into the tiny screens in front of the stage trying to play the best they could, for a moment they were superstars. It was almost beautiful.

Almost. But at PAX, I was no longer capable of being surprised with small miracles. They were everywhere. Right after you've seen one, another is lined up. A man proposed to his girlfriend on stage during Freezepop. She said yes. Out in the crowd, a few couples squeezed closer, silently communicating words the rest of us were never meant to hear.


I picked up my camera and got a little closer to the music.

Freezepop was on stage.










I decided to get a bottle of soda and grab a cigarette in Eden. The line to meet Freezepop was already longer than any line I had seen to see Wil Wheaton. I met Dave outside.

"Jesus, we're going to be busy tonight."
-"I can see that."
"You look at the line for Freezepop and you know for Jonathan Coulton it's going to be just as big tonight." I empathized. But I was glad business was good.




Back inside, the soda machine had a line and a fascinating study of human behavior.

A person would give it their two dollars and press the Coke button. Sold out.
Then they would try the Cherry Coke button. Sold out.
Then the lemonade button. Sold out.
Then the Diet Coke button. Sold out.
Then the bottled water button. Sold out.
Then the Sprite button. |Vend. And walk away with a Sprite.

Each of us watched this. Each of us knew there was only Sprite. And yet, each person upon approaching the machine would insert their two dollars and try the other buttons anyway, in the same order. This happened four or five times before my turn.

When I reached the machine I pressed the Coke button. Sold out.

Son of a bitch, I thought. I did it too.

I took my Sprite and headed in to see Paul and Storm.

An Enforcer stopped me at the door. "Sorry, man. Only bottled water in the Main Theater." I stepped outside for another cigarette. Eden was empty. It was raining. I found a dry spot on the concrete and downed my Sprite.













They were goddamn hilarious. They even made a Fark reference. I was sad this was my introduction to their work.

The wait between their set and Jonathan Coulton wasn't nearly as long as I anticipated. Most folks didn't budge from their spots the way they usually did; pouring out of the theater to use the restroom or grab a quick smoke. They just sat right down where they stood, claiming their spot.








Jonathan Coulton took the stage.








He played a fantastic set. I had hoped he would play Still Alive and Codemonkey, and dammit he delivered; not like some musicians who avoid the songs they are known for out of disgust at their saturation.

At the end of Codemonkey, my camera was held high above the crowd, pointed at the stage. I let the shutter loose with a barrage of clicks at precisely the wrong moment.

"♫ Code Monkey likes yooooooou...... ♫"
-CHUNK-CHUNK-CHUNK-CHUNK-CHUNK-CHUNK

It elicited a couple irritated looks from people in front of me. I sheepishly apologized and moved to the back. The only way I could have been more embarrassed is if Tiger Woods beat me over the head with my camera after hooking a drive into a pond.

When I arrived back in the hotel room, Grandma turned over as I tried to quietly put my bag down.

"How did it go?"
-"FANTASTIC. I don't know why you didn't come!"
"Tim, I was exhausted."
-"I know. But it was awesome.

I sat and watched TV with her for awhile as I told her about the show.


And ate the leftover pizza from Friday.


We didn't have a microwave, but it didn't matter.

It was a hell of a day. It didn't seem fair that there was another whole day to do even more stuff. Make-a-Wish kids don't get to have this much fun.

Before they die, I mean.

Sunday, September 6th - Game Localization Panel - Penny Arcade Q&A - Meeting Wil Wheaton - Wil Wheaton's Awesome Hour - Deathspank - Hotels are Expensive


Grandma and I woke up early to get some coffee. We rolled down to Seattle's Best and ordered some pastries and a couple drinks. Grandma couldn't finish hers.

"This is so fucking sweet my mouth hurts."
-"You want to trade?"
"Okay." I gave her my cafe mocha. "Blegh! This is sweet, too! Jesus!"

We settled on convention center coffee instead. She told me she had leafed through the program for Sunday and found a panel she really wanted to see, "Game Localization: A Behind-the-Scenes Look." It had two guys who were partly responsible for bringing Final Fantasy XII to the English speaking world. The panel was scheduled for 10:30am, so we ran upstairs and were, once again, the first in line.

We watched a convention center employee set up a food and beverage table with the diligence of a head chef. Sure, it was just hot dogs, nachos and chili, but she gave a close inspection, pulling the tablecloth with little tugs that left the folds just perfect; she polished the warming trays with the tip of an ever-present rag. She didn't fuck around.

"Good morning!" she said to the two weirdos watching her work.
-"Good morning!" we replied.

An Enforcer moved the line, and by the line I mean us, to the other side of the wall to get ready for the coming rush. After awhile, a guy sat down behind us wearing a media badge. Grandma was fidgeting.

