If there’s one genre of games I think is getting the shaft over and over again that made me fall in love with gaming in the first place, it would have to be the beat ‘em ups. These games were just notorious for eating a roll of quarters faster than a German in a Mentos commercial. The funniest thing is that many of us didn’t seem to mind doing so.

I wince when I think of all the cash that I’ve dumped into the arcades in my formative years playing these games, all of that cash that could have gone to something more worthwhile like delicious snack foods or maybe saved in my own pocket so I could afford more cartridges for my Sega Master System or my Nintendo. The biggest offence are the ones that I had beaten so many times before but I continued to play and play over and over again.

Tonight’s list are just those, the games where you too might remember playing through multiple times, but wouldn’t mind going back and doing it all again…there’s no better word to describe them than classic.

I’ve come to find that there is nothing more polarizing to most people than the kind of music we all listen to. Religion, sexual preference, or political beliefs mean absolutely nothing when you tell someone that you can’t stand Pink Floyd, or if you think that AC/DC was a shitty band.

It was this thought that had me think about what albums I would bring with me if there ever were some situation where I could no longer have access to my vast collection of music. This type of question was always one that people would ask me but I could never give them a definitive list.

Whether it be the proverbial ‘deserted island’ or ‘post-apocalyptic world’ (where honestly, entertainment would have to take a backseat to survival) I’ve tried to imagine a situation where this kind of list could be deemed an appropriate thing to have ready.

Finding no such situation (where the hell can you get a solar powered CD player that won’t eventually break, unscratchable CDs, and indestructible headphones?), and no way to actually implement it, I said “what the hell” and decided to write it anyway. With that, here is my list of top 10 ‘desert island’ albums. Enjoy!

Back in the great days of my youth almost 19 years ago, when the NES was king and I was a portly little quiet kid. A kid who escaped everyday to the Mushroom Kingdom and Dracula’s Castle to avoid my boring existence as a grade school child. I had very few friends and a non-existent home life so video games became a coping mechanism to help my personal development and became my best friend.

The NES in today’s world is considered archaic, dilapidated, old, and maybe even silly; to me, it was the best game console ever made (until the SNES that is). Many of the games that were there to be enjoyed were ones you had to beat within the time-span from when the power button was pressed to the on position to the time when you either:

• A) Accidentally Hit the Reset Button
• B) Had a Power Outage (prevalent in the south)
• C) The Connection Between Cartridge and NES Failed
• D) You Hit The Power Button

If you didn’t beat the game in that span of time, you had to start over from the beginning, usually World/Level 1-1.

There were some games that did come with more advance features such as Battery Backup (which is now starting to fail in some of my older games ;__:) or Password Features that were great as long as you write it down exactly as it appeared, if not, back to World 1-1 Noob! There was however a way around this problem, the NES didn’t generate heat much at all, the power supply did, so many of us started to leave the NES on all night long while we slept.

I can remember going home from school on Friday night playing all day until I couldn’t possibly go any further, shutting off the TV, the lights and everything else only to have the square cyclopic red eyeball of the NES stare at me all night like HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey threatening to kill me while I slept. Today’s list deals with those few games that forced me to do so on many occasions, I’ll see you at the end.

It’s rather unfortunate for us gamers, in that we aren’t as lucky as fans of books, music, or movies just for the fact that the majority of games released will never ever see a sequel. Even if there is fan support and we think that it would be a good idea and that they ‘deserve’ one, it’s more likely than not that it won’t.

In planning this top ten, I wanted to establish a few criteria:

• The game had to be the only one of its series
• No sequels rumored or planned
• No sequels that do exist

So with that, let’s get started on the topic and the victim of today’s top 10, my list of the games that are beloved by me (among others) and that I think are deserve a sequel. I’ll see you at the end.

There are movies, and then there are MOVIES! Today I hope to share with you my shining examples of the MOVIES that make you glad that you have a dick. You know, the truly testosterone pumped films that blur the line between awesome and homo-erotic. We’ve all seen them hundreds of times but there is no doubting their true awesomeness that strikes a chord deep within our male egos.

Hollywood, in all of its cleft-assholeness has truly forgotten what it is like to make the movie epics that we used to enjoy back in the 80s. I’m talking of course about the movies where you had men as the alpha-male heroes and their big-breasted amazonian women (that always seemed to be in heat) as the subserviant part of the species that either needed to be saved, avenged, or protected…you know, the way it should be.

Lets face it, the Christmas tunes hit the radio before the turkey hits the table. Everyone wants to make a buck off of the most commercial holiday out there. There are thousands of Christmas songs, millions if you include the rabbit-like producing of cover songs. After two months of Christmas music, you can understand why suicide rates are so high around this holiday.

Narrowing the list down to only 10 entries was no easy task, but after many strong glasses of egg nog I present you with the ten most cringe-worthy Christmas songs.

Anyone that knows me personally, knows that I am first and foremost a console gamer. It’s been that way since the early 90s when I first wrapped my grubby mitts around a SNES controller. However, during those defining years for software developers, there WAS a time where I was a console gamer and an avid PC gamer. Unfortunately, with all of the exponential advances that PCs have been making over the last ten years or so, I’ve grown cold at the thought of being a PC gamer again.

I’m sure I would enjoy many of the games that are out on PCs these days; I just don’t want to pay $600+ to have a somewhat entry level PC that can run games at an “ok” level. Even more unbelievable are some of the people paying almost 3 grand on a ‘gaming’ rig. I have my gaming ‘rig’ hooked up to my TV, its called an Xbox 360.

Before you get the wrong idea guys, let me explain that there WAS a time where PC gaming wasn’t that hard to have the right system requirements to play. This magical age came forth mainly for me in the mid 90s right before you HAD to have Windows installed on your computer to play games…that’s right, I’m going there back to the good ‘ol days where you played games using MS-DOS.

Whether it be games, music, books, or movies, I’ve earned my Weird Kid moniker. With movies it was mainly because I had too much time where I was allowed to stay up late watching all the premium channels without any adult supervision. I would honestly stay up until like 4 AM watching movie after movie when I was growing up, it didn’t matter if it was a good movie, it was better than watching ANYTHING on regular TV.

Throughout those formative years, I garnered a hankering for all things B-Movie. Whether it be classic camp like Buckaroo Banzai, bad dystopian future where we fight wars with robots like in Robot Jox, or just something silly starring A-List actors like John Malkovich in Making Mr. Right, I was down for anything anywhere.

Today’s list I hope to share with you the top 10 movies that I think are guilty pleasures to watch. Maybe you don’t think that some of these are bad movies, but I’ve garnered enough shifty eyes to believe that there should be some shame in enjoying these movies as much as I have. See you at the end.

The FIRST game that I ever played on my old NES was Super Mario Brothers. It was not a perfect game really, but for my little 8 year old mind, it was heaven. The action was intense, the speed was just right, and when you got the fire-flower, you thought you could take on the world.

Since those days, we have had many a challenger in the gaming world that has tried to take the crown of best platformer ever. There were games that came before and after Super Mario Bros. that I have played and owned; many of them were on the NES. It is that one aspect that made me narrow down the list from all systems to just one. With that, I think you guys will be pleasantly surprised to share with me today: A Weird Kid’s Top 10 — NES Platformers. See you at the end.