Chris and video games

Chris tried having sex with a video game once, but it didn't work out all that well.

Well, if Spiderman says it...

Chris likes video games. A lot. In fact, Chris may well spend more time on video games than any other activity or pursuit, including his ongoing quest for a woman who will emerge from the internet and have sex with him. He says he spends between two and four hours a day playing games, and that's just what he'll admit to.

Without diving too deep into the amateur psychiatry pool, it's not hard to see why video games hold so much appeal for Chris. His brain is wired to operate according to absolute values and rigidly-defined processes. That's one reason why he has so much trouble dealing with real life — the rules keep changing on him, when he can figure the rules out at all.

In the artificial worlds of Chris's favorite games, the challenges he faces are the kind that his inflexible mind is able to conquer. There, the rules never change, and all he has to do is follow them. Reality isn't so simple, which is why he spends as little time out there as possible.

The early years

Chris has been an avid gamer since a very young age. He had a Nintendo Entertainment System and a Game Boy before he was eight years old and acquired more consoles and games throughout the 1990s. According to the Sonichu Chronicles, he's been a fan of Sonic the Hedgehog since the character's 1991 debut for the Sega Genesis.

His game collection really took off in 1993, when he won his famous shopping spree in the Sonic the Hedgehog Watch & Win Sweepstakes and added $1,000 (even though the total spent was $980.82) worth of Sega games and hardware to his hoard.

Chris's game collection

Main article: List of Chris's video games

Although the last completely reliable account of his collection dates back to January 2009, Chris owns, as a conservative estimate, nearly 700 different game titles across 19 different platforms. Sony consoles dominate his collection — counting the games he's downloaded by way of the PlayStation Network, nearly half of his games belong to the PlayStation family. Nintendo comes next, including more than 100 games for Nintendo's different portable platforms, and Sega brings up the rear. While he owns every Sega console short of an 8-bit Master System and Sonic the Hedgehog is one of his favorite individual franchises, games for Sega consoles don't make up more than 10-15% of Chris's collection.

Chris's violent hatred of the Xbox is well-known, but he likely also owns or at one point owned an original Xbox console; however, it is not known how much he has actually played Xbox games. His eBay account shows that he tried to sell off a handful of Xbox games in the summer of 2008.

The record of his eBay sales also indicates that, in addition to owning at least one of every machine he owns games for, he's gone through at least three or four of Sony's original PlayStation consoles over the years. It's possible that he's had to replace a few of the infamously fragile machines, but this could also be an indication that he has bought the systems and games in bundles.

It's impossible to gauge exactly how much money (and taxpayer money at that) has been shoveled into the furnace of Chris's game collection. Knowledgeable trolls, however, reckon that his physical collection of games and hardware represents around $20,000. His PSN downloads, meanwhile, can be accurately accounted for — there, the bill is close to $3,500 and surely climbing all the while.

What Chris plays

Going on what evidence is available — what he talks about on his websites and YouTube, what his PlayStation Network profile shows the most effort put into, what he decides to construct elaborate fan-works around — Chris has fairly childish, "casual" tastes in video games. He puts an enthusiast gamer's level of effort and time into gaming, but he does it playing stuff like Sonic, Pokémon, Animal Crossing, Guitar Hero, and other games geared toward a less "hardcore" audience. His favorite racing game, Burnout Paradise, is a straightforward action/arcade-style game. LittleBigPlanet earned a hardcore following with its level editor, but otherwise it's just another side-scrolling platform game (and Chris hardly strains the level editor to the limits of its potential). Much of his PSN trophy case is filled out with achievements racked up playing simple downloadable demoscene productions. Even his beloved Brutal Legend isn't remarkably deep as far as gameplay is concerned, even if it's an M-rated title full of foul language and heavy metal music.

The games that Chris owns are not necessarily the games that Chris plays. His PlayStation Network downloads strongly suggest that he spends money on his gaming hobby more or less for the sake of spending it. Witness the $65 he spent on downloadable content for Disgaea 3, a game he had only played to 7% completion several months after originally buying all those downloads.