"I wonder if it's true."
-"What?"
"I wonder if Vic is here."
-"I don't know."
"..."
-"..."
"We should call him."
-"CALL HIM?!"
"Yeah!"
-"You don't just CALL Vic Ireland."
"I'm going to call him." She rifled through her purse and produced a Gaijinworks business card. She's got the craziest shit in there.
-"Well, you have bigger balls than I do."

The guy sitting behind us spoke up.
"You know Vic Ireland?" Well now don't I look like an asshole, now.
-"No, no, no. I don't know him. I've met him a couple times but I don't think he'd recognize me or anything. I wouldn't go around telling people I KNOW Vic Ireland, you know? No," I said, trying not to attract attention to Grandma's rather loud voice message she was yelling into her cell phone.

"Hi, Vic! It's Barb. Hey, we heard you might be down at PAX and we're down here and I was just seeing if it was true or not. Talk to you later!"
-"...."
"I left a message."
-"Ah."

The line got bigger fairly quickly and we were ushered inside.

"Hi, Grandma! You rock!" said some completely random person sitting near us who is awesome.

The panel was well attended. The Q&A line was at least ten people deep. Grandma was really into learning about games localization. She watched the screen showing direct translations with the final dialogue choice with interest. I found it fascinating that the comments between translators could be found within the individual game files. I loved the depth that went into creating descriptions for the FFXII bestiary.

But I felt like I was in the wrong room. I was not the sort of person who was wanted there. Grandma was, sure. But I was a sub-snob. A hideous and annoying critter to localization specialists. I'd love it if the dialogue was spoken in the original Japanese and then just subtitled in English. These guys pour their heart and soul into making sure the voices are done right and I'm not the person who ends up appreciating the work. Hell, I bitched when they introduced voice-acting to Final Fantasy X. I bitched when I found out it's pronounced "Cho-co-bo" and not "Co-co-bo."

I felt ashamed for being in their presence and said nothing.

Grandma laughed at the direct translations from Japanese like it was the silliest thing she'd ever heard. When they played clips of FFXII she nudged me in a way that said Remember that part? I remember that part.

Halfway into the panel, the floor began to shake. The Wolfman Theater was directly above the Main Theater, which was currently being used to showcase a live demo of Star Wars: The Old Republic at volumes clearly intended to drive religious nuts from a compound.

After the panel, we found ourselves in line to see Wil Wheaton. I don't know how we ended up there. One minute we were walking along talking about Square games and the next minute BAM- Wil Wheaton line. He draws everyone in. There is no escape.

Wil looked tired. The night before they showed him laying on the floor of the VIP section during Jonathan Coulton's set literally screaming with embarrassed glee as JoCo changed the words of "My Monkey" to make a song called "Wil Wheaton." Now he was exhausted from a joy-joy hangover. And man did it show.

And yet, always the trooper, he still shook everyone's hand and posed for photos and signed whatever various bullshit we brought to his table. He was exceedingly polite.

We waited behind a guy who loved his camera. We easily got along. He had a Nikon D200 with an SB-600 and a matching bouncer. We talked equipment for a little bit until the very moment he got to meet Wil Wheaton. He handed his camera to me (I was honored to do so) and took a picture of our new friends with our hero. Then, just as quickly, it was our turn.

"Hi, Wil! You need to be on TotalFark more, man," I said, flying my banners.
-"I know, I know. I lurk a lot. Believe me, I see everything, though."
"This is Grandma! She loved you in Secret of NIMH!" I exclaimed happily, doing that thing where you don't mention anything recent but say something true to be back-handed and sincere at the same time. (We also loved you in TNG, man. Best fucking series ever.) You can say things like that to Wil. He's fun.
-"Thank you!"

He happily signed the back of her PAX badge and I took their picture.


Scott Kurtz was signing things at the table next to Wil. He gave us the most wide-eyed look we had ever seen. It was a bit alarming, actually.

"YOU were in SECRET OF NIMH?!" he asked loudly.
-"Yeah. I was Martin."
"Well... now you are my best friend like ...EVER." Really, Scott? You had no other reason to be his best friend before that?

That's right.

We taught Scott Kurtz that Wil Wheaton was in Secret of NIMH. In front of Wil Wheaton. Spread that shit on the internets.

To be fair, I had mostly the same reaction when I looked it up on imdb way back in the day. Secret of NIMH?! Really? Could he BE more awesome?!

Grandma and I floated away feeling giddy. When they're all lined up like that it's hard not to get a little star struck. You don't wait in line and then ask them "So. ....How's it going?" You have to be silly.

If I wanted, I could have had the entire line chime in on the last line of dialogue.

"Auntie Shrew!"
-"Oh, Auntie!"
"OH, NO."

That was the sort of atmosphere at the tables.

Wil Wheaton's Awesome Hour was to have a huge line in its own right, and then man is a hell of a story teller so we didn't want to miss it. We went straight from meeting the man to queue up for his panel. He has that effect on people.

When we reached the queue room, however, an Enforcer told us we could go on in to the Penny Arcade Q&A, just about to start. The one filled to capacity. Why? Grandma's grunge chair.

