This will make sense only to a small subset of gaming brethren.

You may have heard of the Myers-Briggs personality test that were all the rage last century. I distinctly recall taking it during a “bonding” exercise with my fellow RAs at FSU, though my resultant INTP type and its recommendation that I’d make a fabulous assassin limited the “bonding” part of the exercise to some extent… though it was quite a hit with the ladies.

Now there’s a similar assessment for what kind of gamer you are. From The Helping Hand to The Wingman to The Game Master, you too can categorize yourself in meaningless ways! This way you can meet up with like minded gamers and… game. They were kind of harsh to me, though.

The Gibbering F*ckwit

Deliberate Obstinate Retaliatory Klutz (DORK).

You take pride in failure. You may not play many different games, nor experiment with different genres, but you’re uniformly bad at all of them. In team games you are mostly a hindrance in achieving goals when you’re not actively harming your teammates. Few people enjoy playing with you and the ones that claim to enjoy it are lying. Your stilted social interactivity limits your appeal to other social outcasts, toddlers and the deaf. Any list of “friends” you may have accumulated in social gaming networks are filled with those who find entertainment in your abject idiocy.

You see slights against you in mundane circumstances and seek only retribution even when unwarranted. Your lack of understanding of the rules and flow of games leads to frustration for you, your opponents and your teammates. You are consistently out of position, ill-equipped, in the way, and you consume resources that could be used more efficiently by anyone. Anyone at all. Your reflexes could best be described as “glacial” and you have no fine motor control, slewing wildly around and typically facing the wrong way in every situation. You consistently confound other players and even the original game designers by finding new ways to underachieve in even the most constructive and supportive environments.

We are unable to recommend any games more challenging than, say, horseshoes, but even then you would find a way to hurt yourself or others. Just stick to Sudoku. Really simple ones.

:(

Bill Harris posted a hilarious and surprisingly effective method of generating band names for EA’s game Rock Band among other things. I decided to slap together a script that automates the process. Go try it out!

Look at stupid me. Just look what I did in my discussion of my new toy, Rock Band for the Xbox 360.

If only there weren’t rumbles of less than reliable hardware. The guitars have strummers that seemingly inevitably screw up and the “overdrive” doesn’t kick in consistently. The bass drum pedal snaps in half. The drum heads start not responding. People that can’t sing use the mics. I admit to being a bit worried about the longevity of the hardware, but it certainly hits the right balance to provide a simply astounding level of happy happy.

See that? I summoned the hardware failure! I have no one to blame but myself. So there I am trying to get through the Hard difficulty on guitar and I’ve got a steady stream of 16th notes. No fret movements required, just hold ‘em down and strum. I can do that. Except the guitar wouldn’t let me. I could string together maybe 6 or 7 but I’d inevitably lose my run even though I know I’m strumming consistently and in-time.

I certainly will not be mentioning anything about my recently acquired Mass Effect game, nor will I so much as allude to my bass kick pedal.

I tried to fit in a little game of NHL08 this morning before work, but Julia was having none of it. She popped in and wanted to watch but watching soon became…

“Daddy, can you teach me how to play, please?”

I am not, contrary to common opinion, a heartless bastard and this certainly had its intended effect. So I loaded up a shootout, showed her that the left thumbstick made the little guy skate around and that if she wanted to shoot the puck she should push the right thumbstick up.

Away we go. She is quite entertained simply skating around for a while, occasionally sending poor Eric Staal repeatedly into the boards, then crosses the goal line and the whistle blows.

“You can’t cross the little line, sweetie.”

“Oh.”

Next skater comes and she skates around some more and crosses the goal line. Tweet.

“Don’t forget, you can’t cross the line.”

Next skater comes and she skates and pushes the right thumbstick forward and shoots, all by herself! This gets her excited but soon enough Daniel Alfredsson ends our run and the game ends. I set up a rematch and she skates in as Eric Staal again, wrists it from the slot and deflects one off the pads and scores!

“Yay Julia!” I’m pretty sure I scared her by yelling so loudly. “You scored!” She raises the controller over her head and bounces up and down in celebration.

Spezza skates in, toe drags and puts a nice one past Ward. Crap. I figured she might actually win it. Matt Cullen (allpraisehisname) skates in next and Julia skates past the goal line again. Ah well. Heatley takes his turn and boofs it so it’s Cory Stillman up next.

Julia skates in, wrists one which deflects off the glove and through Gerber’s legs for a goal! Winner, Julia! Her second NHL08 shootout ever and she wins it. At 4 and a half years old.

Almost brings a tear to my eye.