So recently I’ve spent a lot of time on you tube and I’ve found myself bookmarking and coming back to the same video’s time and time again. I thought I’d do a post on those videos that have given me the most enjoyment over the months and years. So, here they are;

I’m going to start off with one of my all time favourites here. Many of you, and especially those of you that read Frayed’s post on “XBOX 360 kid” will know the older, more distinguished and refined “N64 Kid”. That video is a classic and everyone with more than a single gaming bone in their body knows it by heart. My video is the oft overlooked musical remix of that very same N64 kid video. The thing is pure genius, from the background percussion rhythm to the old school SNES beeps and sounds and the hysterical titling saying this like “SICKS TEA PHWOAR” in time with the “lyrics”.

Rating: 9/10 “hilarity”

My next video is a slightly more nostalgic piece. “Mario Galaxy spec commercial” is a mock up commercial that I wish had been a real one. In my book it definitely belongs on the TV with all the professionally made commercials that are around today, and I have to say it had more of an impact on me than any other gaming commercial plastered with review snippets and “game of the millennium!!!!!!!!” claims. Mario commercial follows of Italian friend through his various incarnation right up to the present day graphical high point of Super Mario Galaxy rather than describe it any more this one deserves to be watched and the addition of the music almost brings a tear to my eyes.

Rating: 7/10 “heart”

The next video on my list fits in to the genre of “freak out vids” and also falls squarely in to the “gaming related” category. Yes, you can probably already tell where I’m going with this one. Its the hilarious “greatest freakout ever” vid where the mother of an insane teenager cancels his World of Warcraft subscription leading to him freaking out so f*cking hard that he, in a fit of pure rage or possibly demonic possesion, tries to insert a TV remote in to his ASS. For me this just doesn’t add up, I mean, I’ve gotten pretty angry before but never to the extreme where punishing my own ass with a remote would seem like a correct and sensible course of action. I guess that’s just the difference between me and someone who would freak out like that over WOW.

Rating: 7.5/10 “extreme”

Next up is a classic “fail” vid and I’m sure anyone who’s ever played a Wii has had nightmare visions of this exact piece of misfortune happening to them. In the video gentleman, possibly of Russian origin, is enjoying a nice game of Wii bowling on his flat screen. He seem’s to be getting pretty in to the game congratulating himself loudly on a good bowl. Shortly after though he gets a little too enthusiastic and the results speak for themselves. I can only imgine at the pure heartbreak of runinging such a gorgeous piece of equipment, but I have some idea as the seemingly grown man is reduced to crying out for his mummy. And I love the way he taps on the top of it, just to make sure it really is knackered.

Rating: 6/10 “FAIL”

This one’s a real classic from way back, the younger among you may not remember FPS Doug and his insane FPS devotion; “Everybody knows you run faster with a knife!”, “I heard there are no re-spawn points in RL.”, “Every time I get a gun in my hand I automatically point it at someone’s head!”. “Boom Headshot” started something of a craze as I remember and there was a time when you couldn’t log on to any FPS server for more than 10 seconds without someone typing it out in caps lock. It always worried me though that there probably are people out there just like “FPS Doug”, but I enjoy laughing at it so much that I don’t really care!

Rating: 8.5/10 “BOOM HEADSHOT”

The following vid is probably the most famous of them all. It lead to stardom for its leading man elevating him from internet nobody to guest of honour at conventions and a household name amongst gamers. It spawned its own galactic sized meme and has become the battle cry of an entire generation of gamers. Yes, I’m talking about LEEROOOOY JEEEEEEEENIKNS. Leeroy Jenkin’s, created by Ben Schultz, now has among other things his own trading card in the WOW trading card game and his own action figure. He has bee mentioned in various TV shows including South Park and has also been immortalized in WOW as an achievement title for recreating the video.

Rating: 9.5/10 “LETS DO THIS”

Many of you may not know this sleeper but I think for sheer WTFness it deserves its place among these greats. This video shows one young German kids epic struggle to play Unreal Tournament. He seems to be having a pretty tough time of it with the whole thing and gets just a little bit annoyed. I think he’s as much a candidate for demonic possession as the remote control ass kid from before. These types of videos, after making me ache from laughing, make me wonder what games are doing to kids these days. I used to get a little annoyed after my mate killed me in Goldeneye for the 10th time but nothing at all like this lunatic.