SPECIAL POWERS.



Mike and Jerry are the sort of rare people who know to treat a crowd. Grandma found them absolutely charming. One person after another stood up to say they thought Penny Arcade is awesome, and they are awesome, and thank you for the awesomeness. The crowd would groan a little, but Mike would put a stop to it right away.

"You waited in line to say that? That's awesome! Thank you!"

Then the groans turned into massive applause; the person skipped away from the microphone, happy as a pig in shit. Grandma and I knew that feeling. We cheered too.

The entertained just about everything the PAXers threw at them, except for questions about religion. The only reason: they didn't want to bring anybody down.

Grandma found one instance particularly hilarious as a person at the mics asked them to close their eyes and imagine a dark castle, filled with foreboding, lava pits and spikes. When they opened their eyes, a mass of people wearing paper-plate Boo ghosts were at the front of the stage. We laughed our asses off.

A question about an inside joke Scott Kurtz had been making was answered by Scott Kurtz himself, sitting nearby. Once again, Tim Buckley was called a criminal and a plagiarist. Don't feel bad, guys. The bastard stole my internet handle (CtrlAltDelete) I'd been using since 1994. He has taken something from us all.

People pitched game ideas, scripts, DM books, even fashion marketing ideas. All were accepted with a sincere "leave it right here, we'll take a look at it." Briefly, they showed a slash Penny Arcade erotic piece of fanart.

It was drawn to scale.

Nobody left feeling slighted. We were all fans. I had followed the comic from those early days, just like everyone else. And Grandma as well. We have the same bookmarks. They deserved PAX. This success was well earned.

We headed out to get in line for Wil Wheaton's Awesome hour. And, once again, we were first in line behind the Serpent Theater. It was here that we met Donna.

Donna was a cheerful, talkative woman. Like Grandma, she was also in a chair. She was happy Grandma was there, as she thought she was the oldest woman there until she saw Grandma. She was a writer by trade. Her reason for being at PAX- her son was one of the primary organizers of the event. He had started as an Enforcer long ago, but was requested by name to head this up.

"I wanted to go last year but he was like 'Nooo! You'll embarrass me!' And it's true! I wanted to sort of reverse things on him. When he was a kid and we'd go somewhere he'd always bug me. 'I have to go the bathroom!' 'I want a bottle of water!' 'Pick me up!' I figure if I see him I can bug him to death. I'd love to see him annoyed," she smiled.

Behind us (!) were some VIPs and friends of Jerry and Mike whose names I didn't catch. We talked about how nobody treated Grandma like a freak; just a gamer like everyone else. We talked about the Enforcers and what a great job they were doing.

"They get a big party when it's all over," one said. Donna chimed in.
-"Where is it? Where is it! I want to crash it. Oh, that would make my son so mad!"

Her and Grandma talked about New York, raising their kids, the city vs. the country, how kids should play outside instead of just play video games, how she got her kids an Xbox, and how one can use Medicare to pay for an electric chair like hers. They talked all the way into the theater, and were seated up front, next to each other for the panel. We thought she was cool as hell.

The Wil Wheaton Awesome Hour was, in a word: awesome.


Nobody can read a blog post aloud and have it sound like the most fascinating story you've ever heard. Nobody except Wil Fucking Wheaton. He recalled stories about his first experience seeing The Rocky Horror Picture Show and an episode at a restaurant when he defended the word "excellent."

The Q&A differed in one way from Jerry and Mike's, however. When the inevitable "how can I be so awesome like you?" questions arose, he handled them in another way.

"Man, I want you guys to know this- I am not that awesome." He sometimes irritatingly reiterated this point. He was humble to the point of ridiculousness.

I imagine most of us wanted to stand and say "Shut the fuck up, Wil Wheaton. Stop bitching about being called awesome and keep being awesome, you awesome, awesome man."

My favorite part of the Q&A- the topic of celebrities being douches and turning you off entirely from their work (he mentioned Rutger Hauer, I'm sad to report) came up and someone from the audience called out "Jonathan Frakes!"

"SHUT UP," said Wil Wheaton. "Frakes is COOL. I will PUNCH YOU in the FACE."

I loved that :) Mainly because Riker was always my favorite.

The panel ended and we said goodbye to Donna.

Grandma and I went back to the expo floor to explore one last time and buy Portal t-shirts. (We wanted them before but were trying to save our money.)

The convention was no quieter than the day we came. Every controller had someone playing something with a group behind them, watching attentively. Developers were desperately trying to unload free goodies onto the passing crowds lest they had to pay for shipping it all back to wherever. Consequently, we now have two copies of Hello Kitty Online, two copies of Aeria Games Power Collection and enough fliers and stickers to keep a furnace going during an Ohio winter. Grandma was focusing on increasing the size of her button collection that adorned her lanyard like trophy scalps.

We edged near the Deathspank booth for a shot at the drawing.






