While your first blog at Destructoid isn’t the best, most important blog you’ll ever write here, it’s close. A good first impression is key with the community here; take it from someone who didn’t give a good first impression. Sure, my first post had words and all, but not much apart from that. It was a wall of text from a person that no one knew.

See the problem there?

So today, I’d like to welcome you to a little series I’ll be doing here called Cblog Cheat Codes, and today’s topic is going to be for all you lurkers out there: how does one pull off a successful first post? The good news is that it really isn’t all that hard.

God Mode -- Write an intro blog or fill out your profile.

If you’ve not yet really “participated” in the community here, you might be surprised at how close we are. We chat all the time, go on podcasts with each other, and hang out in real life. This might seem scary to a newbie, but rest assured that we’re ready to welcome you to all of this. We just need some help.

Mainly, we need to know who you are. Pull this off in one of two ways: make your very first Cblog here simply an intro post where you spend some serious time telling us who you are and what makes you someone that we want to hang out with. A few paragraphs is really the minimum -- any less and you won’t give us a good idea of who you are. Have an awesome blog idea that just can’t wait? No problem -- just be sure to fill out your profile before you post it, and follow the same guidelines as above. People will be much more willing to read your posts if they have even a general idea of what you’re like, why you’re here, and whether or not you suck.



Infinite Ammo -- For the love of god, use images.

Yep, I screwed this particular pooch on my first post. Got all my words together, put them in a post, picked a title, got too lazy for pictures, and posted.

Imagine if Destructoid’s front page were like that! This place would be gone in a matter of days.

There’s a good reason for that: pictures make things look better. They give the eyes a break from text, they give large blocks of text a greater sense of organization and a smaller sense of confinement, and they give color to an otherwise colorless area.

Honestly, what images you choose is far less important than simply using them. At the same time, you want to find something that’s appealing, high-res, and relevant to your content. Make sure your post starts with an image, and if you have a lot of text, throw in a few more to break everything up. Just don’t use too many -- this ain’t a pop up book. Lastly, don’t forget to make them a respectable size so your post doesn’t look like a kindergarten art project.

Invisibility -- Pay attention to your spelling, grammar, and formatting.

Again, this is one that you just need to attempt. Your first post might not be a shining example of proper MLA style and format, and you don’t need to have your English class proofread it for you. Just show us that you’re trying.

Best advice? Just make your post as if you expected it to be on the front page of Destructoid. It’s extremely easy to read a few editors’ posts and see how we style the posts here. It’s similarly easy to take an extra five minutes to skim your post again to make sure you didn’t accidentally forget to use the space bar. If your first post looks like ass, every reader that loads it is going to close it, and when your avatar pops up in the Cblogs for your second post, no one will bother opening it. Don’t do your content a disservice by making it look or read like crap.



No Clipping -- Say something that people want to read

I’m sorry, but no one wants to read yet another article about whether games are art. No one cares anymore. No one wants to know that you played Double Dragon for the first time in years last night and that you still liked it okbai. And no one wants to read your repost of that news article that was posted on another site a week ago.

You really can post just about anything in your Cblog, but it really needs to take into account who your readers are: a group of extremely varied gamers with high expectations and a low threshold for bullshit. If there’s some popular topic that people have been writing about, you had better be prepared to approach it from an angle that no one else yet has. If you want to write about a game you really like, you had better have something more to say than, “I like it because it’s fun.”

Just take your time and make sure what you’re saying is something you’d find interesting to read if the roles were reversed.

Hope all you future blog all stars find this helpful. And for all of your readers out there, if you’ve got some tips for those first blogs, share them here in the comments.

In the interest of your time and to save some tl;drs, I’ll start off today with a summary: I’m Andrew Kauz, and I’m your new Cblog Commander, Blog Boss, or whatever you want to call me. In any event, I’m taking over as the main cblog helper on staff. That means if you’re a community member, I work for you. If you’re reading this right now, then what I have to say next will absolutely apply to you, so I urge you to stick with me for just a while longer.

