posts by tyson

To be truly honest, this week has been pretty tame in Video Game Store land. No crazed pedophiles, no extremely stupid customers, just a couple of stores full of video games and me, tooling around behind the counter like robot in malaise. This is the perfect time to give you an honest glimpse of how a video game store runs when weirdos aren’t coming out of the woodwork.

Like all tertiary jobs, this one comes with its fair share of retarded and mindlessly repetitive tasks. The biggest one is disc cleaning and re-surfacing. Just about every disc that gets traded in to us gets a thorough cleaning. How people get substances like butter on discs is beyond me; what I have learned is that most people care as much about their game discs as they do about their fourth cousin, twice removed on their mom’s side of the family. Knowing that my trusty re-surfacing machine can buff out even the most treacherous of scratches, I am pretty lenient when it comes to adjusting the trade-in values on the games that come in but you would be amazed at how many “B” and “C” grades I dole out. →  I’m readin’ here!

Last night, I walked into a video game store that was swamped with trade-ins. I could barely make out my manager and another co-worker behind the counter for the stacks of NES games that were piled before them; it was like Christmas…of 1989. Classics like Ice Breakers, Ducktales, RC Pro-Am, and countless others littered the counter top as my geeky colleagues waded through processing all of the games in order to give our Santa Claus his grand total of trade-in credit that the store was bestowing upon him for his generous endowment.

In Germanic folklore, Santa was this skinny guy that dressed in green clothing and gave out gifts to good children while beating the bad ones. Kind of like a strung out father who would smack his kids around while waiting in line at the methadone clinic. For Dutch people, Santa was a guy who would come around and give out presents to deserving children while his helper, called Black Peter, would carry another bag to take away the bad kids. →  Please sir, can I have some more?

One thing that sets my store apart from other video games retailers is our game testing stations. Each of the two stores I flutter between during the week is equipped with just about every major gaming console made in the last twenty years and we encourage people to try out the games before they take them home. This also means that when it is slow, I pretty much play any game I want. Life is good. The other night the battle of the sexes erupted at my Xbox 360 test station.

These two high school kids were playing one of the Soul Caliber games and the girl was absolutely rocking this poor guy’s newly pubescent world. You see, this naive young man confidently entered into a contest of furious button mashing with a girl that had no clue how to play the game. Little did he know that almost all women have a secret power that enables them to totally dominate their male counterparts at video games in which they haven’t the slightest inkling how to play. →  Snap! Crackle! Read!

Last night I achieved a sales goal that I don’t think will ever be topped by another mortal.

It was a quiet evening and my boss, Jason, and I were being good little worker bees. Alphabetizing and sorting titles, rearranging aisles, trying to restructure the layout of my store so that it may actually generate a couple of bucks profit. One of our big tasks of the night had been to weed the crappy and older games from the shelves and make a bargain bin of marked down titles that was placed prominently in front of the door so would-be customers had to walk right past it. Both of us were sitting on the floor of our empty and serene establishment when the front door burst open and two police officers rushed into the building, hands on guns and tasers.

“Do you guys work here,” the senior officer barked. Jason and I looked at each other in befuddlement and answered affirmatively in unison. →  Illiterates hate her! Click to read this one weird trick.

Welcome to the inaugural release of my new and (hopefully) weekly column. Since returning to America, I have found myself short on cash and pretty much willing to do anything for a buck or two. Yes, I have even tried to sell my body but for some reason or another, most prospective customers frown upon my “by the pound, by the hour” pricing scheme. This lack of cash and abundance of free time meant that I spent a lot of time hanging out with my friend who works at a small video game shop close to my house. Well lets be real honest, it isn’t my house, it’s my parents’ house and I live in the basement.

One night my friend and I were talking while there was a lull in customers tooling around the shop and it came up that if I was going to hang out with her at the video game shop, I may as well be getting paid for it. →  Game. James Game.

The Muffin Buffalo stalks through the corridors and crevasses of The Narrows map on Halo 3. Quietly he roams, picking his targets and releasing them from their mortal coils. He has done this many times before and is good at his job. Out of nowhere, a fellow warrior named SheepandVelcro69 jabs Muffin Buffalo from behind with the butt of his shotgun. Muffin Buffalo lurches forward and then lifelessly drops to the ground. This has also happened to him many times, business as usual, the cycle of death repeats.

But wait, SheepandVelcro69 is not leaving his corpse; does he feel remorse for the act he has just committed? Is he taking a moment of silent reflection to realize that body could just as easily be him lying on the ground? No, our shotgun equipped friend creeps up to Muffin Buffalo’s head, centers himself above the corpse’s cranium and proceeds to drop his crotch up and down on the motionless clump of pixels . →  Zero Escape: Nine Hours, Nine Authors, Nine Articles

October of 2005 was a severely messed up time for me. I was newly divorced, living with one of my best friends, and had just found out that in several months time I would be moving to Japan. My life has always been kind of weird but the Fall of ’05 was the pinnacle. Back then, gaming was an escape. My real life kind of sucked and games were an escape for me. I had an Xbox I had modded, a PS2, and a Gamecube. What I lacked in a love life, I more than made up for in pixelated goodness.

When I wasn’t playing video games, I was sleeping or at work. I hated my job and I didn’t sleep often so it can be said that I played a LOT of video games. I did other stuff too, but what sticks in my mind about that time most was the hours I whiled away in front of the TV shooting aliens or playing poker against Chris Ferguson. →  Monster Reader 4