We watched one last demo and waited for the drawing for a little Deathspank statue.

Apparently, there were rules to the thing we hadn't understood. You got a ribbon with a button. You had to come back to booth several times to get a new button. You fill up your ribbon with buttons and you get to enter the drawing. Grandma's ribbon only had one button.

Oops.

One of the Hothead Games developers noticed our conundrum. "Here," she said to Grandma, giving us a slip of paper. "Fill this out for the drawing. There aren't enough women gamers in the world."

Groovy! We didn't win, but it was the thought that counted.

And the man doing the drawing was Ron Gilbert his own self. We hadn't expected that. The Hothead games people got out a little point and shoot camera for the event. One of them looked at the big honking camera around my neck and pointed at me.

"Can you send us your pictures? We'll give you a photo credit..."
-"Um... you don't have to give me credit or anything, it's all good."

I couldn't get very good shots, anyway. I was with Grandma on the edge of the carpet and everything was shot towards me rather than in front of me.

I did get a good shot of a guy taking a picture of that which they wanted a photo.

So that's pretty damn meta if you ask me.





We traded business cards and left, watching them begin to pack up their things, as tired and happy as we were.

I put my camera away and didn't take it out again until I got home. We casually strolled the floor, looking for anything we might have missed. We bought the Portal shirts we wanted and a Penny Arcade book, Birds are Weird. It was the 2003 strips. We knew them all. We circled again. It was almost closing time and we didn't know how to say farewell to PAX.

There were no closing ceremonies.
There were no tearful goodbyes.
There was only a short walk to the elevator and a gentle slope to the front doors.

Back at the hotel, we found ourselves unsure of how to use the rest of the day. We unpacked and repacked our suitcases, mixing dirty clothes with clean clothes and swag. We carefully wrapped the camera gear with t-shirts. I hadn't been able to use the video camera except for Annie's panel. Grandma continued packing and I walked out into Seattle to find us some food.

I brought back McDonalds. We aren't very original on Sundays.

Outside, Seattle went to bed early. The shops were closed and the bars were dark. We decided to do the one thing nobody ever seems to do with their hotel televisions and ordered a movie. The Hangover. It was okay. Pay-per-view doesn't have subtitles so Grandma had to wear her hearing aids again. After our salt-free fries and cheeseburgers, after the movie, Grandma finished her book and I took the longest bath of my life.

Hotel baths are simply wonderful. As much hot water as you want in a huge goddamn tub.

We fell asleep without a regret in the world.

This had been the trip we were looking for.

Monday, September 7th - Labor Day flying - Looking ahead

The shuttle ride from the hotel to SeaTac was depressingly short. Neither of us really wanted to face our problems in Ohio again. We had escaped them. It's hard to accept the freedom as temporary. The shuttle was filled with PAXers still carrying their swag bags and a couple still wearing their badges. They didn't want it to end either, it seemed. They looked at each other and began obvious small talk. "So what did you think of PAX?" they asked. "Awesome," they answered. We just sat and listened. Nobody would have believed our PAX story anyway.

And Grandma and I no longer blended in with them. Now we appeared as an old woman traveling with her scruffy looking relative. Our clothes didn't advertise our culture. Our age didn't give away our hobbies. We were segregated somehow. Again and quickly.

Our first flight, to Chicago, was overbooked. Luckily we kept our seats. Grandma bought a new paperback from a Hudson News in the terminal, and I bought the kids a shitload of Pocky. I fell asleep soon after we were in the air, and didn't wake up until we were over Wisconsin. This time, we flew into the sunset, speeding it up. And once again, O'Hare bounced the light around the walls in wild ways. We ate at a Macaroni Grill.

I ordered the calamari.

"Again?" asked Grandma.
-"I like calamari!"
"You just HAD calamari. Twice."
-"Yes, but it's GOOD."

Grandma ordered spaghetti, but couldn't finish. We drew on the paper tablecloth with the crayons they gave us. I almost ordered a glass of wine to go with dinner, but decided against it. I might have to drive when we landed in Cleveland. We left a good tip and left for our gate.

Labor Day travel wasn't as bad as I thought it would have been, but I was irritable anyway. The recorded messages over the PA about "don't let anyone put anything in your bag" and "the current threat level is ORANGE" sounded exactly like Jeff Bridges, and it was driving me insane. There wasn't any room to sit. People were sitting too close, and not in a friendly way- you were bugging them by your presence just as much as they were bugging you.

But it made sense.

After all, all of us were flying back to Cleveland. What would a trip to Cleveland be without a little torture.

The flight was short and night took over quickly. It was hot and wet everywhere. Thunderstorms had passed through just before we arrived. We found our bag and our ride. Mom greeted us with a hug outside.

"We have to go pretty quick, I'm not supposed to step out of the car parked here. I already got yelled at." She agreed to drive so I wouldn't have to. It's always the small things that make life seem fantastic.

