Today Christina and I changed our Xbox Live Gamertags. I’ve used the name “Joe Sunrider” regularly as my online identity since 2002, and it wasn’t really an easy decision to change it. I’ll let Christina tell her story if she chooses, but I wanted to go into what prompted my change.

I’ve always been a shy person. I have a hard time looking people in the eye and I generally keep to myself. I think it’s a mild form of social anxiety, and since I started playing on Xbox Live a few years ago I’ve been just as nervous entering that online world as I have been out in the real world. I typically don’t use my headset, and when I heard people saying my name over voice chat it always made me uneasy.

I realized recently it was social anxiety keeping me from fully enjoying online gaming. I thought about why I had no problem in MMOs, but with Xbox Live I was uncomfortable. I didn’t think it was voice chat, because I call restaurants and other places all the time on the phone where I don’t know people. I realized it was because on Xbox Live, my first name was out there for everyone to see, whereas in an MMO my identity is hidden behind a false name.

I have a weird relationship with Halo, which has culminated in the past week in which I have devoted much of my free time (and any chance of having a pleasant evening) to the latest game in the series, Halo: Reach.

Now, Christina and I have played a few levels of the campaign but in all honesty the characters could be speaking Russian and the story would make about the same amount of sense to me. I didn’t play Halo 1, I played a bit of Halo 2, played all the way through Halo 3, and I skipped ODST and all the related comics, novels and movies. I’m sure the story is very good, but I don’t know what it is and it’s not why I bought the game.

I don’t even really know WHY I like playing Halo online so much. It brings out the absolute WORST in the gaming community (PROTIP: if your Gamertag makes ANY reference to marijuana, I automatically hate you) and I tend to fly off the handle of a game is going particularly bad for me. Still, every night, every time we have more than fifteen free minutes, Christina and I grab our controllers and join the fight.

I’ve got zombies on the brain. Recently I went back and finished Dead Rising, played through Dead Rising 2: Case 0 and watched the tie-in film Zombrex: Dead Rising Sun. It is zombie mayhem in my head.

I am both fascinated by and scared to death of zombies. I’ve never been into monsters or anything (unless you count Pokémon) but for some reason, despite the sheer amount of jibblies they give me, I am drawn to zombies.

Dead Rising was the very first game I ever saw actually being played for the Xbox 360 (which also makes it the first HD game I ever saw) and it was really the game that sold me on the system (but Viva Piñata and Gears of War certainly helped). Not only was it how amazing it looked (I’m still blown away that you can see clear across the mall) but there were SO. MANY. ZOMBIES. You could use anything as a weapon against them, too! Gardening tools, potted plants, mannequins, and Servbot helmets. The game was unlike anything else.

Hey I know I said I’d post more but I am busy with wedding stuff! You guys have no idea how tired I am. Well, you married people do. The rest of you can only imagine. I mean, you could if video games hadn’t destroyed your imagination.

Posts may be sporadic but they WILL happen! I have an awesome one planned for tomorrow. I’m just super tired and I got Halo: Reach yesterday and I have had exactly 20 minutes of free time to play it. You know what I did with my free time today? I fixed the images in the Pokémon article from the other day. I AM DEDICATED TO YOU.

Please be patient. If I don’t die before my wedding, things will level out soon.

(EDIT: Apparently Serebii got a cease and desist letter from Nintendo demanding they take down their images of the new Pokémon, since they admitted to using a ROM to get the images in the first place. Since I thought it was funny to hotlink to Serebii’s images when they disallow right-clicking on their site, I didn’t save them myself. I’m on the hunt for pictures, so until then, this article loses a lot of its appeal. Sorry!)

(EDIT 2: Images are back, including all the new Pokémon in one image at the end of the article!)

Pokémon Black and White are finally out in Japan, and there was much rejoicing. One of my favorite things to do upon the Japanese release of a new Pokémon game is look through the full list of all the new monsters. Initially, I had my hesitations about the designs in this game, but there’s a lot I really like this time around. I’ll show you some of my favorites and why I think they’re rad.

Be warned, though, if you’re trying to avoid spoilers until the North American release, you don’t want to read any further!

Also note that I have not played the game, nor do I have a ROM. I detest game piracy, and I love the Pokémon games so much I don’t want to spoil my first experience with them by playing them in Japanese anyway.

I’m not going to lie to you, the reason I haven’t updated much this past week is because of World of Warcraft. I make no excuse for it, but I would like to talk about it a bit more.

I got sucked into it pretty bad recently, and I’m taking a break for a while so I can get back into other things and try to re-balance my free time again. With Cataclysm, the next expansion, coming out soon, I was just in a mad rush to do too many things all at once so whenever I had free time and as a result everything else started to suffer. I have a bit of an obsessive personality as it is, so it was all really just a recipe for disaster.

So I was browsing Joystiq today and they linked to a story posted on Creepy + Pasta about a supposedly haunted copy of Majora’s Mask for the Nintendo 64. I won’t go into details because I don’t want to spoil it. The story, while (very likely) fake, is very engaging and absolutely creepy as hell. My skin crawled as I read it. The videos that went with it made it that much more intense.

I LOVE reading creepy pasta, especially ones about video games. There’s a million stories out there about haunted or posessed versions of Pokémon games and some of them are really, REALLY creepy. I poked around Creepy + Pasta a bit more and while most of the other stories are lame, there are a few good ones out there.

I’ve lost HOURS reading urban legends on Snopes. I don’t know why I love this stuff… I don’t really like horror movies or anything. Please share links to any good creepy pasta in the comments section!

Happy birthday Sega Dreamcast! One of the best video game consoles to ever be released turns 11 years old today! Woo!

The Dreamcast has had a very interesting life for a console, with a very short official lifespan but maintaining a very dedicated fanbase that has endured for over a decade. With Dreamcast titles scheduled to hit Xbox Live Arcade and the PlayStation Network in the near future, now is as good a time as any to relive the classics that we fell in love with on Sega’s hardware swan song.

I haven’t really played Street Fighter much lately, mostly because I just couldn’t get used to playing with an arcade stick (and playing with the Xbox 360 controller is NOT an option). It wasn’t anything wrong with the stick itself, it just wasn’t the way I had always played Street Fighter. In the heat of battle I tended to get flustered and lose my position on the stick, and as a result I’d lose and get angry.

I had some good luck the other day and managed to pull a loot card in a booster pack of World of Warcraft cards, so I put the card on eBay and decided to invest in one of the Mad Catz Street Fighter IV Fightpads. They were advertised as a cheaper alternative to the arcade sticks, and I had heard nothing but great things about the d-pad they designed. I picked the one with the Chun-Li design because a) blue is my favorite color, b) I thought it’d be weird buying a controller with a buff dude on it, and c) c’mon it’s Chun-Li, the First Lady of Gaming.

It’s every guy gamer’s dream to someday find a young woman who is as passionate about games as they are, fall madly in love, and live happily ever after. It’s a fantasy for most, but for some lucky guys like me, it’s a reality. While it is super awesome and rad to the max, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t some things you need to be aware of before you start 2-player mode until death do you part.

I’m certainly not complaining; far from it. I’ve dated girls who aren’t into games and girls who think games are just okay, and dating (or in my case marrying) a girl who is a legit gamer is definitely the way to go. The point of this article, my dear brothers, is to bring some things to your attention that you may not have thought of.