I know a lot of you aren’t going to know who I am. I’ve missed two straight PAXs now, been gone from the front page for a few months, and kept myself insanely busy doing a lot of things that haven’t been Destructoid. So, if you’re reading my name for the first time, hello. It’s a damn pleasure to meet you, and I’ll look forward to getting to know you over the next couple of months. As for me, you can call me Andrew, Kauza (like cause-uh), or whatever you’d like. I spent about a year blogging like a madman before I became a contributor here, and now I’m here to talk about community.

And, really, that’s enough about me. This post is really about you -- all of you. The community. The thing that defines, motivates, and simply makes Destructoid. The reason I’m here, the reason you’re here, and the reason any one of us is here. It is, was, and always will be about community.

A huge part of the community here has always been and will always be the community blogs. Many of the people on Destructoid’s staff, including myself, got started simply by writing in the community blogs. We all loved writing and appreciated having people we liked read what we had to say. We thrived on an environment that was at once supportive and ruthless, letting us know when we were awesome, and relishing the opportunity to inform us of when we sucked.

As the blogs got bigger, they became more and more like a Republican’s dream economy: self-guided, self-sufficient, and everlasting. For the most part, all of this has remained true. Less and less direction is required to make sure that the blogs keep going, and if you’ll notice, there are tons of great community podcasts (321GoCast, Zero Cool), community events (Friday Night Fights, NARPS, event meetups), community member interviews (HUGE shoutout to LawofThermalDynamics for doing this), monthly musings, and individual editorials that appear every day. Think for a second about how awesome that all is! There can be no doubt that this community is incredible.

Now, let’s make everything even better.

That’s my mission, and that’s why I’m taking over as Cblog Baron. It’s going to be my sole purpose at Destructoid to be the person who makes all of your cblogging dreams happen, making sure that you have everything you need to write the great blogs you want, and to make sure that no great blog ever goes unappreciated.

There’s going to be a lot that I’ll be doing over the next few days, and weeks, but here are some highlights.

Monthly Musings: These are still going strong, so Jonathan Ross will be keeping the tradition going with some awesome new topics and a lot of promoted blogs. As an added bonus, these posts are going to be even more visible on the site, making them stand out just as a promoted community post should. If there are any questions or concerns with musings, I’ll always be willing to help.

General Promotions: Great blogs happen all the time, and we want to make sure we’re highlighting those. While we may not always have the front page real estate to get every awesome blog up, I’ll be highlighting a lot of blogs in various ways, from tweets to various posts around the site. Of course, for those especially awesome posts, we’ll find a way to get them on the front page if it kills us.

Blogs of the Week: Each week, you’ll see a post from me highlighting some of the best blogs of the week. It’ll be a set maximum each week, so if you see your blog here, you’ll know it’s among the best the site has to offer, and we want to make sure we’re giving you the readership that your awesomeness deserves.

Asking for It: Yeah, it seems simple, but here it is: We want your blogs. We always have. But what I’d like to do is be more vocal in my want -- my demand -- for community participation. I have read so damn many great, rewarding, memorable blogs from people on this site that I can’t bear to see their names empty from the list of blogs anymore. Don’t be surprised if I start contacting you and asking you to write things -- it means that you’re awesome and we can’t live without your thoughts anymore.

Featured Blogs: This may not happen for a while, but we’re looking into more ways to make sure that blogs that the community really likes are featured. This may be an extension of the fap system or something else entirely, but for the present, know that we’re trying to find the best way to make sure your work is easily visible to the full sum of the site’s readership.

More staff presence in blogs: Dtoid staff is busy. Making website is hard work. Still, the staff loves the community blogs just as much as anyone, and make no mistake that everyone on staff checks out those awesome blogs. But we’re all going to make an effort to make more comments, write more blogs, and generally do more community chilling. That awesome new chat function helps, too. As for specifics, I’ll plan to make an occasional blog that’ll address certain things about cblogging such as helpful tips, shoutouts to awesome bloggers, etc.

YOUR Resource: I’m making myself available as your resource for community blogging. Let me know what you need and I’ll get it done. Tips on formatting? Help with images? Wondering why your post didn’t get promoted? Hit me up and we’ll talk. It may be impossible, but it’s my goal to know everyone in the community.

So, what now? First off, I want to give everyone here my email address: andrewkauz at destructoid dottycom. If you need anything from me, don’t hesitate to contact me. Also, follow me on Twitter: @kauza. I’m going to be tweeting about a lot of awesome community stuff as well as being my usual charming self.