I sucked down my first nicotine since Puget Sound and listened to Grandma tell Mom about the trip.

When we got home we unpacked Grandma's new t-shirts to show them off. We gave Mom her present from the silk shop. I unloaded the Pocky onto the table for the kids so they could take a box or two before school.

I grabbed my camera bag, scurried downstairs to my computer and started typing this post.

Jesus.

It's now 11:32am, Eastern Time, Thursday fucking morning.

Holy Jesus goddamn.

How long is this goddamn post?!

I fell asleep twice and took Grandma to Chipotle yesterday but other than that my time has been spent constantly typing.

Holy shit, you guys. Seriously.

I should wrap this up :)


We were sad to leave PAX. We had an experience there that exceeded anything I could have hoped for Grandma. She got to meet wonderful people. Our kind of people. And I'm not talking about Tim Schafer or Wil Wheaton or Jonathan Coulton or Ron Gilbert, although they are certainly going to be highlights in stories I obnoxiously repeat to people for years to come.

I'm talking about you guys.

The 40 or so of you that came up to us just to say "hey, I love you guys!" or "you fucking rock, Grandma" or "I love the blog, man!"

I cannot put into words what that meant to me.

Thank you.

Thank you Annie and Brian, for showing us a great time and sharing your stories.

Thank you Donna for opening up to us in ways strangers never do.

Thank you to John, Matt, and Dave for putting up with my bullshit over a pitcher of beer.

Thank you to Rebbecca, Marie, Casey, Cassidy, Mike, Jen, Paul, Henri, Sean, and all the others. You know why.

Thank you to all of you who spoke to Grandma as a gamer and as a friend. As a PAXer.

And thank you to Jerry and Mike for making this celebration of gaming possible, away from the exclusivity and elitism of E3.

Thank you.

PAX never really ended. We were all there for the same reasons. Penny Arcade and Gaming. This culture doesn't end outside the Washington Convention Center. It spreads everywhere like wildflowers. And it's spreading still. Grandma, like us all, just wants something great to play.

And there's so much to play.

Game on.

Read the rest of this post...

See you guys at PAX!

It's about 2:00am EST and we're about to leave for the airport. Grandma is ridiculously excited for this trip. Excited, and perhaps a bit nervous. PAX has sold out. We got our pre-reg packet in the mail as promised so we're good, but it's going to be a hell of a lot of people this year it seems. That's not the problem- the more the merrier of course; Long Live Penny Arcade! But I wonder how many apologies we'll have to dish out for constantly plowing through crowds of people with one of these.

First, she's going to get to see the Pacific Northwest for the first time in her life. I have been unable to describe it to her in a way that isn't hyperbolic or vague. She's got to see it for herself. You guys in Tacoma might think you live in a rather boring part of the world, but we're in motherfucking Ohio. One week in Youngstown and you'll thank god you a) don't know who James Traficant is and b) didn't grow up in a place where James Traficant is referred to as "an okay guy."

Or to put it another way, the woman who played Mrs. Brisby in The Secret of NIHM is from Boardman, Ohio. She's buried there. She killed herself. Will Wheaton was also in that movie and he's a guest speaker at PAX.

It's like really depressing code where a;Ohio="false"

Second, (yet most important), she gets to see a lot of awesome people. Annie is on a panel. (Hi Annie!) Tim Schafer is on a panel. Tim Schafer made Grandma cry tears of joy. After Psychonauts, I mean. We have to find a way to say thank you for what DoubleFine did for Grandma when she was in the hospital. It is a mission.

Blair Herter used to work for MTV, and did that first segment with Grandma that introduced damn near everybody to what she was about. He's cool as shit. Last time I saw him I drunkenly puked all over myself outside the Mondrian hotel on Sunset Blvd. Hopefully he's forgotten that. But he'll be there too! Not to mention a few people from TotalFark I know; some working as Enforcers, some experiencing the convention like us, and some who just love to get together.

If I'm not mistaken, I think Grandma said Vic is going to be there too.

This could be the reunion.

And all in the celebration of Penny Arcade.

In February, I really, honestly thought this trip would never happen. It was too far away, too expensive to get there, Grandma was too weak, it was too good to happen this year.

I also really need to stop posting now before I jinx the shit out of it for her.

Also! There were some fantastic comments in the last post we weren't able to answer quickly- but I swear I will when we return. As long as I can cram a Panasonic DVX-100b into this carry-on luggage sitting next to me, there will be a video too!

I'm probably forgetting something. If it's a toothbrush, I apologize in advance when you see us.

And if you see us, come say hey! Grandma wants to meet you! That's the whole point of these conventions, man. We all love the same stuff. Grandma is an equal there instead of a freak.

I need to find a toothbrush, now.

Game on!

Read the rest of this post...

Lights and tunnels

Grandma's life is finally resembling something others call "normal." She has completed cardiac therapy, which is another way of saying Medicare won't pay for it anymore. They gave her a certificate reminiscent of the "Pleasure to have in class" awards teachers give to elementary school students which we threatened to hang on the refrigerator.

