For the launch of Pokemon Diamond/Pearl, I took a train down to the Nintendo World Store in Rockefeller Center for their launch festivities. I arrived a tiny bit late, as there were about a clean 100 people in front of me (in the line that was outside of the building, anyway). Most of us bided the time by playing DS games with eachother (Except for me. I’m not nearly social enough.)

The first guy on line (A man who is named “Jack Smith” according to 1up, who waited up all night, that fucker) came out of the store and walked up the line, showing off the two games he got, along with the signed copy of Diamond. You see, if you were one of the first people to pre-order and buy both of the Pokemon games, you got your choice of:

A) Mets tickets.
B) Dinner at the top of the Empire State Building.
C) A signed copy of one of the games.

While he took the stupid prize, one guy opted for the Mets tickets. The only problem was, he didn’t like Baseball. So what did this glorious fucker do? He walked straight up the line, asking people if they were Baseball fans. He gave the tickets to the first kid to say yes. You have to hand it to Pokemon fans. They may be creepy, but they’re pretty good people, deep down under the pathetic.
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On my Desktop, I have a program named Doomi that serves to remind me of little things that tend to slip my mind. Along with notes like “Remember to burn so and so game” and “Write so and so essay” rests this little gem:

“Games! Articles! Design theory! Keep it in mind!”

You see, when I was younger, I was pretty much an endless engine of enthusiasm, willful to spend hours, even days, on the most depressing and soul crushing things. I’d spend hours on sprite comics, fanart, and very very bad homemade games (The most noteworthy, aside from the one that is soon to be mentioned below, is an RPG based around an Anime forum I went to. Ugh.) Nowadays, I lack the motivation to even finish a game (I honestly think the last game I ended was Jump! Ultimate Stars, about 2 years ago), but back then, I had all of the zeal and zest you would expect from a giant nerd with new technology at his fingertips.

What I want you to know is this: I don’t write for this blog for money. I write so I can try to reclaim some of that lost enthusiasm. So while I dick around on the internet, I keep everything in mind. “How would I draw that?”, “Would this make a good game”, and most importantly: “Can I write about this in 400 words or less?”. 400 words, if you didn’t know, was the word limit for each Blag! aritcle. A limit that is utterly murdered by our tl;dr squads.

This brings me to the subject of this article.

While dicking around on TVtropes.org, I happened upon the article “So Bad It’s Horrible – Video Games” I scrolled down until I found a little gem of a mod named Nazi Auferstehung: A DukenDoom Adventure. Knowing I was in for a laugh, I clicked a link that led to it’s Doomworld: Worst Wad of the year “award” recipient page. It was there that I saw something that made my cheecks turn red.

“The wad was over 165 megs when unzipped, containing multiple copies of the Doom 2 IWAD, spread out over some 20-odd wad files.  There is a staggering number of MP3 files that never end up playing as music in the game, and maps 30-32 are just texture-replaced copies of the original maps.”

Now why would this shame lil ol’ ℳℴℯ me? Because that was a huge part of the huge problem that was the huge shit I created a few years ago. That shit didn’t have an official name. So we’ll just call it Rape of a Genre 2006 for now.

It was such a good idea at the time...

I’m not sure where I first heard of MUGEN. My earliest memories are of youtube videos and some guy calling it the hidden salvation of the fighting genre. That guy is an asshole, but not nearly as much of an asshole as I am. After having my curiosity piqued, I downloaded a torrent that called itself “THE BIGGEST AND BESTEST MUGEN TORRENT OF ALL TIME (400+ CHARACTERS AND MORE STAGES THAN BROADWAY DUDE)”. You see a lot of these on every torrent site. Mine was one of them, albeit way bigger than those other pansy ass MUGEN torrents. You see, RG2K6 had 827. This one had about 160 (God, if you can’t be honest on the internet, where can you be honest?). It was also badly organized, and I had to literaly hack the game just to play as most of the characters.