In particular, I’d love to hear your suggestions for awesome community blogging ideas -- anything I can do to make your blogging experience better is fair game. I don’t have magical powers, but I am willing to try everything else to make your wishes reality. Any suggestion is fair game, so go nuts.

You can also use me as a sort of help line for the blogs. Is your video not scaling right? Are you having trouble uploading images? Let me know and I’ll see what I can do to help. My schedule can suck on occasion, but I’ll try to get back to you ASAP.

Lastly, just feel free to email me to say hi. I have so many incredible friends thanks to this site, and I can’t wait to have even more. The better I know each one of you, the better I am able to help you out, and the better you’ll feel about blogging for the site. Win win.

All right. I’ve talked myself nearly into a coma and this fantastic Mothership Wit I have in front of me is making me feel a little happy, so I’m going to wrap things up for the evening by saying this: Welcome to the future of Cblogging on Destructoid. It’s going to be awesome.

PS: Did you read this promoted post about Half Life 2? Pretty damn good.

[context]

Yes, I'm using a football-related quote for my PAX East blog. But, at plenty of people have said in the past, it's extremely difficult to put your first PAX experience into words. At the same time, this was my first gaming event at all, and my first time attending something as "press." Essentially, this trip encapsulated everything that I am striving for in my life. So, yes, I hope you can excuse me if I must rely a bit on someone else's words.

But the end result of this trip is that I am left with clear eyes and a very full heart. I've never been so satisfied with a decision as I am to have traveled from the Southwest to the Northeast for four days of debauchery and JASON.

I joined Destructoid somewhere around this time last year, posting my first c-blog on the final day of April. Since then, I've come to understand that the joining of Destructoid is not a moment to take lightly. Those moments in which your fingers fly across the keyboard don't represent the creation of an account. Even saying that it's the joining of a community doesn't cover it. It's an opportunity. It's a doorway. It's a beginning.

For me, it has been a journey that, nearly a year later, seems to have been leading me toward a world that I dreamed about as a child, responding to printed documents in middle school asking me what I wanted to be when I grew up. When I was being serious, I would sometimes respond "radiologist" or "anesthesiologist." When I was being silly, I would say "I want to work with videogames." I kept this dream to myself for years, feeling embarrassed when I thought my friends or family might find out. I read GamePro, EGM, Nintendo Power, and so on, and I secretly wondered what it would be like to be surrounded by these sorts of people, those who were unashamed to admit that they loved videogames, and had every intention of structuring their lives to include them.

Registering on Destructoid was essentially the beginning of my journey toward the conclusion that, yes, I am justified in structuring my life in such a way, and I am unashamed. I "worked" at this convention they call PAX, finding myself in booths, hotel rooms, and press rooms, all the while doing what some might call work. Coming from two and a half years at the very definition of a dead end job, it felt like a life that belonged to someone else. It's a life that essentially began and ended at PAX, but for this brief, syncopated (to steal a word from Sentry) moment, I felt a sense of enhanced vision. I saw an entire world that I had only dreamed existed, and best of all, I got to participate in it. And I don't care how small a part of it I was, or how silly others think it may be: it was fucking fantastic.

But while I played and wrote by day, I filled my heart with memories by night. I got an early start on Thursday by meeting up with Danl Haas on the plane, and ending in near silence on a bus with Hamza. In fact, in that final bus ride, Hamza commented that we were both very quiet. On that Monday morning, my heart had truly been filled to capacity, and my mood had fully shifted to a sort of melancholic reflection. As we went our separate ways and I was essentially alone for the first time in four days, I felt far sadder than I had anticipated. With a Dunkin' Donuts coffee in one hand and my laptop on my lap, I sat in the near-empty terminal thinking of everything that hadn't quite fit into my girly purple wheelie bag or brown messenger bag.

I hadn't been able to fit all of the wonderful friendships that I immediately made, both among those who I have been talking to nearly daily since I joined the site, to those I had never spoken to before. No, they would have required far more than Southwest's comparatively liberal baggage allowance. Names innumerable, all tied for the first time to a living, breathing face. Bodies I embraced at first sight without the slightest hesitation.