"You hang that shit up there and I swear to god I'll set the fridge on fire," she countered.

Meanwhile, Grandma strolled her way through Infamous on the PS3, first as a hero, then as an asshole. She loved that game, but it wasn't particularly difficult for Grandma seeing as (and I hope we're not the first to notice this) it was basically Sly Cooper 4 with Sly Cooper played by a bald jackass.

Also, we have tons of stuff to talk about. Crispy Gamer, GamesRadar, VidaExtra, Swiss TV... Tons of awesome this past month. Things are good. That's not even including PAX 2009 in September. Grandma and I always wanted to go, so this year we're going.

Do you speak German? Maybe you do. Swiss TV produced a piece on the changing demographics of gaming featuring Grandma last month. Arthur Honegger (no, not that one), the reporter for Swiss TV, was very kind to Grandma, visiting our home in Ohio before flying out to E3 to complete the story.


If you don't speak German, here's something for you: you'll notice that when Grandma is interviewed, there is a single, still image on the screen behind her, a screengrab of the Japanese version of Earth Defense Force 2017, complete with an IGN logo in the bottom right hand corner. Arthur needed a still image on the screen of a game she played, and most pause functions darken the screen or bring up a menu, so I used Java PS3 Media Server on my computer downstairs and found the image from an earlier post. I pulled it up on the PS3 and displayed it on her screen. I had to move the sticks on the controller every few minutes off camera to keep the screen from going dark.

If you do speak German, then I'd like to talk to you a bit about something Arthur said while he was here. We were talking about violence in video games and how it's different in Europe. He mentioned "if there is sex in a video game, nobody cares, but if it's violent it gets banned." Sort of a reverse of how it is here in The States. I remember when the Der Spiegel article about Grandma came out, someone had said that they couldn't get God of War 2 in Germany. Are there ways around this? Is it all PAL games or do you have to get a modded console or an NTSC version or.. how do you do it? We're very curious about this.


Literally while Arthur was setting up his equipment, Grandma checked her email and found that Scott Jones and John Keefer with CrispyGamer.com wanted to show her something they thought would make her feel awesome.

They were right.

Just last week, GamesRadar posted a list that one may think would make Grandma feel badass.

And one would be right.

So now we have two lists of elderly badassness published fairly close together, proclaiming Grandma as the motherfucking queen. Hell, no problems from me there, although I tend to think Grandma's personal vote would be for none other than BUGENHAGEN.

BEHOLD HIS GLORY!
Ho Ho Hoooo, indeed sir. Ho Ho Hoooo.

So now let's look at each list critically, to see how they compare.

It's tricky to do as CrispyGamer lists 21 and GamesRadar 7, but the results are surprising.

First, let's narrow them down by similar games. In the CrispyGamer list, published first, we'll leave out games not on the GamesRadar list for science.
21. Bill - Left 4 Dead
20. Hoy Quarlow - Super Punch Out
19. Helen Parker - Hotel Dusk: Room 215
18. Shun Di - Virtua Fighter series
17. The Vizier - Prince of Persia: Sands of Time
16. Dr. Russell Barnaby - Dead Rising
15. Heihachi Mishima - Tekken series
14. Cranky Kong - Donkey Kong Country
13. Strago Magus - FF VI
12. The Hobo - Bully
11. Gouken - Street Fighter IV
10. Dr. Wily - Mega Man
9. Admiral Tolwyn - Wing Commander
8. Cervantes - SoulCalibur
7. Orca - The Legend of Zelda
6. Dr. Muto - Dr. Muto
5. Old Snake - Metal Gear Solid IV: Guns of the Patriots
4. Dr. Gilbert Zan - Streets of Rage 3
3. Agatha - Fallout 3
2. Frogfucius - Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars
1. Grandma

To refresh, this is the GamesRadar list

7. Bill Overbeck - Left 4 Dead
6. Shun Di - Virtua Fighter
5. The End - Metal Gear Solid 3
4. Heihachi Mishima - Tekken
3. Avery Johnson - Halo
2. Oro - Street Fighter III
1. Grandma

Not counting sequel differences such as Metal Gear Solid and Street Fighter, arguably the biggest change is the inclusion of Avery Johnson of the Halo series. GamesRadar lists The End rather than Old Snake, and Oro rather than Gouken.

As it contrasts in this way, the hierarchy shares a remarkable pattern:

6. Left 4 Dead (CG) / Left 4 Dead (GR)
5. Virtua Fighter (CG) / Virtua Fighter (GR)
4. Tekken (CG) / Metal Gear Solid (GR)
3. Street Fighter (CG) / Tekken (GR)
2. Metal Gear Solid (CG) / Street Fighter (GR)
1. Grandma (CG) / Grandma (GR)

Discounting the inclusion of Halo, these two lists by two different authors on two different high traffic sites seem to hold very, very close opinions. But why? What phenomenon is displayed here? Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting anything sinister. Both articles are well written and in different voices, so the ugly "p-word" doesn't really apply, thank Christ. I'd like to think there are somewhat universal trends and opinions shared by most authors of gaming articles- there are just some things that become Natural Hierarchies, like FFVII > FFX > Alone in the Dark > FFX-2. Debatable? Maybe. But more often than not, that's probably the order you'd find.