It's reasonable to assume that Chris has similar spending habits in real life, a theory bolstered somewhat by his retro game collections. Chris's collections of games for the Sega CD, Sega Saturn, and a couple of other now-dead consoles are dominated by bargain-bin trash, extremely common or extremely shitty games that are easily picked up for very low remaindered prices. No knowledgeable gamer would ever pay money for Sewer Shark, except maybe as a gag gift, but Chris apparently thought it was worth owning.

His collection does a good job of telling us what sort of games Chris doesn't play, though. Outside of the Pokémon series, for instance, he has almost no evident interest in role-playing games. Most of the non-Pokémon RPGs in his collection, like Suikoden and Final Fantasy VII, are PlayStation retro releases he impulse-bought through the PSN. (Chris buys those up like penny candy — he's even downloaded several digital duplicates of PlayStation games that he already owns physical copies of.) One would figure Chris to be a big Nintendo fan, but other than Pokémon and Animal Crossing, franchises that are actually loathed by hardcore Nintendo gamers, he shows little interest in the games that actually keep Nintendo's underpowered systems alive to begin with. He never seems to show interest in upcoming games like Super Mario Galaxy 2 or Metroid: Other M, and the hardcore Nintendo games he does own (like Metroid Prime, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Super Mario World) are most likely just collecting dust on his game collection racks. He also owns almost no sports games. In the Mailbag, he once noted that "Sports titles do not really thrill me," although he didn't explain exactly why.

With a few exceptions, Chris has no apparent interest in video games aimed at his own age group, which is unsurprising. Games like Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto, examples of "hardcore" games aimed at adults are games that simply would not interest Chris because of his juvenile mindset. Video games (and anything else, for that matter) with mature themes that aren't two-dimensionally crass and full of random-access humor would probably confuse and bore Chris and make him feel awkward and uncomfortable, adding to the fact he probably wouldn't be able to get very far in the game. This is supported by the fact that he did try out Bioshock, a first-person shooter with RPG elements, but only for a short time and never touched it again. Most likely the whole game itself flew right over Chris's head and he decided to play some Wheel of Fortune instead.

While he sometimes gets tagged with the "weeaboo" label, Chris doesn't appear to prefer games made in Japan over any other part of the world. In fact, his favorite games of 2008-2009, the period where he's told us the most about what he plays, are pretty evenly divided between Japan (Sonic, Pokémon), the United States (Guitar Hero, Brutal Legend) and Europe (Burnout, LittleBigPlanet). He counts a few Japanese Game Boy and Nintendo DS imports in his larger collection, but they're obviously titles he picked up to try and impress/bribe Megan Schroeder — almost all of them are spinoffs from popular anime, especially magical-girl series like Sailor Moon and Pretty Cure.

When Chris and Megan still got along well together, they were serious players of the arcade version of Soul Calibur III. There's also an arcade in Chris's plans for the CWCville Shopping Center. However, given Chris's more recent inclination to retreat into the comfortable confines of his bedroom, chances are he's not much of an arcade-goer anymore.

Chris the console warrior

Chris thinks the perennial "Console Wars" between rival manufacturers of game machines are extremely serious business, and engages them in all of the bile and fervor of a 10-year-old child soldier in the PlayStation Army. On rare occasions he has almost seemed rational in this respect, saying he "just doesn't like" or "doesn't care much for" the Xbox, but most of the time he doesn't spare strong words when describing the vile HEX-BAWX. By comparison, he has waxed poetic when describing the awesomeness of the PS3, most prominently in his PS3 History Level for LittleBigPlanet.

According to Lucas, Chris would even express his fury over the Xbox in public while hanging out at the Game Place.

It's hard to tell where Chris's religious devotion to the PlayStation comes from, but a religion is what it is. Like his faith in GodJesus, his support for Sony is blind and unthinking. Though he can come up with a simple justification for his opinions in a pinch — typically he brings up the $50 annual fee for online gaming on Xbox Live — Chris shows no sign of having put any serious thought or study into his choice of consoles. His descriptions of the PS3's advantages tend to sound like boilerplate marketing copy (as filtered through the mind of a cave-dwelling autistic, anyway).