Eventually, I became adicted to messing with the engine. All that hacking had really hit the core of my enthusiasm (Now if only I used that enthusiasm for something useful; I could be a Doctor, or a Comp Sci major!). You have to give MUGEN credit; for all of the abominations it spawned, it’s a pretty natch engine. Somebody could actual make a good fighting game with it. Not that they have, or for that matter, ever will…

I became addicted to hoarding all of the best and rarest characters I could find. I spent nights hunting down old warehouses and torrenting newer sets. Within a few weeks, I had one of the best collections around. I was a veteran and expert on any and all MUGEN affairs. Imagine my surprise when I saw a well and heated flame-fest on /v/ about MUGEN.

It had the usual. “[X] is shit!” followed by “Stupid [opinionownedbytheposter]fag” seen frequently on /v/. This was the perfect opportunity for me to post a screenshot of all the characters I had amassed in my time. For what does a Tripfag value more than attention? Did I not say that I write these articles to regain my lost enthusiasm and get tons of attention? No? Well, I really really do.

…

Do you like me yet?

…

No? Jerks.

They asked if I could upload it all, and I gleefuly accepted. I always told myself that I was going to upload this set one day, but I also said that I would cleen all the shit out first. Did I clean out the Hugh Jass mess? Of course not! I was in a hurry! /v/ demanded it be delivered as soon as possible! I had 4 gigs to archive and torrent! The funniest thing is, this is probably the turning point of my youthful enthusiasm. This may be the exact moment in which I became the lazy, unimaginative bastard that I am now.

But enough nostalgia. Time for the good part. What was the shit, you ask? Well, I for one am proud to say that RG2K6 was the very first video game of the genre to contain 26 Gokus. That’s right. 26 horrid, bland, generic, pallette swaps of Goku. What else? about 400 megs worth of music, most of which went unused. What else? About half of the songs linked to places on my hard drive that weren’t in the MUGEN directory, so a shitload of the stages have no music. What else? The torrent says “200+” stages. It’s really “500+”. There was a problem with my version of MUGEN. When a Stage’s config file labeled a directory with “\” and not “/”, it wouldn’t load, so I simply cut the entire stage pack form my collection’s configuration file. You better believe I kept the stage files and their music, though. What else? How about junk characters and spare Screenpacks, with no explanations of why I put them where I did? How about a charatcer that just plain crashed the game? (I forget which one. Probably one of the 15 Gotenks). How about a configuration built specifically for that machine? One that only 5% of PCs can run properly? How about taking characters from games with different rules and metagames and just sticking them all together? And how did I advertise this? Just like all of the other MUGEN collection did. ALL CAPS AND EXCLAMATION POINTS!!! I even added in extra screenshots. Screenshots that showed the “Yaranaika?” guy molesting Cable from MvC2.

Take that, you God Tier Liefeld abomination! With games like this, how can PC gaming EVER be dead?

I know what you’re thinking. “Jesus, was anything RIGHT with this crap?”. Why yes, yes there was.

Someone was nice enough to upload a video of RG2K6 in action…

You see that? Kanye West! At least it wasn’t Linkin Park! My custom select screen was about the only worthwhile thing in this whole mess.

I remember waking up the next morning, and seeing the thread on /t/ about the abomination I had just released onto the world. Oh boy, those comments were amazing.

* This is great, thanks for making this – it has a lot of characters I can’t find anywhere else or are no longer hosted.. I just hope it’s seeded until I can finish downloading it.

* keeps crashing when i start it

* please someone tell me how to completely install it, can someone tell me how i get started, PLEASE Email me, i need help!!

* gg pwnt

* I have the same problem it crashes to desktop when its loading chars.. :’(

* Meh, how can i play this game without crushing?

My concern quickly turned to indifference, as I soon completely forgotten about the demon I had created. Well, until I started showing it off on /co/, which led to me uploading it again, this time to ThePirateBay, where it can be found to this day. Please note in the link below that I was just as enthusiastic when I put it there, and even tried to help some people with their problems (albeit half-assedly).