Are there similar orders to elderly awesomeness?

I find this shit fascinating.

Also: after really thinking about it, I appreciate how difficult it is to create a list of the greatest old folks in gaming- characters, NPC's and real people alike. There are waaaay too many for me to compile any kind of opinion on it. For as much as the 'new' demographic is to gaming, they've been arguably well represented in all sorts of ways. No doubt there have been many instances where they are depicted as old biddies who like cats (I'm looking at you, Nintendo Wii startup guide), there are plenty of times when they have kicked ass.

I will say this, though, I'd have to include Doris Self waaaay up at the top of any such list. I wish her and Grandma could have met.

Anyway, it's been verified by respectable gaming websites: Grandma can destroy us all.

And that's awesome :)


Also! Grandma also enjoyed a mention on the site VidaExtra, so we're getting a lot of traffic from Spanish speaking gamers out there right now. I love international readers. The emails and comments especially- there are people all over the world who know others just like Grandma. This was never a nationalistic thing where people would shake their heads and think "only in America..." The gaming world was never that way. It's a big family. A family with more grandparents than people realized.

Hola!


Now let's talk about Infamous. It's consumed Grandma's life recently between trips to therapy and fishing so it deserves some attention. Infamous was Grandma's choice after beating the everloving shit out of Resident Evil 5. I would have liked to post about RE5 more as well, but the job hunt has limited my activities to applications, resumes, CivIV and the sweet release of sleep. (I know I need to post more often, guys. It's my fault and I'll try to do better.)

But! Infamous was fairly recent so it's easy to remember Grandma's opinions of it.

Such as:

"Fucking... no..no...noooo....NOOOO GODDAMMIT!"

"Get up there. GET UP THERE. GODDAMMIT SLIDE JESUS... SHIT!"

"I can't do this. I give up. I give up, I swear to god."

And that's just one of the "Satellite Uplink" missions.

Where to start. Grandma was first to notice its similarities with Sly Cooper of the two of us. The bluetooth cell phone replacing the radio with the little messages popping up; Bently and Murray essentially replaced by Zeke and John. Jumping on high places and taking a good long look around for missions highlighted by glowing pillars of light. Hell, Cole and Sly even sort of stand and walk the exact same way, haunched over, low to the ground; their worlds distorted as though through a wide angle lens. Look at this:

Raccoon.
Not a raccoon.
So if you are familiar with the themes and gameplay of the Sly Cooper series, you're already know how to play Infamous. That is to say, jumping around, find stuff, climbing on stuff, kick the shit out of something, run away before it kills you.

And goddammit, that's not a bad thing. Sucker Punch didn't make a Sly Cooper mod and call it Infamous, but they are clearly going with what they know how to do best. As platformers go, it's great. Grandma really got into finding new ways of electrocuting people. Because really, before Infamous, we could only think of two ways. Turns out it's more like seven ways.

If she had any gripe with the game, beside the usual "this part is rather difficult" or from what I could tell anyway, it was with the plot.

Grandma, for some reason, had a problem with Trish.

If you haven't played the game yet, Trish is Cole McGrath's girlfriend. According to Grandma, Trish is also, apparently, "a self-righteous bitch."

Spoliers ahead.

"I don't get Trish."
-"What do you mean?"
"I don't know. She just blames everything on Cole just because he's alive during the explosion, right?"
-"No, she's suspicious."
"Of what?"
-"That he delivered the package that was the bomb."
"So she's bitching at Cole for doing his job, is what you're saying."
-"Sort of, I guess."
"She nags at him for being a delivery guy, then she nags at him for surviving while other people died in the blast, then she nags at him because SHE wants to drive people from the hospital, she even digs at him by saying 'ooooo, I was in medical school, I know stuff. What the hell did YOU do with your life."
-No she didn't."
"Yes she did! And then she DIES. And if you play as the evil Cole, she nags at him right before she dies. The only difference between good Cole and evil Cole is you don't get that one last nagging when she dies."
-"She does nag."
"I don't even know why they are together. It doesn't make sense to me."

She like the choice between good and evil, as cliche as it has become since the ending of Legacy of Kain. She dug similar games like KOTOR and Oblivion, where choices matter, even if the choice is a clear polar opposite. There were times when she would get negative karma and not know why, however. It turns out it was because her favorite way of dispatching enemies was blowing up cars; cars that often had innocent bystanders doing their bystanding a little too close. Due to her hatred of Trish, she wasn't annoyed that she dies no matter what the hell you do.