Rating: 5/10 “Possessed”

Well, thats all the ones that I can remember so far. If you have a suggestion as to any others that ought to be included please leave a comment and I’ll write it up in to the article.

Fare thee well Noble Traveller.

EDIT: 08/01/2010

Commenter “Gamesymphony” suggested the addition of this vid. I think its pretty hilarious. Judge for yourselves!

You may have seen the video ‘Kid goes crazy after getting an Xbox 360 for Christmas.’ The sight of that kid going crazy for his Xbox made me both nostalgic and anxious.  I’m not saying he shouldn’t be happy with his present, but what worries me is that, maybe, nothing else, out of all the gifts you could get a kid at Christmas, could make him happier.

Of course, it’s natural for kids to obsess over things they want. But, more and more, it’s games consoles and not action figures or toys that they can touch – play ‘with’ and not ‘on’.

Games are great. But they don’t encourage the imagination in the same way as toys.  I’m in my mid 20s and I’ve played games since I was this kid’s age, but, to be honest, back then I would never have been so obsessed with owning a console. 12-13 maybe. But not at this kid’s age. Games simply weren’t developed enough to hold my concentration or give me as much excitement as my Action Man (who, to this day, probably gave me better adventures than any video game could).

But if I’d grown up in this age of Modern Warfares, Uncharted 2s and Fallout 3s. Well. I wonder if my good old Action man with his ‘eagle eyes’, would have got a look in. And, perhaps, I wouldn’t have developed as mature an imagination or capacity for creative thought as I did – or at least, think, I did.

I say all this because I’ve been working as a Teaching Assistant these last months, helping out with kids (often those who need extra help in their classes) just a little older than this boy. All they talk about is games; I can see them day-dreaming about being on their Xbox when the teacher is reading a story in English, and while it reminds me of how I was at their age (Perfect Dark was a great day-dream), I can’t help feel that there were also ‘other’ distractions I had which were as important (trying to make Star Wars LEGO before Star Wars ‘did’ LEGO, for instance). It scares me when the conversations I hear between these kids revolve entirely around the different ways you can kill people in MW2 (a game they shouldn’t even be playing.  Ha, ha, ha), or how good the graphics are in … oh yeah… MW2.

Now, it’s natural for these kids to find these things cool. What kid wouldn’t?  But what saddens me is that the kids don’t engage with gaming on an intellectual or creative level either. They go on and on about what sweet bits of action they’ve had blasted through their eyeballs, or who they’ve recently ‘OWNED’ at FIFA 57,009 but they never talk about the stories in their games or imagine improvements to the games they’ve played – in other words, they can’t access what communities like this talk about all day.

To me, this kind of shallow addiction or obsession with competitive or violent games is symptomatic of a younger generation who don’t have to look far for an adrenaline rush. Heck, they only have to turn on the Xbox or PS3. And while I think games ARE more active than cartoons, and I’ll be a lifetime hardcore gamer, I don’t think children can be raised soley on the videogame industry’s current output of titles. Gaming isn’t the same for them, they can’t appreciate how it’s grown or that there WAS anything else we did for fun. It would seem rightly absurd to them, given how good videogames are today. But kids should be able to play in the purest sense shouldn’t they? Without computers. As adults, we find it hard to go back to a time when a broom handle could be a lightsabre, or cardboard box a general purpose tool for inventing sets for toys. These kids might lose the ability before they knew they had it.

I know that if I have children, I wouldn’t want them to miss out on what the virtual world has to offer, for games opened my eyes to some great ideas, but I would consider it a loss of innocence on their part if they couldn’t see the fun to be had with a box of LEGO or my collection of Star Wars figures.

In short, I consider myself lucky to have had both traditional, low-tech play and a high-tech, virtual play as part of my upbringing. Today, I’m in awe of how far games have come. But such powerful machines would have robbed me of part of  my childhood – I am almost certain of it, given how much time I spend with games as an adult.

The undertone to this blog: this video could show the day this kid stopped ‘playing’ in his mind, and started playing on his TV. I hope not.

What do you think?