The magnitude of sorrow I’d caused hadn’t hit me until a friend of mine was describing a horrible MUGEN pack his friend downloaded. The way he described it, I just knew it was mine. That’s when it hit me. I was one of the biggest unintentional trolls in history. I made Neville Chamberlain my bitch, while making Freud and Jung my Gods. It’s also when a disturbing theory popped into my head. What if my creative rut was simply God’s way of preventing me from ever creating again? What if the things I was capable of creating would one day put humanity in danger by the magnitude of it’s shittyness?

Well, let’s hope this article will suffice as my martyrdom. I’m an idiot, and I’m sorry.

You can still get RG2K6 if you want. It’s on ThePirateBay. Let me just ask you this: Why in the hell would you do this to yourself? You have so much to live for.

Rape of a Genre 2006: http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/3765211/MUGEN_(800__Characters__400__Stages)

p.s. After this, every time someone mentions this game to me, I will respond with LOL I TROLL U. I will never again willfully admit to making this.

p.p.s. Venom is from Spider-Man.

If you’re anything like me, you’re obsessed with making you Desktop the prettiest bitch at the ball. But did you ever want it to do something… I dunno… useful?

With Rainmeter’s Furbino skin, you can now get updates to both Gamer Blag and 4chan’s /t/ and /v/ right on your desktop.

Rainmeter is a feature rich system meter with support for multiple layers of png images. It can measure all of the basic system statistics such as physical ram, virtual memory, swap, and hard drive space. When coupled with MBM5, it can measure system temperatures and fan speeds. Rainmeter also has the ability to display the time as an analog clock with second, minute, and hour hands. Also available as a Litestep module.

Download Raimeter here:

http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/System-Info/Rainmeter.shtml

Furbino Skin (With 4chan and Gamer Blag):

http://www.mediafire.com/?ldaamhouczk

Original Furbino Skin (Without 4chan and Gamer Blag):

http://customize.org/rainmeter/skins/47568

This is what I deal with every day on the internet.

You see, butt-hurt console war crap come mostly from internal regret. From wasting a paycheck and waiting in the rain for a console, or underestimating your mother’s “you can only have one” rule, regret can be, and probably IS the biggest driving force behind console fanboys.

The Wii had the best launch by far, and is still beating the crap out of the competition, leaving old school Nintendo fanboys and once regretful 1st generation DS owners (who lucked out on the system’s initial lackluster success) laughing all the way to their mother’s basements. The problem is, after Brawl was released, Wii owners noticed not only that there are very few good exclusives, but there doesn’t seem to be many good games on the horizon. Slowly, many are realizing that the Wii may truly be a ‘Gamecube 1.5′.

The PlayStation’s fall from grace is by far the biggest story to come from this generation. The initial failure of the overpriced console left it’s purchases restrained only to Sony loyalists, optimists, graphics whores, and kids that got shafted come Christmas time. Things looked entirely grim, until the turning point at last year’s E3, along with the release of MGS4 and the so-called ‘Blue-Ray victory’ led to pessimists dropping their guards and embracing the console. It’s sudden upturn, in addition to a slew of new exclusives, has not only returned hope to Sony’s eyes, but has led fanboys to strike back at their opposite competition with a violent vengeance.

Which leaves the 360. With good sales and the highest number of quality exclusives, the 360 owners should be the happiest fanboys of the bunch. But lately, with the rise of the PS3’s sales and the Wii’s dominance, the possibility of the 360, once the shining star of the generation, ending up the least successful, has fanboys absolutely livid. Even worse, the constant comments from casual and non-fanboy PS3 owners raving about their new console for no reason other than the fact that they just like to play the games has led to hilariously horrible fanboy wars being ‘fought’ on every corner of the internet.

This combination of groupthink and regret felt on every side has led to the most blatant and annoying generation of video game fanboyism ever seen. Even worse, more and more aging children are being brought into this gloriously unhealthy fandom with this powerful fanboy mindset, which may mean that all future generations of video games inspire the same undeserved rage this one has.

P.S.: Venom is from Spider-Man.