The good and evil endings were very similar to the ends of Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, where different cutscenes were injected as appropriate.

The gameplay frustrated her, but no more than it was supposed to, I think.

"Hard mode is a bunch of BULLSHIT. They hit you two times and you're DEAD."
-"Well... that's why it's hard mode."
"Smartass."

Upon her second playthrough as an evil person:
"I keep trying to fly, but I forgot that I don't have that power yet. It's annoying."

"GODDAMMIT I BLEW MYSELF UP AGAIN."

"I like how when you cure people the enemies just stand there and watch. You think that would be a good time to shoot him."

"Tim."
-"What?"
"Look at this."
-"What?"
"On the theater sign. It says 'Sly Cooper 4.'"
-"Yup."
"It's like they're admitting it."
-"I think they're just giving a little something to the fans, like.. 'it's coming' or something."
"Shit, it's already here."

And yet she still liked it. She has her own theories about who "The Beast" is, so it's safe to bet that's she'll play the sequel.

As long as they don't have Satellite Uplink missions.


Okay. We finally paid for everything, it's all set, so I can say it with absolute certainty:

Grandma is going to PAX.

In the past, she would talk about E3 as though it was the end-all games conference; something she had always wanted to see but couldn't afford and lacked the necessary media credentials to attend. Then MTV stepped in and made that happen in 2006. She loved it, even though she wasn't feeling well at the time (that was a sign of things to come, wasn't it.) In the meantime, you have all described PAX as a big party for gamers. You told her she'd love it. That it's full of her kind of people. Keynote speeches on things we all find interesting. Concerts from groovy musicians. Exhibitions and booths and all manner of good things she would love to see.

At E3 2006, we finally met Annie (hi, Annie!) who introduced Grandma to Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, the creators of a comic that, believe it or not (although most of you know by now) has made Grandma press F5 more often than perhaps people should. It was a brief meeting, but they were cool. She's probably won't get to meet them again with all the stuff they'll have going on during the convention, but goddammit if she's not going to the convention anyway. Grandma is going to have a ball with the rest of us.

It was something I wanted to make happen for Grandma since late last year, but after being laid-off and then her heart-bypass surgery, it seemed more and more like a pipe dream. Somehow we pulled it off. We'll be on a shoe-string budget for the trip, but Grandma is going for all three days of the convention so she can take her time and see all there is to see.

And meet you people!

Seriously, come say hi! Fuck! She loves to talk gaming and lately the only person she's had available to do so is me. And I'm boring.

So come to PAX, goddammit.

Game on!

Read the rest of this post...

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.

Game on.

Read the rest of this post...

And the fun just keeps coming!

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.

Game on!

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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.

It's all up to Grandma!

Game on!

Read the rest of this post...

Let's back up for a minute...

Okay!

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. Sadako Samara Mayu 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.

See you then!

Game on!

/SOMEONE! PLEASE TREAT THEM!

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The Great EA Adventure, Part 4

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 a 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.

Game on.

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The Great EA Adventure, Part 3

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.

Errol Fucking Morris.

[to be continued!]

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The Great EA Adventure, Part 2

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."

[to be continued!]

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The Great EA Adventure

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.

[to be continued...]

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Update!

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.

Game on!

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Fuck yes

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.


He was cool.

Game on!

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Super Mario Galaxy is boring Grandma to death

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?

Game on!

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My first vcast while Tim is busy

I hope this works!

-Grandma

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Come to Mexico with Grandma and me!

Holy fucking shit, you guys.

Holy shit.

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.

Seriously.

Sign up for this thing.

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!

Game on!

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Video 22: Grandma plays Mass Effect

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The current state of things

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.

Game on.

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'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.

Game on!

Read the rest of this post...

Grandma's back, baby!

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.

Grandma.


"Don't point... look.. that's her. THAT'S FUCKING HER!"

"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.)

More to come!

Game on.

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Grandma not dead, doesn't want to go in the cart

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!!

Game on!

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Sitting around, playing video games in the dark

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 :)

More posts on the way!

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GAH!!

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!!

Game on!

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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.

Game on!

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Grandma meets Big Daddy

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

Game on!

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Grandma has Destroyed The Darkness

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.

Next week: BIOSHOCK, motherfuckers!! Wooooo!!!

Game on!

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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.

Game on!

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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.

Game on!

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Video 21 - Grandma plays Overlord

[Update: Yay! Kotaku, Destructoid and Joystiq gave us some love! Thanks, guys. We love ya!]

A couple things on this one:

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.

Game on!

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Grandma on Overlord

"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."



Game on!

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I'm Jonesing, Man

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.

Are your hands supposed to shake?

Game on!

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Grandma chooses Evil over 80's

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.]

Game on!

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Ask Old Grandma Hardcore: Open Thread

Open thread! What do you want to talk about? While we wait, watch the horribly embarrassing Disney PR disaster video after the jump.

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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