I hadn't included the beautiful streets we walked together, the songs we sang, the JASONs we screamed, the beers we drank, the dicks we drew on Pictochat, and the really bad (and sometimes very good) food we ate.

So, what is the ultimate sum of this experience? I don't know that I can even guess at that yet. I know I have left Boston with quite a few more friends, and not just in the "I met you once and then added you on Facebook" brand of friend. I know that the experience is a marker on the correct path for me, one that I hope fate will allow me to tread again very soon.

You truly can't lose being a part of this community.

Does it get better than this? Oh, hell, I don't think it does. Soak it in.

If you flip to the back of your average game manual, you might find a window into the past, hinting at simpler, more infuriating times. If you're lucky, your instruction manual might have a section of blank pages labeled "notes." If you purchased your game used from Gamestop (and were lucky enough to actually get an instruction manual), you might find hand-drawn pictures of ejaculating penises and stick figure copulation.

This is not the intended use of notes pages, of course. Long ago, back before hard drives and autosaves, games relied upon passwords to allow players to retrieve their progress at a later time. Long strings of letters, numbers, and even pictures filled the lines, becoming messes of pencil marks and eraser shavings. A lost or improperly copied password sometimes meant hours of lost progress.

But not all was amiss in the land of passwords. They allowed us to access the wonders of games, giving us abilities far beyond what we had ever dreamed. God modes, flight, and ammunition immeasurable were just a few button presses away, spawning a new category of password forever known as the cheat code. For every pound of password pain, there was a morsel of password pleasure.

The age of the password was short, lasting only until games like The Legend of Zelda adopted an integrated save system. This is a tribute to that age, in all of its splendor and horror.




Passwords seem innocent enough; In this digital age of identity theft and pornographic pay sites, we all have to manage dozens of passwords. They're often stupid, akin to using "password" as your password. Which I definitely don't do for Destructoid. Of course not.

The case used to be fairly similar for videogame passwords. The above password for Kid Icarus, ICARUS ANDTHE ARROWS FLYING, is a real password in the game. It's kind of poetic in a "what the fuck is this shit" kind of way. But it falls into a category that many early videogame passwords did: the lets-make-our-passwords-say-stupid-shit category. Not quite the simplicity of the four-digit passwords of Adventure Island II or the completely unrelated idiocy of President Skroob's luggage combination, but it's a stark contrast to many of the passwords in other games.

You know, like Metroid. The original NES entry into the series was actually very similar to the system used by Kid Icarus. Thanks to the huge number of different states that the game can be started in (based on location, possessed power ups, etc.), the game required a nice 24-character password full of alphabet vomit. Most passwords were just random strings of nonsense.

However, Metroid became famous for some of the unusual passwords that were discovered purely on accident thanks to the game's use of algorithmic passwords. For instance, there's "some-1 set-up us-the B0MB11," which is sort of kind of close to that one funny thing from that one videogame that everyone knows about. Then there's the famous JUSTIN BAILEY code, which started Samus without a suit. There's actually a T-shirt with this code on it. That's the only female to ever wear that shirt, by the way. Verified fact.

Despite the joy of algorithmic password discovery, you can imagine what a chore it would be to keep track of 24-character strings multiple times over the span of a typical playthrough. The passwords were huge and annoying, and there wasn't a damn thing you could do about it except for dig your pencil into your thigh as you struggled to figure out if those were Os or 0s.

The only thing more huge and annoying (besides my penis, which likes to put on a top hat and sing Slipknot songs whenever I'm around old people) were the passwords for GT Advance Championship Racing. The game was originally developed in Japan for the Game Boy Advance, using a battery to save the game's state. However, presumably to cut costs, the battery was left out for the NTSC version, replaced with 16-character abominations like 0i$rf+r4YHf4e++.

I don't know about you, but when I play a portable game, I'm not really interested in carrying around a notebook that's larger than the god damn videogame console that I'm playing simply so that I can access my sweet new tires. And as one IGN reviewer put it back in 2001 (Jesus, passwords were still used in 2001?), if you put in a t and a +, and your handwriting isn't the stuff of the gods, then you'll likely stumble around trying to get the password right, and finally succeed right as your bus ride ends.