Chris and online gaming

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given his antisocial nature, Chris isn't much for online multiplayer games in any genre, be they sports sims, shooters, racing games, or whatever else. Though he owns several games for the PS3 and other consoles that would allow him to play online and interact with other people, his PSN profile shows that he's put hardly any time into multiplayer games.

Dedicated observers of Chris's gaming habits may notice a bit of a paradox developing here. Chris claims to hate the Xbox 360 because Microsoft requires a $50 annual subscription fee for online multiplayer gaming. Why should this wind him up so badly, when he hardly plays any multiplayer games anyhow? Well... that's Chris for you.

Mailbag correspondents have tried to point out the seeming contradiction here, not to mention the weird contrast between Chris's thriftiness as far as Xbox Live is concerned and the massive amounts of money he's wasted on worthless digital trinkets through the PlayStation Network. For all the good it's done, though, they may as well have tried to change his opinion of Asperger's syndrome.

Chris and PC games

Games for personal computers are conspicuously absent from Chris's collection and his evident game-playing habits. The only sign that he's ever even owned any PC games comes from his eBay account, which shows that he tried to auction off a collection of vintage Dungeons & Dragons role-playing games for the PC in the summer of 2008.

In the Fanmail Reading video, after a fan sent him a copy of Half-Life 2, Chris explained, "I don't play PC games. I used to, but I don't anymore." He didn't say why he gave them up, though. In his first Mumble chat, he claimed to "remember Touhou", but later backpedaled and said "I never really heard of that." Exactly what he meant to say in the Mumble chat is unknown.

Chris the industry insider

Chris gets most of his information about the gaming industry from comparatively mainstream sources. He's an avowed reader of Game Informer magazine, as well as Sony's online magazine Qore, and regularly follows the G4 cable network, but he doesn't seem to spend too much of his time actively following more dedicated gaming websites or message boards. He apparently still takes the Spike TV Video Game Awards seriously, which puts him about five years behind anybody with even a cursory interest in the games business.

Chris the game designer

Main article: Sonichu (game)

At various times, especially during the Miyamoto saga, but going as far back as the late 1990s (when he had a prophetic dream of a Sonic game for the Game Boy), Chris has imagined that he could launch himself into a career as a game designer. It's telling, however, that nearly all of his "ideas" for potential video game projects simply involve swapping Sonichu or other Chris-spawned characters into an existing game concept. Pokémon: Lightning Version is a Pokémon RPG with Sonichu in it. Sonichu Adventure is Sonic Adventure with Sonichu in it. John's Custom Gundam: Sisterly Rescue is Gundam: Journey to Jaburo with Megan's quasi-retarded brother in it, and so on.

The closest he's gotten to coming up with something like an original idea is Christian Weston Chandler's Adult Chronicles, and we don't actually know what that game is supposed to amount to beyond what Chris drew on the cover, and occasional haphazard mentions. It's entirely possible that Chris doesn't know the answer to that one either.

Chris nevertheless sincerely believes that his characters and game ideas are ready for commercial prime time. He once rejected an e-mail from the Mailbag that brought up the notion of a not-for-profit fan-made Sonichu game, and brushed off similar suggestions in his first IRC fan chat. In the video about dispelling rumors of an official Sonichu game, he scoffed at the idea of his game ideas being made with 2D graphics.

Modding and customization

Due to the fact that console games are often not moddable, Chris hasn't been able to show off his creativity in this field too much yet. That said, Chris has already made a ton of levels in LittleBigPlanet, and is apparently excited about ModNation Racers. He hasn't, however, shown too much actual competence.

Chris seems to also think that light customization features that the games offer are very important. He spent considerable time on Guitar Hero band, up to drawing disturbing pictures of his bandmates. The amount of time he spent on tweaking his Animal Crossing villages is simply colossal. According to Regina e-mails, Chris made a similarly big deal about Jet Grind Radio and F-Zero GX; In the latter, the customisation is limited to swapping around car parts and choosing colors and decals.