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My Mother, The Crusader November 29, 2011

Posted by Maniac in Editorials.
1 comment so far

Happy Holidays everyone. With the passing of Thanksgiving I’ve decided to spend several times over the month sharing some of my favorite gaming related Christmas shopping memories. I want to share another quick story with all of you from a few years back.

Like many people, I will usually have a few video games on my Christmas shopping list. My family knows next to nothing about technology so they usually just prefer that I write down specifically any gifts I may want so they can show it to a store clerk who may be able to make heads or tails of it. This doesn’t always work, however, as I’ve still had to return a few gifts that were incorrectly picked out by a clerk, but its fine for the general majority of things I’ve asked for. After Christmas ended a few years ago and I had some new games to play, my mother had a shopping story she just had to tell me.

The story, as my mother told it, was that the clerks at the register knew that what my mother was buying wasn’t for her. So they asked her very calmly if whoever she was buying the game for was old enough to play it. This is a huge pet peeve of mine. Even though I am not under the age of eighteen, I do not agree with mandatory ID checks on people when buying movie tickets, video games or music. There’s no law against buying video games at any age like there is with alchohol or tobacco (in fact all attempts to make these laws have outright failed since they violate the first amendment) so its just store-enforced age discrimination, which to me is quite immoral. Sometimes if I do get carded when buying something I’ll just up and leave the store with the unpurchased item still on the clerk’s conveyor belt. I figure they should have a reality check on just how many lost sales those policies will give them.

When my mother was confronted with a clerk spouting this policy to her (a woman in her mid 50s) she told me she looked at the guy with an odd face and said, “Yes, and he’s old enough to buy the beer to go along with it.” and left. When she told me this story I broke out laughing. I guess these sentements run in the family.

Don’t Listen to Clerks, Listen to Me November 29, 2011

Posted by Maniac in Editorials.
1 comment so far

Happy Holidays everyone.  With the passing of Thanksgiving I’ve decided to spend several times over the month sharing some of my favorite gaming related Christmas shopping memories.  I want to share a quick story with all of you from a few years back, it didn’t help me get a job, but it may help you out this shopping season.

I was in my local Best Buy during the holidays, buying some Christmas gifts for my friends and family.  An older couple was behind me in line to ring up their items.  They had purchased a Nintendo Wii and a bunch of shovelware games with it.  A clerk was with them talking about the Wii and the games they had purchased.  The clerk was completely clueless, and had no idea about the technicals of what he was selling.  My evidence to this conclusion ranged from the gaming selection the couple had to the comments he made to them, like he had no idea what kind of internal memory capabilities the Wii had (it does, but not very much, just enough for saves and a few downloadable games) or if Wiimotes have rechargeable batteries (they don’t, they use two AA batteries, and you can only get a rechargeable batteries for it through third parties, not recommended).

As he walked away I turned around and commented on their Wii purchase.  The line was pretty long and I figured I had about five minutes to kill, so it didn’t bother me.  They were actually quite nervous about their purchase and had no idea if they had bought their son right thing.  I’m platform agnostic, so I saw no issue with anyone receiving a Wii as a gift, as long as they got some good games along with it.

I asked how old their son was and they responded he was twenty-two.  I looked at the stack of games they had, and not seeing the obvious game any twenty-two year old with a Wii would have I told them to leave the line immediately and buy him Super Smash Brothers Brawl, which as far as I was concerned was a must play for the Wii.  When they asked what it was about, I said it was a cartoonish fighting game with Nintendo characters and it was very well made and quite fun (I had been playing it at the time).  They left the line and came back with a copy, now satisfied of their purchase.

I guess my problem is I have a serious issue with minding my own business.  But thank goodness for that, or else I’m sure their son would have been out $50 for the copy of Super Smash Bros he would have eventually bought for himself.

I know that a lot of you parents are going to be stuck buying things on your child’s Christmas list that may look as if its written in some foreign language.  You may be asking yourself things like, “What the Hell is an Xbox 360 Kinect 250GB?”  Worry not, because that’s what I’m here for.  If some random person who is not wearing a store tag tells you something knowledgable, take it with a grain of salt, but listen well, he may just know what he’s talking about.