OK, so when it comes to length, there actually is something that's even more horrifying than Mr. Growly Fred Astaire Wannabe up there: the RPG. Swords and Serpents, released in 1990, was a dungeon crawler that put you in charge of a party of four, slaying and slaying your way through 16 levels and, eventually, the titular serpent. However, before all of the stabbing, you started with a lovely 12-character password.

12-characters, you say? I eat pieces of shit like 12-character passwords for breakfast!

Well, sir, I hope you have the stomach of Crazy Legs Conti, because another 12-character password follows right behind the first.

And another.

And another.

And another.

Indeed, a total of five passwords were needed for a four-character party in Swords and Serpents, four representing the stats of each of your characters and one for the overall game progress. In total, sixty characters had to be entered to continue your game. I imagine you'd spend more time inputting passwords than actually playing the game. You could alternatively fill up a piñata with Alpha-Bits and go to town, and you'd get a similar experience, only without the hemorrhoids.

Yet some developers weren't content with using those stupid Latin characters that all of the other developers were using, so they came up with their own brilliant ideas. See Exhibit A below.



Of course, you'll recognize this as one of the password screens from the Mega Man series. It's not so bad. Rather than letters and numbers, this series opted to put its balls on the screen in strategic locations. Really, it's nothing more than a glorified letter and number system, only it makes you think, sort of like multiplication, only with more balls. Yeah, pretty much just like multiplication.

As a side note, I used to actually draw out the grids. I'd get out my paper, make up the grid, and copy the balls into it. For every god damn boss. Why? You'd have to ask 7-year-old me. It might have been all of the gin.

Lastly is perhaps the oddest of the password systems. Because balls are just so passé, the Genesis game Stargate decided to be extra classy and use hieroglyphics.



Yeah, so that's really necessary. If anything, it gave you a good chance to channel your inner Ancient Egyptian, copying down the symbols in exquisite detail. Or, you know, you could just write a word for what you thought each picture looked like. "Triangle with nipple, archway with vagina, triangle with nipple, Egyptian goatse, seagull three-way, triangle with nipple, archway with vagina." Your parents might find your notes and wonder if you've been sniffing glue again, but it's better than learning what that shit means. Remember, kids, no cheating by using that silly Internet thing! That's where the child molesters live.

I'm sure there are plenty more password systems that were just as ridiculous as those here. But I'd wager that the horror of the password nonsense found here is enough to make you praise your memory cards--even the ones that magically erased themselves or got eaten by your epileptic dog Sporky.

Not all uses of passwords have been quite as evil as these, however. The happier side of passwords and their evolution, however, will have to wait until another day. I have a piñata shaped like three mating seagulls and filled with sweet marshmallow password fodder to bash. I think I'll tie three NES controllers together and use it like a flail. Until next time.

Death is an inevitability in life and in games alike, and in both we try to prolong the time that we get to spend on Earth, on Mars, in Hell, or in some generic fantasy land. Whether it's life over or game over, we struggle to persist, doing what is necessary to extend our time just a little longer. We may even extinguish other lives to pursue this selfish goal, yet at the end of it all, nothing has changed. Death is still coming. We may run from it, but it will eventually catch up to us. Death is a Kenyan.

Games are different in one important way: we have not one, but many opportunities to experience death. The gift of perpetual life is granted to us in the form of restart options, respawns, and arcade change machines. In nearly every game we play, death is not permanent. We have start at the beginning of a level, the last checkpoint, or even the very spot at which we made some fatal error. I can't imagine that many gamers are not thankful that these are the rules of life and death that we are governed by.

But when we pull some stupid shit and get ourselves killed, there's an inherent problem that crops up every time: we are taken out of the experience. Call it breaking immersion, or simply losing concentration if the term immersion isn't your bag, but the fact is that nothing is able to remove us more quickly from the body of a game character than death. It's comparable to watching a movie, approaching a climactic, action-filled moment, and accidentally having your friend sit his dumb ass right on the remote, skipping back a chapter on the DVD. You're no longer engaged in what you're watching, and your enjoyment of the moment is replaced by a sense of bewilderment that the jackass still can't take a quick peek at his target before hurtling toward it ass-first.

