Things to do on the toilet besides play games

You can read books about games! After my initial repulsion at the Gamer's Edition of the Guinness Book, it has become my new favorite bathroom reading. It's full of weird little facts about games across all different genres since the dawn of time, and it's the kind of knowledge that you can use to impress your nerdy friends. After adding it to my game knowledge database, I'm pretty sure I could do very, very well at Jeopardy: Gamer's Edition or Trivial Pursuit: Gamer's Edition. If only game shows were able to survive on TV! Alas, woe is the nerds. It's odd that no company has made a mass market video game trivia game yet, what with the industry as a whole having surpassed the movie industry years ago in terms of sales... and now we have Scene-It, a video game about movie knowledge. Where's the movies about video game knowledge? Who knows...

There are some other cool video game books to put on your coffee table next to your controllers and game cases. I thoroughly enjoyed High Score! 2nd Edition, which is full of pretty pictures and neat tidbits. Also, The Ultimate History of Video Games will get you up to speed with the industry better and more entertainingly than any other book/movie/website I've ever seen. Also, Lucky Wander Boy. The greatest piece of video game fiction ever written. You need to find it somewhere and buy it immediately. I hope D.B. Weiss writes another book someday! I'd also love to read Supercade someday... but it's hard to find MIT Press books in Southern Minnesota.

I'm the world's greatest!

A while back, I complained about the Guinness Book for having not enough beatable records in it. Then I remembered, oh yeah, there's already a place where all the game records in the world live: Twin Galaxies. So what's the first thing you do when you're a serious gamer and you see a bunch of scores you can beat? You find out which ones you already have. Apparently, I'm already the world record holder on about half the songs in Amplitude on PS2, and I'm sure I have beaten some of the records on Frequency if I could just find out where my game disc went! However, to actually beat the record and have it verified, you have to film yourself doing it. You can't just mail in picture of the high score screen. Since most of the Amplitude playing was about 5 years ago, I'm a little rusty and I'm having a hard time recapturing my ultra-high scores. But even today, I was able to play a few levels and almost double the world record scores on a few of the songs. It looks like it may not actually be the highest scores in the world, just the highest scores of a person that had the time and energy to submit a score. That could be me.

One guy on the site currently holds 5,019 records across all different types of games. In second place is 890. I may not be able to top Mr. 5000 but I think I could at least get in the top 10... I mean, how hard can it be to get 400 world records? Ok, maybe it would be tough. But, like Steve Wiebe from King of Kong, everybody wants to be good at something.

Records... or not.

I just picked up the Guinness Book of World Records: Gamer's Edition, and I gotta say... it's not quite what I expected. Sure, there's a list of high scores in the back to try to beat, but the majority of the book is records like, "Biggest town in Age of Conan," or "Number of calories burned playing fitness games." Oh boy. The actual records, like "Fastest-selling video game of all time," are buried in between piles of innocuous jibba jabba. The facts are interesting, but I was totally thrown off by the title. Most Guinness books are pages and pages of text with records that are achievable and beatable by everyday, normal people with a lot of practice. This book isn't records. This book is facts. It's still a neat coffee table read... it's just misleading. Oh well, at least there's lots of pretty pictures!