Finding One Night Stand on Steam, I decided $3 was worth a risk on the art style alone. A few moments into the game I was already laughing about how things were going from bad to worse. In One Night Stand, you play as a guy who has just woken up naked in a strange place with a strange woman, who is also naked. And, you have no clue how you got there.

From there is is a choice of what to explore and discover through the environment and interaction with the woman you woke up with. The first play through I did answering as I felt I would and ended up with a middling ending. But, playing in a handful of times now I see that this game has a deep story.

My reductive friend said that this game sounded like " a one room play point and click adventure" and I can't disagree. So, if that sounds interesting to you, give it a try.

I also made a short video about my time with the game.

As I am sitting here the movers are slowly packing up my entire life including my video game collection. It is a humbling experience to see the things that I surround myself with and realize how silly it gets at a certain point. I collect for all the consoles I have and I am happy to say that my collection has grown over the years since I have started and my sons love to play games from my childhood with me. Seeing how many boxes it took to get all the stuff in there I had some thoughts about collecting and I thought I would share them.

My first thought was that I should just embrace the digital future and just replace them all with non-physical copies. This would mean that I would not need to drag around the consoles along with all the cases anymore. The other benefit is that I would not have to worry about any of the discs being scratched or damaged. There are downsides as well. the first one is that most of the games cannot be found legally on any platform. The main problem is that most games lose something being played on a different platform. With the NES there were the rituals of blowing into carts, holding reset while pressing the power button, and trying to keep the carts and reading the manual when in the car away from the console. My sons both will sit and play any game when I pull out my Nintendo 64, but if I have it on my Desktop and I hand them a Xbox 360 controller, they get bored and wander off in 5 minutes. So, the digital future while making the load lighter would ruin the play experience and thus make it not worth playing.

The other thing that it caused me to stop is realizing that I have not turned on any of the 3 Atari consoles I had collected since I had purchased them and tested the games. There are some consoles that collecting for just turns into a waste for me because I never want to play those games again. Atari was largely that, so I gave my Atari consoles away and called it a day. Some other consoles got a hard look, but managed to stay. The Sega Master System was one of these, and it has stayed around because I have only played five games on that system and I feel there are more games that I should find before selling it off to someone who will play it more than I will. My PS1 JRPG collection got a long hard stare before I boxed it up as well. I have limited time in my life, but I still have hope that one weekend my sons and I will get to play through Jade Cocoon. So, some things got left behind, but others managed to survive one more move to hopefully get their day in the sun.

While moving is never easy, this move has given me some things to think about. I think that is because my wife and the kids are already ahead of me, so they are safe and sound away from the moving stresses. Will this revelation cagne my life? Probably not, but it does give me a moment of pause when I see something in a store for a great price and I have to think, “will I ever play this.”

My favorite movie of all time is Big Trouble in Little China, and I am not ashamed of it one bit. I learned over the years I have a strange taste in movies. It was not until last year that I realized my tastes in video games are the same. The difference is that people who play video games are much more verbal, bordering on abusive, when you do not like the same game they do. But, how do you deal with it when people are making fun of the game you love so dearly?

The first thing to do is think of where they are coming from in their dislike of the game. I had a conversation with someone about Dust: An Elysian Tail and he said that he enjoyed Valdis Story: Abyssal City because of the mechanics and that it reminded him of Castlevania. From here I had to stop any comparison of the games, because he was coming from a place of mechanical gameplay and nostalgia. Mechanical gameplay is something Dust: An Elysian Tail does have, but the humor and the art are what won me over in the game. Nostalgia is impossible to argue with because every human beings experinces shape what they will look for later in life. I have nostalgia for Big Wheels and you will never convince me they were not awesome toys. So, before you even start the debate with someone think about what they are saying and why.

When saying something about a game, stick to the facts. We are not talking about a term paper that you have to keep referencing the reader as 'one' so don't. Simply say that, "I had lots of fun playing Deadpool" or "I found the part with the bicycle hilarious." This gives the person you are talking to no way to correct you other than stating their own feelings or bring themselves down to the level of personal attacks. Another thing to do that goes hand in hand is to avoid hyperbole. That means don't start every sentence with "The greatest..." Most people will understand your excitement, but it you have a "greatest video game ever" every other week, it weakens the conversation slightly.

If all else fails, pity them. If you know in your heart that it is an awesome game and they just cannot see that, then just let it go. They may never know the joy of sawing a Locust in half with a chainsaw, getting silent assassin on all missions, or hearing the Ghostbusters reference halfway through the game. And that's ok, because you did. Take that memory and walk away from the conversation.

These have helped me keep calm and level headed most of the time when talking about games I hate and love. So, before you call that person a soulless wretch for not liking Wind Waker: take a breath, look at their position, get the facts, and have some compassion for that pour soul.

I found GiantBomb by listening to podcasts. The list of podcasts and the connections take too long to connect here, but it did all start with TechTV, rest in peace. One of the shows I listen to has become enamored with Rust, which has caused for some great stories on the show. That show is Rebel FM.

One of the people on that show is Mitch Dyer and he has been posting random stuff on twitter and that is how I ended up with this short clip from Rust. In it some great and stupid play is happening and about half way through they start playing a song. I had never heard the song before and doubted that I ever would again if it had not become lodged in my brain.

So, this lead me to tracking down the song, cleverly called "Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom!!" I found it on YouTube and have added it to my Music of Shame playlist because it is so catchy. I have shared it with my friends and they are cursing me for having it stuck in their heads. And, now thanks to Rust and the people playing it we all know about Vengaboys.

Rust is like going out drinking all night. I would have loved to do it ten years ago, but I just don't want to that in my life. But, I love to hear the stories from other people who have the time in their lives.

Going back home for the holidays only every other year means that I get to watch change happen almost like it's in time lapse photography. I was raised in Michigan and enjoyed all of the four seasons, and most of them were great for playing outside on the playground. But, going back every other year the playgrounds I knew are all gone and new ones have popped up in their place. I noticed that this is the same thing that happens to an MMO and that is eventually why I stop playing them.

I have played World of Warcraft on and off since the beta in 2004. When I started playing I saw hundreds of new things and went on great adventures. It turned into my playground and I knew where all the slides were and how fast I could swing across the monkey bars. My friends and I ran around Azeroth and had fun in every corner.

Then someone built a new playground right next door, Outland. We went out there and looked around but just didn't like the new playground so we went back to our old Azeroth and went to Scholomance and read the books piled up there. Slowly, we warmed up to Outlands and would go out there to play on the shiny new things. No matter how shiny the new place was, we still met back in the old place and then went from there.

Now, an even newer playground was built called Northrend. This place was great and had all kinds of new lights and flashing slides. But, it was still not the same as our good old Azeroth. We had many good trips to the new playground, but nothing felt as good as coming home and riding around on our cats and horses under the trees that we had first run through when we were level ten.

Then came the day our favorite playground was bulldozed. The cataclysm tore down our old playground and put up a brand new one with shiny new things in it's place. Scholomance was still there, but all the corners were rounded off and the fresh paint wasn't the same color it used to be. Some of the things that we loved were still the same, but others were gone, and still more got changed to almost unrecognizable forms.

It's not that my friends and I no longer liked the game, we still loved it. But, to us it had changed from the game that we loved into a game that we could appreciate as well made. Just like playgrounds can be built amazingly tall, in the shape of castles, made of wood or plastic, but they will still have swings. That is because fun is fun n matter how it is dressed up.