So, if we can agree that death is the ultimate immersion-breaker, can we suggest that the most immersive game would be one without death? And, no, I don't mean Nintendo's "Super Guide." I mean that a narrative-driven game that relies upon some incredibly immersive moments could benefit from keeping players fully inserted into the bodies of the characters that they're controlling. Yet a full-fledged narrative gaming experience without any danger of failure seems like an impossibility, especially for those types of games that we generally consider immersive. But is there any validity to this idea? I think so, but read on to see why I'm not ready to inject myself with the Jesus serum just yet.




Immediately upon starting to think about this topic, I was reminded of some of the best moments from Uncharted 2. Be forewarned that I will talk about some specific scenes, so this might be slightly spoilery. They're both very different scenes in context, length, and intensity. But they both share one thing in common: they're absolutely enthralling--the sorts of scenes in which you can't believe you get to participate.

The first of which is the opening Dangling Train scene, which is my unofficial official name for it because it reminds me of dangly parts. Anyway, if you were able to take your eyes off of the screen for even a moment in your first playthrough of this section, then you either have a lazy eye, are blind, or had a seizure. For everyone else, I imagine that you shared in my joy as you scaled the interior and exterior of the hanging train car. And if you're fortunate, you got through it unscathed.

The second is the now-famous collapsing building scene, for which I do not have a suggestive title. It's a fairly short scene compared with the full experience of the game, and before you have a chance to fully appreciate just how incredible the moment is, it is over. Just as the supports begin to give way and you realize, against all odds, that you are still in control, you begin that treacherous descent, hopefully making your way safely through the window and onto more stable ground in the next building. Honestly, with Chad's fantastic writeup about this moment, I won't go into any further detail on it, because no further detail is left.

Perhaps your experience was not the same, as I know it's quite possible to die in both of these places. But accounting for all of my many deaths in that game, not one of them was in either of these scenes. It also just so happens that, looking back, I was most engrossed in the game at these two points. Sure, correlation does not imply causality, but in this case, I think I can make a pretty damn strong case for causality.



Let's start with the obvious: death reminds us that we're simply playing a game. Sure, we never truly forget this. It's not as if the illusion is strong enough to make us believe otherwise, but in a truly immersive moment, we simply fail to care about the distinction. It's simply an experience, and a damn impressive one at that. However, the moment that death strikes and we're treated to a "game over" screen or simply an automatic restart from a checkpoint, this momentary feeling in us is destroyed. Sure, we're ready to try again, but immersion can't be regained instantly after it is broken. It needs time to develop, and each death means yet another lost opportunity to keep yourself immersed.

Above all else, death gives us a moment to think. When you die in a game, whether it is your fault or not, a certain amount of frustration sets in. You may curse the game, your AI companions, your own lack of skill, or any number of things. Soon enough, your mind wanders everywhere but the experience you're supposed to be having. Upon your next retry of that difficult section, you'll likely begin to plan out how you're going to avoid those deaths of the past. At this point, your approach to the game changes. You're no longer concerned with being immersed. You're simply concerned with making progress.

If you think I'm suggesting that death be removed from games, you're wrong. After all, where would a game like Demon's Souls be, where much of the game's appeal relies upon death and its constant threatening presence? And where would all games be without a difficult final battle, where the epic quality comes from the difficulty in taking down the world's greatest enemy? No, games absolutely still need death, difficulty, and a sense of dread.

Instead, I think that game designers can carefully plan the places at which a player can die. A lack of death can most benefit those scenes like the one's I described above, where death would not significantly add to the fun of the game, and instead would lead to a loss of immersion and, in the long run, a less enjoyable experience with those scenes. I can only imagine how death would have affected my enjoyment of, say, the crumbling building scene. Had I attempted to jump to the next building and instead jumped awkwardly into the wall, I guarantee that I would view that scene very differently in its aftermath. Its effect would be greatly lessened.

So, my proposition is simple: take those incredible, cinematic moments, and make sure that we experience them as they're intended to be seen. Many have described moments in Uncharted 2 as "cut scenes that you play," and I think this is fair. Just as a cut scene has one definitive version of the experience, these cinematic moments can eschew death to ensure that we experience that one definitive version.

Afterward, the game can go back to punishing us in whatever way it seems fit. We'll be too awestruck by what we just experienced to care.